On a recent Freedom Watch, Judge Napolitano interviewed author James Bovard on government abuse resulting from the Patriot Act.
Tomorrow, Freedom Watch will be airing a special live episode. Click here for more details.
Source: Campaign For Liberty
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A senior intelligence official conceded Tuesday that the spy agency has failed to fully inform Congress about some of its spying activities.
Congress is probing what some Democratic lawmakers argue are failures by the Bush administration’s CIA to tell Congress what it is doing.
Robert Litt is chief counsel for the Director of National Intelligence. He testified before the House Intelligence Committee Tuesday that the spies didn’t tell Congress about a small number of operations. But Litt says the CIA has now corrected those omissions and is now informing Congress of its espionage.
The law requires the intelligence services to brief Congress about certain types of missions it undertakes.
Litt did not discuss what sorts of activities the agency failed to disclose to lawmakers.
CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano told Fox in a statement, “It is the policy of the Central Intelligence Agency to be clear and candid with the United States Congress. Director Panetta has made a relationship of trust, confidence, and respect a top priority.”
The House Intelligence Committee launched a probe over the summer after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) exclaimed at a contentious May press conference that the CIA “lied” to her about using advanced interrogation techniques on detainees.
Democrats on the House Intelligence panel say there as many as five episodes where Congress was kept in the dark. CIA Director Leon Panetta told the committee in June that it failed to alert Congress about a program targeting leaders of Al Qaeda.
Some Republicans on the Intelligence Committee, including ranking member Pete Hoekstra (R-MI), argue that the inquiry is politically motivated and is an effort to shield Pelosi from criticism after her allegation that the CIA failed to tell her the truth.
Source: Fox News
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Obama’s Attorney General, Eric Holder, has apparently hired a cadre of left-wing, Democrat campaign bloggers to troll through the Internet looking for news stories and blog posts that denigrate the Obama agenda. After such websites are found it is the job of these secret lefty bloggers to leave comments that come to the support of Obamaism in the comments sections. It seems that Eric Holder has created his own little propaganda unit in a valiant effort to become the Bloggi Riefenstahl of the Obama era.
As reported at The Muffled Oar, a blog that first broke the story of Holder’s secretive blogging unit — dubbed the “Blog Squad” by blogger Isaac Muzzey — Holder has housed this unit in the Office of Public Affairs at the Department of Justice. It also appears that former John Edwards staffer Tracy Russo is part of this special unit.
A site called whorunsgov.com reported back in May that DOJ hired Russo to do “media outreach for the whole department.” It is, according to whorunsgov.com, the first time such an effort has been made at DOJ.
Of Russo’s duties, The Muffled Oar says:
Not only is the Department of Justice Blog Squad going to reach out to nontraditional media like TPM Muckraker or the Muffled Oar, but they are also tasked with fostering anonymous comments at conservative leaning blogs such as the Free Republic. They are also tasked with fostering anonymous comments, or comments under pseudonyms, at newspaper websites with stories critical of the Department of Justice, Holder and President Obama.
If indeed this is what DOJ media outreach does it would most certainly qualify as “astroturfing.” Astroturfing is the action of using fake commenters and multiple screen names on all sorts of sites to push a similar opinion to create the appearance of a grass roots movement and make it seem as if there are all sorts of individuals naturally supporting a product or political movement.
It most certainly is a creepy, propagandistic sort of effort that Holder’s office is involved in and it is one that certainly seems an immoral one. After all, it most certainly is lying to the public if there are a handful of DOJ employees casting about on hundreds of different websites pretending that they are just your average citizen coming to the support of the Obama administration. But is it illegal? Hans von Spakovsky of National Review’s the corner blog certainly thinks so.
I doubt that the Office of Public Affairs (OPA) has received an ethics opinion from Justice’s Professional Responsibility Advisory Office (PRAO) saying that it is acceptable for OPA employees to be harassing critics of the department through postings that deliberately hide their DOJ affiliation (a practice that is not very “open” or “transparent”). DOJ lawyers also ought to be aware of ABA Model Rule of Professional Conduct 8.4, which states that it is professional misconduct for a lawyer to engage in conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit, or misrepresentation. If the report in The Muffled Oar is correct, tax dollars are being used directly for such dishonest, deceitful behavior.
I must say, it’s hard to disagree with von Spakovsky (if that’s his real name! — a little joke there).
Mr. von Spakovsky also makes a perfectly pertinent point to wrap up his blog post on this matter. He wonders if the Obama administration will ever learn the difference between political campaign and the “entirely different responsibility it now has to enforce this nation’s laws in an objective, nonpartisan, nonpolitical manner”?
I think that the question is a good one. After all, after nearly a year in office, we have yet to see the end Obama’s constant blaming of Bush for every little problem he runs up against not to mention the constant campaign speeches and appearances on TV at every hour, day and night. One gets the uneasy feeling that President Barack Obama has yet to put in an actual day’s work as he constantly campaigns for office instead.
Source: Red Country
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Swine flu infections have peaked out in the USA, even before drug companies could get their vaccines injected into everyone. According to CDC findings announced recently in Atlanta, one in five U.S. children have already experienced the flu this month, and most of those were likely H1N1 swine flu cases, the CDC says.
This comes from a survey of over 10,000 U.S. households conducted by the CDC.
Meanwhile, flu vaccine shipments are way behind schedule. There have been supply problems from the start, and as of right now, relatively few Americans have yet been injected with the swine flu vaccine. (Many have stood in line for hours trying to be injected, but were told to go home with the vaccine ran out.)
Out of nearly 14,000 suspected flu cases tested during the week ending on October 10, 2009, 99.6% of those were influenza A, and the vast majority of those were H1N1 swine flu infections. (http://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/) This is a very strong indication that swine flu infections have peaked during October, 2009.
Further supporting that notion, researchers from Purdue University just published a paper in the October 15 issue ofEurosurveillance (a science journal about communicabledisease) in which researchers stated that the H1N1 swine flu epidemic would peak during “week 42″ (the end of October). Week 42 just passed. It’s over.
The AJC is also reporting this week that swine flu is “retreating” in Georgia, where hospital visits from the flu are markedly down (http://www.ajc.com/health/swine-flu…) and fewer illnesses are being reported in schools, too.
Even the WHO is reporting a downward trend in many areas, saying, “In tropical areas of the world, rates of illness are generally declining, with a few exceptions. …In tropical Asia, of the countries that are reporting this week, all report decreases in respiratory disease activity.” (http://www.who.int/csr/don/2009_10_…)
Meanwhile, even as the swine flu infection peaks out, the shortage of swine flu vaccines means few people have yet been vaccinated. The shortage is causing “chaos” in clinics across the country, news reports say, and flu vaccination events have been cancelled due to the non-arrival of expectedvaccines.
And what, exactly, is causing this shortage of vaccines? According to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, they’re being caused by “production failures” at the drug manufacturing facilities.
Is she serious? People are lining up to be injected with chemicals made by companies that are suffering “production failures?” If these companies can’t meet the production targets they already promised, how can we expect them to meet the safety targets they promised?
The bigger point, though, is that by the time vaccines are available for everyone, most people will have already been exposed to the H1N1 virus and therefore won’t even need a vaccine. There’s also evidence that previous exposure toseasonal flu may confer some natural immunity to H1N1, meaning that vaccines may be redundant from the start (http://www.naturalnews.com/027337_H…).
Delivering vaccines to the public after the pandemic peaks and wanes is sort of like putting on your seatbelt after a head-on collision. (This metaphor assumes, just for the moment, that swine flu vaccines actually work. Even though they don’t.)
Through the coming holiday season, we’ll all get to watch the CDC, the FDA and drug companies desperately try to push vaccines onto people, most of whom are already immune to H1N1 because they were exposed during the peak of the pandemic. This will be quite entertaining to observe because you’ll get to watch health authorities in action, attempting to fabricate an emergency when the pandemic threat has already faded. To maximize vaccinations (and therefore Big Pharma revenues), they’ll need to keep pushing the pandemic fears through the winter months while hoping that no one notices the H1N1 pandemic has evaporated.
Predictably, the big push at that point will be based on the following logic: “Even if you were already exposed to H1N1, getting a vaccine shot can’t hurt. Might as well get one!”
The CDC, which once promised 150 million vaccines by mid-October has pushed its prediction to year’s end. Unless some new H1N1 mutation is released into the population by some bioterrorist group, it’s fairly obvious that the swine flu will have fizzled out by the time Christmas rolls around.
So what will all these clinics do with all the millions of doses of vaccines that nobody really needs at that point? It might seem prudent to dump them down the river, except for the fact that their chemical additives and preservatives make many vaccines qualify as “hazardous waste” according to EPA regulations. It’s illegal to toss them into rivers or even dump them down the drain… it’s perfectly legal, though, to inject them into the body of a six-year-old.
Why don’t they just save the vaccines for next year? They’ll be useless, of course, but no more useless than they already are this year. Just save up all the vials and unleash another swine flu scare next fall to get rid of the inventory! (Don’t laugh. These people might actually take the idea seriously…)
You gotta love the pharmaceutical industry. After forty years of research into cancer (and tens of billions of dollars spent on it), they have yet to find a cure for any cancer at all. And with the swine flu fiasco, they almost managed to come up with a vaccine, but the human immune system — combined with a nation full of sneezers and spreaders — beat them to it.
It must really be depressing to wake up one day as a pharmaceutical company executive and realize you’re irrelevant… and that your “lifesaving” products are obsolete before they even hit the streets. Of course, the ridiculously high pay might make up for some of that, and if you get really depressed, you can always take your own company’s pills if you’re willing to brave the suicide risk. But in the end, the simple fact is that human beings would be better off of the drug companies didn’t exist.
The fact that H1N1 swine flu has already peaked out before the bulk of the vaccine shipments have even arrived proves, once again, how utterly pathetic and medically useless flu vaccines are in the first place. There is nothing a flu vaccinecan do that simple vitamin D can’t do better, and the sad truth is that the entire flu vaccine industry is built on medical quackery and marketing propaganda.
Continued at Natural News
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Millions of Americans are lining up to take the H1N1 swine flu vaccine with no idea about the horrible things that could happen to them. In this article you will read tragic real life vaccine horror stories from people who have personally experienced devastating vaccine side effects. Each of the accounts that you will read below were unsolicited. When we started this site, we began posting stories about the dangers of vaccines, and when people came across our articles they wanted to share their own painful experiences with vaccines. If the American people knew of the tragic stories of the thousands upon thousands of people whose lives have been devastated by vaccines they would not be so eager to line up to take them. The following are some of those stories…..
Ann:
My friend was diagnosed w/GBS today. She had the H1N1 vaccine on Tuesday. She woke up friday morn. with one side of her face paralized, now almost her whole face is paralized. She is starting blood and plasma transfusions tonight. She will be transferred to Barnes hospital soon for more extensive testing. To those who laugh at the severity of this strange, unknown sickness and vaccine I hope you stay informed and not ignorant.
Carrie:
I am a healthcare employee…..the only vaccine offered to employees was the live vaccine. I decided to get it and be the “guinea pig” instead of my toddler. Received the nasal spray on Tuesday, woke up Wednesday with a sore throat and stuffy nose, Thursday had a terrible chest congestion/cough with fever and splitting headache, Friday all symptoms were worse and I couldn’t breathe! I was diagnosed on Friday with H1N1 and pneumonia….. good thing I got the vaccine, huh?
Martha:
I too have taken the flu vaccine on Sept. 16th 2009 and have had reaction to the shot that was different yet very scary and the symptoms seem to change regularly. Of course, I was a perfectly healthy woman of 56 when administered and have had the flu and strange symptoms since. I contacted the community center where the shot was taken and have been told that it was not the shot as others had the same lot but no reaction. My symtoms were high fever, and not being able to walk from dizziness for 2 weeks. Then received the flu that has had me down for another 2 weeks. If anyone else has had these symptoms, I would appreciate a email. I now have pain in my feet and legs that seems to get worse daily.
Svetlana:
I have a friend who took the flu shot in 2001 I believe, and after, started to display neurological problems in his body, like loosing muscle control all over. Since then, he has been diagnosed with ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis) disease. He is unable to talk or do anything for himself, even to swallow, so he is fed through a tube in his stomach. His wife is taking care of him. It is terrible what happened to my friend, he also was fit and healthy all of his life. None of us are taking the flu shot. We have been spared from it, by the grace of God.
John:
In 1976 my grandmother received a flu shot and developed Guillain-Barre Syndrome as a result of the flu shot and died.
Eugenia:
I have two children who have autism spectrum disorders because of the mercury and other toxic agents put into vaccinations that I didn’t realize till too late. To force someone to take this especially when they have a health issue is ludicrous!!
Christian:
1977 I was ORDERED to get the swine flu shot. I got it. The next day (after I got it) we were ordered to NOT get it. My muscles in my calves were showing spasms. Of course the military doctors were saying too soon to be caused by the shot.
Yeah/Right!
Dolores:
I do recall that when swine-flu vaccine was administered in the 70’s, a friend of mine, 28-yrs old, in good health and no known physical disorder of any kind at the time, but as soon as she recd the swine-vaccine, within a month or so, developed breast cancer and underwent surgery. Thanks be to God, we (my husband and children) were fearful of that vaccine and prayed most heartily for God’s powerful help and protection. Yes, I am very scared of this dreadful vaccine as it may kill us instead of healing people. Jesus have mercy on us and drive all the dark forces hovering around the world, destroying God’s creation.
Sandra:
I know a woman whose baby stopped breathing and turned blue several times and had to be rushed to emergency in the 24 hours following the second series of shots (4 months old). Several years later, the identical thing happened to her second baby after vaccination. She still didn’t connect it. That’s how deeply brainwashed our society has become by the high priests of the religion of modern medicine. Every year our population becomes weaker and the instances of autoimmune disease and autism are skyrocketing at an alarming rate.
Parent of Adem:
In January of 2001, my 22 year old son had a flu shot. Within a week he was in a coma and totally paralyzed – Acute disseminated encephalomyelitis (ADEM)- see http://www.adem.org/. After 2-1/2 months in ICU and an additional 4-1/2 months in rehab, he was able to come home. Today he plays quad rugby and lives in a fully handicap accessible house – all because of an extremely rare reaction to a flu shot. What’s happening in response to the swine flu is frightening.
Jack:
Back in the 70’s I was at the peak of health and stamina (college years). I got the SWINE FLU vaccination.
Within a couple days I was virtually paralyzed with my leg, arm, stomach, neck, and chest muscles in so much pain I could barely move. That lasted for over 1 week. It was the worst pain I’ve been in my entire life (and that includes later having my arm literally torn open (~150 stitches), a broken neck, and a broken back).
It took over a month to slowly improve back to normal functonality, while remaining in considerable pain for a great deal of that time.
Jill:
A friend took her son to get his 2 year check up and refused MMR due to vaccine risk concerns. She was delaying and would get them separately. The MD insisted she give him the seasonal flu shot because the flu was going to be bad that year (it was 2003 I believe). She complied, not having done any research on the flu shot. Her son developed fever that night, had diarrhea and illness for three weeks, stopped walking and talking. Six months later he was crawling around the house banging his head on the wall and crying all day. She could barely complete a sentence because she was so devastated. An investigation confirmed vaccine induced Autism. I will never give the flu shot to my kids after seeing what it has done to my friend and her only child.
If the tragic stories that people have posted on our site are not enough to persuade you to avoid the swine flu vaccine, perhaps what happened to NFL cheerleader Desiree Jennings will cause you to stop and think. Taking the seasonal flu vaccine this year changed her life forever…..
The truth is that these vaccines are not as safe as government officials insist that they are. Thanks to the Congress, you will not be able to sue vaccine manufacturers if something goes wrong. Do not blindly trust the health of your family to corrupt government bureaucrats or to the talking heads on television. Do your own research and make an informed decision. It is about time that we all started thinking for ourselves.
Source: Bird Flu Pandemic
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The health-care debate is part of a larger moral struggle over the free-enterprise system.
Regardless of how President Barack Obama’s health-care agenda plays out in Congress, it has not been a success in public opinion. Opposition to ObamaCare has risen all year.
According to the Gallup polling organization, the percentage of Americans who believe the cost of health care for their families will “get worse” under the proposed reforms rose to 49% from 42% in just the past month. The percentage saying it would “get better” stayed at 22%.
Many are searching for explanations. One popular notion is that demagogues in the media are stirring up falsehoods against what they say is a long-overdue solution to the country’s health-care crisis.
Americans deserve more credit. They haven’t been brainwashed, and they aren’t upset merely over the budget-busting details. Rather, public resistance stems from the sense that the proposed reforms do violence to three core values of America’s free enterprise culture: individual choice, personal accountability, and rewards for ambition.
First, Americans recoil at policies that strip choices from citizens and pass them to bureaucrats. ObamaCare systematically does so. The current proposals in Congress would effectively limit choice across the entire spectrum of health care: What kind of health insurance citizens can buy, what kind of doctors they can see, what kind of procedures their doctors will perform, what kind of drugs they can take, and what treatment options they may have.
Meanwhile, ObamaCare would limit the ability of people to choose affordable insurance coverage through less-comprehensive, consumer-driven insurance plans. And it wouldn’t allow Americans to shop for better health-care plans from out-of-state carriers.
Second, Americans believe we should be responsible for the consequences of our actions. Many citizens bitterly view the auto and Wall Street bailouts as gifts to people who took imprudent risks, imperiled the entire economic system, and now appear to be walking away from the mess.
Similarly, Americans are cold to a health-care system that effectively rewards individuals for waiting to get insurance until they get sick—subsidizing their coverage by taxing those who responsibly carry insurance in good times and bad.
On its face, the reformers’ promise to provide health insurance to nearly all, regardless of pre-existing conditions, is appealing. But as most instinctively realize, if people don’t have to worry about carrying insurance until they need it, many won’t buy it. Already, the Census Bureau tells us that 21% of the uninsured are in households earning at least $75,000. Although there are certainly plausible reasons for this in some cases, this phenomenon will worsen under ObamaCare.
Third, ObamaCare discourages personal ambition. The proposed reforms will institute a set of government mandates, price controls and other strictures that will make highly trained specialists, drug researchers and medical device makers less valued now and in the future. Americans understand that when you take away the incentive to make money while saving lots of lives, the cures, therapies and medical innovations of tomorrow may never be discovered.
Yet we are told this is all for the best. In his commencement speech at Arizona State University earlier this year, Mr. Obama told the graduates not to “fall back on the formulas of success that have been peddled so frequently in recent years”: “You’re taught to chase after all the usual brass rings . . . let me suggest that such an approach won’t get you where you want to go.”
Crass materialism is indeed a tyranny that can lead to personal misery. But most Americans believe it’s up to individuals, not a nannying government, to decide what constitutes too much income and too much ambition.
An April 2009 survey conducted by the polling firm Ayers, McHenry & Associates for the conservative nonprofit group Resurgent Republic asked respondents which of the following statements about the role of government came closer to their view: (a) “Government policies should promote fairness by narrowing the gap between rich and poor, spreading the wealth, and making sure that economic outcomes are more equal”; or (b) “Government policies should promote opportunity by fostering job growth, encouraging entrepreneurs, and allowing people to keep more of what they earn.” Sixty-three percent chose the second option; just 31% chose the first.
This is consistent with nonpartisan surveys showing that most Americans think our increasingly redistributionist government is overstepping its bounds. For example, a September 2009 Gallup Poll found that 57% believe the government is “doing too much”—the highest percentage in more than a decade. Just 38% said it “should do more.”
We will continue to hear both sides of the health-care debate argue about particulars of insurance markets, the deficit impacts of reform, and the minutiae of budgetary assumptions. These arguments, while important, do not address the deeper issues involved.
The health-care debate is part of a moral struggle currently being played out over the free enterprise system. It will be replayed in every major policy debate in the coming months, from financial regulatory reform to a cap-and-trade system for limiting carbon emissions. The choices will ultimately always come down to competing visions of America’s future. Will we strengthen freedom, individual opportunity and enterprise? Or will we expand the role of the state and its power?
Source: WSJ
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While battling the FBI’s expanded surveillance guidelines, Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., also revealed (Daily Kos, Oct. 
that in the SenateJudiciary Committee review of the Patriot Act (also Oct. 8), Republicans protecting the Act were joined, in a closed-door classified session, by Obama officials with amendments further preserving it. Then, in a public session, all but three Democrats voted for a watered-down “compromise” bill by Patrick Leahy and Diane Feinstein.
Feingold, Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and new Democrat Arlen Specter (Pa.) had the constitutional courage to oppose the Judiciary Committee bill eventually going to the floor that with few exceptions, leaves the Patriot Act intact. I’ll be reporting on the crucial fight to bring the Bill of Rights back into the Patriot Act as Senate and House versions merge into a lawto be signed by Obama as he continues the Bush-Cheney legacy.
It was Feingold who, in October 2001, was the only member of the Senate to vote against the original Patriot Act as, on the floor, he accurately predicted our greatly weakened privacy, due process and other rights since then.
He is not giving up. “In the end,” Feingold says. “Democrats have to decide if they are going to stand up for the rights of the American people” or (for recent example) “allow the FBI to write our laws.”
As I have reported, the FBI is already writing our laws — without going to any judge. How much have you seen about the FBI’s locking up of the Fourth Amendment on cable and broadcast television (from the right- or the left-leaning stations) in newspapers, on the Internet or, of course, from the Democratic Congressional leadership, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, characteristically indifferent to the Bush-Cheney-Obama assaults on the Bill of Rights?
As James Madison warned, “A people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives.”
When were the first FBI guidelines on domestic surveillance and why? In the 1970s, Sen. Frank Church of Idaho, chairman of a Senate Committee on Intelligence Activities, exposed FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO (Counter-intelligence Program) as an omnivorous surveillance operation that aimed squarely at preventing Americans “exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and association.”
If Big Brother is always watching you, you become careful of what you say and with whom you associate.
The Church committee’s revelations resulted in the then-attorney general, Edward Levi (a former professor of constitutional law), and Congressman Don Edwards formulating the first FBI guidelines specifically faithful to the Constitution.
When I was reporting on Edwards’ congressional service (1962 to 1995), I often described him as the “The Congressman from the Constitution.” As chairman of the House Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights, Edwards, a former FBI agent, set standards for congressional oversight of the FBI.
Under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, these standards have become obsolete.
I commend to every member of Congress and their constituents what Edwards said in 1975 about the Church committee’s newly disclosed unbounded, warrantless standards of FBI surveillance of Americans who might “threaten” national security. And compare the Don Edwards’ definition of fundamental American civil liberties with those of present Attorney General Eric Holder and FBI Director Robert Mueller — and their astonishingly permissive standards of FBI accountability.
“No federal agency,” said Congressman Edwards, “the CIA, the IRS, or the FBI, can be at the same time policeman, prosecutor, judge and jury. That is what constitutionally guaranteed due process is all about. It may sometimes be disorderly and unsatisfactory to some, but it is the essence of freedom.”
The Constitution, Edwards continued, does not permit “federal interference” with Americans’ speech or associations, and other such citizen constitutional rights, “except through the criminal justice system, armed with its ancient safeguards.” Like mandated judicial supervision — absent from current Obama administration FBI surveillance guidelines.
Edwards regarded as “subversive” the “notion that any public official — the president or a policeman — possesses a kind of inherent power to set aside the Constitution whenever he thinks the public interest, or ‘national security’ warrants it.”
Don Edwards represented the Constitution we are losing.
On Aug. 10, 2002, in Washington, Don Edwards received the American Bar Association’s Thurgood Marshall Award for his “unswerving devotion to the Constitution and its values throughout his career.”
How many present members of Congress do you believe qualify for that award? Any of the Senate or House members representing you? Unhesitatingly, I nominate Sen. Russ Feingold of Wisconsin.
It was in 2002 that I asked Don Edwards what he thought of the then Bush-Cheney definition of the Bill of Rights. “Locking people up,” he began, “citizens or noncitizens, without being charged and without access to a lawyer is wrong.” But our Nobel Prize-winning President Obama is seriously considering “permanent detention” of terrorism suspects who cannot be tried in court because of the tortures they have undergone under American custody. This same president does not object to the current warrantless FBI surveillance of Americans without evidence, for reasons of “national security.” Would you give Obama a Liberty Medal?
Source: Opposing Views
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According to White House Press Secretary, Robert Gibbs, Obama’s Daughters will not receive the vaccine based on their profile. Apparently, according to him, only children with an impaired immune system are supposed to take the vaccine. But,I don’t think that is not what the media has been reporting at all. In fact, when my grandchildren went to get the “mist”, the only thing the doctor asked about was any allergies. They are perfectly healthy kids.
It gets stranger all the time, as this is supposed to be a level 6 pandemic, not a virus that only attacks susceptible children. According toWHO, “Almost half of the reported cases of oseltamivir resistant virus have occured in patients taking oseltamivir for prophylaxis. While the significance of this observation is not yet clear, prophylaxis should only be offered where there are strong reasons for doing so..in general, WHO does not recommend the use of antiviral drugs for prophylactic purposes. For people who have had exposure to an infected person and are at a higher risk of developing severe or complicated illness, an alternative option is close monitoring for symptoms, followed by prompt early antiviral treatment should symptoms develop.
Why do I keep hearing doctors on Cable News, including Fox, recommending that children receive a flu shot for prevention. Am I missing something here? In fact, I went to the official site of the Secretary of Human Health Services, and that was the first thing I saw: the importance of getting your flu shot. Every time I drive by Walgreens, there it is a sign “Get your flu shot.”
Many of you may have heard of Jane Burgemeister, an Austrian journalist, who claims that the H1N1 vaccine is an attempt by the World Elite to reduce the population. she states on her website :In February 2009, Baxter’s Austrian subsidiary in Orth an der Donau manufactured and distributed 72 kilos of vaccine material, contaminated with a H5N1 (more lethal) virus, to 16 laboratories in four countries… this deadly contamination and distribution was almost certainly due to criminal intent.” She has filed injunstion against the Obama Administration and WHO.
Even the Times of India reported that the H5N1 was mixed with H3N2, and the Times went on to say “Accidental release of a mixture of live H5N1 and H3N2 viruses could have resulted in dire consequences. While H5N1 doesn’t easily infect people, H3N2 viruses do. If someone exposed to a mixture of the two had been simultaneously infected with both strains, he or she could have served as an incubator for a hybrid virus able to transmit easily to and among people.”
Remember the Nuremberg Code for your defense, since there has been a lot of talk about “forced vaccinations”: “The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, overreaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision.”
Source: HubPages
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Social networking sites and applications such as Facebook, Twitter and their competitors can facilitate communication and information sharing amongst diverse groups and individuals is by now a cliché.
It should come as no surprise then, that the secret state and the capitalist grifters whom they serve, have zeroed-in on the explosive growth of these technologies. One can be certain however, securocrats aren’t tweeting their restaurant preferences or finalizing plans for after work drinks.
No, researchers on both sides of the Atlantic are busy as proverbial bees building a “total information” surveillance system, one that will, so they hope, provide police and security agencies with what they euphemistically call “actionable intelligence.”
Build the Perfect Panopticon, Win Fabulous Prizes!
In this context, the whistleblowing web site Wikileaks published a remarkable documentOctober 4 by the INDECT Consortium, the Intelligence Information System Supporting Observation, Searching and Detection for Security of Citizens in Urban Environment.
Hardly a catchy acronym, but simply put INDECT is working to put a human face on the billions of emails, text messages, tweets and blog posts that transit cyberspace every day; perhaps your face.
According to Wikileaks, INDECT’s “Work package 4″ is designed “to comb web blogs, chat sites, news reports, and social-networking sites in order to build up automatic dossiers on individuals, organizations and their relationships.” Ponder that phrase again: “automatic dossiers.”
This isn’t the first time that European academics have applied their “knowledge skill sets” to keep the public “safe”–from a meaningful exercise of free speech and the right to assemble, that is.
Last year The Guardian reported that Bath University researchers’ Cityware project covertly tracked “tens of thousands of Britons” through the installation of Bluetooth scanners that capture “radio signals transmitted from devices such as mobile phones, laptops and digital cameras, and using the data to follow unwitting targets without their permission.”
One privacy advocate, Simon Davies, the director of Privacy International, told The Guardian: “This technology could well become the CCTV of the mobile industry. It would not take much adjustment to make this system a ubiquitous surveillance infrastructure over which we have no control.”
Which of course, is precisely the point.
As researchers scramble for a windfall of cash from governments eager to fund these dubious projects, European police and security agencies aren’t far behind their FBI and NSA colleagues in the spy game.
The online privacy advocates, Quintessenz, published a series of leaked documents in 2008 that described the network monitoring and data mining suites designed by Nokia Siemens, Ericsson and Verint.
The Nokia Siemens Intelligence Platform dubbed “intelligence in a box,” integrate tasks generally done by separate security teams and pools the data from sources such as telephone or mobile calls, email and internet activity, bank transactions, insurance records and the like. Call it data mining on steroids.
Ironically enough however, Siemens, the giant German electronics firm was caught up in a global bribery scandal that cost the company some $1.6 billion in fines. Last year, The New York Times described “a web of secret bank accounts and shadowy consultants,” and a culture of “entrenched corruption … at a sprawling, sophisticated corporation that externally embraced the nostrums of a transparent global marketplace built on legitimate transactions.”
According to the Times, “at Siemens, bribery was just a line item.” Which just goes to show, powering the secret state means never having to say you’re sorry!
Social Network Spying, a Growth Industry Fueled by Capitalist Grifters
The trend by security agencies and their corporate partners to spy on their citizens has accelerated greatly in the West since the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
This multi-billion industry in general, has been a boon for the largest American and European defense corporations. Among the top ten companies listed by Washington Technology in their annual ranking of the “Top 100″ prime government contractors, all ten–from Lockheed Martin to Booz Allen Hamilton–earned a combined total of $68 billion in 2008 from defense and related homeland security work for the secret state.
And like Siemens, all ten corporations figure prominently on the Project on Government Oversight’s Federal Contractor Misconduct Database (FCMD), which tracks “contract fraud, environmental, ethics, and labor violations.” Talk about a rigged game!
Designing everything from nuclear missile components to eavesdropping equipment for various government agencies in the United States and abroad, including some of the most repressive regimes on the planet, these firms have moved into manufacturing the hardware and related computer software for social networking surveillance in a big way.
Wired revealed in April that the FBI is routinely monitoring cell phone calls and internet activity during criminal and counterterrorism investigations. The publication posted a series of internal documents that described the Wi-Fi and computer hacking capabilities of the Bureau’s Cryptographic and Electronic Analysis Unit (CEAU).
New Scientist reported back in 2006 that the National Security Agency “is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks.”
And just this week in an exclusive report published by the British high-tech publication,The Register, it was revealed that “the government has outsourced parts of its biggest ever mass surveillance project to the disaster-prone IT services giant formerly known as EDS.”
That work is being conducted under the auspices of the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the British state’s equivalent of America’s National Security Agency.
Investigative journalist Chris Williams disclosed that the American computer giant HP, which purchased EDS for some $13.9 billion last year, is “designing and installing the massive computing resources that will be needed to analyse details of who contacts whom, when where and how.”
Work at GCHQ in Cheltenham is being carried out under “a secret project called Mastering the Internet.” In May, a Home Office document surfaced that “ostensibly sought views on whether ISPs should be forced to gather terabytes of data from their networks on the government’s behalf.”
The Register reported earlier this year that telecommunications behemoth Detica and U.S. defense giant Lockheed Martin were providing GCHQ with data mining software “which searches bulk data, such as communications records, for patterns … to identify suspects.” (For further details see: Antifascist Calling, “Spying in the UK: GCHQ Awards Lockheed Martin £200m Contract, Promises to ‘Master the Internet’,” May 7, 2009)
It seems however, that INDECT researchers like their GCHQ/NSA kissin’ cousins in Britain and the United States, are burrowing ever-deeper into the nuts-and-bolts of electronic social networking and may be on the verge of an Orwellian surveillance “breakthrough.”
As New Scientist sagely predicted, the secret state most certainly plans to “harness advances in internet technology–specifically the forthcoming ’semantic web’ championed by the web standards organisation W3C–to combine data from social networking websites with details such as banking, retail and property records, allowing the NSA to build extensive, all-embracing personal profiles of individuals.”
Profiling Internet Dissent
Pretty alarming, but the devil as they say is in the details and INDECT’s release of their “Work package 4″ file makes for a very interesting read. And with a title, “XML Data Corpus: Report on methodology for collection, cleaning and unified representation of large textual data from various sources: news reports, weblogs, chat,” rest assured one must plow through much in the way of geeky gibberish and tech-speak to get to the heartless heart of the matter.
INDECT itself is a rather interesting amalgamation of spooks, cops and academics.
According to their web site, INDECT partners include: the University of Science and Technology, AGH, Poland; Gdansk University of Technology; InnoTech DATA GmbH & Co., Germany; IP Grenoble (Ensimag), France; MSWiA, the General Headquarters of Police, attached to the Ministry of the Interior, Poland; Moviquity, Spain; Products and Systems of Information Technology, PSI, Germany; the Police Service of Northern Ireland, PSNI, United Kingdom (hardly slouches when it comes to stitching-up Republicans and other leftist agitators!); Poznan University of Technology; Universidad Carlos III de Madrid; Technical University of Sofia, Bulgaria; University of Wuppertal, Germany; University of York, Great Britain; Technical University of Ostrava, Czech Republic; Technical University of Kosice, Slovakia; X-Art Pro Division G.m.b.H, Austria; and finally, the Fachhochschule Technikum, also in Austria.
I don’t know about you, but I find it rather ironic that the European Union, ostensible guardians of democracy and human rights, have turned for assistance in their surveillance projects to police and spy outfits from the former Soviet bloc, who after all know a thing or two when it comes to monitoring their citizens.
Right up front, York University’s Suresh Manadhar, Ionnis Klapaftis and Shailesh Pandey, the principle authors of the INDECT report, make their intentions clear.
Since “security” as the authors argue, “is becoming a weak point of energy and communications infrastructures, commercial stores, conference centers, airports and sites with high person traffic in general,” they aver that “access control and rapid response to potential dangers are properties that every security system for such environments should have.”
Does INDECT propose building a just and prosperous global society, thus lessening the potential that terrorist killers or other miscreants will exploit a “target rich environment” that may prove deadly for innocent workers who, after all, were the principle victims of the 2004 and 2007 terrorist outrages in Madrid and London? Hardly.
As with their colleagues across the pond, INDECT is hunting for the ever-elusive technological quick-fix, a high-tech magic bullet. One, I might add, that will deliver neither safety nor security but rather, will constrict the democratic space where social justice movements flourish while furthering the reach of unaccountable security agencies.
The document “describes the first deliverable of the work package which gives an overview about the main methodology and description of the XML data corpus schema and describes the methodology for collection, cleaning and unified representation of large textual data from various sources: news reports, weblogs, chat, etc.”
The first order of business “is the study and critical review of the annotation schemes employed so far for the development and evaluation of methods for entity resolution, co-reference resolution and entity attributes identification.”
In other words, how do present technologic capabilities provide police, security agencies and capitalist grifters with the ability to identify who might be speaking to whom and for what purpose. INDECT proposes to introduce “a new annotation scheme that builds upon the strengths of the current-state-of-the-art,” one that “should be extensible and modifiable to the requirements of the project.”
Asserting that “an XML data corpus [can be] extracted from forums and social networks related to specific threats (e.g. hooliganism, terrorism, vandalism, etc.),” the authors claim they will provide “different entity types according to the requirements of the project. The grouping of all references to an entity together. The relationships between different entities” and finally, “the events in which entities participate.”
Why stop there? Why not list the ubiquitous “other” areas of concern to INDECT’s secret state partners? While “hooliganism, terrorism, vandalism, etc.,” may be the ostensible purpose of their “entity attributes identification” project, surely INDECT is well aware that such schemes are just as easily applicable to local citizen groups, socialist and anarchist organizations, or to the innumerable environmental, human rights or consumer campaigners who challenge the dominant free market paradigm of their corporate sponsors.
The authors however, couldn’t be bothered by the sinister applications that may be spawned by their research; indeed, they seem quite proud of it.
“The main achievements of this work” they aver, “allows the identification of several types of entities, groups the same references into one class, while at the same time allows the identification of relationships and events.”
Indeed, the “inclusion of a multi-layered ontology ensures the consistency of the annotation” and will facilitate in the (near) future, “the use of inference mechanisms such as transitivity to allow the development of search engines that go beyond simple keyword search.”
Quite an accomplishment! An enterprising security service or capitalist marketing specialist need only sift through veritable mountains of data available from commercial databases, or mobile calls, tweets, blog posts and internet searches to instantaneously identity “key agitators,” to borrow the FBI’s very 20th century description of political dissidents; individuals who could be detained or “neutralized” should sterner methods be required.
Indeed, a surveillance scheme such as the one INDECT is building could greatly facilitate–and simplify–the already formidable U.S. “Main Core” database that “reportedly collects and stores–without warrants or court orders–the names and detailed data of Americans considered to be threats to national security,” as investigative journalists Tim Shorrockand Christopher Ketchum revealed in two disturbing reports last year.
The scale of “datasets/annotation schemes” exploited by INDECT is truly breathtaking and include: “Automatic Content Extraction” gleaned from “a variety of sources, such as news, broadcast conversations” that identify “relations between entities, and the events in which these participate.”
We next discover what is euphemistically called the “Knowledge Base Population (KBP),” an annotation scheme that “focuses on the identification of entity types of Person (PER), Organization (ORG), and Geo-Political Entity (GPE), Location (LOC), Facility (FAC), Geographical/Social/Political (GPE), Vehicle (VEH) and Weapon (WEA).”
How is this accomplished? Why through an exploitation of open source materials of course!
INDECT researchers readily aver that “a snapshot of Wikipedia infoboxes is used as the original knowledge source. The document collection consists of newswire articles on the order of 1 million. The reference knowledge base includes hundreds of thousands of entities based on articles from an October 2008 dump of English Wikipedia. The annotation scheme in KBP focuses on the identification of entity types of Person (PER), Organization (ORG), and Geo-Political Entity (GPE).”
For what purpose? Mum’s the word as far as INDECT is concerned.
Nothing escapes this panoptic eye. Even popular culture and leisure activities fall under the glare of security agencies and their academic partners in the latest iteration of this truly monstrous privacy-killing scheme. Using the movie rental firm Netflix as a model, INDECT cites the firm’s “100 million ratings from 480 thousand randomly-chosen, anonymous Netflix customers” as “well-suited” to the INDECT surveillance model.
In conclusion, EU surveillance architects propose a “new annotation & knowledge representation scheme” that “is extensible,” one that “allows the addition of new entities, relations, and events, while at the same time avoids duplication and ensures integrity.”
Deploying an ontological methodology that exploits currently available data from open source, driftnet surveillance of news, broadcasts, blog entries and search results, and linkages obtained through a perusal of mobile phone records, credit card purchases, medical records, travel itineraries, etc., INDECT claims that in the near future their research will allow “a search engine to go beyond simple keyword queries by exploiting the semantic information and relations within the ontology.”
And once the scheme is perfected, “the use of expressive logics … becomes an enabler for detecting entity relations on the web.” Or transform it into an “always-on” spy you carry in your pocket or whenever you switch on your computer.
This is how our minders propose to keep us “safe.”
CIA Gets In on the Fun
Not to be outdone, the CIA has entered the lucrative market of social networking surveillance in a big way.
In an exclusive published by Wired, we learn that the CIA’s investment arm, In-Q-Tel, “want to read your blog posts, keep track of your Twitter updates–even check out your book reviews on Amazon.”
Investigative journalist Noah Shachtman reveals that In-Q-Tel “is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. It’s part of a larger movement within the spy services to get better at using “open source intelligence”–information that’s publicly available, but often hidden in the flood of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports generated every day.” Wired reported:
Visible crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. (It doesn’t touch closed social networks, like Facebook, at the moment.) Customers get customized, real-time feeds of what’s being said on these sites, based on a series of keywords. (Noah Shachtman, Exclusive: U.S. Spies Buy Stake in Firm that Monitors Blogs, Tweets,” Wired, October 19, 2009)
Although In-Q-Tel spokesperson Donald Tighe told Wired that it wants Visible to monitor foreign social media and give American spooks an “early-warning detection on how issues are playing internationally,” Shachtman points out that “such a tool can also be pointed inward, at domestic bloggers or tweeters.”
According to Wired, the firm already keeps tabs on 2.0 web sites “for Dell, AT&T and Verizon.” And as an added attraction, “Visible is tracking animal-right activists’ online campaigns” against meat processing giant Hormel.
Shachtman reports that “Visible has been trying for nearly a year to break into the government field.” And why wouldn’t they, considering that the heimat security and even spookier black world of the U.S. “intelligence community,” is a veritable cash-cow for enterprising corporations eager to do the state’s bidding.
In 2008 Wired reports, Visible “teamed-up” with the Washington, DC-based consulting firm “Concepts & Strategies, which has handled media monitoring and translation services for U.S. Strategic Command and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, among others.”
According to a blurb on the firm’s web site they are in hot-pursuit of “social media engagement specialists” with Defense Department experience and “a high proficiency in Arabic, Farsi, French, Urdu or Russian.” Wired reports that Concepts & Strategies “is also looking for an ‘information system security engineer’ who already has a ‘Top Secret SCI [Sensitive Compartmentalized Information] with NSA Full Scope Polygraph’ security clearance.”
In such an environment, nothing escapes the secret state’s lens. Shachtman reveals that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) “maintains an Open Source Center, which combs publicly available information, including web 2.0 sites.”
In 2007, the Center’s director, Doug Naquin, “told an audience of intelligence professionals” that “‘we’re looking now at YouTube, which carries some unique and honest-to-goodness intelligence…. We have groups looking at what they call ‘citizens media’: people taking pictures with their cell phones and posting them on the internet. Then there’s social media, phenomena like MySpace and blogs’.”
But as Steven Aftergood, who maintains the Secrecy News web site for the Federation of American Scientists told Wired, “even if information is openly gathered by intelligence agencies it would still be problematic if it were used for unauthorized domestic investigations or operations. Intelligence agencies or employees might be tempted to use the tools at their disposal to compile information on political figures, critics, journalists or others, and to exploit such information for political advantage. That is not permissible even if all of the information in question is technically ‘open source’.”
But as we have seen across the decades, from COINTELPRO to Operation CHAOS, and from Pentagon media manipulation during the run-up to the Iraq war through driftnet warrantless wiretapping of Americans’ electronic communications, the secret state is a law unto itself, a self-perpetuating bureaucracy that thrives on duplicity, fear and cold, hard cash.
Source: Rogue Government
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