Edward Snowden revelations prompt UN investigation into surveillance

The UN's senior counter-terrorism official is to launch an investigation into the surveillance powers of American and British intelligence agencies following Edward Snowden's revelations that they are using secret programmes to store and analyse billions of emails, phone calls and text messages.

The UN special rapporteur Ben Emmerson QC said his inquiry would also seek to establish whether the British parliament had been misled about the capabilities of Britain's eavesdropping headquarters, GCHQ, and whether the current system of oversight and scrutiny was strong enough to meet United Nations standards.

Click to read more...

ReThink911 Covered by Metro News and Ottawa Citizen

The Ottawa Metro Newspaper published an article on Thursday November 21, 2013 about the upcoming ReThink911 Ad Campaign in Ottawa, Canada’s capital city. This very positive media coverage published on page 4 was seen by over 50,000 Ottawa residents, educating them about the destruction of World Trade Center Building 7. The Ottawa Citizen also published an article about the campaign, though less in-depth, which was seen by over 100,000 Ottawa residents.

Both articles cover the ReThink911 ad campaign that will be on Ottawa buses during the month of December. The articles also talk about the presence of ReThink911 and Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth spokespersons at the city’s November 20 Transit Commission meeting, where the Commission voted to review its advertising policies in response to the ReThink911’s September 2013 ad campaign.

Click to read more...

Voices From The Grave: 9/11

This historic national 9/11 truth conference was held September 14-15, 2013 on the occasion of the twelfth anniversary of the events of September 11, 2001.

Click to read more ...

The Money Changers Serenade: A New Plot Hatches - Paul Craig Roberts

Former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, a protege of Treasury Secretaries Rubin and Summers, has received his reward for continuing the Rubin-Summers-Paulson policy of supporting the “banks too big to fail” at the expense of the economy and American people. For his service to the handful of gigantic banks, whose existence attests to the fact that the Anti-Trust Act is a dead-letter law, Geithner has been appointed president and managing director of the private equity firm, Warburg Pincus and is on his way to his fortune.

A Warburg in-law financed Woodrow Wilson’s presidential campaign. Part of the reward was Wilson’s appointment of Paul Warburg to the first Federal Reserve Board.

Click to read more...

Obama’s overhaul of spy programs cloaked in more secrecy

President Barack Obama has faced withering criticism around the globe for his secret spying programs. How has he responded? With more secrecy.Obama has been gradually tweaking his vast government surveillance policies. But he is not disclosing those changes to the public.

 Has he stopped spying on friendly world leaders? He won’t say. Has he stopped eavesdropping on the United Nations, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund?

He won’t say. Even the report by the group Obama created to review and recommend changes to his surveillance programs has been kept secret.

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/11/25/209465/obamas-overhaul-of-spy-programs.html#storylink=cpy

US has already broken its promises on civilian deaths, says Afghanistan

The United States has broken promises made to Afghanistan last week after an airstrike in Helmand province killed a toddler and injured two women, a senior Afghan government official has said.

The first allegations of a civilian death in a Nato bombing for over two months comes at a particularly awkward time for US-Afghan relations, which are heavily strained by the refusal of the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, to sign a security pact allowing US forces to stay on after 2014.

The US-Afghan bilateral security agreement (BSA) was endorsed at a loya jirga (national gathering) convened by Karzai last week and which was was expected to finalise the deal after a year of painful negotiations.

Click to reead more...

Deconstructing the NIST WTC 7 Building Report

In the October Blueprint, AE911Truth published the conclusion of Chris Sarns’ five-part series in which he documented five key misstatements in NIST’s explanation of the initiation of collapse of WTC 7. August had previously seen the introduction of four short videos produced by a small team of international, independent researchers who are working in collaboration with AE911Truth. These analyses can be understood by anyone willing to study the details.

We expand here on the last of the four videos, entitled ‘MaladmiNISTration,’ as it introduced new information following NIST’s June 2012 Erratum document in which they admitted errors in their report.

Our short video from last month’s article on the subject will help to reacquaint you with this important development:

Click to read more...

Manhattan DA disclaims authority to prosecute 9/11 murders

Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth has for years sought an impartial investigation, under public auspices, of the collapse of the Twin Towers and Building #7 at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.  Until we were recently advised on the applicable law, we had not petitioned for a grand jury investigation of the 9/11 event.

We have been advised by counsel that various current and former officials in the federal government of the United States might have a conflict of interest with regard to initiating or conducting a genuine investigation.

Click to read more...

Judge Halts Sentencing After Feds Admit They Failed To Reveal Use Of NSA Data

We've been following the crazy story of the Solicitor General of the US, Donald Verrilli, making blatantly false statements to the Supreme Court concerning how the feds would have to reveal to defendants that some of the evidence used against them came from secretive NSA data collection methods. In Verrilli's defense, it is now apparent that lawyers for the intelligence community flat out lied to him, and he is reasonably angry about that -- leading to the DOJ to officially change its policy to now be consistent with what Verrilli told the Court: that if NSA data is used against someone, that fact will come out during the process, and the defendant can challenge it. Along with this, the feds have started selectively alerting some lawyers that some NSA data was used on their clients.

Click to read more...

If You Don't Care About The NSA Because You 'Haven't Done Anything Wrong,' You're Wrong

Cardinal Richelieu's famous line is:

If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.

It's easy to twist almost anything to be used against you if someone cares enough. And with a legal code that means people are committing, on average, three felonies a day (at least according to one estimate), it can be even worse.

That's worth keeping in mind any time someone writes off the NSA as not being an issue for them because they've "done nothing wrong."

Click to read more...

NSA Spied On Porn Habits Of 'Radicalizers,' Planned To Use Details To Embarrass Them

WASHINGTON -- The National Security Agency has been gathering records of online sexual activity and evidence of visits to pornographic websites as part of a proposed plan to harm the reputations of those whom the agency believes are radicalizing others through incendiary speeches, according to a top-secret NSA document. The document, provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, identifies six targets, all Muslims, as “exemplars” of how “personal vulnerabilities” can be learned through electronic surveillance, and then exploited to undermine a target's credibility, reputation and authority.

The NSA document, dated Oct. 3, 2012, repeatedly refers to the power of charges of hypocrisy to undermine such a messenger.

Click to read more...

Peace, Love, and Pepper Spray

Peace, Love, and Pepper Spray, a new coffee table book by Emmy Award-winning journalist and photographer Amber Lyon, chronicles modern protesting in America with more than 200 photographs of activists at the heart of recent protests across the country.

The book’s 12 chapters and individual activist profiles cover an array of recent protests with a focus on immigrant rights, Anonymous, women’s right to go topless, the Chicago Teacher’s Strike, online protest, attacks on press freedom, home foreclosure barricades, Keystone XL Pipeline demonstrations, Chicago NATO protests, Trayvon Martin, Anaheim police brutality and many, many more…

Click to read more...

Penny Lane: Gitmo’s other secret CIA facility

WASH POST

A few hundred yards from the administrative offices of the Guantanamo Bay prison, hidden behind a ridge covered in thick scrub and cactus, sits a closely held secret.

A dirt road winds its way to a clearing where eight small cottages sit in two rows of four. They have long been abandoned. The special detachment of Marines that once provided security is gone.

But in the early years after 9/11, these cottages were part of a covert CIA program. Its secrecy has outlasted black prisons, waterboarding and rendition.

In these buildings, CIA officers turned terrorists into double agents and sent them home.

Click to read more...

Iran will be barred from accepting gold as payment for oil

BLOOMBERG

Iran’s accord with world powers to limit its nuclear program in exchange for as much as $7 billion in relief from sanctions left Presidents Barack Obama and Hassan Rouhani the task of selling the deal to critics.

By agreeing to curtail its nuclear activities, Iran won an easing of certain sanctions on oil, auto parts, gold and precious metals for six months.

The deal, which is reversible, was announced early yesterday after five days of talks in Geneva. Without removing sanctions on oil exports, it releases some of Iran’s oil assets and allows it to keep exporting crude at current levels.

Click to read more...

Gold Beat Stocks Except During the Tech Bubble

Warren Buffett once noted, Gold doesn’t do anything “but look at you.” It doesn’t pay a dividend or produce cash flow.

However, the fact of the matter is that Gold has dramatically outperformed the stock market for the better part of 40 years.

I say 40 years because there is no point comparing Gold to stocks during periods in which Gold was pegged to world currencies. Most of the analysis I see comparing the benefits of owning Gold to stocks goes back to the early 20^th century.

However Gold was pegged to global currencies up until 1967. Stocks weren’t. Comparing the two during this time period is just bad analysis.

Click to read more...

N.S.A. Report Outlined Goals for More Power

NY TIMES

Officials at the National Security Agency, intent on maintaining its dominance in intelligence collection, pledged last year to push to expand its surveillance powers, according to a top-secret strategy document.

In a February 2012 paper laying out the four-year strategy for the N.S.A.’s signals intelligence operations, which include the agency’s eavesdropping and communications data collection around the world, agency officials set an objective to “aggressively pursue legal authorities and a policy framework mapped more fully to the information age.”

Written as an agency mission statement with broad goals, the five-page document said that existing American laws were not adequate to meet the needs of the N.S.A. to conduct broad surveillance in what it cited as “the golden age of Sigint,” or signals intelligence.

Click to read more...

NSA infected 50,000 computer networks with malicious software

The American intelligence service - NSA - infected more than 50,000 computer networks worldwide with malicious software designed to steal sensitive information. Documents provided by former NSA-employee Edward Snowden and seen by this newspaper, prove this.

A management presentation dating from 2012 explains how the NSA collects information worldwide. In addition, the presentation shows that the intelligence service uses ‘Computer Network Exploitation’ (CNE) in more than 50,000 locations. CNE is the secret infiltration of computer systems achieved by installing malware, malicious software.

Click to read more...

United States Can Spy on Britons Despite Pact, N.S.A. Memo Says

The National Security Agency is authorized to spy on the citizens of America’s closest allies, including Britain, even though those English-speaking countries have long had an official non-spying pact, according to a newly disclosed memorandum.

The classified N.S.A. document, which appears to be a draft and is dated January 2005, states that under specific circumstances, the American intelligence agency may spy on citizens of Britain without that country’s consent or knowledge. The memo, provided by the former N.S.A. contractor Edward J. Snowden, is labeled secret and “NOFORN,” indicating that it may not be shared with any foreign country.

Click to read more...

US Working Overtime Behind The Scenes To Kill UN Plan To Protect Online Privacy From Snooping

The UN has apparently been considering a proposal pushed by Brazil and Germany, to clarify that basic offline rights to privacy should apply to online information and activities as well. The proposal is targeted at attempts by governments -- mainly the US -- to ignore privacy issues in spying on people around the globe. Not surprisingly, the US is (quietly) working hard to stop this plan. Colum Lynch at Foreign Policy has the scoop, noting that publicly, the US is pretending to support this in some form:

But privately, American diplomats are pushing hard to kill a provision of the Brazilian and German draft which states that "extraterritorial surveillance" and mass interception of communications, personal information, and metadata may constitute a violation of human rights. The United States and its allies, according to diplomats, outside observers, and documents, contend that the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights does not apply to foreign espionage.

Click to read more...

FISA Court Tells The DOJ That It Needs To Explain Why It's Ignoring Order To Declassify Surveillance Opinion

Yesterday, we wrote about the DOJ responding to a FISA Court order that it declassify a FISA Court ruling on the interpretation of Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act (related to the bulk collection of metadata), in which the DOJ effectively told the court that it wasn't going to obey. This was the extent of the DOJ's reasoning:

After careful review of the Opinion by senior intelligence officials and the U.S. Department of Justice, the Executive Branch has determined that the Opinion should be withheld in full and a public version of the Opinion cannot be provided

Click to read more ...