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whitewind

PRISM Planet

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THAT's the reason we don't need American government spying on everyone, they are fucking nutters

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i think there was a new entry in the dsmv for "government beurocrat"

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/22/edward-snowden-us-china

Snowden, accused of espionage by the US government (now there's the joke) has accused the US of recording the text messages of Chinese citizens.

The US government is getting a lot of egg on it's face, unfortunately MSM is still managing to minimise the utter outrage of their behaviour.

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I want you to get this fuck where he breathes! I want you to find this nancy-boy Edward Snowden, I want him DEAD! I want his family DEAD! I want his house burned to the GROUND! I wanna go there in the middle of the night and I wanna PISS ON HIS ASHES!

i can just imagine how many high level operatives in the us intelligence service are saying these words right now,

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As a general rule for understanding public policies, I insist that there are no persistent "failed" policies. Policies that do not achieve their desired outcomes for the actual powers-that-be are quickly changed. If you want to know why the U.S. policies have been what they have been for the past sixty years, you need only comply with that invaluable rule of inquiry in politics: follow the money.

When you do so, I believe you will find U.S. policies in the Middle East to have been wildly successful, so successful that the gains they have produced for the movers and shakers in the petrochemical, financial, and weapons industries (which is approximately to say, for those who have the greatest influence in determining U.S. foreign policies) must surely be counted in the hundreds of billions of dollars.

So U.S. soldiers get killed, so Palestinians get insulted, robbed, and confined to a set of squalid concentration areas, so the "peace process" never gets far from square one, etc., etc. – none of this makes the policies failures; these things are all surface froth, costs not borne by the policy makers themselves but by the cannon-fodder masses, the bovine taxpayers at large, and foreigners who count for nothing.

http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/intelligence-corporatism-and-dance-of.html

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The full truth might be far worse than what we now know, or it might be awful, but in a way that is significantly different from what we now think. The critical point is that, because we have been provided with only a very selective part of the truth, we have no way of answering these questions. The problem goes still deeper than that: because we have only a small fraction of the entire presentation, we don't even know what questions we should be asking. It may be that we should actually be worried about an aspect of all this that hasn't occurred to anyone -- at least, to anyone in the great unwashed public. Some of the select few who have reviewed all 41 slides may have performed a brilliant analysis, and they may know that there are additional issues out there that would make our heads explode (or explode even more) -- but if they have such knowledge, based not on what they've shared so far but on the totality of the presentation, they aren't going to tell us.

Note, too, that we don't know that what we've been told is the most important part of the Prism story. You might argue that the published stories imply that, but they don't explicitly make any such claim. The published stories represent the newspapers' judgment concerning what information they believe, via some mysterious alchemical process, it is "responsible" to share with us. So perhaps what we know isn't the most important part of the story.

http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/2013/06/fed-up-with-all-bullshit.html

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Fucking class - The Guardian's Live Blog on Snowden.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/24/edward-snowden-booked-on-plane-from-moscow-to-havana-live-coverage

It's like "Where's Wally?" with FSB and AMerican agents all over Moscow Airport like a rash.

Journo's wetting themselves with excitement, printing pictures of the wrong guy, booking planes to Havana, everything!

Edited by whitewind

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I love how the media's managed to turn this into another 'personality' story, ignoring the actual story of the NSA legally spying on citizens. Because the actual story's too hard, and some scrawny guy taking shirtless selfies in his bedroom is easier and grabs more attention.

I really hope we're able to find out what else they've been watching before this story turns into a made-for-tv movie and a fanclub. Doubt it though.

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Ecuador has dropped trade rights with the US and has made a generous offer of $23 million for "Human Rights training".

I think everyone would start to forgive the US government if it said sorry and repealed all those secret laws, don't you?

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We may never know all the details of the mass surveillance programs, but we know this: The administration has justified them through abuse of language, intentional evasion of statutory protections, secret, unreviewable investigative procedures and constitutional arguments that make a mockery of the government’s professed concern with protecting Americans’ privacy. It’s time to call the N.S.A.’s mass surveillance programs what they are: criminal.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/28/opinion/the-criminal-nsa.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&

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In the case of the French Government: You express shock and horror when you find out that the US is spying on you. To prove that your anger is real (and that you are not just playing to your population's anger), do you:

A. Offer the whistle-blower political asylum.
B. Award the whistle-blower a medal.
C. Spark an international diplomatic incident by denying the President of an allied friendly country flyover rights, on the off-chance that the whistle-blower might be on the plane.

Bolivia complains to UN after Evo Morales was "kidnapped" by being denied airspace over Western Europe and forced to land in Austria

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Telstra agreed more than a decade ago to store huge volumes of electronic communications it carried between Asia and America for potential surveillance by United States intelligence agencies.

Under the previously secret agreement, the telco was required to route all communications involving a US point of contact through a secure storage facility on US soil that was staffed exclusively by US citizens carrying a top-level security clearance.

The data Telstra stored for the US government includes the actual content of emails, online messages and phone calls.

The US Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation also demanded that Telstra "provide technical or other assistance to facilitate ... electronic surveillance".

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In 2001, when the "network security agreement" was signed, Telstra was 50.1 per cent owned by the Commonwealth Government.

The revelations come as the British and US governments reel from the leaking of sensitive intelligence material that has detailed a vast electronic spying apparatus being used against foreign nationals and their own citizens.

This week, Fairfax Media reported that four Australian defence facilities are being used by the US in this intelligence collection regime, including Pine Gap and three secret signals facilities at Darwin, Geraldton and Canberra. The local centres are used in a National Security Agency surveillance program codenamed X-Keyscore.

Now, the latest revelations raise further questions about the extent of the Australian government's co-operation with the US global intelligence effort, as well as its own data collection regime.

The 2001 contract was prompted by Telstra's decision to expand into Asia by taking control of hundreds of kilometres of undersea telecommunications cables.

Telstra had negotiated with a Hong Kong company to launch Reach, which would become the largest carrier of intercontinental telecommunications in Asia. The venture's assets included not just the fibre-optic cables, but also "landing points" and licences around the world.

But when Reach sought a cable licence from the US Federal Communications Commission, the DOJ and the FBI insisted that the binding agreement be signed by Reach, Telstra, and its Hong Kong joint venture partner, Pacific Century CyberWorks Ltd (PCCW).

The contract does not authorise the company or law enforcement agencies to undertake actual surveillance. But under the deed, Telstra must preserve and "have the ability to provide in the United States" all of the following:

"Wire" or electronic communications involving any customers - including Australians - who make any form of communication with a point of contact in the US;

"Transactional data" and "call associated data" relating to such communications;

"Subscriber information"; and

"Billing records".

"All Domestic Communications ... shall pass through a facility ... physically located in the United States, from which Electronic Surveillance can be conducted pursuant to Lawful US Process," the contract says.

"The Domestic Communications Company [Reach] will provide technical or other assistance to facilitate such Electronic Surveillance."

The US facility had to be staffed by US citizens "eligible for appropriate US security clearances", who also "shall be available 24 hours per day, seven days per week, and shall be responsible for accepting service and maintaining the security of Classified Information".

It also makes it incumbent on Reach not to allow data and communications of interest to be destroyed.

Reach and Telstra were required to "take all reasonable measures" to prevent use of their infrastructure for surveillance by a foreign government. "These measures shall take the form of detailed technical, organisational, personnel related policies and written procedures, necessary implementation plans, and physical security measures," the contract says.

The document was signed by Douglas Gration, Telstra's then company secretary and now a Melbourne barrister.

His own webpage describes his responsibilities at the time to have included "liaising with law enforcement and national security agencies".

He told Fairfax he couldn't remember much about the agreement. "Every country has a regime for that lawful interception," he said. "And Australia has got it as well."

"It would be no surprise if you're setting up something like Reach, which I think from memory had a station where they man the traffic in the US. [so] they would need an agreement with the US to do that."

Reach has offices located in Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and the UK. It also has two premises in the US, in New Jersey and San Francisco, either of which may house the secure storage facility stipulated by the contract.

In 2011, Telstra and PCCW restructured their partnership, giving Telstra control of the majority of Reach's undersea cables. The corporate restructuring most likely would have triggered a requirement to renegotiate the security deed with the US Government.

Scott Whiffin, a Telstra spokesman, said the agreement was required to "comply with US domestic law".

"It relates to a Telstra joint venture company's operating obligations in the United States under their domestic law. We understand similar agreements would be in place for all network infrastructure in the US."

"When operating in any jurisdiction, here or overseas, carriers are legally required to provide various forms of assistance to Government agencies."

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