Center a new Political Faction Not left, not right, but in the "Center".

31Jan/120

Unquestionably, the United States is now a military dictatorship!

Copied from: http://www.hermes-press.com/militarismindex.htm

Unquestionably, the United States is now a military dictatorship! We're living in a fascist police state in which absolute power is concentrated in a capitalist criminal cabal that uses military and police power to dominate the people mentally and physically.

The U.S. had been moving toward a total military dictatorship since about 1913; but in 2012 the final nail in the coffin of democracy and justice was hammered into place with the passage of the National Defense Authorization Act, Title X, Subtitle D (NDAA)!


NDAA allows American citizens to be arrested, imprisoned, and tortured by the U.S. military--without due process of any kind!

Other criminal features of this current American military dictatorship include:

"Naturally the common people don't want war: Neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, IT IS THE LEADERS of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is TELL THEM THEY ARE BEING ATTACKED, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. IT WORKS THE SAME IN ANY COUNTRY."

 

Hermann Goering, President of the Reichstag and Nazi Luftwaffe Commander in Chief,

from Gilbert, G.M. (1947). Nurenberg Diary, New York: Signet

 

Americans have been led to assume that war, as an institution, is merely a means that a society uses to achieve its ends when forced to by emergency or crisis. In actuality, the basic political-economic structure of the United States consists of the production of armaments by the "defense industry" and the destruction of armaments in fabricated wars. Wars are not "caused" by a crisis such as Pearl Harbor, 9/11, nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, or a supposed Yemini Al Qaeda underpants terrorist; wars are contrived for political-economic purposes by those in power.

"Although war is 'used' as an instrument of national and social policy, the fact that a society is organized for any degree of readiness for war supersedes its political and economic structure. War itself is the basic social system, within which other secondary modes of social organization conflict or conspire. It is the system which has governed most human societies of record, as it is today."

 Leonard Lewin. (1967),

Report From Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace

The current political-economic rulers in the U.S. and Europe have duped the people into thinking that war is a last resort which "we" must adopt when our national or bloc sovereignty is threatened or when a ruthless leader engages in "ethnic cleansing" or some other unspeakable act.

The "National Defense State" scam works this way in the U.S.:

  • Congress sinks huge sums into the "defense" budget.

  • Congress transfers the money to the Pentagon and the Pentagon distributes our tax money to the various defense industries.

  • "Defense" industry corporations buy congresspersons and presidents with campaign contributions.

This process gives controlling-interest owners of corporations outrageous profits and control over the government.

From the chart on the top, it's easy to see that war--the making and destroying of armaments--is the primary business of the U.S. under the present regime of the capitalist cabal. Certainly, there is no need to spend the obscene amounts of money on armaments when other nations are spending so much less in comparison.

"The point to be grasped has been staring Western civilization in the face for the last half century: Namely, that a predominantly megatechnic economy can be kept in profitable operation only by systematic and constant expansion. Instead of a balanced economy, dedicated to the enhancement of life, megatechnics demands limitless expansion on a colossal scale. A feat only war or mock-war-rocket building and space exploration can supply."

Lewis Mumford

Capitalists Start Wars, They Don't Fight In Wars

In 1863, the North passed a law to draft young men into the Union army. Because of one provision in the conscription legislation, the most extreme urban violence America had ever seen erupted in New York City. The provision was that rich families could--for $300--buy their sons' exemption from the draft. So these sons of rich capitalists dodged the draft by buying their way out of the draft: J.P. Morgan, Jay Gould, James Fisk, William Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Philip Armour, and Andrew Mellon. Judge Thomas Mellon's letter to his son Andrew clearly expressed the sentiment of capitalists: "In time you will understand and believe that a man may be a patriot without risking his own life or sacrificing his health. There are plenty of other lives less valuable."

J.P. (Pierpont) Morgan and his underlings essentially started World War I, reaping huge profits from the death of every American, British, French, and German soldier. Pierpont Morgan's New Haven railroad was about to go bankrupt when hostilities in Europe broke out. Morgan first convinced US President Woodrow Wilson to allow his companies to make loans to France to finance its war effort. Morgan then convinced the British and French governments to name him essentially the sole purchasing agent for the $3 billion to be spent on war materiel. This netted the J.P. Morgan company $30 million in commissions.

Pierpont directed the contracts--and profits--to Morgan-connected companies: Banker's Trust, Bethlehem Steel, Du Pont, United States Steel, Morgan-Guggenheim Utah Copper Company, and International Harvester. However, by 1917, the Allies had been brought to their knees and the J.P. Morgan interests were in deep trouble. The Allies owed Morgan and other US corporations $1.5 billion. All these loans would go bad if the United States did not enter the war. American Ambassador to Britain Walter Hines wrote to President Wilson that "Unless we go to war with Germany, our Government, of course, cannot make such a direct grant of credit . . ." to France and Britain. Within four weeks, President Wilson asked Congress for a declaration of war--and J.P. Morgan was saved.

"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."

Martin Luther King Jr., speech at NYC Riverside Church , April 4, 1967

 

Capitalist Wars Continue Unabated

The cabal-led military dictatorship is carrying out a policy of militaristic imperialism. The puppet Obama regime is now building the biggest-ever war machine:

  • Obama is now deploying more troops than Dubya did. George W. Bush left the White House with 173, 000 US troops deployed in the two principal US wars (142,000 in Iraq and 31,000 in Afghanistan). With the increase of 45,000 troops in Afghanistan, Obama is now deploying a total of 233,000: 120,000 in Iraq and 113,000 in Afghanistan

  • Obama says the various "wars" are costing $1 trillion. In truth, the entire "war on terrorism" has cost $6 trillion and continues to cost $1.5 trillion per year.

  • Israel's right-wing militaristic government has been given billions in US military aid over many decades

  • During the past half century US aid to Israel has totaled a whopping $81.3 billion (November 2001 Congressional Research Service report)

  • Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia are among the next largest recipients of US military weaponryPoor, developing nations bought 68 percent of US weapons output in 2000 (Congressional Research Service study)

    • From 1999 to 2000, Egypt received $1.3 billion in US military aid and Jordan got $123 million
    • While Saudi Arabia receives no outright US military assistance, it has bought over $33.5 billion of the most sophisticated US weapons systems (AWACS, F-15's and more) over the past ten years; that's more than US military assistance given to Israel and Egypt combined
  • American weapons producers signed contracts for some $18.6 billion dollars in 2000, up from around $12.9 billion dollars the previous year

  • US contracts accounted for 49.7 percent of global sales in 2000 and the US controlled half of the developing world's arms market with $12.6 billion in sales

  • The US routinely sells weapons to undemocratic regimes and gross human rights abusers (Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Pakistan, Kuwait, Turkmenistan and Turkey), which the capitalist cabal views as "trustworthy allies"

  • Because the U.S. military budget is about 10 times as large as the next military budget, the United States has been able to out-compete all other countries in producing and selling weapons on the global market, running other countries out of business

  • In addition to controlling military technology, the United States gives an enormous amount of military aid:The US power elite not only recruits and solicits and consolidates and solidifies a monopoly relationship with the military elites in countries around the world, but also with the foreign policy elites, the people who work at institutes for strategic studies and in the Foreign Service, the people who develop concepts of the world and of international relations, which then drive and determine the kind of choice points that governments will make along the way on a wide variety of issues

    • In foreign aid
    • In the form of subsidized purchases of weapons
    • In guaranteed loans to countries to buy weapons
    • To train the military in other countries (e.g. Indonesia)
      in dealing with civil conflict, civil unrest, insurgency, and emergencies

"The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. Even when weapons of war are not actually destroyed, their manufacture is still a convenient way of expending labour power without producing anything that can be consumed."

George Orwell, 1984

The Military Dictatorship Budget

Congress unquestioningly passes every military budget, but if we can afford to install country clubs in over a thousand embassies and bases all over the globe, wouldn't these perks be a good place to slash expenditures? The cabal pretends to be reducing the deficit--targeting the elderly and poor by cutting $38 billion in what it calls "entitlements"--while INCREASING the military budget by $700 billion in 2011!

In 2010, $1.53 Trillion was spent by military establishments throughout the world. €30 billion a year could eradicate world hunger. 90% of workers' taxes go to military spending.Religious leaders worldwide continue to support illicit militaristic imperialist wars, mindlessly intoning the lie that military personnel are fighting against terrorism or "sing the American way of life."

The capitalist cabal lies to the American people about how much it spends on military expenses. As indicated in the image on the right, the Obama puppet regime tells the American taxpayers that only about 17% of the federal budget goes to the military expenditures. In reality, about 90% of workers' taxes go to military spending!

World Militarism

In a correlative article on oil imperialism, we saw that a major part of the overall world dominance strategy is:

  • First, they sell armaments to a regime (for example, Panama, Iraq, Yugoslavia/Kosovo, Afghan/Pakistan/Taliban Mujaheddin).

  • Then, they demonize the regime to which they sold the armaments and declare war on it (e.g. Panama Invasion, Gulf War, UN Kosovo war, Afghanistan war, Iraq war).

  • After the war, they station permanent military bases in the country and use the military bases to control the energy resources in the surrounding countries.

  • They impose the current U.S. foreign policy doctrine called "full-spectrum dominance": the U.S. must control military, economic and political developments everywhere.

"If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy."

James Madison, while a United States Congressman


Militarism Gives Resistance to Tyranny a Bad Name

The United States was in part created by a revolutionary war fought by American patriots against their British oppressors. Throughout much of American history, especially since the beginning of the twentieth century, U.S. leaders have primarily perpetrated war on the people of the world instead of using war to free the people from oppression. Even in the second world war, which has been called "the good war," American and German industrialists collaborated with the Nazis for the purpose of making unconscionable profits.

Even so, we must remember that resistance, of all kinds, against tyranny is sometimes the only or the best response to naked aggression and oppression. The fact that the cabal regime has previously and is now using war merely as a pretext for its imperialistic schemes does not destroy the principle that the people's resistance against tyranny is sometimes necessary. It's necessary to resist the current tyranny of the Obama puppet regime with whatever means are effective.

Certainly, in the present situation the cabal has a monopoly over violence (military, intelligence agencies, police) in the United States and the world. So it would be idiotic for ordinary citizens to use violence in our present struggle to create a New America where the well-being of all its citizens is the common goal. But we citizens must, nonetheless, do everything in our power to combat the onslaughts against our Constitutional liberties:

  • Speak out against each instance of oppression that we see

  • Avoid allowing ourselves to be duped by the call for a jingoistic, 200% patriotism that is part of the "High Cabal's" scam to marginalize the people

  • Join with activist groups that are working to improve conditions and fight tyranny

  • Create cooperative commonwealth communities

The Lexicon of Understanding

In a series of articles on this Web site, we've exposed the various facets of the capitalist cabal's overthrow of American democracy and control of the United States:

In these articles, we have used such terms as fascism, cabal, militarism, dictatorship, police state, world dominance, war crimes, war profiteering, state criminality, economic exploitation, and military dictatorship.

In each instance, we provide an immediate explanation or linkout which defines these terms. Such terms as these cited sometimes possess connotations that connect them with older ideological concepts.

For example, the term imperialism was used extensively in Marxist and socialist writings. We encourage our readers to avoid being put off by these irrelevant connotations and concentrating on the precise meanings and relevant context. In the case of the term "imperialism," for instance, we define it as "the policy, practice, or advocacy of extending the power and dominion of a nation, especially by direct territorial acquisition or by gaining indirect control over the political or economic life of other areas."

Our use of these terms should in no way be construed as our agreement with doctrinaire Marxist or socialist ideologies. As our Web site makes clear, we work within the American progressive movement that issued from the Enlightenment and Perennialist traditions.

Such concepts as referred to above are essential terms of discourse in these times when the cabal and its Obama puppet regime engage in fearsome actions which can only be explained through concepts such as "fascism" and "dictatorship."

We do not enjoy having to use such extreme terms as "police state" and "military dictatorship," but in such extreme times as these it's necessary to speak the plain truth to help the American people wake up to what's happening.

In a television program, Phil Donahue spoke with swindled employees of Enron, World,com, and other criminal corporations. Many of the workers who had been fired, without severance pay, by these companies days after the senior executives had stolen millions, were still dazed. These were well-intentioned, hard-working people who had been completely savaged by corporate fat-cats. "What can we do?" they asked.

Well, certainly the first thing American workers must do is wake up to what the cabal is doing: fostering and allowing corporate crime to run rampant, destroying the life savings of thousands of people.

We must be aware that the capitalist cabal is actually a military dictatorship which will inevitably lead to the total destruction of our civil liberties unless we make sure that doesn't happen.

It's easy to miss the unmistakable aspects of the cabal's dictatorship if we assume that tyranny in the United States will necessarily take the same form as in, say, Nazi Germany, the communist Soviet Union, Sadam Hussein's dictatorship in Iraq, or other instances of despotism.

The United States has a long and glorious history of civil rights and some amount of governance by the will of the people. So the cabal's puppet Obama regime must start from a different historical position in its insane drive toward a police state. Daily, we see the Obama-led junta demolishing Constitutional liberties with impunity. We must recognize that the old forms of military dictatorship--with jackbooted storm troopers--have been replaced with new "war on terrorism" military control of civilians. And we must be aware that the cabal has created a one-party political system; both Republican and Democrat leaders serving the same capitalist aims.

9/11 was an unconscionable act of terror and whether the Bush regime planned and carried out that operation is still an open question. The cabal perpetrated a second terrorist act on Christmas day, 2009, with US intelligence agencies making certain that the "underwear bomber" was able to board Flight 253. It's quite possible that the Obama regime will create a Weimar Germany style financial crash to usher in a complete Nazi-like police state.

What the cabal is doing is so tyrannical that we must begin immediately to act as a people to stop its deliberate destruction of our nation.

"If any question why we died,
tell them, because our fathers lied."

Rudyard Kipling

Books:

  • Nick Turse, The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives, 2008
  • David Robb, Operation Hollywood: How the Pentagon Shapes and Censors the Movies, 2004

  • Klaus Dodds, Screening Terror

  • Matthew Alford, Reel Power

  • Melani McAlister, Culture, Media, and US Interests in the Middle East

 

Filed under: General No Comments
2Aug/100

Not new information, but may be the starting point for rebelion; Wikileaks leaks classified US Government military documents.

What may be the biggest turning point for America since Martin Luther King, Wikileaks.org now the center point of providing Government transparency.

Filed under: General No Comments
6Jul/101

The Multi-billion dollar industry of Social Network Spying.

The title explains it all, and thanks to Wiki-leaks we have a lot more information to indulge on.

From WikiLeaks

October 24, 2009

By Tom Burghardt (Global Research)[1]
That 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 document October 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 Shorrock and 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.
As published in Global Research. Thanks to Tom Burghardt and Global Research for covering this material. Copyright remains with the aforementioned.

Filed under: General 1 Comment
17Mar/100

Have you ever wanted to read the new Health Care Bill being formed?

Well here it is 167 pages of 211.

http://patientsunitednow.com/files/full-bill-searchable.pdf

19Nov/092

Free Internet Act, They are trying to take away your freedom!

http://www.savetheinternet.com/ - Follow the link to sign a petition against the large Telcom companies. Protect the internet at all costs.
Want to learn about what Net Neutrality is : CLICK HERE
What google says about Net Neutrality:
Network neutrality is the principle that Internet users should be in control of what content they view and what applications they use on the Internet. The Internet has operated according to this neutrality principle since its earliest days... Fundamentally, net neutrality is about equal access to the Internet. In our view, the broadband carriers should not be permitted to use their market power to discriminate against competing applications or content. Just as telephone companies are not permitted to tell consumers who they can call or what they can say, broadband carriers should not be allowed to use their market power to control activity online.
Guide to Net Neutrality for Google Users[3]
16Nov/090

Capitalism is widely accepted as Democracy.

What is it that allows us to accept the fact that 1% of the united states carries more money than 95% of Americans? Why is it that we sit and watch as our lives are controlled by the very means that allows us to live? Other countries; Japan, Western Europe, Australia, etc... Have all ready enacted a true democracy, While America the country that invented "true democracy" lays down all and follows for a strict state monopoly capitalism. People easily gain misconceptions on what capitalism is and does for them, I mean with so much media propaganda it's not hard to believe lies. There can be free enterprise with out the need of a hierarchy of corporate pyramid scams, truly the latter is just a euphemism, it is much worse than that. We The United State of America is actually closer to a Dictatorship (If you use the top 1% as a single entity) than a democracy. In contemporary usage, dictatorship refers to an autocratic form of absolute rule by leadership unrestricted by law, constitutions, or other social and political factors within the state. The corporate ladder appoints who survives, and who fails, while using our government to support this. They own what they can get, and do not have remorse. They bypass all of our constitutional laws through money and loop holes.

What more can I say? If you have opposite opinions please leave comments. If you don't believe this at all, then you are just accepting capitalism by default, and have no intention on educating your self, wake up.

http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=2007wb-imf-call - Not that I agree with every aspect of this Anarchist Group(So - Called, Since the definition of anarchy was changed from what you probably were taught about it. There are many types, and not all are destructive.

Schools of thought - Get more info on anarchy here.[show]

http://www.anarchistnews.org/?q=taxonomy/term/7 - Yes, it all starts as a spark.

http://www.alternet.org/ - Trusty news to compare to the not so trustful corporate media.

There will be more.

Filed under: General No Comments
10Oct/092

What do you think of Obama’s Nobel Prize?

What do you think of Obama's Nobel Prize? US President Barack Obama has won the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009. Is he a worthy winner? The Nobel Committee hailed Mr Obama's "extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and co-operation between peoples", citing his work to rid the world of nuclear weapons. Mr Obama said that he was "surprised and deeply humbled" by the award and that he did not feel he deserved to be in the company of some of the "transformative figures" who had previously received the award. The US President was chosen ahead of the likes of Morgan Tsvangirai, Prime Minister of Zimbabwe, who had been a favourite for the award.

Is Barack Obama the right choice for the Nobel Peace Prize? If not, who would you have chosen? Send us your comments.

If you are going to leave a comment, leave an educated one, here are some resources:

How some one is nominated for the nobel peace prize: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Peace_Prize
Where Barack Obama started:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_House_Committee_on_Foreign_Affairs

http://veterans.house.gov/

Filed under: General 2 Comments
5Oct/091

Embedded Media, The way coporate power houses control information.

Embedded media is not something new, and it is not just singled out to the US. Embedded media is news media that is distributed through high end chosen media sources, ie Fox news, etc... The problem with this is that most of those chosen newscasters are chosen because they are with in the corporate friend circle. They enjoy the corporate function parties, the tax free "business cars", and the great opportunities of interviewing  seemingly untouchable high chairs, the president of the United States being one of them. So in fact the only information you will get from these sources is strongly filtered and pre-programed information. Let's offer you some external links to prove my point:

http://news.antiwar.com/2009/10/04/galbraith-was-ordered-to-cover-up-karzai-fraud/ - Unfiltered and unbiased.
http://news.antiwar.com/2009/10/04/billions-in-us-aid-never-reach-pakistans-military/ - Fox won't even touch that.
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=15501 - I doubt if any US broadcasting station would allow this man to report.
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=15496 - Oh man, you would probably be drowned as a witch for mentioning this on public TV!

Now as you can see news media that is open, and not embedded is completely different. This has nothing to do with Right or Left wing, which is also a ploy. This is "CENTER" unbiased, real people, real news. Don't continue being satisfied with Embedded media, reach out to the extents of the internet, and find the truth..

Filed under: General 1 Comment
2Oct/093

BBC -”Big Brother is watching you shop” Old news now current….

I suggest you read the article below.  It is funny how BBC released this article recently, but corporations have been using this type of campaigning for years now. Why is it just now that our government claims to start enacting laws against the collection of our personal information.

Where are the people distributing petitions against this, where are the American protesters, and why are we just letting it get this far?

By Michael Fitzpatrick ( - Resource link here -  )

A surveillance state, with cameras on every street is commonplace but now Big Business is also turning to Big Brother.

Face recognition, behaviour analysing surveillance cameras, biometric profiling and the monitoring and storing of our shopping patterns has made snooping into our habits, movements and private lives ever easier.

Dismayed at its shrinking power to market to us via traditional media or even the internet, the private sector is now proposing to reach potential customers in ways that critics say should have us all concerned.

"There is an enormous pent-up demand for personalised location advertising, whether it is on your cellphone or PDA, on your radio in your car, or on the billboards you walk by on the streets and inside stores," says Bruce Schneier, chief security technology officer of BT.

"This is yet another technological intrusion into privacy. And like all such intrusions, it will be taken as far as the owner of that intrusion finds it profitable."

Emotional reactions

Advert in China

Are adverts watching you?

New surveillance technology could even evaporate the advertiser's favourite grouse that "half of advertising is wasted, but we don't know which half".

Advertisers are turning to "intelligent" digital billboards that use cameras to watch you watching the ads.

In Germany, developers have placed video cameras into street advertisements attempting to discern people's emotional reactions to the ads, according to the Washington-based privacy advocate outfit the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC).

It warns that this type of surveillance encroaches on civil liberties. Such face, voice and behaviour technology could be a means of tracking individuals on a mass level across their entire lives, it says.

Pushed by the demands of advertisers and security-minded governments, these technologies are becoming so increasingly smart and intrusive that they now resemble something out of science fiction, it warns.

Science fact

Some of the technology available now seems to have overtaken fiction.

When an interactive ad shouts out to Tom Cruise's character in the 2002 film Minority Report: "John Anderton, you could use a Guinness!" It identified him as he walked through a mall by scanning the unique pattern of his iris.

This is now pretty standard. Face recognition technology is proving to be a handier, more sophisticated tool to pick us out on the street, a crowded room or at passport control.

Such systems are able to automatically detect and identify human faces using recognition algorithms.

The first step for a facial recognition system is to recognise a human face and extract it from the rest of the scene. Next, the system measures the distance between the features -- a distinctive aspect of our faces that does not change with disguises or even surgery.

Matches can then be found in databases in under a second, although 100% accuracy is not yet guaranteed.

Currently the private sector is finding such systems useful for what it calls "targeted marketing," or "dynamic advertising."

Japan's NEC, for instance, sells face-recognition technology to allow advertisers to tailor what ad is showing on a digitised screen depending on the viewer's sex and age.

Tracking systems, such as these, can determine the viewer's gender 85-90% of the time, approximate age and ethnicity, and change the ads accordingly.

NEC denies the system raises privacy concerns as it does not store any images, only the analysed results (age and sex) based on those images.

But as Schneier points out systems like these are likely liable to "function creep" where a technology is brought in for one purpose, to profile your sex while viewing an ad for example, and then begins to push the boundaries.

"Once the cameras are installed and operational, once they're networked to central computers, then it's a simple matter of upgrading the software," he says.

"And if they can do more -- if they can provide more "value" to the advertisers -- then of course they will. To think otherwise is simply naive."

And when advertisers start to follow us, our privacy, our right to be left alone will be severely compromised, he thinks.

More control

Viviane Reding

EU commissioner Viviane Reding wants to see tighter controls

Democratic governments, charged with protecting us from such violations, are beginning to wake up to these practices.

The US is about to propose a bill to ensure that consumers know what information is being collected about them. While the EU promises to rigorously police what it claims are already stringent controls on our personal data.

"Europeans must have the right to control how their personal information is used," Viviane Reding, the EU's commissioner for information society and media told BBC news. "We cannot give up this basic principle, and have all our exchanges monitored, surveyed and stored, in exchange for a promise of 'more relevant' advertising."

Despite such assurances, given the pervasiveness of such technologies firstly on the internet and now spreading to the physical world, what we do about them in the next few years will be crucial. It might control our privacy for generations to come say human rights advocates.

"Companies are increasingly impatient to get to us and once these practices are commonplace it will hard to reverse them," says Marc Rotenberg director of EPIC. "Particularly as, ironically, we lose privacy these companies are gaining secrecy."

It would seem sensible to debate now how far business and the state should be allowed to tag us while we still have a privacy to protect.

Filed under: General 3 Comments
1Oct/090

Major player in the Demise of American structure: “pornography”

Big corporate powers, allowed and promoted by the US government. "So scott??? what are you trying to tell me." You must be thinking.

I'm telling you that human trafficking is a major issue, and watching pornography usually supports those same corporations that want you to stay helpless, and with out knowledge. I can list a few top American porn industries that will be nice and safe in their compound while you struggle. These are the same people that take part in human trafficking as well.

CBS has taken a stand and published this online "http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/11/21/60minutes/main585049.shtml". I am not sure if it was ever aired, but it still proves my point about the government assisting such terrible things.

Filed under: General No Comments