Patriot Act – Freedom of Speech Criminalized

By Susan Lindauer
COTO Report

Most of you know I was the Chief U.S. Asset covering the Iraqi Embassy at the United Nations for 7 years before the War. You know I was subsequently arrested on the Patriot Act, locked up on Carswell Air Force Base, and threatened with forcible drugging to silence me, when the Bush cabal decided to blame Pre-War Intelligence for their catastrophic decision to go to War.

On the 10 year anniversary of the start of the War, it’s worth examining the comprehensive peace option hammered out in the two year run up to the invasion. I was traveling in Minnesota this week for speaking engagements. In a television interview, I discussed the peace option at length.

Governmental Secrecy: Shield for Tyranny, Incompetence, and Corruption

Guest Blogged by Stephen H. Unger

An essential pillar of democracy is openness. There is no way that people can meaningfully participate in government, even if only by voting for representatives, if they do not have access to accurate information related to government operations. This was well understood by the founders of the US and embedded in the Bill of Rights. Conversely, a salient characteristic of undemocratic systems of all types, such as Czarist Russia, the Soviet Union, and Nazi Germany is a high degree of governmental secrecy.

The standard excuse for the suppression of governmental information is national security. In practice, it is improperly used in most situations, i.e., there is no legitimate reason for keeping secret the great majority of information classified secret by the government. Secrecy is used to conceal abuse of power, illegality, corruption, incompetence, and waste. A common instance of misuse of secrecy is when government officials make statements to reporters on controversial matters under the condition that they not be identified in the published stories. Below, I discuss how secrecy is being misused in the US. But first, consider when secrecy does make sense.

New Homeland Security Report Sees “Evolutionary Shift” in Terror Threat

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By Activist Post

A new report issued by Homeland Security Policy Institute, a “think and do tank”, entitled “Counterterrorism Intelligence Law Enforcement Perspectives” calls for further centralization of the anti-terror apparatus inside the United States.

The changing, converging nature of threats faced today — especially those from terrorism, transnational crime and the use of technology to carry out criminal behavior — make it imperative that intelligence-led policing be integrated into the decentralized police structures and community policing principles of the United States.

The report lists a hierarchy of threats that include an overall “evolutionary shift” toward “a blended terror threat that unites foreign directed or inspired attacks with homegrown elements and operators.”

This policy paper forms the new narrative that could justify the continuing infiltration and crackdown upon peaceful protest, civil disobedience, and even the questioning of American foreign policy and Homeland Security directives, whether on the street or in cyberspace.

911 Family Member Lorie Van Auken on Unanswered Questions, Cover Up, the Rise of Police State

By Sibel Edmonds
Boiling Frogs Radio Show

Lorie Van Auken joins us and shares with us her reflections ten years on about the events of 9/11 and her loss. She discusses the still-classified 28 pages of the JICI dealing with terrorist financing, the 9/11 families’ stalled lawsuit to bankrupt the terrorists and the direct interventions by the White House to protect the Saudi regime against the justice-seeking families, and the many uninvestigated questions and facts covered up by the 9/11 commission. She questions our current many-fronted wars and the senselessness of the occupation of and our military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan with Saddam Hussein and Bin Laden both dead, while our economy is crashing here at home. Ms. Van Auken talks about the three versions of the NORAD timeline, the passage of the Patriot Act as a vehicle to erode our civil liberties, NSA’s illegal wiretapping of our domestic communications under the guise of security, and more!

Prime Aim of Obama’s Surveillance State Is to Quash Dissent

By Glenn Greenwald
Salon

Last year, Obama unveiled a plan to require all services that enable communications to enable back-door government access. This year, he demanded greater power to obtain Internet records without a court order.  DNC Chair, Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz has sponsored a truly pernicious bill that would force Internet providers to keep logs of their customers’ activities for one year, writes Glenn Greenwald.

How Smart Meters Enable Totalitarian Technocracy (video)

By Patrick Wood
August Forecast & Review

The dark horse of the New World Order is not Com­mu­nism, Socialism or Fas­cism: It is Tech­noc­racy. The imple­men­ta­tion of national, con­ti­nental and global Smart Grid sys­tems pave the way for Tech­noc­racy to be imple­mented on a global basis: It’s being hailed as a New World Wide Web of Energy.

Editor of August Forecast & Review http://www.augustreview.com gives a 40 minute presentation on “Technocracy” at the Eagle Forum Convension, Saturday June 18, 2011.

As America’s Economy Collapses, ‘New Normal’ Police State Takes Shape

By Tom Burghardt
Pacific Free Press

Forget your rights.

As corporate overlords position themselves to seize what little remains of a tattered social net (adieu Medicare and Medicaid! Social Security? Au revoir!), the Obama administration is moving at break-neck speed to expand police state programs first stood-up by the Bush government.

ECHELON: Global Eavesdropping Scheme Dwarfs Murdoch’s ‘News of the World’

By Sherwood Ross
Global Research

As eavesdroppers go, next to Uncle Sam and John Bull, Rupert Murdoch, the moral force behind Fox News, is an amateur.

That’s because a global eavesdropping scheme being run today by the United States and Great Britain dwarfs anything that Rupert Murdoch’s editors at The News of The World (TNTW) ever dared attempt.

British Prime Minister David Cameron may well deny he knew TNTW was tapping the phones of members of UK’s Royal household or those of American 9/11 victims. But he can’t claim he doesn’t know his country is a partner in ECHELON, which, according to Washington journalist Bill Blum, is a “network of massive, highly automated interception stations” that is eavesdropping on the entire world.

Smart Meters Another Invasion of Privacy, EMF health danger

By Aaron McCollum
Bob Tuskin Show

Here’s a 5-minute overview.

Smart Meters are yet another tool of Command & Control by those who have their tentacles of power over those of us trying to live a life free of corruption, pollution and elitist rule. These devices are infesting the homes and businesses of Americans across the nation and the option of not having one is almost always not an option at all.

Smart Meters are yet another Big Brother tool that can actually monitor you in your home by way of knowing when and how long you are on your computer, when you go into a room by way of the light switches, when you have armed your security system and even when you have left or come home when your garage door is activated.

How Much Privacy Should We Give Away in the Name of Safety?

By Lee Camp
Moment of Clarity

Living in the Shadows: A World of Black Ops and Cyber Wars

The very word “secrecy” is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths, and to secret proceedings. — John F. Kennedy

By John Galt
Activist Post

A shadow has descended on freedom worldwide:  Congress is in the dark; sovereign foreign nations are in the dark; and the average American can’t imagine that a world of espionage, black ops, psy ops, and the apparatus of a surveillance-industrial complex run by globalists has them in the crosshairs.

When exiting CIA director, Leon Panetta, openly admitted that shadow wars and black ops should be a strategy employed through direct military control by the CIA, it marked a new Dark Age.

Warning: This Message Contains Democracy

By Susan Lindauer

No great civilization is ever destroyed from without, or conquered by external forces, until it first destroys itself from within. America’s leaders should have thought long and hard about that before voting to extend the Patriot Act last week.

Unhappily it’s official. We the People are the enemy. We have dared to prod and examine government policy too closely. We have questioned government leadership when we should rightly have obeyed without challenge. Some of us have exposed wrongful government practices and deceptions, expecting to hold Congress and White House leaders accountable to voters. Foolish us!

Last week Congress set the record straight. Breaking campaign promises to defeat the Patriot Act, Congress blocked hearings and debate on amendments that would fix problems in surveillance rules, and rammed a four year extension on the American People. Only 31 Republicans and 122 Democrats voted against the Patriot Act in the House.

10 Indications the United States Is a Dictatorship

By Activist Post

For a people to be free, they must first be honest with themselves, their government, and the world at large. History is filled with stories of free nations that fell under the spell cast by their governments who exploited the threat of terror.

In fact, numerous presidents in American history already have used various specific threats to sidestep their Constitutional restraints. Today we are entering a nebulous world where our “enemy” cannot be defined, has no particular allegiance to one country, and is able to adopt new leaders at will. Rather than encourage a sense of resilience and independence in its citizens, America has chosen to amplify the terror threat in order to concentrate power in the hands of the State. The very first signpost on this historically familiar road to tyranny is an atmosphere of hate, suspicion, and vindictiveness. It first begins as an outwardly directed aggression and then rather abruptly turns inward upon itself.

The good news is that freedom is won and lost in our hearts and minds. It is for this reason that we must state the obvious: we have clearly passed through the first “atmospheric” stage of approaching dictatorship, and have now entered the second — the open behavior of a dictatorship in the United States.

Globalists secret weapon exposed: Tech kill chips!

By Alex Jones
InfoWars

May 16:  As the world is distracted by the royal nuptials and Obama’s ever changing death soap opera of CIA asset Osama bin Laden, the technocrats are rolling out the next phase of their global control grid. This foundations of this plan were laid in the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and have been updated each subsequent year. In addition to Obama’s strangle hold on the internet, all smart devices have federally mandated control and kill switches added. This will give the government total control over incoming information to all smart phones regardless of manufacturer.

Defense bill would allow clandestine cyberwarfare operations

By Suzanne Kubota
Federal News Radio

Within the chairman’s mark of the 2012 Defense Authorization bill is language that would allow DoD to carry out clandestine operations in cyberspace against targets located outside the United States and to defend against all attacks on DoD assets.

Released Monday, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Rep. Howard P. “Buck” McKeon, (R-Calif.) helps to define the Rules of Engagement in cyberspace for the Defense Department, noting “because of the evolving nature of cyber warfare, there is a lack of historical precedent for what constitutes traditional military activities in cyberspace.”

Revelations about the Growth of Government Surveillance in 2010

By Steven Aftergood
Secrecy News

By every available measure, the level of domestic intelligence surveillance activity in 2010 increased from the year before, according to a new Justice Department report to Congress on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

“During calendar year 2010, the Government made 1,579 applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (hereinafter ‘FISC’) for authority to conduct electronic surveillance and/or physical searches for foreign intelligence purposes,” according to the new report (pdf).  This compares to a reported 1,376 applications in 2009.  (In 2008, however, the reported figure — 2,082 — was quite a bit higher.)

Genetic Patdown: Homeland Security plan for DNA screening could quickly lead to other uses, abuses

Ed. Note: The original article that was reposted here asserted factual errors, which contradict info in the author’s cited source. It is more appropriate, therefore, to repost the story broken by Katie Drummond on Feb. 26.  Despite a later DHS denial, DHS officially confirmed to The Daily that it is testing a device that collects DNA. [Image]

By Katie Drummond
The Daily
February 26, 2011

Airport scanners already get under your clothes, but federal officials aren’t stopping there: They want to get inside your genes, too.

This summer, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security plans to begin testing a portable DNA scanner, The Daily has learned.

How Close Are We to a Nano-based Surveillance State?

By Michael Edwards
Activist Post

In the span of just three years, we have seen drone surveillance become openly operational on American soil. In 2007, Texas reporters first filmed a predator drone test being conducted by the local police department in tandem with Homeland Security.  And in 2009, it was revealed that an operation was underway to use predator drones inland over major cities, far from “border control” functions.  This year it has been announced that not only will drone operations fly over the Mexican border, but the United States and Canada are partnering to cover 900 miles of the northern border as well. [Image]

Now that the precedent has been set to employ drones over non-combat areas, the military is further revealing the technology of miniaturization that they currently have at their disposal.  As drone expert, P.W. Singer said, “At this point, it doesn’t really matter if you are against the technology, because it’s coming.”  According to Singer, “The miniaturization of drones is where it really gets interesting.  You can use these things anywhere, put them anyplace, and the target will never even know they’re being watched.”

So what exactly is on the horizon?

U.S. & Canada merge, plan biometric tracking of North Americans

By Alex Newman
New American

The move toward a North American Union received another big boost last week as President Barack Obama and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper met in Washington, D.C. to hammer out a deal on creating a common “perimeter” around the two countries while diminishing the role of the nations’ shared border and developing a biometric system to track North Americans. The two leaders, touting the plan as a move toward security and prosperity, signed a four-page declaration supposedly committing the two countries to working together on a wide range of issues. According to news reports, the final agreement was the product of many months of work.

Tea Party My Ass: Over 3/4 vote for Patriot Act

By Karl Denninger
Market Ticker

You were lied to America.

I told you this before the election.  That you were snookered, lied to, and bamboozled.  That you would not get either real fiscal accountability or liberty and The Rule of Law out of The Tea Party. Many said I was full of crap.

Really?

I challenge any and all who said I was wrong to explain this … Cross-referencing the list at MSNBC and the outcome of the vote, the following is a list of Tea Party-backed candidates voting for the bill (Patriot Act reauthorization):