Month: October 2015

Video of the Day – Introducing Ground Based Delivery Drones

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Welcome to our brave new world.

From Reuters:

Israeli industrial designer Kobi Shikar has come up with the concept of a parcel delivery drone that will never get off the ground – and that’s just fine with him.

The Transwheel Delivery Drone is a sensor-packed motorized unicycle that Shikar says could be an earthbound alternative to Amazon’s futuristic plans to use drone multicopters to deliver packages to your front door.

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How America’s Modern Shadow Government Can Be Traced Back to One Very Evil Man – Allen Dulles

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Allen Dulles, the CIA director under presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, the younger brother of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, and the architect of a secretive national security apparatus that functioned as essentially an autonomous branch of government. Talbot offers a portrait of a black-and-white Cold War-era world full of spy games and nuclear brinkmanship, in which everyone is either a good guy or a bad guy. Dulles—who deceived American elected leaders and overthrew foreign ones, who backed ex-Nazis and thwarted left-leaning democrats—falls firmly in the latter camp. 

But what I was really trying to do was a biography on the American power elite from World War II up to the 60s. That was the key period when the national security state was constructed in this country, and where it begins to overshadow American democracy. It’s almost like Game of Thrones to me, where you have the dynastic struggles between these power groups within the American system for control of the country and the world…

Absolutely. The surveillance state that Snowden and others have exposed is very much a legacy of the Dulles past. I think Dulles would have been delighted by how technology and other developments have allowed the American security state to go much further than he went. He had to build a team of cutthroats and assassins on the ground to go around eliminating the people he wanted to eliminate, who he felt were in the way of American interests. He called them communists. We call them terrorists today. And of course the most controversial part of my book, I’m sure, will be the end, where I say there was blowback from that. Because that killing machine in some way was brought back home.

– From the Mother Jones article: You Think the NSA Is Bad? Meet Former CIA Director Allen Dulles

Many of you will be intimately familiar with the name Allen Dulles. Younger readers, of my generation or below, will be far less so. It is precisely because the youth of this nation remain so ignorant of the nefarious characters in America’s past, that David Talbot’s recently published book, The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government, is so incredibly important.

Mr. Talbot has been recently conducting invaluable interviews about the book with various media organizations. One of the best I’ve seen is with Mother Jones. Here’s some of what he had to say about America’s longest serving CIA director:

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Obama’s Nominee to Head the FDA Has Very Deep Ties to the Pharmaceutical Industry

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No one who knows him thinks he wants to weaken the regulatory agency he has been chosen to lead. But he has deeper ties to the pharmaceutical industry than any FDA commissioner in recent memory, and some public health advocates question whether his background could tilt him in the direction of an industry he would be in charge of supervising.

– From the All-Gov article: Obama’s Nominee for FDA Chief Scrutinized for Ties to Big Pharma

Nothing from the above quote should surprise anyone. One of the hallmarks of the Obama Administration, has been his penchant for consistently surrounding himself with some of the biggest cronies America has to offer. From choosing Tim Geithner as Secretary of the Treasury, to the coronation of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, the list is almost endless.

Of course, it’s not just his cabinet choices that have justifiably raised eyebrows, but also his nominees to head various agencies, seemingly for the sole purpose of maintaining the status quo and protecting “elite” criminals. No such choice was more blatant than Mary Jo White to head the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). As I noted before she even worked a single day on the job: Meet Mary Jo White: The Next SEC Chief and a Guaranteed Wall Street Patsy.

This prediction proved to be accurate in spades, as we learned in subsequent years. See:

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The 3 Best and Worst Moments of the Democratic Debate (From a Libertarian Standpoint)

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If you’re like me, and a brief attempt to watch last night’s Democratic debate was thwarted in less than thirty minutes due to the relentless and unwatchable heaping pile of bullshit that it was, never fear. ReasonTV has complied the debate’s three best and worst moments.

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Meet “Groundwork” – Google Chairman Eric Schmidt’s Stealth Startup Working to Make Hillary Clinton President

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An under-the-radar startup funded by billionaire Eric Schmidt has become a major technology vendor for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, underscoring the bonds between Silicon Valley and Democratic politics.

The Groundwork, according to Democratic campaign operatives and technologists, is part of efforts by Schmidt—the executive chairman of Google parent-company Alphabet—to ensure that Clinton has the engineering talent needed to win the election. And it is one of a series of quiet investments by Schmidt that recognize how modern political campaigns are run, with data analytics and digital outreach as vital ingredients that allow candidates to find, court, and turn out critical voter blocs.

There is also another gap in play: The shrinking distance between Google and the Democratic Party. Former Google executive Stephanie Hannon is the Clinton campaign’s chief technology officer, and a host of ex-Googlers are currently employed as high-ranking technical staff at the Obama White House. Schmidt, for his part, is one of the most powerful donors in the Democratic Party—and his influence does not stem only from his wealth, estimated by Forbes at more than $10 billion.

According to campaign finance disclosures, Clinton’s campaign is the Groundwork’s only political client. Its employees are mostly back-end software developers with experience at blue-chip tech firms like Netflix, Dreamhost, and Google.

– From the excellent Quartz article: The Stealthy, Eric Schmidt-backed Startup that’s Working to Put Hillary Clinton in the White House

The following article from Quartz is fascinating, important and extremely troubling. It zeros in on a company you’ve probably never heard of called “Groundwork,” a startup backed by Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt. The sole purpose of the company appears to be to get Hillary Clinton elected President. What is so concerning about the company is that it appears to be little more than a clever way to get around the already extraordinarily loose campaign finance rules.

For instance, we all know about the rise of Super PACs and how they essentially allow unlimited funding to political candidates. The one limitation on their power is they are not allowed to directly coordinate with the political campaigns themselves. Enter “Groundwork,” which has seemingly found an exploitable loophole to this meager restriction. As such, the Quartz writers insightfully ask: “Are startups the new Super PACs?” It appears so.

From Quartz:

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CIA Torture Victims Launch Lawsuit Against Psychologist Masterminds Behind the Program

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This is interesting.

From the Guardian:

Survivors of CIA torture have sued the contractor psychologists who designed one of the most infamous programs of the post-9/11 era.

In an extraordinary step, psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen now face a federal lawsuit for their role in convincing the CIA to subject terror suspects to mock drowning, painful bodily contortions, sleep and dietary deprivation and other methods long rejected by much of the world as torture.

For more on Mitchell and Jessen, I suggest reading: Revelations from the Torture Report – CIA Lies, Nazi Methods and the $81 Million No-Bid Torture Contract.

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David Cameron Attacks Twitter Users, Following in the Footsteps of the Saudi Religious Police Chief

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You know things are not well in the world when you hear claims that the Prime Minister of Great Britain had sex with a dead pig’s head and you barely flinch. That’s because sexual relations with farm animal carcasses simply pales in comparison to the man’s disastrous, authoritarian political positions.

In his latest act of verbal diarrhea, David Cameron has gone on the offensive…against Twitter. Little did he know it, but he’s actually quite late in his perceived “insight” into those who use the social media platform. For instance, it was over two years ago when Saudi authorities made their position quite clear. Here’s a excerpt from the post, Saudi Religious Police Chief Goes on the Attack…Against Twitter:

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Declassified 1952 Footage of the U.S. Navy’s Plans for “Offensive Biological and Chemical Warfare” is Released

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Earlier this year, I published a post titled, Conspiracy Fact – How the Government Conducted 239 Secret Bioweapon Experiments on the American People. Here are a few excerpts:

It all began in late September of 1950, when over a few days, a Navy vessel used giant hoses to spray a fog of two kinds of bacteria, Serratia marcescens and Bacillus globigii — both believed at the time to be harmless — out into the fog, where they disappeared and spread over the city.

The unsuspecting residents of San Francisco certainly could not consent to the military’s germ warfare test, and there’s good evidence that it could have caused the death of at least one resident of the city, Edward Nevin, and hospitalized 10 others.

Over the next 20 years, the military would conduct 239 “germ warfare” tests over populated areas, according to news reports from the 1970s.

These tests included the large-scale releases of bacteria in the New York City subway system, on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, and in National Airport just outside Washington, D.C.

So how seriously was the U.S. military planning for offensive biological and chemical warfare? Very seriously, as this recently declassified 1952 video demonstrates (h/t to Motherboard for highlighting this):

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Merkel “Surprised” as Hundreds of Thousands March in Berlin Against TTIP “Corporate Dictatorship”

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In what is being described as the largest German protest in recent years, hundreds of thousands of enraged citizens descended upon Berlin over the weekend to voice their collective displeasure at the government’s attempt to consolidate corporate dictatorship by passing a democracy killing agreement being marketed as a “free trade” deal, known as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).

The TTIP is basically the TPP but between the U.S. and Europe as opposed to the U.S. and Asia and parts of Latin America. Like the TPP, it further consolidates corporate power, destroys consumer protections and has been negotiated entirely in secret. For prior articles on the TPP, see:

How the TPP Could Lead to Worldwide Internet Censorship

U.S. State Department Upgrades Serial Human Rights Abuser Malaysia to Include it in the TPP

Julian Assange on the TPP – “Deal Isn’t About Trade, It’s About Corporate Control”

Trade Expert and TPP Whistleblower – “We Should Be Very Concerned about What’s Hidden in This Trade Deal”

As the Senate Prepares to Vote on “Fast Track,” Here’s a Quick Primer on the Dangers of the TPP

It seems the Germans aren’t prepared to take this assault lying down. We learn from Reuters that:

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How the DEA Uses “Parallel Construction” to Hide Unconstitutional Investigations

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Earlier this year, I highlighted the fact that unconstitutional surveillance was in many ways birthed by the pointless, misguided and utterly failed, “War on Drugs.” Here’s an excerpt from that post, titled, How NSA Surveillance Was Birthed from the Drug War – The DEA Tracked Billions of Phone Calls Pre 9/11:

The now-discontinued operation, carried out by the DEA’s intelligence arm, was the government’s first known effort to gather data on Americans in bulk, sweeping up records of telephone calls made by millions of U.S. citizens regardless of whether they were suspected of a crime. It was a model for the massive phone surveillance system the NSA launched to identify terrorists after the Sept. 11 attacks. That dragnet drew sharp criticism that the government had intruded too deeply into Americans’ privacy after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked it to the news media two years ago.

The similarities between the NSA program and the DEA operation established a decade earlier are striking – too much so to have been a coincidence, people familiar with the programs said. Former NSA general counsel Stewart Baker said, “It’s very hard to see (the DEA operation) as anything other than the precursor” to the NSA’s terrorist surveillance.

The extent of that surveillance alarmed privacy advocates, who questioned its legality. “This was aimed squarely at Americans,” said Mark Rumold, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “That’s very significant from a constitutional perspective.”

In light of this, it should surprise no one that the DEA continues to use unconstitutional, “classified” methods when targeting suspects. Since the collection of this evidence would be questioned in a courtroom, the DEA suggests using a procedure known as “parallel construction” to avoid any controversy in the public record. This is how it works.

From Muckrock:

Drug Enforcement Administration training documents released to MuckRock user C.J. Ciaramella show how the agency constructs two chains of evidence to hide surveillance programs from defense teams, prosecutors, and a public wary of domestic intelligence practices.

In training materials, the department even encourages a willful ignorance by field agents to minimize the risk of making intelligence practices public.

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