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Texas SWAT Team Raids Organic Farm for No Reason

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The increasing use of SWAT teams across these United States is completely and totally incompatible with a free and civilized society. As I mentioned in my recent article about how there are now 50,000 SWAT raids in America annually, many of these military-styled operations target nonviolent offenders, and are often merely money making rackets for … Read more

Meet the NSA’s “Fat Finger”

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James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, has acknowledged that the court found the NSA in breach of the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures, but the Obama administration has fought a Freedom of Information lawsuit that seeks the opinion.

Generally, the NSA reveals nothing in public about its errors and infractions. The unclassified versions of the administration’s semiannual reports to Congress feature blacked-out pages under the headline “Statistical Data Relating to Compliance Incidents.”

From the Washington Post’s groundbreaking article from last evening

For those of you not familiar with Wall Street lingo, people in the financial industry refer to an outsized move in the markets resulting from a human error as a “fat finger,” ie someone pressed the wrong key when placing an order. Unfortunately for us all, it appears the NSA has a surveillance fat finger. Who would’ve guessed it!

In this case, I am referring to last night’s Washington Post article in which the paper reveals that the NSA intercepted a “large number” of calls within the Washington D.C. area supposedly because they mistook D.C.’s area code with the country code of Egypt. Um, ok.

However, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There are countless disturbing revelations outlined in this article, one that was based on documents provided by Edward Snowden, the gift that keeps on giving. Another disturbing fact is that the NSA appears to have purposely withheld information from the parties that are supposed to be overseeing it in order to hide its crimes. Oh, and Mr. President of Transparency Obama is fighting to prevent the public from seeing the opinion of the FISA court that states NSA activities are unconstitutional.  More from the Washington Post:

The documents, provided earlier this summer to The Washington Post by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, include a level of detail and analysis that is not routinely shared with Congress or the special court that oversees surveillance. In one of the documents, agency personnel are instructed to remove details and substitute more generic language in reports to the Justice Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

In one instance, the NSA decided that it need not report the unintended surveillance of Americans. A notable example in 2008 was the interception of a “large number” of calls placed from Washington when a programming error confused the U.S. area code 202 for 20, the international dialing code for Egypt, according to a “quality assurance” review that was not distributed to the NSA’s oversight staff.

In another case, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which has authority over some NSA operations, did not learn about a new collection method until it had been in operation for many months. The court ruled it unconstitutional.

The Obama administration has provided almost no public information about the NSA’s compliance record. In June, after promising to explain the NSA’s record in “as transparent a way as we possibly can,” Deputy Attorney General James Cole described extensive safeguards and oversight that keep the agency in check. “Every now and then, there may be a mistake,” Cole said in congressional testimony.

I suppose in NSA lingo “every now and then” means thousands of times a year.

“We’re a human-run agency operating in a complex environment with a number of different regulatory regimes, so at times we find ourselves on the wrong side of the line,” a senior NSA official said in an interview, speaking with White House permission on the condition of anonymity.

Anonymity for them, transparency for us!

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Retired Marine Colonel to New Hampshire City Council: “We’re Building a Domestic Army”

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We’re building a domestic army and we’re shrinking the military, because the government is afraid of its own citizens. The last time more than 10 terrorists were in the same place at one time was September 11th, and all these vehicles in the world wouldn’t have prevented it, nor would it have helped anybody. So I don’t know where we are going to use this many vehicles and this many troops…We’re building an army over here and I can’t believe people aren’t seeing it. Is everybody blind?

– Retired Marine Colonel Peter Martino

The above quote is taken from a powerful 4 minute video taken at a Concord, NH council meeting to discuss whether or not the city should proceed with a request to obtain a BearCat G3 armored vehicle. I reported on the controversy behind this vehicle request earlier in the week, after the city’s application was made public and showed officials explained it was needed to deal with “domestic terrorists,” which included libertarians and Occupy New Hampshire.

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Chart of the Day: DuckDuckGo

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A month ago, I highlighted the explosive growth in privacy focused search engine DuckDuckGo. At the time, I also stated that I would start using it for my searches to see how it goes. Well I am very pleased to report that I have now successfully conditioned myself to use this search engine for about … Read more

A Broken, Corrupt and Immoral Criminal Justice System

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You know that the rule of law has essentially vanished when the Attorney General himself feels compelled to state: “America’s legal system, we must face the reality that, as it stands, our system is in too many respects broken.” That is precisely what Eric Holder stated earlier this week, while seemingly taking no responsibility for that fact despite being the top lawyer in the nation. Guess he was too busy protecting his banker masters from prosecution to notice.

In any event, the broken criminal justice system really took center stage earlier this year when the federal prosector Carmen Ortiz drove child prodigy Aaron Swartz to his death by piling on overzealous charges in an attempt to advance her career. Instead she drove a gentle genius to an untimely death. Kudos Ortiz.

In light of Holder’s comment, Bloomberg columnist Clive Crook wrote an excellent article outlining some of the main attributes of out increasingly Kafkaesque legal system. Here are some key excerpts:

“As a prosecutor, a judge, an attorney in private practice, and now, as our nation’s attorney general, I’ve seen the criminal justice system firsthand, from nearly every angle. While I have the utmost faith in — and dedication to — America’s legal system, we must face the reality that, as it stands, our system is in too many respects broken.”

In a widely reported speech this week, Eric Holder delivered that assessment of U.S. criminal justice. Many commended his frankness, but if you ask me he’s confused. A broken system of justice shouldn’t command the utmost faith; it should arouse the utmost skepticism. And his appraisal was actually too generous. America’s criminal-justice system is not “in too many respects broken”: It’s a national disgrace, from top to bottom.

According to a forthcoming report from the American Civil Liberties Union, 2,074 federal inmates are serving sentences of life imprisonment without possibility of parole for nonviolent crimes. Think about that.

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Welcome to the Silk Road: A Mind-Blowing Interview with Dread Pirate Roberts

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An entrepreneur as professionally careful as the Dread Pirate Roberts doesn’t trust instant messaging services. Forget phones or Skype. At one point during our eight-month preinterview courtship, I offer to meet him at an undisclosed location outside the United States. “Meeting in person is out of the question,” he says. “I don’t meet in person even with my closest advisors.” When I ask for his name and nationality, he’s so spooked that he refuses to answer any other questions and we lose contact for a month.

All my communications with Roberts are routed exclusively through the messaging system and forums of the website he owns and manages, the Silk Road… “The highest levels of government are hunting me,” says Roberts. “I can’t take any chances.”

– From Forbes’ recent article on the Silk Road

Most of my readers have probably heard of the Silk Road. No, not the historical trade routes that linked Europe to Asia, but rather the online illegal drug marketplace accessible only via anonymity browsing software Tor, and where the only currency accepted is Bitcoin.

Those of you who have heard about it, probably know far less about the man that runs it. A character who only goes by the name Dread Pirate Roberts. He’s a character who usually stays firmly in the shadows for obvious reasons, but who has come out and done an excellent interview with Andy Greenberg of Forbes. What follows are some of the more interesting exchanges. From Forbes:

An entrepreneur as professionally careful as the Dread Pirate Roberts doesn’t trust instant messaging services. Forget phones or Skype. At one point during our eight-month preinterview courtship, I offer to meet him at an undisclosed location outside the United States. “Meeting in person is out of the question,” he says. “I don’t meet in person even with my closest advisors.” When I ask for his name and nationality, he’s so spooked that he refuses to answer any other questions and we lose contact for a month.

All my communications with Roberts are routed exclusively through the messaging system and forums of the website he owns and manages, the Silk Road. Accessing the site requires running the anonymity software Tor, which encrypts Web traffic and triple-bounces it among thousands of computers around the world. Like a long, blindfolded ride in the back of some guerrilla leader’s van, Tor is designed to prevent me–and anyone else–from tracking the location of Silk Road’s servers or the Dread Pirate Roberts himself. “The highest levels of government are hunting me,” says Roberts. “I can’t take any chances.”

By the measure of Carnegie Mellon researcher Nicolas Christin, Roberts’ eBay-like service was grossing $1.2 million a month in the first half of 2012. Since then the site has doubled its product listings, and revenue now hits an annual run-rate of $30 million to $45 million by FORBES’ estimate.

Roberts also has a political agenda: He sees himself not just as an enabler of street-corner pushers but also as a radical libertarian revolutionary carving out an anarchic digital space beyond the reach of the taxation and regulatory powers of the state–Julian Assange with a hypodermic needle.

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The Bahrain Ghetto: Barbed Wire Fencing Goes Up Around Certain Neighborhoods

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The regime in Bahrain has been one of the world’s greatest human rights abusers over the past several years, yet there’s barely a peep by our “most transparent ever” President Barrack Obama. Why?

Well, as anyone with even the slightest degree of geopolitical awareness knows, Bahrain is home to the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet, which represents the regional forces responsible for protecting regional “democracy,” ie the petrodollar. In exchange for our key military base, the U.S. turns a blind eye to the autocratic activities of the feudal monarchy that runs the place. The latest civil rights abuse is the emergence of razor-wire and concrete structures around certain neighborhoods of the capital city of Manama so that the citizenry cannot engage in protest. From the Washington Post:

MANAMA, Bahrain — Inspired by the movement behind Egypt’s military coup, anti-government activists seeking more influence in Bahrain are hoping to gain new momentum by calling for nationwide protests Wednesday. Authorities warned they will “forcefully confront” any large demonstrations, raising fears of more violence in the strategic Gulf kingdom.

Concrete barriers lined major streets in the capital, Manama, and security checkpoints surrounded by barbed wire guarded roads leading to the city from majority Shiite neighborhoods that house many of the protesters. And hundreds of security forces in riot gear stood guard near armored personnel carriers around what used to be Pearl Square, the epicenter of weeks of anti-government rallies that were met with a crackdown in 2011.

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Two Powerful Videos on Physical Gold Supply Tightness

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If the physical gold market is anywhere near as tight as these two market observers indicate, get ready for some serious fireworks in the precious metals markets. The first video is one that has been making the rounds in recent days. It’s an interview with Mihir Dange, co-founder of commodity trading firm Grafite Capital from the … Read more

Forget Student Loans…Introducing Day Care Loans

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Now that enough college age Americans have been stuffed with over a trillion dollars in student debt only to get a job a McDonalds and live with their parents, folks in New York City have come up with a brilliant new concept to ensure the production of an entirely new generation of debt slaves. Introducing day care loans…and here’s the best part, they are “interest only” from childcare to kindergarden!

Of course it makes sense that these loans would originate in my hometown of NYC, which has in the past 15-20 years fully transformed itself into a corporatized, generic and unaffordable Wall Street whorehouse. From CBS:

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) — After housing, child care is one of the largest expenses for families in New York City.

But now, there is an option for parents to get their kids into some of the city’s top pre-kindergarten programs with loans just for day care.

As CBS 2’s Janelle Burrell reported Monday, tuition without room and board for undergrads at Harvard University is $38,891 for the 2013-2014 school year. For Princeton University, it is $40,170.

Pre-school in Manhattan is not far behind, with some elite day care costing families more than $35,000.

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Meet The Meshnet: A New Wave of Decentralized Internet Access

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Across the US, from Maryland to Seattle, work is underway to construct user-owned wireless networks that will permit secure communication without surveillance or any centralized organization. They are known as meshnets and ultimately, if their designers get their way, they will span the country.

– From the New Scientist article, Let’s Start the Net Again

In the wake of the NSA spy revelations, many people have become disillusioned or despondent regarding the seemingly unstoppable pervasiveness of the surveillance state. I am not one of those people. As James Baldwin famously stated: “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

There’s a reason the highest levels of the U.S. military-industrial complex went to such extremes to keep all of this information hidden from the American public and much of Congress. They don’t want us to know that we are merely lab rats in their perverted real life Truman Show. What we don’t know about spying makes the spying all the more effective. I do not for a moment believe that they want us to know all of the details of this program so that we “self-censor.” All the evidence demonstrates that they wanted to keep this stuff deeply buried.

So now at least we all know we have a serious problem, or at least enough of us know. Now it is our duty to dismantle the surveillance state and create something better in its place. Fortunately, many very smart, dedicated people have already been working on this problem, and the information provided by Edward Snowden will merely accelerate our implementation of solutions. One exciting example of this are Meshnets. From the New Scientist:

The internet is neither neutral nor private, in case you were in any doubt. The US National Security Agency can reportedly collect nearly everything a user does on the net, while internet service providers (ISPs) move traffic according to business agreements, rather than what is best for its customers. So some people have decided to take matters into their own hands, and are building their own net from scratch.

Across the US, from Maryland to Seattle, work is underway to construct user-owned wireless networks that will permit secure communication without surveillance or any centralized organization. They are known as meshnets and ultimately, if their designers get their way, they will span the country.

Each node in the mesh, consisting of a radio transceiver and a computer, relays messages from other parts of the network. If the data can’t be passed by one route, the meshnet finds an alternative way through to its destination.

While these projects are just getting off the ground, a mesh network in Catalonia, Spain, is going from strength to strength. Guifi was started in the early 2000s by Ramon Roca, an Oracle employee who wanted broadband at his rural home. The local network now has more than 21,000 wireless nodes, spanning much of Catalonia. As well as allowing users to communicate with each other, Guifi also hosts web servers, videoconferencing services and internet radio broadcasts, all of which would work if the internet went down for the rest of the country.

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