Land Of The Flea

854,000 U.S. Government Snoopers

"What is being done about this? Nothing. It keeps growing. How much does this cost? At least $80 billion a year. That is a lot of money. What is being done inside the federal government to control this? Nothing. Do they monitor our phone calls? Yes. Did they deny this for years? Of course. Then Edward Snowden blew the whistle. A British newspaper published it. Will this change anything? Yes. He will go to jail. Anything else? He will get a great deal of publicity. Anything else? No. The Obama Administration is far more concerned with Snowden’s leaks than with the snoopers. The Obama Administration is the Bush Administration, digitally speaking." Continue reading →

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How the CIA Maneuvered to Get Secret Information From a Swiss Banker

"He described as formative an incident in which he claimed CIA operatives were attempting to recruit a Swiss banker to obtain secret banking information. Snowden said they achieved this by purposely getting the banker drunk and encouraging him to drive home in his car. When the banker was arrested for drunk driving, the undercover agent seeking to befriend him offered to help, and a bond was formed that led to successful recruitment. 'Much of what I saw in Geneva really disillusioned me about how my government functions and what its impact is in the world,' he says. 'I realised that I was part of something that was doing far more harm than good.'" Continue reading →

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NSA spying allegations mean U.S. could provide ‘virtually unlimited’ info on citizens to allies

"Britain’s foreign secretary took to television on Sunday to reassure Britons that London’s own spies had not circumvented laws restricting their own activity by obtaining information collected by Washington. In Germany, sensitive to decades of snooping by East German Stasi secret police, the opposition said Chancellor Angela Merkel should do more to protect Germans from U.S. spying and demand answers when President Barack Obama visits this month. In Australia, a government source said the U.S. revelations could make it more difficult to pass a law allowing the government to access Internet data at home." Continue reading →

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Michael Scheuer: Bin Laden predicted Obama’s war on the 4th Amendment

"More than a decade ago, Osama bin Laden appeared in a brief video to speak about several issues. One of them was to advise the Islamic world that they should expect the U.S. military to be defeated. The other was to suggest that Muslims should be prepared to watch the U.S. government strangle the civil liberties of Americans in the name of prosecuting its war against the Islamist mujahedin. We have learned that the bin Laden’s second prediction has come to pass in the Obama administration’s expansion of a Bush-era program to collect electronic information on U.S. citizens who are entirely unrelated to the war against the Islamists." Continue reading →

Continue ReadingMichael Scheuer: Bin Laden predicted Obama’s war on the 4th Amendment

Edward Snowden, NSA whistleblower: ‘I do not expect to see home again’

"The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything. With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested without targeting. If I wanted to see your emails or your wife's phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your emails, passwords, phone records, credit cards. I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things … I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to support or live under." Continue reading →

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All the Infrastructure a Tyrant Would Need, Courtesy of Bush and Obama

"Even if all the critics were proved wrong, even if the CIA, NSA, FBI, and every other branch of the federal government had been improbably filled, top to bottom, with incorruptible patriots constitutionally incapable of wrongdoing, this would still be so: The American people have no idea who the president will be in 2017. What we know is that the people in charge will possess the capacity to be tyrants -- to use power oppressively and unjustly -- to a degree that Americans in 1960, 1970, 1980, 1990, or 2000 could've scarcely imagined. To an increasing degree, we're counting on having angels in office and making ourselves vulnerable to devils." Continue reading →

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Hawaii’s Forgotten Internment Camps

"While the Roosevelt administration's internment of Japanese-American citizens on the West coast is well-documented, the story of Hawaii's internment camps was buried for years. Jane Kurahara, a researcher at the Japanese Cultural Center of Hawaii, made it her personal mission to uncover as much as she could about Hawaii's mysterious internment camps. And, amazingly, Kurahara and the cultural center eventually discovered ruins of a long-forgotten camp on Oʻahu. Reason TV spoke with Niiya and Kurahara about the history of Hawaii's internment camps and visited the newly discovered ruins, which will be open to the public soon." Continue reading →

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Supreme Court affirms Rumsfeld’s immunity from torture lawsuits

"U.S. military officials who engaged in ordering or carrying out the torture of individuals in custody can now rely upon an across-the-board legal defense that protects them from being sued for committing what amounts to an international crime, thanks to a Supreme Court ruling on Monday. The court affirmed an earlier ruling by the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, which held in 2012 that former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld could not be sued for personally approving torture techniques used against prisoners held during the Bush administration’s terror war." Continue reading →

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