military industrial complex

This Man Can’t Say Why the Government Wants to Jail Him for a Century

"In the US government's campaign against journalists, Barrett Brown is one of the lesser-known victims. And now even less will be forthcoming about his story, as the Texas-based writer, satirist and Internet activist is under a federal court gag order, forbidden to talk about his case or the charges that could land him in prison for more than 100 years. Brown was arrested in Dallas a year ago, hit with a dozen charges of identity theft for pasting a link to the chat room of ProjectPM, a wiki research forum he founded in 2009. The link led to a huge cache of hacked documents posted to WikiLeaks that had been purloined from the intelligence contractor Stratfor Global Intelligence." Continue reading →

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Bill Bonner: Ike’s Warning

"In a modern context, America’s wars seem silly, stupid and counterproductive. But they are as popular as the Super Bowl. Both of those explanations have merit. But Ike understood it differently. He saw how powerful internal forces drive a military machine to become an empire… and to make war. An educator will try to aggrandize himself by insisting on more education. A butcher will want more meat on the menu. And a man with a gun in his hands will declare – with a straight face and in solemn sincerity – that we need to kill someone in Syria to protect our manhood!" Continue reading →

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The 7 Choices Left to the Military-Industrial Complex

"Since 2002 the US government has presided over one of the most dramatic financial bubbles of all time: the bubble of the military-industrial complex. This bubble, like all others, will pop, and it looks to be deflating right now. The amounts of money that have been spent in the past decade can only be characterized as obscene. In addition to the military complex, we have a massive intelligence complex. Not only that, but we also have a massive law enforcement complex. The Department of Homeland Security has given them at least $34 Billion in the past several years, on top of their take from local taxes, state taxes, fines, seizures, and other Fed money." Continue reading →

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Glenn Greenwald: Inside the mind of NSA chief Gen Keith Alexander

"Now, on the website of DBI Architects, Inc. of Washington and Reston, Virginia, there are what purports to be photographs of the actual Star-Trek-like headquarters commissioned by Gen. Alexander that so impressed his Congressional overseers. It's a 10,740 square foot labyrinth in Fort Belvoir, Virginia. The brochure touts how 'the prominently positioned chair provides the commanding officer an uninterrupted field of vision to a 22'-0' wide projection screen'. Its "primary function is to enable 24-hour worldwide visualization, planning, and execution of coordinated information operations for the US Army and other federal agencies.'" Continue reading →

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How the US government inadvertently created Wikileaks

"So here you have a non-US citizen at a foreign university doing graduate work studies, and the United States government came barreling in and not only snuffed out the funding and killed his studies, it also barred him from knowing what it was he had been funded to research. It was at that moment, Julian told me, that he decided he would devote himself to exposing organizations that attempted to keep secrets and withhold information in an effort keep the masses ignorant and disadvantaged. So you see, depending on who you ask, the US government actually helped create of Wikileaks. And the rest, as they say, is history." Continue reading →

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How the NSA Spies on Smartphones Including the BlackBerry

"For an agency like the NSA, the data storage units are a goldmine, combining in a single device almost all the information that would interest an intelligence agency: social contacts, details about the user's behavior and location, interests (through search terms, for example), photos and sometimes credit card numbers and passwords. According to the documents, it set up task forces for the leading smartphone manufacturers and operating systems. Specialized teams began intensively studying Apple's iPhone and its iOS operating system, as well as Google's Android mobile operating system. Another team worked on ways to attack BlackBerry." Continue reading →

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With “Follow The Money”, NSA Knows All About Your Spending Habits

"While collecting credit card data was to be expected, what is even worse is that the NSA has also secretly planted itself in the nexus of the entire global USD-intermediated financial transactions system courtesy of SWIFT. In other words, America's unsupervised uber spies, when not checking in on their former significant others, spend the bulk of their time tracking who is buying what, where, and with whose money. They also know how much anyone in the world has spent on credit card-based purchases, what the source of that money is, and what the purchase was. In other words: absolute monetary and financial surveillance." Continue reading →

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‘Follow the Money’: NSA Spies on International Payments, Banking, Cards

"The National Security Agency (NSA) widely monitors international payments, banking and credit card transactions. The spying is conducted by a branch called 'Follow the Money' (FTM). The collected information then flows into the NSA's own financial databank, called 'Tracfin,' which in 2011 contained 180 million records. Some 84 percent of the data is from credit card transactions. Further NSA documents from 2010 show that the NSA also targets the transactions of customers of large credit card companies like VISA for surveillance. The NSA's Tracfin data bank also contained data from SWIFT, a network used by thousands of banks to send transaction information securely." Continue reading →

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Apple: iPhone Fingerprint Reader Means Government Business

"In October 2012, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement - ICE, announced a major iPhone win for a high security government agency. The contract was for iPhone services sourced through various carriers with a total award value of $2.1 million, covering 17,676 users. I expect to see more and more government iPhone contracts, especially if the new phone launch focuses on security. In February of this year Apple landed a major contract with the New Zealand police, for an estimated $159M over the next 10 years. The contract provides 6,000 users with an iPhone, and 3,900 with an iPad as well. The TSA in May 2012 also released a contract for purchasing up to 1,000 handheld Apple devices." Continue reading →

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Huge Solar Drone Could Fly, Conduct Surveillance For Five Years

"A solar-powered high-altitude drone made by Titan Aerospace is intended to be able to remain in flight for about five years. When manufactured, it would have 3,000 solar panels producing about 7 kW of electricity and would be above the clouds, so it would be exposed to sunlight constantly during daylight hours. One is scheduled for completion next year. The point of having such a plane would be to keep a payload in flight long-term, presumably in a manner similar to communications satellites. They could be used for surveillance applications such as environmental monitoring, fire monitoring and disaster response, among other things." Continue reading →

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