truedelphi
truedelphi's JournalThe Two Major Reasons Why NSA Needs to Spy on US:
One is that we the common everyday people are a thorn in the side of the PTB. Regardless of all the efforts of the CIA and NSA to remake this nation into a nation of full time supporters of Big Energy, Wars, Financial Gain only for Big Financial Firms, and to re-shape the Two Party System into One Big Money Party, we little people still create groups like Occupy, and we still protest everything from Wall Street policies to Fracking, to the XL Pipeline to Monsanto.
Just as Gollum grumbled about how Frodo kept tight hold of "The Precious," our major members of the military and the Political Class grumble over how we middle class and lower middle class folks refuse to give up on our right to free assembly and our right to free speech. What better way to intimidate all of us than to keep records of everything we say or email or type into our computer. Since that information can be reconstituted into the conversations that we have had, even years down the road, the fact remains that those of us who do protest what the One Percent is trying to do are not sleeping quite so well. Of course, there aren't any historical records that exist to instruct us about about what misfortune or calamities might occur when a government spies on us, so we will just have to wait and see what happens ( <---- Sarcasm alert for last sentence.)
The second reason is the money. The vast monetary resources of the MIC are being diverted from crude and barbaric items like weapons to Surveillance. Over the next five years, my bet is that the budget for All Things Surveillance will easily exceed the amounts of money spent on the Iraq War (three to six trillions of dollars is what experts say that war cost us.) Of course, this information is usually kept "classified" so good luck on finding out what it really takes monetarily to do all this.
For instance,it would not be possible for me to doubt for one moment that Senator Di Feinstein is making it possible for her husband Richard Blum to handle another set of contracts similar to those he handled after George Dubya's Shock and Awe campaign of 2003. Richard Blum made some 27 millions of dollars then - I bet the Golden State couple are hoping to make five or six times that amount on surveillance. Lucky for them that she holds the top position inside the US Senate Committee of Intelligence Oversight.
Your disputing the Caens researchers may or may not be valid.
i know there are literally hundreds of ways that any one research study can be set up, so whether the Caens team did or didn't do their work properly I don't know.
But please explain ths one point to me, and a valid point it is: as long as I have been looking into the world of Big Pesticides, and GM foods and seeds, any time any researcher points out that there is a problem, with an independent study, you don't see monsanto, with all its billions of dollars of profit saying, "We are not totally satisfied with the way the test and research was done, but the concerns are legit that we so far have not looked into any long term testing to see how animals fare years down the line. Since we have the money to do this, we will undertake a more proper test ourselves."
[h2][font color=red]Why is it the case that the Major Companies do slipshod tests and studies of their products? Vaccines are tested six months, if that. Pesticides tested even less.[/h2][/font color=red]
Not once in my 40 years of investigating these matters did I ever ever discover any large corporation doing this. A test sample is too small, a Big Firm will announce, and so the research is given the gong. Thousands of times this "gonging" of studies has been done, and none of these companies ever ever take it upon themselves to do a proper test. How does that make sense? Why would you even trust these companies? We are the only developed nation on earth that does not have gas spectrography analysis of the components of a product asking for EPA approval. We let the companies tell us what is in the product.
For instance, Do you know that when you use "Simple Green" with it s environmentally charming assertions about how it doesn't affect streams or waterways, you are inhaling ether, and absorbing i through your skin if you don't use gloves? ! Bet you didn't know that. Ether was banned on account of how it builds up in our bodies, so that the lives of anesthesiologists would be spared, bu there are no laws prohibiting ether being in cleaning products! (By the way the initial, Roundup Test that supposed showed it was safe involved Monsanto researchers feeding it to dogs, which is a crap research test, because when glyphosate is ingested, it performs differently and involves different immune pathways than when it is inhaled. Since RoundUp is inhaled, then the whole test was pointless, but it was this initial test that allowed Monsanto to get the EPA to sign off on licensing the product for sale to the general public. (Monsanto also lied about the fact their product contained formaldehyde, as without an aldehyde the stuff would be in cake-like form and not sprayable.)
July 3rd, '13, Prosecution against Brad Manning Rests -
Next week the defense arguments will begin.
Among the various charges for which he faces the military court in this trial, are allegations that he stole, purloined, or knowingly converted “to his use or the use of another, a record or thing of value of the United States or of a department or agency thereof” and “of a value of more than $1000? in violation of a statute prohibiting the embezzlement of government property.
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Embarrassing’ Holes as US Govt Rests Case Against Bradley Manning
By Lauren McCauley, www.commondreams.org
July 3rd, 2013
Defense team now expected to motion for dismissal of charges for ‘lack of evidence’
Take action for Brad see below article
After 14 days and 80 witnesses, the United States government prosecuting Pfc. Bradley Manning in the long-awaited trial against the military whistleblower has rested their case.
As Manning’s defense team prepares to present their case next week, they are hoping Manning’s prospects have risen after the government was forced to close their portion of the trial with an “embarrassing admission” that the Army had misplaced Manning’s military contract, the Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) , which laid out the terms of his access to classified information.
Over three years after being arrested for leaking details of military atrocities and intelligence to WikiLeaks, Manning is on trial for 21 charges including aiding the enemy, which carries a possible life sentence.
Ahead of the trial, Judge Colonel Denise Lind stated that in order to prove their charge of ‘aiding the enemy’ the prosecution must demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt that Manning had “a general evil intent,” in that he “had to know he was dealing, directly or indirectly, with an enemy of the US.”
Lind added that the soldier cannot be found guilty if he acted “inadvertently, accidentally, or negligently.”
Full article at URL http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/07/03-3
If you' re strongly Pro Choice, then you should support Ed Snowden.
Stop and think about it - should the Republicans ever take over the nation and install their total agenda of Government and Church control over a woman's body, just what do you think the NSA spying would be used for then?
Do you think the surveillance might enable someone to know if you went somewhere and had an abortion?
If you pay anything in health insurance & in taxes, this is a must read, must
Comment.
Those of you who are following the current saga of the ObamaCare insurance program, set to operate next year, should consider the Supreme Court's ruling.
They decided that the ACA was a legitimate law because they established that the ACA was a tax. And that Congress clearly has the right to impose a tax.
If that is how they ruled, then it is important for every single person filing an income tax return to consider the following: it is NOT legal to pay taxes on taxes. So it stands to reason that every single penny any household pays in order to comply with ObamaCare must be monies deducted from their gross earnings.
Currently a person has to figure out if a health expense is over 7.5% of their income in order to deduct health related items, but I believe that the SCOTUS ruling has set a precedent for all of us to be able to at least get our health insurance premiums viewed as deductions.
Plus there is NO fib. Snowden discussed how he could act the way any person inside an
Organization acts.
H e says he had th e ability to grab a hold of a person's personal information and target that person. He probably did have that power. What is in the slides that the Wash Po published is how the individuals inside the NSA should do their jobs. However, the individuals who are trusted at an agency are not necessarily dong things according to that chart. If you can get into the computer system, you probably have the power to do as Snowden says he could do.
The entire nation just realized that IRS personnel did not bother to follow their flow charted, administrative/operational chain of commands. They choose to target specific groups of people based on political affiliation.
It is apparent that once an individual has a job, as long as their computer is up and running, and their computer is tied into the data on their network, they probably have the goods on whatever information or individuals falls under their scrutiny. Many DU'ers realize this - which is why there have been two OP's in two days about how the NSA and CIA can use the data they are gathering to make book on the stock market, or in even more nefarious manners regarding the purchasing of a business or businesses.
I did read the OP and I did observe the slides.
However, think about it. He has the proven ability in some position to take away as much data as he did.
When i was 21 years old, I was an underwriter for a moderately sized insurance company. I had the goods on anyone who had insurance at that company. I had abilities the file clerks who worked on my floor did not have; I had abilities the typists didn't have. I could request a file and review it (or not!) and then cancel that person's insurance. Maybe because I saw in your file you had too many car accidents and too many DUI's, or maybe because I didn't like you.
We underwriters collectively agreed to grab ahold of any application requesting "umbrella protection" that involved Washington DC persons. Anyone who applied for "umbrella protection" on account of working in the Nixon White House was denied. No one in my group told our bosses. Those Republicans were all denied. We underwriters had agreed on a very few short sentences, something to the effect that "Due to concerns about the stability of the position you hold, our company declines to insure you at this point."
Okay, sothink about this. Yes, our bosses could have found out that us super radical underwriters were denying decently paying insurance policies. The year was 1973. It was not obvious that Nixon's personnel would be resigning or out of jobs soon. But we did what we did because we wanted to.
If this example is not enough to make you think about it, then here is another one - there is an entire operations code for IRS personnel regarding the fact that they are not to target specific groups according to party affiliation, or according to political stance. Yet those of us reading the news over the last few months have come to learn that certain rogue elements inside the IRS have indeed targeted specific groups, although that is not what the administrative/operations manual tells them.
I think that this is something many others here on DU understand. Right now, at this moment in time, there is an excellent OP up (by HiPointDem) about how there is a strong possibility that NSA and CIA personnel are playing games with their info, for their own profit on the stock market using information they have at hand. Granted this is speculative - but this is the second OP in as many days in which someone is saying what I am saying - that once you are inside the halls of power, the office of information, the storage center for data, you have the power. I had it. My colleagues had it. We used it in a way none of our bosses suspected, but in the end, if they ever found out about it, I bet they were glad we denied all those umbrella policies to Nixon's personnel.
And if you want to say -well look there are safeguards, and an insurance agency isn't what the NSA is - then how is it that Mr Snowden did what he did and is still a free man? And if what he is telling us is not significant, then why is there all the outrage??????
Also if what he is saying is not true, then why the hell is he being considered the most treasonous bastard of the last five years? And that categorization of Snowden is scarey on its own kmerits - if he is a traitor, and the entire definition of a traitor is that they give aid or information or comfort to the enemy - then that means that you and Iand everyone else are the damn enemy! Except of course, the military and the Top Members of society and Top Political Class personages
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