Tiger Woods Protected Under Veil of Secrecy

Since infancy, Tiger Woods life has been shrouded by a veil of secrecy. Tiger has all the earmarks of a classic Black Manchurian Candidate. He had been sheltered within an artificially contrived environment at Stanford University, the handmaiden of the military-industrial-medical-congressional complex, while he cloned his skills on the way to becoming the (NOW) New World Order’s greatness programmed golfer. According to research, most Black Manchurian Candidates are individuals with created dissociative identity disorders that fall within the following five criteria:

1. Dissociate identity disorder created deliberately. Candidate usual has had contact with OSS, CIA, BLUEBIRD, ARTICHOKE, MK-ULTRA controllers or institutions or Military intelligence controllers or institutions, and prisons. Candidate’s contact may have been created through bloodlines, military recruitment, enlistment, imprisonment, or civilian employee of military institutions.

2. A new identity is implanted which includes multiple personalities. Candidate has sudden appearance of an unknown operative personality, or new behavior involving senseless and uncharacteristic violence.

3. Amnesia barriers are created. Candidate has had memory loss proximate, and during a specific operation.

4. Used in simulated or actual operations. Candidate carried out an operative or assassination, and killing(s) may have occurred during or close to national or state elections, or involved political, religious groups or figures.

5. Disposal after operation.  Candidate is killed or has had judge, or severely compromised jury trial, or guilty pleaded, declared insane or found suitable for commitment to mental institution, confined to solitary confinement in state or federal prison with restricted visitation with little or no access to inmate populations.

The Black Manchurian Candidate Criteria was expanded from the groundbreaking work of Colin A. Ross, M.D. in the operational use of multiple personality disorders by U.S. military and intelligence agencies.[1]  So far Tiger Woods has substantially met at least 4 of 5 criterions for a Black Manchurian Candidate. 

Criterion No. 1 Bloodline Connection & MK ULTRA Institutions

Bryon Bell, Setup Man & Keeper of the Tiger's Secrets

Tiger shroud of secrecy has been veiled by a small knot of tight-lipped friends. Tiger’s endless supplies of blond blue-eyed maidens came through his so-called best friend from Western High School in Anaheim, Bryon Bell. Bell is the president of Tiger Woods Design. Bell is always discreet about Tiger. Bell tells no tales. He does no public interviews.

Tigers’ half-blood siblings are afraid to say anything about him or Earl. Even Tida Woods is committed to silence about Tiger. Earl while he was alive like a good military intelligence officer that he was held Tiger’s secrets and did no talking. Earl, Tiger and his camp had a reputation for severing relationships with anyone that talks. [2] Why?

Earl Woods, Old Schoool Military Intelligence Operative

Tiger Wood’s father, Earl Woods, served two full tours of duty in the Vietnam War, the second as part of the elite United States Army Special Forces Green Berets. The Green Berets were trained and developed by Hitler’s Commando, Obersturmbannführer SS (Lieutenant Colonel) Otto Skorzeny’s Paladin Group. [3]

Reichsfuehrer Heinrich Himmler's SS Insignias

Earl Woods was a U.S. Defense Department Information School graduate. Near the end of his active duty career, Lt. Col. Woods was Professor of Military Science & Tactics, (Army ROTC) at the City College of New York.

In 1961, Woods was in Korea, and next year sent to Vietnam as a military advisor. President John F. Kennedy had vowed to withdraw U.S. military advisors from Vietnam just prior to his assassination in 1963.

Back in the US in 1966 in the march to escalate of the war in Vietnam, he volunteered for the Green Berets, an elite special force, and was appointed Special Services (CIA) Officer in Bangkok, Thailand in charge of organizing recreation for the troops as a cover.

U.S. Special Forces Insignias Copied from Obersturmbannfuhrer Otto Skorzeny's SS Special Forces

In August 1966, the CIA was setting up a huge interrogation-torture center in Udorn, Thailand as part of its counterinsurgency plans. Earl Woods met Kultida “Tida” Woods in Bangkok. “Tida” has Thai, Chinese, and Dutch ancestry. Undoubtedly, Tida was also working with the CIA when they met. Earl and Tida married on or around July 11, 1969 in Brooklyn, New York.

In 1970, Woods returned to Vietnam as part of the CIA Phoenix Assassination Program, where he became an assistant to a South Vietnamese Army officer, Colonel Phong. They fought together in many tight spots, and Phong more than once saved his life. Woods was so impressed by his friend that he called him “Tiger”.

In March 1974, Earl Woods retired as lieutenant-colonel. Woods then obtained a job in California with Arrowhead Products, and later McDonnell Douglas, one of the largest U.S. military intelligence contractors and part of the shadow government of America.

On December 30, 1975, Tida bore Earl Woods’ fourth child, Eldrick “Tiger” Woods, as a bloodline to SS Skorzeny’s trained U.S. Army Special Forces Command; and McDonnell Douglas.

The nickname, “Tiger”, came from Earl Woods’ friendship with Colonel Vuong Dang “Tiger” Phong, of the South Vietnamese Army above. At sometime, Earl Woods moved to Cypress, Orange County – a white neighborhood – because it was five minutes away from a naval golf course. The golf course is at Seal Beach Naval Weapons Base along the Pacific Ocean. It is a strange place to relocate just to play golf.

Seal Beach Weapons station is rumored to be attached by an underground tunnel to the China Lake Naval Air Weapons Base also on the coast of the Pacific Ocean. One of the most heavily identified trauma based mind control centers by children is located at China Lake. Hauptsturmführer-SS  (Captain) Dr. Josef Mengele, Angel of Death, is also alleged to have worked out of China Lake on mind control programs for the U.S. government under Project Paperclip. [4]

Earl Woods dedicated his son to Nazi racial science as a MK ULTRA bloodline medical experiment. Tiger’s programmers had vowed to turn Tiger into an extraordinary human clone. In Tiger’s infancy, Earl Woods had already proclaimed him as a gift to the world on a par with Gandhi and Nelson Mandela.

From a child with Seal Beach and China Lake Naval Air Weapons Base as a backdrop, Tiger had been raised in highly structured artificially contrived environment in the shadow of the U.S.Army Special Operations Command. According to the Defense Press Service, As late as 2004, Tiger was continually involved in some type of special operation’s training and programming at Pope Air Force Base in North Carolina home to the Joint Special Operations Command and Delta Force soldiers and SEALs.

Earl Woods said his son learned on the sniper course at Fort Bragg something that could have a direct impact on his golf game: that his left eye is his dominant eye. This, he said, will help his son with his “plumbing” on the course to determine where the ball will go.

Earl Woods said he used his military training to instill in Tiger the discipline and focus that has turned him into a world-renowned golfer. Woods said his son “was always inquisitive about the training I put him through,” particularly the “mental-toughness training,” and “wanted to know where that came from.” [5]

Earl Woods had helped mold Tiger into some type of U.S. Army experimental bloodline mind controlled clone that would be medically transformed into a multiple personality New World Order world class athlete or an assassin.

Criterion No. 2: Tiger Woods Developed Big Black Brute Operative Personality Obsessed with Blond Blue-Eyed Maidens

Prior to the public drama of the weekend of Thanksgiving 2009, Woods had an impeccable squeaky clean international image. In lieu of the magnitude of scandalous and outlandish revelations of the secret world of Tiger and his blond blue-eyed maidens, Woods’ image appeared to have been carefully manufactured, crafted and protected to benefit some future NWO agenda.

Tiger’s Blond Blue-Eyed Maidens, a dozen porn stars, cocktail waitresses and a party girl with connections to 9-11, may yet turn out to be an assortment of CIA Monarch mind controlled sex slaves and operatives. [6]

Criterion No. 3: Tiger Woods’ Disassociated States, and Memory Loss Proximate During the Specific Operation to Sensationally Disgrace Himself

In regards to the facts and events surrounding Tiger’s infamous auto accident, a lot of strange and odd things don’t add up or make any sense. Immediately after the car crash, a neighbor reported that Tiger was barefoot, asleep and snoring on the ground at the car.[7]

Reportedly, Tiger was in and out of consciousness, blinding in and out of a disassociated state. Tiger clearly appeared to be under the influence of something, [8] a post hypnotic state? At the hospital, doctors even had to use a breathing tube to assist Tiger’s respiration, which is odd and extremely strange reaction to a minor traffic accident.[9]

This is not the first time that Woods has suddenly lapsed into an extraordinary and abnormal disassociated “dormant state.” In June 2008, Tiger reportedly fell into a coma after allegedly eating a poisoned Granny Smith apple. [10]

Tiger’s wife, Elin Nordegren, was an immigrant and alien of Stockholm, Sweden when they were married. During World War II, Sweden a neutral country nevertheless provided steel to the Nazis war machine. It also allowed the Nazis to use its railways to invade Norway. Nazi Germany also needed Sweden strategically as a neutral country as a conduit for goods and foreign currency. It is not happenstance that after WWII, Sweden became Europe’s richest nation swelled with Nazi flight capital, which still welds a great deal of power and influence in Sweden, and the world.

Nordegren Photographed Inspecting an U.S. Naval Installation & Warship

Nordegren’s immigrant alien status at the time she was arranged to meet Tiger is suspect and unknown. In 2003, she was photographed visiting at an unidentified U.S. Naval base inspecting a warship for some interest.

Additionally, Elin was not a world class model. She was a former swimsuit model. Elin was working as a nanny for Swedish golfer Jesper Bo Parnevik before she was setup to marry the world’s richest and most well known athlete. With the marriage, Nordegren has acquired unprecedented access to world-wide governmental and social inner circles and networks.

Nordegren’s mom is Barbro Holmberg. She was born April 7, 1952 in Stensele, Västerbotten. She is a highly placed influential Swedish Social Democratic politician. On October 10, 2003, she was appointed Minister for Migration and Asylum Policy in the Swedish Government. As a consequence of the change of government following the 2006 government election, she left office on October 6, 2006. Holmberg is the governor of Gävleborg County, Sweden. [11] She has a degree in social work from the Department of Social Work, Stockholm University. [12]

Holmberg began her career in 1976 as a Research Assistant with National Board of Health and Welfare of Sweden. In 1977, she had been an Information Officer for the National Association for Aid to Drug Abusers (RFHL). [13] She is no strangler to clandestine governmental mind control research and development.

Verna Dannborg alleges that she was covertly implanted with mind control research brain electrodes by Swedish Cybergod Professor Torg Skoog of the National Board of Health and Welfare of Sweden. [14]

Has Tiger Woods’ brain been implanted with a similar experimental electrodes or micro chips which would explains the veil of secrecy surrounding him, and his sudden lapses into disassociated trances and states that causes him to even not recall how to breathe.  

Criterion No. 4: Tiger Used in Simulated Clandestine False Flag Operation (Operation Northwoods) to Polarize the Races

According to a source circulating at the Kremlin, it stated that the CIA ordered the  sensational ‘takedown’ of Tiger Woods in an effort to greater fuel their efforts to ignite a race war that the military industrial complex believe is needed in order to socially re-engineer the United States as it nears total economic collapse. [15]

According to the source, the reason behind the CIA’s targeting of Tiger Woods is the ‘deliberate demoralization’ of Americas black race population by the destruction and neutralization of one of their most esteemed idols by the racially stereotyped depiction of Tiger as an ‘out of control’ and ‘oversexed’ negro man unable to assimilate among whites. [16]

The report further stated that the ‘main target’ behind the media destruction of Woods is President Obama, whom the CIA has calculated will suffer increasing alienation from his Nations white population. Mixed raced Obama and Woods are viewed as the two most popular among Black people and the takedown of Tiger for has out of control sexual affairs with numerous Blond Blue-eyed maidens reinforce white Americans belief that ‘black men just can’t control themselves’. [17]

However, Tiger may have been intentionally triggered to implode to terminate Elin Nordegren’s secret spy information gathering operation on Wood’s secret military intelligence mind control programming.

Criterion No. 5: Disposal after Operation

Elin Nordegen, , and Barbro Holmberg are all foreign nationals. Nordegen was used as a honey-pot asset deliberately setup with Tiger. A honey-pot is a term used to describe an intelligence agency operative (usually opposite sex but could be same sex) who is used to sexually attract and then ensnare a predetermined targeted individual into an affair in order to gain information, and or to lure the target in a way that he or she could be set-up, framed, arrested or assassinated. [18]

Nordegen’s mission had been either to gather military intelligence information as a spy for a foreign concern on Tiger’s secret mind control project or monitor, supervise and oversee Tiger until he was setup to be triggered by the military industrial complex to mentally implode into an international scandal to demoralize people of color; and sensationally exposed him as a stereotypical out of control sexual deviant Big Black Brute.

There will be no reconciliation of the marriage. If everything goes as projected, at least half of Tiger’s acquired wealth is subject to become a national asset of Sweden.

One of Tiger’s acquired friends is D.J. Hanlon. Hanlon is the son of David P. Hanlon, President of the Rio Hotel/Casino of Las Vegas. He was also connected with Merv Griffin Resorts. Merv Griffin Resorts of Atlantic City, New Jersey took over Resorts International, Inc. that had substantial ties and connections with the Iran-Contra/Cocaine Affair William J. Casey, Director of the CIA [19]

Among his many interests, Hanlon is also the director of RemoteMDX, Inc. The company develops, markets, and sells wireless monitoring equipment and services to law enforcement and bail bond agencies. Its primary product is TrackerPAL — tracking devices worn on the ankle to monitor the whereabouts of criminals on parole or probation. Using global positioning system and cellular technology, the device features two-way voice communications, alarms, and Web-based location tracking in real time. RemoteMDx’s SecureAlert subsidiary provides monitoring services. The company electronically monitors some 12,700 offenders. [20]

RemoteMDX is eerily similar to the governmental monitoring objectives of people of color once advanced by Dr. Louis Jolyon West’s Center for the Study and Reduction of Violence. [21]

Currently, Woods is surrounded by his shroud of close friends. He has reverted into some sort of infantile disassociate state and spends most his time watching cartoons and eating cereal until he is rewired and reprogrammed with a NWO agenda chip. [22]

Is it so hard to believe that Tiger Woods had been a secret MK ULTRA “racial matters” experimental super athlete manufactured by the U.S. Army Joint Chiefs of Staff, and then imploded as a continuation of the Northwoods Project to foment national racial discord as a veil to cover-up Nordegren’s successful spy penetration and infiltration?   I don’t think so!

[2] Sounes, Howard, The Wicked Game: Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods, and the Business of Modern Golf, William Morrow & Co, (2004) New York, NY, pg. 216

[3] Lee, Martin A. (1999). The Beast Reawakens: Fascism’s Resurgence from Hitler’s Spymasters to Today’s Neo-Nazi Groups and Right-Wing Extremists. Taylor & Francis. pp. 186

[4] http://www.theforbiddenknowledge.com/hardtruth/mind_control_cults.htm

[5] http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=26854

[6] http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/esp_sociopol_mindcon02.htm

[7] http://sports.espn.go.com/golf/news/story?id=4712889&campaign=rss&source=ESPNHeadlines

[8] http://www.tmz.com/2009/12/08/tiger-woods-hospital-overdose/

[9] Id.

[10] http://thesportsculture.com/2008/06/26/tiger-woods-is-in-a-coma-after-eating-poisoned-apple/

[11] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbro_Holmberg

[12] Id.

[13] Id.

[14]http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:rU4MPXHoqGMJ:www.lambros.name/CYBERGODS.pdf+%22vera+dannborg%22&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

[15] http://www.whatdoesitmean.com/index1307.htm

[16] Id.

[17] Id.

[18] http://www.rense.com/general69/webb1b.htm

[19] http://www.ctka.net/abc_cap.html

[20] http://www.answers.com/topic/remotemdx-inc

[21] http://www.english.ucla.edu/ucla1960s/7274/Max/nagano4.htm

[22]http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/tiger_lonely_days_of_cereal_toons_OALLTQANs7SBAEZbzE67kL

(Copyright © 2009)

I give you two women from two different cultures. One raised to expect a great deal of praise and attention for being pretty, the other to expect to make her way by doing her share of the work. Each making herself happen within her respective culture according to survival values shaped in childhood to reflect the needs and yearnings of her family, particularly of her mother. Two women, two childhoods, two cultures, two ways of being in the world—two different lives, one in Afghanistan, one in California, a nation unto itself.

Actually, I don’t give you two women at all but rather two photographs of women, one I’ve had on my wall since (I think) the fall of 2001, scanned from the pages of (I believe) The Christian Science Monitor; the other scanned from a 1959 photo reproduced on page 13 of the current issue of AARP The Magazine, November/December 2009. I regret I don’t know the names of either photographer because I’d like to give credit to those who created these stunning portraits.

I present these photos side-by-side as symbols of what it might mean to be raised in two different cultures opening onto two different styles of consciousness expressed in two contrasting ways of being women in the world. Compare and contrast; feast your eyes:

Imagine local men (and women for that matter) meeting these women. Put yourself in their place. Feel what they might feel. Imagine the parents and siblings with whom these women grew up. Imagine their playmates, special friends, neighbors, mentors, teachers, spiritual advisers. Imagine these women trading places, the one switching from herding goats in Afghanistan to herding goats on the outskirts of Los Angeles; the other drying off, taking a stroll through the outskirts of Kandahar in her bathing suit. Run through the routine once again—same women, same dress, different cultural settings. What sorts of response do they get? How are they regarded? How are they judged? How are they treated?

I smile when I look from one photo to the other; I can imagine others frowning, getting upset, wanting to take some kind of action. Someone mutters, “Such things shouldn’t be allowed.” “Obscene, I’d say.”  This is not just a matter of aesthetic dissonance. It’s a question of what’s considered proper for how a young woman conducts herself in public. What is attractive to one might be an outrage to another. (In the interest of full disclosure,) I find both women exceptionally attractive to an equal degree. But in doing so, I take their respective cultures into account. These images depict alternative ways of being women in the world, and the range of such possibilities appeals to me. But the world is divided into regions where one possibility might be appropriate and the other less so.

The local culture we grow up in provides a range of options for expressing our biological values. Moving from one culture to another, we remain the same men or women, but might be expected to conduct ourselves according to the prevailing norms of the places we visit. We’re the same people, but are looked at differently, so come across differently. How we present ourselves as sexual beings is a sensitive issue in every culture. Largely because the relation between the sexes is the fundamental reason we have cultures in the first place. This is such common knowledge, I am almost embarrassed to bring it up. Which I do precisely to make the point that this is the sort of thing that led to nineteen men from a foreign culture to board four airplanes on September 11, 2001 with deliberate intentions of inflicting as much harm as they could on a people with a history of (inadvertently) offending the manhood and religious beliefs of people like themselves.

This was an incident in which males from one culture took a stand against a different culture for, as they viewed it, flaunting its ways and beliefs in an insensitive, arrogant, and offensive manner. When manhood is threatened, watch out!—a punch in the face is sure to follow. Few in America saw the blow struck on 9-11 from a sociological or cultural (rather than criminal or military) perspective. But the outrage felt in response to how Americans conduct themselves abroad as if to elicit some kind of reaction is, indeed, more an inter-cultural than a military matter. If 3,000 innocents had not died, two landmark buildings been leveled, and the HQ of the U.S. military not been attacked, in such a case we might not have lashed out by bombing Afghanistan and subsequently invading Iraq. But all that havoc did occur; the die was cast.

After eight years of war, we can reconsider whether or not that was the most appropriate response we could have made. Certainly the families of those who died are unlikely ever to change their minds. But the families of soldiers and civilians wounded or killed in the aftermath might pause to consider why their sons and daughters bore the burden of revenging the first wave of deaths. Once begun, where does the carnage end? Which prompts me to recall the following rhyme:

For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

Not that 9-11 is comparable to loss of a horseshoe nail, but once loins are girded and weapons primed, how do we ungird and unprime them? Once offense is taken, can it ever be forgiven? More likely by the seasoned and wise than the ardent and young.

Which is a tremendous burden to place on the two women from two different cultures I introduce at the head of this post. A burden somewhat similar to the one thrust on Helen of Troy, Boadicea, or even Mrs. O’Leary’s fictional cow credited with starting the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. My point is that cultural differences have consequences, sometimes profound ones when accustomed ways of expressing biological values are made an international issue because so passionately adhered to as if they were innately human. The values are certainly human, but the particular ways they find expression in different cultures are regional at best. The fault lies in taking local customs and attitudes to be universal or God-given virtues, with the result that only deviant infidel sinners would dare present themselves differently.

When it comes to the culturally accepted ways through which we give form to individual consciousness, values, and person-hood, extreme absolutism and fundamentalism are no virtues. Acceptance of cultural relativism gives leeway to those whose practices differ from our own. On 9-11, no such allowances were made. As if only one of the women pictured above were right to conduct herself as she does, making the other categorically wrong.

The Catholic Church, with considerable help from its rich out-of-state friends, recently spent millions of dollars to squelch legal acceptance of same-sex marriages in Maine. Right-to-lifers are equally fervent in their intent to outlaw abortions, distribution of condoms, and anything else that smacks of family planning. There it is again, that heavy-handed approach to how human sexuality is expressed. Heavy-handed because not just thumbs but whole palms and many hands are pressed hard on the scales of justice. These are just a few further examples of how our upbringing and life experiences impact the shaping of our biological values. When I see a photo of Rush Limbaugh mouthing off, I see a child three or four years old. I regard many members of Congress with the same X-ray vision. There’s a lot of it around these days, variations on the basic attitudes we acquire in childhood. Hardened and polished, like fake diamonds, they gleam with the brilliance of universal truth.

I think everyone should have photos such as the two I offer in this post on their refrigerator door as an example of how differently we export our internal selves and attitudes to the external world. Each one of us does it for him- or herself because, for genetic, epigenetic (not predetermined), and experiential reasons, we are all personally unique. In the words of Gerald M. Edelman:

From the very beginning of neuroanatomy, there are rich statistical variations in both cell movement and cell death. As a result, no two individuals, not even identical twins, possess the same anatomical patterns (Wider than the Sky, 29).

Given our diversity, it is remarkable we are able to sort almost seven billion people into only eight thousand different cultural groups. To ask or expect that all cultures conform to a standard imposed by any one of them, or by any group or individual within a culture, would be,—and if attempted, is—absurd. Rather than decry our variability, we would do well to celebrate it every day of our lives. Think how dull life would be if we all held to the same beliefs, thought the same thoughts, and conformed to identical standards! What could we talk about that we didn’t already know? I say, vivre la difference, not just between the sexes, but within them as well—as my two examples so beautifully illustrate.

Every day, on average
18 American veterans**
commit suicide

….

The military rushes these young men and women

out of service through the WTB’s

to where the numbers no longer count against the

commander’s, leader’s or medical professionals

**Stats as of 20 Dec 09, Dept of VA

Hieronymus Bosch, Hell Garden of Earthly Delights

It all started strangely, bank defaults in the UK, people queued, the money plummeted, and no amount of government spin helped. Inevitably people turned on the Jews.

Momentarily Israel seemed to garner some strength from being the refuge it had always said it was there for. Many thought it was Zionism reborn, briefly it seemed as though pride and purpose were returning.

In Europe it was like the Inquisition: “you can stay if you give up being Jewish”. And as for Bankers and the like they scarpered and hid for shame. It was the end of capitalism. Strange how it happened overnight.

The “wars without end” suddenly ended, coincidently with the fall of the Jews.

All this was of no immediate help to the Palestinians or the Americans, except, Americans followed suit, and just like the Iron curtain fell, and one country after another shed the Soviets, so it happened in the Capitalist world. Like dominoes, from Japan to Canada, everyone rebelled against the banks, the Jews, the wars, unfortunately it wasn’t a party. Food shortages and poverty took hold. They were anyway unfolding.

But the stranglehold of the propagandising Press ended abruptly. CNN and the BBC went down the drain.

Judaica was now presented as principally a haven for perpetuating central banks and interest rates. While the Jews were the last to accept this, they were nevertheless weakened by their lack of defence. Pointing to the religion seemed a little senseless when few actually followed it.

Some knock on events from the collapsing capitalism, was losing Egypt and Jordan as collaborators in the Jewish craving for eternal punishment. Without the US, the banks, and the Zionists, Israel suddenly came to its senses, it withdrew from the West Bank.

Some Israelis actually started dreaming of being artists instead of security agents. Inevitably a form of civil war erupted amongst the Jews. Their empire in collapse, bickering broke out, it was of such a low level, having grown up in a stew of disinformation. It was the tower of babel all over again.

Tower of Babel

Tower of Babel

The Leviev’s and Rahm Emmanuels went the way of CNN, the rich donors to Eretz Yisrael were no more.

Few had time to think of all the pointless deaths and wounded from the inane wars. But xenophobia, fiefdoms and local accountability returned and replaced the endless diatribe of “Islamic extremism” etc. After decades of single issue campaigns, there was no room for a national or transnational unifying ideology or common ground.

Many conscientious truthseekers surfaced, apologists for 911 and other false flags, strangely, no one had time to listen to them.

It was the end of the Jewish era………………….

A local ability to trust returned, there was no longer a need to pay tribute to certain Icons: Jewishness and the Holocaust etc. And as much as God had made man in his image, it became apparent that certain oligarchies had used this archetypal symbolism to mould common people.

The unanswered question that remained is whether humans needed to worship or be devoted.

The year 2009 will be over in ten days…but not only that, it’ll also be the end of the first decade of the 21st century.

So I began thinking about the biggest news stories of 2009 to the American public compared to the Japanese public.

So first the biggest U.S. news stories of 2009:

—————–
And the biggest news stories of 2009 in Japan:

What were the biggest news stories of 2009 to you?
How about the biggest news story of the first decade of the 21st century? I think it must be the 2001 September 11 attack on the World Trade Center in America.

For those of you who don’t understand what this video means, I’ll explain. The Mujahideen were the Afghanistan fighters during the 1970’s Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. We funded and trained the Mujahideen during that war and helped them defeat the Soviet Union. The Mujahideen became the Taliban and then later on they became known as Al’Qaeda. Brzezinski was the one selected to oversee this agenda. Don’t believe me? Look at the photo below for proof.

Here we have a photo of both Brzezinski and Bin Laden together in the 1970’s during Brzezinski’s training of the Mujahideen/Taliban.

It is only in the west that name Al’Qaeda is used. Why? Well as the FBI’s most wanted listing for Osama Bin Laden states: Al’Qaeda means “The Database”. Better known as the CIA list or “database” of US trained Taliban members in the middle east. Speaking of Osama Bin Laden, did you know he’s a CIA agent? It’s true. While he was in the US his cover name was Tim Osman. Look it up. I’m not kidding.

This is a video of Good Morning America where Chris Cuomo interviews 4 Pakistanis on Bin Laden and his CIA connections.

If you clicked on the link to the FBI’s Most Wanted Page for Osama Bin Laden and read his description and the list of things he is wanted for, a few questions should be raised. Like for example, why isn’t the attacks on 09-11-01 listed as one of the things he’s wanted for?

By connecting the tops of the World Trade Center towers with a tightrope in 1974, Philippe Petit created a space that wasn’t there. By populating that space with a human being, he invented a space where nobody else would ever venture. He made it real.

Of course, he made my knees turn to jelly, but he made it real and he messed with our heads in a way that connected art and athleticism and imagination. (If you haven’t seen “Man On Wire,” do so.)

By writing a book that features Petit and the World Trade Center as a motif, a background element, Colum McCann has created a novel about The World Trade Center and our reaction to the events by 9-11 by pretty much avoiding the whole topic.

McCann calls “Let The Great World Spin” an “anti-narrative of the 9-11 experience.”

It is just that.  It’s also touching and powerful.

“The novel doesn’t want to cling to all the grief, all the sadness,” said McCann in the interview posted at www.therumpus.net . “I am interested in grace and recovery, and making sense of the small lives at the bottom.”

Grace and recovery. Who doesn’t need a bit of those two necessities as 2009 draws to a close. Can we all just get a bit of grace and recovery around here?

“Let The Great World Spin” has “trite potential” written all over it. The theme—and I’m giving nothing away here—is that nothing is entirely by itself.

The observation, that “nothing is entirely by itself,” comes from Gloria as she’s leaving a gathering of women who have lost sons in Vietnam. “Each thing as strange as the last, and connected,” she concludes.

The inter-connectedness of the stories in McCann’s novel isn’t apparent at first. But then you begin to see how the stories touch each other and interact and you watch in awe as McCann pulls the cinch tighter and then yanks hard at the end as the last story-arrow is shot up from 1974 and it lands decades later after the War in Iraq. Too neatly? This is probably a matter of how sweet you like your endings. I vote yes. It feels entirely real and it leaves you with a ray of hope that human connections do make a difference.

McCann enters the worlds of each of his main characters with ease. We are inside Petit’s head (though Petit is unnamed) and we are inside the head of a Jesuit priest, a prostitute, a judge, an artist, and a Park Avenue woman of means.  Mother-and-daughter prostitutes Tillie and Jazzlyn are pieces of work, terrific creations.

I enjoyed all the writing and the shift in voice and tone from character to character, but Claire Soderberg is particularly well drawn. Her grief is palpable. She’s one of several mothers who have bonded over the loss of their sons in Vietnam and, when we meet her for the first time, is about to host the group at her relatively fancy apartment for the first time.

“How to greet? Handshake? Air kiss? Smile? The first time around they had hugged good-bye, all of them, in Staten Island, at the doorstep, with the taxi beeping, her eyes streaked with tears, arms around one another, all of us happy, at Marcia’s house, when Janet pointed to a yellow balloon caught in the treetops: Oh, let’s meet again soon! And Gloria had squeezed her arm. They had touched cheeks.”

MCann’s characters pinball off each other and we begin to see how their lives overlap too, how the small decisions in one setting lead to the consequences in the next.  I found McCann’s descriptions detailed, rich and inviting. The dialogue was just as sharp.

“Let The Great World Spin” is a symphony. It engages a wide range of players and they rely on each other to produce one big sound, though we readers are the only ones who get to see the whole picture.

McCann has also said “every novel is a failure,” that the execution never matches the original vision as it developed in the author’s head.

Maybe.

Hard to see the “failure” here—“Let The Great World Spin” created a space I didn’t know existed.  The book gives you a chance to “look at the crap and the grime and the torments in the world around us,” as McCann says, “and still find something beautiful in the end.”

WND reports on the new mosque at the site of the Twin Towers:

Islamic mosque built at 9/11 Ground Zero.

I’ll keep this nice and short because it just came to my mind. I already know that Chomsky has either been compromised or he knows that since he got the culprits of 9/11 all wrong he would be professionally and publicly embarrassed by having all of his post 9/11 work discredited as an MIT linguistics professor and an renowned expert on world history and global politics. For a while I thought Chomsky just was masking some allegiance to Israel since he’s Jewish, and we all know how insular they usually are, but he has been very critical of Israel in the past and even today. That could be a ruse too but I doubt it now. I think his reputation as a history geek is far more important to him than Zionism or Judaism or even being Jewish.

via Chomsky’s Atheism and 9/11 « Race Rules.

Last week (December 8, 2009) FBI Director Mueller called for an independent review of the FBI’s handling of information about the suspect in the Fort Hood shooting, such as Major Hasan’s contacts with a radical imam in Yemen.  “It is essential to determine whether there are improvements to our current practices…that could make us all safer in the future.” 

Translation:  Maybe we screwed up by not sharing this information with the Army.

But how could we possibly be safer, as there have been no terrorism attacks since 9/11 in the U.S.?

by Rep. John Boehner (R-OH)

In their rush to bring Guantanamo Bay terrorists on to U.S. soil, Washington Democrats have repeatedly failed to articulate an overarching strategy to confront and defeat the terrorist threat.  At the very least, the American people deserve to know how importing these dangerous terrorists and giving them the same rights as U.S. citizens will make us any safer.  I have yet to see a good explanation, but Republicans will stand with Illinois families and seek every remedy at our disposal to stop this dangerous plan.

A small town that houses the nearly empty maximum-security Thomson Correctional Facility is expecting a windfall of federal dollars (1 BILLION of them and about 2,000 jobs, to be exact) thanks to President Obama’s plan to move Gitmo detainees into America’s heartland for eventual trials in civilian courts.

From CNN:

“It don’t bother me that there is going to be terrorists — or people who our government think are terrorists — living there,” said Mary Wiggins, a 43-year-old waitress at the popular Sunrise Cafe. “Murderers are in there, and terrorists are murderers. What difference does it make?

“If it brings people into this cafe, well, I guess I’m fine with it,” she said.

So now the detained terrorists are good for the economy.  I thought I heard of everything.

Perhaps this was the plan all along.  If it is believable to liberals that George W Bush pre-planned his war in Iraq and used the 9-11 attacks as cover, then it is entirely possible that Obama used liberal outrage over the Guantanamo Bay prison to hide a massive shunting of taxpayer dollars to his adopted home state.

Will there be an investigation?  Not from the Pelosi or Reid quarters.  Look out if terror strikes this little town or NYC during the trials.  Americans are fickle but demand blood when attacked.  Ask the Japanese why they are the only nation that has suffered from a nuclear attack so far.  It wasn’t because they were the world’s biggest threat by a long shot.  It was because the US grew weary of fighting their radical elements and tactics and losing too many of our young men in battle.  It was also because of the way they attacked Pearl Harbor.  Revenge became a dish best served with massive doses of radiation.

Democrats are risking much political capital these days for things like unpopular plans for health care, climate emissions taxes and national defense (and moving terror suspects on to US soil, where they’ll be tried in US civilian courts).  The liberal base is fine with all of this, but the center and right are fuming.  If an attack occurs, there won’t be much left of a democrat for quite some time.

No, not according to the FBI, not in the USA.  Both Republican defenders of George W. Bush and Democrats like Nancy Pelosi want to prop up this story, and for whatever reason, the press doesn’t press them on it.

Yup, move on, nothing to see here, no terrorist attacks in the U.S.  Except maybe:

Naveed Haq, who shot 6 women, killing one, at the Seattle Jewish Federation in 2006 was found guilty today

Major Nidal Malak Hasan, who ‘allegedly’ shot 13 people to death at Fort Hood

The 5 “wholesome” American kids arrested in Pakistan for trying to link with extremist groups to attack U.S. troops in Afghanistan

In June 2009, two soldiers were shot, one fatally, in Arkansas by a suspect who the FBI delicately noted had “political and religious motives”

John Muhammad, a Muslim, the 2002 Beltway Sniper, and Boyd Malvo, who claimed they killed for jihad.  Muhammad said he was a fan of Osama Bin Ladin, but surely he was just crazy.

The July 4, 2002 shooting by an Egyptian national at Los Angeles International Airport.  A young woman killed in the attack lived not far from me.

In March 2006,  Mohammed Reva Taheri-azar rented an SUV and drove it into a crowd of students at the University of North Carolina.  He carried out the attack, which injured nine people, due to “the treatment of Muslims around the world.”  At his arraignment, he told the Judge that he was “thankful for the opportunity to spread the will of Allah.”  He is currently serving a 33-year sentence.

You can read more about more of these non-existent attacks here.  And even leftist KCRW feels pushed to explore this issue.

After reading an article on wired.com about telecommunications selling spy data to governments (that is posted on my blog here) I checked out the blog mentioned in the wired.com article and man was it FULL of important information! Everything below is the work of the original author on slight paranoia. (The original article can be found here) I’ve only copy and pasted it onto my blog because it is VERY important that you read this information. Explore all the links in the article below. And please visit slight paranoia for any questions you may have and to read all his other posts or to just send him a quick thank you message.

Disclaimer: The information presented here has been gathered and analyzed in my capacity as a graduate student at Indiana University. This data was gathered and analyzed on my own time, without using federal government resources. This data, and the analysis I draw from it will be a major component of my PhD dissertation, and as such, I am releasing it in order to receive constructive criticism on my theories from other experts in the field. The opinions I express in my analysis are my own, and do not reflect the views of the Federal Trade Commission, any individual Commissioner, or any other individual or organization with which I am affiliated.

UPDATE 12/3/2009 @ 12:20PM: I received a phone call from an executive at TeleStrategies, the firm who organized the ISS World conference. He claimed that my recordings violated copyright law, and asked that I remove the mp3 recordings of the two panel sessions, as well as the YouTube/Vimeo/Ikbis versions I had embedded onto this blog. While I believe that my recording and posting of the audio was lawful, as a good faith gesture, I have taken down the mp3s and the .zip file from my web hosting account, and removed the files from Vimeo/YouTube/Ikbis.

Executive Summary

Sprint Nextel provided law enforcement agencies with its customers’ (GPS) location information over 8 million times between September 2008 and October 2009. This massive disclosure of sensitive customer information was made possible due to the roll-out by Sprint of a new, special web portal for law enforcement officers.

The evidence documenting this surveillance program comes in the form of an audio recording of Sprint’s Manager of Electronic Surveillance, who described it during a panel discussion at a wiretapping and interception industry conference, held in Washington DC in October of 2009.

It is unclear if Federal law enforcement agencies’ extensive collection of geolocation data should have been disclosed to Congress pursuant to a 1999 law that requires the publication of certain surveillance statistics — since the Department of Justice simply ignores the law, and has not provided the legally mandated reports to Congress since 2004.

Introduction

“[Service providers] have, last time I looked, no line entry in any government directory; they are not an agent of any law enforcement agency; they do not work for or report to the FBI; and yet, you would never know that by the way law enforcement orders them around and expects blind obedience.”
– Albert Gidari Jr., Keynote Address: Companies Caught in the Middle, 41 U.S.F. L. Rev. 535, Spring 2007.

“The reason we keep [search engine data] for any length of time is one, we actually need it to make our algorithms better, but more importantly, there is a legitimate case of the government, or particularly the police function or so forth, wanting, with a Federal subpoena and so forth being able to get access to that information.”
– Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, All Things Considered, NPR interview between 5:40 and 6:40, October 2, 2009.

Internet service providers and telecommunications companies play a significant, yet little known role in law enforcement and intelligence gathering.

Government agents routinely obtain customer records from these firms, detailing the telephone numbers dialed, text messages, emails and instant messages sent, web pages browsed, the queries submitted to search engines, and of course, huge amounts of geolocation data, detailing exactly where an individual was located at a particular date and time.

These Internet/telecommunications firms all have special departments, many open 24 hours per day, whose staff do nothing but respond to legal requests. Their entire purpose is to facilitate the disclosure of their customers’ records to law enforcement and intelligence agencies — all following the letter of the law, of course.

‘Juking’ the stats

If you were to believe the public surveillance statistics, you might come away with the idea that government surveillance is exceedingly rare in the United States.

Every year, the US Courts produce the wiretap report which details every ‘intercept’ order requested by Federal, state and local law enforcement agencies during that year. Before the police, FBI, DEA or other law enforcement agents can tap a phone, intercept an Internet connection, or place a covert bug into a suspect’s home, they must obtain one of these orders, which law professor and blogger Orin Kerr describes as a “super warrant,” due to the number of steps the government must go through in order to obtain one.

The official wiretap reports reveal that there are approximately 2000 intercept orders sought and approved by judges each year.

As you might expect, the vast majority of these intercept orders are for phone wiretaps. Thus, for example, of the 1891 intercept orders granted in 2008, all but 134 of them were issued for phone taps.

The number of electronic intercept orders, which are required to intercept Internet traffic and other computer assisted communications is surprisingly low. There were just 10 electronic intercept orders requested in 2008, and only 4 of those were from the Federal government — which was itself a massive increase over the one single order sought by the entire Department of Justice in both 2006 and 2007.

This graph, and the information contained within it, simply does not make sense. The number of electronic intercepts should, like the number of phone wiretaps, be going up over time, as more people purchase computers, and as criminals or other persons of government interest start to use computers to communicate and plan their business activities. Why were there almost 700 total (federal and state) electronic intercept orders obtained in 1998, but only 10 in 2008?

While I have no way of proving it, I suspect that there have never been a large amount of electronic intercept orders obtained in order to monitor computer communications. The electronic intercept orders, as reported by the US Courts, include those used to monitor computers, fax machines, and pagers. The wiretap report doesn’t break down the numbers for these individual technologies — but I suspect that the nearly 700 electronic intercept orders granted in 1998 were largely for fax machines and pagers. Thus, as these technologies died out, it is only natural that the number of electronic intercept orders declined

That still leaves us with one large question though: How often are Internet communications being monitored, and what kind of orders are required in order to do so.

The stats don’t cover all forms of law enforcement surveillance

As I described at the beginning of this article, the government routinely obtains customer records from ISPs detailing the telephone numbers dialed, text messages, emails and instant messages sent, web pages browsed, the queries submitted to search engines, and geolocation data, detailing exactly where an individual was located at a particular date and time.

However, while there are many ways the government can monitor an individual, very few of these methods require an intercept order.

In general, intercept orders are required to monitor the contents of real time communications. Non-content information, such as the To/From and Subject lines for email messages, URLs of pages viewed (which includes search terms), and telephone numbers dialed can all be obtained with a pen register/trap & trace order.

While wiretaps require a “superwarrant” which must be evaluated and approved by a judge following strict rules, government attorneys can obtain pen register orders by merely certifying that the information likely to be obtained is relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation — a far lower evidentiary threshold.

In addition to the fact that they are far easier to obtain, pen register orders are also not included in the annual US courts wiretap report. Not to fear though — a 1999 law requires that the Attorney General compile annual statistics regarding DOJ’s use of pen register orders, which he must submit to Congress.

Unfortunately, the Department of Justice has ignored this law since 2004 — when five years worth of reports were provided to Congress in the form of a single document dump covering 1999-2003. Since that one submission, both Congress and the American people have been kept completely in the dark regarding the Federal government’s extensive use of pen registers.

Since we don’t have any pen register stats for the last five years, it is difficult to do a current comparison. However, for the five years worth of data that we do have, it is possible to make a few observations.

First, in 2003, Federal agents used 15 times more pen registers and trap & traces than intercepts. Perhaps this was because each of the 578 Federal intercept orders obtained in 2003 had to be thoroughly evaluated and then approved by a judge, while the 5922 pen registers or 2649 trap & trace devices each received a cursory review at best.

Second, the number of pen registers and trap & trace orders went down after 9/11, at a time when the FBI and other parts of DOJ were massively increasing their use of surveillance. 4210 pen registers were used in 2000, 4172 in 2001, and 4103 in 2002.

It is important to note that these numbers only reveal part of the picture, as these statistics only cover the use of pen registers/trap & traces by the Department of Justice. There are no public stats that document the use of these surveillance methods by state or local law enforcement. Likewise, these stats only cover the requests made for law enforcement purposes — pen register surveillance performed by the intelligence community isn’t reported, even in aggregate form.

Stored Communications

The reporting requirements for intercepts and pen registers only apply to the surveillance of live communications. However, communications or customer records that are in storage by third parties, such as email messages, photos or other files maintained in the cloud by services like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo Facebook and MySpace are routinely disclosed to law enforcement, and there is no legal requirement that statistics on these kinds of requests be compiled or published.

There is currently no way for academic researchers, those in Congress, or the general public to determine how often most email, online photo sharing or social network services deliver their customers’ data to law enforcement agents.

While these firms deliver sensitive customer data to government agents on a daily basis, they go out of their way to avoid discussing it.

“As a matter of policy, we do not comment on the nature or substance of law enforcement requests to Google.”

“We do not comment on specific requests from the government. Microsoft is committed to protecting the privacy of our customers and complies with all applicable privacy laws.”

“Given the sensitive nature of this area and the potential negative impact on the investigative capabilities of public safety agencies, Yahoo does not discuss the details of law enforcement compliance. Yahoo responds to law enforcement in compliance with all applicable laws.”

Only Facebook and AOL have publicly disclosed the approximate number of requests they receive from the government — 10-20 requests per day and 1000 requests per month, respectively.

Follow the money

“When I can follow the money, I know how much of something is being consumed – how many wiretaps, how many pen registers, how many customer records. Couple that with reporting, and at least you have the opportunity to look at and know about what is going on.
– Albert Gidari Jr., Keynote Address: Companies Caught in the Middle, 41 U.S.F. L. Rev. 535, Spring 2007.

Telecommunications carriers and Internet firms do not just hand over sensitive customer information to law enforcement officers. No — these companies charge the government for it.

Cox Communications, the third largest cable provider in the United States, is the only company I’ve found that has made its surveillance price list public. Thus, we are able to learn that the company charges $2,500 for the first 60 days of a pen register/trap and trace, followed by $2,000 for each additional 60 days, while it charges $3,500 for the first 30 days of a wiretap, followed by $2,500 for each additional 30 days. Historical data is much cheaper — 30 days of a customer’s call detail records can be obtained for a mere $40.

Comcast does not make their price list public, but the company’s law enforcement manual was leaked to the Internet a couple years ago. Based on that 2007 document, it appears that Comcast charges at least $1000 for the first month of a wiretap, followed by $750 for each month after that.

In the summer of 2009, I decided to try and follow the money trail in order to determine how often Internet firms were disclosing their customers’ private information to the government. I theorized that if I could obtain the price lists of each ISP, detailing the price for each kind of service, and invoices paid by the various parts of the Federal government, then I might be able to reverse engineer some approximate statistics. In order to obtain these documents, I filed Freedom of Information Act requests with every part of the Department of Justice that I could think of.

The first agency within DOJ to respond was the U.S. Marshals Service (USMS), who informed me that they had price lists on file for Cox, Comcast, Yahoo! and Verizon. Since the price lists were provided to USMS voluntarily, the companies were given the opportunity to object to the disclosure of their documents. Neither Comcast nor Cox objected (perhaps because their price lists were already public), while both Verizon and Yahoo! objected to the disclosure.

I then filed a second request, asking for copies of the two firms’ objection letters. Those letters proved to be more interesting than the price lists I originally sought.

Click here for the complete Verizon price list letter.
Click here for the complete Yahoo! price list letter.

First, Verizon revealed in its letter that it “receives tens of thousands of requests for customer records, or other customer information from law enforcement.”

Assuming a conservative estimate of 20,000 requests per year, Verizon alone receives more requests from law enforcement per year than can be explained by any published surveillance statistics. That doesn’t mean the published stats are necessarily incorrect — merely that most types of surveillance are not reported.

In its letter, Verizon lists several reasons why it believes that its price list should remain confidential. Of these reasons — two stand out. First, the company argues, customers might “become unnecessarily afraid that their lines have been tapped, or call Verizon to ask if their lines are tapped (a question we cannot answer.)”

The second interesting reason is that:

“Our pricing schedules reveal (for just two examples) that upon the lawful request of law enforcement we are able to [redacted by USMS]. In cooperation with law enforcement, we do not release that information to the general public out of concern that a criminal may become aware of our capabilities, see a change in his service, correctly assume that the change was made at the lawful request of law enforcement and alter his behavior to thwart a law enforcement investigation.”

I’m not sure what capabilities this section is referring to — but I’d love to find out more.

Yahoo!’s letter is far less exciting, and doesn’t even hint at the number of requests that the company receives. There is one interesting tidbit in the letter though:

“It is reasonable to assume from these comments that the [pricing] information, if disclosed, would be used to “shame” Yahoo! and other companies — and to “shock” their customers. Therefore, release of Yahoo!’s information is reasonably likely to lead to impairment of its reputation for protection of user privacy and security, which is a competitive disadvantage for technology companies.”

Geolocation

“Federal officials are routinely asking courts to order cellphone companies to furnish real-time tracking data so they can pinpoint the whereabouts of drug traffickers, fugitives and other criminal suspects, according to judges and industry lawyers.” Ellen Nakashima, Cellphone Tracking Powers on Request, The Washington Post, November 23, 2007.

“Law enforcement routinely now requests carriers to continuously ‘ping’ wireless devices of suspects to locate them when a call is not being made … so law enforcement can triangulate the precise location of a device and [seek] the location of all associates communicating with a target.”
– Christopher Guttman-McCabe, vice president of regulatory affairs for CTIA — the Wireless Association, in a July 2007 comment to the Federal Communications Commission.

As mobile phones have become ubiquitous, the law enforcement community has learned to leverage the plentiful, often real-time location information that carriers can be compelled to provide. Location requests easily outnumber wiretaps, and as this article will reveal, likely outnumber all other forms of surveillance request too.

In terms of legal requirements, this information can often be gained through the use of a hybrid order, combining a Stored Communications Act request and a Pen Register request. As noted before, the former law has no reporting requirement, and the law requiring reports for the Pen Register requests has been ignored by the Department of Justice since 2004.

In March of this year, telecommunications lawyer Al Gidari, who represents many of the major telcos and ISPs, gave a talk at the Berkman Center at Harvard University. During his speech, he revealed that each of the major wireless carriers receive approximately 100 requests per week for customers’ location information.

100 requests per week * 4 wireless major carriers (Sprint, Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile) * 52 weeks = 20k requests per year.

While Gidari’s numbers were shocking when I first heard them, I now have proof that he significantly underestimated the number of requests by several orders of magnitude.

Hanging with the spooks

Several times each year, in cities around the globe, representatives from law enforcement and intelligence agencies, telecommunications carriers and the manufacturers of wiretapping equipment gather for a closed door conference: ISS World: Intelligence Support Systems for Lawful Interception, Criminal Investigations and Intelligence Gathering.

ISS World is no stranger to the privacy community. Back in 2000, FBI agents showed off a prototype of the Carnivore interception system to attendees at ISS World. Days later, stories appeared in both the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times after one attendee leaked information to the press.

ISS World had been on the list of events that I’d wanted to attend for a long time, even moreso after my research interests started to focus on government surveillance. Thus, in October of this year, just a month after moving to Washington DC, I found myself at the Washington DC Convention Center, attending ISS World.

Looking around at the name badges pinned to the suits milling around the refreshment area, it really was a who’s who of the spies and those who enable their spying. Household name telecom companies and equipment vendors, US government agencies (both law enforcement and intel). Also present were representatives from foreign governments — Columbia, Mexico, Algeria, and Nigeria, who, like many of the US government employees, spent quite a bit of time at the vendor booths, picking up free pens and coffee mugs while they learned about the latest and greatest surveillance products currently on the market.

The main draw of the event for me was two panel discussions: A presentation on “Regulatory and CALEA Issues Facing Telecom Operators Deploying DPI Infrastructure”, and a “Telecom Service Providers Roundtable Discussions”

Not knowing ahead of time what the speakers would say, and not wanting to be called a liar if I later cited an interesting quote in a research paper, I decided to make an audio recording of the two panels.

One wireless company, 50 million customers, 8 million law enforcement requests for customer GPS information in one year

Both panels are fascinating, and worth listening to in full.
Click here for an mp3 of the complete the Deep Packet Inspection Panel.
Click here for mp3 of entire telecom panel.

However, by far the most jaw-dropping parts of the telecom service providers roundtable were the following quotes:

“[M]y major concern is the volume of requests. We have a lot of things that are automated but that’s just scratching the surface. One of the things, like with our GPS tool. We turned it on the web interface for law enforcement about one year ago last month, and we just passed 8 million requests. So there is no way on earth my team could have handled 8 million requests from law enforcement, just for GPS alone. So the tool has just really caught on fire with law enforcement. They also love that it is extremely inexpensive to operate and easy, so, just the sheer volume of requests they anticipate us automating other features, and I just don’t know how we’ll handle the millions and millions of requests that are going to come in.
– Paul Taylor, Electronic Surveillance Manager, Sprint Nextel.

“In the electronic surveillance group at Sprint, I have 3 supervisors. 30 ES techs, and 15 contractors. On the subpoena compliance side, which is anything historical, stored content, stored records, is about 35 employees, maybe 4-5 supervisors, and 30 contractors. There’s like 110 all together.”
– Paul Taylor, Electronic Surveillance Manager, Sprint Nextel, describing the number of employees working full time to comply with requests for customer records.

“Cricket doesn’t have as many subscribers so our numbers are going to be less. I think we have 4.5 – 5 million subscribers. We get approximately 200 requests per calendar day, and that includes requests for records, intercepts. We don’t have the type of automation they do, and we can’t do the location specificy that they can, because we don’t have GPS.”
– Janet A. Schwabe, Subpoena Compliance Manager, Cricket Communications

“Nextel’s system, they statically assign IP addresses to all handsets … We do have logs, we can go back to see the IP address that used MySpace. By the way – MySpace and Facebook, I don’t know how many subpoenas those people get, or emergency requests but god bless, 95% of all IP requests, emergencies are because of MySpace or Facebook… On the Sprint 3G network, we have IP data back 24 months, and we have, depending on the device, we can actually tell you what URL they went to … If [the handset uses] the [WAP] Media Access Gateway, we have the URL history for 24 months … We don’t store it because law enforcement asks us to store it, we store it because when we launched 3G in 2001 or so, we thought we were going to bill by the megabyte … but ultimately, that’s why we store the data … It’s because marketing wants to rifle through the data.”
– Paul Taylor, Electronic Surveillance Manager, Sprint Nextel.

“Two or three years ago, we probably had less than 10% of our requests including text messaging. Now, over half of all of our surveillance includes SMS messaging.”
– Paul Taylor, Electronic Surveillance Manager, Sprint Nextel.

Conclusion

As the information presented in this article has demonstrated, the publicly available law enforcement surveillance statistics are, at best misleading, and at worst, deceptive. It is simply impossible to have a reasonable debate amongst academics, public policy makers, and members of the public interest community when the very scale of these surveillance programs is secret.

As an example, consider the following quote from the November 4, 2009 markup hearing of the House Judiciary Committee, which is currently considering a bill to expand the government’s PATRIOT Act surveillance powers. During the hearing, Rep. Lamar Smith, the Ranking (Minority) Member said the following:

Unlike other tools which actually collect content, such as wiretaps, pen registers and trap-and-trace devices merely request outgoing and incoming phone numbers. Because the government cannot collect any content using pen registers, a minimization requirement makes no sense. What is there is there to minimize?

After reading this article, it should be clear to the reader that pen registers and trap & trace devices are used for far more than just collecting phone numbers dialed. They are used to get email headers (including To, From and Subject lines), the URLs of web pages viewed by individuals, and in many situations, they are used (along with a Stored Communications Act request) to get geolocation information on mobile phone users.

The reason I’m quoting Rep. Smith isn’t to poke fun at his expense, but to make a serious point. How can we have a serious public debate about law enforcement surveillance powers, when the senior most Republican on the committee responsible for the oversight of those powers doesn’t understand how they are being used? Likewise, this paragraph should by no means be read as an attack on Rep. Smith. How can he be expected to understand the extensive modern use of pen registers, when the Department of Justice continues to break the law by failing to provide yearly statistics on the use of pen registers to Congress?

My point is this: The vast majority of the government’s access to individuals’ private data is not reported, either due to a failure on DOJ’s part to supply the legally required statistics, or due to the fact that information regarding law enforcement requests for third party stored records (such as email, photos and other data located in the cloud) is not currently required to be collected or reported.

As for the millions of government requests for geo-location data, it is simply disgraceful that these are not currently being reported…but they should be.

SOURCE: http://paranoia.dubfire.net/2009/12/8-million-reasons-for-real-surveillance.html

A “Necessary War” — for a Gas Pipeline

It’s Obama’s War Now

By GARY LEUPP

Reposted from (http://current.com/1stfq4c) at Counterpunch.org – November 30, 2009

There are now at present some 68,000 U.S. troops and 42,000 allied forces occupying Afghanistan, in league with the Northern Alliance warlords and the corrupt and feeble Karzai regime in Kabul. President Obama clearly wishes to increase the figure and will announce before an audience of West Point cadets Tuesday that he will add over 30,000 more while pushing the Europeans to add 10,000. This will bring the total number of occupation forces to around the level of the Soviet deployment at its peak in the 1980s.

The Soviets were trying to protect the secular government in Afghanistan and to discourage Islamic fundamentalism, a potential threat to the neighboring Soviet Central Asian republics such as Uzbekistan. What is Obama trying to do?

AMERICA HAS HAD ENOUGH.

The illegitimate wars were spawned by false-flag terrorism, are based on fraud, deceit, and are for opium, oil, the building of a natural-gas pipeline, riches and hegemony.

BRING THEM ALL HOME!

It’s Time to Leave Afghanistan

Appears also at AntiWar.com

Statement by Rep. Ron Paul, December 12, 2009, before the House of Representatives’ Foreign Affairs Committee on December 10, 2009.

Mr. Speaker thank you for holding these important hearings on US policy in Afghanistan. I would like to welcome the witnesses, Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry and General Stanley A. McChrystal, and thank them for appearing before this Committee.

I have serious concerns, however, about the president’s decision to add some 30,000 troops and an as yet undisclosed number of civilian personnel to escalate our Afghan operation. This “surge” will bring US troop levels to approximately those of the Soviets when they occupied Afghanistan with disastrous result back in the 1980s. I fear the US military occupation of Afghanistan may end up similarly unsuccessful.

In late 1986 Soviet armed forces commander, Marshal Sergei Akhromeev, told then-Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, “Military actions in Afghanistan will soon be seven years old. There is no single piece of land in this country which has not been occupied by a Soviet soldier. Nonetheless, the majority of the territory remains in the hands of rebels.” Soon Gorbachev began the Soviet withdrawal from its Afghan misadventure. Thousands were dead on both sides, yet the occupation failed to produce a stable national Afghan government.

Eight years into our own war in Afghanistan the Soviet commander’s words ring eerily familiar. Part of the problem stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of the situation. It is our presence as occupiers that feeds the insurgency. As would be the case if we were invaded and occupied, diverse groups have put aside their disagreements to unify against foreign occupation. Adding more US troops will only assist those who recruit fighters to attack our soldiers and who use the US occupation to convince villages to side with the Taliban.

Proponents of the president’s Afghanistan escalation cite the successful “surge” in Iraq as evidence that this second surge will have similar results. I fear they might be correct about the similar result, but I dispute the success propaganda about Iraq. In fact, the violence in Iraq only temporarily subsided with the completion of the ethnic cleansing of Shi’ites from Sunni neighborhoods and vice versa – and all neighborhoods of Christians. Those Sunni fighters who remained were easily turned against the foreign al-Qaeda presence when offered US money and weapons. We are increasingly seeing this “success” breaking down: sectarian violence is flaring up and this time the various groups are better armed with US-provided weapons. Similarly, the insurgents paid by the US to stop their attacks are increasingly restive now that the Iraqi government is no longer paying bribes on a regular basis. So I am skeptical about reports on the success of the Iraqi surge.

Likewise, we are told that we have to “win” in Afghanistan so that al-Qaeda cannot use Afghan territory to plan further attacks against the US. We need to remember that the attack on the United States on September 11, 2001, was, according to the 9/11 Commission Report, largely planned in the United States (and Germany) by terrorists who were in our country legally. According to the logic of those who endorse military action against Afghanistan because al-Qaeda was physically present, one could argue in favor of US airstrikes against several US states and Germany! It makes no sense. The Taliban allowed al-Qaeda to remain in Afghanistan because both had been engaged, with US assistance, in the insurgency against the Soviet occupation.

Nevertheless, the president’s National Security Advisor, Gen. James Jones, USMC (Ret.), said in a recent interview that less than 100 al-Qaeda remain in Afghanistan and that the chance they would reconstitute a significant presence there was slim. Are we to believe that 30,000 more troops are needed to defeat 100 al-Qaeda fighters? I fear that there will be increasing pressure for the US to invade Pakistan, to where many Taliban and al-Qaeda have escaped. Already CIA drone attacks on Pakistan have destabilized that country and have killed scores of innocents, producing strong anti-American feelings and calls for revenge. I do not see how that contributes to our national security.

The president’s top advisor for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, said recently, “I would say this about defining success in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In the simplest sense, the Supreme Court test for another issue, we’ll know it when we see it.” That does not inspire much confidence.

Supporters of this surge argue that we must train an Afghan national army to take over and strengthen the rule and authority of Kabul. But experts have noted that the ranks of the Afghan national army are increasingly being filled by the Tajik minority at the expense of the Pashtun plurality. US diplomat Matthew Hoh, who resigned as Senior Civilian Representative for the U.S. Government in Zabul Province, noted in his resignation letter that he “fail[s] to see the value or the worth in continued U.S. casualties or expenditures of resources in support of the Afghan government in what is, truly, a 35-year old civil war.” Mr. Hoh went on to write that “[L]ike the Soviets, we continue to secure and bolster a failing state, while encouraging an ideology and system of government unknown and unwanted by [the Afghan] people.”

I have always opposed nation-building as unconstitutional and ineffective. Afghanistan is no different. Without a real strategy in Afghanistan, without a vision of what victory will look like, we are left with the empty rhetoric of the last administration that “when the Afghan people stand up, the US will stand down.” I am afraid the only solution to the Afghanistan quagmire is a rapid and complete US withdrawal from that country and the region. We cannot afford to maintain this empire and our occupation of these foreign lands is not making us any safer. It is time to leave Afghanistan.

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