A post for those far-too-many deniers of our “new normal” (it really is all about the one percent’s “economics,” when you drill down to it, frankly) that chastise the increasing number of Americans who now reference this as our “surveillance state;” and, for all who acknowledge these inconvenient facts as reality, please consider this an alarming update…
First, this MUST-READ, breaking report just in from Kevin Gosztola, over at FDL (aside from the basic, outrageous facts of the story, the DHS’ employee’s statement, which includes a truly twisted, self-justified comparison to the FBI’s surveillance of Martin Luther King, is absolutely mind-numbing; and that’s just the tip of this iceberg-sized travesty)…
Military Employee Admitted He Was Paid by Army to Attend Private Activist Meetings in Homes
Kevin Gosztola
FireDogLake
Monday June 16, 2014 10:57 am
An attorney pursuing a lawsuit against alleged domestic United States military spying says during depositions in the case a civilian employee who worked for the Army admitted he was paid to attend activist meetings at private homes in the state of Washington. One fusion center intelligence employee, who coordinated with the military, also considered civil disobedience to be “terrorism.”
The lawsuit is known as Panagacos v. Towery. It accuses the US military of directing John Jacob Towery, who worked for the US Army Force Protection Division at Fort Lewis, to infiltrate a group called the Port Militarization Resistance (PMR) in Olympia and Tacoma, Washington. It also accuses the cities of Olympia and Tacoma of coordinating with the military to violate the First and Fourth Amendment rights of activists.
Gosztola notes that Port Militarization Resistance (PMR)
"...organized demonstrations from 2006 to 2009 against the 'use of civilian ports in Puget Sound for striker vehicles and other military cargo being shipped over to Iraq and then shipped to Pakistan or Afghanistan,' according to Larry Hildes, who is one of the National Lawyers Guild attorneys representing activists targeted by the military."
He also reports: "Nonviolent civil disobedience was a part of some of the demonstrations, and at one demonstration in May 2006, police used pepper spray on demonstrators."
Thomas Rudd, head of Force Protection, is accused of directing Towery to identify activists “in order to facilitate their arrest without probable cause.” Rudd apparently instructed Towery to build friendships and provide reports on what activists were planning, which Rudd could share with government agencies.
Both Towery and Rudd are accused of coordinating with local law enforcement in the state of Washington to “silence” PMR activists.
According to Hildes, Towery admitted during depositions that he had not only been paid by the Army to go to PMR meetings in private homes but was also paid to attend meetings related to actions planned for the Republican National Convention and Democratic National Convention in 2008.
Chris Adamson, who was the director of a regional intelligence group of the Department of Homeland Security’s Washington Fusion Center and a lieutenant of the Pierce County Sheriff’s Office, stated in depositions that “civil disobedience is terrorism,” according to Hildes.
He claimed to attorneys that, while he admired Martin Luther King Jr., even what the civil rights movement had done had a “criminal nexus” and “he would have expected them to be investigated as terrorists.”...
If you're a social activist--and many reading this here are--the only word I can use that comes close to my sensibilities when I first read this (and there's much more to Gosztola's story; so please read the entire piece) is:
"Chilling."
(h/t Kossack SouthernLiberalinMD)
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Also as part of my ongoing follow-up to my post here on Friday, Guardian: Pentagon Preparing For Mass Civil Breakdown; DoD Report: Activists Are "Social Contagions," a few more developments loaded with pertinent and confirming facts, all pointing to more inconvenient truths that the greater story really is about current-day, domestic, military-intelligence realities, and it has very little to do with any lame attempts at spin proffered up by government apologists, including even a few in this community. So, here's a little more specific, damning info regarding my original post on Friday, as: brought to my attention by a friend, over the weekend; and, a second piece at the Guardian, from Friday, from Nafeez Ahmed, who’s been covering this Orwellian nightmare—in far greater detail, I might add--for much longer than I initially realized. See the excerpt farther down, below, from Ahmed from last year, as well.
As kind of an intro to these two pieces from Ahmed, here’s the real deal on those DoD research grants, directly from the U.S. Army, as far as the Minerva Initiative’s concerned (see page 3 of the original document--linked via the headline, below--that includes the critical blockquote, immediately below, too)…
From the U.S. Army’s Documentation on The Minerva Research Initiative
U.S. Army
July 2011
…The Minerva Research Initiative competition is for research related to the seven (7) topics listed below. Detailed descriptions of the topics can be found in Section VIII, “Specific Minerva Research Initiative Topics.” The detailed descriptions are intended to provide the proposer a frame of reference and are not meant to be restrictive. Innovative proposals related to these research topics are highly encouraged. White papers and full proposals are solicited which address the following topics:
(1) Strategic Impact of Religious and Cultural Changes
(2) Terrorism and Terrorist Ideologies
(3) Science, Technology and Military Transformations in China and Developing States
(4) National Security Implications of Energy and Environmental Stress
(5) New Theories of Cross-Domain Deterrence
(6) Regime and Social Dynamics in Failed, Failing, and Fragile Authoritarian States
(7) New Approaches to Understanding Dimensions of National Security, Conflict, and Cooperation…
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As most who have been following the NSA-Snowden story now realize it, the U.S. and Great Britain are joined at the hip when it comes to state and international surveillance. Friday, Nafeez Ahmed provided his Guardian audience with a closer look at related developments across the pond, the day after he reported upon comparable travesties here in the U.S.…
Defence officials prepare to fight the poor, activists and minorities (and commies)
The self-defeating logic of militarised social science targets anti-capitalist 'extremists' in the new 'age of uncertainty'
Nafeez Ahmed
Guardian
June 13, 2014
Yesterday I wrote about the Pentagon's dubious role in funding social science research that could be applied to active military operations in the context of the increasing propensity for global systemic crises to challenge US interests. Several key research projects highlighted the extent to which US security agencies, assisted by civilian academic institutions, view entire populations – particularly those involved in political activism – as potential terror suspects who, therefore, deserve to be carefully monitored and studied.
It is not just the US where the effort to subordinate social science to the demands of state military ideology continues apace. In Britain, a key area where this is occurring is in the Research Councils UK (RCUK) Global Uncertainties programme, recently rebranded as the 'Partnership for Conflict, Crime and Security Research.'
The programme is led by the Economics and Social Research Council (ESRC), and supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). But it is not an independent exercise.
Rather it is explicitly designed to "help governments, businesses and societies to better predict, detect, prevent and mitigate threats to society" in the context of" environmental change and diminishing natural recourses, food security, demographic change, poverty, inequality and poor governance, new and old conflicts, natural disasters and pandemics, expansion of digital technologies, economic downturn and other important global developments."…
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Here’s Ahmed from a year ago, virtually to the day, with even more ominous details…
Pentagon bracing for public dissent over climate and energy shocks
NSA Prism is motivated in part by fears that environmentally-linked disasters could spur anti-government activism
Nafeez Ahmed
Guardian
June 14, 2013
Top secret US National Security Agency (NSA) documents disclosed by the Guardian have shocked the world with revelations of a comprehensive US-based surveillance system with direct access to Facebook, Apple, Google, Microsoft and other tech giants. New Zealand court records suggest that data harvested by the NSA's Prism system has been fed into the Five Eyes intelligence alliance whose members also include the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
But why have Western security agencies developed such an unprecedented capacity to spy on their own domestic populations? Since the 2008 economic crash, security agencies have increasingly spied on political activists, especially environmental groups, on behalf of corporate interests. This activity is linked to the last decade of US defence planning, which has been increasingly concerned by the risk of civil unrest at home triggered by catastrophic events linked to climate change, energy shocks or economic crisis - or all three.
Just last month, unilateral changes to US military laws formally granted the Pentagon extraordinary powers to intervene in a domestic "emergency" or "civil disturbance":
"Federal military commanders have the authority, in extraordinary emergency circumstances where prior authorization by the President is impossible and duly constituted local authorities are unable to control the situation, to engage temporarily in activities that are necessary to quell large-scale, unexpected civil disturbances."
Other documents show that the "extraordinary emergencies" the Pentagon is worried about include a range of environmental and related disasters…
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Here’s the Guardian’s Trevor Timm, from Saturday, on a story I’ve covered extensively at Daily Kos over the past few years (long before we ever knew the name, Edward Snowden).
As a matter of personal note, it’s becoming increasingly clear to yours truly that there’s some conflation going on in the press and within our government with regard to the “Stingray”/“IMSI Catcher” story and the “AT&T Hemisphere” story (here’s a LINK to my latest post on the AT&T Hemisphere Project, and what I believe is, perhaps, the truly over-arching story on the state of our surveillance state; but more about that at another time).
The US government doesn't want you to know how the cops are tracking you
Thought the NSA was bad? Local police and the Obama administration are hoovering cellphone location data from inside your house, and a crackdown could lead to surveillance reform
Trevor Timm
theguardian.com
Saturday 14 June 2014 07.30 EDT
All across America, from Florida to Colorado and back again, the country's increasingly militarized local police forces are using a secretive technology to vacuum up cellphone data from entire neighborhoods – including from people inside their own homes – almost always without a warrant. This week, numerous investigations by major news agencies revealed the US government is now taking unbelievable measures to make sure you never find out about it. But a landmark court ruling for privacy could soon force the cops to stop, even as the Obama administration fights to keep its latest tool for mass surveillance a secret.
So-called International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) catchers – more often called their popular brand name, "Stingray" – have long been the talk of the civil liberties crowd, for the indiscriminate and invasive way these roving devices conduct surveillance. Essentially, Stingrays act as fake cellphone towers (usually mounted in a mobile police truck) that police can point toward any given area and force every phone in the area to connect to it. So even if you're not making a call, police can find out who you've been calling, and for how long, as well as your precise location. As Nathan Freed Wessler of the ACLU explained on Thursday, "In one Florida case, a police officer explained in court that he 'quite literally stood in front of every door and window' with his stingray to track the phones inside a large apartment complex."
Yet these mass surveillance devices have largely stayed out of the public eye, thanks to the federal government and local police refusing to disclose they're using them in the first place – sometimes, shockingly, even to judges. As the Associated Press reported this week, the Obama administration has been telling local cops to keep information on Stingrays secret from members of the news media, even when it seems like local public records laws would mandate their disclosure. The AP noted:
Federal involvement in local open records proceedings is unusual. It comes at a time when President Barack Obama has said he welcomes a debate on government surveillance and called for more transparency about spying in the wake of disclosures about classified federal surveillance programs.
Some of the government's tactics to hide Stingray from journalists and the public have been downright disturbing. After the ACLU had filed a records request for information on Stingrays, the local police force initially told them that, yes, they had the documents and to come on down to the station to look at them. But just before an ACLU rep was due to arrive, US Marshals seized the records and hid them away at another location, in what Wessler describes as "a blatant violation of state open-records laws".
The federal government has used various other tactics around the country to prevent disclosure of similar information…
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Of course, throughout the past year, we have been told that the White House wasn’t focused upon Edward Snowden. They had bigger fish to fry. Apparently, according to the WaPo, on Saturday, not so much…
U.S. officials scrambled to nab Snowden, hoping he would take a wrong step. He didn’t.
By Greg Miller
Washington Post
June 14, 2014 10:38 PM
While Edward Snowden was trapped in the transit zone of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport last year, U.S. officials were confronting their own dearth of options in the White House Situation Room.
For weeks, senior officials from the FBI, the CIA, the State Department and other agencies assembled nearly every day in a desperate search for a way to apprehend the former intelligence contractor who had exposed the inner workings of American espionage then fled to Hong Kong before ending up in Moscow.
Convened by White House homeland security adviser Lisa Monaco, the meetings kept ending at the same impasse…
…
… Several U.S. officials cited a complication to gathering intelligence on Snowden that could be seen as ironic: the fact that there has been no determination that he is an “agent of a foreign power,” a legal distinction required to make an American citizen a target of espionage overseas.
If true, it means that the former CIA employee and National Security Agency contractor, who leaked thousands of classified files to expose what he considered rampant and illegal surveillance of U.S. citizens, is shielded at least to some extent from spying by his former employers…
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Last but never least, please checkout, “Whistleblowers Refused To Be Silenced,” by Kossack Jesselyn Radack, regarding Chelsea Manning’s outstanding op-ed in Sunday’s NY Times, “The Fog Machine Of War.”
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