A federal judge has found the NSA’s massive surveillance program to be in violation of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution which precludes unreasonable searches and seizures. That will come as no surprise to those who have followed our efforts in the past to oppose it, but Richard Leon of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia, unlike us, is in the position to do something about it. He has stayed his ruling in the expectation that the US government will appeal in order to continue with its accumulation of every electronic record of every American citizen as well as those of many other residents of the world. Judge Leon described the technology involved as “almost Orwellian”, where “almost” is superfluous. Edward Snowden, who reveals the massive NSA surveillance program, has been voted “Person of the Year” in a poll conducted by EuroNews.
In a 300-page report released Wednesday, a presidential advisory panel has recommended sweeping changes to the NSA program, which has gone overboard in violating the public’s right to privacy, where the data on communications that the agency has been collecting in bulk is “not essential to preventing attacks”. In complex but nevertheless most interesting case, the Senate Committee on Intelligence has requested the CIA to release its own internal report on its “enhanced interrogation” techniques. The CIA has been battling the Senate Committee for a year to keep its own 6,000 page study, which cost some $40 million, from being released to the public. The CIA has rebutted with a 122 page response of its own, but the Senators believe that its own study will confirm the same findings as the Senate’s own investigation and will therefore reveal that the CIA has been lying under oath to Congress.
The NSA offical, Bill Binney, who created the NSA surveillance program, has declared that we are now “a police state”, where the question becomes whether it is too late to undo it. The White House is going to stand with the present arrangement of combining the NSA directorship and the military’s cyberwarfare command in a single individual, in spite of an external review committee’s recommendation that they be separated. Another conflict of interest has emerged from Jeff Bezos, founder of amazon.com having purchased The Washington Post while having a $600,000,000 grant from the CIA. And if the FCC does not renew the Internet Neutrality provisions, we may find that the net becomes increasingly under the control of powerful companies, who are able to change its character and make it analogous to cable TV.
False flag attacks have become familiar territory for the public, largely because of their discussion on the internet. Active shooter drills have gone live in several cases, most recently in Colorado. Russia Today (RT) has done an exceptional job of exposing the Boston bombing hoax, where its “Truthseeker” program was threatening to go viral when it mysteriously disappeared from the internet, but it is still accessible at locations like this one. A 9/11 lawsuit brought against American Airlines for “allowing the hijackers” to board Flight 11 has been settled for $135 million, but Flights 11 and 77 were not even scheduled to fly that day and the planes associated with Flights 93 and 175 were not taken out of service by the FAA until 28 September 2005, which suggests that this is yet one more in an endless series of PR efforts to uphold the 9/11 myth.
The American Studies Association has recommended a ban on academic and scholarly exchanges with Israel as a form of protest against its abusive policies toward Palestinians, which is one of the preeminent human-rights issues of our time. And the idea of making the Middle East a “nuclear-free zone” has received renewed emphasis, but will undoubtedly be fiercely resisted by Israel, which has the only stockpile of nuclear weapons in the area–along with biological and chemical weapons, it has never acknowledged possessing. Iran has equipped its naval vessels with advanced missiles, in case of an attack from Israel, which has been looming for 15 or more years now but appears to be receding with the success of recent diplomatic initiatives. A conflict has arisen between the US and China in the South China Sea over China’s declaration of its control of that area. And Iceland has set an example for the world by incarcerating bankers who cheat the public and do not fulfill their obligations under the law. Were the US to do that, our prisons would be overflowing with white-collar criminals, but we seem instead to keep funding their criminal acts.
The Sandy Hook School has been completely destroyed, where those who were working on the project were given gag orders not to discuss what they saw or did not see, such as pock marks on the walls or blood on the floor. A new and powerful 1.5 hour study by Sofia Smallstorm, “Unraveling Sandy Hook”, is embedded in “Sandy Hook + American gullibility = coming Gulag America”, now available on Veterans Today. And Jim corrects the image he should have presented last week of the “falling man” from 9/11, which actually occurred against the background of a Twin Tower, but it was a simulation rather than an actual tower, as the fake corner of the building displays. This is one more proof that the media was profoundly involved in deceiving the American public re 9/11.