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we've got nothing to hide....We’re all being targeted now. We’re all guilty until proven innocent now. And thanks to the 24/7 surveillance being carried out by the government’s spy network of fusion centers, we are all now sitting ducks, just waiting to be tagged, flagged, targeted, monitored, manipulated, investigated, interrogated, heckled and generally harassed by agents of the American police state. Although these precrime programs are popping up all across the country, in small towns and big cities, they are not making us any safer but they are endangering individual freedoms. BY JOHN W. WHITEHEAD
Nationwide, there are upwards of 123 real-time crime centers (a.k.a. fusion centers), which allow local police agencies to upload and share massive amounts of surveillance data and intelligence with state and federal agencies culled from surveillance cameras, facial recognition technology, gunshot sensors, social media monitoring, drones and body cameras, and artificial intelligence-driven predictive policing algorithms. These data fusion centers, which effectively create an electronic prison—a digital police state—from which there is no escape, are being built in partnership with big tech companies such as Microsoft, Google and Amazon, which helped to fuel the rise of police militarization and domestic surveillance. While these latest expansions of the surveillance state are part of the Biden Administration’s efforts to combat domestic extremism through the creation of a “precrime” crime prevention agency, they have long been a pivotal part of the government’s plans for total control and dominion. Yet this crime prevention campaign is not so much about making America safer as it is about ensuring that the government has the wherewithal to muzzle anti-government discontent, penalize anyone expressing anti-government sentiments, and preemptively nip in the bud any attempts by the populace to challenge the government’s authority or question its propaganda. As J.D. Tuccille writes for Reason, “[A]t a time when government officials rage against ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ that is often just disagreement with whatever opinions are currently popular among the political class, fusion centers frequently scrutinize peaceful dissenting speech.” Indeed, while the Biden Administration was recently dealt a legal blow over its attempts to urge social media companies to do more to combat so-called dis- and mis-information, these fusion centers are the unacknowledged powerhouses behind the government’s campaign to censors and retaliate against those who vocalize their disagreement and discontent with government policies. Already, the powers-that-be are mobilizing to ensure that fusion centers have the ability to monitor and lockdown sectors of a community at a moment’s notice. For instance, a 42,000-square-foot behemoth of a fusion center in downtown Washington is reportedly designed to “better prepare law enforcement for the next public health emergency or Jan. 6-style attack.” According to an agency spokeswoman, “Screens covering the walls of the new facility will show surveillance cameras around the city as well as social media accounts that may be monitored for threatening speech.” It’s like a scene straight out of Steven Spielberg’s dystopian film Minority Report. Incredibly, as the various nascent technologies employed and shared by the government and corporations alike—facial recognition, iris scanners, massive databases, behavior prediction software, and so on—are incorporated into a complex, interwoven cyber network aimed at tracking our movements, predicting our thoughts and controlling our behavior, the dystopian visions of past writers is fast becoming our reality. What once seemed futuristic no longer occupies the realm of science fiction. The American police state’s take on the dystopian terrors foreshadowed by George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and Phillip K. Dick have all been rolled up into one oppressive pre-crime and pre-thought crime package. In this way, the novel 1984 has become an operation manual for an omnipresent, modern-day surveillance state in which ordinary Americans find themselves labeled domestic extremists for engaging in lawful behavior that triggers the government’s precrime sensors. With the help of automated eyes and ears, a growing arsenal of high-tech software, hardware and techniques, government propaganda urging Americans to turn into spies and snitches, as well as social media and behavior sensing software, government agents are spinning a sticky spider-web of threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, flagged “words,” and “suspicious” activity reports aimed at snaring potential enemies of the state. It’s also a setup ripe for abuse. For instance, an investigative report by the Brennan Center found that “Over the last two decades, leaked materials have shown fusion centers tracking protestors and casting peaceful activities as potential threats. Their targets have included racial justice and environmental advocates, right-wing activists, and third-party political candidates.” One fusion center in Maine was found to have been “illegally collecting and sharing information about Maine residents who weren’t suspected of criminal activity. They included gun purchasers, people protesting the construction of a new power transmission line, the employees of a peacebuilding summer camp for teenagers, and even people who travelled to New York City frequently.” This is how the government is turning a nation of citizens into suspects and would-be criminals. This transformation is being driven by the Department of Homeland Security, the massive, costly, power-hungry bureaucracy working hard to ensure that the government is all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful. Yet here’s the thing: you don’t have to do anything illegal or challenge the government’s authority in order to be flagged as a suspicious character, labeled an enemy of the state and locked up like a dangerous criminal. In fact, all you need to do is live in the United States. It’s just a matter of time before you find yourself wrongly accused, investigated and confronted by police based on a data-driven algorithm or risk assessment culled together by a computer program run by artificial intelligence. Before long, every household in America will be flagged as a threat and assigned a threat score. Without having ever knowingly committed a crime or been convicted of one, you and your fellow citizens have likely been assessed for behaviors the government might consider devious, dangerous or concerning; assigned a threat score based on your associations, activities and viewpoints; and catalogued in a government database according to how you should be approached by police and other government agencies based on your particular threat level. Combine predictive policing with surveillance, overcriminalization and precrime programs, then add in militarized police trained to shoot first and ask questions later, and as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, you’ll be lucky to escape with your life. If you’re not scared yet, you should be. https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads
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except if you are a biden....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gX0XTDSd17g
Fox News host Jesse Watters reacts to the Secret Service closing its investigation on the White House cocaine mystery on 'Jesse Watters Primetime.'
Jesse Watters: Dems would demand Trump pee in a cup if it was his White HouseREAD FROM TOP.
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impunity.....
BY Phil Butler
Definitions: “impunity, noun, the exemption from punishment or freedom from the injurious consequences of an action.”
In 2013, Edward Snowden leaked information from the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) about massive surveillance being carried out on individuals, companies, and governments on a global scale. Snowden released to the media millions of documents and kept essential files to prove his allegations that U.S. agencies, especially the NSA, operate with impunity, spying on anyone in the agency’s sights. Even though Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing unveiled heinous operations by the NSA in close cooperation with three of its four Five Eyes partners: Australia’s ASD, the U.K.’s GCHQ, and Canada’s CSEC, no heads rolled.
NSA boss and retired U.S. Air Force Lt. General James Clapper, who lied to Congress about NSA wiretapping and other strategies, did not even receive a slap on his wrist. Then, President Obama wrote a memo saying he had “full faith in Director Clapper’s leadership of the intelligence community.” Clapper resigned effective the day Barack Obama stepped down as president. He is now an expert commentator at CNN.
Only Edward Snowden paid the price for unimaginable wrongdoing by individuals and agencies of power. He alone is a hunted man. And worse still, the whole affair was a test of the general public’s will to resist tyranny. It seems clear now that then-President Barack Obama and a laundry list of Western leaders in politics and business knew about the deep surveillance of individuals, companies, and even charities without legal authority. In one instance, the NSA, the CIA, and GCHQ went so far as to spy on users of Second Life, Xbox Live, and World of Warcraftand attempted to recruit would-be informants from the sites. All this and much more were revealed to journalist Glenn Greenwald at The Guardian newspaper.
To give you an idea of the gravity of what the NSA was doing, in Greenwald’s book No Place to Hide, he said that the NSA’s stated objective was to “Collect it All,” “Process it All,” “Exploit it All,” “Partner it All,” “Sniff it All” and “Know it All.” Barack Obama defended the NSA and other intelligence agencies and basically told the citizens of Earth to “fuck off” if they did not like America’s way of protecting itself. And the spying continues.
Edward Snowden is not alone in his plight as a truthteller. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is the ultimate iconoclast against the real Big Brother Orwell only imagined. On the run from the American security state for over a decade, he sits languishing in Britain’s worst prison today simply for publishing the truth. First, WikiLeaks released the horrific discoveries of Chelsea Manning, revealing war crimes the U.S. military had committed in Afghanistan and Iraq. Specifically, Manning’s evidence showed the world the horrors of the B1 Granai airstrike in Afghanistan, where 147 civilians were killed, most of them children.
Manning also brought to light, through WikiLeaks, the 2007 Baghdad Airstrike, where U.S. AH64 Apache helicopters gunned down two Reuters war correspondents and civilians. The Pentagon never officially opened an investigation but issued a statement blaming the Reuters correspondents for Then own death because they were not wearing “press gear.” No one but Chelsea Manning suffered insult and injury in this case.
WikiLeaks released blockbuster after blockbuster, including how Hillary Clinton cheated her Democratic Party opponent Bernie Sanders out of the nomination to run against Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential race. In this case, DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned and an apology to Sanders from the DNC. Wasserman Shultz is still the U.S. representative from Florida’s 25th congressional district and the office she assumed in 2004. The leadership of America CHEATED the people in an election process, and no heads rolled. Then, they blamed the Russians for losing the White House. And now, since we let them, they blame the Russians for almost everything.
Cablegate was revealing how the Arab Spring was unleashed on the world. Then there were the Guantánamo Bay Files, the Syria Files, the Kissinger Cables, and the Saudi revelations. But with the release of emails to and from John Podesta and Hillary Clinton, WikiLeaks unveiled the sheer arrogance and unscrupulousness of the Washington elites. Then Seth Rich, the source of the DNC leaks, got dead quickly, even by Washington standards. And again, no heads rolled, not at Guantánamo, not because of the Benghazi debacle, and especially not when the U.S. creating ISIS sent millions of refugees to Europe. We are talking absolute impunity. We are watching with eyes wide open the schoolyard bullies fleecing not only other students but the teachers and the principal.
Fast-forward to the recently leaked Discord Files that the U.S. deep state still spies on Ukraine (wiretapping Zelensky’s office), NATO partners including Germany, diplomats like UN Secretary-General António Guterres, and ordinary citizens like this writer, whose Facebook data was recently seized by the FBI in connection with the 2016 events. Most recently, the wiretapping of the minister of Equatorial Guinea on the eve of the Russia-Africa summit shows that U.S. spying on friends and foes has not even slowed down. The American security state listens to and makes records against everyone. My country’s ruling elites have become the new mafia, running protection rackets, using bribery or killing, gathering blackmail information, and trashing everything it says about individual rights in our U.S. Constitution. And still, no heads roll. From drone raids on bridges and pipelines, to satellite targeting of Russian generals fighting in Ukraine, my country threw off the white cowboy hat long ago.
I want to wind up with the Discord Files, which prove the presence of the U.S. and other NATO nations’ special forces operating in the war zone. Only a few Americans realize the Ukraine conflict is spilling into the Middle East. The Discord chat releases, allegedly by Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old airman in the Massachusetts Air National Guard, are dozens of highly classified documents revealing sensitive information intended for senior military and intelligence leaders. Some of the files show the U.S. penetration of Russian military plans, U.S. spy efforts against not just Russia but against American allies, and the United Nations secretary general.
The United States ruling elites are spying and double-dealing with total impunity at home and abroad. Many analysts talk about the U.S. surveillance state, but few tell of the actions taken by Americans after the intelligence is gathered. I won’t talk about the Nord Stream pipeline here, the overthrow of leaders like Muammar Gaddafi, and the effects of American-backed regime changes. I want to end this report with the ultimate damage, the loss of human life, potential, and the freedoms Americans should hold so dear.
Phil Butler, is a policy investigator and analyst, a political scientist and expert on Eastern Europe, he’s an author of the recent bestseller “Putin’s Praetorians” and other books. He writes exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
https://journal-neo.org/2023/08/03/the-american-surveillance-state-when-will-big-brother-fall/
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https://www.rt.com/news/580797-fbi-investigation-contractor-nso-spyware/
FBI exposes its own agents in contract probe – NYTThe FBI used code names in its dealings with the offending contractor, suggesting it knew the rules had been brokenFREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW...........