The power of III

Summum ius summa iniuria--More law, less justice
--Cicero.

17 March 2012

NSA Operation Stellar Wind--Big Brother goes live in 2013

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.


--George Orwell


If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever.

--George Orwell



It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself—anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face ... was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime ...


--George Orwell

Thought you were communicating in privacy with PGP or hushmail?  Nope.


Become familiar with the NSA's Utah Data Center and Operation Stellar Wind:


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 Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.” It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness” program created during the first term of the Bush administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy.


 But “this is more than just a data center,” says one senior intelligence official who until recently was involved with the program. The mammoth Bluffdale center will have another important and far more secret role that until now has gone unrevealed. It is also critical, he says, for breaking codes. And code-breaking is crucial, because much of the data that the center will handle—financial information, stock transactions, business deals, foreign military and diplomatic secrets, legal documents, confidential personal communications—will be heavily encrypted. According to another top official also involved with the program, the NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users in the US.


The upshot, according to this official: “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.”

 NSA super-plans include:


 -Computing power developed to break PGP and other strong privately utilized encryption. This apparently is close to being achieved, despite the fact that it takes 340 undecillion (10 to the 36th power) combinations to crack 128 bit.


 -Most powerful computer in the world built in utmost secrecy in Tennessee. (The computing power achieved: Multiple petaflops, i.e. one quadrillion operations per second, with the goal of exoflop [one quintillion operations per second] speeds by 2018).


 -The NSA also has the ability to eavesdrop on phone calls directly and in real time. 10-20 internal US wiretapping stations exist throughout the country. International cable landing points are tapped. -NSA/Pentagon Global Information Grid, global communications web, expanding to handle Yottabytes of data: one septillion bytes = one yottabyte = 500 quintillion pages of text.



 [Whistleblower] Binney left the NSA in late 2001, shortly after the agency launched its warrantless-wiretapping program. “They violated the Constitution setting it up,” he says bluntly. “But they didn’t care. They were going to do it anyway, and they were going to crucify anyone who stood in the way. When they started violating the Constitution, I couldn’t stay.” According to Binney, one of the deepest secrets of the Stellar Wind program—again, never confirmed until now—was that the NSA gained warrantless access to AT&T’s vast trove of domestic and international billing records, detailed information about who called whom in the US and around the world. As of 2007, AT&T had more than 2.8 trillion records housed in a database at its Florham Park, New Jersey, complex. [Verizon also participates]


 Sitting in a restaurant not far from NSA headquarters, the place where he spent nearly 40 years of his life, Binney held his thumb and forefinger close together. “We are, like, that far from a turnkey totalitarian state,” he says.


What's that awful smell?  Oh, the government just passed some Stellar Wind...
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 From Wired magazine, via zerohedge.com



16 March 2012

No more plea bargains: Demand your right to trial by jury, and crash the [unconstitutional] system

Via Fight the Power blog, from the New York Times:


AFTER years as a civil rights lawyer, I rarely find myself speechless. But some questions a woman I know posed during a phone conversation one recent evening gave me pause: “What would happen if we organized thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of people charged with crimes to refuse to play the game, to refuse to plea out? What if they all insisted on their Sixth Amendment right to trial? Couldn’t we bring the whole system to a halt just like that?” ...“The truth is that government officials have deliberately engineered the system to assure that the jury trial system established by the Constitution is seldom used,” said Timothy Lynch, director of the criminal justice project at the libertarian Cato Institute. 


In other words: the system is rigged. In the race to incarcerate, politicians champion stiff sentences for nearly all crimes, including harsh mandatory minimum sentences and three-strikes laws; the result is a dramatic power shift, from judges to prosecutors. The Supreme Court ruled in 1978 that threatening someone with life imprisonment for a minor crime in an effort to induce him to forfeit a jury trial did not violate his Sixth Amendment right to trial. Thirteen years later, in Harmelin v. Michigan, the court ruled that life imprisonment for a first-time drug offense did not violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment


 ...I launched, predictably, into a lecture about what prosecutors would do to people if they actually tried to stand up for their rights. The Bill of Rights guarantees the accused basic safeguards, including the right to be informed of charges against them, to an impartial, fair and speedy jury trial, to cross-examine witnesses and to the assistance of counsel. But in this era of mass incarceration — when our nation’s prison population has quintupled in a few decades partly as a result of the war on drugs and the “get tough” movement — these rights are, for the overwhelming majority of people hauled into courtrooms across America, theoretical. 


More than 90 percent of criminal cases are never tried before a jury. Most people charged with crimes forfeit their constitutional rights and plead guilty.

12 March 2012

MICROCHIP IMPLANT ALLOWS ENEMIES OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE TO SPEAK TO GOD


The implant is specifically designed to be injected in the forehead.


When properly installed, it will allow the foreign and/or domestic enemies of the Constitution to speak to God.


Microchips come in a wide variety of sizes (and insertion devices).
Modified from a mass email I received...


11 March 2012

HR 347

The President has signed the bill, H.R. 347 into Law on March 9, 2012.


Here's what you need to know about it:


Text of First Amendment to the Constitution


 Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Reality check of the implications of the new law from a local news station in Ohio:

  Interesting side notes from the ACLU blog on H.R. 347:
 It's important to note — contrary to some reports — that H.R. 347 doesn't create any new crimes, or directly apply to the Occupy protests. 
 The bill slightly rewrites a short trespass law, originally passed in 1971 and amended a couple of times since, that covers areas subject to heightened Secret Service security measures. These restricted areas include locations where individuals under Secret Service protection are temporarily located, and certain large special events like a presidential inauguration. They can also include large public events like the Super Bowl and the presidential nominating conventions (troublingly, the Department of Homeland Security has significant discretion in designating what qualifies as one of these special events). The original statute, unchanged by H.R. 347,made certain conduct with respect to these restricted areas a crime, including simple trespass, actions in or near the restricted area that would "disrupt the orderly conduct of Government," and blocking the entrance or exit to the restricted area. H.R. 347 did make one noteworthy change, which may make it easier for the Secret Service to overuse or misuse the statute to arrest lawful protesters. Without getting too much into the weeds, most crimes require the government to prove a certain state of mind. Under the original language of the law, you had to act "willfully and knowingly" when committing the crime. In short, you had to know your conduct was illegal. Under H.R. 347, you will simply need to act "knowingly," which here would mean that you know you're in a restricted area, but not necessarily that you're committing a crime.


As I have said before, in other polemics about the evil of big Government, they .gov opens the door with a (legislative) toe, then a foot, then a leg, then a (literal) SWAT team.


The individuals who willfully and knowingly participated in this criminal violation of the constitution broke their oath:


I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: So help me God.


Oathbreakers: 
-Members of Congress who voted for the bill. 
-The President of the United States.
-Any federal or local law enforcement that will enforce it.
-Anyone who ever took the oath who votes for an oathbreaker.