Data Mining: Big Corporations Are Gathering Every Shred Of Information About You That They Can And Selling It For Profit

By Michael Snyder | June 21, 2012 | The Economic Collapse Blog

When most people think of “Big Brother”, they think of the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, the Department of Homeland Security and other shadowy government agencies.  Yes, they are definitely watching you, but so are many big corporations.  In fact, there are some companies that are making tens of millions of dollars by gathering every shred of information about all of us that they can and selling it for profit to anyone willing to pay the price.  It is called “data mining”, and these data miners want to keep track of literally everything that you do.  Most people know that basically everything that we do on the Internet is tracked, but data mining goes far beyond that.  When you use a customer rewards card at the supermarket, the data miners know about it.  When you pay for a purchase with a credit card or a debit card, the data miners know about it.  Every time you buy a prescription drug, that information is sold to someone.  Every time you apply for a loan, a whole host of organizations is notified.  Information has become an extremely valuable commodity, and thanks to computers and the Internet it is easier to gather information than ever before.  But that also means that our personal information is no longer “private”, and this trend is only going to get worse in the years ahead.

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Has the Communist Manifesto replaced the Constitution?

By George Hawley | June 9, 2012 | Young Americans for Liberty

When the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union imploded two years later, Americans sighed a breath of relief. Seemingly overnight, our debilitating fear that a horde of T-72’s would blitz through the Fulda Gap evaporated; the world realized a nuclear holocaust would not be the Cold War’s coup de grace. What’s more, the Cold War’s conclusion freed millions of souls from Soviet oppression. We were right to be relieved. American conservatives, who were eager to take credit for USSR’s demise, were feeling particularly triumphant at that time. We had finally reached the “end of history,” and “democratic capitalism” reigned supreme. It remains to be seen, however, whether post-Cold War conservative chest thumping was truly justified.

Although all freedom lovers should celebrate the downfall of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the peaceful death of the Soviet Empire did not necessarily indicate the demise of Marxism as a force in the world. In fact, a strong case can be made that the United States is more Marxist now than ever before. It is true that a socialist revolution did not occur, as Marx predicted, via an apocalyptic struggle between workers and the bourgeoisie, but a socialist revolution of sorts nonetheless occurred. To those who believe Marxism has been relegated to “the dustbin of history,” I can only point to the words of Marx himself. The world we inhabit is not so different from the one Marx envisioned.

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Madison Ruppert: Secret backdoors in microprocessors discovered [Video]

Shady Companies With Ties to Israel Wiretap the U.S. for the NSA

By  | April 3, 2012 | Wired Magazine

The NSA's new super-secret 1-million-square-foot data center in Utah. Photo: Name Withheld

The NSA's new super-secret 1-million-square-foot data center in Utah. Photo: Name Withheld

Army General Keith Alexander, the director of the NSA, is having a busy year — hopping around the country, cutting ribbons at secret bases and bringing to life the agency’s greatly expanded eavesdropping network.

In January he dedicated the new $358 million CAPT Joseph J. Rochefort Building at NSA Hawaii, and in March he unveiled the 604,000-square-foot John Whitelaw Building at NSA Georgia.

Designed to house about 4,000 earphone-clad intercept operators, analysts and other specialists, many of them employed by private contractors, it will have a 2,800-square-foot fitness center open 24/7, 47 conference rooms and VTCs, and “22 caves,” according to an NSA brochure from the event. No television news cameras were allowed within two miles of the ceremony.

Overseas, Menwith Hill, the NSA’s giant satellite listening post in Yorkshire, England that sports 33 giant dome-covered eavesdropping dishes, is also undergoing a multi-million-dollar expansion, with $68 million alone being spent on a generator plant to provide power for new supercomputers. And the number of people employed on the base, many of them employees of Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, is due to increase from 1,800 to 2,500 in 2015, according to a study done in Britain. Closer to home, in May, Fort Meade will close its 27-hole golf course to make room for a massive $2 billion, 1.8-million-square-foot expansion of the NSA’s headquarters, including a cybercommand complex and a new supercomputer center expected to cost nearly $1 billion.

The climax, however, will be the opening next year of the NSA’s mammoth 1-million-square-foot, $2 billion Utah Data Center. The centerpiece in the agency’s decade-long building boom, it will be the “cloud” where the trillions of millions of intercepted phone calls, e-mails, and data trails will reside, to be scrutinized by distant analysts over highly encrypted fiber-optic links.

Despite the post-9/11 warrantless wiretapping of Americans, the NSA says that citizens should trust it not to abuse its growing power and that it takes the Constitution and the nation’s privacy laws seriously.

But one of the agency’s biggest secrets is just how careless it is with that ocean of very private and very personal communications, much of it to and from Americans. Increasingly, obscure and questionable contractors — not government employees — install the taps, run the agency’s eavesdropping infrastructure, and do the listening and analysis.

And with some of the key companies building the U.S.’s surveillance infrastructure for the digital age employing unstable employees, crooked executives, and having troubling ties to foreign intelligence services, it’s not clear that Americans should trust the secretive agency, even if its current agency chief claims he doesn’t approve of extrajudicial spying on Americans. His predecessor, General Michael V. Hayden, made similar claims while secretly conducting the warrantless wiretapping program.

Until now, the actual mechanics of how the agency constructed its highly secret U.S. eavesdropping net, code-named Stellar Wind, has never been revealed. But in the weeks following 9/11, as the agency and the White House agreed to secretly ignore U.S. privacy laws and bypass the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, J. Kirk Wiebe noticed something odd. A senior analyst, he was serving as chief of staff for the agency’s Signals Intelligence Automation Research Center (SARC), a sort of skunkworks within the agency where bureaucratic rules were broken, red tape was cut, and innovation was expected.

“One day I notice out in the hallway, stacks and stacks of new servers in boxes just lined up,” he said.

Passing by the piles of new Dell 1750 servers, Wiebe, as he often did, headed for the Situation Room, which dealt with threat warnings. It was located within the SARC’s Lab, on the third floor of Operations Building 2B, a few floors directly below the director’s office. “I walk in and I almost get thrown out by a guy that we knew named Ben Gunn,” he said. It was the launch of Stellar Wind and only a handful of agency officials were let in on the secret.

“He was the one who organized it,” said Bill Binney of Gunn. A former founder and co-director of SARC, Binney was the agency official responsible for automating much of the NSA’s worldwide monitoring networks. Troubled by the unconstitutional nature of tapping into the vast domestic communications system without a warrant, he decided to quit the agency in late 2001 after nearly forty years.

Gunn, said Binney, was a Scotsman and naturalized U.S. citizen who had formerly worked for GCHQ, Britain’s equivalent of the NSA, and later become a senior analyst at the NSA. The NSA declined Wired’s request to interview Gunn, saying that, as policy, it doesn’t confirm or deny if a person is employed by the agency.

Shortly after the secret meeting, the racks of Dell servers were moved to a room down the hall, behind a door with a red seal indicating only those specially cleared for the highly compartmented project could enter. But rather than having NSA employees putting the hardware and software together and setting up walls of monitors showing suspected terrorism threats and their U.S. communications, the spying room was filled with a half-dozen employees of a tiny mom-and-pop company with a bizarre and troubling history.

“It was Technology Development Corporation,” said Binney.

The agency went to TDC, he says, because the company had helped him set up a similar network in SARC — albeit one that was focused on foreign and international communications — the kind of spying the NSA is chartered to undertake.

“They needed to have somebody who knew how the code works to set it up,” he said. “And then it was just a matter of feeding in the attributes [U.S. phone numbers, e-mail addresses and personal data] and any of the content you want.” Those “attributes” came from secret rooms established in large telecom switches around the country. “I think there’s 10 to 20 of them,” Binney says.

Formed in April 1984, TDC was owned by two brothers, Randall and Paul Jacobson, and largely run out of Randall’s Clarkesville, Maryland house, with his wife acting as bookkeeper. But its listed address is a post office box in Annapolis Junction, across the Baltimore-Washington Parkway from the NSA, and the company’s phone number in various business directories is actually an NSA number in Binney’s old office.

The company’s troubles began in June 1992 when Paul lost his security clearance. “If you ever met this guy, you would know he’s a really strange guy,” Binney said of Paul. “He did crazy stuff. I think they thought he was unstable.” At the time, Paul was working on a contract at the NSA alongside a rival contractor, Unisys Corporation. He later blamed Unisys for his security problems and sued it, claiming that Unisys employees complained about him to his NSA supervisors. According to the suit, Unisys employees referred to him as “weird” and that he “acted like a robot,” “never wore decent clothes,” and was mentally and emotionally unstable. About that time, he also began changing his name, first to Jimmy Carter, and later to Alfred Olympus von Ronsdorf.

With “von Ronsdorf’s” clearance gone and no longer able to work at the NSA, Randy Jacobson ran the company alone, though he kept his brother and fellow shareholder employed in the company, which led to additional problems.

“What happened was Randy still let him have access to the funds of the company and he squandered them,” according to Binney. “It was so bad, Randy couldn’t pay the people who were working for him.” According to court records, Ronsdorf allegedly withdrew about $100,000 in unauthorized payments. But Jacobson had troubles of his own, having failed to file any income tax statements for three years in the 1990s, according to tax court records. Then in March 2002, around the time the company was completing Stellar Wind, Jacobson fired his brother for improper billing and conversion of company funds. That led to years of suits and countersuits over mismanagement and company ownership.

Despite that drama, Jacobson and his people appeared to have serious misgivings about the NSA’s program once they discovered its true nature, according to Binney. “They came and said, ‘Do you realize what these people are doing?’” he said. “‘They’re feeding us other stuff [U.S.] in there.’ I mean they knew it was unconstitutional right away.” Binney added that once the job was finished, the NSA turned to still another contractor to run the tapping operation. “They made it pretty well known, so after they got it up and running they [the NSA] brought in the SAIC people to run it after that.” Jacobsen was then shifted to other work at the NSA, where he and his company are still employed.

Randall Jacobsen answered his phone inside the NSA but asked for time to respond. He never called back.

In addition to constructing the Stellar Wind center, and then running the operation, secretive contractors with questionable histories and little oversight were also used to do the actual bugging of the entire U.S. telecommunications network.

According to a former Verizon employee briefed on the program, Verint, owned by Comverse Technology, taps the communication lines at Verizon, which I first reported in my book The Shadow Factory in 2008. Verint did not return a call seeking comment, while Verizon said it does not comment on such matters.

At AT&T the wiretapping rooms are powered by software and hardware from Narus, now owned by Boeing, a discovery made by AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein in 2004. Narus did not return a call seeking comment.

What is especially troubling is that both companies have had extensive ties to Israel, as well as links to that country’s intelligence service, a country with a long and aggressive history of spying on the U.S.

Read the full article here.

Alarms Over Obama Coup Against Constitution Surging

By Bob Unruh | April 13, 2012 | WND

obama-worried

‘2nd term free of electoral restraints may be a frightening prospect’

There always have been those few who have launched diatribes over the dictatorial actions of any given U.S. presidential administration, over civil rights, foreign affairs, the economy, the draft or a dozen other topics – even though the Constitution was written specifically to prevent the collection of too much power by one branch of government.

Now, again, there are words like “egocentric megalomaniac” being ascribed to the White House, and warnings about detention camps and government surveillance of its citizens.

But where previous generations of warnings emanated from lone wolves with their fax machines in dusty spare rooms, the current alarms are being issued by the likes of Investors Business Daily, First Amendment authority Nat Hentoff, New York Times best-selling author Robert Ringer and their equals.

“A second term free of electoral restraints [for Obama] may be a frightening prospect,” IBD wrote in a commentary in the last week. “This is, after all, a president who has said he can’t wait for Congress to act and will govern by executive order and regulations if necessary. He has questioned the Supreme Court’s ‘unprecedented’ review of Obamacare.”

The publication pointed out that the Obama administration already is in contempt of court – in a court dispute over its ban on oil drilling rigs in the Gulf of Mexico.

When U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman ruled that the Obama Interior Department unconstitutionally imposed an offshore drilling moratorium, the agency “simply established a second ban that was virtually identical.”

“Judge Feldman was not amused. ‘Each step the government took following the court’s imposition of a preliminary injunction showcases its defiance,’ Feldman said in his ruling. ‘Such dismissive conduct, viewed in tandem with the re-imposition of a second moratorium …. provides this court with clear and convincing evidence of its contempt,’” the editorial said.

The issue recently was brought into the headlines by comments from Judge Andrew Napolitano, a Fox News analyst who said, “I think the president is dangerously close to totalitarianism. A few months ago he was saying the Congress doesn’t count. The Congress doesn’t mean anything. I am going to rule by decree and by administrative regulation. Now he’s basically saying the Supreme Court doesn’t count. It doesn’t matter what they think. They can’t review our legislation.

“That would leave just him as the only branch of government standing,” Napolitano said.

His comments came after statements from Obama that the U.S. Supreme Court wouldn’t take the “unprecedented” action of actually overturning the Obamacare law, even though that is exactly what courts do when justices determine the legislation is unconstitutional.

“I think he [Obama] has some problems with understanding the Constitution, or accepting limitations on his power,” said Napolitano. “Look, they’re equal branches of government, but with respect to what the law means and what the Constitution means, the court is superior to the president.”

His comments came recently on Neil Cavuto’s program, when the discussion turned to the U.S. Supreme Court’s discussion of the unconstitutionality of Obamacare and Obama’s verbal attack on the court shortly after the oral arguments.

Here are Napolitano’s comments:

Read the full article here.

Your Cell Phone Makes You A Prisoner Of A Digital World Where Virtually Anyone Can Hack You And Track You

By Michael Snyder | April 6, 2012 | Activist Post

If you own a cell phone, you might as well kiss your privacy goodbye.  Cell phone companies know more about us than most of us would ever dare to imagine.  Your cell phone company is tracking everywhere that you go and it is making a record of everything that you do with your phone.  Much worse, there is a good chance that your cell phone company has been selling this information to anyone that is willing to pay the price — including local law enforcement.  In addition, it is an open secret that the federal government monitors and records all cell phone calls.  The “private conversation” that you are having with a friend today will be kept in federal government databanks for many years to come.

The truth is that by using a cell phone, you willingly make yourself a prisoner of a digital world where every move that you make and every conversation that you have is permanently recorded.  But it is not just cell phone companies and government agencies that you have to worry about.  As you will see at the end of this article, it is incredibly easy for any would-be stalker to hack you and track your every movement using your cell phone.  In fact, many spyware programs allow hackers to listen to you through your cell phone even when your cell phone is turned off.  Sadly, most cell phone users have absolutely no idea about any of this stuff.

The next time that you get a notice from your cell phone company about “changes” to the privacy policy, you might want to play close attention.  Your cell phone company might be about to sell off your most personal information to anyone that is willing to write a big enough check.  The following is from a recent CNN article….

Your phone company knows where you live, what websites you visit, what apps you download, what videos you like to watch, and even where you are. Now, some have begun selling that valuable information to the highest bidder.

In mid-October, Verizon Wireless changed its privacy policy to allow the company to record customers’ location data and Web browsing history, combine it with other personal information like age and gender, aggregate it with millions of other customers’ data, and sell it on an anonymous basis.

So who is buying this information?

We just don’t know.

But we do know that local law enforcement agencies all over the country are increasingly using cell phone data to nail suspects, and often it is the cell phone companies that are the ones selling them the cell phone data that they need.

According to a recent New York Times article, many local police departments are doing this without getting a warrant first….

Law enforcement tracking of cellphones, once the province mainly of federal agents, has become a powerful and widely used surveillance tool for local police officials, with hundreds of departments, large and small, often using it aggressively with little or no court oversight.

That same article says that cell phone companies have standard prices that they charge to local law enforcement officials for information that they request….

Cell carriers, staffed with special law enforcement liaison teams, charge police departments from a few hundred dollars for locating a phone to more than $2,200 for a full-scale wiretap of a suspect.

So if you are breaking the law, your cell phone may be used to gather evidence and to track you down.  In the United States, cell phone companies are required by law to be able to pinpoint the locations of their customers to within 100 meters.

So if you are a criminal, your cell phone could be leading the police right to you even as you are reading this article.

Sometimes the police don’t even use the cell phone companies.  Recently, the Wall Street Journal ran an article that discussed the capabilities of the “stingray devices” that many local law enforcement agencies are using now.

A “stingray device” acts like a cell phone tower and it can gather any information that a normal cell phone tower can.  The following is how a recent Wired article described these “stingrays”….

You make a call on your cellphone thinking the only thing standing between you and the recipient of your call is your carrier’s cellphone tower. In fact, that tower your phone is connecting to just might be a boobytrap set up by law enforcement to ensnare your phone signals and maybe even the content of your calls.

So-called stingrays are one of the new high-tech tools that authorities are using to track and identify you. The devices, about the size of a suitcase, spoof a legitimate cellphone tower in order to trick nearby cellphones and other wireless communication devices into connecting to the tower, as they would to a real cellphone tower.

The government maintains that the stingrays don’t violate Fourth Amendment rights, since Americans don’t have a legitimate expectation of privacy for data sent from their mobile phones and other wireless devices to a cell tower.

Isn’t that just great?

Read the full article here.

Data Mining You

By Tom Engelhardt | April 3, 2012 | The American Conservative

From TomDispatch: How the intelligence community is creating a new American world 

I was out of the country only nine days, hardly a blink in time, but time enough, as it happened, for another small, airless room to be added to the American national security labyrinth. On March 22nd, Attorney General Eric Holder and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, Jr. signed off on new guidelines allowing the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), a post-9/11 creation, to hold on to information about Americans in no way known to be connected to terrorism — about you and me, that is — for up to five years.  (Its previous outer limit was 180 days.) This, Clapper claimed, “will enable NCTC to accomplish its mission more practically and effectively.”

Joseph K., that icon of single-lettered anonymity from Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial, would undoubtedly have felt right at home in Clapper’s Washington. George Orwell would surely have had a few pungent words to say about those anodyne words “practically and effectively,” not to speak of “mission.”

For most Americans, though, it was just life as we’ve known it since September 11, 2001, since we scared ourselves to death and accepted that just about anything goes, as long as it supposedly involves protecting us from terrorists. Basic information or misinformation, possibly about you, is to be stored away for five years — or until some other attorney general and director of national intelligence think it’s even more practical and effective to keep you on file for 10 years, 20 years, or until death do us part — and it hardly made a ripple.

If Americans were to hoist a flag designed for this moment, it might read “Tread on Me” and use that classic illustration of the boa constrictor swallowing an elephant from Saint-Exupéry’sThe Little Prince. That, at least, would catch something of the absurdity of what the National Security Complex has decided to swallow of our American world.

Oh, and in those nine days abroad, a new word surfaced on my horizon, one just eerie and ugly enough for our new reality: yottabyte.  Thank National Security Agency (NSA) expert James Bamford for that.  He wrote a piece for Wired magazine on a super-secret, $2 billion, one-million-square-foot data center the NSA is building in Bluffdale, Utah. Focused on data mining and code-breaking and five times the size of the U.S. Capitol, it is expected to house information beyond compare, “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.’”

The NSA, adds Bamford, “has established listening posts throughout the nation to collect and sift through billions of email messages and phone calls, whether they originate within the country or overseas. It has created a supercomputer of almost unimaginable speed to look for patterns and unscramble codes. Finally, the agency has begun building a place to store all the trillions of words and thoughts and whispers captured in its electronic net.”

Which brings us to yottabyte — which is, Bamford assures us, equivalant to septillion bytes, a number “so large that no one has yet coined a term for the next higher magnitude.” The Utah center will be capable of storing a yottabyte or more of information (on your tax dollar).

Large as it is, that mega-project in Utah is just one of many sprouting like mushrooms in the sunless forest of the U.S. intelligence world. In cost, for example, it barely tops the $1.7 billion headquarters complex in Virginia that the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agencywith an estimated annual black budget of at least $5 billion, built for its 16,000 employees.  Opened in 2011, it’s the third-largest federal building in the Washington area.  (And I’ll bet you didn’t even know that your tax dollars paid for such an agency, no less its gleaming new headquarters.)  Or what about the 33 post-9/11 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work that were under construction or had already been built when Washington Post reporters Dana Priest and William Arkin wrote their “Top Secret America” series back in 2010?

In these last years, while so many Americans were foreclosed upon or had their homes go “underwater” and the construction industry went to hell, the intelligence housing bubble just continued to grow. And there’s no sign that any of this seems abidingly strange to most Americans.

Read the full article here.

10 Reasons Why Nothing You Do On The Internet Will EVER Be Private Again

Staff Report | March 23, 2012 | End of the American Dream

The Internet is rapidly being transformed into a Big Brother control grid where privacy rights are being systematically strangled to death.  The control freaks that run things have become absolutely obsessed with watching, tracking, monitoring and recording virtually everything that you do on the Internet.  One thing that you can count on is that nothing you do on the Internet will ever be private again.  In fact, if you are obsessed with privacy then the last place you want to be is on the Internet.  Most Americans have absolutely no idea how far Internet surveillance has advanced in the past few years.  At this point, it would be hard to imagine any place less private than the Internet.  Do not ever put anything on the Internet that you would not want the authorities or your employer to hold you accountable for.  Basically, the Internet is creating a permanent dossier on each one of us, and we contribute to this process by freely posting gigantic volumes of information about ourselves on social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter.  The Internet is the greatest tool for mass communication that the world has perhaps ever seen, and it gives average citizens the ability to communicate with each other like never before, but there is also a downside to using the Internet.  Everything that we do on the Internet is being watched, monitored and recorded and there is no longer any such thing as Internet privacy.  If you think that you still have any privacy on the Internet, then you are either ignorant of what is going on or you are being delusional.

The following are 10 reasons why nothing you do on the Internet will ever be private again….

Read the full article here.

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