Rachael Woodhouse
GCN Live.com

“Don’t take the chip!” This advice – trumpeted by the vigilant across the airwaves and cyberspace – is proving to be harder and harder to follow, as RFID (radio-frequency identification) continues permeate more and more aspects of public life. The latest utilization of this controversial technology has to do with the new U.S. passports being issued with embedded RFID.

RFID technology is already being used on toll roads, season parking tickets, and other forms of automatic payment. For example, in Norway, all public toll roads are equipped with an RFID payment system known as AutoPASS.

Renowned consumer travel advocate Edward Hasbrouck recently spoke with GCN’s Dr. Katherine Albrecht about the growing public outcry regarding RFID.

In addition to privacy concerns, rising costs associated with the technology are coming under fire from civil liberties groups such as the ACLU. Albrecht points out that a 23% price hike – From $110 to $135 – for new passports went into effect on Tuesday, July 13th.

But Hasbrouck says that’s not all. “What I think is likely to be of most concern … is that the price of having pages added to your passport, if you’ve been using it for a number of years and it fills up, and you don’t want to just get a new one — you’d like to keep that old one without a chip in it — and at least get up to its full 10-year validity before you have to get a chipped and traceable passport — the fee to add pages to your passport is going from zero – free – to 82 dollars.”

“What’s happened is that having the RFID chips has proved, not surprisingly, not only to be more complicated but more expensive than the State Department had anticipated, and so they’re trying to make us bear that cost,” Hasbrouck says.

Edward Hasbrouck is a freelance travel journalist, consumer advocate for travelers, author of the "Practical Nomad" series of travel how-to and advice books, and consultant to the Identity Project on travel-related privacy, civil liberties, and human rights issues.

According to Wikipedia, “There are a variety of groups defining standards and regulating the use of RFID, including: International Organization for Standardization (ISO), International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), ASTM International, DASH7 Alliance, EPCglobal. (Refer to Regulation and standardization below.)”

Hasbrouck says public opposition to RFID is strong and growing, with the prevailing sentiment unlikely to change anytime soon. “What’s interesting I think is that … 98% of the comments from the public opposed this scheme. They didn’t just get comments from the public, but they did also hear from the travel industry itself, some airlines, industry associations, who realized that raising the price of a passport would raise the bar for Americans going abroad. They heard from a number of consumer and civil liberties groups.”

But Hasbrouck says these concerns fell on deaf ears with government bureaucrats. “What happened is that the State Department basically just brushed off all the criticisms and said ‘we’re going to put these fee increases ahead regardless.”

U.S. Passports Issued per Fiscal Year (2009 - 1996) (source: <strong><a href="http://travel.state.gov">U.S. State Department</a></strong>)

In related travel woes, the ACLU has now filed a complaint against the federal government’s no-fly list, which has prevented several Americans abroad from returning home. “This is a group of Americans who have been trapped overseas and can’t come home because the U.S. government will not give any airline permission to fly them home. So they’ve literally been exiled from their own country for no reason that the government will tell them.”

So the question remains: In our post-911 world, is travel privacy and freedom headed for the dustbin of history?
(more…)

Steve Watson
GCN Live.com
Thursday, Jul 29th, 2010

Google’s cosy relationship with the U.S. spy network has once again been thrust into the spotlight as the company is reported to have jointly invested with the CIA in an Internet monitoring project that scours Twitter accounts, blogs and websites for all sorts of information, and can also “predict the future”.

Google Ventures, the investment arm of Google, has injected a sum of up to $10 million, as has In-Q-Tel – which handles investments for the CIA and the wider intelligence network – into a company called Recorded Future.

The company describes its analytics as “the ultimate tool for open-source intelligence”.

Wired’s defence analyst, Noah Schachtman, has a detailed report on the joint venture:

“…it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine “goes beyond search” by “looking at the ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.”

The idea is to figure out for each incident who was involved, where it happened and when it might go down. Recorded Future then plots that chatter, showing online “momentum” for any given event.”

Recorded Future “continually scans thousands of news publications, blogs, niche sources, trade publications, government web sites, financial databases and more,” according to it’s portfolio.

It sifts through millions of posts and conversations taking place on blogs, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon to “assemble actual real-time dossiers on people.”

It is also being integrated with Google Earth, which, as Schachtman points out in his piece, was seeded with In-Q-Tel/CIA investment. This integration will allow real time tracking of the locations of persons or groups as part of the overall intelligence dossier.

A promotional video shows the company’s real time browser-operated data mining engine at work:

Of course, Recorded Future is sold as “terrorism analysis”, however the information scouring engine clearly extends beyond that to include crime, indictments and civil court cases etc. In this context, the ability to predict “future curves” is one small step away from Minority Report policing technology. Indeed, analytics are already being used by the Memphis Police Department, whose Operation Blue CRUSH uses predictive analytics by IBM.

Recorded Future takes in vast amounts of personal information such as employment changes, personal education and family relations. The video also shows categories covering pretty much everything else, including entertainment, music and movie releases, as well as other innocuous things like patent filings and product recalls.

The news comes at the same time as revelations that the government is proposing to grant the FBI powers to force firms such as ISPs to hand over an individual’s data.

We have previously reported on Google’s intimate and long standing connections to government spy networks.

There is also no doubt that Google is one of the corporations at the forefront of the government’s drive to use cybersecurity as a pretext for restricting the openness of the Internet, having previously worked with the NSA and the CIA.

The recent scandal involving the company’s street view roaming vehicles accessing the wi-fi details of internet users and mapping their online activities has also raised serious questions over intelligence links. This latest development will only enhance those concerns.

Recorded Future also smacks of past military and intelligence projects such as Total Information Awareness and MATRIX, LifeLog and the Brain Machine Interfaces enterprise. all designed to target American citizens.

Further reading: Google Spies, Censors Users

Further reading: Top Secret America: Google Launches Cover Up Of ‘Google Spies’ Story

Kurt Nimmo
GCN Live.com
July 29, 2010

More evidence has emerged revealing Google’s spook connections. Noah Shachtman, writing for Wired, details how the CIA’s technology investment operation, In-Q-Tel, and Google are supporting a company that monitors the web in real time. The company, Recorded Future, scans tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find imputed relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents. Recorded Future claims it can utilize this information to predict the future.

“The idea is to figure out for each incident who was involved, where it happened and when it might go down. Recorded Future then plots that chatter, showing online ‘momentum’ for any given event,” writes Shachtman. CEO Christopher Ahlberg, a former Swedish Army Ranger with a PhD in computer science, told Wired “you can actually predict the curve, in many cases” with the software developed by his company.

As previously noted here and elsewhere, Google has done business with the NSA and the CIA in the past. In-Q-Tel financed the mapping firm Keyhole bought by Google in 2004. “This appears to be the first time, however, that the intelligence community and Google have funded the same startup, at the same time,” writes Shachtman.

In the above promotional video produced by Recorded Future, the software is utilized to search for the keywords “Pakistan” and “jihad,” leading us to believe the technology will be used to track down and data-mine information about Muslim terrorists and rogue states.

The NSA, however, has a history of spying on American citizens exercising their First Amendment rights. For instance, in 2004, it was revealed that the mega-snoop agency had worked with the Baltimore Intelligence Unit of the Baltimore City Police Department to monitor an anti-war organization. In December, 2005, The New York Times revealed that the Bush administration and the NSA had eavesdropped on the electronic communications of Americans.

The Pentagon, the FBI, and the CIA have a long track record of violating the civil liberties of Americans.

“The NSA kicked its spy campaign into high gear in the 1960s. The FBI demanded that the NSA monitor antiwar activists, civil rights leaders, and drug peddlers,” writes Earl Ofari Hutchinson. “The Senate Select Committee that investigated government domestic spying in 1976 pried open a tiny public window into the scope of NSA spying.”

During the reign of Bush it was revealed that the FBI, the Pentagon and the National Security Agency had each set up covert operations to monitor the constitutionally protected political activities of citizens opposed to the Bush administration’s war in Iraq. The FBI targeted a large number of people, including a “vegan community project” in Indianapolis, the Catholic Worker movement and its “semi-communistic ideology,” Code Pink, the anti-war coalition United for Peace and Justice, Greenpeace and attendees of the Third National Organizing Conference on Iraq, according to Joel Bleifuss writing for In These Times.

In 2009 the Department of Homeland Security produced a document targeting returning veterans, advocates of the Second Amendment, and state militias and patriot groups as potential terrorists. In Missouri and Virginia, police intelligence agencies characterized constitutionalists, Ron Paul and Chuck Baldwin supporters, and members of the patriot community as terrorists.

Recorded Future, when finally implemented, will not data-mine CIA and intelligence community manufactured Muslim terrorists, as the video above intimates, but the real threat to the establishment — the American people.

Google is complicit in the effort to build a huge surveillance and control grid. It is an enthusiastic handmaiden of the global elite. Recorded Future is a pre-crime tool that will be used by the controllers to predict what the ruling elite consider criminal activity — support for the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and the willingness to exercise and defend those liberties in the political realm.

Rachael Woodhouse
GCN Live.com

July marked the 105th month of war in Afghanistan. At a cost of $60-65 billion per year, that marks over half a trillion dollars in war spending.

Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin, a staunch anti-war advocate, recently spoke with Barry Lynn, host of GCN’s Culture Shocks, about the social and economic costs of the prolonged US engagement in Afghanistan.

President Obama has publicly stated that July 2011 will mark the beginning of a process to withdraw troops. So has President Barack Obama reneged on his campaign promises, or did he simply lie about his position on the war? “In the case of Afghanistan, perhaps it’s even worse. I mean, who knows if George Bush would have escalated the war in Afghanistan. So, the situation we have now is a man who came in really putting himself forward as a peace president. He didn’t say he would bring the troops home from Afghanistan, it’s true, but he did really push the fact that he was against the war in Iraq. That gave him an edge over Hillary Clinton when it came to the primaries. And people expected more from Barack Obama.”

“We still have to wait until the end of August to see if Obama is going to follow through on that timetable, to get all the combat troops by the end of August. How many troops will be left behind? How many contractors will be left behind? Those are still important questions.”

Medea Benjamin has been described as "one of America’s most committed -- and most effective -- fighters for human rights" by New York Newsday, and called "one of the high profile leaders of the peace movement" by the Los Angeles Times.

“There are at least a hundred members of Congress and I don’t know how many in the Senate, probably more like 20, who will vote against war funding and are openly against this war, but you didn’t hear a peep out of them during the hearing.”

Benjamin thinks the American people have had enough war. “I think the fact that the administration and the Congress, both Democrats and Republicans, keep putting out this fear message that ‘we’ve got to fight them there, so they can’t come and fight us here’ continues to be a useful one for their purposes, but we should recognize that the majority sentiment has indeed turned against the war.”

The results of a CBS News poll earlier this month tends to corroborate that statement. 31 percent said the war in Afghanistan was going “very well” or “somewhat well,” while 41 percent said the war was going “somewhat badly” and another 21 percent said it was going “very badly.”

According to the Christian Science Monitor, “A recent Washington Post/ABC News poll found that 53 percent of Americans consider the war effort is not worth the costs. A CBS News poll found that virtually the same number – 54 percent – want a timetable for withdrawing troops from Afghanistan. The CBS poll found that only a third of Americans accept keeping US troops in Afghanistan more than two additional years.” These numbers are fresh on the heels of the latest WikiLeaks release of 92,000 classified documents on the war in Afghanistan.

General David Petraeus, now in charge of troops in Afghanistan, issued a three-page manifesto on July 27th.

General David Petraeus took over command of more than 140,000 US and NATO troops in Afghanistan on July 4 from General Stanley McChrystal. Regarding Petraeus, Lynn asked Benjamin why the Senate voted 99-0 to confirm Petraeus to replace the ousted McChrystal. “I was in those hearings and it was softball after softball”, Benjamin said. “There wasn’t a hard question in the crowd. In fact the only relatively hard question was whether or not he would stick to this Obama timetable of beginning to withdraw the troops in July of next year, with no endpoint in sight. There was no questioning of the war itself.”

In summation, Benjamin simply says American taxpayers can’t afford the war. “The escalation was and is a big mistake, and especially coming on top of a financial crisis, where the majority of people now recognize that we just can’t afford this war.”

Paul Craig Roberts
GCN Live.com
July 28, 2010

It was 2017. Clans were governing America.

	Clans organized around families and individuals who possessed stocks of food, bullion, guns and ammunition. Photo: A scene from the 1997 film, The Postman.

The first clans organized around local police forces. The conservatives’ war on crime during the late 20th century and the Bush/Obama war on terror during the first decade of the 21st century had resulted in the police becoming militarized and unaccountable.

As society broke down, the police became warlords. The state police broke apart, and the officers were subsumed into the local forces of their communities. The newly formed tribes expanded to encompass the relatives and friends of the police.

The dollar had collapsed as world reserve currency in 2012 when the worsening economic depression made it clear to Washington’s creditors that the federal budget deficit was too large to be financed except by the printing of money.

With the dollar’s demise, import prices skyrocketed. As Americans were unable to afford foreign-made goods, the transnational corporations that were producing offshore for US markets were bankrupted, further eroding the government’s revenue base.

The government was forced to print money in order to pay its bills, causing domestic prices to rise rapidly. Faced with hyperinflation, Washington took recourse in terminating Social Security and Medicare and followed up by confiscating the remnants of private pensions. This provided a one-year respite, but with no more resources to confiscate, money creation and hyperinflation resumed.

Organized food deliveries broke down when the government fought hyperinflation with fixed prices and the mandate that all purchases and sales had to be in US paper currency. Unwilling to trade appreciating goods for depreciating paper, goods disappeared from stores.

Washington responded as Lenin had done during the “war communism” period of Soviet history. The government sent troops to confiscate goods for distribution in kind to the population. This was a temporary stop-gap until existing stocks were depleted, as future production was discouraged. Much of the confiscated stocks became the property of the troops who seized the goods.

Goods reappeared in markets under the protection of local warlords. Transactions were conducted in barter and in gold, silver, and copper coins.

Other clans organized around families and individuals who possessed stocks of food, bullion, guns and ammunition. Uneasy alliances formed to balance differences in clan strengths. Betrayals quickly made loyalty a necessary trait for survival.

Large scale food and other production broke down as local militias taxed distribution as goods moved across local territories. Washington seized domestic oil production and refineries, but much of the government’s gasoline was paid for safe passage across clan territories.

Most of the troops in Washington’s overseas bases were abandoned. As their resource stocks were drawn down, the abandoned soldiers were forced into alliances with those with whom they had been fighting.

Washington found it increasingly difficult to maintain itself. As it lost control over the country, Washington was less able to secure supplies from abroad as tribute from those Washington threatened with nuclear attack. Gradually other nuclear powers realized that the only target in America was Washington. The more astute saw the writing on the wall and slipped away from the former capital city.

When Rome began her empire, Rome’s currency consisted of gold and silver coinage. Rome was well organized with efficient institutions and the ability to supply troops in the field so that campaigns could continue indefinitely, a monopoly in the world of Rome’s time.

When hubris sent America in pursuit of overseas empire, the venture coincided with the offshoring of American manufacturing, industrial, and professional service jobs and the corresponding erosion of the government’s tax base, with the advent of massive budget and trade deficits, with the erosion of the fiat paper currency’s value, and with America’s dependence on foreign creditors and puppet rulers.

The Roman Empire lasted for centuries. The American one collapsed overnight.

Rome’s corruption became the strength of her enemies, and the Western Empire was overrun.

America’s collapse occurred when government ceased to represent the people and became the instrument of a private oligarchy. Decisions were made in behalf of short-term profits for the few at the expense of unmanageable liabilities for the many.

Overwhelmed by liabilities, the government collapsed.

Globalism had run its course. Life reformed on a local basis.