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Sabtu, 01 Maret 2014

America’s Roads Have Been Turned Into A Revenue Generating Surveillance Grid

Shakedown Artists

Police department are less and less interested in public safety. Today being a cop is all about grinding down the taxpayers with endless fees to extract cold, hard cash.
In addition, the 4th Amendment has been abolished as motorists are being shaken down without probable cause or a search warrant.

By Michael Snyder
The Economic Collapse.com

What do speed traps, parking tickets, toll roads, speed cameras and red light cameras all have in common? They are all major revenue sources for state and local governments. All over America today there are state and local governments that are drowning in debt. Many have chosen to use "traffic enforcement" as a way to raise desperately needed revenue.

According to the National Motorist Association, issuing speeding tickets raises somewhere between 4.5 billion and 6 billion dollars in the United States each year. And the average price of a speeding ticket just keeps going up. Today, the national average is about $150, but in many jurisdictions it is far higher. For example, more than 16 million traffic tickets are issued in the state of California each year, and the average fine is approximately $250.

If you are wealthy that may not be much of a problem, but if you are a family that is barely scraping by every month that can be a major financial setback. Meanwhile, America's roads are also being systematically transformed into a surveillance grid. The number of cameras watching our roads is absolutely exploding, and automated license plate readers are capturing hundreds of millions of data points on all of us. As you drive down the highway, a police vehicle coming up behind you can instantly read your license plate and pull up a whole host of information about you.

Follow The Money
Governments are using the police as
fundraising machines to shakedown
the public for cold, hard cash.

This happened to me a few years ago. I had pulled on to a very crowded highway in Virginia and within less than a minute a cop car had scanned me and was pulling me over because one of my stickers had expired. But these automated license plate readers are being used for far more than just traffic enforcement now.

For example, officials in Washington D.C. are now using automated license plate readers to track the movements of every single vehicle that enters the city. They know when you enter Washington, and they know when you leave. So where is all of this headed? Do we really want to live in a "Big Brother" society where the government constantly tracks all of our movements?

Back in the old days, the highways of America were great examples to the rest of the world of the tremendous liberties and freedoms that we enjoyed. Americans loved to hop into their vehicles and take a drive. But now government is sucking all of the fun out of driving. The control freak bureaucrats that dominate our political system have figured out that giant piles of money can be raised by turning our roads into revenue raising tools.

At this point things have gotten so bad that even some police officers are admitting what is going on. Just check out what a few of them told Car and Driver...

The president of a state police union isn’t pretending it doesn’t happen. James Tignanelli, president of the Police Officers Association of Michigan union, says, “When elected officials say, ‘We need more money,’ they can’t look to the department of public works to raise revenues, so where do they find it? Police departments.

“A lot of police chiefs will tell you the goal is to have nobody speeding through their community, but heaven forbid if it should actually happen—they’d be out of money,” Tignanelli says.

Police Chief Michael Reaves of Utica, Michigan, says the role of law enforcement has changed over the years. “When I first started in this job 30 years ago, police work was never about revenue enhancement, but if you’re a chief now, you have to look at whether your department produces revenues,” he says. “That’s just the reality nowadays.”

And as the economy has gone downhill, many jurisdictions have massively jacked up traffic fines. According to the Los Angeles Times, various traffic fines in the Los Angeles area are far higher than they once were...

If you're caught running a red light in Los Angeles, be prepared to shell out $446, up from $271 eight years ago. Make a rolling right turn at a stoplight and the ticket comes to $381 -- more than double what it cost in 2008.

And of course the cost to the driver does not end with the ticket. Your car insurance will likely go up as well. In fact, one study found that a driver that just gets one speeding ticket will pay an additional 20 percent for car insurance for the next three to six years.

That can add up to a lot of money.

But politicians just keep wanting to find a way to issue even more tickets. One of the hottest trends all over the country is to automate the issuing of traffic tickets by installing cameras. According to USA Today, this has become a huge growth industry...

Sales of the cameras have nearly quadrupled since companies moved to digital and wireless technology in the mid-2000s. The number of local contracts for cameras was up to 689 last year, from 155 in 2005, according to industry data complied by market leader American Traffic Solutions (ATS).

And these automated traffic cameras can raise an enormous amount of cash. Just check out what has been happening in Washington D.C....

The speeding and traffic light cameras have become more lucrative as their number in the District has increased. Combined, they issued tickets valued at $24.4 million in 2007. That figure more than doubled by 2010, to $50.9 million, and it reached $84.9 million in the last fiscal year.

Big Brother is building a photo file
of your every movement.

But as annoying as those traffic cameras are, automated license plate readers are perhaps even more insidious.

The amount of data that these automated license plate readers are capturing is astounding. The following is from a recent article by the Electronic Frontier Foundation...

Photographing a single license plate one time on a public city street may not seem problematic, but when that data is put into a database, combined with other scans of that same plate on other city streets, and stored forever, it can become very revealing.

Information about your location over time can show not only where you live and work, but your political and religious beliefs, your social and sexual habits, your visits to the doctor, and your associations with others. And, according to recent research reported in Nature, it’s possible to identify 95% of individuals with as few as four randomly selected geospatial datapoints (location + time), making location data the ultimate biometric identifier.

Our license plates have essentially become "our papers" which the government can read whenever it would like without even asking for our permission.

According to L.A. Weekly, local police agencies in the L.A. area have captured more than 160 million data points on private citizens using these automated license plate readers...

L.A. Weekly has learned that more than two dozen law enforcement agencies in Los Angeles County are using hundreds of these "automatic license plate recognition" devices (LPRs) — units about the size of a paperback book, usually mounted atop police cruisers — to devour data on every car that catches their electronic eye.

The L.A. County Sheriff's Department and the Los Angeles Police Department are two of the biggest gatherers of automatic license plate recognition information. Local police agencies have logged more than 160 million data points — a massive database of the movements of millions of drivers in Southern California.

Each data point represents a car and its exact whereabouts at a given time. Police have already conducted, on average, some 22 scans for every one of the 7,014,131 vehicles registered in L.A. County.

Judge Napolitano on license plate cams

License plate readers used to record those who attend political rallies.

As the use of these devices becomes more widespread and they become even more sophisticated, eventually the government will know where almost all of us are and what almost all of us are doing at all times.

The following is a brief except from a Washington Post article that detailed how automated license plate readers are now being used to create a "dragnet" that will track the movements of all vehicles from the time that they enter Washington D.C. to the time that they leave...

More than 250 cameras in the District and its suburbs scan license plates in real time, helping police pinpoint stolen cars and fleeing killers. But the program quietly has expanded beyond what anyone had imagined even a few years ago.

With virtually no public debate, police agencies have begun storing the information from the cameras, building databases that document the travels of millions of vehicles.

Nowhere is that more prevalent than in the District, which has more than one plate-reader per square mile, the highest concentration in the nation. Police in the Washington suburbs have dozens of them as well, and local agencies plan to add many more in coming months, creating a comprehensive dragnet that will include all the approaches into the District.

This is just the beginning.

For now, as long as you carefully obey all traffic laws and you don't work in a major city like Washington D.C., the changes that are happening probably do not affect you too much.

But the key is to see where all of this is going. Our roads are slowly but surely being transformed into a revenue generating control grid. And this is just yet another example of how government feels the need to constantly watch, monitor, track and regulate everything that we do.

Does anyone else feel like the life is slowly being choked out of our society, or am I alone?

See our article CIA-DHS Build a Massive License-Plate Reader Data Base

“Nothing was your own except the few cubic
centimetres inside your skull. ”
George Orwell
1984

Jumat, 28 Februari 2014

Obama's NSA steals millions of Yahoo webcam chats

Big Brother is Watching You

Yahoo: 'A whole new level of violation of our users' privacy'.
Obama's NSA uses the British security services as a cover to spy on you and avoid the 4th Amendment to the Bill of Rights.

Britain's surveillance agency GCHQ, with aid from the US National Security Agency, intercepted and stored the webcam images of millions of Internet users not suspected of wrongdoing, secret documents reveal.

GCHQ files dating between 2008 and 2010 explicitly state that a surveillance program codenamed Optic Nerve collected still images of Yahoo webcam chats in bulk and saved them to agency databases, regardless of whether individual users were an intelligence target or not.

In one six-month period in 2008 alone, the agency collected webcam imagery – including substantial quantities of sexually explicit communications – from more than 1.8 million Yahoo user accounts globally reports the UK Guardian.

Yahoo reacted furiously to the webcam interception when approached by the Guardian. The company denied any prior knowledge of the program, accusing the agencies of "a whole new level of violation of our users' privacy".

GCHQ does not have the technical means to make sure no images of UK or US citizens are collected and stored by the system, and there are no restrictions under UK law to prevent Americans' images being accessed by British analysts without an individual warrant.

Optic Nerve, the documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden show, began as a prototype in 2008 and was still active in 2012, according to an internal GCHQ wiki page accessed that year.

The system, eerily reminiscent of the telescreens evoked in George Orwell's 1984, was used for experiments in automated facial recognition, to monitor GCHQ's existing targets, and to discover new targets of interest.

Such searches could be used to try to find terror suspects or criminals making use of multiple, anonymous user IDs.

One document even likened the program's "bulk access to Yahoo webcam images/events" to a massive digital police mugbook of previously arrested individuals.

"Face detection has the potential to aid selection of useful images for 'mugshots' or even for face recognition by assessing the angle of the face," it reads. "The best images are ones where the person is facing the camera with their face upright."

Chilling Cradle to Grave Tyranny

David Knight speaking with Infowars writer/reporter Paul Joseph Watson about

governments all over the world trying to claim ownership of children.

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot
stamping on a human face—for ever.”
George Orwell
1984

Selasa, 18 Februari 2014

Obama Thought Police force student to apologize for being a "racist"

Burn the evil racist at the stake!

The Thought Police force student to apologize

for "micro-aggression" against Obama

Double Retard Alert! - Actually today we have a rare double retard alert. First, we have the insane Leftist Loons trying to beat down a student as a "racist" for posting the above GIF image that Jay Leno also used. But second, the student totally caved, dropped his pants, bent over and gave a spineless apology for having done nothing.

A student at McGill University in Montreal, Canada was forced to issue a formal apology for emailing a picture of Comrade Obama kicking open a door–all because some students thought the image was somehow racist.

The image was actually an edited .gif, and was shown by Jay Leno on “The Tonight Show” last fall. It humorously suggests that the president may be fed up with press conferences. McGill student Brian Farnan, vice president of the university’s student government, sent out an email with the .gif and the harmless caption, “Honestly midterms get out of here,” according to Legal Insurrection.

What happened next is almost unbelievable: Another student issued a formal complaint against Farnan for committing a “micro-aggression.”For those not up-to-date on the PC lexicon, “micro-aggression” is the latest phrase of choice for leftist radicals seeking to blame racism for common annoyances suffered by people of all races.

Minority activists at the University of Michigan, for example, have insisted that trivial slights, such as “Having your opinion second-guessed in a group assignment,” are micro-aggressions (Fucking Bullshit!!!) that betray the campus as a hostile place for students of color.

The .gif of Obama kicking a door was racist because of the “cultural, historical and living legacy surrounding people of color—particularly young men—being portrayed as violent,” according to the apology letter that Farnan was forced to write.

Technically, Farnan got off easy. Under the McGill student government’s Orwellian “equity policy,” Farnan could have been suspended or even dismissed from his position as vice president in the organization. The decision to force Farnan to apologize was apparently made by an “equity commissioner,” whose will can only be overturned by a two-thirds majority of the student government.

Like a true victim of the thought police, Farnan was forced to denounce his heretical email.

Spineless Apology Alert - “Despite the innocent intentions influencing my decision to use this particular image, I have come to recognize the negative implications of adding the .GIF image within this given context,” he said. “By using this particular image of President Obama, I unknowingly perpetuated this living legacy and subsequently allowed a medium of [Student Society of McGill University] communication to become the site of a microaggression; for this, I am deeply sorry.”

Wow. That made me lose my lunch. What a pussy.

(Daily Caller)

.
"The thought police would get him just the same. He had committed--would have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper--the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed forever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you."
George Orwell
1984, Book 1, Chapter 1

Jumat, 14 Februari 2014

Police to review your private medical records

Big Brother is Watching You

UK Police And Companies Will Have Access To Database

Of All England's Medical Records

The so-called "Conservative" UK government is currently building a database called care.data that will contain all of England's medical records. It's being promoted as providing valuable information for healthcare management and medical researchers that will lead to improved treatment.

Given the extremely sensitive nature of the material that will be stored, you might have expected this to be opt-in, but instead the UK government has chosen to make it opt-out. Not only that, but the relatively sparse information about what was happening was sent in the form of a generic, unaddressed letter that differs little from the dozens of junk mail pieces received by most households each week, and failed to include any easy-to-use opt-out form reports Tech Dirt.

This has fuelled suspicions that the UK government is making it hard to opt out in order to keep the numbers enrolled in the database as high as possible. More recently, good reasons why people might want to avoid the scheme have emerged. For example, it was revealed that as well as being provided to research scientists, the database could also be bought by companies:

Drug and insurance companies will from later this year be able to buy information on patients -- including mental health conditions and diseases such as cancer, as well as smoking and drinking habits -- once a single English database of medical data has been created.

Now we learn that the UK police will also have access:

The database that will store all of England's health records has a series of "backdoors" that will allow police and government bodies to access people's medical data.

As the UK MP David Davis told the Guardian:

"The idea that police will be able to request information from a central database without a warrant totally undermines a long-held belief in the confidentiality of the doctor-patient relationship," he said.

That means that as well as the risk of a privacy disaster of unprecedented proportions if the consolidated health data is lost or stolen as a result of being passed to third parties (as has already happened with a similar but smaller database), patients may be less likely to confide in their doctors knowing that details will end up in a database sold to companies and freely available to the police.

Nice work, Mr Cameron.

Glenn Beck's "Surveillance State"

_________________________________

1984 is Here
"Political tags - such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth - are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire."
- - - Robert A. Heinlein

“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”
George Orwell
1984

Sabtu, 11 Januari 2014

Orwellian Newspeak Dictionary Updates

“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.”

George Orwell

1984

In case you were not notified, all Newspeak dictionaries must be updated at once. “Welfare” is now an unword. The correct Newspeak term is “transitional living fund.” Thus says Sheila Jackson Lee, spokesbeast for the ruling class, in her personally issued decree.

Also, remember that having been universally acknowledged as a disaster, ObamaCare is now also an unword. Nancy Pelosi has instructed us to use the more explicitly Orwellian term, “Affordable Care Act.” The unword “ObamaCare” is to be considered racism — i.e., a thought crime of the worst order.

Hey Sheila, you can rename the Marxist re-distribution of wealth anything you want, but it does not make you any less a Commie thief.

Thanks Moonbattery

Sabtu, 04 Januari 2014

Sanders asks NSA if Congress is being spied on

Senator Bernie Sanders

Standing Up To Big Brother

An alliance of Libertarians, Constitutional Federalists, Liberals and Socialists is coming together to limit the 1984 Police Surveillance State.

BURLINGTON, Vt., (UPI) -- U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (Independent - Vt.) said Friday he has asked the National Security Agency whether it has spied on members of Congress and other officials.

In a posting on his official congressional website, Sanders said he has written to the NSA director, Gen. Keith Alexander, to ask whether the agency has monitored telephone, email and Internet communication by others in Congress or in other elective offices.
.
"Has the NSA spied, or is the NSA currently spying, on members of Congress or other American elected officials?" Sanders asked in the letter.
.

The post on Sanders' website said spying includes "gathering metadata on calls made from official or personal phones, content from websites visited or emails sent, or collecting any other data from a third party not made available to the general public in the regular course of business?"
.
Sanders -- who has introduced legislation to restrict powers of the NSA and the FBI to secretly monitor Americans' electronic communications -- said he is "deeply concerned" by disclosures that the NSA has collected massive amounts of data on phone calls, emails and Internet activity "by millions of innocent Americans without any reason to even suspect involvement in illegal activities."
.
He said the United States "must be vigilant and aggressive" in protecting against terrorist attacks but noted a federal judge in Washington recently called the surveillance policies "almost Orwellian" in ruling the practice is likely unconstitutional.
.
The Obama administration Friday filed a formal appeal of the ruling.

Matt Drudge, Bernie Sanders and Ron Paul
vs
Barack Obama, George Bush and Big Brother
.
Say what you want about Drudge, but his site has been a compendium of the exploits and abuses of Big Brother. Say what you want about Paul and Sanders, but they have both warned for years about the dangers of the Big Brother state.
.
Say what you want about any other issues, but on this matter Drudge, Paul and Sanders are on the side of Jefferson, Madison and Ben Franklin, who said we have a republic, if we can keep it. We will only keep our republic if we end the abuses that unfold every day, whether it is the abuses of the IRS against the Tea Party, the abuses of the national security state against our liberties or the abuses of big business against our privacy when we bank, shop, walk, talk, drive, email or make phone calls.
.
Yes, some secrecy is needed, and some eavesdropping is necessary. But what is happening is wrong. What is happening is out of control. What is happening, the way it is happening, and the magnitude of what is happening, poses the great danger to the American republic that is more dangerous than any plot hatched by any terrorist.
.
From my experience with these matters I warn: Beware of secrecy imposed by elitists of any kind who claim that only they know what is good for us, only they are allowed to know which rights they will allow us to have, and only they can decide whether they tell us which rights they choose to attack, undermine and destroy rather than preserve, protect and defend.
.
Personally I am willing to accept a little more danger to my life from terrorists than the greater danger posed by those seeking to destroy our rights under the pretense that they are making us safe. What say you?
.
See more at The Hill.com

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping
on a human face—forever.”
George Orwell
1984

Selasa, 31 Desember 2013

Hollywood Plans Pro-Communist Version of Anti-Communist Animal Farm

George Orwell might have seen this coming.

The retard Moonbats of Hollywood strike again. Millionaire Liberals living in Malibu and Beverly Hills mansions want to make a movie about the evils of capitalism and wealth building. The sad thing is Liberals do not understand how fucking stupid they look.

(From Moonbattery.com) - In his most famous work 1984, Orwell describes a totalitarian society in which history is constantly rewritten to meet the momentary political needs of the ruling party, on the theory that those who control the present control the past, and those who control the past control the future.

Another well-known work warning of the perils of oligarchical collectivism is Animal Farm, in which a socialist revolution leaves everyone but those who end up in power worse off than before. Applying the principles of the former book to the latter, we have the next obscenity to be excreted by Hollywood:

Actor Andy Serkis is set to direct an upcoming movie adaptation of George Orwell’s classic novel Animal Farm. But there will be a slight deviation from the story’s original focus: rather than serve as a cautionary tale about Communist totalitarianism, this updated version will address Hollywood’s predictable, go-to embodiment of evil, the Darth Vader of our time: corporate greed.

That is, the anti-communist story will be twisted around to advance the ideological objectives of communists.

What would expect from the leftist oligarchs of Tinseltown?
Gibbers Serkis,

“First and foremost, we are not making a film about Communism and Stalinism because if Orwell was writing the story today, he would be talking about other relevant topics like globalization and corporate greed.”

Yeah right. A more likely possibility is that Orwell

might be taking up his pen against the abuses of government surveillance, the left’s alliance with the creeping totalitarianism of Islamic theocracy, and the oppression inherent in the left’s shrewd manipulation of political language, such as its relentless push for submission to speech codes and its intolerance of politically incorrect expression.

Typically of left-wing propaganda, the movie will be targeted toward an audience too innocent to laugh it off.

“We’re making a family film,” said Serkis. Of course, because progressives are nothing if not proselytizers for their political religion, and they know how critical it is to preach their gospel to the youth. Hence all the family-friendly, anti-corporate, animated environmentalist propaganda films in recent years like Wall-E, Happy Feet, and The Lorax. Serkis’ Animal Farm seems destined to be burdened by a similar sort of heavy-handed agitprop.

From here, the commies running Hollywood can press ahead with a version of Atlas Shrugs that extols socialism and attacks “corporate greed” and the long-overdue film version of The Gulag Archipelago praising the just and humane ways of the Soviet government. Then they might broaden their perspective with a biblical epic promoting homosexuality.

Rabu, 11 Desember 2013

Google wants to put microchips in your skull

Obey Your Masters

Microchips implanted in your skull by Google . . . shit,

what could possibly go wrong with that?

What the Fuck! - The madness just does not end. Now Google wants to put microphones in your bedroom and microchips in your skull.

"I don’t have a microchip in my head – yet," says the man charged with transforming Google’s relations with the technology giant’s human users.

But Scott Huffman does envisage a world in which Google microphones, embedded in the ceiling, listen to our conversations and interject verbal answers to whatever inquiry is posed.

Huffman, Google's engineering director, leads a team tasked with making conversations with the search engine more reflective of the complex interactions people enjoy with each other reports the UK Independent.

A microphone hanging from the ceiling, responding to verbal queries, would remove the need to whip out a phone to remind yourself what time tomorrow’s flight leaves. It could also make sure you don’t miss the flight altogether.

When challenged on the likelihood of such a system being vulnerable to NSA wiretapping, Huffman glibly responded that people should just trust Google (a company that allowed the NSA to mine data from its cloud network “at will”) to safeguard their information.

Huffman touted the features of such a system, suggesting people could ask Google to screen football highlights on their television via the microphones, or arrange travel plans.

“I could ask my Google ‘assistant’ where we should have lunch, that serves French food and isn’t too expensive? Google will go ‘Ok, we’ll go to that place’ and when I get in my car it should already be navigating to that restaurant. We’re really excited by the idea of multiple devices being able to talk to each other,” said Huffman.

“Google believes it can ultimately fulfil people’s data needs by sending results directly to microchips implanted into its user’s brains,” states the report, a concept which Huffman welcomes reports Infowars News.

Although the idea of embedding a microchip inside the brain is a horror for some, there is a whole movement of people who call themselves transhumanists that will openly embrace such a scenario. Those who refuse to adopt the technology will eventually be seen as luddites and technophobes.

If Google’s transhumanist utopia is to be achieved, the microchip inside the brain must eventually become as ubiquitous as the cellphone. This will all be promoted in the name of convenience and Google will assure us that strong safeguards are in place to protect privacy (while they are work hand in hand with the NSA to desecrate privacy).

From so-called “smart” street lights that use microphones to record conversations, analyze voices and track people, to Xbox and cellphone devices that do likewise, our entire environment is being turned into what former CIA director David Petraeus hailed as a boon for “clandestine statecraft.”

According to whistleblowers like William Binney , the NSA is already recording our conversations, via email, phone and VOIP, and analyzing them in real time. Once our homes and our streets are festooned with microphones, the last refuge of privacy will be completely eviscerated.

Glenn Beck's "SURVEILLANCE STATE"

“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”
George Orwell
1984

____________________________________

1984 is Here.
"Political tags - such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth - are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire."
- - - Robert A. Heinlein

“Under the spreading chestnut tree
I sold you and you sold me--”
George Orwell
1984

Minggu, 08 Desember 2013

British help Obama in a crack down on press freedom

“This White House seems to

only want state media.”

Left-wing journalist Jeremy Scahill appeared on the syndicated show “Democracy Now!” this Thursday to discuss the global “war on journalism,” claiming that “this White House seems to only want state media.”

Scahill spoke with left-leaning hosts Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez about the global suppression of reporters in places far-flung such as Somalia and Mexico reports the Daily Caller.

But although he was responding to the British government’s crackdown on The Guardian newspaper, Scahill reserved special ire for the Obama administration’s aggressive actions against reporters and the First Amendment.

“You have, on the one hand, President Obama saying that his administration is going to be the most transparent in history and that they want to be friends with the press,” he said. “And on the other hand, they are monitoring the metadata of journalists, they are seizing phone records, they are trying to compel journalists to testify against their sources, they are trying to figure out who journalists are talking to within government so that they can go and indict those people.”

The reporter, who has written critical book on the Blackwater military contractor and whose new documentary was recently nominated for an Oscar, stressed the importance of the First Amendment and journalism, and argued that the government was seeking to bury both.

“Our profession, our trade is the only one specifically cited in the Constitution for a reason,” he said. “When all three branches of the government are colluding against the interests of the people, it’s the responsibility of journalists to hold them accountable. But this White House, like Bush’s before, they seem to want only state media. They want everything to look like MSNBC, and that’s not real journalism.”

____________________________________

British are Slaves to Obama's Fascism

UK Guardian newspaper will not be intimidated over NSA leaks as British Parliament acts as Comrade Obama's lackeys in a drive to crush freedom of the press. Editor tells parliamentary committee that stories revealing mass surveillance by UK and US have prompted global debate.

The Police State - The Guardian has come under concerted pressure and intimidation designed to stop it from publishing stories of huge public interest that have revealed the "staggering" scale of Britain's and America's secret surveillance programmes, the editor-in-chief of the newspaper has said.

Giving evidence to a parliamentary committee about stories based on the National Security Agency leaks from the whistleblower Edward Snowden, Alan Rusbridger said the Guardian "would not be put off by intimidation, but nor are we going to behave recklessly".

He told MPs that disclosures from the files had generated a global debate about the powers of state agencies, and the weaknesses of the laws and oversight regimes they worked within reports the UK Guardian.

"In terms of the broader debate, I can't think of a story in recent times that has ricocheted around the world like this has and which has been more broadly debated in parliaments, in courts and amongst NGOs," he said.

"The roll call of people who have said there needs to be a debate about this includes three presidents of the United States, two vice-presidents, generals, the security chiefs in the US [who] are all saying this is a debate that in retrospect we had to have."

Press Intimidation by Big Brother
UK Guardian Editor Alan Rusbridger is ripped by both Labour
and Conservatives for daring to tell the truth.

Rusbridger said the Guardian had been put under the kind of pressure to stop publishing stories that would have been inconceivable in other countries.

"They include prior restraint, they include a senior Whitehall official coming to see me to say: 'There has been enough debate now'. They include asking for the destruction of our disks. They include MPs calling for the police to prosecute the editor. So there are things that are inconceivable in the US.

"I feel that some of this activity has been designed to intimidate the Guardian."

In one curious exchange, the committee chair, Labour Party MP Keith Vaz, asked Rusbridger if he loved his country.

"In a time of universal deceit - telling
the truth is a revolutionary act."
George Orwell

"I'm slightly surprised to be asked the question," replied Rusbridger. "But, yes, we are patriots and one of the things we are patriotic about is the nature of democracy, the nature of a free press and the fact that one can in this country discuss and report these things.

"One of the things I love about this country is that we have that freedom to write, and report, and to think and we have some privacy, and those are the concerns which need to be balanced against national security, which no one is underestimating. I can speak for the entire Guardian staff who live in this country that they want to be secure too."

At one point, Conservative Party MP Mark Reckless suggested a criminal offence had been committed by sharing some of the Snowden material with the New York Times.

"You have I think Mr Rusbridger admitted a criminal offence in your response. Do you consider that it would not be in the public interest for the CPS [Crown Prosecution Service] to prosecute?"

Rusbridger replied: "I think it depends on your view of a free press."

He said the Guardian had not lost control of any of the documents and the newspaper had used "military-grade" encryption to safeguard the files.

"No data was lost, we lost control of no data. No names have leaked from the Guardian."

Ex-NSA official on Snowden and the U.S. spy leviathan

Thomas Drake, who was prosecuted for allegedly disclosing National Security Agency secrets years before Edward Snowden surfaced, says the U.S. government has an "industrial-scale" surveillance system that "the Stasi in East Germany would have drooled over." Drake speaks with Reuters defense correspondent Andrea Shalal-Esa.

The End of Internet Freedom

In another blow to the Constitution, the Supreme Court declined to hear a case by Amazon and Overstock.com challenging a law that requires online retailers to collect sales tax in states where they have no physical presence.