Privacy is Dead, Freedom and Rights now Under Attack

There is no escaping that the Internet began as a military research project.

The internet began in a 1966 program called Resource Sharing Computer Networks. Started by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (the precursor to DARPA, where the “D” stands for “Defense”), this network was meant to decentralize data storage to protect it from a nuclear strike. Over time, ARPANET grew to become the Internet we know and love today.

Facebook is CIA's Primary Intelligence Source

CIA uses Facebook to Openly and Legally Spy on Americans

People share virtually every bit of information about themselves with Facebook. From age, race, sexual orientation, religious and political affiliation, even daily updates about their whereabouts, people are sharing literally everything. And since this is open source information, it is totally legal for the CIA, FBI, DHS and any other acronym and law enforcement agency to use it.

When this information is posted alongside with your picture, the government can (and does) create a composite profile of you and literally every American who is even remotely connected to a social media site, particularly Facebook, but also Twitter, Google Plus, MySpace, YouTube and about a dozen others.

Deputy CIA Director, Christopher Sarinsky, said about Facebook: “After years of secretly monitoring the public, we were astounded so many people would willingly publicize where they live, their religious and political views, an alphabetized list of all their friends, personal emails addresses, phone numbers, hundreds of photos of themselves, and even status updates about what they were doing moment to moment. It is truly a dream come true for the CIA.”

Although I was aware of the U.S. government efforts to monitor the Internet, including social media, having written several articles about the subject, including, U.S. Homeland Security Monitoring Facebook, Twitter and other Sites for Signs of Discontent, Internet Anonymity, Security is a Purposely Spread Illusion and Big Brother has Your Password, but even I had no idea as to what extent.

The collected data is then assessed, studied and analyzed by every type of expert known to man. This analysis is "sought by the highest levels at the White House" and ends up in the President's intelligence briefing almost on a daily basis, Doug Naquin, director of the CIA's Open Source Center was quoted saying.

Facebook and the other social media sites are enabling the CIA, NSA, DHS, FBI and every other acronym reporting to Washington to get reliable real-time assessments of public sentiment during rapidly changing events around the world.

Monitoring these sites saves intelligence and police agencies millions in information gathering operations, as well as countless man hours. It's a lot easier and cheaper to obtain information that is shared with you voluntarily, than when it has to be gathered through wiretaps, interrogations and informants.   

The CIA facility focused on counterterrorism operations was set up in response to recommendations by the 9/11 Commission.

Though the CIA team known as the "vengeful librarians" is just one of the teams that gathers information in multiple languages to build a real-time picture of the mood in various regions of the world, it is the only one the news media caught with their pants down.  Who knows what other secret intelligence gathering and analyzing activities the NSA, DHS or FBI have operating in the shadows right now?

However, we do know, by their own admission, that the CIA is monitoring Facebook and watching other social networks from a nondescript facility in a Virginia industrial park, twenty-four hours a day.

News of the CIA operation comes just before the United States Department of Homeland Security said it was working on guidelines for protecting the privacy rights of US citizens while it monitors social media sites.

Yet, the CIA is suspected of even using Facebook applications, like suggested friends, which allowed the agency in more than one occasion to go deeper undercover into people's networks, to which they gained trust and access when Agents befriended them on Facebook.They are thought to use location apps like Forursquare together with GPS, to know exactly where you go, when you go there, who you meet there and how long you stay.



With Washington afraid that an Internet Revolution is Inevitable, and that it could it spill over into the Real World our government is going to be keeping closer tabs on us than ever. Maybe mainstream will wake up to what's going on when martial law is declared and various so called ‘trouble makers’ are rounded up and shipped off to Gotonomo Bay style concentration camps.

If you had been reading my articles, such as The United States is under Martial Law right now through Obama's New Executive Order and China and Russia threaten US Attack on Iran fraught with unpredictable consequences, you would know that this scary scenario becomes more likely with each passing day. I don't know what our leaders are thinking, but it appears as if they care little about our welfare, much less our wishes.

With them monitoring the Internet, social media and Bloggers, I should be worried that I would be one of the first to disappear, but I will not let them scare me any more than I will let them silence me.

Am I on Facebook? Why certainly! I love using their own systems against them.

Written By: Tom Retterbush

One Nation Under Surveillance

A New Social Contract to Defend Freedom Without Sacrificing Liberty 

What limits, if any, should be placed on a government's efforts to spy on its citizens in the name of national security? Spying on one's own citizens in a democracy? Changes in technology make it impractical to distinguish between 'foreign' and 'local' communications. And our culture is progressively reducing the sphere of activity that citizens can reasonably expect to be kept from government eyes. The main casualty of this transformed environment will be privacy. Recent battles over privacy have been dominated by fights over warrantless electronic surveillance or CCTV; the coming years will see debates over DNA databases, data mining, and biometric identification. There will be protests and lawsuits, editorials and elections resisting these attacks on privacy. Those battles are worthy. But the war will be lost. Modern threats increasingly require that governments collect such information, governments are increasingly able to collect it, and citizens increasingly accept that they will collect it.

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Big Brother is Spying from Drones Overhead

Unmanned Drones are already flying for Law Enforcement

The killing of terrorist and insurgents by heavily armed drones, controlled by operators thousands of miles away has prompted criticism that the technology is too impersonal and results in too much collateral damage, but most critics have been silent considering the many pilots that have been spared.

While drones are in heavy use in the wars abroad, their use in the States is rare, because of federal restrictions on air space. Commercial use is virtually forbidden, and less than 300 certificates of authorization have been issued to government entities to take drones for a whirl. The Federal Aviation Association, though, has announced that it plans to revisit its restrictions in the spring of 2012. That means it could be much easier to fly drones in the U.S. as soon as 2013 or 2014. What will that mean? Who will use them?

The technology has attracted not only military, but also intelligence and law enforcement customers.

Drones are already in use by British police, there is a discussion about equipping domestic drones with weapons in the US, and Australian police have started to show interest in acquiring them.

The thought of drones in civilian spaces—especially drones operated by law enforcement—makes many American civil libertarians suspicious. The same is true in the United Kingdom. Several companies that want the U.K. to adopt surveillance drones are trying to combat the machines’ “spy in the sky” stigma.

Recently, the L.A. published a rather disturbing story about the use of Predator drones by local law enforcement officials in the United States. The article reported a recent example where a sheriff in South Dakota called in a Predator B drone to perform surveillance on a family farm!

The article recounts an incident which occurred over the summer in Nelson County, South Dakota. The local sheriff, Kelly Janke, went looking for six missing cows at a farm owned by the Brossart family. Coincidentally, the family allegedly belongs to an anti-government group called the Sovereign Citizen Movement and has had repeated run-ins with local police in Nelson County.

The cows had supposedly crossed into the Brossart's farm, which was reason enough apparently for the sheriff to get a search warrant and pay them a visit. I suppose that in South Dakota it's normal to obtain search warrants to search for missing cows. When the sheriff arrived at the farm he was confronted by three men with rifles who ordered him to get off of their property.

This being South Dakota, the sheriff naturally called for reinforcements from from three different county sheriffs departments, the state Highway Patrol, a regional SWAT team, the bomb squad, ambulances and of course, a Predator drone! What the hell is happening in America?

Sheriff Janke found out about the drones last spring when attending a briefing on how two Customs and Border Protection drones based at a nearby air base could help local law enforcement. When Janke called for backup, one of the drones patrolling the Canadian border over North Dakota and Montana was called in to assist at the Brossart farm.

Officers were able to watch live video from the drone as it circled at 10,000 feet, providing a feed of thermal imaging streamed down to a handheld device, showing the Brossarts moving around their property with rifles in hand. Sheriff Janke and his army decided to retreat until the following day.

The following morning, the Predator was back above the Brossart farm providing images to the sheriff, showing that the Brossarts were no longer armed. Janke and the SWAT team were able to arrest Rodney Brossart, his daughter and three sons and find the missing cows.

Unbelievable! The use of drones for retrieving some cows! This is hardly an isolated incident, as Predator drones are being used for surveillance purposes by Federal, state, and local agencies all across the country. It appears as if this is becoming a common practice and without any public acknowledgement or debate. Like a lot of things outrageous, unnecessary and controversial, our leaders manage to keep these types of things out of mainstream media.

For example, though North Dakota has used the Grand Forks' Predators to fly at least two dozen surveillance flights since June, Michael C. Kostelnik, a retired Air Force general who heads the office that supervises the drones said, Predators are flown "in many areas around the country, not only for federal operators, but also for state and local law enforcement and emergency responders in times of crisis."

Good to know! Good to know how our tax money is being flown around.

Drone purchases for the Customs and Border Protection agencies were first authorized by Congress in 2005. According to the Times, these Federal agencies own eight of the unmanned spy planes.

Furthermore, there use in state and local matters is apparently justified by Federal officials who cite "broad authority to work with police from budget requests to Congress that cite 'interior law enforcement support' as part of their mission," according to Bennett's article.

The reason that such controversial and scary tactics have been under the mainstream "radar" is because U.S. courts have allowed law enforcement to conduct aerial surveillance in the absence of a warrant. Predator drones can not be seen or heard and are operated remotely, falling under the same legal guidelines as police helicopters or aircraft.

This means that Federal, state, and local law enforcement officials are using U.S. air space to conduct surveillance on American citizens in missions that resemble those being carried out against Al-Qaeda and other terrorists in Afghanistan, Pakistan and other foreign countries.

Does anybody other than myself see a problem with this?

Written By: Tom Retterbush

Predator: The Remote-Control Air War over Iraq and Afghanistan: A Pilot's Story
The Nintendo generation has taken to the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan where remotely controlled aircraft are killing America¹s enemies and saving American lives. Matt J. Martin is considered a "top gun" in the world of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). For nearly four years, he has flown hundreds of missions on two warfronts in a new kind of combat that, until recently, was largely classified Top Secret. He and his fellow Predator pilots have been actively involved in virtually every facet of the War on Terror in Iraq and Afghanistan: tracking Osama bin Laden; capturing top al-Qaeda leader al-Zarqawi; fighting with the U.S. Marines in Fallujah; and rescuing aid workers kidnapped in Afghanistan by the Taliban. This is Matt J. Martin's story and that of his aircraft, the 27-foot long Predator. 
Get Predator directly from Amazon, HERE



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Is the FBI Monitoring Your Social Networks?

Everybody knows the FBI has been monitoring social media, yet they want to step it up more!

Social media has never been private. And the FBI has taken advantage of social media carelessness with all they've got. 

Although OSINT, better known as open-source intelligence, has been around for a long time, people continue to share photos, videos and personal info without a second thought. 

Not only does the FBI want a data-mining social media application, but InformationWeek reports that the CIA, DHS and the IARPA, also known as "the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency, are also interested in mining the Web. Pretty much every acronym in the book is for picking up clues about public opinion and news for use in only god knows what.

Even though this is all publicly available information, it's still a bit sinister, considering your 'personal info' could be misinterpreted and saved by a government database like the DHS database of secret watchlists. 

This is all not new, as the ACLU reported that spying on free speech was nearly at Cold War levels back in 2010. In 2010, the EFF also warned that Big Brother wants to be your friend on social media. And it's getting worse. The spying and data storage is at epidemic levels. Just this week, Napolitano said in her DHS pressrelease, "Think of it this way--if we have to look for a needle in a haystack, it makes sense to use all of the information we have about the pieces of hay to make the haystack smaller."

Recently, the FBI busted MegaUpload founders for copyright infringement on a massive scale. Now the government is in the market for a social media application to help them predict, prevent and respond to crises.

In fact, the FBI is looking for a geospatial and analysis mapping tool that will allow them to identify and geolocate events, incidents and emerging threats. Supposedly, this will be used for reconnaissance and surveillance, national security events planning and operations, counterintelligence, terrorism, “cyber” crime, SIOC (Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities) operations, as well as other missions. They want a flexible system that can adapt and identify a variety of situations.

The government has already been unofficially using social networking sites for investigations, data collection, and surveillance for quite some time. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the Samuelson Clinic at U.C. Berkeley filed suit against several government agencies recently for refusing to disclose their data collection policies. 

The Department of Justice did release some of this information on January 24, which included DPD draft search warrants and affidavits for Facebook and DOD draft search warrants and affidavits for MySpace, not to mention the articles and PowerPoint presentations on how to use social media sites for investigations.

The draft search warrants are especially interesting as they show the full extent of data the government regularly requests for investigations of people. This includes more than just people's profile information but also who you “poke” and who “pokes” you, who rejects your friend requests, what music you listen to, all photos you upload as well as any photos you’re tagged in (whether or not you upload them), who’s in each of your Facebook groups, which apps you use, your privacy settings and IP logs that can show if and when you viewed a specific profile and from what IP address you did so.

These findings did indeed reveal how few, if any, of our online activities are actually private. Yet still the government wants more. Here are some of their most requested capabilities:

The uncovered information did raise concerns that such surveillance could have a negative impact on free speech and freedom of the press. But just because the government is watching, doesn’t mean it is actually, officially watching you. MegaUpload.com for example, had a large-scale operation with 50 million daily visitors and 150 million registered users that accounted for 4% of the total traffic on the Internet. The indictment stated the company had made about $175 million in profits through advertising revenue and premium memberships. The amount of damages to copyright holders is believed to total more than $500 million.

What's really interesting is, that all of this occurred without the help of the censorship bills SOPA, PIPA or ACTA. It goes to show that there is already enough surveillance and censorship legislation and technology out there. Do we really need more?

Written By: Tom Retterbush

Someone's Watching You!
Somewhere in D.C., a vast computer complex churns through quintillions of data bytes about every American, living or dead. And one of them is you! Satellites circle in space, prying into your intimate family secrets, while underground groups plot how to clone your DNA. Your phone may be tapped, your office burglarized, your identity stolen. They're bugging your clothing and hacking your e-mail. In this book, you'll learn how you can lose Big Brother for good!

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