Police State

To reduce leaks, NSA cutting 90 percent of sysadmins.

"Alluding to an issue of mistrust, Alexander further clarified: 'At the end of the day it's about people and trust ... if they misuse that trust they can cause huge damage.'"

Who can't be trusted? Slashdot is right about the failure to recognize irony.

Silent Circle discontinues encrypted email service to avoid problems with US government. They had claimed they would move out of the US before doing anything like this. Silent Circle's website silentcircle.com is down. It looks like the police state is on a rampage. More. Silentcircle.com is back up. Here's what they say:

"

• Silent Circle has preemptively discontinued Silent Mail service to prevent spying.
  We designed our phone, video, and text services (Silent Phone, Text and Eyes) to be completely end-to-end secure with all cryptography done on the clients and our exposure to your data to be nil. The reasons are obvious -- the less of your information we have, the better it is for you and for us.
  Silent Mail has thus always been something of a quandary for us. Email that uses standard Internet protocols cannot have the same security guarantees that real-time communications has. There are far too many leaks of information and metadata intrinsically in the email protocols themselves. Email as we know it with SMTP, POP3, and IMAP cannot be secure.
  And yet, many people wanted it. Silent Mail has similar security guarantees to other secure email systems, and with full disclosure, we thought it would be valuable.
  However, we have reconsidered this position. We've been thinking about this for some time, whether it was a good idea at all. Yesterday, another secure email provider, Lavabit, shut down their system less they "be complicit in crimes against the American people." We see the writing on the wall, and we have decided that it is best for us to shut down Silent Mail. We have not received subpoenas, warrants, security letters, or anything else by any government, and this is why we are acting now.
  We've been debating this for weeks, and had changes planned starting next Monday. We'd considered phasing the service out, continuing service for existing customers, and a variety of other things up until today. It is always better to be safe than sorry, and with your safety we decided that in this case the worst decision is no decision.
  Silent Phone and Silent Text, along with their cousin Silent Eyes are end-to-end secure. We don't have the encrypted data and we don't collect metadata about your conversations. They're continuing as they have been. We are still working on innovative ways to improve secure communications. Silent Mail was a good idea at the time, and that time has passed.
  We apologize for any inconvenience, and hope you understand that if we dithered, it could be more inconvenient.

"

The lack of security is true. You have to encrypt locally.

Free speech includes encrypted speech, but government is shutting it down anyway.

More NSA spying programs leaked to New York Times.

French government shuts down Eiffel Tower over hoax.

Patsy sentenced to 30 years for obeying his FBI handlers.

Connection between Michael Hastings, Edward Snowden and hacker Barrett Brown. Includes evidence of another NSA spy program. Good luck finding this in the mainstream media.

"When the FBI raided the Dallas home of journalist Barrett Brown in March 2012, the travails of the Vanity Fair and Guardian contributor didn’t get much ink — that is, until Michael Hastings published an exclusive on the Brown raid on Buzzfeed.
The story included a copy of the search warrant that revealed why the government was so interested in Brown: Along with colleagues at the research wiki he started, ProjectPM (PPM), Brown was looking into a legion of shadowy cybersecurity firms whose work for the government raised all sorts of questions about privacy and the rule of law.
Since Hastings was familiar with the government contractors listed in the search warrant, he was also potentially culpable in whatever “crimes” the feds believed Brown and PPM were guilty of. Is this why he was being investigated in the days before his fatal crash on June 18, 2013?"

This corresponds with the FBI warrant on Fox News reporter James Rosen. Obama considers reporters who contact whistleblowers to be criminals themselves.

"For those unfamiliar with Brown’s tale, WhoWhatWhy has been chronicling his trials since February 2013.  He is currently in federal custody in Ft. Worth, Texas, facing over a hundred years behind bars for researching 70,000 hacked emails obtained from the cybersecurity firm HBGary Federal and its parent company HBGary. At no point is the government alleging he was involved in the hack itself. His putative “crime” is doing what investigative reporters are supposed to do: digging for the truth about breaches of the public trust."

More evidence of the same. Here's the program:

"Romas/COIN was the name given to a program through which the U.S had been conducting “a secretive and immensely sophisticated campaign of mass surveillance and data mining against the Arab world,” according to emails hacked from the cybersecurity firm HBGary Federal. Evidently, this program allows the intelligence community to “monitor the habits, conversations, and activity of millions of individuals at once.”"

Most Americans would probably support that.

"Over the course of a year, Aaron Barr, CEO of HBGary Federal, sought out various companies to form a consortium that could wrest control of Romas/COIN from the current contract holder, Northrop Grumman. Eventually the consortium included no less than 12 different firms — ranging from niche software companies to behemoths like Google, Apple, and even Disney."

There's that infighting I was talking about.

"The Bonesaw program functions essentially as a user-friendly map.
That map has at its disposal the geolocation and Internet address of every device connected to the Internet around the globe. By designating a country and city — like Beijing, China for example — and the name or address of a target — say, a People’s Liberation Army research facility — a user can find out what software is running on all of the computers inside the facility, what entry points to those computers exist, and a menu of custom exploits that can be used to sneak in."

That's amazing.

Continuing being the greatest liar, hypocrite and fraud in my lifetime, Obama says government must be more transparent on spying. Apparently he has no concept of oxymorons or being a moron.

The Senate intelligence committee will conduct a whitewash investigation of NSA programs to fool Americans into believing NSA isn't spying on them and when it is, it's to their benefit.