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NSA's Own Secret Google

The National Security Agency is secretly providing data to nearly two dozen U.S. government agencies with a “Google-like” search engine built to share more than 850 billion records about phone calls, emails, cellphone locations, and internet chats, according to classified documents obtained by The Intercept.

The documents provide the first definitive evidence that the NSA has for years made massive amounts of surveillance data directly accessible to domestic law enforcement agencies. Planning documents for ICREACH, as the search engine is called, cite the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Drug Enforcement Administration as key participants.

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Liberal NPR Is Laundering CIA Talking Points to Make You Scared of NSA Reporting

By Glenn Greenwald and Andrew Fishman

On August 1, NPR’s Morning Edition broadcast a story by NPR national security reporter Dina Temple-Raston touting explosive claims from what she called “a tech firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.” That firm, Recorded Future, worked together with “a cyber expert, Mario Vuksan, the CEO of ReversingLabs,” to produce a new report that purported to vindicate therepeated accusation from U.S. officials that “revelations from former NSA contract worker Edward Snowden harmed national security and allowed terrorists to develop their own countermeasures.”

The “big data firm,” reported NPR, says that it now “has tangible evidence” proving the government’s accusations. Temple-Raston’s four-minute, 12-second story devoted the first 3 minutes and 20 seconds to uncritically repeating the report’s key conclusion that ”just months after the Snowden documents were released, al-Qaeda dramatically changed the way its operatives interacted online” and, post-Snowden, “al-Qaeda didn’t just tinker at the edges of its seven-year-old encryption software; it overhauled it.” The only skepticism in the NPR report was relegated to 44 seconds at the end when she quoted security expert Bruce Schneier, who questioned the causal relationship between the Snowden disclosures and the new terrorist encryption programs, as well as the efficacy of the new encryption.

With this report, Temple-Raston seriously misled NPR’s millions of listeners.

US Media Rules of Reporting on Israeli ‘Operations’ in Gaza

Mediagate? As if we needed another lesson in why we need an independent media...and be sure to follow the link for careers in the first paragraph below for how fair and balanced goes in the drive by media.

by Peter Casey, August 23, 2014

Since Hamas fired its first projectile from Gaza into Israel in 2001, the US establishment media have strictly followed several rules of reporting on the “rockets.” These rules are unwritten. The scriveners and TV news broadcasters may not even think of them as rules. Nevertheless, American mass media reporting on Gaza rockets consistently and predictably follows one absolute, overarching, principle: Israel is always the victim. The rules implement this First Principle. Short are the careers of those who transgress them.

Is Police Brutality Color-Blind?

The Missouri police shooting death of Michael Brown has spotlighted police brutality toward blacks but many other Americans, including whites, are finding themselves the targets of harsher and harsher police tactics, notes Nat Parry.

I Trolled My Congressman On Twitter

… about Iraq and the War Powers Act by Justin Raimondo, August 22, 2014

I live in the little town of Sebastopol, in northern California’s Sonoma county: think of Berkeley, only with horses. It’s the kind of town where a sign, posted near an impressive grid of solar energy screens, greets you as you enter the city limits, declaring Sebastopol a "nuclear-free zone" – and where, as you might imagine, the Iraq war wasn’t exactly all that popular. My congressman is one Jared Huffman – a liberal Democrat, naturally: Republicans don’t stand a chance in these parts – and so when I heard President Obama was sending yet more troops to Iraq, as well as ordering air strikes, I called Huffman’s Washington office, convinced my concerns would be getting a sympathetic hearing – a notion of which I was soon disabused.

A USS Liberty’s Hero’s Passing

USS Liberty-300x231 Silver Star winner Terry Halbardier, the hero who got off the SOS that saved the USS Liberty from Israeli destruction in 1967, died last week in California, prompting ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern to recall the murderous attack and the cowardly cover-up that followed.

War Is A Racket

For more information about this book go here.

THE RULES OF THE NEW ARISTOCRACY

Post by Fans of J. Michael Straczynski.

Send out the clowns

Can You Pass a 100 Year Old Test?

Find out here.

Educating the Public

by Mike Nixson

I am watching the remake of the series Cosmos. Carl Sagan, the host of the original series is a hard act to follow. He had the science down right but there was a real passion in his serach for not only facts but the truth and the process for getting there. Neil deGrasse Tyson does a good job in the new series although he won't be imitated as effectively. For a lot of believers it brings up a lot of disturbing and challenging issues, not the least of which is how to reconcile the interpretations of a book written by errant men with an observable universe created by an inerrant God. Many opt to accept interpretations that contradict the empirical evidence of God's handiwork. I think there is a name for that.