National Security State up Against a Whistleblower Revolution

There are nearly 5 million people in the United States with security clearance, and any one of them could be the next Edward Snowden or Bradley Manning. 

So what -- if anything - are intelligence agencies doing to better keep their secrets. And, might more whistleblowing be just thing to convince more Americans that massive domestic surveillance isn't the best way to keep us safe. 

Political Commentator Sam Sacks speaks with former NSA and CIA Chief Michael Hayden and whistleblower Jesselyn Radack. 

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AGENDA: Grinding America Down

 "AGENDA" Trailer - Please Watch...  See below to order FULL MOVIE

This is NOT just another conspiracy theory

"'AGENDA' is the most powerful exposé of the communist, socialist, progressive attempt to take over America produced so far"...Ted Baehr, Moviguide

To order the full movie, go to: AgendaDocumentary.com (quantity discounts available) 

note:  thehonestintelligence is not an affiliate of, and has nothing to do with the site listed above; to purchase the full movie.  We are sharing this information with you for your own information and growth.

A film that finally puts the pieces of the puzzle together. If you've wondered why America has been falling apart from within, you will love AGENDA.  Please share with everyone you can and order a few copies to give to pastors, representatives, and conservative leaders. 

 America needs to see this film!

Must Read! “A Helpless Military: Just What Obama Ordered”

Submitted by Trevor on June 19, 2013

Of all of Barack Obama‘s crimes against the American people this is the worst.

What Obama is doing to the U.S. military puts hundreds of millions of lives and the survival of the entire West at stake.

 by Maj. Gen. Patrick Brady

As incompetence, deception, duplicity and dishonesty become the hall marks of the Obama administration, it is important that we not lose sight of the greatest danger posed beyond these serial scandals: the feminization, emasculation and dismantling of our military. The two most important elements of national survival are the media and the military; one keeps us free and the other keeps us secure. We know the media are failing – God help us if the military does also. We may be able to fix the government in 2014. Fixing the military is more problematic.

Let’s begin with Benghazi. It is incomprehensible that any commander, let alone the commander in chief, would go AWOL during a crisis such as Benghazi, but he was. In the midst of the massacre of our ambassador and three heroic Americans, President Obama was nowhere to be found. He did manage to surface, too late for the massacre, to meet a campaign commitment the next day. But, before retiring, we are told he turned the crisis over to his underlings, including the military. What we learned about our military leadership during that crisis should alarm all Americans.

The demise of our military of course begins with the commander in chief, but he can’t do it alone. He has to have willing sycophants and he has had them in the civilian and military leadership at the Department of Defense. The indifference of the people and military inexperience in Congress are contributing factors. The military disasters are a form of gradualism. Look at the changes under Mr. Obama. We cannot focus on these changes enough.

Our military is suffering unprecedented rates of suicide and PTSD. Obama’s sequestration will cut benefits to veterans as well as damage readiness. (There has been a 2000 percent increase in backlog for veteran assistance in four years!) We now have a quad-sexual military with all the health, readiness and moral issues that come with exalting sodomy. Sexual assault is at an all-time high. Women will be tasked to lead bayonet charges. As a result of the sex scandals, Congress is now looking to curtail the military’s ability to discipline, another tribute to the lack of leadership in the military and lack of military understanding in Congress.

Billions of defense dollars are unaccounted for. Christianity is under military attack, and Bibles have been burned to appease Muslims. (References to God and Jesus are forbidden at Arlington, chaplains will be forced to perform homosexual “marriages,” and Bibles and religious item are forbidden to the wounded at Walter Reed, etc.)

We have a new doctrine for crisis: “Don’t deploy forces into harm’s way without knowing what’s going on.” Therefore, no Normandy or Inchon. In other words, don’t go until the crisis/massacre is over. Their default position is don’t go, period. The military leadership, after the terrorist massacre at Fort Hood, outrageously lamented the effect it would have on diversity – and equally outrageously labeled it workplace violence denying the victims and their families the benefits they deserve.

There have been unprecedented security leaks, and China is electronically in bed with us. They even lost the graves of our warriors at Arlington. I could go on, but it should be clear that all of the above is the result of a leader who knows not the difference between a corps and a corpse and is both indifferent to and unknowledgeable of military readiness. And as bad, the military leadership is complicit in these disasters. (As a further tribute to their ineptitude, they have actually considered combat-level medals for warriors not shooting and desk-bound computer operators, medals that were the laughingstock of veterans.)

But given that the president tasked the military to act in the Benghazi crisis, what did they do? Indefensibly, they did nothing, they did not even try! No obstacle, no doctrine, nothing can defend not trying, never mind the risk, to save fellow Americans. Were they under orders to sit on their a– and let their fellow Americans die? In my 34 years of military service involving many crises, I never knew of one without an after action report (AAR), in which each and every action was put under a microscope to identify those responsible for the results be they good or bad. Congress, the media, someone should demand the AAR on Benghazi. It must exist. Who ordered the stand down? Who said sit on your a–? Why no hearing on this?

Just as the way forward for America is a return to the morality and values of the past, so too must the military return to the readiness standards and common sense of the past. We can survive in a relatively valueless society – but only with a strong and ready military. Sadly the military is mirroring society – the goal of Mr. Obama and progressives – and will soon be impotent. Once the progressives have a helpless military they no longer need to explain why they didn’t go; they can say we are unable to go. Progress is not the path we are on; true progress is the path to our past. The other scandals may be more glamorous and outrageous (such as lying about Benghazi before the coffins of those massacred by terrorists, enemies’ lists and assaults on the First Amendment) but what Mr. Obama is doing to our military is more grave.

Maj. Gen. Patrick Brady, retired from the U.S. Army, is a recipient of the United States military’s highest decoration, the Medal of Honor. He is the author of “Dead Men Flying: Victory in Viet Nam The Legend of Dust Off: America’s Battlefield Angels.”

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ICIJ Releases Offshore Leaks Database Revealing Names Behind Secret Companies, Trusts

Photo: Shutterstock

Readers can search information about the ownership of more than 100,000 offshore entities in tax havens and discover the networks around them.

Secrecy is no longer acceptable

When Bernard Madoff built his $65 billion house of cards; when food distributors passed off horsemeat as beef lasagna in Europe; and when Apple, Google and other American companies set up structures to channel their profits through Ireland — they all used tax havens.

They bought secrecy, minimal or zero taxes and legal insulation, the distinctive products that tax havens market and that allow companies to operate in a fiscal and regulatory vacuum. Using the offshore economy is akin to acquiring your own island where the rules that most citizens follow don’t apply.

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists publishes today a database that, for the first time in history, will help begin to strip away this secrecy across 10 offshore jurisdictions.

The Offshore Leaks Database allows users to search through more than 100,000 secret companies, trusts and funds created in offshore locales such as the British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Cook Islands and Singapore. The Offshore Leaks web app, developed by La Nación newspaper in Costa Rica for ICIJ, displays graphic visualizations of offshore entities and the networks around them, including, when possible, the company’s true owners.
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• Read the Offshore Leaks Database FAQs
• How we built the Offshore Leaks Database
• Video: See the Offshore Leaks Database in action
• Search the Offshore Leaks Database
• Get in touch with ICIJ

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Attacking Apathy

The data are part of a cache of 2.5 million leaked offshore files ICIJ analyzed with 112 journalists in 58 countries. Since April, stories based on the data — the largest stockpile of inside information about the offshore system ever obtained by a media organization — have been published by more than 40 media organizations worldwide, including The Guardian in the U.K., Le Monde in France, Süddeutsche Zeitung and Norddeutscher Rundfunk in Germany, The Washington Post and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC).

ICIJ’s investigation — called Offshore Leaks by the Twittersphere and the public —has shaken the political and economic establishments from South Korea to Canada, sparking investigations, resignations and a renewed sense of urgency among world leaders that this is the time to rein in offshore abuses .

EU Commissioner Algirdas Semeta said the ICIJ’s investigation has transformed tax politics and amplified political will to tackle the problem of tax evasion – knocking down what the EUobserver called “a wall of apathy” in Europe that had thwarted previous attempts to attack offshore secrecy.

“I personally think Offshore Leaks could be identified as the most significant trigger behind these developments  ...  It has created visibility of the issue and it has triggered political recognition of the amplitude of the problem,” he told EU Observer. 

Semeta said the need for tax transparency overrides the principle of data privacy.

During a visit to the White House in May, British Prime Minister David Cameron made a strong pitch for tackling what he called “the scourge of tax evasion,” one of the central themes of next week’s “G8” meeting, in Northern Ireland, of leaders of eight of the world’s wealthiest countries. “We need to know who really owns a company, who profits from it, whether taxes are paid,” said Cameron, who is under pressure from the international community to address the role of Britain’s crown dependencies and territories in the offshore economy.

Anti-corruption advocates are pushing Cameron to persuade the other G8 leaders to support proposals that would require owners of shell companies to register their holdings in public registries.

ICIJ’s Offshore Leaks Database reveals the names behind more than 100,000 secret companies and trusts created by two offshore services firms: Singapore-based Portcullis TrustNet and BVI-based Commonwealth Trust Limited (CTL). TrustNet and CTL’s clients are spread over more than 170 countries and territories.

The Offshore Leaks web app allows readers to explore the relationships between clients, offshore entities and the lawyers, accountants, banks and other intermediaries who help keep these arrangements secret.

While the database opens up a world that has never been revealed on such a massive scale, the ICIJ Offshore Leaks Database is not a “data dump” – it is a careful release of basic corporate information. ICIJ won’t release personal data en masse; the Offshore Leaks Database doesn’t include records of bank accounts and financial transactions, emails and other correspondence, passports and telephone numbers. The selected and limited information is being published in the public interest.

Pressure for Change

ICIJ’s reporting to date has revealed the offshore dealings of politicians, oligarchs, rogue nations and even religious leaders. While many of the arrangements are perfectly legal, extensive reporting by ICIJ and others show that the anonymity granted by the offshore economy facilitates money laundering, tax evasion, fraud and other crimes.

Even when it’s legal, transparency advocates argue that the use of an alternative, parallel economy undermines democracy because it benefits a few at the expense of the majority.

After 17 months of reporting, ICIJ reporters and partners are still digging into this massive trove of financial information. The Offshore Leaks Database gives ICIJ an opportunity to reach journalists and regular citizens in every corner of the world, particularly in countries most affected by corruption and backroom deals. ICIJ believes many of the best stories may come from its readers when they explore the database.

As it fields tips from the public, ICIJ will continue to work on in-depth, cross-border investigations with its network of reporters and media partners. At the same time, ICIJ will continue to reject demands from governments that it turn over all of the files in its offshore trove. ICIJ is an independent network of investigative reporters — not an arm of government.

Some of the same governments that at one time requested ICIJ and its partners to hand over the full cache of files later announced that they have been working on a gigantic leak of offshore documents similar to those obtained by ICIJ. U.S., U.K. and Australian tax authorities said they will share the data with other governments.

The release of the Offshore Leaks Database happens at a time of economic turmoil. Many countries are still fighting the effects of the 2008 financial crisis, putting leaders around the world under unprecedented domestic and international pressure to make sure tax revenue is not lost to offshore havens.

Within days of ICIJ’s April release of dozens of stories based on the secret offshore files, French president Francois Hollande called for the “eradication” of tax havens. Europe’s largest economic powers – the U.K., France, Spain, Italy and Germany – announced that they will start exchanging bank information.

The surprise was even bigger when tiny Luxembourg, long known as one of the world’s most secretive tax havens, said it will share information with tax authorities about European and U.S. citizens with bank accounts in the country.  Another “onshore” European tax haven, Austria, saw the country’s most powerful banker, Herbert Stepic, resign in May in the wake of an Offshore Leaks story that revealed he used companies in Hong Kong and the British Virgin Islands to conduct property deals he did not report to his employer, Raiffeisen Bank International AG.

Meanwhile, U.K. Prime Minister Cameron is trying to clean up his own backyard: the 10 crown dependencies and overseas territories that serve as tax havens. He has summoned their top ministers to London this weekend to try to convince them to share tax information widely with governments around the world. In a letter to the territories, Cameron told them that the time has come to “knock down the walls of company secrecy."

Semeta, the EU tax commissioner, said the change in EU politics – after years of stalling – is due to “a perfect storm” of events, including ICIJ’s Offshore Leaks.

“Secrecy is no longer acceptable. We need to get rid of it,” Pascal Saint-Amans, tax policy director for the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, told The Toronto Star. “If the rules make it possible, then we'll change the rules.”

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FBI DIRECTOR Does NOT KNOW WHO IS IN CHARGE of IRS CASE, 6 WKS INTO THEIR INVESTIGATION - CAN EVERYBODY SAY, "PUPPET!"

FBI Director Robert Mueller Couldn't Answer Any of Ohio Representative Jim Jordan's Questions!
Mr. Jordan asked Mueller who the lead investigator in the IRS case is, and Mueller admitted that he did NOT KNOW. 

The justice department is investigating the misconduct of the IRS, where IRS agents targeted conservative groups seeking nonprofit status, to cause them extra pain and scrutiny.

Mueller doesn't know who the lead investigator is, how many agents are involved in the case, or even who has been investigated up to this point; 6 weeks into their "supposed" investigation. 

For Jordan, this is an outrage. He says the IRS scandal is the most important issue facing the country. "This has been the biggest story in the country," he says, "and you can't even tell me how many agents are assigned?!"

source: CSPAN

BREAKING NEWS - Julian Assange says he has had 'Indirect Contact' with Edward Snowden

WikiLeaks' founder Julian Assange says he has had indirect communication with Edward Snowden - the former CIA contractor who has divulged details of the scope and breadth of U.S. cyber spying operations.

Full Story:

Fugitive WikiLeaks' founder Julian Assange on Monday (June 10) spoke to Australian television from London and said he had been in indirect contact with former CIA contractor Edward Snowden.

Snowden, an outside contractor for the NSA, announced in a video on Sunday (June 9) from Hong Kong that he was the source of leaks about the ultra-secret agency's surveillance programs.

By Monday, he had dropped out of sight and was expected to be at the centre of an extradition battle to face U.S. legal charges.

[Julian Assange, Wikileaks Founder]
"We have had indirect communication with his people.I don't think it's appropriate at this time that I go into further details."

Later, speaking to CNN, Assange said he believed Snowden should take refuge in Latin America, rather than look to Iceland, which has earned a reputation as a safe haven and acts as the home base for the fundraising efforts of Assange's anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks.

The 41-year-old backed demands by Green lawmakers in Australia that the government there reveal whether its own electronic intelligence agencies had aided the clandestine U.S. data mining programme known as PRISM, revealed by Snowden.

[Julian Assange, Wikileaks Founder]
"We must ask the question and the Australian government must answer the question how many Australians have been intercepted? In the relationship between the Defense Signals Directorate and ASIO (Australian Security and Intelligence Organization) and U.S. intelligence has the Australian government been puling that information about Australians, has it been pulling that information about Americans?," he said.

Assange has formed a political party in Australia, the WikiLeaks Party, and is personally running for a seat in the Senate in September elections.

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Julian Assange: "Edward Snowden, Prism Leaker Is A Hero"

Home Depot Co-Founder: We Should Throw Edward Snowden a Party - We Ought to Be Grateful...

This Company DOESN'T Share Your Online Info

'World's most private search engine' won't betray you to Obama

The federal government may be secretly accessing Americans’ online videos, emails, photos and search histories – with the help of Apple, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook, YouTube, PalTalk, AOL and Skype – but “the world’s most private search engine” is staunchly defending its users’ privacy and civil liberties.

StartPage.com and its sister search engine, Ixquick.com, were launched in 2006 to provide a private way for Americans to conduct Internet searches. StartPage provides a private portal to Google results, and Ixquick allows users to retrieve private results from other search engines.

WND reported in 2010 when Katherine Albrecht, a Harvard-trained privacy expert who helped develop StartPage, warned, “It would blow people’s minds if they knew how much information the big search engines have on the American public. In fact, their dossiers are so detailed they would probably be the envy of the KGB.”

It happens every day, Albrecht explained. When an unfamiliar topic crosses people’s minds, they often go straight to Google, Yahoo or Bing and enter key terms into those search engines. Every day, more than a billion searches for information are performed on Google alone.

“If you get a rash between your toes, you go into Google,” she said. “If you have a miscarriage, you go into Google. If you are having marital difficulties, you look for a counselor on Google. If you lose your job, you look for unemployment benefit information on Google.”

Albrecht said Americans unwittingly share their most private thoughts with search engines, serving up snippets of deeply personal information about their lives, habits, troubles, health concerns, preferences and political leanings.

“We’re essentially telling them our entire life stories – stuff you wouldn’t even tell your mother – because you are in a private room with a computer,” she said. “We tend to think of that as a completely private circumstance. But the reality is that they make a record of every single search you do.”

The search engines have sophisticated algorithms to mine data from searches and create very detailed profiles about Americans. She said those profiles are stored on servers and may fall into the wrong hands – for example, the federal government’s detailed files on unwitting U.S. citizens.

Just recently, the Washington Post reported it obtained a top-secret document on a government program in which the NSA and FBI are “tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track foreign targets.”

The program, code-named PRISM, was utilized to obtain information that has become a critical part of President Obama’s daily briefing, according to the Post, which added, “NSA reporting increasingly relies on PRISM as its leading source of raw material, accounting for nearly 1 in 7 intelligence reports.”

And McClatchy recently reported, “Privacy policies for Google, Yahoo! and other Internet service providers explicitly state that the companies collect users’ data, such as names, email addresses, telephone numbers, credit cards, IP addresses, search queries, purchases, time and date of calls, duration of calls and physical locations.

“The policies say that companies may use that information to send you targeted advertising or, if necessary, to comply with requests from government authorities.”

In a December 2009 interview with CNBC, Google CEO Eric Schmidt divulged that search engines may turn over citizens’ private information to the government.

“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place,” Schmidt said. “But if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines, including Google, do retain this information for some time. And it’s important, for example, that we are all subject to the United States Patriot Act. It is possible that information could be made available to the authorities.”
However, StartPage and Ixquick say they have neither participated in PRISM nor shared Americans’ data with the federal government.

“The privacy of our users rests on three important foundations,” explained StartPage and Ixquick CEO Robert Beens. “We are based in the Netherlands, we use encrypted connections, and – most importantly – we don’t store or share any of our users’ personal search data.”

A statement from StartPage and Ixquick explained:

• No user data stored: StartPage and Ixquick never store user data, including IP addresses and search queries, so government agencies have no incentive to ask for these. This privacy is so complete; the company doesn’t even know who its customers are, so it can’t share anything with Big Brother.

• Encrypted (HTTPS) connections: StartPage and Ixquick were the first search engines to use automatic encryption on all connections to prevent snooping. When searches are encrypted, third parties like ISPs and the NSA can’t eavesdrop on Internet connections to see what people are searching for.

• Not under U.S. jurisdiction: StartPage and Ixquick are based in the Netherlands, so they are not directly subject to U.S. regulations, warrants, or court orders. They can’t be forced to participate in spying programs like PRISM. The company has never turned over a single bit of user data to any government entity in the 14 years it has been in business, which is not surprising since there is no data in the first place.

“Unfortunately, it takes a scandal like PRISM to wake people up to the erosion of privacy, ” Albrecht said. “As people get fed up with being spied on, they look for alternatives. We already serve nearly 3 million private searches each day, and we expect that number to grow as people seek shelter from search engines that store and share their private information.”

This summer, the company plans to launch a new email service called StartMail, which will provide a paid and heavily encrypted private email application. Anyone interested in being a StartMail beta tester can now sign up.

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Jon Stewart Tears Apart Obama, DOJ For Prosecuting Whistleblowers And Potheads... But Not Bankers