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While things 'seem' to be quiet on the front line at the moment, I will take this time to reflect on the intentions of this seemingly quiet period...
He has signed more Executive Orders than any president in history, and if one looks at all the Executive Orders of late, you will see a pattern that is leading up to complete governmental control of all the citizen's lands, food, vehicles; basically all personal assets of every single American, through martial law; and martial law has been covered in one of his latest Executive Orders. It is all too obvious that the Executive Orders are preparing for complete government take-over; socialism, communism, fascism, whatever you wish to call it.
Read this story, in this link:
(click here) Who was Malcolm X, or for That Matter, Who is Barack Obama? and I think you will be able to understand just exactly what is unfolding here, and it seems, is rapidly escalating. (After following the link, above, then come back to this page to read further, and watch the revealing video at the bottom.)
This is heavy stuff folks, and I am honestly beginning to actually believe that Martial Law is in the making right now. I am aghast at the order of things occurring over the last couple years, and cannot ignore the stories; no matter how paranoid they may seem. Every story, even the far fetched, are coming from a source that has been led to believe it so. In Africa, they say that if something has been given a name, then it truly does exist. This makes good sense, as if a subject is being discussed, then it HAS to have validity, even if the one discussing it is mistaken of it's origin or value. One needs to go to the source of the creation of the thing, or idea's existence.
Now, I am not a bible thumping alarmist; as are found all over the Internet, (we used to just see them standing on soapboxes on city street corners) but one cannot just sweep their words under the rug, as the bible is certainly the most accurate book of ancient genealogy we have, and the events surrounding the times of each family and their influences during their eras are well recorded within the pages of the bible, as well as the Torah, or Koran. Our errors, it seems to me, are taking those stories out of context and trying to apply the moralities of those stories to our present day in age, and believing their context to be literal. One needs to understand that one third of that book is history and genealogy, while two thirds are prophecy.
Lately, I have seen numerous sites and pages that claim that Obama is the Antichrist. There were a lot of websites and pages a few years ago that claimed that Bush was the antichrist. I think we all, or at least most of us recognize that Nero was something resembling an antichrist, and Hitler was as well, but I cannot accept that there have actually been multiple antichrists. There was only one Christ... My son showed me a very good website that claimed Bush was the antichrist, back in 2004. I read it through, and gave it much thought before I replied to my son; then 13 years old. The points within the writings of that site were very good, and it also mentioned of Nero and Hitler being antichrists. I finally replied to my son, that while there is a possibility that Bush may be the antichrist, I very much doubted it, but I did say that he just may be the precursor to the antichrist... That brings us now, to Obama.
Christ's conception, birth, and family origins were to most, a complete mystery. It was only a handful of people that believed his origin was of the seed of the Holy Spirit; all the rest of the people believed his origin was merely a mystery, with possibly bad backgrounds. Ultimately, there was a LOT of controversy about how he came to be, and who his father was, as well as his intent and doctrines.
Does this sound familiar? Does anyone really know the origins of Barack Obama; where he was born, or his true parentage; both mother and father, or background, or his intent and doctrines?
Christ taught of peace, morality, love, convictions and responsibility for actions, and ultimately, the sovereignty of every individual under the kingdom of God.
Obama teaches war; under the guise of peace, immorality; through the removal of the belief of God, he refuses to accept the convictions and or responsibility of any of his actions, and has removed the right of sovereignty of the individual under any country, state, or otherwise. He represents the "kingdom" of one Government; One World Order; the New World Order.
Need I say more?
Unless we, the people, come together to rebuke this man from office, along with his full staff of criminals, and sentence ALL of them, and the banksters, to pay for their crimes against us, we will be doomed to succumb to Obama and the Banker criminal's plans for us; and then we will have NO rights or opportunities to overthrow them. Time is truly running out for us to be able to change the course these criminals have set up for us. If we do not act now, then we will be needing to use our bug-out bags and hiding locations until they ultimately find us and execute us as terrorists.
Please watch the Video below, and you will then be able to put the pieces together:
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| U.S. Marine Corps AV-8B Harrier II jets participate in the "Eager Lion"
military exercises at Al Quweira near Aqaba city, 290 km (180 miles)
south of Amman, June 19, 2013.(Reuters / Muhammad Hamed) |
Two US fighter jets have dropped four unarmed bombs in Australia's
World Heritage-listed Great Barrier Reef marine park after a training
exercise went wrong.
The AV-8B Harrier jets took off from the aircraft carrier USS
Bonhomme Richard and each released an inert bomb and an unarmed
explosive bomb off the coast of Queensland, the US 7th Fleet said
in a statement on Saturday.
The four bombs, weighing a total 1.8 metric tons (4,000 pounds),
were dropped in more than 50 meters (164 feet) of water away from
coral that was supposed to have minimized possible damage to the
reef, the statement said. Each Harrier jet dropped two 227-kilo
bombs: one BDU 45 and one High Explosive GBU 12. None of the
bombs exploded as the BDU 45s are inert and the GBU 12s were
unarmed when released.
The training mission went gone wrong as the jets from the 31st
Marine Expeditionary Unit were originally told to drop the bombs
at the Townshend Island bombing range. That plan was aborted
after the controllers said the area was not clear of hazards.
The pilots then went ahead with an emergency jettison as they
were not allowed to land with bombs on board and both were low on
fuel, the navy said.
The US Navy and Australian authorities are now investigating the
incident.
 |
| Coral on Australia's Great Barrier Reef.(Reuters) |
The US Navy is planning to recover the bombs that are lying about
100 kilometres offshore and about 16 nautical miles south of Bell
Cay in the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. The US say that the
chance of the bombs exploding was extremely remote.
''Due to low fuel and the inability to land with the amount of
ordnance they were carrying, the on-scene commander determined it
was necessary to designate an emergency jettison area for the
ordnance,'' US Navy spokesman Commander William Marks said.
He said each bomb was jettisoned in a ''safe, unarmed state
and did not explode''.
The Australian Defense Force said the bombs posed ''minimal
risk or threat to the public, the marine environment or civilian
shipping passing the reef area'', according to AP.
''The incident is being investigated by the US and findings
will be provided to the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority
so that the way ahead can be mutually agreed,'' a spokesman
said.
Senator for Australian Greens Party Larissa Waters has called the
dumping of bombs on the World’s Heritage-listed site
"outrageous''.
"We're letting the US military drop bombs on the World
Heritage Great Barrier Reef. I mean, have we gone completely mad?
Is this how we look after our World Heritage areas now? Letting a
foreign power drop bombs on it?"
The failed training mission happened on the second day of the
biennial joint training exercise Talisman Saber that brings
together 28,000 US and Australian military personnel over three
weeks.
Environmentalists and anti-war activists Graeme Dunstan, who is
against the joint exercise, said that the incident proves the US
cannot be trusted to protect the environment.
“How can they protect the environment and bomb the reef at the
same time? Get real,” Dunstan told AP.
The Great Barrier Reef is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and is the
world’s largest coral reef system, made up of over 2,900
individual reefs and 900 islands, stretching for more than 2,600
kilometers (1,600 miles) along the Australian northeast coast.
Jul 17th - In a stunning development, Deputy Director of the NSA, John Inglis, along with Assistant Attorney General, James Cole, have fled the United States after their participation in a contentious congressional meeting on Capitol Hill.
In that meeting, both Inglis and Cole revealed that the depth of NSA spying far surpassed anything that whistleblower Edward Snowden has made public to date. The unauthorized leaks to Congress by Inglis and Cole, which exposed more about NSA spying than anything Snowden has revealed, shook congressional leaders to their core.
The National Security Agency revealed to an angry congressional panel on Wednesday that its analysis of phone records and online behavior goes exponentially beyond what it had previously disclosed.
[...]
John C Inglis, the deputy director of the surveillance agency, told a member of the House judiciary committee that NSA analysts can perform "a second or third hop query" through its collections of telephone data and internet records in order to find connections to terrorist organizations.
"Hops" refers to a technical term indicating connections between people. A three-hop query means that the NSA can look at data not only from a suspected terrorist, but from everyone that suspect communicated with, and then from everyone those people communicated with, and then from everyone all of those people communicated with.
The Obama administration, blindsided by the leaks, immediately announced that the two would be charged under The Espionage Act, and declared them enemies of the state.
Eric Holder, in a hastily convened press conference, admitted that the two had fled the United States on private jets immediately after the hearing, and that their whereabouts where unknown. He was, however, confident that the U.S. would bring them to justice.
“The national security of the United States has been damaged by those leaks. The safety of the American people and safety of people in allied nations is at risk."
[...]
“I am confident that the people who are responsible will be held accountable.”
Rumors are that the two senior intelligence officials have fled to Venezuela, where like Snowden, it is anticipated they will seek asylum. However, much speculation is swirling at this stage regarding their location and fate.
While President Obama, in a short session before reporters, said, "We won't be scrambling any jets to catch these middle-aged leakers," diplomatic channels were already furiously at work, trying to close off all international airspace.
Updates on this story below:
Updates (EST):
11:01 pm - It has been confirmed by multiple sources that Inglis and Cole have fled to Hong Kong.
Despite this revelation, mainstream media is fawning over news that Cole's wife was once a hand model for Palmolive.
10:24 pm - CNN is reporting, per an anonymous government source, that Inglis and Cole intentionally took their respective posts at the NSA and DOJ in order to leak surveillance information to Congress.
"They engaged in a decades-long, career-building venture just for today's leak," the source said.
9:57 pm - MSNBC pundit Melissa Harris-Perry has called for Inglis and Cole to return to the States and face the consequences of their actions, apparently already tired of talking about the two whistleblowers.
"So come on home, John and James, so we could talk about, you know, something else," Harris-Perry said.
9:42 pm - As the world searches for two of the nation's top intelligence officials, President Obama referred to them as "hackers" in a brief media appearance, attempting to recast the Deputy Director of the NSA and Assistant Attorney General as basement-dwelling, Ramen-noodle-eating cyber thieves who were never employed by the U.S. government or affiliated contractors.
9:16 pm - David Gregory has asked this evening whether congressional leaders, who asked the questions that led to Inglis and Cole's whistle-blowing, should be arrested.
"It was just a question," Gregory Tweeted after coming under fire for suggesting U.S. legislators be jailed for doing their jobs. "I was just echoing what others were wondering."
9:03 pm - After rumors began swirling that Inglis and Cole were aboard a plane with the President of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, several European nations closed off their airspace and forced Nazarbayev's twin-engine aircraft to land in a field in Lithuania.
"We have not been this humiliated since that Jew Borat's movie!" screamed Nazarbayev after Lithuanian officials announced Inglis and Cole were not aboard the president's plane.
8:42 pm - Wikileaks has Tweeted that it has been in touch with Inglis and Cole, though refused to reveal their location or whether or not the organization is helping the two asylum seekers.
8:24 pm - A furious Venezuela has denied that intelligence officials are in the country. "The airspace around Latin America is closed. Nobody can get in or out!"
source
RT has reported that: In a secretly unannounced move, President Barack Obama signed an executive order giving the Department of Homeland Security the ability to shut down all of the United States’ communications systems upon his request.
Barack Obama laid out a statement he titled “Assignment of National Security Emergency Preparedness Communications Function”. No doubt a very confusing title. The reasoning behind his issuing of this executive order, is that he feels the government may one day need to access all of our telephones, computers, cable communications, etc., in the name of national security.
“The Federal Government must have the ability to communicate at all times and under all circumstances to carry out its most critical and time sensitive mission.”
The American public should be concerned about what this “mission” could be. In a presidential election, one candidate’s mission may not be the same as his opponents. RT quotes the president as saying:
“Such communications must be possible under all circumstances to ensure national security, effectively manage emergencies and improve national security..”
The fact that our nation needs so much “national security” is puzzling, given the fact that President Obama has declared himself leader of the front that has ended terrorism in the U.S. It seems like now, more than ever, our nation is in peril according to the State Department; but many U.S. citizens are asking themselves, “From what?”, or better yet, “From who?”
According to Obama, the items of confiscation, or shut down can include: wireline, wireless, satellite, cable, broadcasting, internet, and other key information systems. Never in United States’ history has a president given himself the authority to shut down the entire nation and immobilize the citizenry.
The public has been alerted recently that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been buying an excessive amount of weaponry and ammunitions; inclusive of hallow point bullets. DHS has also been given authority to “supervise” some protests throughout the nation. Tea Party groups have had several organized and peaceful protests circled by Department of Homeland Security officers, leading many to believe that DHS has been given the authority to intimidate as well.
If you combine bullets with nationwide immobilizing of all communications, the power given unto the government, is a power our founding fathers never foresaw, nor wished.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) recently announced that they had already used drones on Americans for surveillance. This is just one step closer to American’s journey towards a police state.
source
note: We are actually NOT one step closer; rather, we are now IN a Police State Country.
The cabal that illegally and surreptitiously seized power in the West knows it has lost the war for planetary control. The result is spreading chaos and panic amongst the cabal elite. The signs of this are everywhere now both in the public realm and in the still secret world of military, spy and gangster agencies.
On the public side, the head of Homeland Security and 15 top Sabbatean agents within that department were fired last week, joining the 26 generals, CIA head David Petraeus, Senate Intelligence Committee Chief J. Rockefeller, Pope Maledict, Queen Beatrix of Holland, Prime Minister Julia Gillard of Australia, King Albert II of Belgium and many others in a purge of cabalist operators. Only Eric Holder now stands, and probably not for long, between President Obama and the legal moves to remove him from office.
On the yet to be made public side of things, Italian P2 freemason lodge members say former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy is planning to seek political refugee status, maybe in Russia. In Japan, public security police sources say that cancer-stricken Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has only a few months left to live and that a replacement has already been chosen from within the current ruling clique.
There are also ongoing secret negotiations between representatives of the Gnostic Illuminati, the heads of the world’s martial arts societies, the White Dragon Society, the government of Russia, the dragon family and the Green and Blue among others. According to several key negotiators there is a broad agreement on the need to replace the current ruling structure of the planet with something more benevolent. There is disagreement however between hardliners, mostly in the Western military intelligence apparatus, who want to completely eliminate the 13 Sabbatean bloodlines and the moderates, including the White Dragon Society and various Asian groups, who favour a truth and reconciliation committee, a jubilee and a general amnesty.
In any case, discussions about what comes next are still taking a back seat to the ongoing efforts to remove the cabal from power in the G7 countries.
The cabal has been fighting tooth and nail to keep that power. In the US, the firing of DHS head Napolitano helped derail a plot to use the highly propagandized Zimmerman trial to trigger race riots as an excuse to declare martial law in the US. The involvement of US Attorney General Eric Holder in attempts to stir up race turmoil is now being investigated.
In other cabal moves, a bombing attack on a Russian naval base in Syria is being reported as having involved Israeli planes flying out of Turkey. This is a clear attempt to provoke a Russian military reprisal against NATO member Turkey, triggering World War 3 and thus the Sabbateans’ long awaited “Armageddon.” Of course nobody is being fooled any more by such false flag operations.
Russia responded by holding emergency military drills in the Far East, on the opposite side of Russia from Turkey, sending the signal that “we will retaliate but not when and where you think.” Instead of being fooled into war, Russian and Gnostic Illuminati agents say they will be targeting Sabbatean mafia leaders and top family members in Europe.
Credible threats were also received from MI6 sources of another nuclear terror attack against Japan. In the latest plot, a nuclear device is supposed to be smuggled into Tokyo through a network of secret underground canals via the US airbase in Yokota in Western Tokyo. The source for this warning is the same one that told the Japanese before March 11, 2011 that Japan was about to be hit with a nuclear attack.
The cabal is also trying desperately to stave off bankruptcy in the face of a growing global boycott of cabal income sources. In Japan, they have bribed Shunichi Tanaka, the head of the Nuclear Regulation Authority, to prevent the re-opening of Japan’s nuclear power plants, according to Japanese military intelligence sources. Reopening the plants would mean Japan would import $35 billion less oil per month from cabal controlled oil exporting countries.
As a part of this campaign, various gangsters and agents have been spreading radioactive cesium around Fukushima, according to Japanese police sources. The cesium is mostly industrial waste from the oil and medical industries. The public relations office of the Nuclear Regulation Authority refused to comment on these allegations when called by this reporter.
Despite such moves, cabal control of the oil industry is ending. For example, Australia has announced it has discovered more oil than in Iran, Iraq and Venezuala combined.
Combined with Canada and Russia, it means the world will no longer have to go to the volatile Middle East for oil.
Meanwhile, a boycott aimed at bankrupting the cabal government in the United States is gathering momentum. Purchases of US wheat, rice, beef and other commodities are being curtailed by multiple countries including China, Russia, South Korea and Japan. In addition, the ongoing fires and crashes of Boeing jetliners is apparently part of a successful campaign to shut down the exports of largest US exporter.
The death of US financial criminal Mark Rich has also exposed him as the head of an operation started in the 1990’s during the Clinton administration that has been replacing US gold supplies with tungsten coated bars, according to MI5 sources. Most US gold supplies have already left the country meaning the US dollar has no gold backing inside the US. The gold was apparently stolen by the families that own the Federal Reserve Board in order to stave off bankruptcy.
The Chinese communist government, meanwhile, has bailed out Goldman Sachs in South Korea, according to an executive of a Japanese securities company. In return for continued bail outs of this sort, US corporate government spokesperson Obama informally offered the Sandwich Islands to China, according to a source close to the US/China economic negotiations that took place last week. The Sandwich Islands were renamed Hawaii shortly after the US invaded and took them over in 1900. Russia has also been offered the Aleutian Islands, according to FSB sources.
Needless to say, once the criminal corporate government in the US is bankrupted and removed, the restored Republic of the United States of America will declare all such agreements null and void.
Meanwhile Russia’s move to control the Middle East and thus European energy supplies, combined with the pentagon’s refusal to intervene, has sent shock-waves through European corridors of power. President Obama called Russian President Putin about this issue last week but all Obama can do is wring his hands. The Germans have taken a more robust response to Russian oil power politics by vastly increasing solar power generation and allowing the sale of 200 mile per gallon vehicles.
In any case, expect pressure on the cabal to increase steadily until humanity is finally freed.
source
Former U.S. president Jimmy Carter is so concerned about the NSA spying
scandal that he thinks it has essentially resulted in a suspension of
American democracy.
“America does not at the moment have a functioning democracy,” he said at an event in Atlanta on Tuesday sponsored by the Atlantik Bruecke, a private nonprofit association working to further the German-U.S. relationship. The association's name is German for “Atlantic bridge.”
Carter’s remarks didn't appear in the American mainstream press but were reported from Atlanta by the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel, whose Washington correspondent Gregor Peter Schmitz said on Twitter he was present at the event. The story doesn't appear in the English-language section of the Spiegel website and is only available in German.
The 39th U.S. president also said he was pessimistic about the current state of global affairs, wrote Der Spiegel, because there was “no reason for him to be optimistic at this time.” Among the developments that make him uneasy, Carter cited the “falling of Egypt under a military dictatorship.” As president, Carter managed to get then-Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin to sign the Camp David peace agreements in 1979.
Carter said a bright spot was “the triumph of modern technology,” which enabled the democratic uprisings of the Arab Spring; however, the NSA spying scandal, Carter said, according to Der Spiegel, endangers precisely those developments, “as major U.S. Internet platforms such as Google or Facebook lose credibility worldwide.”
source
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| AFP Photo / Paul J. Richards |
Despite the size and scope of Edward Snowden's NSA whistleblowing,
there's little sign of Washington DC changing its practices, and even
less of an indication that any of its European allies will actually hold
it to account.
Germany Flip-Flops
Germany’s change of direction on this issue reveals a lot about
the scale of the problem. Angela Merkel’s initial public response
seemed to be that of outrage. "We are no longer in the cold
war," said Angela Merkel’s spokesman, Steffen Seibert. "If
it is confirmed that diplomatic representations of the European
Union and individual European countries have been spied upon, we
will clearly say that bugging friends is
unacceptable"(Guardian July 1, 2013).
Merkel’s public façade didn’t hold up for long after Snowden
revealed in Der Spiegel magazine only days later that the US and
Germany were in fact partnering in the global spy network.
“They are in bed with the Germans, just like with most other
Western states”, the German magazine quotes Snowden as
saying, adding that the NSA has a Foreign Affairs Directorate
which is responsible for cooperation with other countries (RT
July 8, 2013). The Der Spiegel report also indicated how German
Federal Intelligence Service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND)
and NSA work together.
The embarrassment of this Snowden bombshell seemed to force
Germany down a notch, with Merkel opting for a new policy of
appeasement instead. So was the initial rift between the US and
Germany mere political theatre?
Merkel told Die Zeit that there was "a need to discuss the
balance between privacy and security, but protection against
terrorism was not possible without the option of electronic
surveillance”. She then added, "(I want) the necessary
discussions with the United States to be conducted in the spirit
which, despite the many justified questions, never forgets that
America has been our most loyal ally over the decades and still
is" (Reuters July 10, 2013).
 |
| German Chancellor Angela Merkel.(AFP Photo / Johannes Eisele) |
"For me, there is no
comparison at all between the state security (Stasi) of the GDR
and the work of intelligence services in democratic states,"
Merkel told Die Zeit (Reuters July 10, 2013). Incredible.
But it’s Merkel’s last statement which indicates that she may be
just as out of touch with public opinion as the culture of denial
which still dominates Washington DC.
No real accountability
Putting the overall theme of government abuse of power into
perspective, this week provided a solid example of what should
happen in an advanced civilized democracy. Luxembourg’s
long-serving Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker announced his
resignation this week over a spying scandal involving illegal
phone-taps, alongside a number other highly corrupt activities.
In normal times, what happened in Luxembourg should also happen
in other countries like the US, or Great Britain - but these are
far from normal times. What passes for normal in this bizarre
epoch is anyone’s guess, and the same goes for what is deemed to
be ‘legal’, especially in the United States.
Snowden’s revelations should have been a watershed moment, but
instead in 2013, there appears to be no parliamentary controls to
regulate the practice of warrantless digital surveillance and
data theft on the part of government agencies, and even less
chance of justice in the courts, where adjudicators have been
rendered impotent to enforce the law which have been buried under
an avalanche of emergency war-time edicts and executive orders.
Well before the Snowden affair this year, Germany effectively
cleared the legal path for one of the corporations within the NSA
collective. Through the use of administrative courts and the EU,
the Administrative Court of Schleswig, Germany upheld two
decisions on February 14th, 2013 which ruled that German data
protection laws do not apply to data processing by Facebook (file
numbers 8 B 60/12 and 8 B 61/1).These controversial judicial
procedure were initiated by Facebook Inc. (USA) and by Facebook
Ltd. (Ireland, EU), and reversed a previous order by the
Independent State Center for Data Protection of
Schleswig-Holstein (ULD) which had ruled to allow users to sign
in on Facebook using a pseudonym and to unblock those
user-accounts that had been blocked due to the users not using
their real name and personal data. At the time this was seen as a
victory for Facebook the corporation – when in fact it was really
a victory for the NSA - who harvests its data from Facebook.
 |
| Luxembourg's Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncke.(AFP Photo / John Thys) |
NSA and GCHQ: A Joint Venture
Based on these latest Snowden leaks, we’ve learned more about the
true nature of America’s NSA and Britain’s GCHQ partnership in
this international spy network, sharing their data and
communications. Through the UK Government’s Communications
Headquarters known as TEMPORA, the British agency is able to tap
over 200 fiber optic cables landing in the UK, saving everything
- up to 27 petabytes a day, which are then parsed out to 300 GCHQ
analysts and 250 NSA colleagues who then sift through it.
Over a decade of Patriot Acts, FISA laws and Wikileaks cables has
left Americans and Europeans alike in a precarious state akin to
Stockholm Syndrome, where their love of digital communications
almost trumps their concerns for privacy. This same ambiguity has
been echoed by Obama and Merkel, who both claim that protection
against terrorism is not possible without the option of
electronic surveillance. But the narrative which was originally
framed around Washington’s invasion of its citizens’ privacy has
since gone international. It’s now about governments partnering
with each other - and with corporations, in the largest global
digital dragnet imaginable.
\
The extent of the US National Security Agency (NSA) overseas
spying in Europe has stunned the European public for sure, and
appears to have rattled the political classes in Germany and
Brussels – but only for now.
According to Edward Snowden’s revelations in the German magazine
Der Spiegel last week, the NSA snoops through approximately 20-60
million German phone connections, and 10 million internet data
sets a day. According to the Snowden report, all in all, the NSA
combs through around half a billion German phone calls, emails
and text messages on a monthly basis.
To add insult to injury, it’s been said the US intelligence
regards Germany as a “third class partner”, on par with
the likes of China and Iraq, making them fair game for NSA
targeting. It’s not just Berlin, as the NSA are also said to have
bugged EU diplomatic offices and gained access to EU internal
computer networks.
So where is the crisis of international diplomacy between the US
and Europe? Under normal circumstances, this might morph into a
major diplomatic crisis pitting the EU members on one side and
the US on the other – but alas, these are not really normal
times. Germany and the EU came out swinging, well, sort of.
President of the European Parliament, Martin Schulz hit out
immediately stating:
“If the allegations prove to be true, it would be an extremely
serious matter which will have a severe impact on EU-US
relations”.
Brussels immediately passed a non-binding resolution, which said
that unless the US provided full disclosure about its email and
communications data, then two EU-US transatlantic
information-sharing deals could be revoked. Those deals are the
Terrorist Finance Tracking Program (TFTP) and Passenger Name
Records (PNR). Both were rammed through the EU Parliament during
the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks. It seemed like
the right thing to do at the time. It gives the US Treasury carte
blanche on all European stored data on international financial
transfers, and gives US Homeland Security carte blanche on all
passenger check-ins and ticket bookings on flights.
Few believe that the EU will actually make good on their threats,
seeing the initial reaction as a mere face-saving exercise,
leading to no real action by MEPs in Brussels.
 |
| AFP Photo / Paul J. Richards |
Global Data Industry: A Digital Cartel
The corporate aspect should not be underrated in terms of its
central role in the international digital data trade. Edward
Snowden’s PRISM revelations of government controlled NSA
wiretapping and data theft are nothing new, as former CIA analyst
Russell Tice prove almost a decade ago in 2005 by showing that
the NSA were engaged in unlawful and unconstitutional wiretaps on
American citizens. But the NSA cannot operate without the
partnership of these companies – all of whom have offices and
operational hubs in most foreign markets.
Herein resides the key aspect in all of this - that in order for
agencies like the NSA and GCHQ to get easy access to all of our
digital communications and data, they still need the cooperation
of corporations to do it. In the US, it’s now known what role
major ISPs and mobile carriers like Verizon and AT&T play in
this equation within US borders, including the existence of
NSA-controlled SG3 collection rooms embedded within the companies
facilities. Shocking enough, but not nearly as shocking if you
consider the role of transnational corporations in enabling the
NSA access to your digital threads.
Internationally, citizens have already signed over most of their
privacy simply by using the digital services of US multinationals
like Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Skype, Yahoo and others.
All of these corporation operate within a ‘profit-first’
ethical vacuum where, in many cases, they are actually charging
the NSA for the privilege of consuming their customers’
communications and data. According to the recent Snowden leaks,
the level of collusion between Microsoft Corp and the NSA is
astonishing, where Microsoft allows the NSA to skirt encryption
protocols on Outlook, Skype video and cloud services, and where
data captured by the NSA is routinely passed on to both the FBI
and the CIA (Guardian July 12, 2013).
The horrible irony here is too obvious to ignore: the US
government, through its NSA, is giving away taxpayer dollars so
these corporations can profit from handing over all of your
personal communications and data.
 |
| Reuters / Pawel Kopczynski |
Such an unholy alliance between partnering governments and
transnational corporations could be defined as fascism, but the
global nature of this operation might require a new term to
define what means as a global phenomenon.
Amidst the international Snowden media circus, it’s important not
to forget that what has enabled agencies like the NSA and GCHQ to
act with impunity, is the fact that both these governments have
excelled in capitalising on a post-September 11th paranoia that
has hijacked the national consciousness in both the US and the
UK. The entire basis upon which their relentless war-time remit
has been erected can be described in three words: “War on
Terror”.
It’s already clear to the global citizenry that the US federal
government and its NSA are out of control, and should be reined
in as soon as possible in order to preserve any remaining moral
standing for a country which has exhausted nearly all of its
goodwill internationally – as well as domestically.
Judging by Washington’s stoic and unapologetic stance thus far,
goodwill doesn’t seem to be a high priority yet. Until the
problem is properly addressed, there will remain a gaping hole of
moral leadership in the international community.
What political leaders are slow the realize is that when the
goodwill has been exhausted, so has the trust, and that’s a very
slippery slope indeed.
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