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December 30, 2013
U.S. State Department whistle-blower’s email was hacked and deleted
Maybe some criminals just randomly happened to perform a sophisticated hacking job earlier this month on the email account of someone who just happened to be a U.S. State Department whistle-blower, and they just happened to delete emails detailing misconduct by top State Department officials.
Also, it could just be an additional coincidence that six months ago the law office of the attorneys representing that whistle-blower happened to be burglarized and some files were stolen – other valuables were left untouched – while no other office suites in the high-rise building were burglarized.
On the other hand, maybe high-level officials in the U.S. government (and U.S. corporations – see the post below) use current and former members of the nation’s vast industry of publicly and privately employed spies to conduct illegal black bag jobs, cyber-attacks, and other crimes to cover-up misconduct and perform other special assignments.
http://nypost.com/2013/12/30/state-dept-whistleblower-has-email-hacked-deleted/
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December 27, 2013
America’s Army of Private Spies
Among the most important stories which mainstream news agencies in the U.S. do not publicly discuss (with rare exceptions) is the shadowy industry of spooks employed by major U.S. corporations. This is partly because of laziness and cowardice in the major news media outlets, but it is also because people in the private intelligence business work hard at staying off the public’s radar.
Many people have heard of corporate espionage, but mainly in reference to corporations spying upon other corporations. A more disturbing activity is privately-funded counterintelligence operations directed at nonprofit organizations, whistle-blowers, and others who are deemed enemies or troublemakers by corporate officials.
Such activities are often performed by former intelligence and law enforcement agents – and in some cases by current members of intelligence and law enforcement agencies who are moonlighting.
A few interesting reports on this subject have emerged recently. A month ago, Democracy Now! reported on some of these activities – as I noted in a post below on 26 November. They stated that some of what is being done is clearly illegal, but that it is rarely prosecuted.
An article by Robert P. Abele posted today on CounterPunch titled “The End of Freedom in America” also touches on this subject. Abele examines a variety of threats posed by America’s shift toward an increasingly authoritarian government. One of the threats he mentions is corporate spying.
Of particular interest in the article is a reference to a report published last month by Gary Ruskin, director of the Center for Corporate Policy, a project of Essential Information. Ruskin was interviewed on that broadcast of Democracy Now! on 25 November.
Anyone wishing to understand gang stalking should have a look at his report – “Spooky Business: Corporate Espionage Against Nonprofit Organizations.” Although the document focuses on the use of spies to undermine nonprofit groups (which should be a serious concern to any American), it also contains valuable clues about how counterintelligence crimes are perpetrated in the U.S. – both by the FBI and by privately-employed goons.
While the exact connections to organized stalking can only be speculated upon, it seems almost inconceivable – based on all the evidence cited in this website – that these corporate spooks do not play a major role in at least some of the stalking (or “counterintelligence subversion” if you prefer a more technical term).
I have explored that subject at length in various places on this website – especially in connection with the 2011 case of the hacked emails of the firms HBGary Federal and Stratfor. That case is discussed in Ruskin’s report – including details about the schemes to discredit critics of the Chamber of Commerce using illegal Cointelpro/Stasi-type tactics such as slander, disinformation, cyberwarfare, and threats.
Other topics of interest in the report include the FBI’s infiltration and harassment of the Occupy Wall Street movement – and lying about those activities, as discovered by the Office of the Inspector General, when several members of Congress requested a review of the matter.
Another disturbing issue addressed in the report is the partnership between the FBI and major corporations, called InfraGard. As the report mentions, the ACLU and others have raised serious concerns about the fact that corporate executives who are granted membership in this alliance have privileged access to certain FBI information – presumably as an incentive to provide intelligence for domestic surveillance operations.
Major corporations hire former members of highly-secretive and often-lawless agencies like the FBI to exploit their technical skills and connections (and casual attitude about legality). In the private sector, these former agents are subjected to even less scrutiny than in the government. Also, even in the unlikely event that they get caught breaking a few laws, they are rarely prosecuted.
Ruskin: Some of this lack of accountability and relative impunity may derive from cohesive “old boy networks” within former intelligence, law enforcement and military circles.
A former CIA division chief, Melvin Goodman, said this about the nature of the private spook industry:
“My major concern is the lack of accountability, the lack of responsibility. The entire industry is essentially out of control. It’s outrageous.”
While Ruskin’s report is filled with interesting information, its author makes clear that the extreme secrecy surrounding corporate espionage means that what is publicly known (for example, from the aforementioned hacked emails) “is merely the proverbial tip of the iceberg.”
You can view or download Ruskin’s report here. I highlighted some of the most relevant sections. Spooky Business
Just to review:
Note: Published articles, reports, affidavits, and other documents supporting and explaining the following points in detail can be found in the “What is Gang Stalking?” page of this website.
(1) The FBI has a history of conducting secret illegal counterintelligence operations directed at American citizens (Cointelpro).
(2) Partly because of post-9/11 expansions of legal powers – for example, under the Patriot Act – the FBI is currently as secretive and powerful as ever.
(3) The FBI is exempt from the Whistleblower Protection Act – which makes it extremely unlikely anyone inside the agency will expose any wrongdoing.
(4) The FBI now has a formal special alliance with major corporations (InfraGard).
(5) The FBI got caught by the DOJ’s Office of Inspector General lying about its counterintelligence operations against supporters of Occupy Wall Street – a political movement critical of large corporations.
(6) In one of the rare glimpses into the activities of private security-intelligence firms – the HBGary email hacking incident – we learned that such firms are conducting illegal counterintelligence activities against critics of U.S. corporations and critics of U.S. foreign policy.
(7) A secretive industry of private spooks now serves large corporations, and it is staffed by current and former members of the FBI and other intelligence and law enforcement agencies.
(8) Such persons are famous for having “good old boy” network type relationships with current and former co-workers, and are therefore very unlikely to encounter any scrutiny by law enforcement officials or exposure by whistle-blowers.
(9) Political oversight of intelligence agencies such as the FBI is currently managed by people like Mike Rogers (R-Michigan) – chairman of the House Intelligence Committee – who is a former special agent of the FBI.
(10) Numerous reports have emerged over the past two decades from individual Americans claiming to have been targeted by serious harassment from people using sophisticated counterintelligence tactics remarkably similar to those used by the FBI during the Cointelpro era – slander, blacklisting, wiretapping, black bag jobs, overt surveillance (stalking), etc. – in many cases after angering someone in the business community who has connections to the law enforcement-intelligence industry.
(11) The FBI – and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) with whom the FBI works – have remained absolutely silent about all such harassment claims, despite the DOJ’s own crime survey statistics showing thousands of people reporting such crimes, and despite mainstream news media reports on the phenomenon such as those cited in this website, and despite a former high-level FBI official (the late Ted L. Gunderson) publicly claiming that “gang stalking” is simply a more sophisticated version of Cointelpro.
(12) In the past year, publications from across the political spectrum have expressed alarm over the excesses of the nation’s intelligence agencies – from an article in the Nation alleging the emergence of an “outsourced” and “worse” version of Cointelpro, to a column in Forbes calling for a new Church Committee investigation.
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December 24, 2013
Tor project member Jacob Appelbaum describes being the target of psychological operations by the U.S. government
The U.S. government’s spying-and-lying industry goons do not like Jacob Appelbaum – not even a little bit. Exposing crimes by the U.S. government does not endear you to the intelligence community.
Appelbaum, a U.S. citizen who currently resides in Berlin, is described by Tor as “our main advocate.” For those who do not follow Internet privacy issues, Tor is a network whose free browser enables relatively anonymous navigation of the Internet – even for users who are not particularly tech-savvy.
You can download the Tor browser here: https://www.torproject.org/
As noted in the article linked below, Appelbaum is among the few people with access to the secret documents leaked by NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden. He is also a confidant of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, and he is an outspoken critic of certain U.S. government policies, such as drone assassinations, the use of torture for interrogations, and the use of secret illegal surveillance and counterintelligence tactics against American citizens.
His high-profile makes Appelbaum an important witness regarding the U.S. government’s use of psychological operations (“psyops”) against targeted individuals – a process commonly referred to as “gang stalking.”
Evidence cited elsewhere in this website suggests that psyops are apparently used frequently by U.S. intelligence agencies – and by their minions in private intelligence-security contractor firms. Such tactics have apparently been used in an unsuccessful effort to intimidate Jacob Appelbaum.
For the most part, mainstream U.S. news corporations dutifully avoid investigating and covering the subject of illegal psyops tactics by the U.S. government. Fortunately, the foreign press does not always follow that self-censorship policy.
Russian news agency RT reported on Saturday that Appelbaum suspects U.S. government involvement in a series of raids on his apartment in Berlin. As the article notes, Appelbaum has also been detained on numerous occasions at American airports and has experienced various creepy incidents at his residence. His account is a textbook description of organized stalking psyops tactics:
“On 10 October, for example, there were two women trying to get into my apartment. They pretended that the property management had given them a key to enter because they wanted to rent the apartment. I called the property management – they knew nothing about it and had not issued a key”
Appelbaum believes that the intention behind the incidents is to make him feel uncomfortable – so that he knows they “care” about him “while leaving no possible evidence.”
Another major foreign news agency – which also is not on the leash of the U.S. intelligence agencies – also reported the incident. German broadcaster DW (Deutsche Welle) published this article.
Harassment of that sort is an example of the kind of government actions which inspired this comment last month by journalist Chris Hedges:
“The corporate state, rapidly losing credibility and legitimacy, is lashing out like a wounded animal.”
The American public’s opposition to a proposal for U.S. involvement in the war in Syria earlier this year made clear that Americans are now wisely skeptical of the U.S. political establishment and intelligence community. That was not the case when the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003.
Two people who were on the right side of history – and on the wrong side of the federal government – were Michael Moore and Susan Sarandon. As outspoken critics of the U.S. military invasion of Iraq, they were subjected to hostile criticism.
Possibly, they also encountered some organized harassment by federal agency goons. It is difficult to say whether the actions they claim were directed against them were of a piece with the counterintelligence strategy of organized stalking. Their high-profile raises the possibility that they were simply the targets of “grass roots” vigilantism not associated with intelligence firms or agencies.
On the other hand, all available evidence shows that intelligence and law enforcement activities in the U.S. – both the legal and illegal kind – are largely out-sourced to private contractors. That arrangement – plus the enormous scale of the current homeland security infrastructure – makes it conveniently possible for sophisticated counterintelligence crimes to be implemented privately.
Consequently, it is difficult or impossible to know who is behind the kind of harassment directed at Moore and Sarandon. The same is true of course in cases of full-blown gang stalking of non-famous individuals.
Jacob Appelbaum’s case is much clearer. Anyone who has studied the news reports, commentary, and videos about Appelbaum – and about the organizations, movements, and individuals with whom he is associated, would be unlikely to question either his veracity or his analysis of the hostile attention he has apparently received. I believe that would be the case even for someone who does not share Appelbaum’s political views.
If you are a victim of organized stalking – or anyone wishing to understand the philosophical, political, and technological nature of modern U.S. Big Brother surveillance and illegal counterintelligence operations – I strongly encourage you to watch this recent inteview of Jacob Appelbaum:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vt7XloDNcm4
Among many interesting comments in the interview are those – approximately 7 minutes into the video – in which he discusses the arrogance of spooks who believe that they deserve to be above the law, and their reactions to being exposed by people like Edward Snowden.
He also describes the “immense harassment from the U.S. government and from these spy agencies” which have targeted him, and he specifically mentions zersetzung (the German term for gang stalking used by the Stasi).
Below is a video of another public appearance – from May of this year – in which Appelbaum offers a comprehensive explanation of secret illegal programs by the U.S. government to punish dissidents – beginning with Cointelpro. He also describes his personal experiences as a targeted individual and his views on how to fight the federal goon squads – both politically and technologically.
A perfect example of the cowardly creepy illegal tactics used by the sociopaths in the U.S. government’s intelligence community is described 25 minutes into this video. Appelbaum recounts an incident which occurred in June 2011 in the U.S. His girlfriend was sleeping alone in her bed at night. She awoke and saw two men in the room staring at her with night-vision goggles. The local corrupt police – who knew that the feds were conducting an illegal counterintelligence operation – refused to help.
Most Americans are almost totally ignorant of the lawless, evil nature and secret powers of the shadowy spy agencies perched at the top of their nation’s power structure.
Appelbaum concludes his speech with a very bleak assessment of the prospects for overcoming the Stasi nature of modern American government. I am personally more optimistic on that point, and I would also point out that this particular speech was delivered one month prior to the revelation of secret NSA documents by whistle-blower Edward Snowden – an event which undeniably had a profound impact on the awareness of many Americans about the criminal nature of their government’s intelligence agencies.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ftfEXxFC4Q
Thank you very much to the reader of this website who brought these videos to my attention so I could share them.
Additional information about the apparent break-in by federal goons at the residence of Jacob Appelbaum’s girlfriend in Seattle (while she was sleeping) is discussed in the video broadcast below of Democracy Now! on February 6, 2013.
The segment also features one of the most famous whistle-blowers in American history, Daniel Ellsberg, who released the Pentagon Papers – which exposed the Johnson Administration’s systematic lying to the American public (and Congress) about the Vietnam War.
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December 24, 2013
News report on bullies in law enforcement agencies
This is an illuminating profile of someone whose personality is common in the law enforcement industry.
http://www.theonion.com/articles/insecure-frustrated-bully-with-something-to-prove,33427/
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December 20, 2013
Journalist who has seen Snowden’s cache of documents promises more revelations
Ryan Gallagher at Slate revealed yesterday that he has a “high degree of certainty” that important new stories should be expected over the next few months based on the leaked documents from NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden.
Gallagher reviewed the secret documents while working with journalist Glenn Greenwald earlier this year.
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December 19, 2013
NSA lawsuit attorney claims the feds hacked his emails to intimidate him
On Monday a federal judge ruled that the NSA’s collection of Americans’ phone records is apparently unconstitutional because it violates the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unlawful search and seizure.
Larry Klayman, the public interest lawyer and conservative political activist who brought the successful lawsuit, stated in several interviews – including one on the progressive radio station KPFK yesterday – that his email account was hacked after he filed his lawsuit.
An audio file of the interview can be played/downloaded at the link below. See the 5 pm program for December 18. The interview begins about 2 minutes into the recording.
Klayman stated that someone began sending emails from his account to other people he knows – a move which Klayman interpreted as being an effort by U.S. intelligence community spooks to intimidate him by letting him know he was being closely watched.
He described the hacking to World Net Daily as follows:
“People began receiving from me emails that I had never sent.”
“The government just wanted me to know they were watching me.”
http://www.wnd.com/2013/12/stunning-revelation-from-man-who-sued-nsa/
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December 18, 2013
Accountability at the top of America’s food chain
Five years after an economic recession was caused – in part – by systemic bank fraud, not one high-level bank executive has been successfully prosecuted.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/jan/09/financial-crisis-why-no-executive-prosecutions/
Accountability at the bottom of America’s food chain
An employee of a Michigan retail store was fired last month for leaving the store briefly to help a woman extinguish a vehicle fire in the parking lot. Seriously.
http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/meijer-worker-fired-putting-fire-21214188
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December 16, 2013
Mainstream versus independent news coverage of U.S. spy agencies
Whether they realized it or not, everyone who saw last night’s episode of the CBS show 60 Minutes witnessed an excellent example of how U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies routinely use the corporate news media to stage dog-and-pony shows for propaganda purposes.
Seeking to shore-up their badly-damaged credibility, the NSA granted rare access to a film crew and agreed to answer some questions on camera about their domestic surveillance operations.
Instead of assigning a curious and skeptical sort of news journalist to host the segment, CBS gave the job to John Miller, a former FBI spokesman who had also served as an official at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
Let’s just say he did not ask the sort of questions Glenn Greenwald would have asked. As the article in today’s Guardian makes clear, I am not the only one who noticed that the report was essentially a free commercial for the U.S. spying-and-lying industry.
CBS should seriously consider limiting the content of 60 Minutes to entertainment-related stories, and just abandon the pretense that it is a news program.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/16/nsa-surveillance-60-minutes-cbs-facts
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December 13, 2012
U.S. corporations’ attitudes about Americans’ privacy
News reports over the past year about illegal secret spying on Americans by their own government have included a lot of discussion about the role of private corporations in spying. The most extreme examples are private intelligence-security contractors with secret clearances who have been caught not only spying, but performing counterintelligence activities – as noted, for example, in the December 7 post below.
At the other end of the spectrum are companies such as Lavabit – the secure email provider which has waged a legal battle to protect its users from surveillance that violates the Fourth Amendment.
One corporation whose views on privacy are of interest to many people is Facebook. Its policies are also the subject of lawsuits related to exploiting information about its users.
Apparently, Facebook also wishes to discourage its users from ever choosing to not share information. When a Facebook user starts writing an update to his or her page – and then decides to erase it instead of posting it – Facebook knows and tracks the fact that the user changed his or her mind.
The article linked below states that Facebook claims they do not retain and view the content of such aborted messages, but that the technology they use would enable them to do so if they wished.
Facebook’s stated interest in tracking these instances of users changing their minds about posting updates (which Facebook calls “self-censorship”) is that such decisions reduce the amount of potentially valuable content on Facebook – because some of those posts would have contained information in which somone might have been interested.
The implication is that Facebook wants to achieve the absolute maximum sharing of user information by finding ways to discourage any discretion about revealing anything.
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December 12, 2013
A former judge on illegal conspiracies by the U.S. government
An article by former judge Andrew Napolitano posted today on Reason makes clear that the current spying by the federal government on U.S. citizens meets the legal definition of a criminal conspiracy.
Napolitano notes that domestic spying of the sort revealed by NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden is a clear violation of the Constitution – notwithstanding the Patriot Act or the various secret rulings of the FISA Court.
Government agents wishing to spy on Americans are required by the U.S. Constitution to first obtain a search warrant from a judge, based on probable cause of criminal behavior.
“The pretense is that somehow Congress lessened the standard for spying that is set forth in the Constitution. It is, of course, inconceivable that Congress can change the Constitution (only the states can), but the conspirators would have us believe that it has done so.”
As the article mentions, it has been recently reported that the FBI and local police – perhaps encouraged by the fact that no one has been fired (let alone prosecuted) for the illegal NSA spying – are engaging in their own forms of illegal spying. That surveillance includes the FBI’s use of software to secretly activate webcams on personal computers to spy on Americans, and local police hacking phone calls.
Crimes perpetrated against Americans as part of secret programs – such as the FBI’s Cointelpro operations and the CIA’s MK Ultra experiments – are almost never prosecuted. Earlier this year, when the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, was caught lying to Congress about the NSA spying, he was not even reprimanded – let alone prosecuted for perjury.
Members of U.S. intelligence agencies and law enforcement agencies (and their private contractors) have learned that laws do not apply to them, and they behave accordingly.
http://reason.com/archives/2013/12/12/the-vast-nsa-conspiracy
Update – December 16, 2013
Today a federal judge ruled that the NSA’s spying on Americans’ phone calls is unconstitutional.
At Politico – a website visited by voters from both major political parties – an article on the ruling generated some interesting comments. One person posted a question about whether the NSA should simply be “unplugged.” After 9 hours, the vote count was 1652 to 5 in favor of ending the spy agency.
In contrast, as many of the news reports posted below make clear, leaders of both political parties overwhelmingly support the continuation and expansion of secret powers for the intelligence community and law enforcement agencies.
Counterintelligence operations such as gang stalking by the FBI and intelligence operations such as Big Brother surveillance by the NSA are illegal weapons intended to serve the agenda of people at the top of the nation’s food chain.
http://www.politico.com/story/2013/12/national-security-agency-phones-judge-101203.html
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December 7, 2013
Peter Ludlow at the Nation re-visits the hacking of Stratfor’s emails
One of the incidents with the most important implications regarding gang stalking in recent years occurred when activists associated with the Anonymous movement hacked the emails at the private intelligence firm Stratfor.
The emails provided hard evidence that U.S. intelligence-security contractors engage in secret counterintelligence operations to subvert groups and individuals who pose a political or public relations threat to corporations or to elements of the federal government.
As noted in my November 16 post below, activist Jeremy Hammond was recently sentenced to 10 years in prison for his role in that incident. Journalist Barrett Brown is currently being tried for charges related to his role in exposing what the hackers discovered, and faces a potential prison sentence of up to 105 years.
In his new article in the Nation, Peter Ludlow argues that the particularly aggressive prosecutions associated with the Stratfor incident are not based on the government’s view of the seriousness of computer hacking generally, but rather a concern about the particular targets of the hacking.
“One gets the impression, then, that Hammond incurred the government’s full prosecutorial wrath not because he hacked, but because of whom and for whom he hacked. His “mistake” was to hack for the people and in particular to hack his way into the shadowy world of private surveillance companies and expose the ways popular movements are spied on and undermined.”
Journalist Glenn Greenwald – who was the suggested target of a subversion plan proposed in some of the leaked emails – made a similar point in a February 2011 article for Salon.com when he compared the strong reaction by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) regarding the hacking of Stratfor’s emails to their total lack of concern about a cyber-attack against WikiLeaks.
The DOJ and the FBI not only appear to be more concerned with protecting the interests of large corporations than those of individuals and non-profit groups, they also very likely have a particular interest in preventing the American public from learning about the activities of the numerous secretive intelligence-security contractor firms.
As noted elsewhere in this website, such firms routinely post job advertisements for “surveillance role players” who are required to have active secret clearances and training in counterintelligence. The job descriptions and qualifications strongly suggest that such persons are being used to manage organized stalking operations using tactics similar to the FBI’s infamous Cointelpro program.
Ludlow’s article contains this interesting description of some of the activities of these intelligence contractors that the cyber-activist computer hackers were trying to expose:
“…the ways corporations and private intelligence firms run psychological operations against Americans [emphasis added].”
Unfortunately, the article does not pose – let alone try to answer – the $64,000 question: are these firms the perpetrators of a largely out-sourced modern version of Cointelpro known as “gang stalking?”
Consistent with the government’s behavior generally regarding the case, Barrett Brown’s defense team is being censored by a gag order. While that legally prevents Brown’s attorneys from telling the public why the feds are trying to railroad Brown, no such excuse exists for the mainstream news agencies which are mostly silent on this case.
Even Americans who are unfamiliar with the state-sanctioned crime of gang stalking ought to be concerned about the enormous implications this case has regarding the trend of America devolving into a police state.
Since Hammond and Brown are serving time for their roles in exposing this matter, other journalists should at least feel obligated to take a look at the slimy ecosystem they exposed when they turned over this rock.
Here is the new article – although it might be behind a subscription paywall:
http://www.thenation.com/article/177462/hacktivists-trial
For now at least, the article is also viewable at this link:
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December 7, 2013
The police state grows: federal prison population rose 27 percent in the last ten years
http://freebeacon.com/federal-prison-population-grows-27-percent-in-10-years/
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December 7, 2013
Nelson Mandela, “terrorist” enemy of the U.S. government, R.I.P.
As the world mourns the death of a truly great leader, Nelson Mandela, it is important to remember how he was treated by much of America’s political establishment, who officially viewed him as a terrorist.
Peter Beinart’s article this week in the Daily Beast offers a clear look back at how the U.S. government typically views anyone who does not behave as one of its puppets.
As Beinart notes, Mandella dared to challenge the notion that every instance of power being exercised by the corrupt U.S. government advances the cause of freedom.
“As with [Martin Luther] King, it is this subversive aspect of Mandela’s legacy that is most in danger of being erased as he enters America’s pantheon of sanitized moral icons. But it is precisely the aspect that Americans most badly need. American power and human freedom are two very different things. Sometimes they intersect; sometimes they do not. Walking in Nelson Mandela’s footsteps requires being able to tell the difference.”
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December 3, 2013
Over 700,000 people are now on the U.S. terrorist watch list
A New York Times article on Saturday reports that at least 700,000 people are now on the federal government’s terrorist watch list. Apparently, little is publicly known about exactly how the list is managed. Some excerpts from the article:
“…the government refuses to confirm or deny whether someone is on the list, officially called the Terrorist Screening Database, or divulge the criteria used to make the decisions…”
“The Terrorist Screening Center, which administers the main terrorist watch list, declined to discuss its procedures, or to release current data about the number of people on various watch lists, and how many of them are American citizens.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/01/sunday-review/who-is-watching-the-watch-lists.html?_r=0
Hat-tip to Homeland Stalk for calling attention to this report.
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December 3, 2012
House Oversight Committee Chair says FBI refuses to cooperate with IRS investigation
If the chairman of the House of Representatives’ Oversight and Government Reform Committee is treated with contempt by the FBI and the Department of Justice (DOJ), how do you think those agencies treat average citizens?
Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) says that the FBI is refusing to turn over any documents related to its investigation of the IRS – which has been accused of applying extra scrutiny to groups based on their political beliefs. Issa is suggesting that the FBI became even more reluctant to cooperate with the house committee after consulting with the DOJ:
“The department’s tactics have impeded a congressional investigation and interfered with the committee’s access to documents and information. Obstructing a congressional investigation is a crime.”
Even more disturbing are allegations that members of some political groups have been essentially harassed by both the IRS and the FBI – such as organizer Catherine Engelbrecht:
“She and her husband faced an occupational safety investigation into their company, an IRS audit of their company, repeated rounds of IRS questions about True the Vote’s activities, and six inquiries from the FBI about the King Street Patriots — including general inquiries and specific questions about someone who attended a group meeting.”
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/dec/2/lawmakers-suspect-fbi-is-impeding-irs-inquiry-targ/
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November 30, 2013
New poll shows Americans do not trust each other
A new Associated Press poll shows that the segment of America’s population which believes that “most people can be trusted” has fallen from half (in 1972) to one-third.
The article does not address the extent of the contribution to that distrust by federal government programs such as the NSA’s monitoring of everyone’s phone calls and emails (and the lying about said program by the Director of National Intelligence), or the Homeland Security Department’s snitching program introduced in 2010 (“If you see something, say something”), or programs such as the campaign introduced in Florida earlier this year to encourage citizens to spy on their neighbors, or the drug war, or the militarization of America’s police forces, or the federal government’s “Insider Threat” program introduced earlier this year encouraging government workers to spy on each other, or a secret federally-sanctioned counterintelligence program (“Cointelpro 2.0”) which recruits neighbors, co-workers, and others to participate in terrorizing their fellow Americans who have been placed on secret watch lists (gang stalking).
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20131130/DAACV0QO2.html
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November 26, 2013
America’s Stasi agents are concerned about Snowden’s “doomsday” cache
A report by Reuters yesterday claims that U.S. and British intelligence officials are worried about the release of additional highly-classified documents stashed by NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden.
Although official spokespersons for the Director of National Intelligence and the NSA declined to comment, Reuters reports that a former U.S. official says of future revelations that “the worst is yet to come.”
Apparently, only a fraction of the documents obtained by Snowden has been released, and the rest are stored remotely and heavily encrypted. A source for the article suggested that the cache of unpublished materials is an “insurance policy” for Snowden to discourage efforts to arrest or harm him.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/11/25/us-usa-security-doomsday-idUSBRE9AO0Y120131125
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November 26, 2013
Corporations are using former intelligence agents to spy on non-profit organizations
Yesterday’s broadcast of Democracy Now! (linked below) reported that major U.S. corporations are using spies – including former CIA, NSA, and FBI agents – to conduct surveillance (sometimes illegally) of non-profit organizations engaged in advocacy for causes such as anti-war policy, consumer rights, environmentalism, animal rights, and arms control.
Corporations engaging in this kind of espionage include Wal-Mart, Monsanto, Bank of America, Dow Chemical, Kraft, Coca-Cola, Chevron, Burger King, McDonald’s, Shell, BP, and others – as well as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
As the report notes, such corporate espionage is often illegal, but rarely prosecuted by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). See the DOJ section of the “What is Gang Stalking?” page of this website for more about that department’s collusion with corporations and its moral rot.
http://www.democracynow.org/2013/11/25/spooky_business_us_corporations_enlist_ex
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November 25, 2013
The dam is breaking: another TV news report on gang stalking
Local news and alternative media reporters often cover stories which the national news agencies (and the ACLU) are too cowardly to go near. Another example of that occurred 11 days ago. It just came to my attention today.
Reporter Erin MacPherson with WDTV Channel 5 News (a local CBS affiliate in West Virginia) presented a report – linked below – on “organized stalking.” The broadcast features testimony from two individuals from Pennsylvania who appear to be credible and sincere, discussing their constant harassment by perpetrators using gang stalking tactics.
MacPherson’s report does not delve into the positions (official or off-the-record) of law enforcement or intelligence agency personnel about gang stalking; however, broadcasting such seemingly credible accounts of this form of criminal harassment and surveillance is noteworthy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUkfNpZb0gU
Here is the link to the WDTV’s webpage featuring the story:
http://www.wdtv.com/wdtv.cfm?func=view§ion=5-News&item=Adult-Bullying-Victims-Speak-Out12826
The first version of Cointelpro spilled into the public’s awareness on March 24, 1971, when the Washington Post reported on secret FBI documents leaked to that newspaper by civilian activists.
Then, as now, corrupt U.S. government officials attempted to supress exposure of the FBI’s crimes. U.S. Attorney General John Mitchell (who later served prison time for his role in the Watergate scandal) asked the Post’s executive editor Ben Bradlee not to disclose the documents. To his credit, Bradlee chose patriotism and truth over the imperatives of the corrupt police state thugs.
Another similarity between counterintelligence operations under J. Edgar Hoover and their modern equivalent operations (which are apparently sanctioned by the feds – but partly out-sourced to intelligence contractors) is the use of civilians to perform some of the dirty work.
A Los Angeles Times article in March 2006 explained that under Cointelpro “the bureau had enlisted a local police chief, letter carriers and a switchboard operator at Swathmore College to spy on campus and black activist groups in the Philidelphia area.”
Mainstream news reports in recent years (cited throughout this website) – as well as countless online accounts from self-proclaimed victims of modern gang stalking – indicate that the same tactics are at work, although on a more sophisticated level.
“Terrorism Liaison Officers,” “Fusion Centers,” corporate spies (members of the secretive FBI-corporate partnership organizations InfraGard and DSAC), neighborhood watch program members, junior-league fascists wishing to participate in the Homeland Security Department’s snitch program (“If you see something, say something”), and private intelligence-security firm contractors (“surveillance role players”) are apparently employed as conspirators and useful idiots in gang stalking operations.
Unlike the Cointelpro scandal – which broke into the news by the leaking of documents in 1971 (and was more thoroughly exposed in the Congressional “Church Committee” investigations several years later), gang stalking is entering the public’s consciousness more incrementally – largely through online alternative media sources such as this website, and local news reports such as that of WDTV.
History will also show that the public exposure of organized stalking was kept at bay for years through disinformation efforts by intelligence and law enforcement agencies (and probably through their private intelligence contractors), as well as by the cowardice and journalistic incompetence of the national news outlets.
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November 23, 2013
Documentary released about actress gang-stalked by the FBI
In the FBI’s official website is a page titled “A Brief History of the FBI.” The page contains over 9,000 words, but just one paragraph about the agency’s infamous Cointelpro operations. While no one should be surprised that the FBI downplays that scandalous chapter of its history, the website’s complete whitewash of the program is more blatantly dishonest than one might expect:
“[The FBI] used both traditional investigative techniques and counterintelligence programs (“Cointelpro”) to counteract domestic terrorism and conduct investigations of individuals and organizations who threatened terroristic violence. Wiretapping and other intrusive techniques were discouraged by Hoover in the mid-1960s and eventually were forbidden completely unless they conformed to the Omnibus Crime Control Act. Hoover formally terminated all “Cointelpro” operations on April 28, 1971.”
The notion that the FBI’s Cointelpro operations exclusively targeted people “who threatened terroristic violence” is not merely a lie; it is a lie so completely at odds with the historical record as to insult the reader’s intelligence.
Similarly, omitting the fact that Cointelpro was only terminated after the program was exposed by civilian activists who leaked information about it to the press is essentially a lie.
Equally dishonest is the absence of any reference to the FBI’s criminality. “Intrusive techniques” is a euphemism for secret unconstitutional abuses of power – the revelations of which led to a major Congressional investigation and reforms.
Among the conclusions of the Congressional inquiry was that “the Bureau conducted a sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and association.”
Somehow that quote was not selected for inclusion in the FBI’s website.
Americans curious about the sinister nature of secret federal law enforcement programs should watch a documentary film released earlier this month about one of the victims of Cointelpro.
Jean Seberg, the subject of the documentary, was a talented and well-known movie actress whose accomplishments included a highly-acclaimed performance in Jean-Luc Godard’s film Breathless.
Seberg stopped appearing in films suddenly while she was at the peak of her career, having apparently been blacklisted by the FBI for her support of the civil rights movement during the 1960s – as documented for example in FBI Secrets: An Agent’s Expose by M. Wesley Swearingen. FBI documents which were later declassified and released to the public under FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests showed that the agency targeted Seberg partly because of her financial contributions to groups such as the NAACP.
The set of crimes perpetrated by the FBI against Ms. Seberg is now sometimes referred to as “gang stalking.” In addition to blacklisting, agents used slander to destroy her life socially, professionally, and psychologically.
As seen in the FBI inter-office memo below, the FBI created a false story to defame Seberg while she was pregnant. Agents planted a story suggesting that the father of the baby was a member of the Black Panther Party – rather than Seberg’s husband. The false story was printed in The Los Angeles Times and Newsweek magazine.
By her account, the stress caused by the defamation resulted in Seberg going into premature labor on August 23, 1970. She then gave birth to a 4 pound baby girl who died two days later.
In addition to blacklisting and slandering Seberg, the FBI wiretapped her phone calls, as reported in the Washington Post and other sources.
Investigating and monitoring Jean Seberg’s activities – and trying to destroy her career and her credibility – were not the FBI’s only goals. In the interests of “neutralizing” her as a political dissident, the agency also waged a campaign to terrorize her by means of overt surveillance (organized stalking by multiple perpetrators) and black bag jobs (break-ins), as noted in this description from the (well-sourced) Wikipedia entry about her:
“According to her friends interviewed after her death, Seberg experienced years of aggressive in-person surveillance (constant stalking), as well as break-ins and other intimidation-oriented activity.”
Jean Seberg was gang-stalked by the FBI. Choose a different term for the type of counterintelligence operation involved if you prefer, but the case is a well-documented textbook example of how the tactics are employed.
One of the implications is this: anyone who insists upon seeing incriminating official documents and mainstream news reports before accepting that gang stalking is currently being used by law enforcement agencies, is really saying that he or she believes that gang stalking is no longer being used.
That is an important distinction. Also, while it is impossible to prove a negative, it is reasonable to ask why Americans should assume that the FBI no longer engages in gang stalking. If your answer is that we should believe it because the FBI says that they discontinued their Cointelpro operations, you are saying – in effect – we should believe the people whose crimes involved systematically spreading lies as one of the tactics and who abandoned their operations only when they were exposed by civilian outsiders. Skepticism is a useful intellectual tool, but you have to point it in the right direction.
In August 1979 Seberg died in Paris from an apparent suicide. Her body was found in the back seat of her car along with a suicide note and a bottle of barbiturates. Seberg’s second husband, Romain Gary, publicly blamed the FBI’s counterintelligence operations against her for causing her despair.
“Movie Star: The Secret Lives of Jean Seberg” premiered on the 15th of this month in Marshalltown, Iowa, where Seberg was born.
Click on image to enlarge.
FBI Inter-Office Memo about Jean Seberg – April 27, 1970
The memo explains that the FBI operation involved spreading lies about Jean Seberg by means of a letter from a fictitious person to “cause her embarassment and serve to cheapen her image with the general public.”
On page 2 of the memo is this assurance: “Usual precautions would be taken by the Los Angeles Division to preclude identification of the Bureau as the source of the letter if approval is granted.”
Click on images to enlarge.
Page 2 of Memo
Los Angeles Times article about Jean Seberg (Sept. 14, 1979)
Click on image to enlarge.
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November 20, 2013
When they try to silence you, it means you are landing some blows.
Somebody really does not like what I’m saying on this website. That message was delivered to me in an unambiguous fashion yesterday at about 5:30 pm.
As I made my way down a freeway on-ramp on my motorcycle – traveling about 30 mph – a car darted across the on-ramp, after entering illegally through an emergency exit, and cut me off. I braked hard and skidded but stayed upright and just avoided the front end of the car. It was close enough that it was not clear whether the perpetrator intended for me crash or to just scare me.
I can’t prove it happened, but I can at least provide my account for the record. Just to be clear: this was not a possible case of bad driving. The driver not only pulled out in front of me suddenly; he also darted across the on-ramp directly at me – without even veering to the right to go down the (one-way) ramp toward the freeway.
Below are images to give you a clear idea of the incident. In the aerial view, the blue arrow represents my motorcycle, and the red arrow is the perp. (There were no other vehicles in either lane.) The second image shows what would have been the perp’s view as he approached the gap on the side of the on-ramp.
Just in case I had any doubts about the deliberate nature of the incident, when I arrived home later, they had a perp walk by my apartment, just out of view, and loudly say “Wow, that scared the shit out of me!”
Typical behavior from America’s corrupt law enforcement/intelligence industry goons: cowardly and illegal.
Note that the incident came just after I exposed the fake documentary (see the entry below), and after I contacted multiple people in the media – and successfully encouraged several other individuals targeted by organized stalking to do the same. This website had an increase in visitors from those outreach efforts and then the perps responded with this incident.
It does tend to confirm for me the accuracy of my analysis of the nature of gang stalking as presented in this website; if my ideas were completely off the mark, no one would feel the need to silence me.
Click images to enlarge.
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November 17, 2013
Firecracker Films might produce a TV documentary on gang stalking
A film company called Firecracker Films is (purportedly) considering making a TV documentary series on “targeted individuals.” The company, which produces reality TV shows and commercials, is based in the U.K., but also has a U.S. office.
Several people associated with the company have contacted me recently to inquire whether I might be interested in participating in the project by sharing my own experiences as a target of organized stalking.
At this stage, the company’s representatives say they are trying to contact persons who consider themselves to be targeted individuals. Reportedly, anyone interested in possibly participating must contact the company by December 1st. Prospective participants will initially be interviewed via Skype by a casting director.
According to the representatives I spoke with, if the company decides to proceed with the project, individuals selected to participate would describe their experiences on camera as part of the series.
If you look at the website for Firecracker Films, you will see that victims of gang stalking should not get their hopes up about this being a Frontline-style documentary, or a 60 Minutes exposé. The company mainly produces commercials and sensationistic reality TV shows. Unfortunately though, I have much more serious concerns than that.
As I see it, the burden is on Firecracker Films to overcome the natural suspicion that their project is simply a piece of disinformation being coordinated with the same undercover perpetrators who operate the government front group, FFCHS.
It would be a very different matter if the company issued a press release which stated explicitly that their proposed documentary will be exploring the claim that organized stalking is a government counterintelligence program – as alleged by people such as the late Ted L. Gunderson, a former high-level FBI official.
Instead, there seems to be no interest in inquiring about government complicity, and instead a big emphasis on individuals discussing directed-energy weapons (which exactly mirrors the priorities of FFCHS).
In my opinion, this project is a piece of disinformation being orchestrated by the perpetrators of state-sponsored organized stalking. I recommend that all victims of illegal counterintelligence activities refuse to participate in this project, and try to warn others about it as well.
Since public exposure of organized stalking is the explicit goal of my website, I would naturally support this project if I thought it were legitimate. I doubt there is even any plan to actually produce a documentary – even a bad one. I think this is probably just a means of gathering information from targeted individuals. Also, if a documentary is produced, I am certain it will be for the purposes of disinformation. Victims of illegal intelligence operations will be portrayed as delusional.
Below is a copy of an email I sent today to someone who identified himself as a casting director named Jesse Margolis. I cc’d the email to everyone at Firecracker Films for whom I could locate an email address.
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Jesse,
I enjoyed speaking with you regarding Firecracker Films’ proposed documentary series about “Targeted Individuals.”
As we discussed, virtually all of the published mainstream news reports on organized stalking are posted on my website – “Fight Gang Stalking” – which is now one of the most popular websites about the subject, as you can see from a Google search.
My hope is that at least a few staff members at Firecracker Films will read the material posted there to better acquaint themselves with the nature of organized stalking.
Experiences described by self-proclaimed targets of gang stalking (including my own first-hand experiences) involve many of the same counterintelligence strategies and tactics used by communist East Germany’s Stasi (state police) and the FBI’s infamous Cointelpro operations. Both of those historical examples involved programs to “subvert” or “neutralize” persons seen as dissidents.
Clearly organized stalking is not just a trend of personal vengeance campaigns, community vigilantism, or criminal activity. The tactical sophistication and apparent widespread nature of the crime would require acquiescence by government agencies.
Anyone even casually familiar with the current scope of U.S. (and U.K.) domestic surveillance infrastructure would have to admit that it would be impossible for widespread organized stalking to escape the attention of the numerous local and federal agencies involved in law enforcement and national security.
A Google query of the term “gang stalking” now yields over six million results, yet officials almost never publicly discuss the issue (there are a handful of exceptions which I list on my website). Law enforcement officials generally don’t discuss it – not even to dismiss it as an “urban legend” or the product of delusional thinking.
The total silence on the matter by agencies theoretically interested in preserving the public’s trust on law enforcement issues – such as the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) – is conspicuous. If federal law enforcement officials believe that gang stalking is a myth, you would think they might at least say so to clarify that for the public.
Numerous reports of stalking of an individual by multiple perpetrators appear in official federal crime victim survey statistics (which were obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request), yet the crime is not listed in the DOJ’s otherwise-comprehensive index of types of crime.
Further evidence of government complicity can be found in several published newspaper articles and TV news reports (linked on the Fight Gang Stalking website) which reported that police officers directly participated in organized stalking activities.
Obviously, the fact that gang stalking is apparently state-sanctioned has huge implications for anyone – such as Firecracker Films – reporting on the subject. By definition, if a government engages in such activities, it is doing so – officially or otherwise – as part of a counterintelligence program.
A common element of counterintelligence operations is disinformation. Agencies involved in organized stalking spread false information about such stalking to counter efforts by victims to expose what is happening.
The most common examples of that strategy are the countless websites that purport to be hosted by self-proclaimed victims of organized stalking, but which make references to demons and Freemason conspiracies and such. The intended effect is to convey the impression that everyone who claims to be targeted by gang stalking is simply delusional.
Another component of the disinformation strategy is the use of front groups – most notably, FFCHS (Freedom From Covert Harassment and Surveillance) – which is ostensibly a gang stalking victim support group, but is actually an organization set up by counterintelligence operatives.
A whole page of my Fight Gang Stalking website is devoted to exposing the fact that FFCHS is not what it purports to be. I won’t re-state the case here, but if you have any doubts, you can visit the website and be instantly disabused of any notion that FFCHS might even possibly be legitimate. It isn’t even a close-call.
A Firecracker Films casting announcement for the proposed documentary series makes reference to “experts” on the subject of organized stalking who will be assisting with the project. This immediately struck me as a red flag because – apart from the perpetrators – there are no public “experts” on gang stalking. Those who orchestrate the operations are not about to reveal anything, and targeted individuals can only speculate about the perpetrators.
The kind of expertise needed to get at the nature of organized stalking would be that of an experienced investigative journalist. Ideally, the journalist should be familiar with the history of crimes by law enforcement and intelligence agencies, such as the activities investigated in the 1970s by the U.S. Senate’s Church Committee – namely, the CIA’s MK Ultra project and the FBI’s Cointelpro operations.
Of course, the very best expert would be an agency whistle-blower with inside information, but the only one so far has been the late Ted L. Gunderson, a high-level FBI official who publicly maintained that gang stalking is a more sophisticated version of Cointelpro. If your documentary omits any reference to Mr. Gunderson and Cointelpro, I will view that as an “interesting” editorial decision.
Similarly, it would be a curious decision to not include the brief – but fascinating – TV news and newspaper reports from the summer of 2011 (linked on my website) about organized stalking by police in Stockton, California.
Because of the use of disinformation in counterintelligence operations, anyone claiming expertise on organized stalking should be viewed with deep suspicion – especially anyone associated with the aforementioned front group, FFCHS.
You should also be very suspicious of anyone who seems exclusively interested in discussing electronic weapons – as opposed to the other numerous and historically well-documented counterintelligence subversion tactics: slander, blacklisting, electronic surveillance, gas-lighting, threats, computer hacking, abusive phone calls, GPS tracking of vehicles, mobbing, etc.
As for vetting self-proclaimed targeted individuals for possible participation in your project, the same concerns apply. Most actual victims of sustained vicious psychological operations (“psyops”) tactics and illegal invasive surveillance would probably be very uncomfortable describing their experiences – for some of the same reasons that rape victims are not comfortable testifying about their experiences.
If Firecracker Films is exclusively concerned with producing a series that offers commercially viable entertainment – as opposed to exploring the true nature of gang stalking – then none of the above points necessarily matter much. You could probably just let FFCHS steer the project. A documentary about astrology, for example, could be entertaining despite the fact that the subject is nonsense.
The reality of psychological terrorism by counterintelligence operations is a much darker business than you probably realize. Perpetrators of gang stalking are basically sociopaths working for rogue agencies; they operate very far outside of the boundaries of the U.S. Constitution and morality.
Everyone at Firecracker Films should give serious thought to the moral implications of producing a disinformation puppet show for the shadowy government agencies (and their private contractors) who perpetrate gang stalking.
_______________________
Here is the email address for Jesse Margolis: jesse.margolis@firecrackerfilms.com
Here is Firecracker Films’ website: http://www.firecrackerfilms.com/
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November 16, 2013
Hacker Jeremy Hammond sentenced to 10 years in prison
Yesterday Jeremy Hammond – a hacker associated with the Anonymous movement – was sentenced to ten years in prison after pleading guilty to stealing internal emails from the intelligence firm Stratfor, and leaking them to Wikileaks.
Here are some excerpts from Hammond’s sentencing statement:
I realize that I released the personal information of innocent people who had nothing to do with the operations of the institutions I targeted. I apologize for the release of data that was harmful to individuals and irrelevant to my goals.
I targeted information security firms because they work in secret to protect government and corporate interests at the expense of individual rights, undermining and discrediting activists, journalists and other truth seekers, and spreading disinformation.
As a result of the Stratfor hack, some of the dangers of the unregulated private intelligence industry are now known. It has been revealed through Wikileaks and other journalists around the world that Stratfor maintained a worldwide network of informants that they used to engage in intrusive and possibly illegal surveillance activities on behalf of large multinational corporations.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/15/jeremy-hammond-sentenced_n_4280738.html
The journalist Chris Hedges was in the federal court for Jeremy Hammond’s sentencing, and wrote an account of it for truthdig. Here are some key passages whose relevance to gang stalking are obvious. Emphasis added.
“The sentence was one of the longest in U.S. history for hacking and the maximum the judge could impose under a plea agreement in the case. It was wildly disproportionate to the crime—an act of nonviolent civil disobedience that championed the public good by exposing abuses of power by the government and a security firm. But the excessive sentence was the point. The corporate state, rapidly losing credibility and legitimacy, is lashing out like a wounded animal. It is frightened. It feels the heat from a rising flame of revolt. It is especially afraid of those such as Hammond who have the technical skills to break down electronic walls and expose the corrupt workings of power.”
“[The judge simply accepted] the frightening fact that intelligence agencies now work on behalf of corporations as well as the state.”
When Hedges interviewed Hammond last month at the jail where he was being held, Hammond gave his view of America’s corrupt law enforcement agencies: “the boot boys of the 1 percent, paid to protect the rich and powerful.”
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/feeding_the_flame_of_revolt_20131117
Jeremy Hammond
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November 13, 2013
Survey shows many American writers now afraid to criticize the U.S. government
A survey published yesterday by PEN American Center – an association of American writers dedicated to protecting free expression – found that many published writers in the U.S. reported that they self-censor on subjects such as military affairs, mass incarceration, drug policies, the Occupy Wall Street movement, and criticism of the U.S. government.
The report of the survey – “Chilling Effects: NSA Surveillance Drives U.S. Writers to Self-Censor” – notes that 40 percent of the writers polled had either curtailed their social media activities or seriously considered doing so.
In addition, 33 percent reported deliberately avoiding certain topics – or at least seriously considered avoiding certain topics – in phone or email conversations.
The survey also revealed that 28 percent had refrained – or seriously considered refraining – “from conducting Internet searches or visiting websites on topics that may be considered controversial or suspicious.”
http://www.pen.org/sites/default/files/Chilling%20Effects_PEN%20American.pdf
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November 11, 2013
New film exposes the gang stalkers of East Germany’s Stasi
A major documentary film to be released next month exposes some of the spies of communist East Germany’s infamous Stasi – the state police.
The Stasi developed and used gang stalking tactics extensively to maintain political control over their nation’s citizens during the Cold War. Agents referred to the tactics as zersetzen – German for “corrode” or “decompose” – a reference to the intended effects upon the political dissidents they targeted.
“Being Radler” was produced by a company called Stateless Media. The film draws upon government documents to reveal the identities of former informants still living in Germany and other countries.
Spying on Germans by their former government remains an emotionally-charged issue in Germany – in part because of revelations such as those made by this film.
Recent revelations that Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, was among those whose phone calls were being listened to by America’s NSA have also contributed to concerns among Germans about government spying – including spying by America’s equivalent of the Stasi.
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November 8 , 2013
Anal rape is now legal when the perpetrators are cops.
If you are still waiting for some distant bright line to be crossed before you acknowledge that America is devolving into a police state, maybe the incident described in the piece linked below will qualify.
Sadly, most Americans will resist that realization until they are personally victimized. Even worse, when a few citizens do begin to stand up for their rights, that “dissident” behavior will be cited as evidence by government enforcers that the police state must expand its powers even more to control the emerging “threat.” Even worse than that, many Americans will passively accept such lies.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/363531/drift-toward-despotism-mark-steyn
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November 8, 2013
Journalist Russ Baker on “America’s invisible government”
What real journalism looks like – or more precisely what real journalism sounds like – can be heard in this fascinating interview with investigative journalist Russ Baker, discussing his book Family of Secrets.
The links below are to the most recent podcasts of a non-profit weekly radio program called TUC Radio. The interview ocurred in April 2010.
Baker explores the enormous influence upon U.S. government policy at the highest levels by the shadowy activities of persons officially and unofficially associated with the spying industry – especially the Bush family and the CIA.
Baker’s analysis and investigation is relevant to organized stalking because he shows how powerful individuals and corporations exert enormous influence behind the scenes through America’s intelligence agencies.
Here is the synopsis posted on the program’s website:
“Gore Vidal called Baker’s book about the Bush Dynasty and America’s invisible government one of the most important books of the past ten years. In Family of Secrets Baker asks the obvious, but unanswered question, how can “such a clan occupy the presidency or vice presidency of the US for 20 of the past 28 years” with yet another Bush, Jeb Bush waiting in the wings. Family of Secrets reads and was conceived as a detective story, based on more than 500 interviews and thousands of documents, backed up by more than a 1000 footnotes. And even though the book uncovers a secret political life for all Bushes it is much more than a family expose. In this interview Russ Baker describes the powers behind the scenes, with examples from the CIA, oil and banking, and how these institutions are created by, and make use of people like the Bush family.”
http://www.tucradio.org/2013_FamilySecretsONE.mp3
http://www.tucradio.org/2013_FamilySecretsTWO.mp3
Here is a link to his book:
http://www.amazon.com/Family-Secrets-Dynasty-Powerful-Influence/dp/B002T45028
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November 3, 2013
NSA grabs every possible bit of information
Yesterday’s New York Times featured a detailed article about the NSA’s apparently insatiable appetite for information about everyone everywhere all the time.
It would be difficult to overstate the scope of the agency’s operations, which include intensive spying on America’s allies as well as its enemies, as recent revelations from Edward Snowden’s leaked documents have made clear.
The NSA’s vast resources include a $10.8 billion per year budget and a workforce of 35,000 employees. To help with the hacking of phones and computers around the world, the NSA employs the largest number of mathematicians of any organization in America.
In preparing the article, the Times reviewed leaked NSA documents from Edward Snowden which were shared by the Guardian newspaper. Here is a description of one of their impressions:
“The documents are skewed toward celebration of the agency’s self-described successes, as underlings brag in PowerPoints to their bosses about their triumphs and the managers lay out grand plans.”
The article notes that to some people, the NSA’s efforts to collect the absolute maximum possible amount of information about everyone “may suggest an agency out of control.”
One person who shares that view is William E. Binney, a former senior NSA official:
Mr. Binney said that without new leadership, new laws and top-to-bottom reform, the agency will represent a threat of “turnkey totalitarianism” — the capability to turn its awesome power, now directed mainly against other countries, on the American public. “I think it’s already starting to happen,” he said. “That’s what we have to stop.”
Keep in mind that the NSA is only one of sixteen national security agencies operating in the shadows with minimal public oversight – and that all those agencies employ numerous private contractors with security clearances who are even further removed from public oversight.
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November 2, 2013
An article about gang stalking published in New Statesman
An image from the article
While it just came to my attention, this article was actually published in the 17 May issue of New Statesman – a British weekly magazine of political and cultural topics founded in 1913.
“Ruins of people’s lives: the shadowy subculture of gang stalking” was written by the critically-acclaimed young British novelist, Ned Beauman.
As you can see from reading the article at the link below, the author seems mainly interested in the topic as a source for themes and inspiration for works of fiction, but the publication of another article on this subject in the mainstream media is another indication that the topic is leaking into the public’s consciousness, which is good news.
Here is the letter I sent (which borrows from the overview page of this website) to the author of the piece:
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Mr. Beauman,
I just read your New Statesman article (of May 2013) about gang stalking. You seem to have made the common mistake of assuming that all of the online accounts of gang stalking are believed by the persons who write them.
People who lack first-hand experience – either as victims or perpetrators of gang stalking – make the natural assumption that online comments on the subject are simply expressions of delusional thoughts. In fact, comments in those websites and forums fall into one of two categories. Some of them are honest descriptions of real stalking; the other category – which includes accounts such as the one you cited in which someone said he believed that animals were conspiring against him – are examples of deliberate disinformation.
Gang stalking – also known as “organized stalking” – is a slang term for a set of tactics used in counterintelligence operations involving the covert surveillance and harassment of a targeted individual. The goal of such operations – in the parlance of counterintelligence personnel – is to “subvert” or “neutralize” an individual deemed by a government agency (or its informants) to be an enemy.
No one should assume that the “enemy” in such operations has to be someone conducting espionage or terrorism. It can simply be someone who angered someone with ties to America’s now-vast law enforcement-intelligence community (including their numerous private contractors). A June 10, 2013 article in USA Today noted that about 1.4 million Americans now hold top-secret security clearances.
Those comments you saw online which appeared to have been written by delusional individuals are a form of disinformation (a tactic common in counterintelligence operations); they are intended to mitigate the exposure of a secret Stasi-type “homeland security” program by creating the impression that the entire phenomenon can be ascribed to paranoia or stupidity.
Instead of a “shadowy subculture of gang stalking” – the subtitle of your article – what is happening is a shadowy business of gang stalking. Perform a Google search for “surveillance role player jobs” and see what you find. Your query will yield numerous job listings by intelligence/security firms advertising domestic undercover spying jobs which require an active security clearance and training in counterintelligence tactics. What do you think those people are doing? It’s a safe bet that they are not employed as shopping mall security guards.
Your article mentioned “developments similar to gang stalking that have been documented in the respectable media,” but your article seemed otherwise to be based almost exclusively on items that purported to be victims’ accounts – rather than published news articles.
Directly-relevant news reports are rare, but some are quite interesting, and dovetail perfectly into many accounts by self-proclaimed targets of gang stalking.
A Newsweek/Daily Beast article in August 2000 described a trend of systematic intense harassment of individuals in their workplaces as part of a phenomenon known as “mobbing” – which is commonly reported by victims as an element of organized stalking.
In the years following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, mainstream news media reports about domestic spying in the U.S. began to appear. In 2004, the PBS news program NOW and Newsweek magazine reported that the Pentagon had quietly resumed its practice of domestic surveillance. (Spying on civilians by the U.S. Army had been one of the scandals which led to the famous Church Committee investigations by Congress in the mid-1970s.)
Another relevant news report in 2004 was an article in the U.K. newspaper The Sunday Times about the use of gang stalking tactics (“zersetzen”) by the intelligence agency MI5 to punish whistle-blowers.
In 2006 The Globe and Mail, a Canadian national newspaper, reported that the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) used gang stalking techniques (referred to as “Diffuse and Disrupt” tactics) against terrorism suspects for whom they lacked sufficient evidence to legally prosecute.
In recent years, references to gang stalking in the media have increased. In October 2010, the influential political blog, Daily Kos posted a claim that zersetzen tactics are being used by intelligence agencies in the U.S., the U.K., and Canada.
Two news reports in 2011 described gang stalking operations in California. In January of that year, local TV news broadcasts on KION (Channel 46) and KCBA (Channel 35) featured a report about gang stalking – referred to as such by the reporters and by Lieutenant Larry Richard of the Santa Cruz Police Department. In August, San Joaquin Valley newspaper The Record and KCRA (Channel 3) local TV news reported that the city manager of Stockton, California had been systematically stalked by local police after a break-down in contract negotiations between the city and the police union.
An article in the Sun Sentinel, a Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper in Florida, appeared in December 2012 about the organized stalking of a police officer by other officers and sheriff’s deputies from multiple jurisdictions. The victim of the stalking had cited an off-duty police officer for reckless driving. The stalking – which included illegally snooping on the victim’s private data and efforts to harass and intimidate her – was apparently done in retaliation.
The brazen use of gang stalking tactics for personal vendettas by law enforcement personnel in the Stockton, California and Florida cases seem to suggest that the officers involved were familiar with the effectiveness of the methods and were also used to getting away with such behavior.
At least two articles in 2013 alleged that the FBI’s infamous Cointelpro operations have re-emerged in full force. In January, an article in CounterPunch magazine asserted that “Cointelpro is alive and well.” In June, an article in the Nation (America’s oldest continuously-published weekly magazine) examined the case of journalist Barrett Brown. He currently faces a potential jail sentence of 105 years in connection with his efforts to expose the activities of private security/intelligence firms. The article’s author wrote: “One might think that what we are looking at is Cointelpro 2.0 – an outsourced surveillance state – but in fact it’s worse.”
The cover article of the October 2013 issue of the magazine Fortean Times is about “State-Sponsored Gangstalking” in the U.S. The author – a professor at California State University Long Beach – explored the case of a former U.S. military service member who stole some equipment and information from the U.S. military, and was then targeted for long-term intense harassment using psychological operations tactics and electronic weapons.
If you wish to see an archive of the above-referenced articles and other related materials (such as a link to the Congressional report about the CIA’s infamous Project MK Ultra mind-control experiments, an affidavit from an FBI whistle-blower about that agency’s role in gang stalking, etc.), you can find it at my website, called “Fight Gang Stalking” – a source which did not exist when you were writing your article.
You concluded your piece in the New Statesman by suggesting that you would likely revisit the subject of gang stalking – at least for inspiration for your fiction. I hope that you do so, and that you consider writing another article which explores the dark business of counterintelligence that gave birth to this form of crime.
Best Wishes,
——
http://www.newstatesman.com/2013/05/ruins-peoples-lives
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November 2, 2013
America’s partners in the international drug war
In the past couple of weeks, news reports have emerged about how the U.S. intelligence community uses its snooping technology to track the networks of friends and associates of Americans – for example by “friends” lists and address books in social media and email accounts. Big Brother wants the ability to identify, monitor, and investigate people based on the people with whom they communicate.
American citizens should also follow this strategy to evaluate the moral character of our nation’s intelligence and law enforcement community.
One of the interesting people on the U.S. government’s friends list is the head of the Honduras’ law enforcement agencies, General Juan Carlos Bonilla. Since the Honduras is apparently the main waystation for cocaine being smuggled to the U.S. and Europe, America’s law enforcement and intelligence communities are inevitably doing business with him.
Bonilla oversees a law enforcement infrastructure accused of employing death squads. By his own account, all law enforcement units in the Honduras are under his control, and he receives support from the U.S. Embassy. Although it apparently does not trouble the U.S. government, the word “control” only applies very loosely: according to an AP article published today (linked below) “there is no consistent account of how many officers are on the payroll or how many show up for work, only estimates ranging from 8,000 to 15,000.”
Just like gang stalking, the drug war means jobs and power for many people in the U.S. government (and their private contractors). Many of those people don’t care about the fall-out at home or abroad of the perpetual warfare. The Honduras has one of the highest murder rates in the world – a fact not unrelated to its key role in the black market for drugs – which is propped-up by the U.S. government’s prohibitionist policies.
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November 1, 2013
More leaks from the intelligence community are anticipated according to ABC News
An ABC News report yesterday suggests that more revelations about scandalous secret activities at the NSA and the CIA are forthcoming. The article quotes an attorney at a whistleblower protection organization called Government Accountability Gap, who says that their group has been contacted by other persons in the intelligence community who have apparently been inspired by the example set by Edward Snowden.
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October 31, 2013
A revealing exchange about the federal government’s view of Americans’ privacy rights in House Intelligence Committee hearing
As you can see in this half-minute video clip, Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Mike Rogers (R-Michigan), has an interesting view of Americans’ privacy rights. In essence, he apparently believes that if you don’t find out that someone is spying on you, then it is as if it didn’t happen.
By the way, Rep. Rogers is a former FBI agent. For some reason, leaders of the House and Senate intelligence committees are rarely, say, former ACLU lawyers.
Please don’t think that by calling attention to this video clip I mean to suggest that Congressman Rogers is essentially a rodent who couldn’t care less about the U.S. Constitution, or that he should not be anywhere near the levers of power in America’s government.
Nor should anyone assume that I necessarily share the position common among libertarians that the views of Rep. Rogers’ Senate counterpart, Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.), are disturbingly close to the views of Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler.
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October 31, 2013
FBI’s tactics in Boston Marathon bombing investigation are fueling suspicions
Anyone interested in the way the FBI conducts its business (which mostly occurs in the shadows) has no choice but to go outside the mainstream news media and read the reporting and analysis that is unburdened by the self-censorship of most corporate news agencies.
An article posted on Tuesday in WhoWhatWhy raises some interesting questions:
“In the six months since the Boston Marathon bombing, the FBI has by all appearances been relentlessly intimidating, punishing, deporting and, in one case, shooting to death, persons connected, sometimes only tangentially, with the alleged bombers.
All of these individuals have something in common: If afforded constitutional protections and treated as witnesses instead of perpetrators, they could potentially help clear up questions about the violence of April 15. And they might also be able to help clarify the methods and extent of the FBI’s recruitment of immigrants and others for undercover work, and how that could relate to the Bureau’s prior relationship with the bombing suspects—a relationship the Bureau has variously hidden or downplayed.”
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October 28, 2013
Washington Navy Yard shooter had emailed gang stalking support group
A few days ago The New York Post reported that prior to his mass shooting rampage in September, the Washington Navy Yard shooter, Aaron Alexis, had sent three emails to the group called Freedom From Covert Harassment & Surveillance (FFCHS).
As explained in detail in the web page about the organization in this website, FFCHS is a front group. Ostensibly it is a support group for gang stalking victims, but it is clearly a disinformation entity.
The federal government – which apparently monitors everyone’s phone calls, emails, and Internet activity – failed to intervene despite the shooter’s emails (and despite other obvious warning flags). See section 8 (Mobbing & Workplace Violence) of the “What is Gang Stalking?” page of this website for the full details of the case.
The New York Post notes that there are now more questions about the official account of what happened:
“[The emails] also suggest that the bloody rampage was plotted as a revenge attack against the US Navy — contrary to FBI statements that the former sailor did not appear to have had a specific target.”
http://nypost.com/2013/10/23/navy-yard-gunman-feared-mind-weapon-before-rampage/
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October 27, 2013
Cover article of this month’s Fortean Times is about gang stalking
The cover article of the October 2013 issue of the U.K.-based magazine Fortean Times is called “Strange Tales of Homeland Security.” As the blurb on the cover makes clear, the piece is about “State-Sponsored Gangstalking.”
Click on image to enlarge.
The U.S. version of the magazine features the article in its October issue; the U.K. version (pictured here) – which apparently runs a month earlier – featured the article in September.
The author of the piece, Robert Guffey – a faculty member of the English Department at California State University Long Beach – describes the article in his blog (Cryptoscatology) as follows:
“Strange Tales of Homeland Security” is a bizarre—but 100% true—first person journalistic account of government harassment taken to the nth degree. This article covers a great deal in a relatively short space: Homeland Security agents run amok in the Pacific Beach area of San Diego, the use of electromagnetic nonlethal weapons to torture homeless people, drug users and ex-prisoners…”
Guffey’s article describes in detail how a U.S. military intelligence agency perpetrated an intense gang stalking campaign against a U.S. citizen.
A marine had gone AWOL after stealing some sensitive military property – including night vision goggles and a laptop containing classfied information. Apparently the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) initiated an organized stalking campaign against the suspect and his associates as well as an investigation. Various psychological operations tactics were used, such as overt stalking, in addition to some far more exotic methods. Possibly the operations were intended to serve as both a form of extra-judicial punishment and as experimentation.
Incidentally, I am personally familiar with the flyer pictured in the article, which mentions several websites about organized stalking. The flyer was created prior to the creation of Fight Gang Stalking, so there is no reference to it. The flyer also inadvertently included some disinformation websites – such as the site for FFCHS.
Click here to download a copy of Robert Guffey’s Fortean Times article as a Word document. (The article is behind a subscription pay-wall at the magazine’s website.)
Strange Tales of Homeland Security
Here is a refernce to the article in Robert Guffey’s blog, Cryptoscatology.
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October 27, 2013
Homeland Security Dept. agents raided a journalist’s home and seized her files
This week brought news of yet another disturbing event in the federal government’s war on journalists who are critical of the police state. Reporter Audrey Hudson revealed this week in an interview with the Daily Caller that federal agents confiscated her notes – which contained the names of her confidential sources – when they raided her home in August. She did not discover that the documents had been taken until a month later.
At about 4:30 am August 6th, agents from the Department of Homeland Security and Maryland State police launched a raid on the home of Ms. Hudson – based on a search warrant to seize weapons which her husband was prohibited from possessing because of an incident 6 years earlier in which he had fired a weapon off of a pier on New Year’s Eve (the couple lives on a bay).
Although she was unaware of it at the time of the raid, the agents had seized Hudson’s notes (even though they were not named in the subpoena). Those documents included names of her anonymous sources inside the Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration.
During the raid, an investigator with the Coast Guard Investigative Service asked Hudson if she was the person who had written a series of stories for the Washington Times which were critical of air marshals. The Coast Guard operates under the Department of Homeland Security, and the investigator identified himself as a former air marshal official.
Ms. Hudson, who was twice nominated by the Washington Times for a Pulitzer Prize, described the documents that were seized:
“In particular, the files included notes that were used to expose how the Federal Air Marshal Service had lied to Congress about the number of airline flights there were actually protecting against another terrorist attack.”
On Friday, the Washington Times said it is “preparing legal action to fight what it called an unwarranted intrusion on the First Amendment.”
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/oct/25/armed-agents-seize-records-reporter-washington-tim/
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October 27, 2013
Mozilla released a new browser add-on to reveal snoopers, advertisers, and others
On Friday, the non-profit free software community Mozilla (producer of the Firefox web browser) released a new add-on for Firefox called Lightbeam – which is designed to reveal third-parties who are active on whichever website you are visiting. (The “first party” is the website; you are the “second party.”)
Some of the third party entities are legitimate – they make the websites work properly; others are advertisers and snoopers. The idea is to display all the parties who are interacting with the sites you visit. Most of the reviews I have seen for Lightbeam are very positive.
If you have the Mozilla Firefox web browser, here is the site where you can download the new Lightbeam add-on:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/lightbeam/
If you are not yet using Firefox, here is the site where you can download the browser:
http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/?src=amo
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October 24, 2013
U.S. government’s use of Stasi tactics on allies is not going over well
Maybe it should have occurred to the creepy power-drunk bastards in America’s spying industry that if they aimed their secret surveillance machine at everyone in the world – American citizens and allies included – that it might end badly.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel – who grew up in Communist East Germany and thus knows about the original Stasi first-hand – phoned President Obama yesterday to express her displeasure about what her spokesman described as “a grave breach of trust.”
Apparently, Ms. Merkel is not amused by revelations that U.S. spooks had been tapping her private cell phone for several years as if she were a criminal suspect named in a search warrant.
Update – December 17, 2013 – Merkel compares the NSA to the Stasi
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/17/merkel-compares-nsa-stasi-obama
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October 24, 2013
Marijuana prohibition: America’s police state versus America’s citizens
A Gallup poll published this week shows that 58 percent of Americans say marijuana should be legalized. In the mean time, an American is arrested for marijuana possession every 48 seconds (658,231 arrests for possession last year).
http://www.gallup.com/poll/165539/first-time-americans-favor-legalizing-marijuana.aspx
http://blog.norml.org/2013/09/16/us-marijuana-arrests-remain-largely-unchanged-in-2012/
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October 19, 2013
CIA director is resisting release of Senate report criticizing the agency’s use of torture
American tax payers have funded a $40 million report on the CIA’s use of torture (“enhanced interrogation techniques”) in questioning terrorism suspects, but CIA Director John Brennan apparently doesn’t want the public to see it. President Obama – predictably – has offered no support for the push by several members of the Senate Intelligence Committee to have the 6,300-page report released to the public.
One of the reasons Brennan probably does not want the report released is noted in a New Yorker article this week by Jane Mayer. The CIA’s top lawyer, Stephen Preston, admitted in a Senate hearing this week that the CIA has been doing a bit of lying to Congress:
…Preston admits outright that, contrary to the C.I.A.’s insistence that it did not actively impede congressional oversight of its detention and interrogation program, “briefings to the Committees included inaccurate information related to aspects of the program of express interest to Members.”
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2013/10/a-cia-lawyer-answers-to-the-senate.html
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October 18, 2013
Conservatives applauding the civil disobedience of Americans who stand up to the police state
Writing in the conservative political journal National Review, Kevin Williamson and Mark Steyn praised the veterans who tore down the barricades placed around the war memorials in Washington D.C. during the recent government shut-down. Williamson wrote that the veterans’ actions were “as excellent a gesture of the American spirit as our increasingly docile nation has seen in years.”
Steyn observed that the government gives Americans reasons to be cautious about clashing with the police state. He cited the non-reaction to the recent fatal shooting by police of the unarmed female motorist in front of the White House:
“… [Washington, D.C. is]…a town where an unarmed woman can be left a bullet-riddled corpse merely for driving too near His Benign Majesty’s palace and nobody seems to care…”
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/361644/potemkin-parliament-mark-steyn
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October 18, 2013
America’s spying-and-lying industry’s biggest critic is gaining power
People whose careers involve trampling on the U.S. Constitution have another thing to worry about as of this week.
Constitutional lawyer and journalist Glenn Greenwald – whose profile skyrocketed after NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden chose him as the primary conduit for revelations about the NSA’s spying on U.S. citizens – has been chosen to help launch a news agency personally funded by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar.
Others chosen to join the new venture include Greenwald’s colleague and documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras and journalist Jeremy Scahill.
This has profound implications for agencies such as the CIA – who have historically infiltrated, intimidated, and corrupted the establishment news media.
The news about Greenwald comes on the heels of the announcement that Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, is buying the Washington Post. The two developments suggest a possible trend – good for Americans, but terrible for the police state – that people with serious financial resources are recognizing the need to stand up to the Stasi rodents.
Here is a CNN article about the new venture:
http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/16/world/europe/greenwald-guardian-nsa-spying/
Here is Greenwald’s newest column in the Guardian – a reminder of why Edward Snowden, a single American patriot who out-foxed the entire police state, chose Greenwald as the journalist he could trust.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/14/independent-epitaph-establishment-journalism
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October 15, 2013
Are U.S. politicians being blackmailed by our intelligence agencies?
A senior policy analyst at the ACLU and an editor at Reason are expressing concerns that America’s political leaders are perhaps being blackmailed by our intelligence agencies to pressure them into supporting the policy agendas of those agencies.
This was exactly the concern raised by Senator Frank Church in the 1970s when he led the investigations into Cointelpro, MK Ultra, and other scandalous secret programs.
As J.D. Tuccille notes in today’s Reason article, former NSA analyst and whistle-blower Russ Tice claims that surveillance of high-ranking officials is common, and that President Obama, for example, was the target of an NSA wiretap in 2004.
Obviously, such information gathering could explain the willingness of American politicians to grant vast powers to the intelligence and law enforcement community despite concerns by the public about their privacy and other rights being violated.
http://reason.com/blog/2013/10/15/is-the-nsa-blackmailing-officials-into-s
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October 12, 2013
Christopher Hedges and Robert Scheer on American Christian Fascism
Yesterday progressive journalist Christopher Hedges was interviewed by Robert Scheer, editor of Truthdig, about a concern they both share regarding the threat posed by what Hedges characterizes as an (heretical) fascist strain of American Christianity.
Hedges is the son of a Presbyterian minister and has a masters degree from Harvard Divinity School. He is fluent in Arabic, French, Spanish, Latin, and Ancient Greek. Formerly a journalist at the New York Times, Hedges now writes a column at Truthdig in which he is harshly critical of both major political parties for their slavish devotion to corporate interests and the military-industrial complex, among other things.
This particular issue – the allegation of a fascist element in American Christianity – is a subject with possible relevance to gang stalking.
Hedges is a critic of the police state nature of America’s current government – such as the Big Brother-type surveillance of the NSA. In this interview however, he is focused more on the emergence of a militant right-wing religious faction, which could gain influence in the event of an economic and political collapse resulting from the corrupt governance by America’s plutocracy.
Personally, I would like to hear Hedges also address some of the conflicting right-wing agendas. For example, the federal government has massively expanded the powers and activities of the military and federal law enforcement agencies since the 9/11 terrorist attacks. A powerful military and a “law-and-order” attitude about police are traditionally supported by religious conservative Republicans. On the other hand, that same group of voters takes a dim view of efforts to restrict individual gun rights and to more closely monitor Americans’ personal activities – which are among the priorities of proponents of a powerful homeland security infrastructure.
So the full analysis of the political dynamics is complicated. However, Hedges’ points about some cultural aspects of Christianity as it is currently manifested in some sectors of American society do have implications relevant to organized stalking.
I won’t try to characterize Hedges’ views – instead I encourage you to listen to the interview, which is fascinating. I would only add that some of the people he is talking about could easily be – and very likely are being – manipulated to serve the interests of counterintelligence operations.
Recruitment of “surveillance role players” by security/intelligence contractors (a topic addressed in multiple posts below and elsewhere in this website) and enlisting the cooperation of other citizens in such operations would very likely exploit the kinds of prejudices and inclinations among the kind of religious followers described by Hedges, for reasons which are fairly obvious.
If you accept Hedges’ characterization of such people – and I do – it is easy to see how they would be willing participants in a process which, like the FBI’s original Cointelpro operations, targets individuals who deviate from the orthodox political culture.
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October 6, 2013
A deep and unauditable source of money for domestic spying
First-hand accounts by individuals targeted for counterintelligence surveillance and subversion (organized stalking) depict a process that would require serious funding – for personnel, surveillance equipment, and in at least some cases, renting a residence (or even several residences) close to the targeted individual.
In one particularly well-reported case of organized stalking in California in 2011, the city manager of Stockton was systematically stalked by local police (a claim supported by the city’s mayor and reported on local TV news programs and in newspaper accounts). In that case, the police officers’ union brazenly purchased the house next to the victim’s residence and used it as a base of operations.
The most plausible explanation for that particular incident, based on the reported facts, is that the local police were familiar with the counterintelligence tactics of organized stalking from previous activities in which they had participated, and decided to employ the methods (psychological operations tactics) for their own unofficial vengeance operation when the police union’s contract negotiations with the city broke down.
The operation’s funding in that particular case was probably unique. The nationwide phenomenon of reported cases of organized stalking – as evidenced in the U.S. Department of Justice’s crime survey statistics obtained by a Freedom of Information Act request – would require a source of funding that is both large and unlikely to be exposed by public auditing.
Historically and currently – according to publicly-available information – the two entities most heavily-involved in U.S. domestic counterintelligence operations are the FBI and the Pentagon. The FBI is officially the primary domestic counterintelligence agency in the U.S., but the military’s involvement in domestic spying also has a well-established history.
One of the scandals – along with Watergate, Cointelpro, and other crimes – which led to the U.S. Senate’s Church Committee investigations in the 1970s was the spying on Americans suspected of being political dissidents by U.S. Army intelligence agents.
A Newsweek article in June 2004 noted that apparently the Pentagon had quietly resumed its practice of spying on American citizens in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Such reporting helps explain the numerous job listings by military/intelligence contractors for what appear to be domestic spying positions. Ads for “surveillance role players” state that applicants must have backgrounds in counterintelligence and active security clearances.
Apparently, U.S. counterintelligence operations are largely outsourced to military/intelligence/security contractors like The Masy Group, Prescient Edge, Whitney, Bradley, & Brown, etc. – each of whom advertises surveillance role player (gang stalker) jobs.
For this shadowy industry, every individual targeted for surveillance and subversion as a potential security threat is a commodity – in the same way that each inmate is a commodity from the perspective of America’s enormous prison industry.
Contractors perpetrating counterintelligence activities are essentially parasites who have tapped into a financial blood supply that comes with the added benefit of the thrill of participating in a secret neo-fascist brotherhood that is effectively above the law.
Plenty of money for organized stalking is sloshing around in the federal pig trough – even as America goes bankrupt. As noted in an article by Ralph Nader published two days ago in CounterPunch magazine, the U.S. military’s budget is not only massive (larger than the next ten largest militaries in the world combined), it is also impossible to audit – according to the government itself:
The U.S. defense budget for 2013 is estimated to be around $716 billion (not counting defense expenses in other civilian departments.)
…The Government Accountability Office (GAO) every year declares the Pentagon budget to be “un-auditable.”
As for the other main entity involved in domestic counterintelligence – the FBI – its previous director, Robert Mueller, recently said the agency will cope with the automatic spending cuts of the federal budget sequestration by shifting resources away from legitimate objectives like fighting violent crime and white-collar business fraud to “national security” – which presumably includes domestic spying and counterintelligence operations – such as the infiltration of “dissident” groups like Occupy Wall Street and the subversion (systematic harassment) of targeted individuals – as in the days of the original Cointelpro.
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October 2, 2013
Reason describes the FBI as a “dangerous” domestic spy agency
If the FBI was reined-in at all by Congress following the Cointelpro scandal in the 1970s, it has since fully returned to its status as a rogue agency. Anonymous bloggers targeted by counteringelligence “gang stalking” operations are not the only ones who suspect this.
Reason is a libertarian opinion journal, but hardly a fringe publication. The editors of the magazine – which recently celebrated its 45th anniversary – interviewed conservative columnist George Will last month, for example, and the mutual respect was evident.
An article by J.D. Tuccille last week in Reason called attention to a report by the ACLU about the FBI’s abuse of its powers. As noted in the article, the FBI’s history of operating outside the lines dates back to the agency’s inception, and they are definitely off the Constitutional leash in the post-9/11 era:
“Never hesitant about flexing its muscles to target dissenters and whistleblowers, the FBI….is more dangerous than ever.”
Anyone who is skeptical that a nationwide phenomenon of organized stalking is being used as a counterintelligence weapon should consider this paragraph from the article – which explains not only how the FBI is able to mostly keep its agents from revealing the agency’s crimes, but also why the abuses tend not to be investigated very aggressively by the press:
Exempted from the Whistleblower Protection Act, the FBI freely retaliates against employees who attempt to call out wrongdoing. As a result, it’s rare for FBI employees to speak out. That culture lends itself to a willingness to target whistleblowers in other agencies—and journalists. Apart from recent revelations about spying on the press, “In 2010 the Inspector General reported the FBI used an illegal ‘exigent letter’ to obtain the telephone records of 7 New York Times and Washington Post reporters.”
http://reason.com/blog/2013/09/24/fbi-plays-the-role-of-domestic-spy-and-s
Here is the ACLU’s report – “Unleashed and Unaccountable: The FBI’s Unchecked Abuse of Authority”
https://www.aclu.org/national-security/unleashed-and-unaccountable-fbis-unchecked-abuse-authority
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October 2, 2013
NSA director admits he lied about terrorism plots being foiled
At a conference in Baltimore in late June, NSA Director Keith Alexander defended the NSA’s secret surveillance programs (whose existence Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, lied to Congress about – as was subsequently exposed by documents leaked by whistle-blower Edward Snowden). Alexander said the surveillance had enabled the government to disrupt 42 terrorist plots and identify 12 individuals who provided support to terrorist groups.
At the time, a headline on NBC News read “NSA Chief Says Surveillance Programs Helped Foil 54 Plots.”
Today, under questioning from Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), Alexander admitted that the actual number was one or two:
“Mr. Alexander also acknowledged that only one or two of the cases cited by senior officials at previous hearings had actually been foiled by the NSA’s vast database.”
Just as they were doing in the days of the original Cointelpro and MK Ultra operations, the intelligence and law enforcement agencies are keeping Congress in the dark. In today’s hearing Senator Leahy said to Alexander: “We get more from the newspapers than we do in the classified briefings that you give us.”
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/oct/2/nsa-chief-figures-foiled-terror-plots-misleading/
The government’s original story:
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October 1, 2013
8-year-old Florida boy suspended for using his finger as a pretend gun
Last Friday, 8-year-old Jordan Bennett of Harmony, Florida wandered onto the radar of America’s police state. While playing cops-and-robbers with another student, Jordan pointed his finger as if it were a gun. For his heinous crime, the boy was suspended from school for a day.
In an age of government-promoted hysteria about terrorism – and in an age of networked databases – it will be no surprise if Jordan finds himself detained one day for extra scrutiny at an airport because his record was flagged by some idiot in the government’s homeland security bureaucracy.
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September 30, 2013
Another journalist questions the official story about Osama bin Laden
One of the constant challenges in trying to maintain an archive of news relevant to organized stalking is deciding whether to include a particular article which is only tangentially related.
For reasons I explain in detail elsewhere in this site, articles and TV reports which are directly on-topic are rare, therefore most of the material I link to is included here because I think it provides helpful context for evaluating claims about gang stalking by illustrating the frequent deception and crimes of government officials and contractors – and the routine failure of the news media to expose the lying.
This article is an example of that. My most recent post below alluded to a claim by famed investigative journalist Seymor Hersh that the official account of the killing of Osama bin Laden is filled with lies. The risk-averse (and often lazy) corporate media rarely question what they are told by the government – especially on matters related to national security.
Journalist Russ Baker shares Hersh’s view on this topic and published an interesting piece in WhoWhatWhy about it last month. At a minimum the article raises some interesting questions – both about the military raid and the reporting on it.
http://whowhatwhy.com/2011/08/17/raidbinladen/
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September 27, 2013
Seymour Hersh excoriates the American news media
In an interview with the Guardian newspaper, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh describes the current American news media as “pathetic.”
The reporter who exposed the My Lai Massacre and the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib recommends firing “90 percent of the editors that now exist” and scrapping the news departments of the major TV networks:
“I would close down the news bureaus of the networks and let’s start all over, tabula rasa. The majors, NBCs, ABCs, they won’t like this – just do something different, do something that gets people mad at you, that’s what we’re supposed to be doing.”
Hersh slams the New York Times for “carrying water for Obama” and criticizes American journalists generally for being too timid to challenge the current administration:
“It’s pathetic, they are more than obsequious, they are afraid to pick on this guy [Obama].”
A chapter of the book Hersh is writing is about the killing of Osama bin Laden. He describes previous accounts of the U.S. Navy SEALs raid this way:
“It’s one big lie, not one word of it is true.”
One of the comments Hersh made is relevant to the lack of news coverage of gang stalking – a problem which derives from the lack of official documentation. (The original version of Cointelpro was exposed when civilian activists broke into an FBI office and stole documents about it and leaked them to the press.) Hersh notes that reports about invasive surveillance by the NSA were mostly ignored prior to the revelations of documents by Edward Snowden:
“Editors love documents. Chicken-shit editors who wouldn’t touch stories like that, they love documents, so he changed the whole ball game.”
http://www.theguardian.com/media/media-blog/2013/sep/27/seymour-hersh-obama-nsa-american-media
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September 27, 2013
At least a dozen NSA employees caught illegally spying on their spouses and partners
I hope the American public draws the same lesson I do from this news – namely that spying powers will inevitably be abused by the people who wield them. Abuse of power is a threat in all spheres of corporate and government power, but infinitely more so in agencies which operate in secret.
Organized stalking is probably often a function of that kind of abuse of power. Using unconstitutional counterintelligence tactics against American citizens is bad enough when it is being done to undermine political dissidents – as was done in the original Cointelpro operations, but it is now also being used as a weapon (I can personally attest to this) by individuals and perhaps also by corporations who are affiliated with the intelligence and law enforcement agencies – such as members of InfraGard and DSAC (see the introduction of the “What is Gang Stalking?” page).
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September 27, 2013
Senators are frustrated that Americans don’t appreciate how much the government helps them by spying on them
Not surprisingly, the best reporting on yesterday’s Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on NSA surveillance was in the Guardian. Some of the comments they highlighted were from senators expressing their contempt for Americans who stubbornly refuse to recognize how fortunate they are to have Big Brother spying on them to keep them safe:
Senator Dan Coats, Republican of Indiana, says it’s frustrating to know what he knows about programs that have saved American lives but to be unable “to convince a non-trusting public” as to those programs’ integrity and worth. Coats is exasperated with “a public that apparently doesn’t want to be convinced.”
Sen. Coats asked why should the Intelligence Committee even be bothered with having to engage in “this torturous exercise of having to get continuous feedback?”
Sen. John Rockefeller (D-West Virginia) is also convinced that the common folk are too dim to appreciate the wonderful domestic spying system: “I don’t think the American people are ever going to understand the Fisa court, how that works, but we do here.”
Chairwoman of the committee, Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.) took exception to the notion that gathering the phone records of all Americans constitutes surveillance:
“Much of the press has called this a surveillance program. It is not….Please describe what is collected as metadata.”
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September 25, 2013
Declassified NSA documents show that Senator Frank Church and columnist Art Buchwald were among the spying targets
Anyone even superficially familiar with the infamous spying and torture programs run by the FBI and CIA from the 1950s to the 1970s knows the name of Senator Frank Church (D-Idaho). He led the investigations into the crimes against American citizens committed by those two agencies.
Declassified NSA documents released yesterday reveal that Sen. Church himself was being spied on by the NSA. Others targeted for surveillance included Washington Post columnist Art Buchwald, Senator Howard Baker (R-Tenn), Martin Luther King Jr., and Muhammad Ali.
As the article notes, Buchwald – a vocal critic of the Vietnam War who famously expressed disappointment that he had not been on President Nixon’s “Enemies List” would probably be pleased: “At least he made the NSA list.”
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September 24, 2013
Washington Times publishes organized stalking article about navy yard shooting
This article was published last Wednesday, but just came to my attention – via a post in one of the Topix forums on gang stalking. The article is in the Washington Times Communities section rather than in their main website, but it might still get some attention.
The article explores the electronic harassment question about the shooting in some depth.
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September 24, 2013
Congressman confirms that SWAT team was ordered not to respond to navy yard shooting
Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) told CNN’s Jake Tapper that he personally spoke with a SWAT team member who confirmed that they were told to stand down (not respond) to the mass shooting at the Washington Navy Yard.
http://www.infowars.com/congressman-confirms-stand-down-order-at-navy-yard/
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September 22, 2013
FBI bypassed ATF and conducted its own gun-trace in navy yard mass shooting
It is not clear what – if any – significance this might have, but another possibly suspicious fact about the Washington Navy Yard shooting has emerged. Associated Press (AP) is reporting that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) was “left out of the loop” when the FBI performed its trace of the shotgun used. Some excerpts:
“The ATF is the federal agency in charge of tracing guns used in crimes.”
“I have never seen an instance where ATF had not been relied upon to trace the gun,” said Mike Bouchard, a former ATF assistant director for field operations. “I have never heard of a situation like that.”
“The FBI’s Washington Field Office declined to comment on the investigation.”
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/atf-loop-navy-yard-shooting-20332955
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September 22, 2013
Timeline of events in navy yard shooting is being questioned
A September 19 article in the New York Times notes that about six weeks prior to the shooting by Aaron Alexis, the shooter’s employer called a motel at which Alexis had stayed to inquire about an incident in which Alexis reported hearing voices while he was there.
“The call…suggests it had deep concerns about his state of mind and raises questions about why he continued to be sent to Navy bases in different states to work on their computer systems.”
Alexis also reported what he perceived to be harassment on August 7 to the Newport, Rhode Island Police Department. The police wrote a report and also notified the navy police because of Alexis’s job as a navy contractor.
A video report posted on Info Wars today – like the New York Times article – raises the question of why Alexis continued to be sent to work at navy bases for five weeks after the police, the navy, and Alexis’s defense contractor employer had been alerted to possible problems, and whether the incident is a case of electronic harassment using the sonic projection technology developed by the military-industrial complex.
The Info Wars video report:
http://www.infowars.com/special-report-aaron-alexis-schizophrenia-or-psyop/
The New York Times article:
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September 22, 2013
SWAT team ordered to stand down during navy yard shooting
One of the details being viewed with suspicion regarding Monday’s mass shooting is that a tactical response team of the Capitol Police was reportedly in the area at the time, but was ordered to stand down (not participate in the police response).
Here are some excerpts from a BBC News report on September 18 which described the non-response:
Multiple sources in the Capitol Police department have told the BBC that its highly trained and heavily armed four-man Containment and Emergency Response Team (Cert) was near the Navy Yard when the initial report of an active shooter came in about 8:20 local time.
According to a Capitol Police source, an officer with the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD), Washington DC’s main municipal force, told the Capitol Cert officers they were the only police on the site equipped with long guns and requested their help stopping the gunman.
When the Capitol Police team radioed their superiors, they were told by a watch commander to leave the scene, the BBC was told.
The gunman, Aaron Alexis, was reported killed after 9:00.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/24153252
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September 20, 2013
More links between Monday’s mass shooting and gang stalking appear in the media
For anyone familiar with accounts by self-proclaimed victims of organized stalking (and the related historical background of MK Ultra and Cointelpro), the facts involved in this week’s shooting rampage immediately raised red flags.
Aaron Alexis, the shooter, had reported being followed by multiple stalkers and being harassed by noise (a psychological operations tactic dating back to ancient siege warfare) and by electronic weaponry (of exactly the sort described in a declassified Pentagon report linked below). Also, by all accounts, there was no clear motive for the shooting rampage – such as a political or religious agenda.
Understandably, most people formed their conclusions about the shooting immediately upon hearing that Alexis had been “hearing voices.”
Charles Krauthammer, the conservative analyst (and former psychiatrist), for example, offered this diagnosis on National Review’s website:
“Delusions, paranoid ideation, auditory (and somatic) hallucinations: the classic symptoms of schizophrenia.”
Naturally, Krauthammer – and others making this assessment – are assuming that the experiences reported by Alexis are a symptom of mental illness. The possibility that the shooter had actually been stalked by multiple perpetrators, and that he had been harassed by electronic weaponry was not ruled-out; it was simply not considered in the first place.
Such assumptions not only exclude consideration of alternative explanations, they also cause people to overlook possible discrepancies that otherwise might be noticed. For example, violence is not a symptom normally associated with schizophrenia; individuals who suffer from schizophrenia are far more likely to harm themselves than others.
Similarly, schizophrenia typically begins in early adulthood, between the ages of 15 and 25. Alexis, who was an information technology employee with a security clearance at a defense-related computer company, was 34 years old.
Fortunately for gang stalking victims, although most psychiatrists might not closely follow electronic gadgetry, the folks at Wired do. An article posted there today takes note of the gang stalking discussion related to the navy yard shooting:
Some conspiracists suggest that Alexis was a “targeted individual,” or “TI,” the term-of-art used by anguished people who believe they’re being “gang stalked” by shadowy enemies, often in the government. The elements of Alexis’ police report — covert microwave weapons, conspiracies and sleep disturbances — are common elements in gang stalking accounts. (Of course, they’re also common elements in schizophrenia.)….
The microwave weaponry theory would be just as absurd as some of the other conspiracies if the Pentagon hadn’t been researching the possibility of using similar voice-projection technology in the past as a nonlethal weapon.
According to one report on the project, such a weapon would create a condition similar to schizophrenia. “Application of the microwave hearing technology could facilitate a private message transmission. It may be useful to provide a disruptive condition to a person not aware of the technology. Not only might it be disruptive to the sense of hearing, it could be psychologically devastating if one suddenly heard ‘voices within one’s head.’”
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2013/09/navy-yard-conspiracies/
A 2008 article at Wired explored the subject of electronic weapons in detail:
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2008/02/report-nonletha/
The year before, Wired featured an article specifically about the so-called “Voice of God” device:
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2007/12/the-voice-of-go/
This is the declassified Pentagon report from 1998 (“Bioeffects of Selected Non-Lethal Weapons”) linked in the 2008 Wired article:
http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/dangerroom/files/Bioeffects_of_Selected_Non-Lethal_Weapons.pdf
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September 19, 2013
Washington D.C. shooting rampage involved multiple gang stalking indications
Whatever one thinks of claims about organized stalking and electronic harassment, Monday’s shooting rampage at the Washington Navy Yard that killed a dozen people (13 including the shooter) and wounded 8 others unquestionably involved details identical to those often associated with claims about gang stalking.
The shooter, Aaron Alexis, claimed to have been stalked by multiple perpetrators and reported that he was the victim of electronic harassment tactics commonly described by other self-proclaimed targeted individuals.
Alexis even carved “My ELF Weapon” into the receiver of his shotgun. ELF is a common abbreviation for “extremely low frequency.”
“Alexis, who was battling mental health issues, told police in Rhode Island in August that he was hearing voices of three people who had been sent to follow him and keep him awake and were using “some sort of microwave machine” to send vibrations into his body, preventing him from falling asleep, according to police reports.
The law enforcement officials said they do not know whether he was referring to those vibrations in his carvings. The Navy has used extremely low frequencies in several capacities, including a joint effort with the Air Force on the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP). HAARP is often cited by conspiracy theorists.”
Not surprisingly, some of the comments posted below some of the online news articles about the shooting make reference to the obvious similarities between the incident and other descriptions of organized stalking.
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September 19, 2013
ACLU obtained 1,800 “Suspicious Activity Reports” and posted them online
“Document requests by the ACLU of Northern California have produced an inside look at the records of suspicious activity reports gathered by federal authorities. The feds appear to be keeping files on people based on tips that fall far below the threshold of reasonable suspicion.”
A comment posted below the article reads:
Mike German at the ACLU, who is quoted above, has done some important reporting on these issues and I commend him for it. However, the most disturbing allegation about civil rights violations in the U.S. currently is one which the ACLU does not publicly discuss – not even to dismiss it – namely, that federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies are still perpetrating counterintelligence operations against U.S. citizens – as they were caught doing previously (the FBI’s Cointelpro and the CIA’s infamous MK Ultra).
A huge number of references appear online (and occasionally in the press) about a tactic known as “organized stalking” or “gang stalking” – which allegedly involves the same psychological operations tactics which East Germany’s Stasi called zersetzen.
Mike German comes closest to reporting on this subject, but never explicitly addresses it head-on. That the ACLU will not even publicly debunk the claim as an unfounded conspiracy theory raises reasonable curiosity. (Is it because they want to avoid appearing to have been shills once the story breaks?) Online searches of the topic yield well over a million results – the vast majority of which are possibly disinformation – as one would expect for a counterintelligence operation seeking to mitigate the effects of exposure.
If you search “fight gang stalking” you can review the published articles on the topic. If you try to contact the ACLU about this, they will not respond with skepticism; they just won’t respond at all.
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September 16, 2013
ACLU requests declassification of secret legal rulings on FBI’s domestic spying
The ACLU is calling for the public to have access to the secret U.S. government legal opinions about FBI surveillance. The group claims the agency has abused its powers:
“There is already substantial evidence that the FBI has gravely misused its new authorities and capabilities…”
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/09/17/us-usa-crime-fbi-idUSBRE98G01P20130917
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September 16, 2013
Sociopaths in U.S. intelligence agencies
Commenting on the skepticism of the push for a U.S. war against Syria, Douglas Valentine at CounterPunch notes that the CIA’s reputation in such matters is an important consideration.
His description of the employees at the agency is relevant to gang stalking, since the CIA ran the infamous Project MK Ultra – one of the historical predecessors of current U.S. domestic counterintelligence operations.
“Despite the popular portrayal of the CIA as patriotic guys and girls risking everything to do a dirty job, the typical CIA officer is a sociopath without the guts to go it alone in the underworld. They gravitate to the CIA because they are protected there by the all-powerful Cult of Death that rules America.”
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/09/16/the-cia-the-press-and-black-propaganda/
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September 14, 2013
Federal agencies now employ 120,000 armed officers
America’s police state approach to government has reached the point that at least 40 federal agencies now have armed divisions.
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September 13, 2013
U.S. Senate fine-tunes the First Amendment
Since the Founding Fathers were too stupid to recognize the danger posed by too much free speech, today’s intellectual giants, like Senator Diane Feinstein (D-California) are improving the First Amendment to make it clear that it only applies to corporate news agencies – and not the alternative media (from which the most serious criticism of government emerges).
Fascists like Sen. Feinstein (chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee) know that it’s easier to control the corporate media – for example, by denying or granting access and jobs to punish or reward journalists for their coverage. Alternative media journalists are less easily controlled, so they are being omitted from the protection of the proposed media “shield law.”
Thanks to National Review and others for calling attention to this abuse of power.
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/358448/there-ought-be-no-law-michael-walsh
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September 13, 2013
WhoWhatWhy posts Part 4 of a 5-part documentary on counterintelligence
This documentary covers a lot of ground – not just counterintelligence. Some of it could use some tighter editing in my view, but it is still very much worth watching; it contains a lot of important and disturbing material and also viewpoints which are normally omitted or downplayed in mainstream U.S. news.
The U.S. domestic counterintelligence operation of organized stalking is a product of a larger philosophy about U.S. military and police power, and information such as that provided by this documentary helps to illuminate the larger context.
This segment covers state-sponsored terrorism, School of the Americas, Harvey Point, death squads in El Salvador, Operation Phoenix in Vietnam, death squads in Iraq, John Stockwell – CIA whistle-blower, Dan Mitrione – U.S. State Department torture techniques instructor, lying about warfare in the U.S. corporate news media, the Battle of Fallujah, U.S. military strategy in the Middle East, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
http://whowhatwhy.com/2013/09/11/tvwhy-counterintelligence-part-4-necrophilous/
Here is my post regarding the first three segments of the documentary.
Update – September 15, 2013
The final segment (Part 5) has now been posted also – about drone warfare, and then it wraps up with interviews of famous whistle-blowers.
http://whowhatwhy.com/2013/09/15/tvwhy-counterintelligence-part-5-drone-nation/
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September 13, 2013
Americans’ trust in government’s competence reaches record low
Less than half of Americans now have even “a fair amount” of confidence in the federal government’s ability to handle either foreign or domestic problems.
In fairness to the federal government though, Gallup did not ask citizens about the competence of government officials in matters at which the officials are most expert, such as retaining power and gaming the system for themselves and their cronies.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/164393/fewer-americans-ever-trust-gov-handle-problems.aspx
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September 12, 2013
Good News – Bad News
The good news for anyone being harassed and spied on by corrupt federal agencies is that such agencies now have less money to throw around because of the budget sequestration. The FBI, for example, must cut about $700 million from its $8 billion budget.
The bad news is that – according to former FBI Director Robert Mueller – the FBI will cope with the budget reductions by shifting resources away from legitimate objectives like fighting violent crime and white-collar business fraud to “national security” – which presumably means domestic spying.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/12/fbi-sequestration-impact-_n_3915781.html
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September 11, 2013
Putin accurately explains the deep corruption in the U.S. government
Russia’s president offers a critique of the attitude which infects the thinking of America’s political leaders.
“It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation.”
This advice applies not only to foreign policy, but also to the culture of federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies (and their contractors) who deeply believe that they are above the moral rules and legal restrictions which govern the common folk.
It is this kind of moral corruption which leads to the use of counterintelligence tactics such as organized stalking against American citizens.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/12/opinion/putin-plea-for-caution-from-russia-on-syria.html?_r=0
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September 11, 2013
U.S. war propagandist caught lying about her credentials
Last week, when Secretary of State John Kerry and Senator John McCain were telling Americans we should go to war, they were citing a researcher with a fictional Ph.D.
In her defense, Elizabeth O’Bagy was not lying any more than say, the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, was when he told Congress that the NSA’s massive domestic surveillance program was not happening – just before Edward Snowden exposed it.
The U.S. spying-and-lying industry (the military, the intelligence community, the federal law enforcement agencies, and their numerous secretive private intelligence/security contractors) is infested with people who have no integrity.
http://www.politico.com/story/2013/09/wall-street-journal-elizabeth-obagy-fired-96637.html?hp=r4
Update to this story…September 27, 2013
Senator John McCain has hired Ms. O’Bagy as a legislative assistant. In the “national security” business, if you are a liar, it is just an indication that you will fit in well with your co-workers because you share their values.
http://dailycaller.com/2013/09/27/mccain-hires-syria-rebel-advocate-elizabeth-obagy/
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September 11, 2013
U.S. intelligence agencies are sharing Americans’ private information with Israel
A top-secret document leaked by Edward Snowden reveals that the NSA routinely gives Israel sensitive information about Americans, including phone calls and emails – in the form of raw data which has not been reviewed by U.S. analysts first.
The federal government ranks your alleged Constitutional rights far below the priorities of foreign lobbyists. Other than that – and the fact that our own government is intensely spying on us in the first place, and the fact that U.S. intelligence and federal law enforcement agencies are frequently caught lying – everything is fine.
http://www.latimes.com/world/la-fg-israel-nsa-20130912,0,3708841.story
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September 8, 2013
U.S. military-intelligence establishment spied on New Zealand journalist critical of Afghan war activities
This news report ocurred six weeks ago, but just came to my attention today.
This is another incident – of many in recent years – in which U.S. intelligence agencies participated in the intimidation of a journalist who dared to report something critical of the military-intelligence establishment.
Last year U.S. Spy agencies helped the New Zealand military monitor the phone calls of New Zealand journalist Jon Stephenson while he was in Afghanistan reporting on the war in a way that was critical of the handling of Afghan prisoners.
The underlying article – linked at the post below – notes the following:
An internal Defence document leaked to the Star-Times reveals that defence security staff viewed investigative journalists as “hostile” threats requiring “counteraction.”
The “counteraction” in this case apparently involved the classic counterintelligence tactic of slandering the target. Stephenson was accused of fabricating information.
Commenting on the defamation case which arose from the incident, a Victoria University media professor described what was done to the journalist as “a concerted and deliberate effort to denigrate that journalist’s reputation for political ends.”
Sadly, many in the mainstream press avoid publicly discussing this pattern of using counterintelligence tactics to intimidate real reporters. Those members of the corporate media who are essentially stenographers and propagandists are naturally unconcerned.
http://cpj.org/blog/2013/07/new-zealand-us-may-have-spied-on-mcclatchy-reporte.php
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September 7, 2013
A dozen former U.S. intelligence officials say CIA director is lying about Syria
Credibility is pretty thin among all the major figures calling for war against Syria. Having the Obama administration invoke the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, to back their position – as was done recently by Secretary of State Kerry – is like having a used-car salesman tell you that the sales manager agrees that you’re getting a great deal. Clapper of course was recently caught lying to Congress about the NSA’s domestic spying programs.
CIA Director John Brennan is just as morally compromised. Among other transgressions, he apparently led a campaign to intimidate journalists by investigating and prosecuting them.
In this open-letter to President Obama, twelve former intelligence officials accuse Brennan of lying to Congress and to the American public about the evidence being cited as a reason for the U.S to go to war.
When people who know how things really work in America’s intelligence and federal law enforcement agencies say that the leadership is corrupt, it should help skeptics realistically assess claims about the use of illegal counterintelligence tactics – such as gang stalking – by those agencies and their numerous intelligence/security corporation contractors.
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/09/12-u-s-intelligence-officials-tell-obama-it-wasnt-assad.html
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September 7, 2013
Secret Client List of Rogue Private Investigators
Private security personnel (with and without government contracts and security clearances) who operate outside the law are apparently a major element of gang stalking. This case – in the U.K. – does not involve stalking, but it involves phone hacking and illegal surveillance.
This article can be found at the link below, but it is mostly behind a subscription pay-wall.
Here is the full text of the article (which was published July 25, 2013)
Home Office ignored warning over rogue private investigators
by Sean O’Neill
The Home Office has known about the illegal activities of rogue private investigators for more than five years but has failed to act on calls to stamp out blagging, phone hacking and illegal surveillance.
Three successive Home Secretaries — Jacqui Smith, Alan Johnson and Theresa May — have had access to a confidential report into illegal practices by private detectives submitted to their department by the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) in January 2008.
The Project Riverside report called for government regulation of private detectives because there was “no means of excluding persons of dubious character or with criminal convictions from the profession”.
Law firms, debt recovery agencies, insurance businesses and individuals — as well as the media — were hiring private detectives to gather personal information illegally. The report said that there was evidence of “a regular trade in unlawfully acquired personal data”.
When the Government set up the Leveson inquiry, in part to examine the media’s use of rogue investigators, in 2011 it excluded other clients of private detectives from scrutiny.
MPs on the Home Affairs Committee said last year they were “very surprised” that Lynne Featherstone, the Home Office minister responsible for regulation of the private security industry, had not read the Soca report.
Soca has published a slightly redacted version of the report, which was prepared to support the case for regulation of the sector. It states that anyone can operate as a private investigator, with the sector ranging from large firms focusing on corporate due diligence to backstreet operations dealing in debt recovery and divorce.
The report revealed fees for private investigators, ranging from £7,000 for a month of phone tapping to £100 for information about a bank balance.
Private detectives who have come under investigation have often had backgrounds in law enforcement or intelligence. Philip Campbell Smith, a former military intelligence officer, and Adam Spears, a former Metropolitan Police officer, were among four men jailed last year for data protection offences after a Soca investigation into blagging, or deceitfully obtaining information about bank accounts, credit cards and medical records.
When the men were jailed at Kingston Crown Court, neither Soca nor the Crown Prosecution Service was prepared to give details of the clients for whom the information was obtained. The Home Affairs Committee is now considering publishing a list of 102 clients of rogue investigators that it has obtained from Soca.
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/uk/crime/article3862736.ece
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September 6, 2013
Why the Latest NSA Leak is the Scariest of All
“The spy agencies’ activities have gone on for more than a decade. Like a silent but pervasive cancer, they have penetrated and weakened every corner of the Internet.”
http://news.yahoo.com/why-latest-nsa-leak-scariest-185052778.html
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September 5, 2013
Barrett Brown Faces Possible 105-Year Jail Sentence
The $56 billion intelligence and cybersecurity industry is crucifying the man who exposed their lawless pig trough. The careerists in the mainstream corporate news media will barely touch this story.
My previous posts on this case were on 11 July and 9 August.
http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/barrett-brown-faces-105-years-in-jail-20130905
Barrett Brown
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September 2, 2013
Is the U.S. military’s domestic spying linked to gang stalking?
In my August 21 entry below I discussed a recent article on Info Wars regarding a job listing by an intelligence contractor for “surveillance role players.” The job ad – and a similar one by another contractor, which I posted a copy of – describe jobs “conducting surveillance operations at various discretion levels” (presumably referring to covert and overt surveillance).
Note that there could be a very fine line (or no line) between “overt surveillance” and “stalking.”
Prospective applicants were advised that they would “coordinate with local law enforcement” and were required to have active security clearances and experience in counterintelligence – or at least experience working for an intelligence contractor.
The ads raise multiple flags for anyone familiar with organized stalking.
Although the Info Wars article was linked on the Drudge Report – which presumably generated a fair amount of attention – apparently no one in the mainstream news media could be bothered to take an interest in anything as trivial as apparent domestic spying (not even to dismiss the matter by confirming and clarifying its nature).
Apparently such jobs – whatever their exact nature – are numerous. If you search online for jobs in the field of “surveillance role players” and “human intelligence” you will discover that plenty of defense contractors seem to be hiring.
A reader of this website brought another of these job listings to my attention (image below), and I easily located more of them.
Many of the job ads refer to “HT-JCOE” (“Human Intelligence Training – Joint Center of Excellence). JCOE is a military training facility at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, the U.S. Army Intelligence Center. Another HT-JCOE facility is located in Norfolk, Virginia.
It could be a coincidence, but during a long period of intense organized stalking in my own case, there was an extraordinary number of vehicles bearing Arizona license plates parked around my residence in California.
The surveillance role player job listings are all nearly identical and offer very little explanation of the specific nature of the jobs. Obviously, the U.S. military has a need for counterintelligence personnel in foreign locations, and presumably trains personnel here (including instructors who might in turn train others overseas), but the job descriptions and the number of jobs (combined with America’s reduced presence in places like Afghanistan) suggests that this is mainly about domestic surveillance. Among the numerous job listings I have seen, none mentioned foreign language skills for example.
I welcome any tips from readers of this website who can point me toward sources of more information on this.
A search for details about the U.S. military’s involvement in domestic intelligence operations yields an interesting November 27, 2005 article in the Washington Post. Here are some excerpts:
“The Defense Department has expanded its programs aimed at gathering and analyzing intelligence within the United States…”
“The White House is considering expanding the power of a little-known Pentagon agency called the Counterintelligence Field Activity, or CIFA, which was created three years ago. The proposal, made by a presidential commission, would transform CIFA from an office that coordinates Pentagon security efforts — including protecting military facilities from attack — to one that also has authority to investigate crimes within the United States such as treason, foreign or terrorist sabotage or even economic espionage.”
“We are deputizing the military to spy on law-abiding Americans in America.”
“each of the military services has begun its own post-9/11 collection of domestic intelligence…”
“The Marine Corps has expanded its domestic intelligence operations and developed internal policies in 2004 to govern oversight of the “collection, retention and dissemination of information concerning U.S. persons,” according to a Marine Corps order approved on April 30, 2004.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/26/AR2005112600857.html
According to the ever-helpful Wikipedia, CIFA was shut-down in 2008, and many of its functions were taken over by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), which specializes in human intelligence.
Here are some excerpts from the Wikipedia entry about the DIA:
“Since mid-2000s, the DIA has come under scrutiny for requesting new powers “to covertly approach and cultivate “U.S. persons” and even recruit them as informants” without disclosing they are doing so on behalf of the U.S. government.”
“It is unclear if the agency has received any additional powers since but it is known that until at least 2005 and possibly later, the DIA’s “personnel stationed in major US cities [have been]…monitoring the movements and activities – through high-tech equipment – of individuals and vehicles”; this occurred parallel to the NSA’s warrantless surveillance that was of similarly dubious legality.”
Here is the above-referenced job listing – which is currently posted on Monster.com
Click on image to expand.
For context about domestic spying by the Pentagon, consider the reporting which ocurred during the years following the 9/11 attack. This is a prime example.
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August 31, 2013
New Documentary on U.S. Counterintelligence Operations
WhoWhatWhy has posted the first three segments of a five-part documentary on the use of counterintelligence tactics and strategies by the U.S. and other Western governments.
I concur with the website editor’s assessment that this documentary “is an enormously compelling and worthwhile watch.”
I encourage anyone targeted by counterintelligence gang stalking crimes to share this documentary with his or her friends, relatives, neighbors, and colleagues so they will have some perspective on the well-established history of serious crimes perpetrated by the U.S. government.
Because of the nature of the subject material, some of the content is unavoidably speculative, but much of it is not, and it includes a lot of shocking material from what skeptics would normally regard as blue-chip journalistic sources (CBS’s 60 Minutes, for example).
Part 1 (History of intelligence agencies, military contractors, disinformation campaigns, the Iran-Contra scandal, assassinations)
http://whowhatwhy.com/2013/08/15/tvwhy-documentary-counterintelligence/
Part 2 (the CIA’s deep involvement in blackmarket drug sales, corporations, and crime syndicates)
http://whowhatwhy.com/2013/08/22/tvwhy-counterintelligence-part-2-the-deep-state/
Part 3 (False flag operations such as Operation Northwoods and Operation Gladio, murdering civilians, conspiracy theories)
http://whowhatwhy.com/2013/08/29/tvwhy-counterintelligence-part-3-the-strategy-of-tension/
At 42:27 in Part 3 is a good two-minute analysis of common views on conspiracy theories by historian Michael Parenti. In essence, Parenti notes that many people who reflexively dismiss all allegations of apparent conspiracies are essentially “coincidence theorists” who naïvely assume that rich and powerful individuals and organizations would not engage in organized assertive efforts to advance their own interests.
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August 29, 2013
“Black Budget” leaked by Edward Snowden published today
Today’s Washington Post features the top-secret 178-page federal budget for the 16 U.S. Spy agencies (and their 107,035 employees), which was leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
Parts of the documents were omitted by the Washington Post, which reported that “sensitive details are…pervasive in the documents.”
Here are some of the key elements of the article:
The $52.6 billion “black budget” for fiscal 2013, obtained by The Washington Post from former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, maps a bureaucratic and operational landscape that has never been subject to public scrutiny.
…the U.S. intelligence community has been reconfigured by the massive infusion of resources that followed the Sept. 11 attacks. The United States has spent more than $500 billion on intelligence during that period…
U.S. spy agencies have built an intelligence-gathering colossus since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, but remain unable to provide critical information to the president on a range of national security threats…
The document describes a constellation of spy agencies that track millions of individual surveillance targets…
The intelligence community’s massive budget might need to be expanded even further to closely monitor all the Americans publicly expressing their contempt for America’s police state. This comment posted below the article at the Washington Post was typical:
Political administrations may come and go in Washington, but the NSA-CIA axis of foreign policy and domestic spying lives on without interruption.
When administrations change, the new one is quickly warped into the militaristic, secretive, hegemonic mindset of our unelected surveillance agencies.
This is the source of our bellicose, bullying foreign policy mistakes of the past 50 years, a policy which has encouraged an expansionist Israel, earned the enmity of the Islamic world, and created the wack-a-mole worldwide war on “terror”. A terror which our NSA-CIA directed foreign policy created.
The US has an intelligence monkey on its back, and needs to remove it ASAP
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August 27, 2013
Julian Assange on the VERY close relationship between Google and the federal government
How close? When Wikileaks called then-Secreatry of State Hillary Clinton, the person who returned the call was the girlfriend of the CEO of Google. Assange paints an interesting picture of how Google has gone from a “California graduate student culture” business to a member of the “U.S. Securitocracy.”
http://www.wikileaks.org/Op-ed-Google-and-the-NSA-Who-s.html
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August 27, 2013
Media reports on the gang stalking infrastructure are increasing.
Those targeted by the federal government’s counterintelligence efforts would most like to see their plight exposed in the mainstream national news media – where it would get the most public exposure. For reasons explored in detail throughout this website, such revelations are few and far between.
In the alternative media (especially in progressive and libertarian magazines and websites, as well as political blogs), however, the exposure is increasing.
In many cases, the reporters and bloggers writing about this subject are – without realizing it – in effect describing the infrastructure behind organized stalking (the darkest element of U.S. domestic counterintelligence operations).
Without having been personally targeted for the blacklisting and abuse of gang stalking (or perhaps having a relative or friend who has been subjected to it), it would be very difficult to know the full scope of the phenomenon.
At Daily Kos, a political blog which receives a lot of web traffic (several hundred thousand visits per day), the following commentary was posted last week on the emerging police state in America. Its relevance to organized stalking is clear to those familiar with the phenomenon either by direct experience or through websites such as this one.
The author of the piece, Ray Pensador, discusses the collusion of corporations and the federal law enforcement/homeland security community – a regular topic here.
Pensador quotes from a report by the Center for Media and Democracy – Dissent or Terror: How the Nation’s Counter-Terrorism Apparatus, in Partnership with Corporate America, Turned on Occupy Wall Street.
“There are two primary domestic public-private intelligence sharing partnerships at work at the federal level: Infragard and the Domestic Security Alliance Council (DSAC).
Infragard is a public-private intelligence sharing partnership managed by the FBI Cyber Division Public/Private Alliance Unit (PPAU). As described by the FBI, Infragard is an “association of businesses, academic institutions, state and local law enforcement agencies and other participants dedicated to sharing information and intelligence to prevent hostile acts against the United States.” There are 86 Infragard chapters nationwide. These Infragard chapters serve as representatives of private sector “stakeholders” in many of the nation’s fusion centers.
DSAC is a public-private intelligence sharing partnership between the FBI, U.S. DHS I&A and several of the nation’s leading corporate/financial interests. Some of these corporate/financial interests comprise the DSAC Leadership Board. The DSAC Leadership Board consists of 29 corporations and banks, including several entities that have been the subject of OWS protests/criticism. Corporate/financial interests active in the DSAC Leadership Board include: Bank of America, MasterCard, Citigroup, American Express, Barclays, RBS Citizens, 3M, Archer Daniels Midland, ConocoPhillips, Time Warner and Wal-Mart. Along with DSAC chairmen from the FBI and U.S. DHS I&A, DSAC is co-chaired by a representative of these private sector interests– currently Grant Ashley, vice president of global security for pharmaceutical giant Merck & Co.”
Here are some excerpts from an insightful comment by a reader (“TarheelDem”)
The Police Executives Research Forum (PERF) organized the phone calls by which cities coordinated the eviction of Occupy Wall Street encampments over six weeks. In each case, the authorities used massive force, confiscated and destroyed personal property, and abused people under arrest with extrajudicial procedures. That was two years ago. And there has been no serious reporting about how that went down. And no whistlleblowers.
In addition, the Department of Homeland Security Fusion centers were used as regional tactical support coordination bodies not only for Occupy Wall Street protests but also for the #NoNATO protests in Chicago.
The message clearly is that if you pop up with a serious protest against corporate malfeasance anywhere in the US that has the potential of assembling more than a couple thousand people, the full force of local, state, and federal law enforcement will come down on you–unless you designate a leader, pay for a government permit, establish your own marshals to act as police, and purchase and expensive bond. All of those high-cost (in labor and money) items are to discriminate in what free speech is allowed. Folks with money get free speech; folks without don’t. And the governments reserve the right to deny permits even to folks with the money to pay all those fees and the resources to train marshals.
And now of course, if you are an “organization of interest”, the NSA/FBI will be tracking all of the communications among your principal people using automated alerts.
The next stage is when some new protest runs head-on into this system by not being mainstream enough.
The full report by the Center for Media and Democracy is posted here:
http://www.prwatch.org/files/Dissent%20or%20Terror%20FINAL_0.pdf
Daily Kos previously posted at least one piece specifically about gang stalking. This item from October 2010 is about the tactics of Zersetzen (gang stalking) that were used by the Stasi (the state police of communist East Germany).
Note: Apparently, the correct German spelling is “zersetzen” (verb) and “zersetzung” (noun).
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/10/12/909826/-ZERZETSEN-TORTURE-Spooks-Lies-and-Threats
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August 25, 2013
The NSA’s media lapdogs
In the 1960s – just as they do today – officials in the U.S. government were systematically lying to the American public. In 1971 journalist Daniel Ellsberg leaked the famous “Pentagon Papers” to the news media, which revealed that fact.
Then, as now, the lying was bipartisan: the Johnson adminstration had lied to the public (and Congress) about the Vienam war, and then the Nixon administration tried to prevent the release of the documents which proved that the government had lied.
Ellsberg is quoted in Sunday’s New York Times describing some of the “journalists” in today’s media who eagerly defend the deception practiced by the current federal government, such as Jeffrey Toobin (who works for CNN and The New Yorker), and Michael Grunwald (a senior correspondent at Time).
Toobin described NSA leaker Edward Snowden (who is viewed as a whistle-blower by a majority of Americans according to polls) as “a grandiose narcissist who belongs in prison.”
Grunwald recently wrote on Twitter: “I can’t wait to write a defense of the drone strike that takes out Julian Assange.”
Daniel Ellsberg’s description of Toobin and Grunwald:
“With Snowden in particular, you have a split between truly independent journalists and those who are tools — and I mean that in every sense of the term — of the government. Toobin and Grunwald are doing the work of the government to maintain relationships and access.”
Ouch!
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August 24, 2013
The Anonymous movement reminds the government that it does not control everything
This was tweeted today on the YourAnonNews Twitter page:
Someone hacked a Colorado Department of Transportation portable electronic sign to deliver an important message:
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August 24, 2013
The White House appoints an expert on lying to the surveillance policy review panel
It might seem like good news that the White House is reviewing domestic surveillance policies – even though the decision was forced by the public backlash that arose after Americans learned they were being spied on and that the NSA had been lying about it.
When he spoke about the review panel two weeks ago, President Obama said the group will “consider how we can maintain the trust of the people [and] how we can make sure that there absolutely is no abuse.”
Don’t get too encouraged by the development though; among the panel members appointed by the White House to review the NSA’s policies is former member of the administration and close confidant of President Obama, Cass Sunstein.
Sunstein has an interesting view about the U.S. government lying to its citizens: he’s in favor of it.
That’s not an exaggeration. Sunstein, former head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (whose responsibilities include overseeing policies on privacy and information quality), has advocated the systematic use of disinformation by the government to shape public opinion. Seriously. I’m not making this up.
An article today at Daily Kos reviewed his controversial theories about how the government should use deception of the American public as a tool for governing.
In 2008, while at Harvard Law School, Sunstein co-wrote a truly pernicious paper proposing that the U.S. Government employ teams of covert agents and pseudo-”independent” advocates to “cognitively infiltrate” online groups and websites — as well as other activist groups….
Don’t read the article if you have any concerns about your blood pressure becoming elevated.
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2013/08/white-house-picks-panel-to-review-nsa-programs/
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August 24, 2013
The Fed’s are protecting you from extremists – like the Founding Fathers, for example.
According to the Department of Defense, the Founding Fathers were extremists, and so are people who “talk of individual liberties, states’ rights, and how to make the world a better place.”
With so many such dangerous people around, it sure is good we have a massive domestic spying and policing infrastructure to protect us. I just hope the fed’s succeed in identifying and rounding-up all those crazy people who believe in individual liberties so we can all sleep better at night.
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August 21, 2013
Craigslist ad posted for “surveillance role players”
InfoWars reported this yesterday (and it was linked on the Drudge Report today).
A job announcement for a part-time position in San Diego posted on Craigslist (purportedly by the intelligence contractor firm The Masy Group) was asking for “motivated surveillance role players….[with experience] conducting surveillance operations at various discretion levels…”
Qualifications included a background in counterintelligence “or as a member of a civilian intelligence community organization” (an intelligence/military contractor firm).
One of the reader comments below the article included a link to a very similar job announcement at a company called Prescient Edge.
Here is one of the postings at their website (see image below). The job title is “Counter-intelligence/human intelligence role-player.” The job is part-time, but it requires a security clearance. Responsibilities include “Coordinate with local law enforcement.”
These two job postings are a whole field of waving red flags of possible relevance to organized stalking. At an absolute minimum, it is apparently some form of domestic spying.
“conducting surveillance operations at various discretion levels…” also sounds very much like gang stalking: covert surveillance for monitoring and overt surveillance for harassment.
Part-time work, as specified, could be worked into the schedule of someone filling short rotating shifts with others and having a day job with the military or a defense contractor that would provide cover.
The note that responsibilities include “Coordinate with local law enforcement” doesn’t require much explanation.
The active security clearance would ensure that participants in the counterintelligence organized stalking program would have a big personal stake in not becoming whistle-blowers. Bradley Manning received a 35-year prison sentence this week for his revelations about the federal government.
Unfortunately, InfoWars did not investigate to try to clarify and confirm the nature of the position. They deserve credit for having reported the advertisement though – as does the Drudge Report for linking to it, which no doubt brings wider attention.
The disgusting thing is that mainstream news agencies won’t touch this stuff with a ten-foot pole. Americans are stuck with groups like InfoWars – who report but don’t investigate – and news agencies which do investigate – but only about topics deemed safe for discussion by the government.
It leaves people wondering what and whom to believe – which is perfect for those in the counterintelligence business who get paid to muddy the waters.
If major news organizations were not practicing self-censorship on these issues you would think they would report on this – if only to discredit “fringe” website news sources. Presumably a serious article about the apparent recruitment of domestic spies would be of interest to a lot of readers at the New York Times, for example – even if it was simply debunking conspiracy theories about what these ads represent.
Americans should really wonder why major daily newspapers don’t make room for such stories. They could presumably make column space available by postponing an installment in one of their series of articles about watching paint dry so they could report on whether the U.S. government is using private contractors to infiltrate our society with spies as was done in communist East Germany.
Click image to enlarge.
http://www.infowars.com/san-diego-craigslist-ad-searches-for-surveillance-role-players/
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August 21, 2013
Coroner report released on Michael Hastings
According to the report released yesterday by the Los Angeles Coroner’s office, journalist Michael Hastings had traces of drugs in his body at the time of his fatal car crash on 18 June.
Reactions to the report are sharply divided as you can see in the comments sections under both of the articles linked below. Skeptics of the murder conspiracy view are heralding the report as a vindication of their position.
Skeptics of the notion that the crash was clearly an innocent accident are wondering aloud about the major news agencies’ apparent inclination to accept whatever they’re being officially told.
For whatever reasons, there remain discrepancies between various accounts of the full set of facts surrounding the incident – such as whether Hastings was being investigated at the time of the accident – and whether the statements of Hastings’ relatives have “evolved” since the accident first happened, and whether (and why) the first-responders were told not to discuss the matter.
There has also been an ongoing debate concerning the technical particulars of the crash – the proper analysis of which would require a familiarity with the details – as well as an understanding of the physics and engineering issues. In theory, the police report is supposed to be a product of such an informed analysis, but it would be nice to hear about it from sources with more objective credibility than that of LAPD.
Given the disturbing recent trend of journalists being investigated and prosecuted and intimidated (as documented in numerous articles cited below in this blog), I would like to see a major news agency devote some resources to creating a complete detailed chronology of Hastings’ death with specific on-the-record quotes that address all of these concerns.
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-michael-hastings-meth-coroner-20130820,0,5038230.story
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/buster/autopsy/michael-hastings-autopsy-867904
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August 19, 2013
NSA told its official to lie to Congress, then replaced him when he refused.
One of the reasons Americans should take seriously the claim that America’s federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies are corrupt is that such criticisms now emanate from sources all across the political spectrum.
By itself it does not prove the veracity of a particular claim, but it should give you pause when a right-wing political journal like National Review is publishing the same kinds of criticisms you would expect to find at the Nation.
Conservative columnist John Fund is calling for greater scrutiny of the NSA, and suggests that – as in the days of Cointelpro – Congress is being kept ignorant of what really goes on in the intelligence community:
“A veteran intelligence official with decades of experience at various agencies identified to me what he sees as the real problem with the current NSA: “It’s increasingly become a culture of arrogance. They tell Congress what they want to tell them. Mike Rogers and Dianne Feinstein at the Intelligence Committees don’t know what they don’t know about the programs.” He himself was asked to skew the data an intelligence agency submitted to Congress, in an effort to get a bigger piece of the intelligence budget. He refused and was promptly replaced in his job, presumably by someone who would do as told.”
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/356098/time-answers-nsa-john-fund
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August 18, 2013
Time reporter pledges his support for the idea of murdering Julian Assange
Perhaps Time magazine should re-consider which side it’s on in the war on free speech – since they’re, you know, a news magazine and all.
Early this morning the former Washington Post reporter, Michael Grunwald – who is now Time’s senior national correspondent – tweeted the following comment – although he deleted it shortly afterward:
A Time spokesperson said that the comment “is in no way representative of Time’s views.”
Right. That’s why they hired Grunwald to be their national correspondent – because they totally disagree with his views.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/aug/18/time-magazine-grunwald-tweets-assange-drone-strike/
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August 18, 2013
The war on journalists heats up
This morning the partner of journalist Glenn Greenwald was detained and questioned for nine hours by security officials at London’s Heathrow Airport – in an obvious attempt to intimidate Greenwald and other journalists who report on the activities of U.S. intelligence agencies.
The security officials also seized the man’s laptop computer, cellphone, data storage devices, and other items.
Greenwald notes the U.S. and U.K. governments do not bother with quaint traditions like morality:
“Even the Mafia had ethical rules against targeting the family members of people they felt threatened by. But the UK puppets and their owners in the US national security state obviously are unconstrained by even those minimal scruples.”
The behavior of agents in the U.S. and its military ally the U.K. in the war on journalists makes clear that members of law enforcement and intelligence agencies which operate in secrecy are very much used to getting away with doing whatever they want.
Clearly they have learned from experience that they enjoy the kind of high-level political protection which ensures that they never have to fear negative publicity or legal repercussions or the possibility of getting fired.
It makes you wonder – or it should – what they do when no one is watching (which is the case most of the time).
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/18/david-miranda-detained-uk-nsa
NBC’s report of this incident includes the following intriguing quotes:
“Greenwald said the incident showed the U.S. government and its allies haven’t figured out exactly what Snowden took with him when he left Hawaii for Hong Kong in May.”
“They definitely don’t know what Snowden took,” he said.
It makes you wonder what else might be revealed. Greenwald is keeping his cards close to his vest. He doesn’t specifically say that there could be more revelations – but he implies it. He understands the public relations aspect of this whole thing very well.
I’m sure he’s driving the intelligence community nuts. Good.
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August 16, 2013
Voters want intelligence director James Clapper prosecuted for perjury.
Don’t hold your breath waiting for it to happen, but polls show that voters think that the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, should be prosecuted for perjury for lying to Congress.
Prior to Edward Snowden’s revelations to the contrary, Clapper denied that the NSA was collecting the phone and Internet records of millions of Americans.
As a practical matter, U.S. intelligence agencies and federal law enforcement agencies exist in a mostly secret and politically protected realm outside of the laws that bind the rest of us, so there is no chance that Clapper will actually be punished.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/16/james-clapper-poll_n_3769267.html
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August 14, 2013
If you use Gmail (or send an email to someone who does) your email is being spied on.
In response to a class action lawsuit against Google for allegedly breaking wiretapping laws, the corporation filed a motion to dismiss the action in which they stated that users have no “reasonable expectation” that their emails are confidential.
If you send an email to a recipient who uses Gmail the contents of your email will automatically be scanned so that Google can use that information to determine which ads to display for the Gmail user.
Google refers to the scanning of email content as “processing,” and says that “all users of email must necessarily expect that their emails will be subject to automated processing.”
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/aug/14/google-gmail-users-privacy-email-lawsuit
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August 13, 2013
Stop being ungrateful: the top 1 percent think Big Brother’s spying is awesome.
If filthy-rich executives like Oracle CEO Larry Ellison think the government should be spying on Americans, it must be a good idea. It’s probably just a coincidence that corporations like his work hand-in-glove with agencies like the NSA.
Ellison says he doesn’t believe anyone will ever abuse the information that’s being collected. He’s not mistaken; he’s lying. You don’t become one of the richest people in the world by being stupid, and no one who isn’t stupid thinks that all this information being gathered isn’t going to be exploited in nefarious ways by both the government and the numerous corporations who participate in the surveillance industry.
As one of the commenters notes, people like Ellison – unlike the rest of us – can summon an army of lawyers should they ever get in trouble as a result of all the spying that goes on.
Moreover, Ellison doesn’t need to worry about getting in trouble in the first place because he’s publicly functioning as an apologist for the spy machine; he’s on their team.
It’s anyone’s guess though whether Ellison (or any particular executive or politician) is behaving as a team player because he’s being blackmailed by the folks who know everything about everyone. That was one of the cautionary pieces of advice from Senator Frank Church who led the famous investigations in the 1970s which uncovered the secret crimes by federal government agencies, such as the FBI and the CIA.
Americans have mostly ignored Church’s advice and stood by as their government has become much more secretive and less restrained by the Constitution.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/13/larry-ellison-nsa_n_3752312.html
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August 13, 2013
Secretary of State Kerry is annoyed that he must contend with an informed public.
John Kerry perfectly illustrates where most of the political class stands on the information war between the U.S. government and American citizens.
In his comments to U.S. State Department personnel in Brazil today Kerry mentioned his concern that people now have too much access to information because of “this little thing called the Internet…[which] makes it harder to govern…”
He also expressed his love for Henry Kissinger. Kerry didn’t make it clear whether his respect for Kissinger was because of – or in spite of – the fact that Kissinger is a war criminal.
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August 13, 2013
Stalking victims take note: Edward Snowden had trouble getting the news media to listen to him too.
If you’re a victim of Cointelpro Version 2.0 (organized stalking) and you’re frustrated by the difficulty gaining the attention of anyone in the news media, you should know that one of the most famous whistle-blowers in the world, Edward Snowden, initially had trouble getting journalist Glenn Greenwald to pay attention to his revelations.
“Snowden anonymously sent [Greenwald] an e-mail saying he had documents he wanted to share, and followed that up with a step-by-step guide on how to encrypt communications, which Greenwald ignored. Snowden then sent a link to an encryption video, also to no avail.”
After several unsuccessful efforts, Snowden ultimately leaked his information to a colleague of Greenwald instead – Laura Poitras, a documentary film maker, who then worked with Greenwald on getting the story out.
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August 12, 2013
CIA Director Brennan was the subject of the late Michael Hastings’ next exposé
According to San Diego 6 news journalist Kimberly Dvorak, the widow of investigative reporter Michael Hastings confirmed that the subject of Hastings’ next project at the time of his death was CIA Director John Brennan.
A hacked email posted on Wikileaks from the president of CIA contractor Stratfor alleged that Brennan – who was then counter-terrorism Czar – was in charge of cracking-down on investigative journalists.
This article indicates that Rolling Stone will soon publish the piece Hastings was working on.
Dvorak’s report also discusses some of the recent analysis of Hastings’ fatal crash.
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August 12, 2013
How the largest pigs at the spy industry trough work the system
Many Americans assume that their nation’s policies on surveillance, law enforcement, and military activities are shaped entirely by the strategic and ideological views of the nations’ political leaders – together with the judgment of the professionals in those areas of government.
While those views play a role, a large factor is simply the career interests and greed of the parasites in the associated industries.
This excellent piece by Glenn Greenwald (and Marcus Baram’s article in the Huffington Post – which Greenwald cites) exposes how key players exploit the revolving door between the surveillance state and its private contractors to cash-in – and how various sycophant TV journalists enable that process rather than call attention to it.
The article is a perfect example of why some people in the establishment news media hate Glenn Greenwald – namely, because he constantly exposes them for what they are.
Since shills like Bob Schieffer at CBS and Dick Gregory at NBC won’t report on these issues, it falls to others to take up the slack. Marcus Baram explains that keeping Americans scared is very good for business if you are someone like former Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff or former head of the NSA and CIA, Michael Hayden.
Chertoff and Hayden are now among the partners at a major defense contractor which “is filled with former national security state officials who exploit their connections in and knowledge of Washington to secure hugely profitable government contracts for their clients.”
In recent years, the Nation, the PBS news show NOW, CounterPunch magazine, and others have alleged that the FBI’s infamous domestic counter-intelligence program, Cointelpro, has quietly re-emerged.
Organized stalking victims should be aware that a large-scale domestic operation to monitor and harass targeted individuals is certainly generating profits for those who administer it. Surely those persons and organizations involved will resist efforts to curtail their activities in the same way that profiteers in the war on terror and the war on drugs oppose efforts aimed at reform and restoration of Constitutional liberties.
Similarly, careerist motivations among many members of the establishment news media will continue to play a big role in shaping the coverage of corporate and government leaders whose organizations operate in the shadows.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/12/michael-hayden-nsa-media-reverence
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August 12, 2013
Be careful what you ask for.
In 2010 the U.S. Department of Homeland Security introduced a national program advising Americans: “If You See Something, Say Something.” Not everyone responded exactly the way the government had hoped.
NSA Whistle-Blower Edward Snowden
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August 9, 2013
Those who would railroad journalist Barrett Brown want to speed-up the train and keep him gagged during the process.
In a case with enormous First Amendment implications, activist and freelance journalist Barrett Brown has been incarcerated since last year and potentially faces a prison sentence up to 105 years related to his efforts to investigate and expose disinformation campaigns and other nefarious activities of intelligence contractors such as Stratfor.
Brown’s trial is scheduled to begin next month, although his attorneys are requesting an extension so they will have more time to prepare. Federal prosecutors are pushing to start the trial next month – and also to have the judge impose limitations (essentially a gag order) on his defense team’s interactions with the media.
Here is the website dedicated to Brown’s defense:
Here is the searchable archive of Stratfor emails posted on WikiLeaks’ website, which states:
“The emails show Stratfor’s web of informers, pay-off structure, payment laundering techniques and psychological methods.”
http://search.wikileaks.org/gifiles/
My first post about Barrett Brown was on July 11, 2013 below.
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August 8, 2013
Feinstein wants First Amendment “shield law” to only apply to major news agencies
Not surprisingly, champion of the police state view of American government, Senator Diane Feinstein (D-California) wants the proposed “shield law” for journalists to apply only to salaried reporters at major news corporations – not to bloggers, activists, and whistle-blowers.
As noted in one of the readers’ comments, the political activist Thomas Paine (author of Common Sense – the best-selling book in American history) would not have rated the protected status in a Diane Feinstein empire.
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August 7, 2013
More about the investigations Michael Hastings pursued before his suspicious death
This is a good review of the important issues related to the late Michael Hastings, the investigative journalist whose fatal auto accident in June has been the subject of much dark speculation.
One of the subjects he had reported on was a disinformation program by the U.S. State Department which uses software created by security contractors to create and manage fake online personas called “sock puppets” to spread U.S. government lies.
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August 5, 2013
U.S. law enforcement agents are being instructed to lie about investigation sources
A secretive unit within the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) called the Special Operations Division (SOD) gathers information (for example, through foreign and domestic wiretaps) and forwards that information to various agencies. The SOD also helps coordinate multi-agency invesigations.
So far, so good (apart from the strategic idiocy and civil rights violations inherent in drug prohibition). However, documents obtained by Reuters show that agents who receive those tips from the SOD are instructed to lie about the origins of their investigations by keeping the SOD’s involvement a secret from defense lawyers, prosecutors, and judges.
That policy – called “parallel construction” – involves “re-creating” the investigation record to make it appear that the initial step in the investigation was something other than a tip from the SOD.
For example, an agent might be told to stop and search a particular vehicle based on a tip. If that search results in an arrest, the agent will then lie (in accordance with official policy) and say that the search was the result of a routine traffic stop.
“ A spokesman with the Department of Justice, which oversees the DEA, declined to comment.”
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/05/us-dea-sod-idUSBRE97409R20130805
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August 4, 2013
More than 5 weeks after Michael Hastings’ fatal crash, still no police report from LAPD
Despite announcing – just 2 days after his June 18 fatal accident – that there were no indications of foul play in the death of journalist Michael Hastings, the Los Angeles Police Department has still not released the accident report.
Today LAPD did release transcripts of the 911 calls reporting the accident. Those transcripts were provided in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from San Diego 6 News.
According to San Diego 6 News reporter Kimberly Dvorak, the FOIA response implied that the fatal car crash is the subject of an investigation by an un-named federal agency. The FBI has denied that it was investigating the incident.
The conservative foundation Judicial Watch is reportedly filing additional FOIA requests this week for information about the investigation. The FOIA requests are being directed to various federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies.
http://www.sandiego6.com/story/Hastings_Death_Examined-20130804
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August 4, 2013
FBI often authorizes criminals to commit crimes according to newly-released documents
When the U.S. Senate’s Church Committee investigated the original version of Cointelpro in the 1970s they found that the FBI was using criminals to commit crimes against targeted individuals.
Organized stalking is not the only area in which the government delegates its dirty work to criminals. USA Today reports that the FBI routinely authorizes criminals to perpetrate crimes when the agency believes it furthers its goals.
“The FBI gave its informants permission to break the law at least 5,658 times in a single year, according to newly disclosed documents that show just how often the nation’s top law enforcement agency enlists criminals to help it battle crime.”
An FBI report from 2011 obtained by USA Today through the Freedom of Information Act revealed that agents authorized 15 crimes a day, on average – although the nature of the crimes is a secret:
“The report does not spell out what types of crimes its agents authorized, or how serious they were. It also did not include any information about crimes the bureau’s sources were known to have committed without the government’s permission.”
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/08/04/fbi-informant-crimes-report/2613305/
Update – December 27, 2013….
Informant crimes authorized by the FBI increased again
A recently-disclosed document shows that in 2012, FBI informants were allowed to break the law at least 5,939 times, a 5 percent increase over 2011.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/27/fbi-otherwise-illegal-activity-report_n_4506385.html
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August 1, 2013
Your TV might be watching you
A firm called iSEC Partners revealed this week that they discovered that several 2012 models of Samsung Smart TVs were vulnerable to being remotely hacked via their web-browsers, such that hackers could turn on the TVs’ built-in cameras and watch the owners of the TVs.
iSEC informed Samsung about the flaws, which have now been fixed.
As CNN notes, the same issue of potential remote hacking to spy on people exists for other devices, such as security cameras.
Also, as reported this past week in the International Business Times, hackers are not the only ones who might be watching you via new technology. Companies like Verizon, Google, and Microsoft are developing devices that can monitor customers’ behavior through TV and video games.
http://money.cnn.com/2013/08/01/technology/security/tv-hack/index.html?iid=HP_River
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August 1, 2013
America’s police state versus a 2-year-old girl
The police state’s drug war has produced another casualty.
A couple in Texas were marijuana smokers, so the government took away their two-year-old daughter, Alexandria, and placed her in an abusive foster home.
The father complained, so the government placed the girl in an even more abusive foster home, where she was beaten to death on Monday.
I guess the government won.
Photo of Alexandria Hill and her father
http://www.kvue.com/news/Father-of-murdered-foster-child-speaks-to-KVUE-218037541.html
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August 1, 2013
America’s police state versus a fawn
Sure, our nation’s economy is in a downward spiral and the federal government has abandoned even the pretense of respecting Americans’ constitutional rights, but at least our police state government is keeping us safe from – a baby deer.
When a couple in Wisconsin brought an abandoned fawn to an animal shelter recently, the staff at the shelter began caring for the animal and scheduled to have it brought to a wildlife preserve in Illinois.
Fortunately the government found out about this evil conspiracy and put a stop to it the day before the deer was scheduled to be taken to the preserve. Apparently state law prohibits possession of a wild deer.
After gathering information about the situation by aerial photo reconnaissance (seriously), nine armed agents from the Department of Natural Resources and four sheriff’s deputies were dispatched to raid the animal shelter.
The squad of 13 brave law enforcement agents sequestered the shelter staff and then hauled the fawn out in a body bag to be euthanized.
Photo of “Giggles” – the fawn that posed a threat to society
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=d80_1375363940
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/aug/1/13-wisconsin-officials-raid-animal-shelter-kill-ba/
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August 1, 2013
German cryptographer reveals how people can easily be framed, spied on, or ripped-off by a cell phone hacker.
Organized stalkers have a plethora of high-tech options to destroy a targeted individual these days. Another one was revealed yesterday at a cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas.
Cell phone sim card encryption and software flaws leave hundreds of millions of cell phones vulnerable to the threat of cyber criminals “highjacking your phone to eavesdrop, impersonate you and ransack your accounts.”
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/aug/01/sim-card-flaw-cellphone-hackers-karsten-nohl
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August 1, 2013
In America, if you use the Internet and you cook food you’re a terrorism suspect
Yesterday a family in Long Island was visited by six armed plain-clothes policemen who questioned them and briefly searched their house because they had recently searched online for information about backpacks and about pressure cookers. Reportedly a computer company had tipped the police about the family’s “suspicious” Internet searches.
The family was probably lucky they weren’t waterboarded.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/01/new-york-police-terrorism-pressure-cooker
Update – August 2, 2013
Apparently, the police who showed up at the Catalano residence were responding to a tip from Mr. Catalano’s former employer, who had called them to report that a review of Mr. Catalano’s work computer revealed that he had searched for “backpacks” and “pressure cooker bombs” (in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing which – as widely reported – involved backpacks and pressure cooker bombs).
Whether that makes you less concerned about the incident depends on whether you think employers should be spying on their employees (and ex-employees) and reporting them to the police for having searched online for a topic that was a major news story – and whether you think that sending six police officers to the man’s home was an excessive response to such a report.
Slate.com claims the police response was perfectly reasonable, and they criticized other media sources for over-reacting to this incident. On the other hand, Slate often acts as an apologist for big government and often seems to take a contrary view on issues purely for the sake of being contrary.
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July 30, 2013
U.S. Senate shows its contempt for the American public
Most Americans oppose arming Syria’s rebels according to recent polls, but the federal government’s secret war machine has other ideas.
Last week, the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee voted to approve the Obama administration’s plan to send weapons to the Syrian rebels despite the lack of support for the idea by Americans.
If you’re angry about it, you’ll have to keep that to yourself. You can’t write a letter of protest to the senators who voted for the plan because it’s a secret which senators voted for the plan.
When asked about her position on the issue, committee chairwoman Senator Diane Feinstein (D-California) said: “It’s classified.”
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/07/30/198097/for-congress-its-classified-is.html
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July 27, 2013
Problems that arise when lazy and/or corrupt law enforcement officers use criminals to gather evidence
If you do any reading about police investigations and prosecutions associated with the drug war, you’ll learn that American law enforcement relies heavily upon criminals to operate as informants to obtain “evidence” for prosecutions.
One advantage of using criminals in your operations is that they’ll pretty much do whatever you want them to since they are desperate and morally-challenged. (This is why most street-level gang stalking perps are – apparently – recruited from the ranks of criminal suspects and ex-cons and other low-lifes.) Also, if they get caught perpetrating a crime on behalf of the police, they have no credibility in the event they point the finger at those who recruited them.
The disadvantage is that such folks are not always the most reliable perps. When police in Scotia, New York wanted to “investigate” a smoke shop, they sent an informant who was facing jail time. The informant planted crack cocaine on the counter and photographed it.
Based on that “evidence” the shop owner was arrested and potentially faced up to 7 years in jail. Fortunately, the shop’s surveillance cameras recorded the informant planting the evidence and the shop owner was exonerated. Apparently, the informant has since “gone missing.”
http://reason.com/blog/2013/07/27/undercover-informant-plants-crack-cocain
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July 26, 2013
Following the money trail – spying on Americans is a big business
Political support for a Stasi Big Brother police state in the U.S. is partly rooted in hawkish views about law enforcement and anti-terrorism strategy, but it’s also rooted in greed.
Spying on Americans is a lucrative business for many government contractors. When Congress voted this week on whether to rein in the NSA’s domestic surveillance programs (July 23), House members who receive big money from those contractors overwhelmingly voted to continue the surveillance.
As Wired reports, the Congress members who supported the NSA’s program to spy on Americans received twice as much campaign finance money from the military and intelligence industry as those who voted to dismantle the program.
Defenders of Constitutional liberties are up against a well-financed industry of parasites.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/07/money-nsa-vote/
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July 26, 2013
The battle lines are being drawn
The fight for the direction of the Republican party has implications for anyone targeted by organized stalking as part of a government counterintelligence program.
It seems very unlikely that the Democratic Party’s heir apparent, Hillary Clinton, an establishment Democrat, would ever go against the wishes of the intelligence agency and law enforcement agency community. Most likely she would continue the generally secretive and militaristic approach to foreign policy and domestic surveillance pursued by Presidents Bush and Obama.
On the Republican side though, ideological fault lines over domestic spying and foreign policy are beginning to rupture. This week’s House vote on the amendment to rein in the NSA’s domestic surveillance was just the first round.
Two prominent Republicans with presidential ambitions, Senator Rand Paul and Governor Chris Christie have taken opposite sides in the debate – not just about the NSA’s domestic spying, but about the wisdom of an aggressive interventionist military policy. Other potential Republican candidates and pundits are also taking sides along roughly neocon versus libertarian lines.
Unfortunately, prospects for a united effort to restore Constitutional respect for civil rights are made complicated by the very different agendas among factions who would be most likely to support putting the police state dog back on its leash.
Libertarians and some “Tea Party” Republicans (as well as progressives) are appalled by elements of Big Brother style government, but they have very different views on social issues, so they are not a natural coalition.
http://www.politico.com/story/2013/07/chris-christie-rand-paul-2016-election-94789.html
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July 25, 2013
Another journalist targeted by the U.S. government
If you’re a target of organized stalking – or for that matter if you’re any American citizen, you might reasonably ask how U.S. military activities in Yemen are relevant to your situation. Here’s how: they reveal the deceptive and corrupt nature of our government in a way that helpfully informs anyone trying to assess allegations being made (at the Nation, Democracy Now!, CounterPunch, and elsewhere) that the FBI’s infamous Cointelpro operations have re-emerged.
For several years the U.S. government has been waging a mostly-secret military campaign in Yemen (essentially a war, but without a Constitutional declaration to make it legal). A U.S. cruise missile strike on a village there in 2009 killed 41 people, including 14 women and 21 children.
The U.S. government and the Yemeni government conspired to lie about the incident, saying that the Yemeni government had launched the attack rather than the U.S., and that the victims were members of an al-Qaeda training camp. The truth about who launched the attack and the identity of the victims was later revealed by two sources: cables released by Wikileaks and evidence gathered and reported by a young Yemini journalist named Abdulelah Haider Shaye.
After exposing what had really happened in the missile strike, Shaye was arrested on apparently trumped-up charges that he had revealed information to help al-Qaeda. He was given a sham trial that was criticized by major human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and sentenced to five years in prison.
In 2011 the president of Yemen announced that he was going to pardon Shaye, but apparently decided against it “because of a phone call from Obama.” Shaye has just been released after serving three years.
Journalist Jeremy Scahill, national security correspondent for the Nation describes what happened in an interview today on Democracy Now!
They said that they had blown up an al-Qaeda training camp. The reality was, women and children were killed. And why do we know that? We know it for two reasons. One is because Abdulelah Haider Shaye went to the scene, he took photographs of what were clearly U.S. cruise missile parts with “General Dynamics” on them, “Made in the United States” on them, and because of the WikiLeaks cables showing that General David Petraeus, who at the time was the CENTCOM commander, conspired with the Yemeni dictator, Ali Abdullah Saleh, for the United States to begin bombing Yemen in the form of drones and cruise—drone strikes and cruise missile strikes and to have the Yemeni government publicly take responsibility for it. So when Abdulelah Haider Shaye exposed this and it became clear to the world that the Obama administration was starting to bomb Yemen, he was abducted by Yemen’s U.S.-backed political security forces. He was taken to a jail and beaten and told that if he continued to report on the U.S. bombing campaign in Yemen, that he would be put back in jail. He went straight from his beating onto the airwaves of Al Jazeera and said, “I was just abducted by Yemen security forces, and they threatened me.” And then, some months later, his house was raided in a night raid, and he was snatched and disappeared for 30 days. He was then brought into a court that was set up specifically to prosecute journalists who had committed crimes against the U.S.-backed dictatorship and was sentenced to five years in that court.
http://www.democracynow.org/2013/7/25/yemeni_reporter_who_exposed_us_drone
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July 23, 2013
The police state is keeping us safe from grandparents
For some reason this grandfather in Lompoc, California thought he could just take his grandchildren to the park without first getting permission from the FBI.
Fortunately, the government sent some Nazi storm troopers to put a stop to that bullshit.
http://www.informationliberation.com/?id=44498
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July 23, 2013
Congress has a fly in the ointment
A handful of members of Congress are daring to champion the notion that the Constitution is even more important than the egos and business cronies of entrenched members of the political establishment.
One such Congressman is 33-year-old Rep. Justin Amash (R-Michigan), a libertarian-leaning Republican. Amash is pushing for a House vote on a bipartisan proposal to establish control over the NSA’s domestic spying authority.
Predictably, the House Intelligence Committee chairman and the White House oppose an immediate vote on the issue. Committee chairman Mike Rogers (also a Republican from Michigan) opposes voting on the issue now as part of the current $54 billion appropriations bill. He wrote that “such changes ought to proceed through a regular legislative process so the effects can be understood and debated fully.”
Rep. Amash replied on Twitter:
“NSA’s unconstitutional spying on ALL Americans was not the product of an informed, open, or deliberative process.”
Touché!
http://www.politico.com/story/2013/07/transportation-housing-bill-senate-94644.html?hp=r3
Update – July 24, 2013…
Rep. Amash’s anti-Big Brother amendment is narrowly defeated.
Round one goes to the Stasi. The House voted 217 to 205 to defeat Rep. Amash’s proposal to abide by the Constitution.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/24/justin-amash-amendment_n_3647893.html
If you’re curious about which members of Congress believe in the Constitution (ayes) and which ones believe in fascism (noes), here’s the break-down:
http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2013/roll412.xml
By the way, the vote did not split along party lines. Instead it was largely the political leadership (the scum at the top of both major parties, along with the White House) who opposed giving Americans their liberty and privacy back. This is obviously a war of the establishment elites and their cronies versus actual Americans.
Update – August 2, 2013
Further evidence that it’s the folks at the top who want the most secrecy
Contempt for the privacy rights of average Americans seems to be the one main issue that the senior leaders of both major parties agree upon. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-California) was among those who voted to continue NSA surveillance of Americans’ phone records; she also rallied other Democrats to vote the same way.
In the Democratic Party’s defense, at least some members of their leadership voted to de-fund the spying program; all the House Republican leaders voted to continue it.
Not all residents of Pelosi’s home district are convinced that Big Brother should be spying on their phone calls. A protest is planned for this weekend.
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July 21, 2013
The Federal Government’s War on Whistle-blowers and Journalists
The increasingly-frequent prosecutions of whistle-blowers and investigative journalists give the impression of a corrupt government lashing-out against those who would expose its corruption.
A quick review of recent cases (which are covered in detail in articles throughout this news archive) gives a sense of the trend. I highlighted the persons targeted just to make clear at a glance the scope of what’s happening.
Revelations by Edward Snowden about NSA surveillance of Americans – and news about the government’s efforts to capture him – have received the most attention recently, but there have been many other important incidents.
Currently we’re awaiting the resolution in the other most high-profile case – that of U.S. Army PFC Bradley Manning. After being arrested for leaking secrets in May 2010, for 9 months he was held in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day, forced to sleep naked without pillows and sheets on his bed, and restricted from physical recreation.
On Saturday, the judge in Manning’s court martial (much of which has been conducted in secret) refused to dismiss the charge of aiding the enemy. Although prosecutors are not seeking the death penalty, the ruling could set a legal precedent that might result in future whistle-blowers receiving the death penalty.
In April of last year, USA Today reported that one of their reporters and an editor were smeared by a disinformation campaign to discredit their reporting on a U.S. government contractor who was conducting disinformation campaigns.
An April 15, 2013 article I called attention to here by Tim Shorrock of the Nation, explained how four NSA employees were subjected to years of legal harassment for exposing Constitutional violations involving domestic spying and also large-scale waste and unethical business practices. The whistle-blowers “described a toxic mix of bid-rigging, cronyism and fraud involving senior NSA officials and several of the nation’s largest intelligence contractors.”
Another whistle-blower, CIA agent John Kiriakou is currently serving a 30-month prison sentence for identifying an intelligence agent who was involved in torture.
Earlier this year when a whistle-blower at the U.S. State Department, Gregory Hicks, voiced his concerns about the handling of the attack on the U.S. embassy in Benghazi, he was apparently subjected to retaliation by senior officials in the department. Those agreeing with the credibility of his claim included persons having no partisan interest in criticizing the Obama administration, such as the Nation magazine.
In May it was revealed that two months of phone records of the Associated Press were secretly obtained by the Department of Justice, seeking the identities of confidential informants. Famed Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein said he believed the seizure of records was intended “to intimidate people who talk to reporters.”
Following the AP phone records incident, journalists reported that trusted sources were becoming noticably more reluctant to provide information. AP President Gary Pruitt said that sources now “fear that they will be monitored by the government.”
Emmy award-winning CBS News correspondent Sharyl Attkisson is a reporter who has been willing to endure resistance and criticism from media colleagues to cover stories that have been politically damaging to the Obama administration, such as the “Fast and Furious” gun-running scandal. In June, CBS confirmed that Ms. Attkisson’s computer was remotely hacked multiple times “using sophisticated methods” late last year, during the period she was investigating the administration’s controversial handling of the attack on the U.S. embassy in Benghazi.
Another story which emerged this year was about Fox News reporter James Rosen, who was investigated by the Department of Justice (DOJ) in 2010. The DOJ subpoenaed his phone records to find his sources for his reporting in 2009 about CIA intelligence regarding North Korea. The DOJ was not merely investigating the person who they identified as the leaker of the information; the search warrants against Rosen accused him – for reporting the story – of being an “aider, and abettor, and/or co-conspirator” in the crime of “espionage.” The warrants indicate that the DOJ was considering indicting Rosen for what has been traditionally known as “journalism.”
Incidentally, if you happen to be searching for information about that case, don’t confuse James Rosen with James Risen. The government now targets so many journalists to intimidate them from reporting on the government’s activities that, by coincidence, New York Times reporter James Risen was also targeted for investigation because he too was engaged in actual journalism.
Risen had reported on information disclosed by a former CIA officer, Jeffrey Sterling, in a 2006 book, “State of War.” A six-year investigation was conducted, during which prosecutors obtained Risen’s telephone, credit, and bank records.
Last month it was reported that for the past two years the White House has been engaged in a program called “Insider Threat” – under which government employees are being told to keep a constant watch on their fellow employees and report any suspicions that someone might be likely to leak any information (including non-classified information) to the public. The program applies even to departments not involved in military, intelligence, or law enforcement – such as the Departments of Education and Agriculture.
Over the last weekend of June, someone broke-into the office of a law firm which is representing a State Department whistle-blower; the perpetrators stole computers and broke into a filing cabinet. Other vaulables were left untouched. No other office suites in the high-rise building were burglarized.
As part of its efforts to keep the federal government’s activities a secret from the American public, the current administration has indicted six journalists for leaking information – more than all previous White House administrations combined.
Equally disturbing perhaps (epecially for targets of organized stalking – who are familiar with slander) is the use of private firms to conduct disinformation campaigns to discredit reporters and political activists.
As noted in the extraordinary July 11 article (see that post below), journalist Barrett Brown is currently in jail for actions related to his role in exposing information about the activities of private intelligence firms with close ties to the federal government. Activities by those firms included, for example, a plan to use disinformation to undermine the Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald on the theory that “if pushed” he would abandon or reduce his public support for Wikileaks.
Greenwald has more recently, of course, been in the international spotlight because of his reporting on the revelations of NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
Americans may eventually push back against efforts to increase the wall of secrecy around the federal government, but they will be battling some powerful forces.
Many in the political establishment take a dim view of the whole “free speech” thing, and see actual reporting as a challenge to their authority. Last month, for example, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) wondered aloud about whether bloggers have free speech rights: “Do they deserve First Amendment protection?”
People like Graham (a hard-core supporter of the Big Brother police-state style of governance) greatly prefer establishment apologist sycophants like David Gregory, host of Meet the Press – rather than investigative journalists like Glenn Greenwald.
When David Gregroy interviewed Greenwald last month, he asked him: “To the extent that you have aided and abetted Snowden, even in his current movements, why shouldn’t you, Mr. Greenwald, be charged with a crime?” There is no evidence that Greenwald “aided and abetted” Snowden, and the question was appropriately criticized by others such as Frank Rich, who wrote that Gregory presumably “also would have accused the Times of aiding and abetting the enemy when it published Daniel Ellsberg’s massive leak of the Pentagon Papers.”
Today’s Washington Post featured an article about the massive expansion of the National Security Agency (NSA), noting that since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, the agency’s workforce has increased by a third, its budget has roughly doubled, and the number of private corporations it uses to support its spying has more than tripled (currently there are close to 500 companies working with the NSA).
All of those are interesting and important facts, but what struck me most was the article’s headline: “NSA growth fueled by need to target terrorists.”
The editors of the Washington Post either believe or are pretending to believe (both possibilities are disturbing) that “the need to target terrorists” is what is fueling the ridiculous growth in the size and power of the federal government’s intelligence agencies.
The massive expansion of the police state (and the corresponding contraction of Americans’ civil liberties) is a product of the greed of parasitic contractors and the lust for power by those government officials who operate in secrecy.
What America needs is a news media led by reporters with the intelligence and courage to question the premise that America should be sacrificing its Constitutional liberty to live under the allegedly secure umbrella of a police state.
About a half-dozen of the articles I posted here since last month concern the late Michael Hastings – a well-known investigative journalist who perished in a suspicious car crash on 18 June – just hours after meeting with a lawyer for Wikileaks, and after reporting to colleagues and friends that he was working on a big story about the CIA, and that he had become the target of an intimidating FBI investigation.
It might never be clear whether his death was an accident, but even the fact that many people are deeply suspicious is a reflection of the climate of fear that exists in the shadow of a police state known for targeting whistle-blowers.
One of the projects Hastings worked on in recent years was a collaberation with other journalists to investigate internal documents obtained from private intelligence firms. That effort, “Project PM” was the one I mentioned above, led by Barrett Brown, which uncovered – among other things – the plan to smear journalist Glenn Greenwald.
Brown has been in jail for approximately 10 months on charges related to that work. He has been denied bail, and could face a prison sentence of up to 105 years if he receives maximum sentences for all charges and is ordered to serve them sequentially.
Americans (even those who have not yet been targeted by Cointelpro operations) should probably start being concerned that journalists and whistle-blowers who try to expose abuses of power are having their computers hacked, their lawers’ offices broken into, their reputations smeared by disinformation, their phone records tracked, and in some cases they are imprisoned or die in suspicious car crashes.
“Why the Hacks Hate Michael Hastings” by Barrett Brown, Vanity Fair – June 23, 2010
http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2010/06/why-the-hacks-hate-michael-hastings
“The MSM and the Snowden Affair: Where True Loyalty Lies” by Eric Alterman, The Nation – July 17, 2013
http://www.thenation.com/article/175326/msm-and-snowden-affair-where-true-loyalty-lies
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July 20, 2013
How Capitalism Really Works
It’s not about building a better mouse-trap; it’s about creating an artificial delay in the supply-line of mouse-traps to inflate their prices.
I rarely post articles on economics here, but they’re not completely off-topic. The moral culture of business elites is of a piece with the arrogance and abuses of power in the upper echelons of government and its private contractors who acquiesce in Cointelpro operations. Gang stalking is an extreme manifestation of the notion that there should be very different rules (or no rules) for the folks at the top.
For those who don’t follow financial reporting, the “vampire squid” referred to in the article’s headline is from Rolling Stone reporter Matt Taibbi’s description of the powerful investment bank Goldman Sachs, which he once described as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/07/vampire-squid-has-set-its-sights-your-beer-can
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July 17, 2013
Michael Hastings’ body was cremated – possibly against his family’s wishes
Kimberly Dvorak, a reporter with San Diego 6 TV news reported that the body of journalist Michael Hastings was apparently cremated against his family’s wishes (possibly destroying evidence about his death – which has been the subject of suspicion). Dvorak said though that she had not yet confirmed directly with Hastings’ widow that the cremation was not authorized by the family.
Dvorak also reported that Hastings had refrained from telling his wife about the story he was working on at the time of his death “to protect her.” In addition, Dvorak said Hastings’ wife has hired a private investigator to investigate the death.
Reportedly, Hastings’ vehicle was traveling at a high-rate of speed at the time of the fatal crash on 18 June, and the Los Angeles Police Department announced soon after the crash that they found no evidence of foul play.
A close friend of Hastings, Army Staff Sergeant Joe Biggs, is among those who have expressed suspicion about the circumstances of the accident. Biggs said that fast driving was out of character for Hastings, who “drove like a grandma.”
Biggs reported that Hastings had revealed to him prior to his death that he was working on a story about the CIA, and that it was “the biggest story yet.” Just hours before the crash, Hastings met with a lawyer for Wikileaks, and told her that he was being investigated by the FBI.
Hastings’ reporting on General Stanley McChrystal – the commander who led the war in Afghanistan – resulted in McChrystal being relieved of command.
http://www.infowars.com/report-michael-hastings-body-cremated-against-familys-wishes/
Previous entries on this story below: June 19, 20, 22, 25
Update to this story – August 13, 2013
Cremation was authorized by the family
A whole bunch of questions remain about Hastings’ fatal crash, but the allegation that the cremation of Hastings’ body might not have been authorized has been found baseless, according to Russ Baker at WhoWhatWhy:
“There are enough truly troubling things about the Michael Hastings story not to have legitimate inquiries sidetracked by a red herring. As Matt Farwell pointed out, instead of advancing a real investigation, such shoddy “reporting” has the exact opposite effect.”
Reporter Kimberly Dvorak should not have raised the cremation issue without checking it out first – a basic mistake for a journalist. In her defense though, at least she is reporting on an important incident which most news agencies are ignoring.
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July 17, 2013
Big Brother is tracking all vehicles
“Using automated scanners, law enforcement agencies across the country have amassed millions of digital records on the location and movement of every vehicle with a license plate…”
http://news.yahoo.com/driving-somewhere-theres-govt-record-140052644.html
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July 14, 2013
Homeland Security Committee chairman calls for increased efforts to capture Snowden before he reveals more of the U.S. government’s crimes
Congressman Michael McCaul, chairman of the House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee said the president needs to bring “any and all pressure” on Russia to hand over whistle-blower Edward Snowden.
Apparently, the federal government is feeling a bit frustrated and impotent these days. Our economy is weak, and so is our foreign influence. After wasting a trillion dollars and the lives of thousands of American soldiers (and allied soldiers and civilians), we have essentially lost the war in Afghanistan. And now Russia is “making a mockery” of America according to Rep. McCaul.
http://news.yahoo.com/senior-republican-says-u-must-step-efforts-snowden-191223878.html
Unfortunately for the American police state opportunists and apologists like Rep. McCaul, Snowden still has more embarassing information to reveal. Glenn Greenwald at the Guardian says “Snowden has enough information to cause [more] harm to the U.S. government in a single minute than any other person has ever had.”
A revelation about the re-emergence of Cointelpro (gang stalking) is probably be too good to be true, so individuals targeted by gang stalkers should not get their hopes up. Still, if there are any more serious revelations about the criminality of federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies, it could at least help awaken the American population to the reality that those communities have partly become lawless rogue entities.
http://in.reuters.com/article/2013/07/13/usa-security-snowden-greenwald-idINDEE96C05520130713
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July 11, 2013
Journalist who exposed disinformation campaigns could get
105-year prison sentence
Northwestern University philosophy professor Peter Ludlow was interviewed on Democracy Now! today concerning his recent article in the Nation, “The Strange Case of Barrett Brown” – about a journalist who has been in jail for approximately ten months.
Your reaction to Ludlow’s article in the Nation (I urge you to read it) will depend on your familiarity with the topics addressed in this website. Anyone who has first-hand experience with gang stalking and a basic knowledge of the FBI’s infamous Cointelpro operations will immediately appreciate the article’s importance.
Even if you have no experience with organized stalking, if you have been reading critiques of the increasingly police state nature of America’s government (and the role of private companies in that disturbing trend), you will likely find this article of interest.
Brown is a journalist sympathetic to groups like Wikileaks and Anonymous. When hackers leaked internal documents from private intelligence firms (Blackwater, Stratfor, HBGary, and others) and posted them online, he began to investigate and report on the contents. That information included such things as plotting by the spy firms to discredit Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald and others – such as critics of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce – by systematically lying about them.
Other activities of security contractors were even more serious – including proposals about opportunities for renditions and assassinations. As a former employee of a security corporation, by the way, I am surprised by none of this.
Ludlow alleges that the Department of Justice (DOJ) is complicit in facilitating disinformation. For example, when Bank of America was concerned about some of their documents which had been leaked, the DOJ referred them specifically to the firm of Hunton and Williams, the law firm (and lobbying firm) which coordinated the disinformation campaign against groups critical of the Chamber of Commerce.
The FBI obtained a warrant to search for Barrett Brown’s laptop computer at his mother’s house (where Brown was) to find out his sources. The FBI charged his mother for obstruction of justice for concealing Brown’s laptop in her house. She faces up to a year in jail.
Presumably, the charges were brought to increase pressure on Brown. When he reacted angrily, saying about an FBI agent that he would “ruin his life,” he was charged with making threats. Also, because some of the leaked documents contained credit card information, Brown was charged with credit card fraud.
He has been denied bail. If he receives maximum sentences and serves them sequentially, he could face 105 years in prison.
Ludlow describes the larger point this way:
“…one might think that what we are looking at is Cointelpro 2.0—an outsourced surveillance state—but in fact it’s worse. One can’t help but infer that the US Department of Justice has become just another security contractor, working alongside the HBGarys and Stratfors on behalf of corporate bidders, with no sense at all for the justness of their actions; they are working to protect corporations and private security contractors and give them license to engage in disinformation campaigns against ordinary citizens and their advocacy groups. The mere fact that the FBI’s senior cybersecurity advisor has recently moved to Hunton and Williams shows just how incestuous this relationship has become. Meanwhile, the Department of Justice is also using its power and force to trample on the rights of citizens like Barrett Brown who are trying to shed light on these nefarious relationships.”
Here is Peter Ludlow’s June 18 article about Barrett Brown in the Nation:
http://www.thenation.com/article/174851/strange-case-barrett-brown
Here is the Democracy Now! interview with Peter Ludlow, discussing Barrett Brown:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvl0pWKaZ14
Here is a good article about Barrett Brown published on June 24 in the Guardian. Brown’s attorney, Ahmed Ghappour, describes the danger involved in the kind of muckraking in which his client was engaged:
“The problem is you have companies doing very sensitive intelligence work for the government. It follows that the enemies of those companies are your own [enemies]. And it would be in their interest to silence or prosecute journalists investigating those companies.”
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jun/24/surveillance-us-national-security
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July 10, 2013
Most Americans view Snowden as a whistle-blower, rather than as a traitor. Most politicians hold the opposite view.
A new Quinnipiac poll found 55 percent of American voters support Edward Snowden’s efforts to expose the government’s surveillance of American citizens. About one-third (34 percent) said they believed Snowden had betrayed his country. The remaining 11 percent had no opinion.
As the article notes, the majority of Americans (of both major political parties) now hold a view that is at odds with almost the entire political establishment.
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July 7, 2013
Break-in at office of law firm representing State Department whistle-blower
Last weekend burglars stole computers and broke into file cabinets at a Dallas law firm representing a high-profile State Department whistle-blower. Other valuable items were left untouched. No other office suites in the high-rise building were burglarized.
“The firm Schulman & Mathias represents Aurelia Fedenisn, a former investigator at the State Department’s Office of the Inspector General. In recent weeks, she raised a slew of explosive allegations against the department and its contractors ranging from illicit drug use, soliciting sexual favors from minors and prostitutes and sexual harassment.”
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July 5, 2013
Did Snowden accomplish anything?
My own view is that NSA contractor Edward Snowden’s exposures of the federal government’s spying on Americans have helped alert our nation about the drift toward a police state. As this article makes clear though, it is still an open question.
One month after The Guardian’s first story, which revealed an order from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court authorizing the National Security Agency to collect the phone records of every Verizon customer, there has been no public movement in Washington to stop the court from issuing another such order. Congress has no intelligence reform bill that would rein in the phone tracking, or Internet monitoring, or cyberattack planning, or any of the other secret government workings that Snowden’s disclosures have revealed.
There is no modern day Sen. Frank Church ready to convene historic hearings about the intelligence community, like the ones Church ran in the 1970s, proceedings that radically transformed the U.S. intelligence services. Far from having been surprised by Snowden’s disclosures, today’s intelligence committee leaders stepped right up to defend the NSA’s surveillance programs. From Republicans, led by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, to Democrats, including Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, they’ve been nearly unanimous in their support.
“I feel I have an obligation to do everything I can to keep this country safe,” Feinstein told The New York Times. “So put that in your pipe and smoke it.”
The advantages of incumbency and seniority in Congress make it virtually impossible to dislodge a barnicle like Feinstein from the ship of state. She’s a typical filthy-rich deeply-entrenched member of the establishment, who never questions the expansion of federal power and secrecy. Unfortunately, because of her position as chairwoman of the Intelligence Committee, her contempt for the Constitution matters.
On the other hand, as Americans watch their freedom and prosperity diminish year after year under the leadership of the plutocracy Feinstein represents, the seas will get rougher for people like her to navigate. Edward Snowden’s revelations have helped accelerate that change.
http://www.politico.com/story/2013/07/edward-snowden-nsa-93742.html
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July 5, 2013
U.S. Postal Service is photographing all mail
Obviously, the government now views all American citizens mainly as potential criminals and/or potential terrorists. Equally obvious is that the government means to closely track – as much as possible – all communications, thoughts, and activities of American citizens.
Every letter and package handled by the U.S. Postal Service is now photographed – approximately 160 billion items each year.
Theoretically, only the outside of the envelopes and boxes are supposed to be photographed. On the other hand, theoretically the White House is supposed to ask Congress for authorization to go to war.
http://rt.com/usa/us-nsa-mail-spying-706/
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July 4, 2013
Happy 4th of July! Go out and celebrate what’s left of your freedom.
This sign posted in Lakewood, Ohio today is a good example of what it looks like when your country becomes a nation of sheep, ruled by a police state.
http://www.infowars.com/park-rules-sign-summarizes-sorry-state-of-freedom-on-independence-day/
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July 4, 2013
FBI’s Use of Stasi Tactics in Gang Stalking
The “Gang Stalking is Murder” website has a new post which reviews the history of gang stalking tactics used by East Germany’s state police force – the “Stasi.” Those tactics are also currently used in Russia – as reported by a journalist at the Guardian, Luke Harding, who is quoted describing his direct experiences with the methods in 2007.
“…these KGB tactics that Putin used as a young agent, that he learned about, have been—are being wheeled out now in what I think is essentially a kind of rebooted, updated version of the Soviet Union, but without the ideology, without socialism, and just with a kind of rapacious elite who want to hang on to their billions and stay in power at all costs.”
This is the comment I posted:
I think you’re correct in identifying as significant that last bit of Harding’s description of the Russian government’s use of any and all tactics to protect the privileged class. It has obvious relevance to what is apparently happening in the U.S. with the counterintelligence program of “gang stalking.”
Also, the same dynamic of self-interest surely applies to those overseeing the stalking (FBI/NSA/CIA/Homeland Security officers, and many local cops). Their power and careers are largely tied to the perpetuation and expansion of the police state.
That same sentence by Harding contains good news though – as I see it – for gang stalking targets: namely, that corrupt police state systems are functioning “without the ideology.” In other words, there is no moral/philosophical core to sustain it. In both Russia and the U.S., the police state will eventually collapse precisely because it’s a morally-hollow self-serving machine.
[For a perfect example of this, see the August 18, 2011 article below about the use of stalking by local police in Stockton, California. Cops stalked a city official there because their contract negotiations had broken down. In other words, the motivation for the stalking was simply greed and/or vengeance.]
Currently, the facade is that Americans are in constant peril because of Islamic Jihadists – so we need to have a super-powerful, extremely secretive, domestic surveillance regime to protect us from this menace.
In the wake of failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the NSA surveillance scandal, revelations about the DOJ spying on reporters, etc., many Americans are beginning to question whether it’s a good deal to abolish the Constitution and our privacy (and to spend massive amounts of money on a military and homeland security force) to supposedly protect us from a threat that kills fewer Americans each year than are killed by lightning strikes.
As Americans wake-up to what is happening – and as the enormous size of the police state leads to information leaks – gang stalking might become unsustainable.
http://gangstalkingismurder.wordpress.com/fbi-using-stasi-techniques-in-its-gang-stalking-program/
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July 3, 2013
Baby taken from her mother to punish the mother for eating a bagel
God bless America’s police state. A Pennsylvania mother had her three-day-old baby taken away from her for five days because she failed a drug test as a result of eating a bagel that contained a poppy seed.
County welfare staff and police forcibly removed the baby girl from the mother’s home. The county and the hospital where the baby was delivered agreed today to pay the mother a settlement of nearly $144,000.
http://www.breitbart.com/system/wire/upiUPI-20130703-153722-4835
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July 3, 2013
Former CIA officer warns against trusting the FBI
Whistle-blower John Kiriakou, a former CIA agent serving jailtime for leaking classified information, wrote an open-letter to Edward Snowden that was published yesterday, warning him against trusting the FBI.
Kiriakou is serving a 32-month jail sentence after pleading guilty to releasing the identity of a covert officer to a reporter. The covert officer was a participant in waterboarding interrogations which Kiriakou publicly condemned.
“FBI agents will lie, trick, and deceive you,” Kiriakou writes. “They will twist your words and play on your patriotism to entrap you. They will pretend to be people they are not – supporters, well-wishers, and friends – all the while wearing wires to record your out-of-context statements to use against you. The FBI is the enemy; it’s a part of the problem, not the solution.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/02/john-kiriakou-edward-snowden_n_3537734.html
Also see the May 31, 2013 entry below regarding the lack of trust in the FBI.
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June 28, 2013
Number of federal wiretaps jumped 71 percent last year
If you were worried that the government is not spying on Americans enough, you can rest easy.
“Federal courts authorized 1,354 interception orders for wire, oral and electronic communications, up from 792 the previous year, according to the figures, released Friday by the Administrative Office of the United States Courts. There was a 5 percent increase in state and local use of wiretaps in the same period.”
Regarding those numbers, keep in mind – as the article notes – just one wiretap in California, for example, intercepted 185,268 phone calls.
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June 27, 2013
Police state on steroids: 7 undercover cops with guns arrest female college student for possession of bottled water
Armed agents of Virginia’s Alcoholic Beverage Control agency (6 men and 1 woman, all in plain clothes) surrounded three female college students as one of the students was walking to her car after purchasing some bottled water at about 10:15 p.m. on 11 April. One agent jumped on the hood of the car; another agent drew a gun. Reportedly, the agents suspected the bottled water was actually beer.
Unsure of who the agents were, the women tried to flee the dark parking lot. The women called 911 as they left the parking lot, planning to drive to a police station. The driver was arrested and spent the night in jail. She was charged with three felonies; today prosecutors dropped the charges.
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June 27, 2013
Teenager jailed since March for making a joke during an online video game
America’s thought police are keeping you safe from teenagers who make inappropriate jokes. The teen in this case, made an online comment – which he identified as a joke, using the common abbreviation “JK” for “just kidding.” Responding to a comment from another player in the game who said he was “crazy,” 19-year-old Justin Carter said he might “shoot up a kindergarten.” Already jailed since March, he could face at least 8 years for making a terrorist threat.
If you don’t think America’s police state government has gone off the rails, you’re a moron.
Update to this story – July 11, 2013
Justin Carter, the 19-year-old thought-crime suspect from San Antonio, Texas was released today on bail after an “anonymous good Samaritan” posted his $500,000 bail. Reportedly, Carter could face up to a decade behind bars if convicted.
Already, he has been punished rather severely for his spontaneous online comment:
“…Carter, 19, has been in jail for nearly four months. Carter says he has been assaulted repeatedly by other inmates and subsequently placed in solitary confinement. According to his lawyer, Carter is so depressed that he’s on suicide watch, meaning that the jail guards have stripped him of his clothes and replaced them with only a gown.”
http://tv.msnbc.com/2013/07/09/texas-19-year-old-in-prison-for-sarcastic-facebook-post/
Justin Carter’s mother has started a petition to ask officials to intervene in the case – and also to restore free speech rights in such cases. You can sign the petition at the link below. Over 200,000 people have already signed it (as of July 25, 2013).
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June 25, 2013
Government employees urged to spy on fellow employees
Under a White House program called “Insider Threat” employees at government agencies (including those with no involvement in national security) are being told to keep a constant watch on their fellow employees and report any suspicions that someone might be likely to leak any information (including non-classified information) to the public.
Insider Threat also covers employees in agencies or departments like the Peace Corps, the Social Security Administration, the Departments of Education and Agriculture. As part of the program, staffers at the Department of Agriculture and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have taken an online tutorial called “Treason 101,” which instructs them to look out for employees fitting the psychological profile of spies. The Department of Education has told its employees that, quote, “certain life experiences … might turn a trusted user into an insider threat.” These experiences include, quote, “stress, divorce, financial problems” or “frustrations with co-workers or the organization.”
http://www.democracynow.org/2013/6/25/insider_threat_government_employees_urged_to
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June 25, 2013
An explanation of how Michael Hastings could have been murdered
Not that the government would ever use technology for anything nefarious, but this is a good explanation of how the reporter Michael Hastings could have been killed in the recent car crash that has been the subject of so much suspicion.
The author concludes that “Your car, ultimately, might be more vulnerable to attack than your computer or smartphone…”
http://www.salon.com/2013/06/25/hacking_a_car_is_way_too_easy/
Update to this story – July 8, 2013
A video clip of a southern California local TV news broadcast. The accident report has still not been released. Police and fire department personnel reportedly have been advised to not discuss the incident.
http://www.sandiego6.com/story/details-of-reporter-hastings-death-remain-elusive-20130708
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June 24, 2013
Mick Jagger on Obama’s Police State
Gang stalking (Cointelpro Version 2.0) has apparently been in effect since the early 1980s – based on claims made by the late Ted L. Gunderson, the FBI official who became a whistle-blower.
So it’s definitely not a partisan issue; both major parties have failed to exercise any restraint over U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies. But Obama is the one in the White House currently and he has embraced the worst elements of the police state (the war on drugs, drone assassinations, undeclared wars, spying on all Americans’ emails, phone calls, and Internet activity, etc.).
At a concert in Washington D.C. this evening, Mick Jagger commented “I don’t think President Obama is here tonight…but I’m sure he’s listening in.”
http://twitchy.com/2013/06/24/mick-jagger-zings-president-obama-at-d-c-concert/
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June 23, 2013
Rand Paul on lying versus telling the truth
There’s a reason I include a link to Senator Rand Paul in the “Tactics” section of this website. Here is an example. On Meet the Press today, while the loathsome and seemingly ubiquitous Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) advocated pursuing NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden “to the ends of the earth” for exposing the U.S. government’s war on Americans’ privacy, Rand Paul noted the difference between Snowden and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper – namely, that Clapper was recently caught lying to Congress, whereas Snowden stands accused of telling the truth.
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June 22, 2013
Disturbing email from Michael Hastings published
“Michael Hastings, the BuzzFeed and Rolling Stone reporter killed in a car crash June 18, sent an email to friends warning that the “Feds are interviewing my ‘close friends and associates.’” In the email, published by Los Angeles television station KTLA 5 Friday, Hastings also said he was “onto a big story, and need to go off the radar for a bit.”
Hastings was killed the next day in an early-morning solo-car crash in Los Angeles. The email is sure to fuel now-widespread conspiracy theories alleging foul play in Hastings’ death.”
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June 21, 2013
Obama meets with privacy watchdog panel … in private
I won’t even try to improve upon that headline of the Washington Times article.
In 2009 Obama famously declared that his presidency would be “the most transparent in history.” These endless examples of the fact that he was simply lying should serve to educate Americans about the nature of the ruling class.
“President Obama’s Friday meeting with a newly reformed privacy watchdog panel will take place behind the closed doors of the White House Situation Room, according to administration officials.
It’s the president’s first sit-down with the recently constituted and little-known Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, created nearly a decade ago but dormant for the entirety of the Obama presidency.”
The general attitude of the federal government (the White House, the FBI, the DOJ, the CIA, the NSA, the IRS, etc.) is basically this: Americans are almost certainly too stupid to know that the government is trampling on their rights, but just in case some people figure it out and try to stand up for their Constitutional rights, we’ll have our massive secret police state spy on everyone so we can identify the potential trouble-makers and crush them before they can stir up trouble. If we get caught, we’ll stage some political theater for the masses: “Look! We’re going to hold a (secret) meeting to discuss your civil liberties! Don’t you feel better?”
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/jun/21/obama-meets-privacy-watchdog-panel-private/
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June 20, 2013
Wikileaks’ lawyer reports that Michael Hastings contacted her a few hours before his fatal crash, and said the FBI was investigating him.
Suspicions about the death of freelance investigative journalist Michael Hastings have just increased.
Was he speeding because it was early in the morning when there was no traffic – or was he trying to evade someone who was pursuing him (either to spook him or to cause an accident)? It’s a reasonable question. A lot of other questions are being raised as well.
Everything about this incident makes it ripe for conspiracy theories – regardless of whether his death was an accident.
Even the New York Times has doubts about the FBI’s credibility on other matters. On Tuesday they published an article questioning the FBI’s finding that 100 percent of the agency’s 150 shootings (from 1993 to 2011) were justified. Here’s the link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/19/us/in-150-shootings-the-fbi-deemed-agents-faultless.html?_r=0
Hastings’ death comes at a time when the credibility of agencies like the FBI and the NSA is at a low point to say the least. Generally, no one investigates the FBI except the FBI, so it’s almost impossible to know what they’re really doing. When the U.S. Senate investigated the FBI in the 1970s the Senate discovered that the agency was stalking people and even hiring mafia members to carry out crimes.
The DOJ has announced that Michael Hastings was not [officially] under investigation. That’s probably true, but was he being “gang stalked?”
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June 19, 2013
Investigative journalist Michael Hastings dies in car crash
America has lost a fearless investigative journalist at a time when they are sorely needed. Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings died in a car crash at about 4:15 am yesterday morning in Hollywood, California.
Hastings was exactly the type of journalist who could have exposed the national scandal of gang stalking. Unafraid of going after big targets, Hastings’ coverage of General Stanley McChrystal – the commander in charge of the war in Afghanistan – led to McChrystal being relieved of command.
U.S. News & World Report quoted Hastings’ colleague at Rolling Stone, Tim Dickinson: “Hastings’ hallmark as a reporter was his refusal to cozy up to power.”
When an aid to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton asked Hastings, “Why do you bother to ask questions you’ve already decided you know the answers to?” he famously snapped back, “Why don’t you give answers that aren’t bullshit for a change?” and published the email exchange.
Hastings’ final article (June 7) was a scathing critique of domestic surveillance policies by President Obama, the Democratic party establishment, the DOJ, the FBI, and military contractors.
“Transparency supporters, whistleblowers, and investigative reporters, especially those writers who have aggressively pursued the connections between the corporate defense industry and federal and local authorities involved in domestic surveillance, have been viciously attacked by the Obama administration and its allies in the FBI and DOJ.”
http://www.buzzfeed.com/mhastings/why-democrats-love-to-spy-on-americans
Not suprisingly, there are suspicions being voiced on the Internet about his death. I’m guessing that quite a few people will be interested in the details of the fatal car crash.
This a report of his death, the death threats he had received, and the ensuing conspiracy theories:
Update – March 14, 2014….
In response to multiple Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, the FBI posted a brief document on its website indicating that “No FBI records indicate an investigative interest in Hastings.”
http://vault.fbi.gov/michael-hastings
Two observations: (1) unlike Hastings, the FBI has a well-documented history of extreme secrecy and getting caught lying about crimes it committed against Americans (Cointelpro), and (2) if Hastings’ death was connected to his efforts to expose unflattering information about high level officials in the Defense Department and/or his efforts to expose crimes by intelligence-security firms (the email hacking incident for which Barrett Brown and Jeremy Hammond are both serving time as I write this), it is very possible that the attention he claimed he was receiving prior to his death might have been made to appear to him as an FBI investigation by any free-lancers who might have been involved in his harassment and/or his death.
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June 19, 2013
Jonathan Schell at The Nation captures the moment:
“A school of fish swims peacefully in the ocean. Out of sight, a net is spread beneath it. At the edges of the net is a circle of fishing boats. Suddenly, the fishermen yank up the edges of the net, and in an instant the calm, open ocean becomes a boiling caldron, an exitless, rapidly shrinking prison in which the fish thrash in vain for freedom and life.
Increasingly, the American people are like this school of fish in the moments before the net is pulled up. The net in question is of course the Internet and associated instruments of data collection, and the fishermen are corporations and the government. That is, to use the more common metaphor, we have come to live alongside the machinery of a turnkey tyranny.”
I posted the following comment at the Nation website in response:
Jonathan Schell, Thank you for an eloquent and accurate portrayal of what this country has become. It makes me physically ill to contemplate where we are as a nation.
I hope there is something left of the DNA of the Founders, so we can stand up to the police state into which we have allowed our government to mutate.
Technology and careerism have had their way; it’s time to fight back.
http://www.thenation.com/article/174889/americas-surveillance-net
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June 18, 2013
Gang stalking victims are not the only ones disgusted with mainstream news media
Less than one-fourth of Americans have confidence in newspapers and television news according to a new Gallup poll.
Anyone familiar with gang stalking knows that the mainstream news media have been – for the most part – too lazy or too cowardly to report on organized stalking.
There have been some exceptions – and I post them here as they come to my attention – for example the August 2011 story about a city manager in California being stalked by police, which was covered by local reporters both on TV and in a newspaper. But such reporting is rare.
One reason many Americans have become less trusting of mainstream news sources is that the wide availability of alternative news sources online has revealed that many stories are ignored – either for political or corporate concerns, or simply because of journalistic incompetence or cowardice.
Update to this story – July 12, 2013
A new Pew Research Center poll shows that the American public’s esteem for journalists has been dropping in recent years. The percentage of Americans who believe that journalists contribute “a lot” to society’s well-being has dropped from 38 percent in 2009 to just 28 percent in 2013.
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June 14, 2013
Agencies with Agendas
In theory, federal agencies serve the public; that’s the high school civics class version of government. In reality, agencies often have agendas and cultures heavily shaped by the ideological and career motivations of their employees.
The well-documented use of criminal tactics by the FBI during Cointelpro (and now allegedly being used in a current version of the program known as “gang stalking”), suggest that secretive agencies are especially prone to become “rogue” entities within the government.
Looking back at the first version of Cointelpro, we know that the people targeted included civil rights and peace activists like Martin Luther King, Jr. and John Lennon. Such priorities reflected the politics and culture of members of the FBI.
As Congress investigates whether the IRS has been targeting organizations (such as Tea Party-affiliated groups) based on their political beliefs, the following statistic is especially interesting: lawyers at the IRS made political donations to President Obama (versus candidate Mitt Romney) at a 20-to-1 ratio.
Just to be clear: I’m simply making a point about the self-serving nature of government entities; it’s not a partisan issue. On police state issues, Americans choosing between the two major parties are essentially choosing their variety of poison. Both parties supported – and continue to support – the unconstitutional abomination that is the Patriot Act, for example.
There is no reason to think that a President Romney would have been any better on military-industrial complex issues and civil rights policies than the current administration. Romney made clear, for example, during his campaign that he was quite enthused about going to war against Iran, and that he had no reservations about the drug war. Also, an article in the Daily Beast on 24 June by Stuart Stevens, Romney’s chief campaign strategist, made clear Stevens’ contempt for whistle-blowers.
http://washingtonexaminer.com/most-irs-government-lawyers-donated-to-obama-campaign/article/2531925
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June 14, 2013
George Will on a government that’s drunk with power
The government has “earned Americans’ distrust” according to George Will. Americans don’t trust the NSA he argues, partly because federal agencies such as the IRS have shown their contempt for the rights of Americans.
Describing Lois Lerner, the IRS administrator who recently invoked her Fifth Amendment rights to avoid testifying about her presumably illegal abuse of power against political opponents, Will said this:
“Lerner, it is prudent to assume, is one among thousands like her who infest the regulatory state. She is not just a bureaucratic bully and a slithering partisan. Now she also is a national security problem because she is contributing to a comprehensive distrust of government.”
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/will061313.php3
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June 12, 2013
Setting the honesty bar as low as possible
I hope other gang stalking victims are enjoying the current U.S. government scandals as much as I am (the State Dept. and White House cover-up of the Behghazi consulate attack screw-ups, the IRS targeting Americans based on their political beliefs, the DOJ spying on reporters, and the NSA spying on everyone).
If you’re a “targeted individual,” you likely already knew about the sleazy character of the federal agencies that operate in the dark. Now the general public is getting a peak at how things work, and it’s amusing to watch the fed’s trying to maintain the façade of legitimacy.
In a Senate hearing in March the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, was asked “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” Clapper replied “No sir, not wittingly.”
On Sunday Clapper was asked in an NBC news interview to account for the discrepancy between his statement and the recent revelations by NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden. Clapper said his statement was “the least untruthful” answer he could give.
I guess that’s the new standard for federal agencies: when lying to America about your activities, try to tell the least dishonest lie possible.
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June 11, 2013
Take a moment to enjoy David Brooks getting verbally beaten-up
Reacting to the NSA spying scandal, pundits have mostly sorted themselves into two camps: those who are disturbed by the fact that our government has mutated into a Big Brother police state, and those who are just happy to have this opportunity to burnish their reputations as statist boot-lickers by defending the political establishment.
Anyone familiar with New York Times columnist David Brooks can guess where he is on this.
Brooks is articulate and often clever, but he’s essentially an apple-polisher. For perspective, you should know that he described his first meeting with Barack Obama, who was then a senator, this way:
“I remember distinctly an image of–we were sitting on his couches, and I was looking at his pant leg and his perfectly creased pant,” Brooks says, “and I’m thinking, a) he’s going to be president and b) he’ll be a very good president.”
Reason.com has a great analysis of Brooks’ take on Edward Snowden:
http://reason.com/blog/2013/06/11/david-brooks-analysis-of-edward-snowden
Update – December 19, 2013
The folks at Reason are still exposing Mr. Brooks’ idiocy. Apparently, he is increasingly of the opinion that America should just become a dictatorship, so clever opinions like his could be more efficiently implemented.
http://reason.com/archives/2013/12/17/david-brooks-paen-to-presidential-power
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June 10, 2013
The government reacts to being caught spying on Americans
The veil has been lifted (a little bit) on the American police state, and people in Washington are weighing-in.
At one end of the spectrum are people like congressman Peter King (R-New York) who is doubling-down on his always-unconditional support for the police state by calling for the head of the whistle-blower (Snowden):
“The United States government must prosecute him to the fullest extent of the law and begin extradition proceedings at the earliest date.”
At the other end of the spectrum are people who believe that the Constitution should be more than a talking point, such as retired congressman Ron Paul (R-Texas):
“The government does not need to know more about what we are doing. We need to know more about what the government is doing.”
Others, such as the Obama administration’s spokeshole, Jay Carney “sidestepped questions about Snowden” today according to the article linked below.
Stay tuned: according to Glenn Greenwald – the reporter to whom the story was leaked – there are more revelations to come.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/10/us-usa-security-idUSBRE95910O20130610
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June 10, 2013
Sales of George Orwell’s 1984 are up 69 percent on Amazon
The headline pretty much tells the whole story.
Part of the interest is tied to the fact that it’s the book’s 60th anniversary, but mostly it’s the fact that the visionary Orwell’s dystopian novel has never been more relevant to the nature of our government.
http://washingtonexaminer.com/sales-of-george-orwells-1984-up-69-percent-on-amazon/article/2531503
Update – August 3, 2013….
Two months after Edward Snowden’s revelations about the NSA surveillance, CNN is reporting that sales of Orwell’s classic increased as much as 9,000 percent at one point.
http://www.cnn.com/2013/08/03/opinion/beale-1984-now/
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June 9, 2013
Gang Stalking victims take note: this is what courage looks like.
If you want to ever see gang stalking ended, you will first need to see it exposed. That will require individuals (like you) to do things like this.
News in the past week has been dominated by stories of the NSA’s scandalous secret programs to spy on Americans. The stories were based on revelations that occurred because the NSA made the mistake of hiring someone with moral principles.
That person, Edward Snowden, a former army soldier, became a whistle-blower when he realized how corrupt the NSA was. Today he revealed his identity to the world via the Guardian newspaper.
Snowden, who currently resides in Hong Kong (and now faces the possibility of extradition to the U.S.) clearly understands the risk:
“We’ve got a C.I.A. station just up the road in the consulate here in Hong Kong, and I’m sure,” he said with a nervous laugh, “that they’re going to be very busy for the next week, and that’s a fear I’ll live under for the rest of my life.”
The next time you’re trying to decide whether to aggressively expose the gang stalkers in your neighborhood by doing something that could involve some small risk on your part, you should consider the example set by people like Edward Snowden – and Bradley Manning, and Julian Assange, and Daniel Ellsberg, and the late Ted Gunderson (the former head of the Los Angeles FBI office who tried – with some success – to expose gang stalking).
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June 7, 2013
A Nation of Boiled Frogs
Every day now seems to bring a new scandalous revelation of the federal government’s secret war on the rights of American citizens.
Last night the Guardian revealed that the NSA has a program called “Prism” which allows the U.S. government to directly collect data from systems at Google, Facebook, Apple, and other Internet companies. The information includes search histories, email contents, file transfers, and live chats.
The good news for the government – and the bad news for Americans – is that our society has been rendered mostly passive by the frog-in-boiled-water phenomenon. The gradual constant erosion of civil liberties (always in the name of “national security”) has become so common, that many people don’t realize they should be outraged.
In the past few days, the “nothing to see here” reaction to these scandals has been voiced by prominent members of both parties – politicians such as Sen. Feinstein (D) and Lindsey Graham (R), as well as writers from Will Saletan at Slate to Andrew McCarthy at National Review.
The good news is that not everyone is drinking the kool-aid anymore. Prominent voices from across the political spectrum are expressing outrage – from Rush Limbaugh to the New York Times (which ran an editorial proclaiming that President Obama “has lost all credibility.” If you read the comments posted at liberal and conservative websites – to say nothing of libertarian websites – you’ll see that a lot of Americans are furious about this stuff.
This would be a perfect time for someone like Sen. Wyden (D-Oregon) or Sen. Paul (R-Kentucky) to call for another Church Committee investigation of the nation’s federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies, and expose the current version of Cointelpro: gang stalking. I wrote a letter to that effect yesterday to Sen. Wyden’s office. Every victim of gang stalking should do the same.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-nsa-data
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June 6, 2013
The National Security Agency (NSA) is collecting all phone records every day from Verizon
Every phone call made or received by Verizon customers is being tracked by America’s largest spy agency.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-records-verizon-court-order
Americans should be grateful for the existence of the foreign press. This latest scandal was revealed by the British paper, the Guardian. Most “reporters” in the U.S. either don’t care or won’t report what Big Brother is doing to Americans. The irony is that this particular spying program specifically targets Americans, and not foreigners, as noted in Forbes:
Breitbart noted that this scandal – just like all other recent major scandals of power abuse by the federal government – was not discovered by the mainstream media.
Don’t worry about America’s mutation into a police state though: Intelligence Committee leaders Senator Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Senator Chambliss (R-Georgia) dismissed this latest intrusion by saying it is only “meta data” being collected (i.e., the identities of the persons making and receiving the calls, and when, and for how long, etc. – not the content of the calls). Nothing to see here people; go back to your grazing.
For more on what U.S. Senators think about the rights and freedoms of average Americans, see the article below.
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June 5, 2013
Some U.S. Senators are unsure whether free speech rights should apply to the common folk
Yesterday, Senator Graham (R–South Carolina) wondered aloud about whether bloggers have free speech rights: “Do they deserve First Amendment protection?”
Graham was actually refering to whether bloggers should be covered by so-called “media shield laws,” designed to protect reporters from things like the recent seizure of Associated Press phone records by the Department of Justice.
Earlier this week, Senator Durbin (D–Illinois) also said he doubted that bloggers should be given media shield rights.
I suspect that if we could replace the current membership of the Senate with a hundred randomly-chosen used-car salesmen, it would elevate the moral character of the institution.
http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/bloggers-media-shield-laws-and-the-first-amendment/
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June 3, 2013
As of today, any American who is arrested (not convicted, just arrested) can have his or her DNA sample taken and entered into a national database.
A divided (5-4) U.S. Supreme Court ruled today that routinely taking a DNA sample from anyone who is arrested is allowed without a search warrant.
One could make a case that taking a suspect’s DNA sample is comparable to fingerprinting -which is already a standard booking procedure. On the other hand, it’s another brick in the wall for a massive government with an increasingly Big Brother police state nature.
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20130603/DA6MB4680.html
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June 1, 2013
A must-read essay by Julian Assange, editor of WikiLeaks
In today’s New York Times, Julian Assange reviews a new book, “The New Digital Age,” written by Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, and Jared Cohen, a former adviser to Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton, who is now director of Google Ideas.
Whether you view Assange as a hero or a criminal – or something in between – you should be interested in this critique of the alliance of power between technology corporations and the U.S. government.
For gang stalking victims, the abuses of power and technology by the U.S. government are an existential concern, but everyone should care about invasions of privacy and manipulation of foreign policy by a self-serving elite.
“Google, which started out as an expression of independent Californian graduate student culture — a decent, humane and playful culture — has, as it encountered the big, bad world, thrown its lot in with traditional Washington power elements, from the State Department to the National Security Agency….
“…The advance of information technology epitomized by Google heralds the death of privacy for most people and shifts the world toward authoritarianism….
“…The New Digital Age is, beyond anything else, an attempt by Google to position itself as America’s geopolitical visionary — the one company that can answer the question “Where should America go?” It is not surprising that a respectable cast of the world’s most famous warmongers has been trotted out to give its stamp of approval to this enticement to Western soft power. The acknowledgments give pride of place to Henry Kissinger, who along with Tony Blair and the former C.I.A. director Michael Hayden provided advance praise for the book.”
For more on Schmidt’s buddy, Henry Kissinger, see my March 31 blog entry.
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May 31, 2013
A helpful tip from the New York Times: always believe the government.
Russ Baker, the author of the terrific article linked here is the founder and editor of WhoWhatWhy. Baker is an investigative journalist whose articles have been published in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, the Nation, The New York Times, the Washington Post, The Village Voice, Esquire and other major publications.
Here Baker deconstructs a recent piece of rubbish featured in the New York Times about conspiracy theories.
As Baker notes, readers of the New York Times are not blindly following its orders to accept whatever the government – and the New York Times – is trying to spoon-feed them:
“Fortunately, a bunch of articulate “nuts’ have challenged this Times piece. Guess who? Times readers. The response comments are full of thoughtful rebuttals.”
Hat tip to the excellent website Gang Stalking Is Murder, which is where I first saw this article.
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May 31, 2013
Gang stalking targets are not the only people who don’t trust the FBI
Ibragim Todashev, a friend of the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing, was shot to death in his apartment in Florida on May 22 during an interrogation by an FBI agent and two detectives from the Massachusetts State Police.
While no official report has yet been issued on the incident, multiple accounts of what happened have been emerging since the shooting, and the stories keep changing.
Regardless of what actually happened, it’s interesting to note that press coverage of the shooting in the mainstream media has included a lot of discussion about the differing and evolving stories that have been leaked.
A lot of people have expressed skepticism about the incident; it seems to reflect a general lack of trust in the law enforcement officials involved. Slate begins its latest article on the shooting this way: “Another day, another version of the story of what happened…”
Rachel Maddow on MSNBC discusses the shooting:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxB9R8blmu8
Update to this story – June 19, 2013
It turns out that all FBI shootings are justified – according to the FBI.
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2013/06/fbi-fatal-shootings-ibragim-todashev/66381/
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May 30, 2013
The U.S. Attorney General’s efforts to silence whistle-blowers by treating reporters as criminals are leading to calls for his resignation
Probably most gang stalking victims tend to focus on their malevolent neighbors as the primary threat to their well-being, but just like the FBI’s Cointelpro operations, gang stalking would not exist without the tacit approval of the top law enforcement agency, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). It is worth remembering that U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy authorized some of the Cointelpro operations, for example.
Currently the DOJ is headed by Eric Holder, whose integrity, as I note in the “What is Gang Stalking?” section of this website, has been suspect since before his tenure as Attorney General.
Prior to his appointment, Richard Cohen at the Washington Post declared that Holder was morally unfit for the position, based on his record of being a puppet of powerful players in Washington. In particular, Cohen and others were concerned about Holder’s approval of a pardon by President Clinton of a wealthy crook named Marc Rich – apparently as a reward for large donations by his wife to the Democratic party.
In all likelihood, Holder was promoted to the highest position in U.S. law enforcement precisely because of his willingness to always do the bidding of those in power.
Currently, Holder is under scrutiny for his approval of a search warrant against reporter James Rosen for having received information leaked to him from a State Department adviser. Allegations have been made that the search warrant even included records of Rosen’s parents.
James Goodale, the author of the article linked below, played a key role in the publication of the Pentagon Papers by the New York Times. He argues that Holder is essentially treating reporters as criminals.
Update to this story – June 21, 2013….
Congresssional votes for Holder’s resignation now at 122…
http://www.politico.com/story/2013/06/eric-holder-james-rosen-ron-desantis-93159.html?hp=r12
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May 28, 2013
Clues about gang stalking can be gleaned from considering some of the people who are not targeted for intense monitoring and harassment.
By definition, a government program which is secret and illegal – and not discussed in the press (such as Cointelpro and MK Ultra) cannot be learned about exclusively through the normal information channels. An understanding of gang stalking requires a different approach.
One critical element of understanding the nature of gang stalking is a knowledge of the undisputed facts about previous secret illegal government programs, conspiracies, and scandals, such as Cointelpro, MK Ultra, Red Squads, East Germany’s Stasi, the Pentagon Papers, Watergate, Iran-Contra, etc.). That background is essential, not only for an awareness of the operational details of nefarious government activities, but also because it allows a more realistic appraisal of the plausibility of various claims about current conspiracies.
Another critical element of understanding the nature of gang stalking is inference. Evidence of the U.S. government’s acquiescence in the widespread use of gang stalking is predictably limited. It does exist – for example, the “Documents” page of this website includes the testimony of FBI agent whistle-blower Ted Gunderson. Still, much of what is happening has to be inferred from a set of facts whose relationship to each other is only clear when those facts are considered in their totality. This is essentially what intelligence analysts do: they acquire numerous pieces of data whose importance – if any – is often not apparent when the facts are viewed separately, and then they look for patterns.
To understand the nature of gang stalking, it’s instructive to consider the implications of who is not targeted.
The original version of Cointelpro did not target individuals who were engaged in violent crime; it mainly targeted people who were seen as political dissidents. Targets included people most Americans would not view as threats to society: Martin Luther King, Jr., and John Lennon, for example. Also, the FBI wasn’t merely monitoring such people; the Senate’s Church Committee found that King was “the target of an intensive campaign by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to ‘neutralize’ him as an effective civil rights leader.” Similarly, in addition to surveillance by the FBI, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) tried to deport Lennon for his peace activism.
Many gang stalking victims express frustration and bewilderment at the extreme monitoring and abuse heaped on them while countless others – who are objectively more dangerous to society – seem to be left alone.
As seen by the above examples, that can be explained in some cases by law enforcement and intelligence agencies perceiving that the targeted individuals represent a political threat to the neo-fascist views of some members of those agencies.
In other instances, government agencies apparently use organized stalking tactics to control people who are viewed as potential criminal or terrorist threats, but are not implicated by legally actionable evidence. See the May 31, 2006 article below, for example, regarding such tactics being used – probably illegally – by Canadian intelligence and law enforcement agencies.
In still other cases, individuals targeted for gang stalking are reportedly chosen because they represent a threat – either to a corporation or to the government – as potential whistle-blowers. Evidence for this is mostly anecdotal, but there are many such accounts. The case of Ted Gunderson (see the “Documents” page of this website) is one example.
A grey area exists on this issue because of the secrecy and disinformation surrounding Cointelpro stalking. Multiple agencies are apparently involved, and the harassment is apparently delegated various ways. Delegation also occurred in the original version of Cointelpro, as found by the U.S. Senate’s Church Committee investigation. That is mentioned, for example, in the opening statement in the C-SPAN documentary clip on the “Videos” page of this website).
Persons with connections, skill sets, and assets relevant to gang stalking – such as private security contractor firms – could easily initiate a gang stalking campaign (using private investigators and others) against anyone who has crossed someone who is a member or a client of those firms. This is apparently what happened to me.
History contains many examples of corporations using private security thugs to wage war on persons deemed inconvenient to the corporations, such as the Battle of Matewan (also known as the Matewan Massacre). Seven detectives and three townspeople died in a gun battle when the Stone Mountain Coal Company employed the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency as enforcers to evict coal miners and their families from a camp on the outskirts of Matewan, West Virginia in 1920.
The analysis above – namely, that private entities with their own agendas sometimes conduct gang stalking operations semi-autonomously, at times colluding with law enforcement – would go a long way toward answering this question: why would the U.S. federal government, which (a) closely monitors its citizens generally and (b) apparently acquiesces in gang stalking against certain targeted individuals, seem relatively unconcerned about numerous others who are manifestly more dangerous? Numerous examples exist, such as the failure to deport certain illegal immigrants who pose a risk.
The logical explanation is that the government sometimes targets individuals for its own reasons (as done with Red Squads, Cointelpro, and MK Ultra), and other times it permits certain well-connected people to arrange for individuals to be targeted. This scenario is even more plausible in light of the well-documented close ties and revolving doors between corporations and government in the post-9/11 security infrastructure.
Here is just one such example – from today’s news – of someone who was clearly dangerous, but did not attract anything like the Big Brother/Stasi-type attention given to the targeted individuals of gang stalking.
Apparently, the individual in this case (linked below) had a history of breaking and entering, and attempted rapes of minors, but he had never participated in political protests or pissed-off anyone with deep pockets and government connections, so he was left free to pursue his interests. He took advantage of his freedom by murdering an elderly couple and raping a two-year-old child.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/28/jerry-andrew-active-jail_n_3348303.html
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May 28, 2013
Nearly half of all Americans believe the federal government now poses an “immediate threat” to their rights and freedoms.
A Gallup Daily tracking survey released yesterday indicates that most Americans (54 percent) believe the federal government has too much power. Moreover, nearly half the population (46 percent) believe that the federal government “poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens.”
It would be interesting to know what these poll numbers would be if the modern version of Cointelpro (gang stalking) became widely known.
Another thing that would be interesting would be to know more about the 8 percent of Americans in the survey who expressed their concern that the federal government has “too little” power. Presumably, for those folks, the power of the FBI/CIA/NSA to read everyone’s email without a search warrant does not go far enough. That’s kind of disturbing. I suppose those are the people who would have been the prison camp guards in Nazi Germany.
That 8 percent is probably also the segment of the population from which gang stalking perp’s are recruited – at the intersection of evil and stupid.
http://www.breitbart.com/system/wire/upiUPI-20130527-100651-4954
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May 24, 2013
Sharyl Attkisson demonstrates the difference between a journalist and a lapdog
If gang stalking victims are to ever see their government rein-in the rogue federal agency thugs who perpetrate gang stalking, they will probably need to rely upon journalists willing to endure some friction in their careers.
Emmy award-winning CBS News correspondent Sharyl Attkisson is one of those journalists. A critic of government abuses of power, Ms. Attkisson has endured resistance from network managers and criticism from co-workers.
Attkisson was one of the few reporters in the mainstream media who aggressively pursued two high-profile scandals of the Obama Administration: the “Fast and Furious” gun-running operation and the handling of the Benghazi embassy attack.
In short, Attkisson has been willing to confront “the Buzzsaw” referred to in Kristina Borjesson’s Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press.
Apparently, part of that buzzsaw may include something familiar to gang stalking victims: having your computer hacked:
Earlier this week, Attkisson told POLITICO her personal and work computers had been “compromised” and were under investigation. Though she said she was “not prepared to make an allegation against a specific entity,” she said elsewhere that “there could be some relationship between these things and what’s happened to James [Rosen],” the Fox News reporter who became the subject of a Justice Department investigation after reporting on CIA intelligence about North Korea in 2009.
http://www.politico.com/story/2013/05/sharyl-attkisson-91871.html
Update to this story – June 14, 2013
CBS News confirmed that Attkisson’s computer was remotely hacked multiple times “using sophisticated methods” late in 2012 (during the time period when she was investigating the Benghazi story).
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May 21, 2013
Kirsten Powers demonstrates the difference between a journalist and a lapdog
More Democrats in the media should follow the example of Kirsten Powers, who understands that journalistic integrity is more important than partisan loyalty. As Ms. Powers notes, the current administration’s inclination to crush all dissent, has been evident since the dawn of the era of Hope and Change. The persecution of whistle-blowers, spying on the press, and other abuse-of-power scandals should not have come as a shock.
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May 21, 2013
Even the professional spooks say (off-the-record) that Assange is being framed
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been living in the Ecuadorian embassy in London since June 2012. He has been granted diplomatic immunity so he can avoid extradition for trumped-up charges of sexual assault in Sweden.
Assange and his defenders have maintained all along that the allegations were a conspiracy to punish and silence him for publishing embarassing U.S. diplomatic cables leaked by U.S. soldier Bradley Manning.
Now a September 2012 email sent by an officer of the UK intelligence agency GCHQ to a colleague has been obtained by Assange – who requested the material under the Data Protection Act.
The email stated “They are trying to arrest him on suspicion of XYZ… It is definitely a fit-up….”
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May 20, 2013
Conservatives (selectively) disgusted with power abuses by the federal government
I’m pleased to see that conservative Republican Hugh Hewitt – who defends foreign interventionism and the enormous cost of the military-industrial complex, as well as the government’s efforts to control Americans’ personal lives in various ways (the drug war, opposition to gay marriage, etc.) – is taking note of the corruption of the powerful elite in Washington.
Commenting on the imperial attitudes on display in the recent scandals at the IRS, the Justice Department, and the State Department, Hewitt eloquently describes the government’s cultural rot:
“D.C. is becoming Versailles on the Potomac, a virtual palace where a few hundred thousand privileged grandees rule through their minions in the provinces. The result is a deep well of contempt which the governors have for the governed, and that attitude has seeped into every nook and cranny of the vast federal power.”
I just wish Hewitt (who is very smart) would seriously consider the implications of the current scandals for the agencies he tends not to worry about, such as the NSA, the CIA, the Pentagon, and the FBI. Those powerful institutions are no doubt plagued by the same arrogance, and they have the additional corrupting temptations that come from operating in near-total secrecy. That, no doubt, is part of what has led to the current widespread use of gang stalking to control and terrorize individuals who are deemed insufficiently servile.
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May 19, 2013
Where do they find cops who would participate in a stalking conspiracy?
Some of the articles I post here are included simply to break down a common unwarranted assumption – namely, that the ranks of America’s law enforcement agencies don’t include many individuals of the sort who would participate in something as evil and unconstitutional as gang stalking.
This is not an attempt to libel the entire police profession – which unquestionably includes not only many decent people, but also heroes who risk their own lives for total strangers; I’m just making a point about the plausibility of the claim that gang stalking receives support from members of the law enforcement community across the country.
Any one of these incidents would not begin to make the case, but there are many. Here is one from today’s news.
A former “Top Cops” award recipient, Richard DeCoatsworth, who sat dressed in a ceremonial uniform next to first lady Michelle Obama at the president’s address before Congress in February 2009, was charged yesterday with raping two women at gunpoint. Previously, he was also charged with using excessive force, when he shot a motorcyclist. In addition, he was sued by a neighbor for making threats.
http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/19/us/philadelphia-police-rape-charge/index.html?hpt=hp_t2
Also see the January 17, 2013 entry below for a much more persuasive piece of evidence – namely, a detailed list of serious crimes in one city by police officers which covers the past half century.
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May 19, 2013
How could the government keep a gang stalking conspiracy secret?
Part of the answer to that question is that the Justice Department thugs could take measures which intimidate potential whistle-blowers who might be considering leaking information to the press. The president of the Associated Press said today that the government’s recent seizure of its phone records has already made sources less willing to talk to AP journalists.
AP President Gary Pruitt said that sources now “fear that they will be monitored by the government.”
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May 18, 2013
Defending the corruption and idiocy of America’s drug war might be about to get harder.
America’s political establishment is still generally afraid to confront the growing public realization that drug prohibition is a hopelessly stupid policy. For example, U.S. Attorney General Holder has still not weighed in about how the Department of Justice plans to cope with the legalization of marijuana in Colorado and Washington.
External developments may force the government to adjust to a new reality. A number of Latin American countries are considering pulling the plug on the prohibition industry. It would be premature to say this will happen soon, but the writing may be on the wall, as evidenced by the new report cited in the article below.
If several countries stop participating in the drug war, the fed’s may have to decide whether to double-down or quit. U.S. political leaders might have to choose between (a) waging war on independent-minded Americans in various U.S. states (while simultaneously waging war against independent-minded nations in Latin America) or (b) abandoning the strategy of prohibition and incurring the political wrath of both the self-righteous hypocrites who support prohibition philosophically and the opportunists who profit from it (the DEA, the prison industry, etc.).
“Publication of the Organization of American States (OAS) review, commissioned at last year’s Cartagena Summit of the Americas attended by Barack Obama, reflects growing dissatisfaction among Latin American countries with the current global policy on illicit drugs.”
“In one scenario envisaged in the report, a number of South American countries would break with the prohibition line and decide that they will no longer deploy law enforcement and the army against drug cartels, having concluded that the human costs of the “war on drugs” is too high.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/may/18/western-leaders-game-changing-drugs-report
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May 16, 2013
The worst of both worlds: the U.S. government is supremely powerful at doing things in which it should not be engaged, and incompetent at the stuff it’s supposed to be doing.
The same U.S. government intelligence/security/police apparatus that can arrange to have me monitored and harassed 24/7 (even though, like most gang stalking victims, I’ve never been arrested or charged or convicted of anything), is incapable of keeping track of a couple of terrorists it knew about. They apparently have gone missing.
This is also the government which – after taking away our rights and liberties in the name of security, especially after the 9/11 attack (warrantless access to everyone’s email, etc.) – was unable to prevent the recent bombing at the Boston marathon – despite having been tipped by the Russians that the perpetrators were bad guys who should be watched.
If you’re a supporter of the police state vision of America (for example if you are a member of the NSA, CIA, FBI, Homeland Security, Blackwater, etc. – or one of the well-connected elite who perceives that such entities do your bidding), in a sense, you cannot lose: if a terrorism suspect is caught planning an attack, he can be paraded as an example of the wisdom of having a super-powerful police state, and if the government fails to catch him and he commits a terrorist act, that event can be cited as a reason for giving them even more power and money. When the FBI, CIA, and NSA failed to prevent the 9/11 attack, they were rewarded with a massive expansion of their powers and budgets.
Government Loses Track of Terrorism Suspects it Already Caught
http://reason.com/blog/2013/05/16/government-loses-track-of-terrorism-susp
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May 15, 2013
Baltimore cops sued (again) for destroying citizen footage of them caught in the act of being themselves
“The Baltimore Police Department is being sued for attacking a woman and smashing her camera, marking the second time in two years it has been sued for destroying footage.”
http://reason.com/blog/2013/05/15/baltimore-cops-sued-again-for-destroying
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May 14, 2013
The IRS is being investigated for giving special scrutiny to groups based on their political views
Even at the outset, this story already looks like a major scandal – rather than an innocent bit of local mis-management, as officials are trying to portray it.
You might recall that the IRS was in the news just last month (see April 10 article below) when they asserted a right to read everyone’s email without a warrant. This is an agency that is corrupted by its power.
If our nation’s tax agency behaves this way, you can imagine what sort of nefarious abuses are taking place at the numerous super-powerful well-funded intelligence agencies (CIA, NSA, etc.) which operate in total secrecy.
Update to this story – July 19, 2013
The author of this piece, Peggy Noonan, is a partisan of course, but she cites some persuasive new testimony before Congress that seems to confirm the initial allegations that the IRS was being used as a tool to supress political groups opposed to the president.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324448104578614220949743916.html
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May 14, 2013
The Associated Press reacts to the government’s seizure of its phone records
The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press.
This incident is disturbing both because of the Big Brother snooping aspect, and also because the potential chilling effect on confidential sources might prevent the public from discovering any number of other government scandals. Famous Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein said on MSNBC today that he believed this was the very intention of the records seizure: “The object of it is to intimidate people who talk to reporters.”
The only good news as I see it is that this affair might wake up the national press – since it affects them personally – and they might start covering these power grabs by the fed’s more aggressively as a result.
http://www.politico.com/story/2013/05/inside-the-ap-fear-determination-91338.html?hp=t1_3
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May 13, 2013
A youth correctional facility in Mississippi for inmates as young as 13 is declared by a federal judge to be “a cesspool of unconstitutional and inhuman acts.”
“For years, the kids at Walnut Grove were subjected to a gauntlet of physical and sexual assaults, and psychological abuse including long-term solitary confinement. All of this took place under the management of private prison conglomerate the GEO Group….
Guards regularly had sex with their young charges and the facility’s pattern of “brutal” rapes among prisoners was the worst of “any facility anywhere in the nation” (court’s emphasis). Guards also were deemed excessively violent—beating, kicking, and punching “handcuffed and defenseless” youths and frequently subjecting them to chemical restraints such as pepper spray, even for insignificant infractions.
The guards also sold drugs on site and staged ‘gladiator-style’ fights.”
This is one installment in a series of interesting articles about the worst prisons in the America.
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May 10, 2013
FBI complies with FOIA request, but redacts everything
When the ACLU filed a Freedom of Information ACT (FOIA) request with the U.S. Department of Justice inquiring about the conditions under which the FBI can force cell phone companies to turn over users’ private text messages, this is what they received:
The redacted memo contained 14 more pages – all of them blacked-out. Even the date was omitted.
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May 10, 2013
Whistle-blower at the U.S. State Dept. suffers retribution for expressing his concerns about the handling of the attack on the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi, Libya
The persecution of whistle-blowers is a symptom of deep rot in the highest echelons of American government and corporations – where almost no one is ever held accountable for either incompetence or malfeasance.
Many of the lapdog apologists in the news media have been deflecting all criticisms of the Obama administration regarding the Benghazi attack by dismissing them as baseless partisan attacks. That’s easy to do when the critic is someone like Rush Limbaugh. However, when the progressive journal The Nation (hardly a Republican propaganda machine) is making the case regarding whistle-blower retribution, it should probably be taken seriously.
“It appears, according to experts, that indeed Hicks not only fits the profile of a whistleblower but is also being unfairly retaliated against by his superiors. The unfortunate backdrop here is an administration with a troubling record of retribution against federal employees who speak out against official policy.”
http://www.thenation.com/blog/174290/troubling-case-gregory-hicks
Update to this story – May 23, 2013….
Victoria Nuland, the former State Department spokeswoman who played a major role in editing the talking points about the Benghazi attack that were used by the Obama administration, has been nominated to be the State Department’s top diplomat for Europe and Eurasia.
The obvious moral of the story is that in America, if you’re a whistle-blower, you’ll get hammered, but if you’re a brown-nosed drone who carries out the orders of your superiors without questioning anything, you’ll be rewarded with promotions.
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May 10, 2013
Nine cops in Bakersfield, California beat a man to death, then seized witnesses’ cell phone video evidence of the beating
Yet another example of the fact that many of the people who become cops are exactly the type of people who should not be cops.
http://reason.com/blog/2013/05/10/cops-beat-possibly-intoxicated-man-to-de#comment
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May 5, 2013
A good example of the idiots who would give away America’s freedoms in pursuit of security
David Gregory is haunted by a New Age of Terror that exists in his imagination
Excerpts from an article by Justin Doolittle posted on DailyKos.com
“First, a simple look at the facts about this alleged New Age of Terror that exists only in David Gregory’s imagination. In 2011, the most recent year for which we have data, 17 Americans were killed by terrorism, a number that’s basically consistent with previous years. Significantly more Americans (26) were killed by lightning. “Death by furniture” constitutes a comparable threat.
But even these figures fail to fully convey the irrationality at play here. Gregory is evidently obsessed with domestic terrorism in particular. Of those 17 Americans killed by terrorism in 2011, none were killed in the United States. In 2010, too, not a single American was killed by domestic terrorism. More Americans were killed by syphilis in 2011 than by terrorism in the entire decade after 9/11. Death by domestic terrorism is so rare as to render it absurd to even discuss. David Gregory devoted nearly an entire show to it.
Note that more than 122,000 died from accidental injury and 53,000 died from the flu and pneumonia in 2011. One could cite any number of statistics to illuminate the silliness of this obsession.
The obsession with domestic terrorism serves important objectives of the political class. It provides a rationale for further eroding privacy and civil liberties – more in sorrow than anger, of course (Gregory: “Do we need to sacrifice privacy in order to be safer?”). To the extent that domestic terrorism is a threat, it makes no distinction based on class (as in the case of 9/11), as opposed to gun violence, which, by and large, targets America’s underclass. It keeps Americans scared, obedient, and supportive of their leaders (a New Age of Terror is hardly an appropriate time for dissent).
We should never accept this stupid obsession with Terrorism just because it’s become so ubiquitous since 9/11. It’s the responsibility of thinking citizens to relentlessly point out how truly irrational it is and how it so transparently involves ulterior motives.”
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May 4, 2013
A former FBI counterterrorism agent claims on CNN that every phone call Americans make is recorded and accessible to the U.S. government
The only limitations left on what the government can do to you are technological – not constitutional – and technology is progressing very quickly.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/04/telephone-calls-recorded-fbi-boston
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May 2, 2013
Florida is encouraging citizens to spy on their neighbors
Palm Beach County’s Sheriff is “planning public service announcements to encourage local citizens to report their neighbors, friends or family members if they fear they could harm themselves or others.”
If someone has a reason to seriously think his neighbor is planning to kill someone, of course he should report it. But you don’t need a government program to tell you that. This is just promoting a snitch culture.
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April 30, 2013
National Review inveighs against conspiracy speculation by Alex Jones
National Review Online (NRO) posted an article today dismissing Alex Jones as a complete nut-job.
It’s easy to make the case that Jones trafficks in conspiracy theories with an indefensible recklessness. He does seem to pounce quickly on breaking stories, and seems to have more passion for speculation than for fact-checking.
On the other hand, Alex Jones – unlike countless people in the news media – is obviously not simply carrying water for the blue team or the red team. Also, unlike most people in the mainstream media, he’s willing to discuss subjects like MK Ultra (in the 1990s he interviewed John Marks, the investigative journalist who wrote The Search for the Manchurian Candidate). His guests have also included people such as Noam Chomsky and NSA whistle-blower William Binney.
The part of the NRO piece that might be of interest to victims of gang stalking is this bit:
“This is the man who, after going on a high-speed paranoiac rant on Piers Morgan Tonight about gun control, returned to his Manhattan hotel room to make a video in which he claimed to be under surveillance by hostile government agents.”
The “hostile government agents” the author refers to were NYPD officers. The writer is vague about what exactly she is implying. Perhaps she believes that government agents are never hostile. Perhaps she believes that American law enforcement agencies never put people under surveillance for political reasons. Perhaps she should read some of America’s history on those issues.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/346957/gospel-alex-jones
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April 28, 2013
The U.S. Army says it doesn’t want more tanks; pork-barreling whores in Congress proceed to buy more tanks.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/28/abrams-tank-congress-army_n_3173717.html
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April 19, 2013
Pulitzer prize awarded for exposing illegal behavior by cops
In my view, this story is very relevant to the subject of gang stalking, since it involves police officers (from multiple agencies) illegally snooping on private data, and stalking a targeted individual to harass and intimidate her.
A Florida newspaper, The Sun Sentinel, won a Pulitzer award for the public service category for exposing reckless driving by off-duty police officers. The interesting part was the retaliation by cops against one of their own for trying to enforce the laws.
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April 15, 2013
A Florida cop found it amusing to bring to a gun range targets that resembled Trayvon Martin, the black 17-year old killed by a zealous neighborhood watch volunteer
http://www.wftv.com/news/news/local/port-canaveral-police-sergeant-fired-trayvon-marti/nXLdC/
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April 15, 2013
Former National Security Agency (NSA) employee whistle-blowers expose NSA’s spying on Americans
This is credible expert whistle-blower testimony about the dark world of Big Brother criminal activities being perpetrated against Americans by the federal government. Gang stalking victims know about this kind of stuff first-hand.
In the expanded surveillance programs after the 9/11 attacks, the NSA began a vast unconstitutional program of domestic surveillance – described as “better than anything that the KGB, the Stasi, or the Gestapo and SS ever had.”
Note that the government’s reaction to the revelations was not to start firing and arresting the bastards at the NSA who oversee the illegal surveillance; they’re going after the whistle-blowers.
http://www.thenation.com/article/173521/obamas-crackdown-whistleblowers?page=0,0
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April 13, 2013
The Israel lobby tells its sock-puppets in the U.S. Congress to create special rules for Israel, and they respond as ordered.
I call attention to this column at the risk of alienating some readers; gang stalking victims will ultimately need Congress to pull the plug on the current version of Cointelpro – just as they did, albeit briefly, with its predecessor, following the Church Committee investigations, and we should know what we’re up against.
This is a good example of how quickly many Congress members jump to do the bidding of powerful interest groups, in stark contrast to their indifference to the plight of powerless non-organized groups, such as victims of gang stalking.
Americans’ perceptions of foreign policy regarding Israel generally is also a good example of the media-driven ignorance of U.S. citizens on critical issues; Americans are rarely told, for example, about the existence of a significant opposition within Israel itself to various hawkish policies.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/13/barbara-boxer-aipac-israel-discrimination
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April 11, 2013
Secrecy guarantees abuses of power in America’s government
Today’s column by Glenn Greenwald notes that even mainstream news agencies are using the word “lies” to describe President Obama’s statements about the drone program.
Greenwald’s main point (which is relevant to counterintelligence operations such as organized stalking) is that when a government is permitted to operate in secrecy, such lies and abuses of power are inevitable.
A transcript of a discussion involving former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger provides a perfect example of what many powerful people in American society really think and say and do when they are not in front of the cameras.
The fact that Kissinger is basically a rat isn’t news (see Christopher Hitchens’ book The Trial of Henry Kissinger for the best account of that), but it’s good to remember how, for decades, “journalists” in the U.S. media mostly fawned over him – while in private, he acted with total contempt for the laws that constrain the common folk. Here is Greenwald’s observation:
That secrecy is the linchpin of abuses of government power is as central a political principle as exists. This week, WikiLeaks released a serachable catalog of millions of once-secret but now-declassified documents and highlighted an incredibly revealing transcript of a 1975 meeting between then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Turkish officials. The US Congress had just enacted an arms embargo on Turkey in response to its aggressive actions in Cyprus, and Kissinger, at this meeting, made clear that the Ford administration opposed the embargo and was committed to finding a way to get arms and other aid to Turkey. When a Turkish official suggested that Kissinger enter into a secret agreement for European countries to provide the arms, this is what was said:
Esenbel: The Europeans should find ways to meet quick needs; for example, the Air Force needs spare parts. For other items that they can’t find in the stocks, maybe you could make a deal with the Dutch or others to send it here
Macomber: That is illegal.
Kissinger: Before the Freedom of Information Act, I used to say at meetings, “The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer.” [laughter] But since the Freedom of Information Act, I’m afraid to say things like that.
We’ll make a major effort.
Again, Greenwald’s take on this:
People who exercise power inevitably abuse it when they can wield it in secret. They inevitably lie about what they do when they can act in the dark. This is just basic human nature, and applies even to the most kind-hearted leaders, even ones who are charming and wonderful family men. This is what makes pervasive secrecy and a lack of oversight and accountability so dangerous.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/apr/11/three-lessons-obama-drone-lies
For anyone interested in the the issue of how lying phony criminal rat-bastards at the highest levels of American government literally get away with murder, here is a video clip of a fascinating interview with Christopher Hitchens regarding Kissinger’s war crimes:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xghrs_N4Vuo
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April 10, 2013
The IRS claims its agents do not need warrants to read Americans’ emails
The IRS’s assertion of this power is stated in internal IRS documents obtained by the ACLU via a Freedom of Information Act request.
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April 10, 2013
The ravenous appetite of the U.S. military-industrial establishment
Despite dire warnings about severe cuts under the sequestration agreement, military expenditures for 2013 will be approximately $638 billion.
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April 3, 2013
The Feds got slapped-down by the secret FISA court for trampling on civil rights while conducting domestic surveillance, but the Obama administration says that Americans should not be allowed to know what the Feds were trying to get away with – because publicly disclosing the nature of the unconstitutional B.S. they were engaged in would allegedly jeopardize Americans’ national security. Seriously.
If you feel safer knowing that the federal government is shielding you from knowing their business – while they’re prying into yours – then you should be happy.
A ruling was made last year by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that the government had violated the FISA Amendments Act, which had legalized President George W. Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program that was implemented immediately after the 2001 terror attacks. The court also found that the government’s surveillance violated the Fourth Amendment. The court’s ruling would probably be unknown to the public if not for comments by Sen. Wyden (D-Oregon), who was briefed about it as a member of the Intelligence Committee.
In response to a lawsuit demanding that the Obama administration disclose the court ruling, the administration is saying to the federal judge that if they are forced to disclose the secret court opinion, the likely result could be “exceptionally grave and do serious damage to the national security.”
As a Slate magazine article recently noted about Obama, “because he is a Democrat, he’s gotten a pass from many of the civil liberty and good-government groups who spent years watching President Bush’s every move like a hawk.”
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/04/secret-surveillance-court/
Update to this story – June 7, 2013….
The fed’s are still trying to keep this under wraps (whatever it is)….
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March 31, 2013
Children getting killed by U.S. airstrikes in the Middle East
Even Americans who don’t have any moral concerns about how many innocent dark-skinned Muslim foreigners we kill, should at least consider the practical consequences of all the hatred it generates toward the U.S.
Glenn Greenwald, who writes for the Guardian, is among the most important voices on such topics.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/mar/31/dirty-wars-terrorism-victims
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March 31, 2013
First-Responders (cops, firefighters, ambulance medics) posting online racist messages and gory photos of accident and crime victims
A reality check for Americans whose mental image of law enforcement personnel is based on the Andy Griffith sheriff of Mayberry…
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/emts_are_pic_and_twisted_WHMpohpsktzM2epWfrXw9I
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March 31, 2013
America’s crony-capitalism may be headed for an economic apocalypse
A bit off-topic perhaps, since most of these articles are about the police state, but if the economy worsens, you can easily imagine how the police-state nature of our government could manifest itself more harshly in various ways. Historically, in both the U.S. and other countries, crises are often used by the government to rationalize grabbing more power over the citizenry.
Economic policy is largely beyond my ken, and I assume that the more technical issues lie beyond the grasp of most Americans, but it’s hard to not be a little bit concerned by predictions such as these by David A. Stockman, former Republican congressman and Ronald Reagan’s budget director (1981 to ’85). His bleak assessment (which is equally critical of the Republican and Democratic establishment) includes the following:
The way out would be so radical it can’t happen. It would necessitate a sweeping divorce of the state and the market economy. It would require a renunciation of crony capitalism and its first cousin: Keynesian economics in all its forms. The state would need to get out of the business of imperial hubris, economic uplift and social insurance and shift its focus to managing and financing an effective, affordable, means-tested safety net.
All this would require drastic deflation of the realm of politics and the abolition of incumbency itself, because the machinery of the state and the machinery of re-election have become conterminous. Prying them apart would entail sweeping constitutional surgery: amendments to give the president and members of Congress a single six-year term, with no re-election; providing 100 percent public financing for candidates; strictly limiting the duration of campaigns (say, to eight weeks); and prohibiting, for life, lobbying by anyone who has been on a legislative or executive payroll. It would also require overturning Citizens United and mandating that Congress pass a balanced budget, or face an automatic sequester of spending.
It would also require purging the corrosive financialization that has turned the economy into a giant casino since the 1970s. This would mean putting the great Wall Street banks out in the cold to compete as at-risk free enterprises, without access to cheap Fed loans or deposit insurance. Banks would be able to take deposits and make commercial loans, but be banned from trading, underwriting and money management in all its forms.
It would require, finally, benching the Fed’s central planners, and restoring the central bank’s original mission: to provide liquidity in times of crisis but never to buy government debt or try to micromanage the economy. Getting the Fed out of the financial markets is the only way to put free markets and genuine wealth creation back into capitalism.
That, of course, will never happen…When the latest bubble pops, there will be nothing to stop the collapse.
The full article is an interesting review of government incompetence on fiscal policy dating back to the great depression. Stockman’s critique of America’s crony-capitalism has predictably generated criticism by pundits, but as Robert Scheer notes:
“For all of the strident attacks on Stockman’s column, I have yet to read a serious critique of his most brazen claim, that the bailouts and quantitative easing that have saved Wall Street and brought the stock market back to historic heights represent class warfare with the vast majority of Americans on the losing side.”
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March 26, 2013
FBI demands unlimited real-time access to all Americans’ email correspondence
Merely being able to read everyone’s email without a search warrant is no longer enough for Big Brother; now the fed’s demand to be able to read everyone’s emails as they’re being sent.
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March 23, 2013
The marginalization of people who speak truth to power – the example of Noam Chomsky
Glenn Greenwald at the Guardian has written a classic column on the ways people are dismissed and marginalized by the government and media establishment for questioning political orthodoxies. His main focus is on the treatment of Noam Chomsky, but Greenwald notes that people in other segments of the ideological spectrum, such as Ron Paul, receive the same treatment. In essence, the method of handling those who dare to question the agenda of those in power is to ignore the substance of their critiques, and make personal attacks on the critics.
“This method is applied with particular aggression to those who engage in any meaningful dissent against the society’s most powerful factions and their institutions. Nixon White House officials sought to steal the files from Daniel Ellsberg’s psychoanalyst’s office precisely because they knew they could best discredit his disclosures with irrelevant attacks on his psyche. Identically, the New York Times and partisan Obama supporters have led the way in depicting both Bradley Manning and Julian Assange as mentally unstable outcasts with serious personality deficiencies. The lesson is clear: only someone plagued by mental afflictions would take such extreme steps to subvert the power of the US government.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/mar/23/noam-chomsky-guardian-personality
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March 22, 2013
The U.S. trained and supported torture and murder squads in Iraq.
Partly because of the photos included in the reporting, Americans heard a lot about the abuses, torture, rape, and murder committed by U.S. soldiers at the American-run prison, Abu Ghraib, during the Iraq war. Less well known are the war crimes committed by police commandos organized and funded by the U.S.
To oversee their operations, the Bush administration brought in James Steele, who oversaw the U.S. advisers when the CIA and the Pentagon were illegally training and supporting the infamous Salvadoran paramilitary death squads who made extensive use of torture and assassinations when they were fighting the leftist guerillas during El Salvador’s civil war in the 1980s.
As the article notes, Steele and his collaborator, Colonel James Coffman, “reported directly to General David Petraeus, who funded this police commando force from a multibillion-dollar fund. The thousands of commandos that Steele let loose came to be mostly made up of Shia militias, like the Badr Brigades, hungry to take revenge on the Sunni supporters of Saddam Hussein. Steele oversaw the commandos, mostly made up of militias. They were torturing detainees for information on the insurgency.”
Note that “the investigation was sparked by memos found in the Iraq War Logs released by WikiLeaks.”
From The Guardian and BBC Arabic, via Democracy Now. The relevant segment of the video begins at 11:20.
http://www.democracynow.org/2013/3/22/new_expos_links_torture_centers_in
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March 22, 2013
Wikileaks Was Just a Preview: We’re Headed for an Even Bigger Showdown Over Secrets
A superb account by Matt Taibbi of the information war between America’s government and its citizens.
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March 17, 2013
Prison guard captain pepper-sprays inmate for punishment
A prison guard captain in Maine punished an inmate for spitting on a guard by spraying pepper spray directly into his face while the inmate was restrained. The spray was of an intensity calibrated for use on multiple persons at a distance of six feet or so.
The captain was initially fired after the video of the incident was leaked, but then he was reinstated by Maine’s corrections dept. commissioner. The dept. reportedly has since turned its attention to the more institutionally important matter of trying to investigate who leaked the video.
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March 15, 2013
Allegations of gang stalking by Jehovah’s Witnesses and Scientologists
As the Australian federal government considers tightening restrictions on the granting of tax-free status to certain organizations, a senator is questioning whether Jehovah’s Witnesses and Scientologists should qualify.
The article linked below does not specifically mention “gang stalking,” but it cites a psychologist who studies cults, and who reports that members who decide to leave the flock are subjected to “bullying, threats, harassment, and stalking.”
In various online forums I see references to allegations that some Jehovah’s Witnesses (and Scientologists) engage in gang stalking. That doesn’t prove anything of course, but skeptics of the allegations should wonder why the issue keeps coming up. I doubt that you would find references to gang stalking if you visit forums about fly fishing or Civil War reenactment.
http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/national/jehovahs-witnesses-a-cruel-cult-20130315-2g5x3.html
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February 11, 2013
Even the right-wing in America is complaining about the militarization of government agencies
One indication that the U.S. has drifted way too far toward a police state is that the conservative opinion journal National Review is expressing concern about it.
Actually, National Review has always had – in addition to its core of conservatism – sympathy for libertarian critiques of government policy. That goes back to its founder, William F. Buckley.
I often disagree with them – for example on their relatively hawkish foreign policy and their failure to condemn drug prohibition – however, I’m with them on this issue.
Deroy Murdock rightly condemns the fact that even agencies such as Agriculture, Labor, the EPA, and others are increasingly employing “military tactics as a first resort in routine law enforcement.”
These “ninja bureaucrats,” as [Quin] Hillyer calls them, run rampant. They, and often their local-government counterparts, deploy weapons against harmless, frequently innocent, Americans who typically are accused of non-violent civil or administrative violations.
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/340268/and-your-little-dog-too-deroy-murdock
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February 1, 2013
America’s brave drug warriors lead a successful assault on a 12-year-old girl – guilty of being inside her own home (where no crimes were being committed).
Billings, Montana police say the 6 am raid they conducted in October 2012 was part of an investigation into a suspected meth lab. But there was no meth lab. And the 12-year-old daughter of Jackie Fasching suffered severe burns after the SWAT team used a broomstick to drop a flash grenade through a window into a bedroom where the girl and her sister were sleeping.
“A simple knock on the door and I would’ve let them in,” [Ms. Fasching] said. “They said their intel told them there was a meth lab at our house. If they would’ve checked, they would’ve known there’s not.” Fasching’s husband, who suffers from congenital heart disease and liver failure, was in fact attempting to open the door to let the cops in just as they knocked it down.
As for the flash grenade, Fasching said it “blew the nails out of the drywall.” There’s also the matter of why, if they were looking for a meth lab, the police would have set off flash grenades in the first place. Meth labs are known to explode.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/01/raid-of-the-day_n_2568491.html
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January 25, 2013
New book documents widespread U.S. war crimes in Vietnam
For anyone tempted to believe that America was a mountain of wonderfulness that only recently began its moral decline – under Bush or Obama or whomever – you might want to check out this new book, which I’m currently reading.
Kill Anything That Moves details the numerous atrocities committed by the U.S. military during the Vietnam war. Apparently, the notorious My Lai Massacre wasn’t nearly as much of an isolated incident as many people believe. The book is thoroughly researched (extensive eyewitness interviews, etc.) and well-written.
Incidentally, the crimes of the My Lai Massacre itself (for which almost no one was seriously punished) are well worth reviewing: American soldiers, on orders from their officers, murdered hundreds of unarmed civilians in a single day in one village (estimates range from 347 to over 500 killed). The villagers that the U.S. forces encountered that day were all women, children, and elderly men. Most of the victims were shot at close-range. Many of the women and girls were raped before being murdered.
A review of Kill Anything That Moves:
http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-01-25/opinions/36546552_1_war-crimes-vietnam-war-atrocities
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January 21, 2013
CounterPunch reports that America is infected with a modern version of Cointelpro
If you’re a victim of gang stalkng – or anyone interested in the subject – read this. It’s one of the best articles on the subject I’ve seen recently. It doesn’t mention the phrase “gang stalking,” but if you don’t see the connection, you’re in over your head. If you’re a journalist or a politician, this is probably as close as you will get to a memo telling you to wake up and grasp what is happening regarding gang stalking.
Obviously, this article did not gain much traction in the mainstream press – it didn’t involve anything important, like the Kardashians – but there must have been a few people who saw it. Although its circulation is small, CounterPunch is both a print magazine and a website. According to the Internet traffic statistics website Alexa.com, links to CounterPunch are posted on approximately 12,000 other websites.
The author, Tom McNamara, provides an excellent review of the original Cointelpro operation, and an analysis of its current incarnation. Perhaps he feels free to discuss such things because he’s on the other side of the Atlantic.
McNamara is “an Assistant Professor at the ESC Rennes School of Business, France, and a Visiting Lecturer at the French National Military Academy at Saint-Cyr, Coëtquidan, France.”
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/01/21/the-return-of-cointelpro/
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January 17, 2013
Where do they find cops who would participate in a stalking conspiracy?
Evaluating the plausibility of widespread acquiescence in gang stalking by police requires considering criminality by police generally. This review of crimes by the Chicago Police Department is a fascinating example.
Browse through the list of convictions of police officers on pages 24 to 47 of this report published by the University of Illinois at Chicago, Department of Political Science. The list is in alphabetical order by the officers’ names, and covers the past half-century. Keep in mind, these were just the crimes that were discovered and prosecuted.
The crimes range from bribery and extortion to torture and murder. Gang stalking would be like jay-walking for the cops on this list.
http://www.uic.edu/depts/pols/ChicagoPolitics/policecorruption.pdf
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December 12, 2012
FBI and CIA operatives (“trolls”) monitor and discredit websites and social media, according to ex-employee of CIA
Disinformation is a major element of gang stalking (and counterintelligence operations generally), as I discuss in the “FFCHS” section of this website, and elsewhere.
Anyone who reads the comments posted online whenever the subject of gang stalking is raised, will note that reports of gang stalking almost invariably attract sarcastic – but ultimately unconvincing – statements by forum trolls, registering their skepticism.
One expects that sort of verbal warfare on Internet forums related to political issues, but you have to wonder why the relatively obscure topic of gang stalking attracts such a dedicated army of detractors. As Hamlet’s mother observed, sometimes people “protest too much.”
As the article linked here notes, a former CIA clandestine service trainee and DIA analyst revealed that the FBI and CIA use trolls to monitor social media and interact with users to discredit information disseminated on the web.
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=6f2_1355313666
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September 27, 2012
Third police officer charged in the fatal beating of a homeless man in Fullerton, California
Police officers in Fullerton, California beat to death an unarmed mentally ill homeless man, Kelly Thomas, in July 2011 – apparently for sport.
Three of the six police officers who were present have now been charged (variously, with second-degree murder, involuntary manslaughter, and excessive use of force) in the beating, which was captured on surveillance video.
The victim, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia, begged for his life before being beaten to death, according to the Orange County District Attorney. In the video, Thomas can be heard screaming “Dad! Dad!”
None of the six officers involved sustained any significant injuries in the altercation. Thomas died from severe injuries to his head, face, and neck when he was removed from life support five days after the beating.
Photos of Kelly Thomas
http://www.ocregister.com/articles/thomas-372930-wolfe-ramos.html
Update – January 13, 2014…
Jury found the perps not legally guilty
In one of the clearest examples ever of the idiocy of American jurors, today a jury found that the cops who beat Kelly Thomas to death for fun should not be considered guilty of anything. The mere fact that the whole crime occurred on video was apparently unpersuasive.
Americans are frighteningly stupid about the abuse of power in the law enforcement industry. Sadly, the jurors in this case are representative of a large element of the population which holds the view that anyone who has a uniform and a badge should never have his or her actions questioned in any way.
http://rt.com/usa/fbi-kelly-thomas-evidence-589/
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September 20, 2012
How accountability works at the highest levels of society
Although this ocurred in the U.K. rather than the U.S., the matter still contains important lessons for Americans, and some of the issues (such as privacy, police corruption, and accountability at high levels of corporate power) are relevant to gang stalking.
A massive scandal has been unfolding in the U.K. involving corrupt police and corrupt private investigators colluding with corrupt news reporters to obtain and exploit personal information for tabloid newspaper stories.
Dozens of journalists and officials have been arrested for conspiring to hack victims’ phones and computers for private information. An inquiry found that more than 700 people had their personal information compromised, including crime victims and also political figures, such as Cherie Blair, wife of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Cops were selling information to the media. The whole scandal reeks of institutional corruption. The people normally relied upon to expose and stop crime (the media and the police) were the perpetrators.
As noted in the article linked below, James Murdoch, who was in charge of the newspaper division of the corporation involved (News Corp) “repeatedly fell short of the exercise of responsibility to be expected of him” according to a report by the UK regulator Office of Communications. The report criticized him for not properly investigating the allegations of hacking.
As “punishment,” he is being promoted to a position of greater responsibility over the corporation’s U.S. television operations. There are different rules for the folks at the top.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/09/20/us-newscorp-murdoch-idUSBRE88J1IR20120920
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September 20. 2012
Forbes magazine writer calls for another Church Committee investigation
Every victim of gang stalking who has done much reading about what is happening to them knows that the primary historical predecessors of gang stalking were the FBI’s Cointelpro operations and the CIA’s Project MK Ultra. They also know that those conspiracies were only fully uncovered and ended (at least temporarily) when the U.S. Congress held investigations into the matter.
Thankfully, there are some journalists who also have a clue about this. One of them is Jody Westby, a contributor to Forbes magazine. If we’re lucky, maybe some non-corrupt politicians might hear about some of these concerns being expressed by a brave few in the media and take some action some day, instead of mindlessly deferring to advocates of the police state.
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April 19, 2012
USA Today journalists smeared by disinformation campaign to discredit their reporting on a U.S. government intelligence contractor
If you piss-off a comedian, he’ll probably make jokes about you; if you piss-off a company that creates propaganda, it will probably try to smear you with propaganda.
Most Americans are not even aware that among the countless parasitic businesses having contracts with the federal government are companies which specialize in spreading propaganda. Americans can be excused for assuming that the vast and often corrupt U.S. federal government would include enough professional liars that they would not need to contract with outside companies to do the lying. Apparently, that’s not the case.
When a reporter and editor at USA Today investigated one such Pentagon contractor, they found themselves targeted by the contractor’s propaganda:
“Fake Twitter and Facebook accounts have been created in their names, along with a Wikipedia entry and dozens of message board postings and blog comments. Websites were registered in their names….”
“…Internet domain registries show the website TomVandenBrook.com was created Jan. 7 — just days after Pentagon reporter Tom Vanden Brook first contacted Pentagon contractors involved in the program. Two weeks after his editor Ray Locker’s byline appeared on a story, someone created a similar site, RayLocker.com, through the same company.
If the websites were created using federal funds, it could violate federal law prohibiting the production of propaganda for domestic consumption.”
The article notes that a proxy service was used to hide the identity of the owner of the websites, and a third website was registered to a non-existent address.
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March 15, 2012
The NSA is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)
The Big Brother government of George Orwell’s 1984 is a reality in today’s America.
“Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.” It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness” program created during the first term of the Bush administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy.”
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/1
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January 18, 2012
In a minor setback for the war on drugs, a federal apellate court ruled that it’s not OK for DEA agents to terrorize innocent 11-year-old and 14-year old girls at gun point – even though it might be fun for the agents.
DEA agents raided a mobile home in Seeley, California at 7 am on January 20, 2007 in search of a drug trafficker. After handcuffing the couple who lived there – and their two daughters – and holding them at gunpoint for half an hour while they ransacked their home, the agents realized they had the wrong address, and left.
The apellate court agreed with the jury that cops really shouldn’t point their guns at the head of an 11-year-old girl while she’s laying handcuffed on the floor of her home.
http://reason.com/blog/2012/06/18/ninth-circuit-to-dea-putting-a-gun-to-an
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January 18, 2012
Conservative author George Will on the clash between freedom and police surveillance
Although he stops short of criticizing current police practices, George Will notes that, at a minimum, they create friction with America’s traditional notions of freedom.
When a hobbyist photographer was “caught” taking photos by a sheriff’s deputy, the photographer asserted his right to remain silent, which drew this response from the deputy:
“You know, I’ll just submit your name to TLO (the Terrorism Liaison Officer program). Every time your driver’s license gets scanned, every time you take a plane, any time you go on any type of public transit system where they look at your identification, you’re going to be stopped. You will be detained. You’ll be searched. You will be on the FBI’s hit list.”
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September 15, 2011
The U.S. federal government’s history of targeting dissent
An organization called Surveillance in the Homeland has published some excellent analysis and reporting on America’s Big Brother tendencies (also see the September 8, 2011 article below).
This is a good review of the long war by the FBI, CIA, and NSA – which continues today – against the First Amendment rights of Americans. There can be no question that gang stalking and other current abuses of power by the fed’s are part of a well-established pattern.
Gang stalking victims who wish to know what corrupt government philosophy gave birth to the current stalking and blacklisting practices need only look at the conclusion by the U.S. Senate Church Committee in 1976 – quoted in this article:
“[The] unexpressed major premise of the programs was that a law enforcement agency has the duty to do whatever is necessary to combat perceived threats to the existing social and political order.”
That notion of doing “whatever is necessary” was – and is – the self-assigned license by which the intelligence community and the law enforcement community have rationalized harassing (often to the point of terrorizing) “subversive” citizens. They essentially believe that their powers transcend the Constitution, and with few exceptions, Congress members and Presidents are too corrupt or politically cowardly to rein-in these agencies.
http://www.surveillanceinthehomeland.org/investigations/60-targeting-dissent.html
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September 8, 2011
A society of spies and militarized police forces – the fall-out from the 9/11 attacks
A decade after the 9/11 attacks, a partnership of Truthout and ACLU Massachusetts surveyed the landscape of American intelligence-gathering and law enforcement. This is an excellent overview of the creepy new Big Brother policing paradigm.
Cointelpro and gang stalking are not discussed in this article (Cointelpro is however discussed in this organization’s September 15, 2011 article “Targeting Dissent” – see the entry above).
My own survey of information about gang stalking gives me the impression that organized stalking clearly pre-dates the surveillance and policing measures implemented after the 9/11 attacks. The late Ted Gunderson, FBI agent and whistle-blower said in his affidavit on gang stalking (see the “Gang Stalking Documents” section of this website) that gang stalking “has been operational since at least the early 1980s.” If true, that would mean that, in essence, Cointelpro resumed (if it was even suspended at all) just a few years after the U.S. Senate Church Committee investigated the illegal program.
Information from articles such as this one from Surveillance in the Homeland, show that if Cointelpro was an extant program at the time of the 9/11 attacks, it is now complemented by a massively expanded intelligence and law enforcement infrastructure.
As I see it, the only good news is this: the existence of the federal government’s well-funded and powerful surveillance infrastructure renders inconceivable the notion that gang stalking could exist without the government knowing about it. That clarifies the analysis of organized stalking in the sense that it rules-out the possibility that it could be a purely criminal enterprise that functions independently of acquiescence by the fed’s.
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August 18, 2011
A city manager in Stockton, California quit after being stalked by local police
This is a rare clear example of a relatively high-profile gang stalking incident reported in the news media. The incident not only involved stalking by police, it involved a target who was a local government official. This is exactly the sort of event that many gang stalking victims probably would wish might happen so the scandal of gang stalking would finally get exposed, yet the incident received minimal news coverage.
To its credit, the local San Joaquin County newspaper, The Record, published the article linked below. Reportedly, the local cops started brazenly harassing Bob Deis, the city manager of Stockton – at his home – as retaliation and/or to intimidate him after contract negotiations broke down. Incredibly, the Stockton Police Officers Association purchased the home next to Mr. Deis and began harassing him with noise and other gang stalking tactics.
Apparently, the stalking was successful: the city manager quit. His account of what happened was backed up by the mayor of Stockton, Ann Johnston.
The tactics suggest that (a) the cops were familiar with just how brutally effective organized harassment and intimidation can be, and (b) they were used to getting away with that kind of abuse. It makes you wonder – or it should – what they would do to someone who is less well-connected than a city manager.
You might expect this sort of thing to happen in a third world country, but not in a modern democracy. Nevertheless, as far as I am aware, no one in the national mainstream news media – or at groups like the ACLU – picked up on the significance of this. It’s hard to say whether that was simply because the matter passed under the radar in a big country with lots of news, or if it was laziness by the national press who should be calling attention to such things, or if the story did get noticed, but was quietly supressed.
http://www.recordnet.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110818/A_NEWS/108180325
A local TV news channel (KCRA Channel 3) did – to its credit – broadcast a brief, but fascinating report on the matter (linked below). The video clip might ring a few bells with gang stalking victims.
The city manager’s last name, Deis, rhymes with “Dice,” so someone (presumably the cops) placed a bumper sticker on his car with a cartoon of a boy urinating on a pair of dice. Acts such as that – and the use of noise, and cutting down trees bordering Mr. Deis’s property, etc. were essentially psychological operations (“psyops”) tactics. Such things would be intimidating from any stalkers, let alone stalkers who have police powers.
Sadly, no one in the mainstream news media connected the dots between this gang stalking incident and the larger scandal of gang stalking generally (or if they did, they kept quiet about it).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDnXlAkq8yE
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August 8, 2011
A corrupt judge in America’s judicial meat-grinder got too greedy
Victims of organized stalking sometimes speculate about the possible role of corruption among judges and lawyers in preventing criminal harassment and stalking from being prosecuted and litigated in America’s court system.
Presumably, formal and informal pressures and careerist motivations do play a role in the silence of judges on the issue of organized stalking. This would not be surprising regarding a practice which is apparently sanctioned by the Justice Department and perpetrated – in at least some cases – by the FBI and its contractors.
At the same time, it is impossible to deny that judges often display real independence from the executive branch. Just last week, for example, a unanimous federal appellate court ruled that the DOJ must reveal its classified memo that explains the agency’s legal justification for targeted killings.
My own view is that the primary obstacle to bringing civil or criminal cases against perpetrators of organized stalking is the absence of evidence due to the types of tactics used.
That having been said, there is wide recognition – even among people with non-conpiratorial views of government – that America’s judicial system is deeply flawed. Arguably the most serious defect is that plea bargains have essentially replaced jury trials for defendants who are not wealthy; there is enormous pressure on defendants to plead guilty even if they are innocent.
As the following case demonstrates, the judicial system also features old-fashioned bribery in some instances. The salient point of this case, as I see it, is the corrupting influence upon American government created by the profit motive of private contractors.
Organized stalking is probably sustained partly by the fact that “surveillance role players” – domestic counterintelligence spies – are a source of profit for intelligence-security contractors. Similarly, America’s vast incarceration industry has a direct stake in seeing as many people locked up as possible.
Last week a judge in Pennsylvania was sentenced to 28 years in prison for taking bribes from the builder of juvenile detention centers. Judge Mark Ciavarella Jr. and a second judge, Michael Conahan, who pleaded guilty last year, took more than $2 million in bribes in exchange for supplying the detention centers with kids to use as inmates.
“Ciavarella, known for his harsh and autocratic courtroom demeanor, filled the beds of the private lockups with children as young as 10, many of them first-time offenders convicted of petty theft and other minor crimes.”
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March 20, 2011
New poll confirms Americans’ ignorance about civil liberties and other matters
A major obstacle to eradicating gang stalking is the shocking ignorance Americans have about their government.
A new poll by Newsweek found that 73 percent didn’t know why we fought the Cold War, and 29 percent couldn’t even name the vice president. Perhaps most disturbing, 44 percent were unable to define the Bill of Rights.
Among other problems this presents, a population with such deep ignorance provides a huge supply of potential recruits for gang stalking operations. Such people are easily manipulated.
Better-educated Americans have heard about scandals such as the Pentagon Papers, Watergate, and Iran-Contra, but even those people are mostly unfamiliar with even darker conspiracies, such as the CIA’s Project MK Ultra. That’s the challenge for gang stalking victims.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/03/20/how-dumb-are-we.html
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January 29, 2011
TV news report about gang stalking in California
A January 29, 2011 TV news broadcast in California (Channel 46 – KION and Channel 35 – KCBA) featured a report – linked below – about gang stalking.
The news report is significant because it is rare for gang stalking to be discussed in TV news reports and rare for police officers to publicly mention the term.
In the segment’s introduction, a reporter said that police describe gang stalking as “bullying on steroids” – which is certainly an accurate description.
A self-proclaimed victim of gang stalking, Lawrence Guzzino of Salinas, California, was interviewed in the report. He described his experiences in a way that seemed credible and consistent with numerous such accounts. Guzzino said he was being systematically stalked in his neighborhood.
The reporters indicated that Guzzino’s case was not unique. They characterized gang stalking as a “trend” that involves, among other things, overt stalking to “terrorize” the victim.
Larry Richard, a police lieutenant with the Santa Cruz Police Department, was interviewed in the report, and he stated that gang stalking is not new.
Unfortunately, the report’s assertions become a bit muddled at this point, because Richard’s description of gang stalking makes reference to online bullying via social media, such as Facebook and Twitter. The reporter did not explicitly ask him about overt stalking done in-person, so he never clearly addressed the issue.
Note however that Richard did say that gang stalking predates the era of online social media – which implies that it must involve other tactics as well.
Also note that – as mentioned above – the report begins by saying that police characterize gang stalking as “bullying on steroids,” which sounds more serious than simply posting some rude comments on the Internet. The description is not specifically attributed to Larry Richard, however, so it is unclear who said it.
Update – attorney Keith Labella obtained a letter about the report.
On the basis of the California Public Records Act, attorney Keith Labella requested and obtained additional information about this incident – specifically, a letter from Lieutenant Richard dated March 30, 2011, in which he describes gang stalking.
This is the body of Larry Richard’s letter – including typo’s:
“Candice Nguyen from KION is doing a story ion this phenomenon called “Gang Stalking”. It has nothing to do with “gangs”, rather it is a form of cyber-bullying. The intent is a psychological impact and socially ostresizing the targeted person. With tools available to track someone (Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, etc) it has made people more vulnerable to this. It has implications to workplace violence, love relationships gone bad, etc. I told Candice it is like Mean Girls or cyber-bullying on steroids.”
In my opinion, it is clear that Lieutenant Richard is simply lying in this letter.
The letter was produced in response to the request by Labella for written clarification and confirmation of the news report. Richards had two months between the TV news broadcast and the preparation of this letter. He had to know that the TV broadcast specifically discussed claims of overt physical stalking, but he completely dodges that issue by neither confirming or denying any awareness of such stalking, and instead addresses only the unrelated issue of cyber-bullying.
Here is the letter:
Here is the video clip of the TV broadcast:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DB-MlhPmXqk
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November 29, 2010
Leaked U.S. cable contains apparent reference to organized stalking in Canada
Today WikiLeaks published a leaked classified U.S. diplomatic cable dated July 9, 2008 which documented a discussion which occurred a week earlier between Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) Director Jim Judd and Counselor of the U.S. State Department Eliot Cohen. The cable was part of the cache of secret documents leaked by U.S. Army private Bradley Manning.
The cable describes a statement made by CSIS Director Judd during the discussion:
…Judd said CSIS had responded to recent, non-specific intelligence on possible terror operations by “vigorously harassing” known Hezbollah members in Canada.
Just to be clear, the people being “vigorously harassed” were not people who sneaked into Canada using fake identities and had been observed committing crimes. If that were the case, they could have been arrested and prosecuted. These were people on whom the CSIS had no legally incriminating evidence, so CSIS was – apparently – overtly stalking them as an extra-judicial operation.
The cable notes that the CSIS director expressed his frustration at having to comply with “recent court rulings that, Judd complained, had inappropriately treated intelligence agencies like law enforcement bodies.”
An article about the cable’s release was published today by the Canadian newspaper the Globe and Mail. That article notes that the discussion documented in the cable occurred during a period when the intelligence agency was the subject of judicial scrutiny:
“At the time, a series of Canadian judges were probing CSIS complicity in American actions that may have led to the torture of terrorism suspects…”
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October 7, 2010
Just like America – but without the Constitution. FBI caught spying on a college student in California.
The FBI had placed a GPS tracking device on a car belonging to a college student in California. A federal appellate court had ruled that law enforcement agents can do that without getting a search warrant.
“A California student got a visit from the FBI this week after he found a secret GPS tracking device on his car, and a friend posted photos of it online….
….half-a-dozen FBI agents and police officers appeared at Yasir Afifi’s apartment complex in Santa Clara, California, on Tuesday demanding he return the device.
Afifi, a 20-year-old U.S.-born citizen, cooperated willingly and said he’d done nothing to merit attention from authorities. Comments the agents made during their visit suggested he’d been under FBI surveillance for three to six months….
His discovery comes in the wake of a recent ruling by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals saying it’s legal for law enforcement to secretly place a tracking device on a suspect’s car without getting a warrant, even if the car is parked in a private driveway.”
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/10/fbi-tracking-device/all/
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January 15, 2010
Conspiracy theories, gang stalking, and the current U.S. administration
The Obama administration’s penchant for secrecy and for spying on Americans – and its casual attitude about the Constitution – should raise questions about a connection between the culture of the political class and gang stalking.
Glenn Greenwald’s article linked below exposes the moral rot at the highest levels of the U.S. government, and an Orwellian view of news and propaganda.
Cass Sunstein – a close confidant of President Obama – began serving as Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in September 2009. Sunstein has an interesting view on lying by the federal government: he favors it.
“In 2008, while at Harvard Law School, Sunstein co-wrote a truly pernicious paper proposing that the U.S. Government employ teams of covert agents and pseudo-”independent” advocates to “cognitively infiltrate” online groups and websites — as well as other activist groups — which advocate views that Sunstein deems “false conspiracy theories” about the Government. This would be designed to increase citizens’ faith in government officials and undermine the credibility of conspiracists.
….Sunstein advocates that the Government’s stealth infiltration should be accomplished by sending covert agents into “chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups.” He also proposes that the Government make secret payments to so-called “independent” credible voices to bolster the Government’s messaging (on the ground that those who don’t believe government sources will be more inclined to listen to those who appear independent while secretly acting on behalf of the Government). This program would target those advocating false “conspiracy theories,” which they define to mean: “an attempt to explain an event or practice by reference to the machinations of powerful people, who have also managed to conceal their role.”
Glenn Greenwald’s article:
http://www.salon.com/2010/01/15/sunstein_2/
Cass Sunstein’s Harvard Law School paper:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1084585
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September 25, 2009
Would America’s police officers participate in illegal stalking?
For perspective, consider this: some of them have sex with cows.
Members of the U.S. law enforcement industry have some very interesting and creative views on morality and laws and such.
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March 12, 2009
New Jersey newspaper: gang stalking flyers are being distributed
The Verona-Cedar Grove Times – a local weekly print newspaper in New Jersey founded in 1948 – published an article on March 12, 2009 about “a former Verona resident” – Frank L. Raffaele – “who has been handing out fliers claiming a large, organized group of stalkers is targeting residents and business owners with the objective of destroying their lives.”
The article makes clear that the flyers described gang stalking – and specifically referred to it as such.
Frank Raffaele’s description of gang stalking – as quoted in the article – provides a good sense of the modern American version of what communist East Germany’s Stasi called zersetzung (which is also sometimes called “no-touch torture”).
“Their intention is to murder their target without getting their hands dirty. It’s the perfect hate crime.” states the flier, which is titled “A Community Secret Revealed: Organized Stalking is Thriving in NJ.”
Victims of Cointelpro Version 2.0 (gang stalking) who want to fight back and want to know which tactics will make trouble for corrupt local law enforcement officials who acquiesce in gang stalking should take note: the article gives the impression that the police department was not pleased about having the flyers distributed.
“He’s scaring people,” said police Chief Doug Huber. “It doesn’t make any sense, it’s unsubstantiated and it’s frightening some people.”
Patrol officers and detectives have questioned Raffaele on several occasions. One detective asked him to stop handing out the fliers.
To his credit, Mr. Raffaele did not back down:
Reached by phone on Tuesday, Raffaele said he has no intention of stopping.
“I’m exercising my First Amendment right at free speech,” Raffaele said. “I want to inform people and raise awareness on this subject. These people do exist and it’s a big problem.”
For whatever reason, the Verona-Cedar Grove Times article is no longer among the articles available online at the website of the company which owns that newspaper, North Jersey Media Group. I emailed the reporter, Anthony G. Attrino as well as the website NorthJersey.com for additional information, but received no reply.
I do not know whether Mr. Attrino – who is a local crime-beat reporter and therefore presumably wants to be on good terms with local police agencies for career reasons – has been asked to not discuss the matter further.
An archive of the Verona-Cedar Grove Times is hosted by the Newsbank database. I requested and received a copy of the article – posted verbatim below – via the Verona, New Jersey Library.
Here is a link to the article itself, but access requires a subscription to the database.
Here is the full article:
Verona-Cedar Grove Times (Montclair, NJ) March 11, 2009
Stalker Claims Unsettle Police
by Anthony G. Attrino
Detectives are questioning a former Verona resident who has been handing out fliers claiming a large, organized group of stalkers is targeting residents and business owners with the objective of destroying their lives.
“Their intention is to murder their target without getting their hands dirty. It’s the perfect hate crime.” states the flier, which is titled “A Community Secret Revealed: Organized Stalking is Thriving in NJ.”
The one-page flier concludes, “Your neighbor, Frank Raffaele” and gives a Pine Brook address.
Raffaele, 51, is a former Verona resident who moved years ago but resurfaced in recent weeks to hand out fliers, according to police. He has dropped them off in businesses across the township and left the papers in doors and fences in Verona, Caldwell and Pine Brook.
“He’s scaring people,” said police Chief Doug Huber. “It doesn’t make any sense, it’s unsubstantiated and it’s frightening some people.”
Patrol officers and detectives have questioned Raffaele on several occasions. One detective asked him to stop handing out the fliers.
Reached by phone on Tuesday, Raffaele said he has no intention of stopping.
“I’m exercising my First Amendment right at free speech,” Raffaele said. “I want to inform people and raise awareness on this subject. These people do exist and it’s a big problem.”
The flier states that group stalking is a method of harassment by a large group of people, often in the hundreds, against a sole individual.
“The process starts when the group selects a target,” the flier states.
“Once the selection is made an expert campaign of character assassination begins with the intention of isolating the person from the community.”
“He’s getting people excited, especially in light of what happened,” said Police Capt. Fred DiStefano, referring to the Feb. 22 robbery and shooting of gas station attendant Daniel Pritchard.
Pritchard, 29, was killed at the Claridge Sunoco on Pompton Avenue. Two suspects have been arrested, jailed and charged with murder in his death.
DiStefano said there is no connection between Pritchard’s shooting and Raffaele or his fliers.
Police have not charged Raffaele with a crime, saying it appears to be within his legal rights to hand out the literature.
“There’s no law that we could come up with” against it, DiStefano said.
Still, detectives have questioned Raffaele at least twice – in person and on the phone.
And Verona police have taken the unusual step in recent days of including Raffaele’s letter in their police blotter, calling the stalking claims unsubstantiated.
The blotter, along with a copy of the flier, was faxed to the Times on Monday morning.
“He’s disgruntled, but what he’s disgruntled about we don’t know,” the police chief said.
The flier states the stalkers are professionals, both paid and unpaid, full and part-time.
“The unpaid stalkers are usually neighbors who have been recruited as a result of a successful smear campaign,” the flier states. “They naively think they are doing a good deed. Harassment techniques are infinite.”
The flier contains the Internet addresses of three Web sites with information and video about gang stalking, and general information about who the victims have been. In one video, the narrator discusses the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, former President Ronald Reagan and the practices of Scientology.
The video further states that community police watch groups, church groups and gay activists “might actively follow, harass, and assist in the torture and occasional murder of targeted individuals that are total strangers. …”
“I think this is a serious issue,” Raffaele said.
Huber said Raffaele has no history of arrest.
Asked whether Raffaele might be dangerous, Huber said, “He’s never given anybody a hard time – we don’t believe he’s dangerous.”
DiStefano asked that anyone who receives a “stalker” flier from Raffaele call police. He said detectives will continue to question Raffaele if they receive complaints.
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Update….February 2014….
According to this obituary, Mr. Raffaele died at his residence in Pinebrook, New Jersey on November 14, 2013 at the age of 56. I do not know the cause of his death.
The amount of publicly-available information about gang stalking has increased significantly in the past few years, and it clarifies the fact that gang stalking is a government-sanctioned program. That information was less common when Frank Raffaele created his flyer, and he apparently assumed that the activity was purely a vigilante phenomenon.
I noticed that in 2008 Frank Raffaele posted a review on Amazon of the self-published 2007 book Cause Stalking by David Lawson. That book – which is apparently out-of-print – is purportedly a first-hand account by a licensed private investigator about how gang stalkers operate.
Lawson’s description of the harassment tactics seem to be accurate, however his stated analyis of organized stalking – that it is purely a criminal phenomenon rather than a state-sanctioned one – is not plausible.
Here is the comment Mr. Raffaele posted on Amazon on December 9, 2008:
Great Book! Unless you encounter one of these groups, it’s hard to believe that they exist. Some of these groups are so well integrated into communities that they operate almost seamlessly from the community. It would have been interesting for the author to have speculated on how these groups are financed. They are, however, so clandestine and extremely well managed that it would be hard to find out unless they can be infiltrated. Just be careful about the neighbor you don’t like, he or she might belong to a group. Meeting one of these groups one realizes that the question of evil is not just a topic for theologians.
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January 2009
Private Security Firms Acting as Spies
I know something about security corporations, having worked in the security industry for over a decade. Americans naturally give much less thought to the activities of private security firms than they do to government law enforcement agencies, but such corporations ought to be on the public’s radar. I can personally attest that at least one of the largest international private security firms engages in gang stalking, since they employed those tactics against me.
Private contractors play a huge role in both law enforcement and national security affairs, and in many cases, they operate with far less supervision and regulation than government entities. That lack of accountability can be easily exploited – for example, by the federal government, when it wants to avoid direct involvement and accountability, and by private individuals and organizations who have their own agendas.
As with other spheres of power (such as the financial industry), there is a revolving-door phenomenon at work: members of federal and local law enforcement agencies often move into private security jobs and can exploit the information and contacts they have aquired. It serves the interests (legitimate and illegitimate) of both the government and corporations – and the individual employees – to blur the lines between the public and private spheres.
As with the defense industry, private security can be a lucrative activity. Corporate clients often have deep pockets, and the government – which also contracts with private security firms – has even deeper pockets (and can rationalize endless expenditures in the name of “national security”).
Many people are at least superficially familiar with the sordid practices of private investigators – if only from movies and books. As with the law enforcement community, the profession seems inevitably to attract its share of individuals who are predisposed to abuse their power. I personally worked with a number of security industry managers and their minions who were on the slimy side of the human nature spectrum.
This article discusses one example – the use of private security spies to infiltrate social justice organizations.
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July 2, 2008
U.S. government is appointing numerous public and private citizens to operate as spies (“Terrorism Liaison Officers”) throughout American society
“Police officers, firefighters, paramedics, and utility workers…are entrusted with hunting for ‘suspicious activity’ and then reporting their findings, which end up in secret government databases.”
http://progressive.org/mag/mc070208
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January 14, 2007
The Washington Post published a feature article on gang stalking
This Washington Post Magazine cover article on gang stalking was written by Sharon Weinberger, a journalist who specializes in national security issues such as weapons systems and military policies.
Weinberger seems to have approached the subject with an open mind – perhaps because of her familiarity with some of the dark practices and exotic technologies associated with warfare and intelligence operations.
The self-proclaimed targets of gang stalking interviewed for the article are portrayed as well-educated and seemingly rational individuals.
Among those interviewed, for example, was novelist Gloria Naylor – a winner of the National Book Award. Naylor wrote a semi-autobiographical book which was published in December 2005 in which she described her experiences as a target of organized stalking. The book’s title, 1996, was the year it became apparent to Naylor that she was being stalked.
Psychological operations used against Naylor are identical to those described in the harassment tactics section on the “What is Gang Stalking?” page of this website.
“…Naylor describes what she calls “street theater” — incidents that might be dismissed by others as coincidental, but which Naylor believes were set up. She noticed suspicious cars driving by her isolated vacation home. On an airplane, fellow passengers mimicked her every movement — like mimes on a street.”
The circumstances by which Naylor apparently came to be targeted are not specifically described in the article, but they are documented elsewhere. Here is a short explanation from the review of her book 1996 by Booklist:
“In 1996 novelist Naylor moved to secluded St. Helena Island. A minor fracas with a crotchety neighbor, whose brother worked for the National Security Agency, set into motion a series of events that made Naylor the object of close scrutiny by the government.”
As the Washington Post article indicates, such accounts are typical. Regarding another self-proclaimed targeted individual interviewed for the article for example, Weinberger wrote:
“GIRARD’S STORY, HOWEVER STRANGE, reflects what TIs around the world report: a chance encounter with a government agency or official, followed by surveillance and gang stalking, and then, in many cases, voices, and pain similar to electric shocks.”
A section in the middle of the article explores one of the reporter’s areas of expertise: secret weapons developed by the Defense Department:
“… In 1965, according to declassified Defense Department documents, the Pentagon, at the behest of the White House, launched Project Pandora, top-secret research to explore the behavioral and biological effects of low-level microwaves. For approximately four years, the Pentagon conducted secret research: zapping monkeys; exposing unwitting sailors to microwave radiation; and conducting a host of other unusual experiments (a sub-project of Project Pandora was titled Project Bizarre). The results were mixed, and the program was plagued by disagreements and scientific squabbles. The “Moscow signal,” as it was called, was eventually attributed to eavesdropping, not mind control, and Pandora ended in 1970. And with it, the military’s research into so-called non-thermal microwave effects seemed to die out, at least in the unclassified realm.
But there are hints of ongoing research: An academic paper written for the Air Force in the mid-1990s mentions the idea of a weapon that would use sound waves to send words into a person’s head. “The signal can be a ‘message from God’ that can warn the enemy of impending doom, or encourage the enemy to surrender,” the author concluded.
In 2002, the Air Force Research Laboratory patented precisely such a technology: using microwaves to send words into someone’s head. That work is frequently cited on mind-control Web sites. Rich Garcia, a spokesman for the research laboratory’s directed energy directorate, declined to discuss that patent or current or related research in the field, citing the lab’s policy not to comment on its microwave work.
In response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed for this article, the Air Force released unclassified documents surrounding that 2002 patent — records that note that the patent was based on human experimentation in October 1994 at the Air Force lab, where scientists were able to transmit phrases into the heads of human subjects, albeit with marginal intelligibility. Research appeared to continue at least through 2002. Where this work has gone since is unclear — the research laboratory, citing classification, refused to discuss it or release other materials.”
The article contains a description of a conference call hosted by Freedom From Covert Harassment & Surveillance (FFCHS) – the U.S. government’s disinformation front group which is the subject of its own page in this website.
Weinberger describes the event objectively – but there is no indication that she considered the possibility that the organization is actually a charade used for disinformation purposes. In fact, the words “disinformation” and “counterintelligence” do not appear in the article. That is comparable to an overview of the game of poker that does not mention bluffing.
In her defense, at the time this article was written the reporter did not have the benefit of seeing the numerous online references to the true nature of FFCHS which later emerged.
An ideal journalistic approach to this topic – for example, in a follow-up article – would involve having a news agency such as the Washington Post very quietly dispatch some investigative journalists with private investigator type skills to conduct some discrete surveillance of self-proclaimed targeted individuals to look for evidence that they are in fact being followed and watched and harassed by criminal informants and other perpetrators.
Given her lack of personal experience as a target of gang stalking, Sharon Weinberger deserves credit for acknowledging the plausibility of the reports of such government harassment. Regarding the numerous comments generated by her article, for example, she notes the apparently rational nature of many of the self-proclaimed victims of gang stalking:
“….for anyone who thinks that all TIs are mentally ill people in need of forced medication, I suggest you check out some of the extremely sane tactics they employ. For example, their organized response to the article would make some political campaigns jealous. As one mind control blog advises:
We must write the Washington Post in high numbers to show that this story merits a follow up. We must get our side of the story out, before the perps start inundating them with letters that we are crazy. Please take part in this to give the accurate side of what is really happening and remember to forward any supporting evidence.”
Overall, Weinberg’s article is one of the most thorough, honest, and well-informed mainstream press accounts of gang stalking. On the issue of energy weapons, for example, she makes clear that even people without first-hand experience as victims of the U.S. government’s Stasi crimes should be open-minded about the increasingly-common allegations of domestic terrorism perpetrated by those connected to the military/intelligence/law enforcement complex:
“….given the history of America’s clandestine research, it’s reasonable to assume that if the defense establishment could develop mind-control or long-distance ray weapons, it almost certainly would. And, once developed, the possibility that they might be tested on innocent civilians could not be categorically dismissed.”
On the subject of voice-projection technology being used in psychological operations – as described by many targets of organized stalking, Weinberg had this to say in her blog:
“One final thought: Some of the documents I dug up through a Freedom of Information Act request indeed confirmed that the Air Force Research Laboratory patented a device to send sounds and voices into someone’s head as a “psychological warfare tool.”
So, I guess that begs the obvious question: even if you dismiss everyone who claims they are a victim of mind-invading technology, what do you think the Pentagon plans to do with such a device?”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/10/AR2007011001399.html
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May 31, 2006
A mainstream news media article about gang stalking in Canada
A Canadian national newspaper, The Globe and Mail, reported that the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) used gang stalking techniques (referred to as “Diffuse and Disrupt” tactics) against terrorism suspects for whom they lacked sufficient evidence to prosecute.
“Both CSIS and the RCMP are now under scrutiny in judicial inquiries and civil courts, with a series of men jailed overseas accusing the agencies of making end runs around the justice system.”
A CSIS official told a Canadian Senate committee: “if prosecution is not viable, there are other techniques.”
Tactics included constant surveillance: “he was followed everywhere.”
A criminal defense attorney stated that many of her clients complain of harassment by authorities, although they are never arrested.
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October 10, 2004
The Sunday Times reports on gang stalking in the U.K.
The Sunday Times, a major newspaper in the U.K., reported that the intelligence agency MI5 uses gang stalking tactics (“zersetzung” as it was called by East Germany’s Stasi) to punish whistle-blowers.
The article can be found at the link below, but it is mostly behind a subscription pay-wall. Here is the full text of the article:
Lies, threats and whistleblowers
By Liam Clarke
They are supposed to be protected but the government persecutes them. Northern Ireland is a dangerous place in which to speak out, says Liam Clarke
Armoured vehicles gather outside the home of a retired police officer. His house is searched for “secret papers”, he is arrested and questioned in an anti-terrorist holding centre. Later his name appears in the papers, he is forced to move house because of death threats and he can’t find work due to an interminable police inquiry.
The Stasi, the old East German secret police, used to call such tactics “Zersetzen”, roughly translated as “to undermine, subvert and corrode”. But we’re not talking about East Germany here but Northern Ireland, a part of the UK.
The policeman, who now uses the pseudonym Alan Barker, is a former member of the RUC Special Branch. He is accused of being the source of official transcripts of an MI5 tap on Martin McGuinness’s home phone, which my wife and I quoted extensively in a biography of McGuinness. There was no damage to national security but there was embarrassment to government figures.
My wife and I were arrested, but last week we were informed there would be no charges.
In a blistering report on the police operation Nuala O’Loan, the Northern Ireland police ombudsman, condemned the raids on Barker’s home and on ours and recommended that eight police officers be disciplined for 32 separate offences.
Despite this debacle, the hounding of Barker continues unabated. It is a phenomenon I have witnessed many times before. The government’s “whistleblower’s charter” is supposed to protect those who speak out, but the reality is that those who do are persecuted.
“Tony Buchanan”, a former special forces soldier who told The Sunday Times that Stephen Restorick, the last British soldier to be killed in Northern Ireland, could have been saved, has been showered with injunctions and bills for damages.
He had been working on a security contract in Iraq. Now his security clearance has mysteriously run into difficulties and he has been faced with a bill for “damages” for breaching confidentiality.
“Martin Ingram”, a Manchester-born former undercover soldier in Northern Ireland, faced even rougher treatment when he told The Sunday Times about a catalogue of official wrongdoing, including how army burglars burnt the offices used by Sir John Stevens, the commissioner of the Met, in a bid to obstruct an investigation into military intelligence collusion in several murders.
He was arrested, his home was burgled and a personal memoir taken by the burglars later turned up in court papers served on him by the MoD. Nick Cameron, a former SAS soldier who used a series of articles in The Sunday Times to accuse the United Nations and Nato of abandoning 50,000 Muslims under Serbian attack in the UN “safe area” of Srebrenica in 1995, faced similar treatment.
None of these people has been convicted of anything but each has seen his life undermined, subverted and corroded. What the authorities are ensuring is that the price of telling the truth is so high that few will be prepared to pay it.
http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/news/article241256.ece#
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August 9, 2004
Big Business Becoming Big Brother
Notwithstanding their various warm and fuzzy ad campaigns, big corporations are not your friends – unless your friends are the sort of folks who would stab you in the back after taking your money.
The U.S. government has been colluding with big corporations to spy on Americans since the dawn of the Cold War, as this article notes, and the practice is increasing.
“The government is increasingly using corporations to do its surveillance work, allowing it to get around restrictions that protect the privacy and civil liberties of Americans, according to a report released Monday by the American Civil Liberties Union…”
http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/2004/08/64492?currentPage=all
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June 21, 2004
The Pentagon is apparently spying on American citizens
One of the scandals (along with Watergate, Cointelpro, and other crimes) which led to the U.S. Senate’s Church Committee investigations during the 1970s was the spying on Americans by U.S. Army intelligence agents.
As this Newsweek article notes, apparently the Pentagon is quietly resuming its practice of spying on American citizens.
“Without any public hearing or debate, NEWSWEEK has learned, Defense officials recently slipped a provision into a bill before Congress that could vastly expand the Pentagon’s ability to gather intelligence inside the United States, including recruiting citizens as informants.”
http://www.truth-out.org/archive/item/48419:the-pentagon-spying-in-america
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August 13, 2000
A mainstream news media article about “mobbing” (the workplace harassment component of gang stalking)
As with gang stalking generally, articles occassionally appear in the mainstream press about the workplace harassment component of gang stalking (mobbing). Here is one example from Newsweek/Daily Beast:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2000/08/13/they-call-it-mobbing.html
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If you can help expose illegal spying and harassment of Americans by intelligence agencies, law enforcement agencies, and private security contractors, please do so. America needs more patriots like Daniel Ellsberg, Edward Snowden, Jeremy Hammond, Barrett Brown, Russell Tice, William Binney, Ray McGovern, Thomas Drake, Frank Serpico, Thomas Tamm, Hugh Thompson, Jr., William C. Davidon, John Raines, Bonnie Raines, Keith Forsyth, Judi Feingold, and Bob Williamson.
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