Alarm as Trump Requests Permanent Reauthorization of NSA Mass Spying Program Exposed by Snowden

Common Dreams

Civil liberties groups and privacy advocates raised alarm Thursday after the Trump administration called on Congress to reauthorize an NSA mass surveillance program that was exposed by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The New York Times, which obtained the Trump administration's request to Congress, reported that "the administration urged lawmakers to make permanent the legal authority for the National Security Agency to gain access to logs of Americans' domestic communications, the USA Freedom Act."

"It's long past time that this surveillance program was shuttered once and for all."
—Patrick Toomey, ACLU

"The law, enacted after the intelligence contractor Edward J. Snowden revealed the existence of the program in 2013, is set to expire in December, but the Trump administration wants it made permanent," according to the Times.

The administration claimed in its letter to Congress—which was signed by outgoing National Intelligence chief Dan Coats—that the NSA has suspended the spying program, but Free Press Action government relations director Sandra Fulton said in a statement that this "should give little comfort to those whose privacy rights are routinely violated by authorities."

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New Snowden Leaked Memos Show NSA Aided Israel's "Targeted Assassinations"

Zero Hedge

A couple of new bombshell leaked NSA documents from the Snowden archive published days ago by The Intercept confirms the extremely close level of cooperation between American and Israeli intelligence services, especially as part of the so-called "global war on terror" since 9/11. The documents reveal the NSA even assisted in an aggressive targeted assassination campaign waged by Israel inside Lebanon, especially during the 2006 Lebanon War. 

According to The Intercept's report — aptly titled "Israel Hated American Ban on Sharing Intel for Assassinations, so US Made New Rules" —the newly unearthed NSA memos reveal attempts to find a legal loophole of sorts on the part of the US intelligence officials which would allow unprecedented information sharing related to a deeply controversial targeted assassination campaign by Israel.

The Intercept report states:

As Israel and the Lebanese militia Hezbollah exchanged blows during their short-lived but devastating 2006 war, Israeli military officials used private channels to pressure their American counterparts in the National Security Agency for intelligence to help assassinate Hezbollah operatives, according to a pair of top-secret NSA documents. The NSA was legally restricted from providing such information but, after Israeli officials asked for an exemption, U.S. intelligence officials decided on a new framework for information-sharing.

Essentially the Israeli SIGINT National Unit (ISNU), considered "Israel's NSA", convinced their US intelligence counterparts to circumvent US laws and procedures regarding intel sharing with with allied nations. 

"To ISNU, this prohibition [on sharing data for targeted killings] was contrary not only to supporting Israel in its fight against Hizballah but overall, to support the US Global War on Terrorism," the NSA memo stated. 

“ISNU’s reliance on NSA was equally demanding and centered on requests for time sensitive tasking, threat warning, including tactical ELINT” — electronic intelligence — “and receipt of geolocational information on Hizballah elements,” the NSA official wrote. “The latter request was particularly problematic and I had several late-night, sometimes tense, discussions with ISNU detailing NSA’s legal prohibition on providing information that could be used in targeted killings.”

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"The Most Destructive Breach In History": Hackers Use NSA Code To Grind Baltimore To A Halt

Zero Hedge

The United States is no longer supplying its enemies only with conventional weapons – that list now also includes cyberweapons. While Baltimore has been struggling with an aggressive cyber-attack over the last three weeks, previously profiled here , it has now been revealed that a key component of the malware used by cyber-criminals was actually developed just a short drive from Baltimore - at the NSA, according to the New York Times.

The tool used - called EternalBlue – has been used by hackers in North Korea, Russia and China to "cut a path of destruction around the world", and resulted in billions of dollars in damages.

Now, it has come full circle and is back in the US, wreaking havoc just miles from Washington. In fact, security experts say that attacks using EternalBlue have soared and cyber-criminals are honing in on vulnerable towns and cities, using it to paralyze governments. The NSA's connection to the attacks had previously not been reported and the NSA hasn’t commented about it since an unidentified group leaked the weapon online in April 2017.

The NSA and the FBI still don’t know whether or not it was leaked by foreign spies or US insiders.

The leak has been referred to as “the most destructive and costly N.S.A. breach in history,” by Thomas Rid, a cybersecurity expert at Johns Hopkins University. He continued: “The government has refused to take responsibility, or even to answer the most basic questions. Congressional oversight appears to be failing. The American people deserve an answer.”

An answer that we're sure they won't get. 

Commenting on the leak in April 2017, Edward Snowden said that the "NSA just lost control of its Top Secret arsenal of digital weapons; hackers leaked it."

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Whistleblowers Say NSA Still Spies on American Phones in Hidden Program

Comment: Obvious doesn't even come close...

------------------- 

Nafeez Ahmed

INSURGE INTELLIGENCE

On Monday 4th, the New York Times reported that the National Security Agency has “quietly” shut down a controversial phone records surveillance program revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013.

The claim was made by a senior Republican congressional aide who told the newspaper that the Trump administration had stopped using the program, which analyses the domestic call and text logs of American citizens, due to technical problems.

On Twitter Snowden hailed the news as a “victory”, while Intercept journalist Glen Greenwald, who broke the Snowden story to international acclaim, took the story at face value. Neither of them raised the obvious question — is the “shut down” of this program merely a smokescreen to continue spying on American phones under new or different secretive programs?

Since then, further doubt was cast on the NYT report when NSA chief General Paul Nakasone refused to confirm or deny the story. But he did tell a major security conference on Wednesday that the agency was still “in a deliberative process” about whether to use a revamped version of the vast database of American phone records.

All of this, however, is an elaborate ruse. According to two former top NSA officials interviewed by INSURGE, there is no credible reason to believe that NSA phone surveillance has truly been shut down. 

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Russia takes steps to survive global internet shutdown with its own web – MPs

RT

Russia is preparing itself to be disconnected from the World Wide Web. The Lower House of Parliament passed in the first reading a law ensuring the security of the Russian part of the internet.

The bill envisions the ‘Runet’ – the Russian segment of the internet – being able to operate independently from the rest of the world in case of global malfunctions or deliberate internet disconnection. The measures to ensure internet stability include the creation of a national DNS system that stores all of the domain names and corresponding IP numbers.

The new legislation was drafted in response to the new US cyber strategy that accuses Russia, along with China, Iran, and North Korea, of using cyber tools to “undermine” its economy and democracy. It also threatens dire consequences for anyone conducting cyber activity against the US.

The autonomous system would ensure that Russia doesn’t face a total internet shutdown if relations with the West completely collapse and the US goes as far as cutting off Russian IP addresses from the World Wide Web.

Back in 2012, then-US President Barack Obama signed an executive order allowing him to take control of all communications on American soil, including those crucial for the normal operation of the internet.

The US National Security Agency actually caused a three-day internet blackout in Syria in November 2012, whistleblower Edward Snowden told Wired magazine. NSA hackers accidently ‘bricked’ one of the core routers while trying to install spyware on it.

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Australia Becomes First Western Nation to Ban Secure Encryption

extremetech.com

 

Australia is now the first Western nation to ban security, following a decision by its parliament to pass a bill forcing companies to hand over encrypted data to police upon demand. The government will be allowed to demand this without judicial review or oversight of any kind, beyond the requirement to get a warrant in the first place. Furthermore, the law requires corporations to build tools to give them the ability to intercept data sought by police when such tools do not already exist. 

While the bill has only passed Australia’s lower chamber, the upper chamber has indicated it will pass the legislation provided there are later votes on unspecified amendments to the current bill.

Australia has become the first nation to enact into legislation what both the UK and US governments very much want — government-mandated backdoors into encryption systems that require corporations to hand over data on demand. The response of the tech industry has been straightforward: There is no way to perform this task that does not fundamentally weaken security. 

And for all that journalism is often the process of laying out multiple sides to an argument or debate, there’s no actual debate to be had, here — not, at least, as far as the security principles are concerned. We can certainly debate whether people should be entitled to privacy, or if the governments of nominally free countries should have access to this information in the first place. But as to whether it’s actually possible to build secret backdoors into security systems without fundamentally weakening them, the evidence is simple: No.

As Cindy Cohn wrote in a recent post on Lawfare Blog:

Even without compromising the cryptography, there is no way to allow access for only the good guys (for instance, law enforcement with a Title III warrant) and not for the bad guys (hostile governments, commercial spies, thieves, harassers, bad cops and more). The NSA has had several incidents in just the past few years where it lost control of its bag of tricks, so the old government idea called NOBUS—that “nobody but us” could use these attacks—isn’t grounded in reality. Putting the keys in the hands of technology companies instead of governments just moves the target for hostile actors. And it’s unrealistic to expect companies to both protect the keys and get it right each time in their responses to hundreds of thousands of law enforcement and national security requests per year from local, state, federal and foreign jurisdictions. History has shown that it’s only a matter of time before bad actors figure out how to co-opt the same mechanisms that good guys use—whether corporate or governmental—and become “stalkers” themselves. 

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NSA triples spying rate on Americans’ phone calls, collects 530mn records in 2017

RT

 

The NSA has tripled its surveillance of Americans’ phone chatter, collecting over 534mn phone call records and text messages last year, despite pressure for more restrictions and transparency, a new official report has revealed.

Over the course of 2017, the National Security Agency (NSA) collected some 534,396,285 call detail records (CDRs), representing a dramatic increase over the previous year when, the agency gathered details of 151,230,968 calls, according to the report released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI).

A call detail record contains various attributes of the call, such as the source number, destination number, and the call duration, but does not include the “content of any communication, the name, address, or financial information of a subscriber or customer, or cell site location or global positioning system information,” the report states. The data is collected under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

The report also noted that the NSA collected records from some 129,080 'non-US persons' which is a rather minor increase from 106,469 records collected the year before, under FISA Section 702. The highly controversial Section 702 does not require that an individual surveilled be a suspected terrorist, spy or foreign agent, nor does it demand judicial approval to target someone. Information gleaned by such data collection can be kept for years and may be used for purposes that do not have to be related to national security.

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The NSA Wants a Skeleton Key to Everyone’s Encrypted Data

Gavin Hanson
Activist Post

Like it or not, you are your data. In this day and age, your receipts, social media activity, public records, GPS data, and Internet search history are the proof of who you are. And while you may have thought you had secrets, the Federal Government would like the rest of them.

The seemingly innocuous pieces of information we trade away every day create a detailed mosaic of our lives used to target advertising and create personality profiles that are exploited by the FBI, political operatives like Cambridge Analytica, and Russian propagandists.

And those are just the legal shenanigans! Instances of malicious hacking that jeopardize social security numbers and other important data are on the rise as well.

But all hope is not lost! There is but one meaningful defense against such intrusions, one used by whistleblowers, banks, the government (often poorly), and college students: encryption.

Encryption, to oversimplify, is the process of putting your data in a combination locked safe, and it’s becoming more popular. Like all passcodes, these combinations are best stored non-electronically.

Automatically encrypted search engines and Internet services simplify the process for users. They protect individuals’ data from hacking, theft, and even the government, but they also retain a repository for all the combinations they use to lock data up.
But that may soon change.

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Top NSA Official Says Russia Election Meddling is Propaganda to Increase War-Spending—Media Silent

Activist Post
Jay Syrmopoulos

William Binney is a 30-year National Security Agency veteran, who served as the global Technical Director for geopolitical analysis at the NSA and was an architect of its surveillance program before becoming a famed whistleblower upon resigning in 2001.

Binney was persecuted for attempting to expose lies and distortions of intelligence by the George W. Bush administration used to justify systematic, massive, and all-encompassing surveillance into all Americans’ private electronic communications.

In regards to Russiagate, Binney has been a strong proponent of the idea that the Democratic National Committee was not hacked by Russians, and in a November 15 interview, published on the Washingtonsblog news-site, titled “How to Instantly Prove (Or Disprove) Russian Hacking of US Election”, he provides a technical analysis that exposes how the Democratic party allegations of “Russian hacking” are a part of an operation of intentional deception backed by the military-intelligence-industrial complex.

The former NSA tech guru says the agency he worked at for decades has evidence of exactly who hacked… or instead, proves that the emails were leaked by a Democratic party insider.

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Former Qatari PM publicly admits to collusion and coordination between 4 countries, led by US, to destabilize Syria and support terrorists

Tyler Durden
Zero Hedge

A television interview of a top Qatari official confessing the truth behind the origins of the war in Syria is going viral across Arabic social media during the same week a leaked top secret NSA document was published which confirms that the armed opposition in Syria was under the direct command of foreign governments from the early years of the conflict. And according to a well-known Syria analyst and economic adviser with close contacts in the Syrian government, the explosive interview constitutes a high level "public admission to collusion and coordination between four countries to destabilize an independent state, [including] possible support for Nusra/al-Qaeda."Importantly, "this admission will help build case for what Damascus sees as an attack on its security & sovereignty. It will form basis for compensation claims."

As the war in Syria continues slowly winding down, it seems new source material comes out on an almost a weekly basis in the form of testimonials of top officials involved in destabilizing Syria, and even occasional leaked emails and documents which further detail covert regime change operations against the Assad government. Though much of this content serves to confirm what has already long been known by those who have never accepted the simplistic propaganda which has dominated mainstream media, details continue to fall in place, providing future historians with a clearer picture of the true nature of the war.

This process of clarity has been aided - as predicted - by the continued infighting among Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) former allies Saudi Arabia and Qatar, with each side accusing the other of funding Islamic State and al-Qaeda terrorists (ironically, both true). Increasingly, the world watches as more dirty laundry is aired and the GCC implodes after years of nearly all the gulf monarchies funding jihadist movements in places like Syria, Iraq, and Libya.

The top Qatari official is no less than former Prime Minister Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber al-Thani, who oversaw Syria operations on behalf of Qatar until 2013 (also as foreign minister), and is seen below with then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in this Jan. 2010 photo (as a reminder, Qatar's 2022 World Cup Committee donated $500,000 to the Clinton Foundation in 2014).  

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The Multibillion-Dollar U.S. Spy Agency You Don't Know About

James Bamford
Sott.net

On a heavily protected military base some 15 miles south of Washington, D.C., sits the massive headquarters of a spy agency few know exists. Even Barack Obama, five months into his presidency, seemed not to have recognized its name. While shaking hands at a Five Guys hamburger restaurant in Washington in May 2009, he asked a customer seated at a table about his job. "What do you [do]?" the president inquired. "I work at NGA, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency," the man answered. Obama appeared dumbfounded. "So, explain to me exactly what this National Geospatial..." he said, unable to finish the name. Eight years after that videotape aired, the NGA remains by far the most shadowy member of the Big Five spy agencies, which include the CIA and the National Security Agency.

Despite its lack of name recognition, the NGA's headquarters is the third-largest building in the Washington metropolitan area, bigger than the CIA headquarters and the U.S. Capitol.

Completed in 2011 at a cost of $1.4 billion, the main building measures four football fields long and covers as much ground as two aircraft carriers. In 2016, the agency purchased 99 acres in St. Louis to construct additional buildings at a cost of $1.75 billion to accommodate the growing workforce, with 3,000 employees already in the city.

The NGA is to pictures what the NSA is to voices. Its principal function is to analyze the billions of images and miles of video captured by drones in the Middle East and spy satellites circling the globe. But because it has largely kept its ultra-high-resolution cameras pointed away from the United States, according to a variety of studies, the agency has never been involved in domestic spy scandals like its two far more famous siblings, the CIA and the NSA. However, there's reason to believe that this will change under President Donald Trump.

Throughout the long election campaign and into his first months as president, Trump has pushed hard for weakening restraints on the intelligence agencies, spending more money for defense, and getting tough on law and order. Given the new president's overwhelming focus on domestic security, it's reasonable to expect that Trump will use every tool available to maintain it, including overhead vigilance.  

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Yes, your smart TV really is spying on you: Leaked docs reveal CIA secretly turned Samsung TVs into microphones that spy on your conversations

Natural News 

For years Deep State insiders and others familiar with the federal government’s spy agencies have been sounding the alarm about the development of technology that enables constant, real-time electronic surveillance of anyone, anywhere, anytime (President Donald Trump, something to consider as you delve into who ordered it against you and why.)

Now, thanks to another whistleblower following in the footsteps for former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, WikiLeaks has provided the proof that these insiders weren’t kooks or conspiracy theorists – they were spot-on. (RELATED: Is Your TV Spying On You? For Millions Of Viewers, The Answer Is YES!)

According to a treasure trove of newly released documents known collectively as “Vault 7” in the “Year Zero” series, not only does the CIA conduct improper electronic surveillance, it does through using technology that can tap into smart TVs, iPhones, Android devices, and other wireless handheld technology.

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Washington and America Implode at the Hands of a Treasonous, Obama-Led Shadow Government

Joachim Hagopian
Sott.net

The United States federal government in Washington is under attack today. Our nation's capital is presently under siege, not from military bombs or rockets fired by any foreign enemy but from powerful enemies within. With Obama-Hillary-Soros forces ostensibly maneuvering outside official government channels, against America's legitimately elected President Trump, and their loyalist foot soldiers - the neocons and intelligence community loyalists within the CIA/NSA/FBI still operating inside deep state, criminally conspiring with Mainstream Media, this sinister alliance is also organizing legions of clueless young leftist protesters to be at the ready for deployment in the streets to wreak havoc violently rioting as paid agitator insurgents. What we have here on our hands is an American Spring uprising, an insurgent regime change operation taking place right here in our own country currently bent on overthrowing America's existing "democratically elected" government.

At no time in our prior history has anything so openly subversive and treacherously treasonous ever been perpetrated on the United States of America before... the closest being the covert conspiracy singlehandedly thwarted by America's military hero General Smedley Butler in 1934, when a band of elitist bankster traitors attempted a coup d'état against the FDR administration. The all-too-familiar divide and conquer strategy is once again the globalist go-to Modus Operandi, being implemented through multi-prong assaults waging an open insurrection war against the Trump administration in order to successfully execute a coup committed by traitors out to take down America as their latest banana republic.

Despite having written a number of articles critical of Trump policy as president and latest White House puppet, his presidency has been undermined, sabotaged and categorically rejected by his opponents at every turn. Trump rightfully called mainstream media fake news "an enemy of the American people." Tactics deployed by MSM and Trump's multiplicity of enemies are so blatantly illegal and highly unethical that as a fair-minded journalist seeking the truth, I feel compelled to address this demonization of Donald Trump perpetrated by the same crowd that's been demonizing Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad for years. Understanding the why and the wherefore of this unprecedented full scale attack on a standing US president is key to recognizing the truly diabolical bigger picture unfolding at the behest of the planetary controllers.

The ruling elite's longtime agenda has been to destroy the United States and the West from within. In reaction to last year's growing anti-globalist movement, represented by the Brexit vote and "anti-establishment" Trump election, the elite is becoming desperately aggressive now, fighting for absolute domination and population control, insidiously whipping up unstable domestic conditions throughout the Western world, engineered to explode with racial, class, religious and politically charged civil war violence in both America and Europe. In the US this takes the form of mass deployment of a robotically dumbed down, highly manipulated yet well-organized political left, constituting the elite's WMD against Trump's reactionary militarized authoritarian federal forces, soon spilling blood and chaos as America's very own Spring uprising. The coming riots are aimed at causing the violent breakdown of civil society in both America and Europe, of course co-timed with the ongoing, incessant MSM propaganda machine, 24/7 delivering the false narrative of overly hostile, aggressive Russia, China and Iran intended to ignite World War III, simultaneous to the implosion of the house of cards global economy - the New World Disorder's perfect storm of cataclysmic events, mapped out long in advance to bring about its one world government tyranny.

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Paul Craig Roberts Explains The Stakes For Trump And All Of Us

Paul Craig Roberts

We need to understand, and so does President Trump, that the hoax “war on terror” was used to transform intelligence agencies, such as the NSA and CIA, and criminal investigative agencies, such as the FBI, into Gestapo secret police agencies. Trump is now threatened by these agencies, because he rejects the neoconservative’s agenda of US world hegemony that supports the gigantic military/security annual budget.

Our secret police agencies are busy at work planting “intelligence” among the presstitute media that Trump is compromised by “Russian connections” and is a security threat to the United States. The plan is to make a case in the media, as was done against President Nixon, and to force Trump from office. To openly take on a newly elected president is an act of extraordinary audacity that implies enormous confidence, or else desperation, on the part of the police state agencies.

Here you can see CNN openly cooperating with the CIA in treating wild and irresponsible speculation that Trump is under Russian influence as if it is an established fact.

The “evidence” provided by CNN and the CIA is a “report” by the New York Times that, with little doubt, was planted in the NYT by the CIA.

This is so obvious that it is clear that CNN and the CIA regard the American people as so gullible as to be completely stupid.

Glenn Greenwald explains to Amy Goodman that the CIA is after Trump, because Trump’s announced policy of reducing the dangerous tensions with Russia conflicts with the military/security complex’s need for a major enemy:

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Yes, Trump is Dangerous, But the Unelected Deep State Trying to Overthrow Him Is Far Worse

Free Thought Project

 

There is a proverbial shit storm brewing in Washington D.C. right now and it is separate from the one created by President Donald Trump. Since Trump took office, his executive orders have enraged Americans from coast to coast. While some of them were beneficial like ending the US involvement in TPP, others, like the travel ban, have caused unnecessary turmoil for innocent people. However, all those orders were conducted in the open and for all Americans to see — unlike the soft coup being carried out against Trump in secret by the deep state.

As Jay Syrmopolous pointed out last week, giving a clear admission of a soft coup in progress, John Schindler, a former professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College, who spent nearly a decade with the super-secret National Security Agency as an intelligence analyst and counterintelligence officer — and who still maintains deep connections to the intelligence community — readily admitted that senior elements of the intelligence community (IC) are engaging in treason against Trump. 

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A New Era of Mass Surveillance is Emerging Across Europe

Just Security

The world was a different place when, in October 2015, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) struck down the “Safe Harbour” data-sharing agreement that allowed the transfer of European citizens’ data to the US. The Court’s decision concluded that the indiscriminate nature of the surveillance programs carried out by U.S. intelligence agencies, exposed two years earlier by NSA-contractor-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden, had made it impossible to ensure that the personal data of E.U. citizens would be adequately protected when shared with American companies. The ruling thus served to further solidify the long-standing conventional wisdom that Continental Europe is better at protecting privacy than America.

However, Europe’s ability to continue to take this moral high ground is rapidly declining. In recent months, and in the wake of a series of terrorist attacks across Europe, Germany, France and the United Kingdom — Europe’s biggest superpowers — have passed laws granting their surveillance agencies virtually unfettered power to conduct bulk interception of communications across Europe and beyond, with limited to no effective oversight or procedural safeguards from abuse.

The same political leaders and legislators that once rebuked the NSA on the ethics of its mass surveillance practices, seem to now be taking a page out of the NSA’s playbook. This post surveys these three national legal frameworks, highlighting their troubling similarities, with the aim of showing how legislators from these countries are treading a dangerous line of surveillance expansion and overreach, paving the way for more European countries to follow in their footsteps. Indeed, European countries are increasingly chiming in to an ever-growing chorus of supporters for wholesale global surveillance in the name of perceived security. This rhetoric finds especially fertile ground in modern-day Europe, which has been engulfed by populist messaging surrounding the refugee crisis, immigration and heightened security threats. However, rushed and vague mass surveillance laws, while they might increase public approval ratings in the short term, are not a true panacea to the fundamental flaws in European intelligence cooperation that were exposed by the recent attacks.  

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Report: US Intel Met Secretly With Mossad, Plotting to Hide Intelligence From Trump

Information Liberation

A bombshell report from Israeli news service Ynet says Israeli and American intelligence officials are plotting to hide intelligence from incoming president Donald Trump.

Trump needs to see this report. Our lying press is completely ignoring it.

YnetNews reports:

Donald Trump’s upcoming inauguration as the next president of the United States is causing Israeli intelligence officials to lose sleep as well. Discussions held in closed forums recently raised fears of a leakage of Israeli intelligence top-classified information, clandestine modus oprandi and sources, which have been exposed to the American intelligence community over the past 15 years, to Russia – and from there to Iran.

The cause of concern are the suspicions of unreported ties between the president-elect or his associates and the Kremlin, whose agents are also associated with intelligence officials in Tehran.

These fears, which began upon Trump’s election, grew stronger following a meeting held recently between Israeli and American intelligence officials (the date of the meeting is not mentioned to protect the sources of the report). During the meeting, according to the Israelis who participated in it, their American colleagues voiced despair over Trump’s election, as he often lashes out at the American intelligence community. The American officials also told the Israelis that the National Security Agency (NSA) had “highly credible information” that Russia’s intelligence agencies, the FSB and GRU, were responsible for hacking the Democratic Party (DNC) servers during the elections and leaking sensitive information to WikiLeaks, which hurt Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

The American officials further added that they believed Russia President Vladimir Putin had “leverages of pressure” over Trump – but did not elaborate. They were apparently referring to what was published Wednesday about embarrassing information collected by the Russian intelligence in a bid to blackmail the president-elect.

The Americans implied that their Israeli colleagues should “be careful” as of January 20, Trump’s inauguration date, when transferring intelligence information to the White House and to the National Security Council (NSC), which is subject to the president. According to the Israelis who were present in the meeting, the Americans recommended that until it is made clear that Trump is not inappropriately connected to Russia and is not being extorted – Israel should avoid revealing sensitive sources to administration officials for fear the information would reach the Iranians.

Officials within our intelligence community are working to undermine our own president.
They're actively putting the interests of Israel over America. 

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Exit Obama in a Cloud of Disillusion, Delusion and Deceit

Craig Murray
craigmurray.org.uk

I had promised myself and my family that on this holiday I would do nothing but relax. However events have overtaken my good intentions. I find myself in the unusual position of having twice been in a position to know directly that governments were lying in globe-shaking events, firstly Iraqi WMD and now the "Russian hacks".

Anybody who believes the latest report issued by Obama as "proof" provides anything of the sort is very easily impressed by some entirely meaningless diagrams. William Binney, who was Technical Director at the NSA and actually designed their surveillance capabilities, has advised me by email.

It is plain from the report itself that the Russian groups discussed have been under targeted NSA surveillance for a period longer than the time frame for the DNC and Podesta leaks. It is therefore inconceivable that the NSA would not have detected and traced those particular data flows and they would be saved.

In other words, the NSA would have the actual hack on record, would be able to recognise the emails themselves and tell you exactly the second the transmission or transmissions took place and how they were routed. They would be able to give you date, time and IP addresses. In fact, not only do they produce no evidence of this kind, they do not even claim to have this kind of definite evidence.

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Russia "Tired Of Obama Lies About Hackers", Vows Response To Any New Sanctions

Zero Hedge

As Washington prepares to unleash new sanctions on Russia, it appears Putin won't take this laying down. If U.S. adopts new sanctions against Russia, govt in Moscow will resort to counter-measures, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova warns in a website statement.

As we detailed previously, the delay in sanctions against Russia have come from Obama's inability to take unilateral actions under current laws.  While Obama previously signed an executive order that would allow him to freeze the assets in the United States of people overseas who have engaged in cyber acts, it only applies to actions that have threatened U.S. national security or financial stability.  Further, per a "senior administration official," use of the existing law would require (1) actual election infrastructure to be designated as 'critical infrastructure' and (2) the administration to prove that such infrastructure was actually "harmed," conditions which the National Security Council say have not been met.  

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The CIA's foxes are guarding the Facebook henhouse

F. William Engdahl
New Eastern Outlook

The latest mantra of CIA-linked media since the "Pizzagate" leaks of data alleging that Hillary Clinton Campaign Manager John Podesta and other highly influential political persons in Washington were connected to an unusual pizza place near the White House run by a 41-year old James Achilles Alefantis called Comet Ping Pong, is the need to crack down (i.e. censorship) on what is being called "Fake News." The latest step in this internet censorship drive is a decision by the murky social media organization called Facebook to hire special organizations to determine if Facebook messages are pushing Fake News or not. Now it comes out that the "fact check" private organizations used by Facebook are tied to the CIA and CIA-related NGO's including George Soros' Open Society Foundations.

In the last weeks of the US Presidential campaign, Wikileaks released a huge number of emails linked to Clinton Campaign Manager, John Podesta. The contents of thousands of emails revealed detailed exchanges between Podesta and the oddly-influential Comet Ping Pong pizza place owner, Alefantis, as well as the Clinton campaign, which held fundraisers at Comet Ping Pong.

The Pizzagate scandal exploded in the final weeks of the US campaign as teams of private researchers documented and posted Facebook, Instagram and other data suggesting that Alefantis and Comet Ping Pong were at the heart of a pedophilia ring that implicated some of the most prominent politicians in Washington and beyond.

The New York Times and Washington Post moved swiftly to assert that the Pizzagate revelations were Fake News, quoting "anonymous sources" who supposedly said the CIA "believed" Russia was behind hackers who exposed emails and documents from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Hillary Clinton's campaign chair John Podesta. Former NSA senior intelligence expert William Binney claimed the Podesta and Clinton campaign data were leaked, not hacked. The NSA, he pointed out, would immediately identify a hack, especially a foreign hack, and they have remained silent. 

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