Long Before Epstein: Sex Traffickers & Spy Agencies

Elizabeth Vos
Consortium news

The alleged use of sexual blackmail by spy agencies is hardly unique to the case of Jeffrey Epstein. Although the agencies involved as well as their alleged motivations and methods differ with each case, the crime of child trafficking with ties to intelligence agencies or those protected by them has been around for decades.

Some cases include the 1950s -1970s Kincora scandal and the 1981 Peter Hayman affair, both in the U.K.; and the Finders’ cult and the Franklin scandal in the U.S. in the late 1980s. Just as these cases did not end in convictions, the pedophile and accused child-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein remained at arms’ length for years.

“For almost two decades, for some nebulous reason, whether to do with ties to foreign intelligence, his billions of dollars, or his social connections, Epstein, whose alleged sexual sickness and horrific assaults on women without means or ability to protect themselves… remained untouchable,” journalist Vicky Ward wrote in The Daily Beast in July.

The protection of sex traffickers by intelligence agencies is especially interesting in the wake of  Epstein’s death. Like others, Epstein had long been purported to have links with spy agencies. Such allegations documented by Whitney Webb in her multi-part series were recently published in Mintpress News.

Webb states that Epstein was the current face of an extensive system of abuse with ties to both organized crime and intelligence interests. She told CNLive! that: “According to Nigel Rosser, a British journalist who wrote in the Evening Standard in 2001, Epstein apparently for much of the 1990s claimed that he used to work for the CIA.”

Vicky Ward, who wrote on Epstein for Vanity Fair before his first arrest, and claimed the magazine killed one of her pieces after Epstein intervened with editor Graydon Carter, said in a Tweet that one of Epstein’s clients was Adnan Khashoggi, an arms dealer who was pivotal in the Iran Contra scandal and was on the Mossad (the Israeli intelligence agency) payroll. This was also noted in a book “By Way of Deception” by former Mossad agent Victor Ostrovsky.

A former Epstein friend reported in @Salon last week that Epstein claimed “he worked for governments to recover money looted by African dictators. Other times those dictators hired him to help them hide their stolen money.” https://t.co/pYkOlFGoyY

— Vicky Ward (@VickyPJWard) July 16, 2019

The Times of Israel reported that Epstein was an “active business partner with former prime minister Ehud Barak” until 2015, adding: “Barak formed a limited partnership company in Israel in 2015, called Sum (E.B.) to invest in a high-tech startup…. A large part of the money used by Sum to buy the start-up stock was supplied by Epstein.”

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The Epstein associate nobody's talking about: The IDF-Linked bond girl infiltrating the UK NHS

 

 

Johnny Vedmore
The Swamp

I have a story to tell you. A story that causes my heart to pound and my blood pressure to rise as I type each and every word. A true story of a woman of great wealth and power, who rode on Jeffrey Epstein's "Lolita Express" private jet on several occasions. She appears to be a German-born Israeli state intelligence operative based in London. An ex-model whose name appeared in the Panama Papers from the Mossack Fonseca leaks and who became embroiled in a FIFA corruption scandal with Sepp Blatter and his family. She is perhaps the closest example that you could possibly find to a real-life "Bond Girl." Yet, she is almost completely unknown to the majority of us. This lady has recently infiltrated the NHS through the UK Department of Health and Social Care with the help of Matt Hancock MP, and her presence signifies a major threat to the data security of every citizen of the United Kingdom. Every single piece of data about you, your health issues, your blood type, the model of the wireless pacemaker keeping you alive, every detail of every embarrassing medical problem in the hands of the Israeli state apparatus and potentially sold off to the highest bidder. You may think that this doesn't concern you. Why would you need to worry about a foreign far-right government which has been proven to meddle in the affairs of our country? Your data would be useless to them, surely? But that's not the world we live in anymore. Big data is the modern gold rush. The psychologists and marketing agents have mastered how to make you buy things; the next step is for them to successfully master making you do things, and for that kind of control over people, they need everybody's data.

When I was first researching the Jeffrey Epstein case, I trawled through every piece of official documentation that was available. I knew what I was looking for and how very dangerous it was. I had begun attempting to identify state assets through their movements, actions, associations, and by good old fashioned detective work. I was interested in identifying any MI5 or MI6 agents, Israeli Mossad, CIA, or any other part of a nation states spying apparatus. It's possibly one of the most dangerous hobbies on earth, spy hunting, and if I'm honest, I'm not even sure why I'm doing it. Regardless, Jeffrey Epstein's sweetheart deal was probably what they would give to a foreign intelligence operative. Epstein was a perfect place to begin fishing for potential spooks.

Once I find somebody who I suspect of being involved in espionage, I will track down all existing information on that individual and build the story of their lives as best as I can. I learn every known habit they have and instead of immediately writing an article about them, I just continue to note their activities with interest. I have been watching many potential state actors for a fair few years. I've also missed out on breaking a few good stories by waiting for too long. But I don't want to simply show you the past as much as I want to show you the present, and even possibly, the future.

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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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Mega Group, Maxwells And Mossad: The Spy Story at The Heart of The Jeffrey Epstein Pedo Scandal

Whitney Webb
MintPress News

As billionaire pedophile and alleged sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein sits in prison, reports have continued to surface about his reported links to intelligence, his financial ties to several companies and "charitable" foundations, and his friendships with the rich and powerful, as well as top politicians.

While Part I and Part II of this series, "The Jeffrey Epstein Scandal: Too Big to Fail," have focused on the widespread nature of sexual blackmail operations in recent American history and their ties to the heights of American political power and the U.S. intelligence community, one key aspect of Epstein's own sex-trafficking and blackmail operation that warrants examination is Epstein's ties to Israeli intelligence and his ties to the "informal" pro-Israel philanthropist faction known as "the Mega Group."

The Mega Group's role in the Epstein case has garnered some attention, as Epstein's main financial patron for decades, billionaire Leslie Wexner, was a co-founder of the group that unites several well-known businessmen with a penchant for pro-Israel and ethno-philanthropy (i.e., philanthropy benefiting a single ethnic or ethno-religious group). However, as this report will show, another uniting factor among Mega Group members is deep ties to organized crime, specifically the organized crime network discussed in Part I of this series, which was largely led by notorious American mobster Meyer Lansky.

By virtue of the role of many Mega Group members as major political donors in both the U.S. and Israel, several of its most notable members have close ties to the governments of both countries as well as their intelligence communities. As this report and a subsequent report will show, the Mega Group also had close ties to two businessmen who worked for Israel's Mossad — Robert Maxwell and Marc Rich — as well as to top Israeli politicians, including past and present prime ministers with deep ties to Israel's intelligence community.

One of those businessmen working for the Mossad, Robert Maxwell, will be discussed at length in this report. Maxwell, who was a business partner of Mega Group co-founder Charles Bronfman, aided the successful Mossad plot to plant a trapdoor in U.S.-created software that was then sold to governments and companies throughout the world. That plot's success was largely due to the role of a close associate of then-President Ronald Reagan and an American politician close to Maxwell, who later helped aid Reagan in the cover-up of the Iran Contra scandal.

Years later, Maxwell's daughter — Ghislaine Maxwell — would join Jeffrey Epstein's "inner circle" at the same time Epstein was bankrolling a similar software program now being marketed for critical electronic infrastructure in the U.S. and abroad. That company has deep and troubling connections to Israeli military intelligence, associates of the Trump administration, and the Mega Group.

Epstein appears to have ties to Israeli intelligence and has well-documented ties to influential Israeli politicians and the Mega Group. Yet, those entities are not isolated in and of themselves, as many also connect to the organized crime network and powerful alleged pedophiles discussed in previous installments of this series.

Perhaps the best illustration of how the connections between many of these players often meld together can be seen in Ronald Lauder: a Mega Group member, former member of the Reagan administration, long-time donor to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel's Likud Party, as well as a long-time friend of Donald Trump and Roy Cohn.

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Are Israel’s spies stealing your data?

Katherine Barnett
Electronic Intifada

Israeli spies go on to pursue questionable careers upon leaving the military.

Two cyber warfare and data collection companies that have recently been put under scrutiny were founded by graduates of the Israeli military’s Unit 8200, a high-tech spy branch responsible for the training of some of the country’s top technology experts and leading cyberwarfare efforts.

Israeli tech company Onavo, owned by Facebook, and Israeli cyber warfare company NSO Group were both founded by unit veterans.

This demonstrates how expertise developed in the unit can and has been used to create commercial tech platforms that put consumer security at risk.

What does the military unit do?

 

Unit 8200 is widely seen as Israel’s equivalent to the National Security Agency in the United States.

Its members are young, usually between 18 and 21, and are chosen for their math, science and problem-solving talents.

Those working within the unit help the development of surveillance tech, hacking, encryption and decoding techniques. They also gather internal and foreign signals and are responsible for cyber-policing and monitoring civilians.

Unit 8200 also plays a significant role in the systematic discrimination against Palestinians.
In 2014, 43 reservists affiliated with Unit 8200 revealed details of surveillance methods used to pry on the most intimate private data of innocent Palestinians, including material of a sexual and financial nature.

“The Palestinian population under military rule is completely exposed to espionage and surveillance by Israeli intelligence. While there are severe limitations on the surveillance of Israeli citizens, the Palestinians are not afforded this protection,” the soldiers wrote in a letter published by The Guardian.

Despite the widespread media coverage this received, the monitoring of Palestinians by Unit 8200 continues.

The Palestinian campaign group 7amleh outlined in a report released in December 2018 how the unit intercepts Palestinian communication networks and injects them with text messages and phone calls.

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The Trump Administration Is Using the Full Power of the U.S. Surveillance State Against Whistleblowers

The Intercept

 

Government whistleblowers are increasingly being charged under laws such as the Espionage Act, but they aren’t spies.

They’re ordinary Americans and, like most of us, they carry smartphones that automatically get backed up to the cloud. When they want to talk to someone, they send them a text or call them on the phone. They use Gmail and share memes and talk politics on Facebook. Sometimes they even log in to these accounts from their work computers.

Then, during the course of their work, they see something disturbing. Maybe it’s that the government often has no idea if the people it kills in drone strikes are civilians. Or that the NSA witnessed a cyberattack against local election officials in 2016 that U.S. intelligence believes was orchestrated by Russia, even though the president is always on TV saying the opposite. Or that the FBI uses hidden loopholes to bypass its own rules against infiltrating political and religious groups. Or that Donald Trump’s associates are implicated in sketchy financial transactions.

So they search government databases for more information and maybe print some of the documents they find. They search for related information using Google. Maybe they even send a text message to a friend about how insane this is while they consider possible next steps. Should they contact a journalist? They look up the tips pages of news organizations they like and start researching how to use Tor Browser. All of this happens before they’ve reached out to a journalist for the first time. 

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Iran’s Intelligence Ministry Dismantled CIA Spy Network

South Front

Iranian security forces have identified and destroyed an integrated network of operatives serving the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) inside the country, the Intelligence Ministry reported on July 22.

According to the Fars news agency citing  the Ministry’s director-general for counterintelligence, Iran captured 17 professional spies working on behalf of the CIA throughout last year and some of those arrested had been handed death sentences. The detained suspects were operating in key organizations and institutions mainly in the private sector.

“The identified spies were employed in sensitive and vital private sector centers in the economic, nuclear, infrastructural, military and cyber areas… where they collected classified information,” the unnamed official said.

The report said that the CIA had recruited its operatives by mainly contacting them over the internet. Other tactics included issuing or renewing US visas, hiring Iranian specialists, providing necessary equipment and access to certain participants in scientific events abroad, sending emails and messaging through social media.

In June, the Intelligence Ministry said it had “penetrated the US safe system in cyberspace,” which the CIA has used for maintaining communication with the spies.

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Did Pedophile Jeffrey Epstein Work For Mossad?

Comment: In a word: Yes.  Mossad are knee-deep in all kinds of disgusting activities, much like many of our intelligence agencies.

----------------------------------

Philip Giraldi
The American Herald

The extent of Israeli spying directed against the United States is a huge story that is only rarely addressed in the mainstream media. The Jewish state regularly tops the list for ostensibly friendly countries that aggressively conduct espionage against the U.S. and Jewish American Jonathan Pollard, who was imprisoned in 1987 for spying for Israel, is now regarded as the most damaging spy in the history of the United States.
 
Last week I wrote about how Israeli spies operating more-or-less freely in the U.S. are rarely interfered with, much less arrested and prosecuted, because there is an unwillingness on the part of upper echelons of government to do so.

I cited the case of Arnon Milchan, a billionaire Hollywood movie producer who had a secret life that included stealing restricted technology in the United States to enable development of Israel's nuclear weapons program, something that was very much against U.S. interests. Milchan was involved in a number of other thefts as well as arms sales on behalf of the Jewish state, so much so that his work as a movie producer was actually reported to be less lucrative than his work as a spy and black-market arms merchant, for which he operated on a commission basis. 

That Milchan has never been arrested by the United States government or even questioned about his illegal activity, which was well known to the authorities, is just one more manifestation of the effectiveness of Jewish power in Washington.
 
A far more compelling case involving possible espionage with major political manifestations has just re-surfaced. I am referring to Jeffrey Epstein, the billionaire Wall Street "financier" who has been arrested and charged with operating a "vast" network of underage girls for sex, operating out of his mansions in New York City and Florida as well as his private island in the Caribbean, referred to by visitors as "Orgy Island." Among other high-value associates, it is claimed that Epstein was particularly close to Bill Clinton, who flew dozens of times on Epstein's private 727. 

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Recruiting American Spies for Israel

Philip Giraldi

Unz Review

Israel never loses an opportunity to promote what it perceives to be its interests. That any nation would do just that most of the time should surprise no one, but Israel is perhaps unique in terms of how assiduously it works at creating situations that favor it through the use of corruption of foreign governments and subversion of existing institutions. For most countries, the actions of a minority that seeks to advance the interests of a foreign nation would face strong resistance, but Israel manages to get away with what it does due to the presence of powerful and wealthy diaspora communities, most particularly in the Anglophone countries, but also in France.

The Israel Lobby in the United States has been subjected to some scrutiny thanks largely to the impetus provided by Professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s groundbreaking study The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. More recent revelations have come from undercover journalism undertaken by al-Jazeera, which has demonstrated how British Jewish groups and parliamentarians have worked together with Israeli Embassy intelligence officers to remove public officials believed to be critical of Israel. Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the Labour Party, has been on the receiving end of a campaign to replace him for his alleged anti-Semitism solely because he has condemned Israeli oppression of the Palestinians. A second al-Jazeera investigation demonstrated how The Lobby, cooperating with the Israeli Embassy, has been controlling discussion of the Middle East in the United States, which should have surprised no one.

Europe indeed appears to be a hotbed of anti-Semitism, or so Israel and its friends would have us believe. Leaders in France, Germany and Britain feel compelled to frequently address the issue, making the equivalent of a war on anti-Semitism a principal objective of government. The United States has joined this effort, appointing a Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism whose job includes reporting other countries’ treatment of Jews and Israel.

The newest wrinkle comes under the category of Lawfare. It consists of hate crime laws that are directed against anyone criticizing Jews and, increasingly, Israel. In fact, any criticism of Israel is frequently being seen as a criminal offense, a trend that is also evident in the United States at the national, state and local levels, where Jewish groups have also been quick off the mark in claiming that anti-Semitism is surging. Freedom of speech in the western world has been diminished as a result.

Diaspora Jews are well entrenched in the media, which has enabled them to promote a narrative favorable to Israel no matter what it does, to include a repetitive dose of holocaust guilt that plays out from Hollywood and elsewhere in the media. The assiduously cultivated message for the public is that Jews are always the victims, never the aggressors, even when IDF snipers shoot Arab children and medical workers during protests.

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Mueller Caught In Another Deception; Key ‘Russia Link’ Exposed As Informant For US, Ukraine

Zero Hedge

A Ukrainian businessman painted in the Mueller report as a sinister link to Russia was actually a “sensitive” intelligence source for the US State Department who informed on Ukrainian and Russian issues – and passed messages between the Washington and Kiev, according to The Hill‘s John Solomon.

Konstantin Kilimnik, who worked for Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, was described on page 6 of the Mueller report as having “ties to Russian intelligence” – and was cast in a sinister light as a potential threat to democracy. Mueller completely omitted the fact that Kilimnik was working as an informant and intermediary between America and Ukraine, and subsequently indicted him for obstruction of justice.

Kilimnik was not just any run-of-the-mill source, either.
He interacted with the chief political officer at the U.S. Embassy in Kiev, sometimes meeting several times a week to provide information on the Ukraine government. He relayed messages back to Ukraine’s leaders and delivered written reports to U.S. officials via emails that stretched on for thousands of words, the memos show.
The FBI knew all of this, well before the Mueller investigation concluded. –The Hill

What’s more, the chief political officer at the Kiev embassy from 2014 to 2017, Alan Purcell, told the FBI that State officials – including senior embassy officials Alexander Kasanof and Eric Schultz, thought Klimnik was such a valuable asset that they wouldn’t mention his name in official cables out of fear that WikiLeaks would expose him.

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Of Suspected Spies & Cathedrals... and Western Media Hypocrisy

Finian Cunningham
Strategic Culture

It’s hilarious to see the double standards of Western media applied in the case of alleged American spy Paul Whelan who is being detained in Russia and facing trial.

Whelan, a former US marine, was denied bail this week in a Moscow court after it emerged that he had been found in possession of state secrets while supposedly holidaying in Russia.

Western media widely aired the theory that the American man has been “set up” by Russian state security after he had received a USB computer stick from someone while staying in a Moscow hotel last month. The person whom he received the disk from has not been identified, but presumably he or she was known to the American, otherwise why would he have accepted the item?

Whelan claims he was in Russia as a tourist and that he didn’t check the contents of the computer mini-disk at the time because he assumed it contained “images of a cathedral he had visited”. He was reportedly arrested soon after receipt of the disk, on December 28, by Federal Security Service (FSB) officers.

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Theresa May says Russia 'highly likely' behind poison attack on former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter

Comment: Oh the shock! We all knew that this was going to be the outcome. And to think they were poisoned just down the road from Porton Down the infamous military base that has a lamentable history of chemical weapons experimentation and warfare. 

See: Secret UK army base analyzing nerve agent used on Sergei Skripal has long been Britain's most controversial military facility

What are the odds that an MI6/MI5 spy was used as a pawn in the propaganda war against Putin and Russia? Extremely high since this is part and parcel of black operations and state-sponsor terror. Putin is in a different league to these clowns and would never attempt something so obviously stupid, knowing it would illicit precisely the kind of BS that has nevertheless come his way.

Apparently they think all of the public will buy all this crap. And it seems they might be right on that. At least, if you're an Independent reader.

----------------------------

The Independent

Theresa May has said it is "highly likely that Russia was responsible" for the Salisbury nerve agent attack.

The Prime Minister has been been updating MPs on the poisoning of ex-Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, following warnings from a senior Tory MP that the incident amounted to "state-sponsored attempted murder".

Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Tom Tugendhat said he would be surprised if the Prime Minister - who chaired high-level talks on the Salisbury nerve agent attack today - did not blame the Kremlin.

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DNC Lawyer Scrambles To Block Evidence From Hidden Laptop Tied To Wasserman Schultz

Zero Hedge

A lawyer for former DNC IT staffer Imran Awan is scrambling to block evidence found on a hidden laptop which may contain proof of a massive spy ring operating at the highest levels of Congress, in what may be the largest breach of National Security in U.S. history.

Awan, a Pakistani national, worked for dozens of Democratic members of Congress along with his wife, two brothers and a friend. Following the publication of DNC emails by WikiLeaks in the lead-up to the 2016 election, Congressional investigators discovered that the Awans had a secret server being housed by the House Democratic Caucus backed up to an offsite Dropbox account.

“For members to say their data was not compromised is simply inaccurate. They had access to all the data including all emails. Imran Awan is the walking example of an insider threat, a criminal actor who had access to everything,” -Daily Caller

According to a briefing, "all five of the shared employees system administrators collectively logged onto the [House Democratic] Caucus system 5,735 times, or an average of 27 times per day,” despite only one of them being authorized to do so.

The Awans were banned from the House IT network on February 2, 2017 after being named in a criminal investigation - however they continued to work in the building for Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz until Imran Awan's arrest at Dulles Airport trying to flee the country in late July. Awan and his wife, Hina Alvi, were charged with conspiracy and bank fraud in relation to a real estate transaction.

The laptop in question was tucked away in a tiny room formerly used as a phone booth on the second floor of the Rayburn House Office Building late one night in March, only to be found by Capitol Police just after midnight on April 6, 2017 along with notebooks marked 'attorney client privilege,' letters addressed to the US Attorney of DC regarding Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and several forms of identification. Based on the contents of the backpack, some believe Awan wanted the laptop to be found.

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Former Obama insider, Evelyn Farkas, reveals she was involved in "helping to spy on Trump for Obama"

Alex Christoforou
The Duran

Evelyn Farkas says Barack Obama was indeed spying on candidate Trump.

#Obamagate picks up more speed, as the former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Obama White House, Evelyn Farkas, has admitted that Donald Trump was spied on, and that Obama tried to hide both the source, and how the information was being disseminated to "the hill."

Farkas was on MSNBC's Morning Joe, when she made the stunning revelation that she was involved in "helping to spy on Trump for Obama."

Farkas unknowingly ratted out her former boss Barack Obama on the liberal left propaganda outlet, MSNBC...

"I was urging my former colleagues, and, and frankly speaking the people on the Hill [Democrat politicians], it was more actually aimed at telling the Hill people, get as much information as you can - get as much intelligence as you can - before President Obama leaves the administration.

Because I had a fear that somehow that information would disappear with the senior [Obama] people who left; so it would be hidden away in the bureaucracy, um, that the Trump folks - if they found out HOW we knew what we knew about their, the Trump staff, dealing with Russians - that they would try to compromise those sources and methods; meaning we no longer have access to that intelligence.
So I became very worried because not enough was coming out into the open and I knew that there was more. We have very good intelligence on Russia; so then I had talked to some of my former colleagues and I knew that they were also trying to help get information to [Democrat] politicians.

Farkas admitted to having first hand knowledge that the Obama administration spied on a US presidential candidate's transition team in order to gather "intelligence" for political use, information which was then leaked to the media through Obama January executive order 12333. 

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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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CIA Contractor on #VAULT7 Leak: ‘There is Heavy Shit Coming Down’

Zero Hedge

Everything that Wikileaks has revealed over the past year has hurt both the integrity and honor of the United States. The question you have to grapple with, is it well deserved? After all, living inside of a vast and powerful empire has its benefits. As the empire expands, so does the wealth of its citizens. But it hasn't worked out that way, has it? The CIA deep staters have turned their guns on the people they serve -- using third world banana republic tactics to silence opposition, take down regimes not beholden to their world view, using advanced technology to both spy and monitor on American citizens -- infringing on our civil rights like nothing we've ever seen before. 

The reason for the populist uprising and the lack of equanimity amongst those traditionally supportive of the CIA lies in the improper distribution of the spoils of war. There aren't any. All the average American has received from $10 trillion in Obama inspired deficit spending is American casualties of war, jobs lost to cheaper labor overseas, expensive oil prices, expensive healthcare, and run away education costs -- along with a sundry of social disturbances that have people fed up.

While the elite flaunt hedonistic lifestyles, eschewing basic decency for the perverse, normies get more of the same old bullshit. After electing a true agent of change in Donald Trump, the people are laughed at and impugned by the elitist media. Their President is set upon by 'permanent government' officials in the intelligence agencies -- whose only goal is to derail and destroy his term before it even begins. 

Then we come to find out the same people who told us the Russians were our enemy, revealing corruption and depravity on a monumental scale via the Podesta emails, they were, in fact, the ones spying on us all along -- both lying and mocking us like Lords in a fiefdom.

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'Secret' ministers, teachers and social workers are spying on us

image credit: tommygioelisvoice 

Mass Private I 

Police State America is using 'secret' ministers, teachers, social workers to spy on us.

According to a NJ.com article, the FBI/DHS are enlisting clergy, social workers and mental health professionals to counsel (spy on) troubled people who voice support for terrorism. They're calling this group of spies "Shared Responsibility Committees" (SRC).

The FBI and DHS have led forums in NJ and even launched a social media campaign warning about terror groups like ISIS, environmental extremists and sovereign-citizen movements. In other words, they're attempting to vilify anyone speaking out against the government.

Police are 'secretly' using priests, social workers and doctors to spy on us.

SRC members, must sign confidentiality agreements, and can't consult outside experts on treatment plans. Police are using "secret non-disclosure agreements" to spy on our cell phones and now this. Having ministers and doctors sign 'secret' agreements to spy on us, is this some sort of sick, perverted joke?

But wait, it gets worse.

Law enforcement is also allowed to pose as clergy, social workers etc.

"The church and faith community are now being faced with the reality that the government is sending IRS agents pretending to be members of the clergy into Christian meetings, gatherings and services for the distinct purpose of the government "spying" on them said Rev. Patrick J. Mahoney, Director of the Christian Defense Coalition.

Unfortunately, churches spying on members is nothing new, last year I warned everyone that "Churches were paying the gov't up to $100 a month to spy on families! 

The gov't hopes the money churches donate to spy on parishioners will be used to support a regional (spying) supervisor in the future.

"The service is free for the state and instead relies on donations from enrolled churches. The suggested monthly rate of $100 would eventually support a regional supervisor to mediate between churches and the department."

And if they doesn't turn your stomach, churches have begun using facial recognition to spy on their members.

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IRS Scandal Deja Vu: Hillary Clinton's Email Server "Wiped Clean"

Zero Hedge

If, as one claims, one is innocent of i) using a personal email account to send out confidential information and/or to take advantage of one's political position to abuse opponents and ii) deleting said confidential emails against government regulations, what would one do when faced with a government subpoena demand? If one is the IRS' Lois Lerner, one would claim, against subsequently revealed facts, that a hardware error led to a permanent loss of all demanded emails, even though by email protocol definition, said emails are always stored on at least one off-site server. Or, if one is Hillary Clinton, one would just format the entire server. 

This, according to the Hill, is precisely what Hillary Clinton has done as the recent clintonemail.com scandal continues to grow bigger and impair ever more the already frail credibility and decision-making skills of the former first lady and democratic presidential hopeful.  According to the head of the House Select Committee on Benghazi says former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has erased all information from the personal email server she used while serving as the nation’s top diplomat.

“We learned today, from her attorney, Secretary Clinton unilaterally decided to wipe her server clean and permanently delete all emails from her personal server,” Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) said in a statement Friday.

What difference does it make if she deleted all her emails? 

Apparently a lot.

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Coming to a city near you: ‘Smart’ street lights that “track everything we do all the time”

Mass Private I

Should you find yourself in terminal "B" at the Newark New Jersey airport, look up. Those aren't just new lights. They're SMART SURVEILLANCE LIGHTS -- a sophisticated array of LED fixtures with built-in sensors and cameras connected over a wireless network. They monitor security and the flow of foot traffic.

There's that magic buzz word being touted by private companies & our govt. 'SECURITY'!

We have to spy on everything you do for your SAFETY, this is utter nonsense and complete B.S.

In March of 2014 I reported on how Big Brother is using streetlamps to spy on you.

"Newark's primarily interested in energy saving," said Hugh Martin, president of Sensity, the Silicon Valley company that developed the smart lights at Newark and also a parking garage in San Jose.

"This week we saved $3,500 -- over $182,000 a year, in energy saved just from this," Martin said.

Saving money isn't the only reason the bulbs are in the spotlight.

"There's a motion sensor in each individual light," he said.

Across the globe, cities are phasing out old, energy-wasting incandescent and sodium bulbs and replacing them with LEDs, which can act as a power hub that can be tailored for high-tech surveillance add-ons.

Authorities in New York City announced last year that they would be replacing the city’s 250,000 street lights with new LEDs by 2017, although it is not known how many of these will feature “smart” technology.

In 2013 Spying street lights that record video & audio were installed at the Mercedes Superdome & in Vegas.

There are about 4 billion outside lights in the world today. Imagine all of those lights connected in one global spying network! 

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Spying Is Meant to Crush Citizens’ Dissent, Not Catch Terrorists

Washington's Blog

While many Americans understand why the NSA is conducting mass surveillance of U.S. citizens, some are still confused about what’s really going on. 

In his new book, No Place to Hide, Glenn Greenwald writes:

Image: NSA HQ (Wiki Commons).

The perception that invasive surveillance is confined only to a marginalised and deserving group of those “doing wrong” – the bad people – ensures that the majority acquiesces to the abuse of power or even cheers it on. But that view radically misunderstands what goals drive all institutions of authority. “Doing something wrong” in the eyes of such institutions encompasses far more than illegal acts, violent behaviour and terrorist plots. It typically extends to meaningful dissent and any genuine challenge. It is the nature of authority to equate dissent with wrongdoing, or at least with a threat.

The record is suffused with examples of groups and individuals being placed under government surveillance by virtue of their dissenting views and activism – Martin Luther King, the civil rights movement, anti-war activists, environmentalists. In the eyes of the government and J Edgar Hoover’s FBI, they were all “doing something wrong”: political activity that threatened the prevailing order.

The FBI’s domestic counterintelligence programme, Cointelpro, was first exposed by a group of anti-war activists who had become convinced that the anti-war movement had been infiltrated, placed under surveillance and targeted with all sorts of dirty tricks. Lacking documentary evidence to prove it and unsuccessful in convincing journalists to write about their suspicions, they broke into an FBI branch office in Pennsylvania in 1971 and carted off thousands of documents.

Files related to Cointelpro showed how the FBI had targeted political groups and individuals it deemed subversive and dangerous, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, black nationalist movements, socialist and communist organizations, anti-war protesters and various rightwing groups. The bureau had infiltrated them with agents who, among other things, attempted to manipulate members into agreeing to commit criminal acts so that the FBI could arrest and prosecute them.
Those revelations led to the creation of the Senate Church Committee, which concluded: “[Over the course of 15 years] the bureau conducted a sophisticated vigilate operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of first amendment rights of speech and association, on the theory that preventing the growth of dangerous groups and the propagation of dangerous ideas would protect the national security and deter violence.”

These incidents were not aberrations of the era. During the Bush years, for example, documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) revealed, as the group put it in 2006, “new details of Pentagon surveillance of Americans opposed to the Iraq war, including Quakers and student groups“. The Pentagon was “keeping tabs on non-violent protesters by collecting information and storing it in a military anti-terrorism database”. The evidence shows that assurances that surveillance is only targeted at those who “have done something wrong” should provide little comfort, since a state will reflexively view any challenge to its power as wrongdoing.

The opportunity those in power have to characterise political opponents as “national security threats” or even “terrorists” has repeatedly proven irresistible. In the past decade, the government, in an echo of Hoover’s FBI, has formally so designatedenvironmental activists, broad swaths of anti-government rightwing groups, anti-war activists, and associations organised around Palestinian rights. Some individuals within those broad categories may deserve the designation, but undoubtedly most do not, guilty only of holding opposing political views. Yet such groups are routinely targeted for surveillance by the NSA and its partners.

One document from the Snowden files, dated 3 October 2012, chillingly underscores the point. It revealed that the agency has been monitoring the online activities of individuals it believes express “radical” ideas and who have a “radicalising” influence on others.

***

The NSA explicitly states that none of the targeted individuals is a member of a terrorist organisation or involved in any terror plots. Instead, their crime is the views they express, which are deemed “radical“, a term that warrants pervasive surveillance and destructive campaigns to “exploit vulnerabilities”.

Among the information collected about the individuals, at least one of whom is a “US person”, are details of their online sex activities and “online promiscuity” – the porn sites they visit and surreptitious sex chats with women who are not their wives. The agency discusses ways to exploit this information to destroy their reputations and credibility.
The NSA’s treatment of Anonymous, as well as the vague category of people known as “hacktivists”, is especially troubling and extreme. That’s because Anonymous is not actually a structured group but a loosely organised affiliation of people around an idea: someone becomes affiliated with Anonymous by virtue of the positions they hold. Worse still, the category “hacktivists” has no fixed meaning: it can mean the use of programming skills to undermine the security and functioning of the internetbut can also refer to anyone who uses online tools to promote political ideals. That the NSA targets such broad categories of people is tantamount to allowing it to spy on anyone anywhere, including in the US, whose ideas the government finds threatening.

Greenwald told Democracy Now yesterday:

People are aware of J. Edgar Hoover’s abuses. The nature of that series of events is that the United States government looks at people who oppose what they do as being, quote-unquote, “threats.” That’s the nature of power, is to regard anybody who’s a threat to your power as a broad national security threat.

***

There has already been reporting that shows that—the document, for example, in the book that shows the NSA plotting about how to use information that it collected against people it considers, quote, “radicalizers.” These are people the NSA itself says are not terrorists, do not belong to terrorist organizations, do not plan terrorist attacks. They simply express ideas the NSA considers radical. The NSA has collected their online sexual activity, chats of a sexual nature that they’ve had, pornographic websites that they visit, and plans, in the document, on how to use this information publicly to destroy the reputations or credibility of those people to render them ineffective as advocates. There are other documents showing the monitoring of who visits the WikiLeaks website and the collection of data that can identify who they are. There’s information about how to use deception to undermine people who are affiliated with the online activism group Anonymous.

Recent stories show that Greenwald is right:

• In 1972, the CIA Director Relabeled “Dissidents” As “Terrorists” So He Could Continue Spying On Them … And Nothing Has Changed

• 500 Years of History Shows that Mass Spying Is ALWAYS Aimed at Crushing Dissent

• “These Programs Were Never About Terrorism: They’re About Economic Spying, Social Control, and Diplomatic Manipulation. They’re About Power”

And it’s not just spying …

The government may treat anyone who challenges its policies as terrorists.  For example:

• The former head of the NSA and CIA compared privacy advocates to terrorists

• Peaceful protest may be treated as terrorism by the FBI

• Questioning war may be considered terrorism

The indefinite detention law may be used against American dissenters. Specifically, the trial judge in the lawsuit challenging the law had asked the government attorneys 5 times whether journalists like Pulitzer prize-winning reporter Chris Hedges could be indefinitely detained simply for interviewing and thenwriting about bad guys.   The government refused to promise that journalists like Hedges won’t be thrown in a dungeon for the rest of their lives without any right to talk to a judge.

Constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead writes:

No matter what the Obama administration may say to the contrary, actions speak louder than words, and history shows that the U.S. government is not averse to locking up its own citizens for its own purposes. What the NDAA does is open the door for the government to detain as a threat to national security anyone viewed as a troublemaker. According to government guidelines for identifying domestic extremists—a word used interchangeably with terrorists, that technically applies to anyone exercising their First Amendment rights in order to criticize the government.

Daniel Ellsberg notes that Obama’s claim of power to indefinitely detain people without charges or access to a lawyer or the courts is a power that even King George – the guy we fought the Revolutionary War against – didn’t claim.  (And former judge and adjunct professor of constitutional law Andrew Napolitano points out that Obama’s claim that he can indefinitely detain prisoners even after they are acquitted of their crimes is a power that even Hitler and Stalin didn’t claim.)

And the former top NSA official who created NSA’s mass surveillance system says, “We are now in a police state“.