Police America Act

"The so-called 'Protect America Act of 2007,' which we are calling the 'Police America Act,' allows for massive, untargeted collection of international communications without court order or meaningful oversight by either Congress or the courts. It contains virtually no protections for the U.S. end of the phone call or email, leaving decisions about the collection, mining and use of Americans' private communications up to this administration."
ACLU factsheet

"The Protect America Act is a dangerous nationalistic law that tips the United States toward tyranny by providing legal protections for a massive program of electronic surveillance called Total Information Awareness."
Protect America - Act!



"With a partisan stalemate in the Senate holding up any revision to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the House today adopted a 15-day extension of the Protect America Act, legislation last August that expanded the surveillance powers of the Bush administration.

"Senate Democrats are unable to agree among themselves and with their GOP counterparts on proposed FISA amendments, specificially a Intelligence Committee proposal to grant retroactive legal immunity to telecommunications companies that have participated in President Bush's warrantess surveillance program."
CBS

"Right now members of Congress are trying to pass a law that would grant immunity to large telcos like AT&T that have been spying on their customers' private phone conversations and passing along what they've learned to the National Security Agency. The law, called the Protect America Act, would allow telephone and Internet providers to hand over all private data on their networks to the government -- without notifying their customers and without any court supervision of what amounts to mass wiretapping."
A Polite Message from the Surveillance State

Security Experts Say Protect America Act Leaves US Citizens' Privacy Unprotected

More news on this subject :: More online videos
Surveillance and subservience :: Protect America Act of 2007
Receive email alerts on the Protect America Act

Categories: liberty, bush, authoritarianism, usa, privacy, civil+rights, 1984, homeland+security, surveillance

Facebook and its CIA connections

With friends like these ...

By Tom Hodgkinson

"I despise Facebook. This enormously successful American business describes itself as 'a social utility that connects you with the people around you'. But hang on. Why on God's earth would I need a computer to connect with the people around me? Why should my relationships be mediated through the imagination of a bunch of supergeeks in California? What was wrong with the pub?

"And does Facebook really connect people? Doesn't it rather disconnect us, since instead of doing something enjoyable such as talking and eating and dancing and drinking with my friends, I am merely sending them little ungrammatical notes and amusing photos in cyberspace, while chained to my desk? A friend of mine recently told me that he had spent a Saturday night at home alone on Facebook, drinking at his desk. What a gloomy image. Far from connecting us, Facebook actually isolates us at our workstations.

"Facebook appeals to a kind of vanity and self-importance in us, too. If I put up a flattering picture of myself with a list of my favourite things, I can construct an artificial representation of who I am in order to get sex or approval. ('I like Facebook,' said another friend. 'I got a shag out of it.') It also encourages a disturbing competitivness around friendship: it seems that with friends today, quality counts for nothing and quantity is king. The more friends you have, the better you are. You are 'popular', in the sense much loved in American high schools. Witness the cover line on Dennis Publishing's new Facebook magazine: 'How To Double Your Friends List.'

"It seems, though, that I am very much alone in my hostility. At the time of writing Facebook claims 59 million active users, including 7 million in the UK, Facebook's third-biggest customer after the US and Canada. That's 59 million suckers, all of whom have volunteered their ID card information and consumer preferences to an American business they know nothing about. Right now, 2 million new people join each week. At the present rate of growth, Facebook will have more than 200 million active users by this time next year. And I would predict that, if anything, its rate of growth will accelerate over the coming months. As its spokesman Chris Hughes says: 'It's embedded itself to an extent where it's hard to get rid of.'

"All of the above would have been enough to make me reject Facebook for ever. But there are more reasons to hate it. Many more.

"Facebook is a well-funded project, and the people behind the funding, a group of Silicon Valley venture capitalists, have a clearly thought out ideology that they are hoping to spread around the world. Facebook is one manifestation of this ideology. Like PayPal before it, it is a social experiment, an expression of a particular kind of neoconservative libertarianism. On Facebook, you can be free to be who you want to be, as long as you don't mind being bombarded by adverts for the world's biggest brands. As with PayPal, national boundaries are a thing of the past.

"Although the project was initially conceived by media cover star Mark Zuckerberg, the real face behind Facebook is the 40-year-old Silicon Valley venture capitalist and futurist philosopher Peter Thiel. There are only three board members on Facebook, and they are Thiel, Zuckerberg and a third investor called Jim Breyer from a venture capital firm called Accel Partners (more on him later). Thiel invested $500,000 in Facebook when Harvard students Zuckerberg, Chris Hughes and Dustin Moskowitz went to meet him in San Francisco in June 2004, soon after they had launched the site. Thiel now reportedly owns 7% of Facebook, which, at Facebook's current valuation of $15bn, would be worth more than $1bn. There is much debate on who exactly were the original co-founders of Facebook, but whoever they were, Zuckerberg is the only one left on the board, although Hughes and Moskowitz still work for the company.

Thiel is widely regarded in Silicon Valley and in the US venture capital scene as a libertarian genius. He is the co-founder and CEO of the virtual banking system PayPal, which he sold to Ebay for $1.5bn, taking $55m for himself. He also runs a £3bn hedge fund called Clarium Capital Management and a venture capital fund called Founders Fund. Bloomberg Markets magazine recently called him 'one of the most successful hedge fund managers in the country'. He has made money by betting on rising oil prices and by correctly predicting that the dollar would weaken. He and his absurdly wealthy Silicon Valley mates have recently been labelled 'The PayPal Mafia' by Fortune magazine, whose reporter also observed that Thiel has a uniformed butler and a $500,000 McLaren supercar. Thiel is also a chess master and intensely competitive. He has been known to sweep the chessmen off the table in a fury when losing. And he does not apologise for this hyper-competitveness, saying: 'Show me a good loser and I'll show you a loser.' ...

"The third board member of Facebook is Jim Breyer. He is a partner in the venture capital firm Accel Partners, who put $12.7m into Facebook in April 2005. On the board of such US giants as Wal-Mart and Marvel Entertainment, he is also a former chairman of the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA). Now these are the people who are really making things happen in America, because they invest in the new young talent, the Zuckerbergs and the like. Facebook's most recent round of funding was led by a company called Greylock Venture Capital, who put in the sum of $27.5m. One of Greylock's senior partners is called Howard Cox, another former chairman of the NVCA, who is also on the board of In-Q-Tel. What's In-Q-Tel? Well, believe it or not (and check out their website), this is the venture-capital wing of the CIA ... In-Q-Tel, ... 'identifies and partners with companies developing cutting-edge technologies to help deliver these solutions to the Central Intelligence Agency and the broader US Intelligence Community (IC) to further their missions'.

"The US defence department and the CIA love technology because it makes spying easier. "We need to find new ways to deter new adversaries,' defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in 2003. 'We need to make the leap into the information age, which is the critical foundation of our transformation efforts.' In-Q-Tel's first chairman was Gilman Louie, who served on the board of the NVCA with Breyer. Another key figure in the In-Q-Tel team is Anita K Jones, former director of defence research and engineering for the US department of defence, and - with Breyer - board member of BBN Technologies. When she left the US department of defence, Senator Chuck Robb paid her the following tribute: 'She brought the technology and operational military communities together to design detailed plans to sustain US dominance on the battlefield into the next century.' ... "
Guardian Unlimited

"Keyhole, Inc was also an asset of In-Q-Tel until Google bought them in 2004, for an undisclosed sum. Keyhole does work in 'geospatial data visualization applications,' but we know them as the engine behind GoogleEarth, the greatest piece of software humankind has ever created."
Source

Information Operations Roadmap

Washington's $8 Billion Shadow (PDF)

Facebook - The CIA Conspiracy

In-Q-Tel at Wikipedia

Categories: liberty, privacy, 1984, surveillance, facebook

Bush further expands 'national security' snooping

"Not content with spying on other countries, the NSA (National Security Agency) will now turn on the US's own government agencies thanks to a fresh directive from president George Bush.

"Under the new guidelines, the NSA and other intelligence agencies can bore into the internet networks of all their peers. The Bush administration pulled off this spy expansion by pointing to an increase in the number of cyber attacks directed against the US, possibly from foreign nations. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) will spearhead the effort around identifying the source of these attacks, while the Department of Homeland Security and Pentagon will concentrate on retaliation."
Bush orders NSA to snoop on US agencies

"President Bush signed a directive this month that expands the intelligence community's role in monitoring Internet traffic to protect against a rising number of attacks on federal agencies' computer systems.

"The directive, whose content is classified, authorizes the intelligence agencies, in particular the National Security Agency, to monitor the computer networks of all federal agencies -- including ones they have not previously monitored."
Bush orders NSA to snoop on US agencies

"The White House warned Democratic leaders yesterday that President Bush would veto a proposal to extend an expiring surveillance law by 30 days, saying that Congress should quickly approve a Senate bill favored by the Bush administration.

"The move is aimed at forcing Congress to renew and expand the Protect America Act -- which is due to expire at the end of the day Thursday -- and escalates a national security showdown between Democrats and the White House just before the president's annual State of the Union address."
Veto of Wiretap Measure Is Threatened

Categories: liberty, bush, authoritarianism, usa

Why I Believe Bush Must Go - by George McGovern

As we enter the eighth year of the Bush-Cheney administration, I have belatedly and painfully concluded that the only honorable course for me is to urge the impeachment of the president and the vice president.

After the 1972 presidential election, I stood clear of calls to impeach President Richard M. Nixon for his misconduct during the campaign. I thought that my joining the impeachment effort would be seen as an expression of personal vengeance toward the president who had defeated me.

Today I have made a different choice.

Of course, there seems to be little bipartisan support for impeachment. The political scene is marked by narrow and sometimes superficial partisanship, especially among Republicans, and a lack of courage and statesmanship on the part of too many Democratic politicians. So the chances of a bipartisan impeachment and conviction are not promising.

But what are the facts?

Bush and Cheney are clearly guilty of numerous impeachable offenses. They have repeatedly violated the Constitution. They have transgressed national and international law. They have lied to the American people time after time. Their conduct and their barbaric policies have reduced our beloved country to a historic low in the eyes of people around the world. These are truly "high crimes and misdemeanors," to use the constitutional standard.

From the beginning, the Bush-Cheney team's assumption of power was the product of questionable elections that probably should have been officially challenged -- perhaps even by a congressional investigation.

In a more fundamental sense, American democracy has been derailed throughout the Bush-Cheney regime. The dominant commitment of the administration has been a murderous, illegal, nonsensical war against Iraq. That irresponsible venture has killed almost 4,000 Americans, left many times that number mentally or physically crippled, claimed the lives of an estimated 600,000 Iraqis (according to a careful October 2006 study from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health) and laid waste their country. The financial cost to the United States is now $250 million a day and is expected to exceed a total of $1 trillion, most of which we have borrowed from the Chinese and others as our national debt has now climbed above $9 trillion -- by far the highest in our national history.

All of this has been done without the declaration of war from Congress that the Constitution clearly requires, in defiance of the U.N. Charter and in violation of international law. This reckless disregard for life and property, as well as constitutional law, has been accompanied by the abuse of prisoners, including systematic torture, in direct violation of the Geneva Conventions of 1949 ...
Washington Post

Google News on impeach bush

Categories: usa, iraq, impeach, bush, cheney, impeach+bush