Glenn thrashes Sen. Lindsey Graham’s idiotic comments on Egypt

August 8, 2013
glennbeck.com

Glenn’s blood hit the boiling point on radio this morning in reaction to some pretty remarkable audio from Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) about the crisis in Egypt. During a visit to Cairo earlier this week, the Senators sat down with CBS News and admitted that the country is “just days or weeks” away from “all out bloodshed.”

Glenn Beck Explains the ‘Real Reason Why You Should Care About the Middle East’

The American Surveillance State Is Here - Can It Be Evaded?

August 2, 2013
alt-market.com
By John Whitehead

This article was written by John Whitehead and originally published at The Rutherford Institute

“If, as it seems, we are in the process of becoming a totalitarian society in which the state apparatus is all-powerful, the ethics most important for the survival of the true, free, human individual would be: cheat, lie, evade, fake it, be elsewhere, forge documents, build improved electronic gadgets in your garage that’ll outwit the gadgets used by the authorities.” – Philip K. Dick, author of Minority Report

On any given day, the average American going about his daily business will be monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways, by both government and corporate eyes and ears.

A byproduct of this new age in which we live, whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency, whether the NSA or some other entity, is listening in and tracking your behavior. As I point out in my new book, A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, this doesn’t even begin to touch on the corporate trackers that monitor your purchases, web browsing, Facebook posts and other activities taking place in the cyber sphere.

The revelations by Edward Snowden only scrape the surface in revealing the lengths to which government agencies and their corporate allies will go to conduct mass surveillance on all communications and transactions within the United States.

Erected in secret, without any public input, these surveillance programs amount to an electronic concentration camp which houses every single person in the United States today. Indeed, government whistleblower Russ Tice, who exposed the NSA’s warrantless surveillance of American phone calls as far back as 2005, insists that despite Obama administration claims that the NSA is simply collecting metadata, the NSA is in fact retrieving “the contents of emails, text messages, Skype communications, and phone calls, as well as financial information, health records, legal documents, and travel documents.”

These communications are being stored in the NSA’s Utah Data Center, a massive $2 billion facility that will be handling yottabytes of data (equivalent to one septillion bytes—imagine a one followed by 24 zeroes) on American communications. This Utah facility is opening amidst a backlash against NSA surveillance. Most recently, the Obama administration and the NSA went into overdrive to quash an amendment sponsored by Justin Amash (R-Mich.) that would have cut off funds to the NSA if it collects surveillance data on American citizens who are not under criminal investigation. It was a bold move, especially when one considers that the NSA operates off a budget of approximately $10 billion. After all, when the government no longer listens to the citizenry—when it no longer abides by the Constitution, which is our rule of law—and when it views the citizenry as a source of funding and little else, we have no choice but to speak to the government in a language it understands—money.

Unfortunately, lobbyists and the Washington elite succeeded in defeating the amendment 217-205. Not surprisingly, many of those who voted down the bill were also recipients of campaign funds from the lucrative security/surveillance sector.

In the face of such powerful lobbyists working in tandem with our so-called representatives, any hope of holding onto even a shred of privacy is rapidly dwindling. Indeed, the life of the average American is an open book for government agents. As Senator Ron Wyden, a longtime critic of the American surveillance state, points out, government agencies operate based upon a secret interpretation of the Patriot Act which allows them to extract massive amounts of data from third party agencies, enabling them to collect information on “bulk medical, financial, credit card and gun-ownership records or lists of ‘readers of books and magazines deemed subversive.’”

Cell phones are equally vulnerable, serving as a “combination phone bug, listening device, location tracker and hidden camera.” Indeed, it’s incredibly easy to activate a cell phone’s GPS and microphone capabilities remotely. For example, the FBI uses the “roving bug” technique, which allows agents to remotely activate the microphone on a cellphone and use it as a listening device. A federal judge actually ruled in 2006 that this was a constitutional technique when it was used to listen to two alleged mobsters, despite the fact that no phone call was taking place at the time.

With private corporations also taking advantage of this technology, the outlook is decidedly grim. In an attempt to mimic the tracking capabilities of online retailers, brick-and-mortar stores now utilize WIFI-enabled devices to track the movements of their customers by tracking their phones as they move throughout the store. The data gathered by these devices include “‘capture rate’ (how successful window displays are at pulling people into the store); number of customers inside the store; customer visit duration and frequency; customer location within the store; people who walk by the store without coming in; and the amount of foot traffic around the store.”

Combined with facial recognition technology, our cell phones have become a tell-all about our personal lives. For example, one Russian marking company, Synqera, “uses facial recognition technology to tailor marketing messages to customers according to their gender, age, and mood.” As one company representative noted, “if you are an angry man of 30, and it is Friday evening, [the Synqera software] may offer you a bottle of whiskey.”

Americans cannot even drive their cars without being enmeshed in this web of surveillance. As confirmed by an ACLU report entitled, “You Are Being Tracked: How License Plate Readers Are Being Used to Record Americans’ Movements,” the latest developments in license plate readers enable law enforcement and private agencies to track the whereabouts of vehicles, and their occupants, all across the country.

License plate readers work by recognizing a passing license plate, photographing it, and running the information against a pre-determined database that lets police know if they’ve got a “hit,” a person of interest, though not necessarily a suspected criminal. There are reportedly tens of thousands of these license plate readers now affixed to police cars and underpasses in operation throughout the country. The data collected from these devices is also being shared between police agencies, as well as with fusion centers and private companies.

Indeed, while all drivers’ data is being collected, only a fraction of the data collected constitutes a “hit.” An even smaller fraction of those “hits” actually result in an arrest. Overall, the hit rate for criminal activity gleaned from the license pictures is usually between .01% and .3%, meaning that over 99% of the people being unnecessarily surveilled are entirely innocent.

The implications for privacy are dire. All of the data points collected by license plate readers can be traced and mapped so that a picture of a vehicle’s past movements can be re-constructed. Furthermore, the photographs produced by license plate readers “sometimes include a substantial part of a vehicle, its occupants, and its immediate vicinity.”

In addition to tracking tens of thousands of innocent people, the data collected by license plate readers is often kept far beyond any reasonable period of time. Data retention policies vary widely, from the Ohio State Highway Patrol, which deletes non-hits immediately, versus some localities which hold on to data for weeks, months, or years. Some localities hold on to the information indefinitely.

To cap it off, private companies are also getting into the data collection game, as data collected on innocent drivers is being shared between both government agencies and corporations. One such business, Final Notice, offers the information they gather to police agencies and intends to start selling the information to other groups soon, including bail bondsmen, private investigators, and insurers.

Another company, MVTrac, claims to have data on “a large majority” of vehicles in the US, and the Digital Recognition Network (DRN) claims to have a network of affiliates of more than 550. These affiliates feed over 50 million plate reads into a national database containing “over 700 million data points on where American drivers have been.”

This is the United States of America today, where liberty and privacy are the currency for any and all essential services. Short of living in a cave, cut off from all communications and commerce, anyone living in the concentration camp that is America today must cede his privacy and liberty to a government agency, a corporation, or both, in order to access information via the internet, communicate with friends and family, shop for food and clothing, or travel to work.

We have just about reached the point of no return. “If we do not seize this unique moment in our constitutional history to reform our surveillance laws and practices, we are all going to live to regret it,” warned Senator Wyden. “The combination of increasingly advanced technology with a breakdown in the checks and balances that limit government action could lead us to a surveillance state that cannot be reversed.”

Government: The Deadliest Scourge

July 31, 2013
lewrockwell.com
By Charles Burris

The primary object of every government ruling elite is survival — masquerading under the rubric of “national security” — the jealous maintenance of its power, prestige, opulence and privilege against all potential rivals.


GOVERNMENT: THE DEADLIEST SCOURGE

Civilization is based on the fear of violent death. Thus concluded authoritarian political philosopher Thomas Hobbes in his famous Leviathan in 1651, written following the devastation and chaos of the English Civil War. Man’s fate without organized civil government was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short,” Hobbes concluded.

Yet somberly reflecting upon the untold billions butchered over hundreds of centuries by the systematic slaughter of war, slavery, torture and famine, one must agree with Edmund Burke that, in fact, statism has been mankind’s deadliest scourge.

Burke, founding father of conservatism, in surveying man’s sordid record in his classic, A Vindication of Natural Society, in 1756 observed: “By sure and uncontested principles, the greatest part of the governments on Earth must be concluded to be tyrannies, impostures, violations of the natural rights of mankind, and worse than the most disorderly anarchies.” The cure was worse than the disease.

History has seen the unvarying, wearisome parade of one parasitic government succeeded by another for thousands of years. Is this the price we have paid for civilization?

While we eagerly await the welcome demise of a Nicolae Ceausescu, an Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a Ferdinand Marcos or Manuel Noriega, visible rulers are always vulnerable. It is in the hidden, murky political sub-strata where insurgency is born.

Despite their labeling, all governments are oligarchies. All states or regimes are characterized by the brutal struggle for power in its diverse open and concealed forms by competing elites. (Just ask former House Speakers Jim Wright and Jim Barker).

The most significant political division to be observed in such internecine warfare is that between the rulers and the ruled, the “ins” and the “outs,” the elite and the non-elite. The primary object of every government ruling elite is survival — masquerading under the rubric of “national security” — the jealous maintenance of its power, prestige, opulence and privilege against all potential rivals.

This rule is initially based upon naked force and fraud. Later, it is sustained by habituation to subjection and obedience by an elaborate formula propped up with a widely held ideology, religion, or myth.

“The devices — of bread and circuses, of ideological mystification and dependency — that all rulers today use to bamboozle and gull the masses have not substantially changed for centuries,” observed economist and political philosopher Murray N. Rothbard.

All governments, no matter how ruthless and despotic (or seemingly benevolent and just), rest upon this “engineering of consent” of the gullible majority, largely by the propaganda beamed at the populace by the rulers and their intellectual apologists in the complacent and compliant news media.

Governments do not remain in power except by the willing acquiesce and apathetic resignation of their subject peoples.

In 1989, we witnessed an elemental force of destructive fury spontaneously arise to cleanse the Earth of the barbarism of statism and its attendant corruption and predation. This hurricane-like ferocity is freedom, and its contagion is sweeping from continent to continent, nation to nation, person to person.

Freedom has always been the genius of American civilization; indeed, of all civilization. It is time for each of us, as Americans and, more importantly, as human beings, to solemnly renew our civic religious legacy, and swear in our hearts with Thomas Jefferson, “eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”

It is time for each of us to be in the vanguard of this worldwide renascence of human liberty in the last decade of the 20th century, joining in solidarity with our brothers and sisters abroad in declaring war upon the state, all governments, as destroyers of rights and plunderers of the common heritage of humanity.

Charles A. Burris is a writer and political communications research consultant.

Senator Ron Wyden on Domestic Data Collection and Privacy Rights

Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon is by far the most outspoken foe in Congress of the NSA and the domestic surveillance state that was created by Woodrow Wilson in 1917, accelerated by Harry Truman, and made exponential by the passage of the Patriot Act in 2001.

He delivered a remarkable speech on July 23 at a meeting held by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. This is a standard Democratic Party Beltway organization: pro-union, pro-global warming, pro-green, pro-big government. But on civil liberties, it is on the side of rolling back the federal government in general and the NSA in particular.

Wyden’s speech was a summary of how the NSA has provided incorrect information to Congress and the public. He did not say “lies,” but this is what he clearly meant. He admitted that Snowden — unnamed — blew the whistle on the NSA. Snowden provided evidence of the extent of the data collection, which the NSA’s director had categorically denied to Congress had been going on. Wyden’s speech is the best summary I have read on the extent of the NSA’s systematic deception of Congress.

He ended his speech with these words:

We find ourselves at a truly unique time in our Constitutional history. The growth of digital technology, dramatic changes in the nature of warfare and the definition of a battlefield, and novel courts that run counter to everything the Founding Fathers imagined, make for a combustible mix. At this point in the speech I would usually conclude with the quote from Ben Franklin about giving up liberty for security and not deserving either, but I thought a different founding father might be more fitting today. James Madison, the father of our constitution, said that the the accumulation of executive, judicial and legislative powers into the hands of any faction is the very definition of tyranny. He then went on to assure the nation that the Constitution protected us from that fate. So, my question to you is: by allowing the executive to secretly follow a secret interpretation of the law under the supervision of a secret, nonadversarial court and occasional secret congressional hearings, how close are we coming to James Madison’s “very definition of tyranny”? I believe we are allowing our country to drift a lot closer than we should, and if we don’t take this opportunity to change course now, we will all live to regret it.

The NSA — secret budget — is using a secret law and a secret court system — the FISA-authorized court system — to construct a truly Orwellian apparatus for spying on the American public. Members of Congress are not legally able to reveal any of this. He said that he cannot legally speak of what he knows. Were it not for Snowden, he made clear, he could not have spoken about what he knew before Snowden went public.

Death Squad USA

July 27, 2013
Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

Kay Griggs, a colonel’s wife, speaks out about the imperial military. (Thanks to Jack Douglas)

President Obama and the race problem

How The Unconstitutional Federal Reserve Act Came Into Being

The Federal Reserve Is A Fraud...illegally created in 1913

This is a short video clip of the beginning of Aaron Russo's Freedom To Fascism. It describes how the fraudulent Federal Reserve System was created...how the banks illegally took over the American Government.

Mark Levin explains how we can rescue America from Tyranny

July 10, 2013
therightscoop.com

 For the first time Mark Levin begins to discuss his much awaited new book, The Liberty Amendments, and describes a process we can use to turn back the tide on this leviathan of a federal government we have. And the federal government will have no say about it.

In short, the founders made a way in the Constitution for the states to amend the Constitution WITHOUT the Federal Government’s involvement. It’s not a constitutional convention, but rather a convention for amending the Constitution. Mark Levin believes this is the only way back to a constitutional republic but he’s under no illusion that it will be easy. In fact, he said there has been at least one attempt to do this and it was not successful.

He explains the process below    TO LISTEN

Above The Law...Freedom files...Judge Andrew Napolitano

July 10, 2013
judgenap.com

Fidelity to the rule of law is the centerpiece of a free society. It means that no one is beneath the protection of the law and no one is absolved of the obligation to comply with it. The government may not make a person or a class of persons exempt from constitutional protections, as it did during slavery, nor may it make government officials exempt from complying with the law, as it does today.
Everyone who works for the government in the United States takes an oath to uphold the Constitution and the laws written pursuant to it. In our system of government, we expect that Congress will write the laws, the courts will interpret them and the president will enforce them. Indeed, the Constitution states that it is the president's affirmative duty to enforce the law. That duty is not an abstract formulation. Rather, it means the president cannot decline to enforce laws with which he disagrees or whose enforcement might cause him or his political allies to lose popularity. It also means the president cannot make up his own version of the law as a substitute for what the Constitution commands or Congress has written.
In the modern era, presidents have rejected the value of the rule of law and instead followed their own political interests. President George W. Bush, for example, while signing into law a federal statute prohibiting the government from reading your mail without a search warrant, boasted that he had no intention of enforcing that law -- and we know that he famously did not enforce it.
But no modern president has picked and chosen which laws to enforce and which to ignore and which to rewrite to the extremes of President Obama. His radical rejection of the rule of law, which presents a clear and present danger to the freedom of us all, has had fatal consequences.
The law requires that if American tax dollars are being given to the government of another country, and that government is toppled by its military -- the common phrase is a coup d'‚tat -- the flow of cash shall stop immediately, lest we support financially those who have betrayed our values.
In Egypt, the military arrested the president, suspended the Constitution and installed a puppet regime. But Obama, embarrassed at the fall of the popularly elected but religiously fanatical government he supported, refuses to consider that military takeover a coup. Instead he has called it a popular uprising supported by the military, and he has continued the flow of your dollars into the hands of a military that has been murdering scores of peaceful demonstrators daily in the streets of Cairo.
The president's signature domestic legislation -- Obamacare -- is scheduled to become effective in stages. One of its provisions, requiring employers of more than 50 persons to offer health insurance acceptable to the feds to all of their employees, becomes effective on Jan. 1, 2014. In anticipation of its becoming law, insurance carriers and employers have calculated that instead of costs going down, as the president promised, they will certainly go up, resulting in the loss of jobs. So the president, mindful of the midterm congressional elections in November 2014 and fearful that Democrats who supported this law might suffer at the polls at the hands of deceived and thus angry voters, announced on the Fourth of July weekend that he planned not to enforce that provision until Jan. 1, 2015.
When he wanted to use military force in Libya and Pakistan -- two allies -- without congressional approval, out of fear, no doubt, that Congress might turn him down, he dispatched the CIA to do his killing. Why? Because federal law requires that he report all offensive use of the military to Congress and eventually obtain its approval for continued use. Because the CIA largely operates in secrecy, the president needn't report its behavior publicly or even acknowledge that it took place.
In the same vein, he recently moved all records of the Osama bin Laden killing from the military -- which carried it out -- to the CIA. Why? Because the military is largely susceptible to the Freedom of Information Act, which commands transparency, and the CIA is largely not. He probably fears that the truthful version of bin Laden's demise will become known. If so, it would be the fourth version of those events his administration has given.
When he wanted to kill an American and his 16-year-old son in Yemen because the American, though uncharged with any crime and unasked to come home, might be difficult to arrest while advocating war in a foreign country, he wrote his own rules for governing his own killings. He did so in secret and notwithstanding clear language in the Constitution expressly prohibiting the government from taking life, liberty or property without due process of law.
And when he wanted to keep us safe from terrorists but servile to him by spying on all of us, he established an enormous network of domestic spies who have access to all of our phone calls, emails and text messages. And he did this despite unambiguous language in the Constitution requiring a search warrant based on particularized probable cause of crime about the records he wanted to seize or the venues he wanted to search.
What's going on?
What we have is a runaway government, dismissive of the Constitution it has sworn to uphold, contemptuous of the law it is required to enforce and driven by its own values of maximum control and minimum personal freedom. And we have a Congress supine enough to let this happen, as well as a judiciary so tangled in its own arcane procedures that immeasurable human freedom will be destroyed and Obama out of office before any meaningful judicial review can be had.
Is this the rule of law? What shall we do about?

Ted Cruz’s Father Delivers Epic Speech Touting Patriotism and Lambasting Obama’s ‘Socialist’ Inclinations

June 6, 2013
theblaze.com

Rafael Cruz, the father of Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, invigorated the crowd during tonight’s FreedomWorks Free the People event.

Upon rising to power, he said that Castro, like Obama, spoke about hope and change. While the message sounded good at the time, it didn’t take long for socialism to take root in his home country. And he paid the price.

Describing his own personal journey escaping Cuba and working hard to build a life for himself in the U.S., the elder Cruz noted comparisons that he believes exist between Fidel Castro’s governance and President Barack Obama’s executive actions.

Entrepreneurs Responsible for Almost All Economic Growth

'Train wreck' Obamacare begins to unravel; massive government boondoggle set to self-destruct by 2015

June 8, 2013
naturalnews.com

(NaturalNews) Even before it is fully implemented, Obamacare is already starting to self-destruct. The White House announced last week it will simply invent its own interpretation of the law and "delay the enforcement" of the employer Obamacare mandate for another year, to 2015. This, we are told, is to allow businesses more time to "smooth" compliance with the law, but that's only the cover story. In reality, the entire private sector economy was preparing to fire tens of millions of workers, cut their hours and radically downsize companies in order to avoid going bankrupt under Obamacare mandates that no one can afford.

Described as a "train wreck" by one of its original authors (Sen. Baucus), and called a "fiasco for the ages" by the Wall Street Journal, Obamacare is a massive government boondoggle that's headed for complete disaster.

In a desperate effort to get out of the way of that oncoming train, insurance companies are scrambling to flee the market entirely. America's largest health insurer, UnitedHealth, has just announced it's closing shop in California and walking away from all health insurance customers there.

That's how bad Obamacare really is, even for the insurance companies: it's better to close up shop than even attempt to serve customers under the government's onerous rules. Read More

Government Spying Has Always Focused On Crushing Dissent … Not On Keeping Us Safe

June 7, 2013
washingtonblog.com

Governments Spy On Their Citizens for Control and Power

Top terrorism experts say that mass spying on Americans doesn’t keep us safe.

High-level American government officials have warned for 40 years that mass surveillance would lead to tyranny. They’ve warned that the government is using information gained through mass surveillance in order to go after anyone they take a dislike to. And a lieutenant colonel for the Stasi East German’s – based upon his experience – agrees.

You don’t have to obsess on the NSA’s high-tech spying to figure out what the government is doing. Just look at old-fashioned, low-tech government spying to see what’s s really going on.

Instead of focusing on catching actual terrorists, police spy on Americans who criticize the government, or the big banks or the other power players. Read More