511 Apple avoids tax; Google wiretaps; Internet Spy Bill Exposed

Apple avoids tax; Google wiretaps; Internet Spy Bill Exposed

(1) Spy Bills cf unofficial spying
(2) Insanity! CISPA Has Passed! [In the House of Reps]
(3) CISPA: Internet Spy Bill Exposed - Brother Nathanael
(4) Apple avoids billions in tax
(5) Letterbox in Luxembourg one way Apple avoids paying billions in
worldwide tax
(6) Apple responds to tax criticism
(7) Google was scooping up personal information from wi-fi users as its
cars drove by
(8) US Government wants to convict defendants on the basis of secret
evidence - Paul Craig Roberts
(9) The homeland security state has come to campus
(10) Counterattack against the democratic "excesses" of the 1960s movement

(1) Spy Bills cf unofficial spying - Peter Myers, April 30, 2012

Government agencies ALREADY spy on the people. But because they are
operating illegally, their information cannot be used in court, and thus
we are safe - mostly.

Laws that make such surveillance LEGAL would pave the way to Thought
Control.

Brother Nathanael portrays the surveillance state as Jewish-directed and
aimed at anti-Zionists (item 3).

Items 9 & 10, on the other hand, depict the surveillance state as
incipient fascism.

(2) Insanity! CISPA Has Passed! [In the House of Reps]

Steve Campbell <callstevec2@gmail.com> 30 April 2012 03:55

Note: Defeating this tyranny is of prime importance; I need not
elaborate. Not only would the final passage of this "bill allow the
government to monitor your online activity," but change, edit or delete
your emails and online activity as well. - sc

http://newsworldwide.wordpress.com/2012/04/27/cispa-has-passed-pressfortruth-tv/

CISPA Has Passed! (pressfortruth.tv)

Posted on April 27, 2012 by zandocomm

Yesterday the House of Representatives passed the CISPA bill which will
now go to the senate for a final vote. The bill would allow the
government to monitor your online activity if it constitutes a “security
threat”. This has nothing to do with protecting copy righted material
and everything to do with blocking the free flow of information online. ...

(3) CISPA: Internet Spy Bill Exposed - Brother Nathanael

Brother Nathanael <bronathanael@yahoo.com> 30 April 2012 14:51

CISPA - Internet Spy Bill Exposed

By Brother Nathanael Kapner

http://www.realzionistnews.com/?p=716

{http://www.realjewnews.com/
My Name Is Brother Nathanael Kapner
I'm A "Street Evangelist"
I Grew Up As A Jew
I'm Now An Orthodox Christian
I Wish To Warn How Zionist Jews
Are Destroying Christianity Throughout The World}

Big Brother is at it again my friends.

We fought Big Brother on SOPA and we won.

But now an even scarier Bill has just been passed by the House, the
Cyber Intelligence Sharing Protection Act, known as CISPA, which will
override every single privacy law ever enacted.

Now, this Bill allows for Internet providers such as Comcast, owned by
Zionist-Jew, Brian Roberts; Verizon, whose Chairman is Ivan Seidenberg;
and countless public entities to “share” with Federal Agencies our
emails, personal information, and private communications.

And not only this under CISPA, but any email or social-network postings
that pose “the threat of harm” to any “individual or group” will also be
shared with Federal Agencies. And that’s scary.

For powerful watchdog lobbies such as the Jewish Anti-Defamation League,
known as the ADL, led by Abraham Foxman, will be further empowered to
demand information on anyone that THEY deem a “threat.”

In other words, you can criticize a ‘Goy’ or any country that you
want…but you better not criticize a ‘Jew’ or the anti-Christ state of
Israel.

The sham about it all is that our Congressmen claim that CISPA will
“protect” us from “cyber threats.”

But cyber attacks, the experts tell us, are rare. And quite frankly this
BILL will do absolutely nothing to stop professional hackers who know
how to take down a Website.

And while those sites are going down, Internet providers will be too
busy filling orders for the ADL to spy on us little guys all in the name
of “preventing” a cyber attack.

Now, a big reason why SOPA did NOT pass a few months ago was because it
would have destroyed mega businesses like Google, Amazon, and Facebook,
who would have been liable for all user-interaction content on their
Websites.

CISPA on the other hand won’t harm the mega businesses because they
don’t require their customers to be anonymous. In fact, they prefer
their users not to be anonymous so as to learn more about their buying
and spending habits.

Facebook, Amazon, and Google, would then benefit from CISPA…and that’s
probably why they’re not opposing the Bill.

While SOPA harmed both the people AND corporations, CISPA only harms the
people.

And while it’s important to get rid of CISPA we must realize that if
CISPA goes, another will pop up.

Jewish Senators Joseph Lieberman and Dianne Feinstein both have Cyber
Security Acts waiting in the wings. And they’re just itching to take
away our last bastion of free speech, the Internet.

What we need is something to guarantee and protect our fundamental
rights on the Internet. We need a Bill of Internet Rights. Let’s all
think about what that Bill would be.

We’re not powerless. We’ve got the numbers. We can make a difference.

(4) Apple avoids billions in tax

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/australian-it/apple-avoids-billions-in-tax/story-e6frgakx-1226342306332

From: AP April 30, 2012 7:44AM

APPLE has been using subsidiaries in Ireland, the Netherlands and other
low-tax nations as part of a strategy to cut its global tax bill by
billions of dollars every year.

A published report outlined legal methods used by Cupertino,
California-based Apple to avoid paying billions of dollars in US federal
and state taxes.

A report in The New York Times said even though the company is based in
California, Apple has set up a small office in Reno, Nevada to collect
and invest its profits. The corporate tax rate in Nevada is zero. In
California, it's 8.84 per cent.

While many major corporations try to reduce their tax bills, technology
companies like Apple, Google, Microsoft, and others have more options to
do so.

That's because some of their revenue comes from digital products or
royalties on patents, which makes it easier for them to move profits to
tax-friendly states or countries, the Times said.

In contrast, it's tougher to shift the collection of profits from the
sale of a physical product - like groceries or a car - to a tax-friendly
haven.

The 71 technology companies in the S&P 500, including Apple, Google,
Yahoo and Dell, reported paying global cash taxes over the past two
years at a rate that's, on average, one-third less than other S&P 500
companies, the Times said.

Apple has legally allocated about 70 per cent of its profits overseas,
where tax rates are often much lower than in the US, according to
company filings.

The Times cites a study by former Treasury Department economist Martin
A. Sullivan that estimates Apple's federal tax bill would have been
$US2.4 billion higher last year without such tactics.

The newspaper says Apple paid $US3.3 billion in cash taxes globally on
$US34.2 billion in profits last year.

That's a tax rate of 9.8 per cent.

In a statement, Apple told the Times that it has complied with all laws
and accounting rules, and says that its US operations generated nearly
$US5 billion in federal and state income taxes in the first half of
fiscal 2012.

Wall Street analysts predict Apple could earn up to $US46.9 billion in
its current fiscal year, according to FactSet.

(5) Letterbox in Luxembourg one way Apple avoids paying billions in
worldwide tax

http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/letterbox-in-luxembourg-one-way-apple-avoids-paying-billions-in-worldwide-tax-20120429-1xswe.html

Charles Duhigg, David Kocieniewski

April 30, 2012

RENO, Nevada: Apple, the world's most profitable technology company,
doesn't design iPhones in Nevada. It doesn't run AppleCare customer
service from Reno. And it doesn't manufacture MacBooks or iPads anywhere
nearby.

Yet, with a handful of employees in a small Reno office in a company
subsidiary named Braeburn Capital, Apple has done something central to
its corporate strategy: it has avoided millions of dollars in taxes in
California and 20 other US states.

Apple's headquarters are in Cupertino, California. By putting an office
to collect and invest the company's profits in Reno, just 350 kilometres
away, Apple sidesteps state income taxes on some of those gains.

Advertisement: Story continues below California's corporate tax rate is
8.84 per cent. Nevada's, zero.

Setting up an office in Reno is one of many legal methods Apple uses to
reduce its worldwide tax bill by billions of dollars a year.

As it has in Nevada, Apple has created subsidiaries in low-tax countries
such as Ireland, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and the British Virgin
Islands - some little more than a letterbox in Luxembourg or an
anonymous office in Nevada - that help cut the taxes it pays.

Almost every large corporation tries to minimise taxes. For Apple, the
savings are especially alluring because the company's profits are so
high. Wall Street analysts predict Apple could earn up to $US45.6
billion ($43.5 billion) this fiscal year - a record for a United States
business.

Braeburn is a variety of apple that is simultaneously sweet and tart.
When someone in the US buys an iPhone, iPad or other Apple product, a
portion of the profits from that sale is often deposited into accounts
controlled by Braeburn, and then invested in stocks, bonds or other
financial instruments, company executives say. Some profits from those
investments are shielded from California tax authorities by virtue of
Braeburn's Nevada address.

Since founding Braeburn in 2006, Apple has earned more than $US2.5
billion in interest and dividend income on its cash reserves and
investments around the globe. What's more, Braeburn allows Apple to
lower its taxes in other states because many of those jurisdictions use
formulas that reduce what is owed when a company's financial management
occurs elsewhere.

While Apple's Reno office helps the company avoid state taxes, its
international subsidiaries - particularly the company's assignment of
sales and patent royalties to other nations - help reduce taxes owed to
the US and other governments.

The Luxembourg subsidiary, named iTunes S.ar.l., has just a few dozen
employees, according to corporate documents filed in that nation and an
executive. But when customers across Europe, Africa or the Middle East -
and potentially elsewhere - download a song, television show or app, the
sale is recorded in this small country, present and former executives say.

In 2011, iTunes S.ar.l.'s revenue exceeded $US1 billion, an Apple
executive said, representing about 20 per cent of iTunes' worldwide sales.

Apple, say former executives, has been particularly talented at
identifying legal tax loopholes.

Apple was a pioneer of an accounting technique known as the ''Double
Irish with a Dutch Sandwich'', which reduced taxes by routing profits
through two Irish subsidiaries - Apple Operations International and
Apple Sales International - and the Netherlands and the Caribbean.

Without such tactics, Apple's federal tax bill in the US would have been
$US2.4 billion higher last year, a recent study by a former Treasury
Department economist, Martin Sullivan, said. As it stands, the company
paid cash taxes of $US3.3 billion around the world on its reported
profits of $US34.2 billion last year, a tax rate of 9.8 per cent.

Apple, in a statement, said it ''pays an enormous amount of taxes which
help our local, state and federal governments. In the first half of
fiscal year 2012, our US operations have generated almost $US5 billion
in federal and state income taxes, including income taxes withheld on
employee stock gains, making us among the top payers of US income tax''.

The New York Times

(6) Apple responds to tax criticism

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57423874-37/apple-responds-to-tax-criticism-by-highlighting-job-creation/

Apple responds to tax criticism by highlighting job creation

Rebuttal comes in the wake of a report claiming the tech giant goes to
great lengths to avoid paying billions of dollars in taxes.

by Steven Musil April 29, 2012 12:25 PM PDT

Apple responded today to criticism the company goes to great lengths to
cut its global tax bill by billions of dollars every year, trumpeting
the "incredible number of jobs" it has created. The statement was in
response to an in-depth report published yesterday by The New York Times
that depicted Apple as a pioneer in developing ways to sidestep taxes
and that companies seeking to do the same have used its methods as
templates. "Apple serves as a window on how technology giants have taken
advantage of tax codes written for an industrial age and ill-suited to
today's digital economy," the Times reported.

In response, Apple said it was one of the biggest taxpayers in the U.S.

"Apple also pays an enormous amount of taxes which help our local, state
and federal governments," the company said in a statement printed by The
New York Times. "In the first half of fiscal year 2012 our U.S.
operations have generated almost $5 billion in federal and state income
taxes, including income taxes withheld on employee stock gains, making
us among the top payers of U.S. income tax." Apple also said its focus
on innovation has created more than 500,000 jobs in the U.S. -- "from
the people who create components for our products to the people who
deliver them to our customers." Apple's full statement:

Over the past several years, we have created an incredible number of
jobs in the United States. The vast majority of our global work force
remains in the U.S., with more than 47,000 full-time employees in all 50
states. By focusing on innovation, we've created entirely new products
and industries, and more than 500,000 jobs for U.S. workers -- from the
people who create components for our products to the people who deliver
them to our customers. Apple's international growth is creating jobs
domestically since we oversee most of our operations from California. We
manufacture parts in the U.S. and export them around the world, and U.S.
developers create apps that we sell in over 100 countries. As a result,
Apple has been among the top creators of American jobs in the past few
years.

{Comment (Peter M.): Apple products are mainly made in China}

Apple also pays an enormous amount of taxes which help our local, state
and federal governments. In the first half of fiscal year 2012 our U.S.
operations have generated almost $5 billion in federal and state income
taxes, including income taxes withheld on employee stock gains, making
us among the top payers of U.S. income tax.

We have contributed to many charitable causes but have never sought
publicity for doing so. Our focus has been on doing the right thing, not
getting credit for it. In 2011, we dramatically expanded the number of
deserving organizations we support by initiating a matching gift program
for our employees.

Apple has conducted all of its business with the highest of ethical
standards, complying with applicable laws and accounting rules. We are
incredibly proud of all of Apple's contributions.

(7) Google was scooping up personal information from wi-fi users as its
cars drove by

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304868004577374272894249402.html

Updated April 29, 2012, 8:03 p.m. ET

Google Engineer Told Others of Data Scoop

By AMIR EFRATI and DON CLARK

A Google Inc. GOOG -0.08% engineer told others at the company about his
plan to scoop up personal information from wireless-network users as
specially equipped cars drove by their homes, but the practice continued
for two years after the internal disclosures, a Federal Communications
Commission investigation found.

The engineer, whose name hasn't been disclosed, explained his plans to
other engineers and at least one senior manager involved with the
project, known as Street View, in 2008, the FCC report states.
Nevertheless, it says, Street View managers told the agency they didn't
learn the Google cars were collecting the personal information until 2010.

Findings in the report bolster Google's contention that the plan to
gather the personal data—which included the contents of some emails and
the Web addresses of sites users visited—was conceived by a single
engineer. But it also suggests that Google might have been able to move
faster to put a stop to the activity, which prompted apologies by the
company and has helped fuel government scrutiny of its privacy safeguards.

A heavily redacted version of the report was released earlier this
month. Google decided to release a nearly complete version of the report
after the FCC concluded Google didn't violate a U.S. law against
wiretapping but said it obstructed the probe and must pay $25,000. The
Los Angeles Times reported the findings in the document Saturday.

Google strongly denies impeding the probe.

"We decided to voluntarily make the entire document available except for
the names of individuals," a Google spokeswoman said. "While we disagree
with some of the statements made in the document, we agree with the
FCC's conclusion that we did not break the law. We hope that we can now
put this matter behind us."

Google's Street View project sent hundreds of vehicles to photograph
city streets around the world so that people using Google Maps could see
360-degree images of the locations. An aspect of the project that wasn't
generally known at the time was Google's collection of data about
individual wireless networks, including those in people's homes.

The data, among other things, has been used to help Google figure out
the precise location of someone using a smartphone powered by the
company's Android software.

In April 2010, Google denied that it was collecting private data from
Wi-Fi users, but it reversed itself the following month. It said it had
learned that data had been collected from unprotected Wi-Fi networks and
attributed the activity to a single Google engineer. "Quite simply, it
was a mistake," the company said in a blog post.

The FCC's 25-page report, dated April 13, provides additional evidence
that the plan to gather the data was intentional. It says the unnamed
engineer wrote computer code to collect "payload data"—including
personal email, text messages, passwords, Internet-usage history and
other personal information that was moving through unencrypted Wi-Fi
networks within range of the Street View vehicles between 2008 and 2010.

The engineer, the report said, believed such data could be useful to the
company. The FCC report said the engineer wrote a "design document" for
his work that listed as a "to do" item the need to discuss "privacy
considerations" with a company lawyer, something the agency said never
occurred. Google also said the information was never used.

Colleagues of the engineer claimed during the probe that they didn't
know about the practice despite the engineer's disclosures, the report
stated, but the agency provides evidence that at least one senior
manager did talk with the engineer about it. An internal email recounted
a conversation in which the engineer "openly discussed his review of
payload data with a senior manager of the Street View project," the
report stated.

In an excerpt from an email, the manager asked the engineer: "Are you
saying that these are URLs [Web addresses] that you sniffed out of Wifi
packets that we recorded while driving?" The engineer confirmed the
practice in a subsequent email.

The manager wasn't named. The engineer has refused to testify in the
probe, invoking the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

Since Google disclosed the controversial practice in 2010, it has faced
scrutiny from foreign governments as well as U.S. state attorneys
general, though so far it hasn't faced major penalties. The company has
been fined for allegedly violating privacy laws and has agreed to audits
of its privacy practices.

U.S. and European regulators are now investigating how Google bypassed
the privacy settings of millions of users of Apple Inc.'s AAPL -0.77%
Safari Web browser, a practice that was discovered earlier this year. In
that instance, Google used special computer code to install tracking
files known as cookies on some people's computers even if the device was
set to block such tracking. Google says it has removed such "cookies"
and never collected personal data.

Write to Amir Efrati at amir.efrati@wsj.com and Don Clark at
don.clark@wsj.com

(8) US Government wants to convict defendants on the basis of secret
evidence - Paul Craig Roberts

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=30525

TRIALS WITHOUT CRIMES OR EVIDENCE

by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts

Global Research, April 25, 2012

Andy Worthington is a superb reporter who has specialized in providing
the facts of the US government's illegal abuse of "detainees," against
whom no evidence exists. ( http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/ ) In an
effort to create evidence, the US government has illegally resorted to
torture. Torture produces false confessions, plea bargains, and false
testimony against others in order to escape further torture.

For these reasons, in Anglo-American law self-incrimination secured
through torture has been impermissible evidence for centuries. So also
has been secret evidence withheld from the accused and his attorney.
Secret evidence cannot be confronted. Secret evidence is distrusted as
made-up in order to convict the innocent. The evidence is secret because
it cannot stand the light of day.

The US government relies on secret evidence in its cases against alleged
terrorists, claiming that national security would be threatened if the
evidence were revealed. This is abject nonsense. It is an absurd claim
that presenting evidence against a terrorist jeopardizes the national
security of the United States.

To the contrary, not presenting evidence jeopardizes the security of
each and every one of us. Once the government can convict defendants on
the basis of secret evidence, even the concept of a fair trial will
disappear. Fair trials are already history, but the concept lingers.

Secret evidence murders the concept of a fair trial. It murders justice
and the rule of law. Secret evidence means anyone can be convicted of
anything. As in Kafka's The Trial, people will cease to know the crimes
for which they are being tried and convicted.

This extraordinary development in Anglo-American law, a development
demanded by the unaccountable Bush/Obama Regime, has not resulted in
impeachment proceedings; nor has it caused an uproar from Congress, the
federal courts, the presstitute media, law schools, constitutional
scholars, and bar associations.

Having bought the government's 9/11 conspiracy theory, Americans just
want someone to pay. They don't care who as long as someone pays. To
accommodate this desire, the government has produced some "high value
detainees" with Arab or Muslim names. But instead of bringing these
alleged malefactors to trial and presenting evidence against them, the
government has kept them in torture dungeons for years trying to create
through the application of pain and psychological breakdown guilt by
self-incrimination in order to create a case against them.

The government has been unsuccessful and has nothing that it can bring
to a real court. So the Bush/Obama Regime created and recreated
"military tribunals" to lend "national security" credence to the
absolute need that non-existent evidence be kept secret.

Andy Worthington in his numerous reports does a good job in providing
the history of the detainees and their treatment. He deserves our
commendation and support. But what I want to do is to ask some
questions, not of Worthington, but about the idea that the US is under
terrorist threat.

By this September, 9/11 will be eleven years ago. Yet despite the War on
Terror, the loss of Americans' privacy and civil liberties, an
expenditure of trillions of dollars on numerous wars, violations of US
and international laws against torture, and so forth, no one has been
held accountable. Neither the perpetrators nor those whom the
perpetrators outwitted, assuming that they are different people, have
been held accountable. Going on 11 years and no trials of villains or
chastisement of negligent public officials. This is remarkable.

The government's account of 9/11 implies massive failure of all US
security and intelligence agencies along with those of our NATO puppets
and Israel's Mossad. The government's official line also implies the
failure of the National Security Council, NORAD and the US Air Force,
Air Traffic Control, Airport Security four times in one hour on the same
morning. It implies the failure of the President, the Vice President,
the National Security Adviser, the Secretary of Defense.

Many on the left and also libertarians find this apparent failure of the
centralized and oppressive government so hopeful that they cling to the
official "government failure" explanation of 9/11. However, such massive
failure is simply unbelievable. How in the world could the US have
survived the cold war with the Soviets if the US government were so
totally incompetent?

If we attribute superhero powers to the 19 alleged hijackers, powers in
excess of V's in V for Vendetta or James Bond's or Captain Marvel's, and
assume that these young terrorists, primarily Saudi Arabians, outwitted
Dick Cheney, Condi Rice, The Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Tony Blair,
along with the CIA, FBI, MI5 and MI6, Mossad, etc., one would have
expected for the President, Congress, and the media to call for heads to
roll. No more humiliating affront has ever been suffered by a major
power than the US suffered on 9/11. Yet, absolutely no one, not even
some lowly traffic controller, was scapegoated and held accountable for
what is considered to be the most extraordinarily successful terrorist
attack in human history, an attack so successful that it implies total
negligence across the totality of the US government and that of all its
allies.

This just doesn't smell right. Total failure and no accountability. The
most expensively funded security apparatus the world has ever known
defeated by a handful of Saudi Arabians. How can anyone in the CIA, FBI,
NSA, NORAD, and National Security Council hold up their heads? What a
disgraced bunch of jerks and incompetents. What do we need them for?

Consider the alleged hijackers. Despite allegedly being caught off guard
by the 9/11 attacks, the FBI was soon able to identify the 19 hijackers
despite the fact that apparently none of the alleged hijackers' names
are on the passenger lists of the airliners that they allegedly hijacked.

How did 19 passengers get on airplanes in the US without being on the
passenger lists?

I do not personally know if the alleged hijackers were on the four
airliners. Moreover, defenders of the official 9/11 story claim that the
passenger lists released to the public were "victims lists," not
passenger lists, because the names of the hijackers were withheld and
only released some four years later after 9/11 researchers had had years
in which to confuse victims lists with passenger lists. This seems an
odd explanation. Why encourage public misinformation for years by
withholding the passenger lists and issuing victims lists in their
place? It cannot have been to keep the hijackers' names a secret as the
FBI released a list of the hijackers several days after 9/11. Even more
puzzling, if the hijackers' names were on the airline passenger lists,
why did it take the FBI several days to confirm the names and numbers of
hijackers?

Researchers have found contradictions in the FBI's accounts of the
passenger lists with the FBI adding and subtracting names from its
various lists and some names being misspelled, indicating possibly that
the FBI doesn't really know who the person is. The authenticity of the
passenger lists that were finally released in 2005 is contested, and the
list apparently was not presented as evidence by the FBI in the
Moussaoui trial in 2006. David Ray Griffin has extensively researched
the 9/11 story. In one of his books, 9/11 Ten Years Later, Griffin
writes: "Although the FBI claimed that it had received flight manifests
from the airlines by the morning of 9/11, the ‘manifests' that appeared
in 2005 had names that were not known to the FBI until a day or more
after 9/11. These 2005 ‘manifests,' therefore, could not have been the
original manifests for the four 9/11 flights."

The airlines themselves have not been forthcoming. We are left with the
mystery of why simple and straightforward evidence, such as a list of
passengers, was withheld for years and mired in secrecy and controversy.

We have the additional problem that the BBC and subsequently other news
organizations established that 6 or 7 of the alleged hijackers on the
FBI's list are alive and well and have never been part of any terrorist
plot.

These points are not even a beginning of the voluminous reasons that the
government's 9/11 story looks very thin.

But the American public, being throughly plugged into the Matrix, are
not suspicious of the government's thin story. Instead, they are
suspicious of the facts and of those experts who are suspicious of the
government's story. Architects, engineers, scientists, first responders,
pilots, and former public officials who raise objections to the official
story are written off as conspiracy theorists. Why does an ignorant
American public think it knows more than experts? Why do Americans
believe a government that told them the intentional lie that Saddam
Hussein had weapons of mass destruction despite the fact that the
weapons inspectors reported to President Bush that Hussein had no such
weapons? And now we see the same thing all over again with the alleged,
but non-existent, Iranian nukes.

As Frantz Fanon wrote, the power of cognitive dissonance is extreme. It
keeps people comfortable and safe from threatening information. Most
Americans find the government's lies preferable to the truth. They don't
want to be unplugged from the Matrix. The truth is too uncomfortable for
emotionally and mentally weak Americans.

Worthington focuses on the harm being done to detainees. They have been
abused for much of their lives. Their innocence or guilt cannot be
established because the evidence is compromised by torture,
self-incrimination, and coerced testimony against others. They stand
convicted by the government's accusation alone. These are real wrongs,
and Worthington is correct to emphasize them.

In contrast, my focus is on the harm to America, on the harm to truth
and truth's power, on the harm to the rule of law and accountability to
the people of the government and its agencies, on the harm to the moral
fabric of the US government and to liberty in the United States.

(9) The homeland security state has come to campus

From: "Sadanand, Nanjundiah (Physics Earth Sciences)"
<sadanand@mail.ccsu.edu> Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2012

Homeland Security Goes to College

How college campuses became a Homeland Security battleground.

-By Michael Gould-Wartofsky,Thu Mar. 22, 2012 , Mother Jones

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/03/homeland-security-college-campus-crackdown-occupy

Campus spies. Pepper spray. SWAT teams. Twitter trackers. Biometrics.
Student security consultants. Professors of homeland security studies.
Welcome to Repress U, class of 2012.

Since 9/11, the homeland security state has come to campus just as it
has come to America's towns and cities, its places of work and its
houses of worship, its public space and its cyberspace. But the age of
(in)security had announced its arrival on campus with considerably less
fanfare than elsewhere - until, that is, the "less lethal" weapons were
unleashed in the fall of 2011.

Today, from the City University of New York to the University of
California, students increasingly find themselves on the frontlines, not
of a war on terror, but of a war on "radicalism" and "extremism." Just
about everyone from college administrators and educators to law
enforcement personnel and corporate executives seems to have enlisted in
this war effort. Increasingly, American students are in their sights. ...

(10) Counterattack against the democratic "excesses" of the 1960s movement

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=30466

"Global Spying". Washington's "Weaponized Data" System

by Tom Burghardt

Global Research, April 23, 2012

From driftnet surveillance to data mining and link analysis, the secret
state has weaponized our data, "criminal evidence, ready for use in a
trial," as Cryptohippie famously warned.

No longer the exclusive domain of intelligence agencies, a
highly-profitable Surveillance-Industrial Complex emerged in the 1980s
with the deployment of the NSA-GCHQ ECHELON intercept system. As
investigate journalist Nicky Hager revealed in CovertAction Quarterly
back in 1996:

The ECHELON system is not designed to eavesdrop on a particular
individual's e-mail or fax link. Rather, the system works by
indiscriminately intercepting very large quantities of communications
and using computers to identify and extract messages of interest from
the mass of unwanted ones. A chain of secret interception facilities has
been established around the world to tap into all the major components
of the international telecommunications networks. Some monitor
communications satellites, others land-based communications networks,
and others radio communications. ECHELON links together all these
facilities, providing the US and its allies with the ability to
intercept a large proportion of the communications on the planet.

With the exponential growth of fiber optic and wireless networks, the
mass of data which can be "mined" for "actionable intelligence,"
covering everything from eavesdropping on official enemies to blanket
surveillance of dissidents is now part of the landscape: no more visible
to the average citizen than ornamental shrubbery surrounding a strip mall.

That process will become even more ubiquitous. As James Bamford pointed
out in Wired Magazine, "the Pentagon is attempting to expand its
worldwide communications network, known as the Global Information Grid,
to handle yottabytes (10 to the 24th bytes) of data. (A yottabyte is a
septillion bytes--so large that no one has yet coined a term for the
next higher magnitude.)"

"It needs that capacity because, according to a recent report by Cisco,
global Internet traffic will quadruple from 2010 to 2015," Bamford
reported, "reaching 966 exabytes per year. (A million exabytes equal a
yottabyte.) ... Thus, the NSA's need for a 1-million-square-foot data
storehouse. Should the agency ever fill the Utah center with a yottabyte
of information, it would be equal to about 500 quintillion
(500,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text."

A former top NSA official turned whistleblower, William Binney, who
resigned in 2001 shortly after the agency stood-up the Bush regime's
warrantless wiretapping programs (now greatly expanded under Hope and
Change™ huckster Barack Obama), "held his thumb and forefinger close
together" and told Bamford, "We are that far from a turnkey totalitarian
state."

Last week, Binney said on Democracy Now when queried whether there were
any differences between the Bush and Obama administrations, "Actually, I
think the surveillance has increased. In fact, I would suggest that
they've assembled on the order of 20 trillion transactions about U.S.
citizens with other U.S. citizens."

Add to that the Transportation Security Administration's invasion of
"travel by other means," as Jennifer Abel pointed out in The Guardian,
through the agency's usurpation of "jurisdiction over all forms of mass
transit," and it should be clear to Americans (though it isn't) that
there is no way of escaping the secret state's callous trampling of our
rights.

Commenting, Salon's Glenn Greenwald pointed out that the "domestic
NSA-led Surveillance State which Frank Church so stridently warned about
has obviously come to fruition."

"The way to avoid its grip is simply to acquiesce to the nation's most
powerful factions, to obediently remain within the permitted boundaries
of political discourse and activism."

"Accepting that bargain," Greenwald noted, "enables one to maintain the
delusion of freedom--'he who does not move does not notice his chains,'
observed Rosa Luxemburg--but the true measure of political liberty is
whether one is free to make a different choice."

But in a militarized Empire such as ours the only "choice" is to shut
up, keep your head down--or else.

'Lower Your Shields and Surrender Your Ships'

Militarist solutions to intractable social contradictions, the
oft-maligned class struggle, do not appear out of the blue. Indeed,
NSA's ECHELON system, the template for STELLAR WIND and the agency's
associated email and web search database known as PINWALE, were
technological responses by Western elites to challenges posed by the
"excess of democracy" decried by Samuel Huntington and his cohorts in
The Crisis of Democracy, published by the Rockefeller-funded Trilateral
Commission..

Social critic Andrew Gavin Marshall observed that for Huntington and the
right-wing ideologues who mounted an intellectual counterattack against
the democratic "excesses" of the 1960s, the "massive wave of resistance,
rebellion, protest, activism and direct action by entire sectors of the
general population which had for decades, if not centuries, been largely
oppressed and ignored by the institutional power structure of society,"
were "terrifying."

Fast forward to today. As the global economic crisis deepens and
hundreds of millions of people worldwide reject the "austerity"
boondoggles of the financial sharks who brought on the crisis through
massive frauds disguised as "investment opportunities," our corporatist
masters are fighting back and have turned to police state methods to
prop-up their illegitimate rule.

Nor should it surprise us, as George Ciccariello-Maher pointed out in
CounterPunch in the wake of last summer's London "riots," a mass
response to police murder (coming soon to an "urban exclusion zone" near
you!): "Irrational, uncontrollable, impermeable to logic and
unpredictable in its movements, these undesirables have once again
ruined the party for everyone, as they have done from Paris 1789 to
Caracas 1989. In Fanon's inimitable words: 'the masses, without waiting
for the chairs to be placed around the negotiating table, take matters
into their own hands and start burning...'"

Call it the great fear of those lording it over the slaves down on the
global plantation!

Combining attributes of Jeremy Bentham's "Panopticon" and George
Orwell's ubiquitous "Big Brother," the National Security State, as it
works to stave-off its own well-deserved collapse, seeks to root out and
marginalize "dangerous" individuals and ideologies thereby "inoculating"
the body politic from what were euphemistically called in the halcyon
days of J. Edgar's COINTELPRO operations, "subversive elements."

It matters little whether today's "usual suspects" are landless
peasants, displaced workers, investigative journalists, civil
libertarians or innocent citizens mistakenly caught in one dragnet or
another: "threats" will be "neutralized" or more pointedly, in the
evocative language employed by spooks: "Terminated with extreme prejudice."

Operating alongside tried and methods--police repression and
violence--contemporary crackdowns are guided by "robust situational
awareness" gleaned from the wealth of personal data stored on multiple
digital devices (the spies in our pockets) and in huge databases. As
Cryptohippie averred: "An electronic police state is quiet, even unseen.
All of its legal actions are supported by abundant evidence. It looks
pristine."

"When we produced our first Electronic Police State report," the privacy
professionals wrote, "the top ten nations were of two types:

1. Those that had the will to spy on every citizen, but lacked ability.

2. Those who had the ability, but were restrained in will.

But as they revealed in their 2010 National Rankings, "This is changing:
The able have become willing and their traditional restraints have
failed." The key developments driving the global panopticon forward are
the following:

• The USA has negated their Constitution's fourth amendment in the name
of protection and in the name of "wars" against terror, drugs and cyber
attacks.

• The UK is aggressively building the world of 1984 in the name of
stopping "anti-social" activities. Their populace seems unable or
unwilling to restrain the government.

• France and the EU have given themselves over to central bureaucratic
control. ...