Tuesday, September 10, 2013

The US President’s ‘Secret Book’ – Information So Forbidden, So Dangerous, It Must Be Kept Hidden From the Public!

 give em ALL the "books" in the World ....STILL couldn't come wit an "original"  thought/idea  if  it ain't on the "prompt"  dah boo boo dah er um ok yea  ah oh yea um dad duh   ...lol fucking monkey's in the zoo playing wit themselves & throwing their own shit on the wall  ... will HIT on some~thin ..before an ass pipe in D.C. (degenerate city)    ...would  :o  hey America ..who ya wanna bomb  NOW   ..how bout them smart ass monkey's ?

The US President’s ‘Secret Book’ – Information So Forbidden, So Dangerous, It Must Be Kept Hidden From the Public!

Saturday, September 7, 2013 16:45

Is there really a book passed down from president to president called, “The President’s Book of Secrets”?  This video explores the idea, provides facts, and interviews with ‘top of the line’ government officials you’ll know and recognize. Also revealed are secret places in the White House, hidden tunnels, doors and an entire underground beneath Virginia, as well as doomesday plans, weapons, drones, Martial Law and much more! Fact or fiction? I wonder what Barack Obama’s book would look like?  If so, they’ve probably started an entire enterouge!

Supporting Al-Qaeda during the anniversary week of 9/11

Published time: September 09, 2013
AFP Photo / Pool / Chris Pedota
AFP Photo / Pool / Chris Pedota
In a twist of irony that has escaped mainstream commentators, during the week of 9/11, the US is considering a course of action that will empower Al-Qaeda, i.e. bombing Syria.
As terror expert Evan Kohlmann put it, “two of the most powerful insurgent factions in Syria are Al-Qaeda factions.” Kohlmann is an authority on the subject, having worked as a consultant in terrorism matters for the DoD, DOJ, FBI, and other law enforcement agencies. 
Regarding the prospective strike on Syria, Steven A. Cook, a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at The Council on Foreign Relations, warns that “American and allied cruise missiles would be to the benefit of the Al-Qaeda-linked militants fighting Assad—the same militants whom US drones are attacking regularly in places such as Yemen.” 
According to Bloomberg, speaking off the record with military and intelligence officials within Obama’s own administration, “among the primary concerns expressed were that the main beneficiaries could be groups affiliated with Al-Qaeda.”  
Assad is a secular leader, which is one of the reasons he is hated by Al-Qaeda. Bombing the secular regime he represents makes it easier for fundamentalist challengers like Al-Qaeda to seize power. Such transfer of power, from secular regimes to religious extremists, is not without recent precedent. In Iraq, the US overthrow of secular leader, Saddam Hussein, enabled an Al-Qaeda organization (AQI) to emerge in Iraq in 2003. As the head of UN weapons inspections in Iraq points out, AQI “didn’t exist in the country until after the invasion.” Now the US wants to participate in the Syrian conflict—the very same conflict that’s provided a sanctuary for AQI leaders.
On the topic of Iraq, the US intelligence community expected the invasion of Iraq to increase the likelihood of terror attacks against the US. As a letter from CIA Director George Tenet to the Senate Intelligence Committee chair revealed, it was anticipated that Bush’s invasion of Iraq would lead to “much less constrain[t] in adopting terrorist actions”. The intelligence community was correct; according to a study by research fellows at the NYU School of Law, terror has increased by over 600% following the invasion of Iraq.

Rebel fighters prepare explosive devices to be used during fighting against Syrian government forces on September 7, 2013 in Syria's eastern town of Deir Ezzor (AFP Photo / Ricardo Garcia Vilanavoa)
Rebel fighters prepare explosive devices to be used during fighting against Syrian government forces on September 7, 2013 in Syria's eastern town of Deir Ezzor (AFP Photo / Ricardo Garcia Vilanavoa)
Now the US intelligence community is anticipating that a strike on Syria would, as previously stated, “be…to the benefit of the Al-Qaeda-linked militants.” We can only hope they’re wrong this time around.
If we had an authentic democracy—rule by the people—an attack wouldn’t happen, because strong majorities oppose intervening in Syria. Polls conducted by Reuters almost daily between May 31st and September 3rd indicate without exception that a strong majority of Americans are opposed to intervening in Syria, even if Syria used chemical weapons. Similarly, a poll conducted by the BBC shows that, in the UK, “71% of people thought Parliament made the right decision” to reject military action against Syria. Two thirds of respondents said they wouldn’t care if Parliament’s decision harmed UK-US relations.
Another poll shows that a stunning 80% of Americans believe that Obama should seek congressional approval for a strike on Syria. The Obama administration has interpreted this rather narrowly, having scheduled a congressional vote, but still insisting that Obama has the right to attack Syria “no matter what Congress does”, as Secretary of State John Kerry bluntly remarked. Obama said the same thing, albeit somewhat more tactfully: “I believe I have the authority to carry out this military action without specific congressional authorization”.
The polls pertaining to the prospective strike on Syria differ significantly from those regarding the US and UK support for the Iraq War. Back in 2003, a series of polls found that a majority of Britons supported the invasion of Iraq; Americans at the time supported the invasions by even larger majorities.
Simply put, there’s less support for a strike on Syria than there was for the invasion of Iraq—and we know how well the Iraq War turned out.
Yet public opinion and the threat of provoking terror attacks are not persuasive to the unfathomable wisdom of the Obama administration. As John Kerry said, a strike on Syria “is of great consequence to…all of us who care about enforcing the international norm with respect to chemical weapons.” Apparently Kerry is more concerned with international norms than international law, since attacking Syria without a UN Security Council resolution would violate the latter. In Obama’s words, the Security Council is “paralyzed”—meaning it won’t do what he tells it to do.
Matthew Waxman, writing for the Council on Foreign Relations, observes that, “despite treaties outlawing chemical weapons use, there is no precedent for using military intervention as a response to violations.”
To be fair to the Obama administration, we should listen to what US leaders have to say about chemical weapons; they’re experts on the matter. In Iraq alone, they used white phosphorous and depleted uranium munitions, which coincided with an explosion of birth defects documented by a recent study published in the Bulletin of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology. According to an Al Jazeera journalist, incidences of congenital malformations in the city of Fallujah surpassed those that followed the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II.
Ken Klippenstein lives in Madison, WI, USA, where he edits whiterosereader.org. He can be reached via email at kenneth.klippenstein@gmail.com or on Twitter @kenklippenstein

Lil Wayne Releases Anti Police State Song With Likely References to Monarch Programming



The rapper Lil Wayne’s recent song ‘God Bless Amerika’ has a line in it that may reference the CIA’s ‘Monarch Programming’, or manipulation and use of MK Ultra tactics on celebrities to make them complicit.

Opinion
By Cassius Methyl
Intellihub.com
September 7, 2013
Although many people want to make the mainstream, ‘brainwashing’ culture and music irrelevant from their lives, rightfully so, it may be important to take note of instances that prove some of these celebrities are in fact under the direct control of the ‘elite’, or people who use them for their propaganda agendas.
People like Jay Z, who even named his record label ‘Roc A Fella records’ (Rockefeller) and famously took pictures with and was endorsed by Barack Obama, or people like Michael Jackson, who was manipulated by elitists, are the type of extremely famous celebrities who are or once were in line with elitist agendas.
Lil Wayne’s recent album, ‘I Am Not a Human Being II’, has not only a red butterfly on the cover, but contains the song ‘God Bless Amerika’, which is partly about how militarized and corrupt the US government and police are.
Lil Wayne may have come quite close to seeing the monarch programming in Hollywood and the music industry, so maybe he was referencing that with the line ‘I saw a butterfly in hell today’, in the song ‘God Bless Amerika’.
It is a vague, seemingly coded message, and can’t be interpreted almost any other way than as one.
Hopefully Lil Wayne will not continue to sell out, but will start exposing the monarch programming that is going on in the music industry.
Monarch programming, of course, it a part of the CIA’s program ‘Mk Ultra, which is said to have stopped, but surely is going on. Many hyper-famous celebrities’ videos have references to the Illuminati, or MK Ultra, or things of that nature, and learning about this requires plenty of research on your own. The Monarch butterfly is a symbol of the control that a person is put under, when being abused with such things as sound torture, sexual abuse, physical abuse, or sleep deprivation, to make a person susceptible to ‘mind control’.
These practices were revealed when the public learned about the CIA’s project ‘MK Ultra’, where the CIA used these torture methods against average citizens to try and master the methods of mind control.  However, censorship in the mainstream media was present back then like today, and this was scarcely reported on.
As ‘sold out’ and commercial as Lil Wayne has become, it seems here he is actually talking about something of reality, the reality of the police state, and perhaps also monarch programming. That is a noteworthy thing, hopefully more celebrities will speak out and wake people up.

http://intellihub.com/2013/09/10/reporter-asks-obama-peace-prize-presents-dilemma-bombing-foreign-countries/

http://intellihub.com/2013/09/10/reporter-asks-obama-peace-prize-presents-dilemma-bombing-foreign-countries/

Mexico’s Unfolding Political Crisis: Denationalization and the Privatisation of Oil and Electricity

Mexico’s Unfolding Political Crisis: Denationalization and the Privatisation of Oil and Electricity

The Other Super Power Is Winning

The Other Super Power Is Winning

10 Signs The Global Elite Are Losing Control

truther September 10, 2013
Eric Blair
    AP
Karma is coming for the elite in a big way. As the Powers That Be head toward a devastating defeat in their war plans for Syria, signs are emerging that their rule over humanity is rapidly diminishing.
Over the last decade the global elite have been on a mad dash to consolidate power over the world. It’s always been their plan like some evil villain in a comic book, but after 9/11 the plan went into overdrive and then turbo charged during the financial crisis of 2008.
10 Signs The Global Elite Are Losing Control
Yet it’s doomed to fail because humans are meant to be guided by their own free will, not controlled like livestock. The more the elite try to control humanity, the more entropy occurs. Entropy, for those who don’t know, is the lack of order or predictability; a gradual decline into disorder.
Although the elite still enjoy a huge wealth advantage over the masses, they are now resigned to behaving like tyrants to maintain control. This, in turn, exposes their dark side which has been cleverly concealed for ages. Not anymore.
People are waking up in droves, at least as fast as the elite can build their full-spectrum prison matrix.  Let them try.  To paraphrase Victor Hugo, “No army can stop an idea whose time has come.”
Here are ten signs that the elite are losing control over the people:
1. Official lies no longer effective: The lies they tell simply don’t work anymore. There was a time when official lies, especially about war and peace, were believed. Because, after all, how evil would it be to lie about such things? Generally people want to believe they are being told the truth when life and death is at stake. The boy who cried wolf has cried one too many times. Even if they told the truth at this point, very few would believe them.
2. No confidence in politics: US politicians have a paltry approval rating. The trust in government is at all-time lows here and around the world. Mainstream polls show only 10% of the public has confidence in Congress. In other words, 90% don’t believe in them to be competent to govern.
Watch this Town Hall exchange below where a man threatens US Senator John McCain with arrest for treason to his face. This would have never happened just a year or two ago:
3. No confidence in media: The most recent polls show that 77% of the population no longer trusts corporate TV news. Is it any wonder why the establishment media failed to sell the lies about the alleged Syria chemical event?  With all their monopoly might over the airwaves, they can no longer claim that black is white simply because officialdom says so.
4. Bankers rejected: Hungary recently became the first country to follow Iceland’s lead by shedding international bankers (IMF) and is considering pursuing prosecution of past prime ministers who enslaved the people with debt.
Look for this trend to continue even if nations decide to default to break free.
5. Vatican abruptly cleaning up its act: Under the previous Pope, Pope Benedict, scandals erupted from the Vatican ranging from covering up pedophile priests to money laundering and fraud. Benedict, in an unprecedented move, abruptly retired to make way for a seemingly much more likable Pope Francis. Pope Francis by all measures is working furiously to reclaim the church’s peaceful and humble reputation. Whether this is genuine or a PR move, it’s telling that the church was forced into such a drastic turnaround to save itself from losing all credibility.
6. Mutiny among soldiers: Finally. Soldiers, who are outlawed from making political statements, are steadily speaking out against US military adventurism. As Einstein famously said “The pioneers of a warless world are the young men (and women) who refuse military service.”
7. Militarized police state: One of the darkest signs that the elite are losing their grip on power is the construction of the militarized police state specifically trained to combat domestic civil unrest. Local cops with tanks and other combat gear are working with Feds at Fusion centers, active Army units are on American soil for the first time in history, the NSA spy grid is being used by the IRS and DEA, and the elimination of due process for Americans under the NDAA are just some of the tyrannical moves made to secure the elite criminals from public backlash. They’re clearly scared, and they should be given what they’ve done to the American people and the Constitution.
8. Serious secession movements everywhere: A state seceding from a larger political entity used to be an ultra-fringe concept, until now. In America, secession movements are winning over the public in parts of Colorado and California. In Europe, serious secession movements are happening in Spain and Scotland, as well as several EU nations flirting with the idea of dropping out of the euro. Decentralization = Entropy!
9. GMO food being rejected everywhere: Control the food and you control the people. True in theory, but much more difficult in practice. GMO leaders like Monsanto are being exposed. All of their economic and political strength cannot defeat the spread of knowledge about the dangers of pesticide-soaked Frankenfoods. GMO fields are being burned in protest in America and around the world, informed nations continue to reject their products, and labeling laws are gaining traction.
10. Cannabis liberation: Many reading this will think marijuana legalization is a superficial development. However, it is a major signpost that the elite’s grip is fading.  Enormous resources have been spent to keep cannabis illegal. Cannabis has been a powerful medicine for physical, mental, and spiritual health throughout the ages. This single plant represents a huge threat to the power structures and their industries, hence its seemingly senseless illegality. The approaching global reversal of the tyrannical policy of prohibition is the first of many concessions to come.

Deal Or No Deal: John Kerry’s Historic Diplomatic “Mistake” Proves That Obama Does Not Want Peace

Deal Or No Deal: John Kerry’s Historic Diplomatic “Mistake” Proves That Obama Does Not Want Peace

Precious Little Girl Dismembered While She Is Still Alive By Obama’s Psychotic Syrian Rebels

hey America THIS  is what ALL you's nit~wit fucked in the heads  dummycocks & republipubes  have VOTED into the Offices of THIS once Great Country !      that's right look the fuck in the mirror !!!       i don't knows whats worse the ass pipes you vote for  or you's nattering ,goofy fucks THAT JUST fucking keep sending the lowest/basest  walking/talking ass spewing shit pipes  to D.C. (degenerate city )  & the best you's can fucking keep coming UP wit is ....... well i voted for the lesser of 2 evils  & you walk around like you fucking did something or you are something   & here's the kicker ..WHAT Good Decent Person on this Planet  ... would even want a vote from ya  :o     & you wonder what the fuck that "stuff"    that is raining down ALL over this Country  IS ?  & even  the fucks from  Nineveh  r looking up from hell & going holy fuck ! Precious Little Girl Dismembered While She Is Still Alive By Obama’s Psychotic Syrian Rebels

NSA spies reportedly exploited iPhone location bug not fixed until 2011

File gave detailed account of users' whereabouts over extended periods of time.

The latest revelation about the National Security Agency's (NSA) expansive surveillance program isn't really a revelation at all. It comes from Germany's Der Spiegel magazine, which reports that smartphones powered by Apple's iOS, Google's Android, and Blackberry's operating systems are among the devices government spies exploit when they want to intercept a target's communications.
Buried in Monday's ho-hum report, however, is this intriguing nugget:
The NSA analysts are especially enthusiastic about the geolocation data stored in smartphones and many of their apps, data that enables them to determine a user's whereabouts at a given time.
According to one presentation, it was even possible to track a person's whereabouts over extended periods of time, until Apple eliminated this "error" with version 4.3.3 of its mobile operating system and restricted the memory to seven days.
The lack of specifics in the article makes it hard identify the iOS bug, but it sure sounds like the one a pair of researchers reported in April 2011. It allowed anyone with physical access to an iPhone or iPad, or potentially a data backup of the device, to reconstruct a detailed account of the user's comings and goings, often down to the second, over an extended period of time. The geolocation data was stored in an easy-to-read file that was updated in real time, putting users at increased risk should their devices, computers, or backups ever fall into the hands of a hacker or government snoop who knew about the undocumented behavior.
In the weeks following the disclosure by researchers Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden, Apple defended the behavior, which was most likely intended to improve the performance of iPhones and iPads. Apple ultimately updated iOS to prevent it from storing such a detailed list of locations over such a long period of time. Version 4.3.3, according to Wikipedia, was released a month after the bug came to light. The changes included reducing the size of the "crowd-sourced location database," no longer backing it up to iTunes, and deleting it entirely when location services were turned off.
Is this the change that broke the hearts of NSA agents by preventing them from tracking the long-term movements of iPhone users? Probably. Researcher Warden confirmed to Ars that 4.3.3 was the release that closed the snooping hole he and Allan disclosed. But even if it's not, the geolocation caching behavior is a good example of the way even innocuous-sounding features designed to improve users' experiences can be used maliciously against them by adversaries. The Spiegel article goes on to say that NSA agents describe such attacks as exploiting the "carefree approach many users take to the device." One NSA document cited referred to the attitude as "nomophobia"—short for no mobile phobia—since the only thing agents perceived users fearing was the lack of connectivity.
After their discovery became public, Warden and Allan learned that forensic investigators had been exploiting the bug for years to dredge up the comings and goings of iPhone users involved in civil or criminal court cases.
"It's interesting to see the NSA was using it to snoop around, too," Warden said in a phone interview.

THE BONES OF GIANTS, PSEUDOSCIENCE, AND THE COVERT ANTIQUITIES WAR

Yesterday, you’ll recall, I blogged about the possibility that we are looking at a covert “antiquities war,” as various factions of the global elite seek to acquire ancient knowledge, and suppress public knowledge of it, for the purpose of engineering a false social reality and human history for public consumption, while in private and in secret, the same elite holds to a vastly different version of human history and cosmology. I also suggested yesterday that we might be looking at the post-war breakaway civilization’s emulation of the Nazi Ahnenerbediest, or at its actual postwar continuation.
This attempt to suppress “uncomfortable” archaeological data has been done by a variety of methods, most of which were documented – along with a vast catalogue of archaeological anomalies that “didn’t fit the public historical spin” – by Cremo and Thompson in their 900 page tome, Forbidden Archeology. One favorite method has been to accuse those who present unusual archaeological findings, or who maintain views in opposition to the standard model, as “pseudoscience.”
And in particular, this effort has concentrated itself around the occasional discovery of the bones of “giants,” taller than human remains of hominids or, in some cases, actual humans. In fact, in this respect, the coverup and “covert antiquities war” appears to have originated in the nineteenth century, for as I recounted in Genes, Giants, Monsters and Men, there are persistent rumors of the actual destruction of such remains.
But the stories of their discovery keep appearing, and usually in countries not entirely under the thumb of the Anglosphere oligarchs:
Giants in Loja – Ecuador
Of course, such stories and photos and can faked, photoshopped, and fed into the idea stream of the Internet by just about anybody. And in this case, the fact that this “skeleton” is now on display in an “ancient aliens” amusement park in Switzerland raises one’s suspicion meter into the red zone, and it should. It’s a convenient way to cast the whole subject into a dubious light.
What cannot, however, be so misdirected is the Ecuadorian broadcast itself, and that such bones were sent to the Smithsonian. So far, to my knowledge, the Smithsonian isn’t commenting.
But what also cannot be misdirected is the venue of their purported discovery: the “Gods’ cemetery,” a cemetery apparently full of such giant bones. In Ecuador…
…thousands of miles away from Mesopotamia, where one of its ancient texts referred to a time when “there were giants in the Earth.”
So why would the oligarchs of a breakaway civilization seek to recover such finds, then suppress public knowledge of their existence, and ridicule those who would maintain that they not only existed, but that there was a covert antiquities war taking place, a war that included the suppression of large scale public acknowledgement of their existence?
As I averred yesterday, one reason might be that they were fearful of a repeat of a Tower of Babel Moment of history, that, literally, they were afraid of yet another intervention from the “gods.” But another reason also comes to mind: when a civilization is in a state of collapse, and its elites know  it, one of the first things that gets done is the secreting of its archives and treasures, and the attempt to preserve knowledge for the future.
… and that, too, is what those ancient texts and esoteric traditions also suggest happened, long ago, in the High Antiquity of the Gods.

Read more: THE BONES OF GIANTS, PSEUDOSCIENCE, AND THE COVERT ANTIQUITIES WAR

Let's Start A War: These Politicians Will Meet in the Comfort and Safety of Washington to Decide the Fate of Millions

Let's Start A War: These Politicians Will Meet in the Comfort and Safety of Washington to Decide the Fate of Millions

Intercepts caught Assad rejecting requests to use chemical weapons, German paper says

Source: McclatchyDC
BERLIN — Syrian President Bashar Assad has repeatedly rejected requests from his field commanders for approval to use chemical weapons, according to a report this weekend in a German newspaper.
The report in Bild am Sonntag, which is a widely read and influential national Sunday newspaper, reported that the head of the German Foreign Intelligence agency, Gerhard Schindler, last week told a select group of German lawmakers that intercepted communications had convinced German intelligence officials that Assad did not order or approve what is believed to be a sarin gas attack on Aug. 21 that killed hundreds of people in Damascus’ eastern suburbs.
The Obama administration has blamed the attack on Assad. The evidence against Assad was described over the weekend as common sense by White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
“The material was used in the eastern suburbs of Damascus that have been controlled by the opposition for some time,” he said. “It was delivered by rockets, rockets that we know the Assad regime has, and we have no indication that the opposition has.”
Russia has questioned that logic, announcing last week that in July it filed a 100-page long “technical and scientific” report on an alleged March 19 chemical weapons attack on a suburb of Aleppo that it says implicates rebel fighters.
A U.N. team dispatched to Syria to investigate the March 19 attack was sent to the scene of the Aug. 21 incident. The samples it collected are currently being analyzed in Europe at labs certified by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the international agency that monitors compliance with chemical weapons bans.
The German intelligence briefing to lawmakers described by Bild am Sonntag fits neither narrative precisely. The newspaper’s article said that on numerous occasions in recent months, the German intelligence ship named Oker, which is off the Syrian coast, has intercepted communications indicating that field officers have contacted the Syrian presidential palace seeking permission to use chemical weapons and have been turned down.
The article added that German intelligence does not believe Assad sanctioned the alleged attack on August 21.
Last week, the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel, also citing a briefing for German legislators, said that the Oker had intercepted a phone call between a commander from the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah and an official at an unidentified Iranian embassy saying that Assad had ordered the Aug. 21 chemical attack out of anger. The Hezbollah commander called the attack a “huge mistake,” Der Spiegel said. It was not clear if the two news accounts were based on the same or different briefings.
Assad told American journalist Charlie Rose in an interview to be broadcast in its entirety Monday night on PBS that “there has been no evidence that I used chemical weapons against my own people.”
Even if Assad didn’t approve the use of chemical weapons, he’d likely be held responsible for its use by a rogue unit within Syria’s security forces.
David Butter, a Syria expert with the British think tank Chatham House, called the German intelligence “an interesting distraction, but nothing more right now.”
“To build a case that Assad had no role in the use of chemical weapons, we’d need a lot more evidence,” he said. “And, of course, as head of state, if a war crime has been committed by his regime, he is ultimately responsible.”
The German intelligence report would seem to fit the European mood of the moment, however, that U.S. military action must wait for the results of the U.N. investigation. “What happened is all very murky,” Butler said. “Let’s wait for the United Nations investigation before talking about the next step.”
European foreign ministers on Saturday issued a statement calling the Aug. 21 attack a “war crime,” but said nothing should be done without U.N. approval. New opinion polls over the weekend in France, Germany and Great Britain showed strong disapproval of military action in Syria. The British poll, done for The Sunday Telegraph, indicated only 19 percent of the population backs the idea of military action with the United States, while 63 percent oppose it. The polls in France and Germany showed similar margins of opposition.
Meanwhile, a new tabulation of the dead from the Aug. 21 incident raised more questions about Obama administration officials’ account of what took place.
The Damascus Center for Human Rights Studies, an anti-Assad group, said that it had been able to document 678 dead from the attacks, including 106 children and 157 women. The report said 51 of the dead, or 7 percent, were fighters from the Free Syrian Army, the designation used to describe rebels that are affiliated with the Supreme Military Council, which the U.S. backs.
The report said that the organization was certain that more than 1,600 died in the attack, but that it had not been able to confirm the higher number.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has said 1,429 people died Aug. 21, included 426 children, but has not said how the United States obtained the figures. Other estimates have ranged from a low of “at least 281” by the French government to 502, including “tens” of rebel fighters and about 100 children, by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a London-based group that tracks violence in Syria.

Israel’s secret intel unit spawns high-tech tycoons

Source: UPI
The Israeli military’s top-secret Unit 8200, the Jewish state’s equivalent of the U.S. National Security Agency, has spawned a generation of high-tech start-ups and more technology millionaires than many business schools, and these days the cyber security sector is booming.
Unit 8200 is now the Israeli military’s biggest branch in manpower terms. It has grown swiftly in recent years as cyberwarfare has become one of the major security threats to military organizations and industrialized states whose vital infrastructure is vulnerable to cyberattack.
But Unit 8200 remains the most secretive of Israel’s military units. Even the name of its commander is a state secret, as is its annual budget .
It has a major, highly secure base in the Negev Desert south of Tel Aviv. But little is known about its work in what’s known as signals intelligence, intercepting and analyzing other forces’ communications and data traffic from mobile phones chatter and emails to flight paths and electronic signals.
Unlike other branches of the Israeli military, virtually all its research and development is conducted in-house by its huge cadre of engineers, programmers and technicians.
Unit 8200 headhunts the brightest students from high schools and colleges, and there seems to be no shortage of volunteers.
So it’s no surprise that many veterans of Unit 8200 — invariably known as “eight-two hundred” — have been behind a host of successful high-tech start-ups in the commercial sector after they leave the service.
These enterprises provide a unique contribution to Israel’s high-tech sector, widely recognized as one of the most advanced in the world.
The country’s high-tech exports total an estimated $25 billion a year, a quarter of Israel’s exports.
The high-tech sector currently boasts 5,000 companies that employ 230,000 people and earn
Recent Israeli success in the field include the Zisapel brothers, Yehuda and Zonhar, who sold and floated a dozen companies for hundreds of millions of dollars; and Yair Cohen, a former brigadier general who once commanded Unit 8200, who heads the intelligence cyberdivision of Elbit Systems, a major defense company.
Then there’s Aharon Zeevi Farkash, another former Unit 8200 chief, founder and chief executive of FST21, which employs a mix of technologies, combining hardware and software to suit specific needs that are in the hands of young men and women hardly out of their teens.
Yossi Vardi, who founded Israel’s first software company in 1969, says “more high-tech millionaires have been created from 8200 than from any business school in the country.”
Israeli tech firms like Nice, Converse and Check Point were all set up by Unit 8200 alumni or based on technology developed by the unit which cyber insiders say is in some cases decades ahead of the U.S. and Europe
A measure of these companies’ success is that many are bought out by the titans of the field.
IBM announced in August that it’s buying Trusteer, a privately owned Israeli cloud-based cybersecurity software provider whose customers include many of the largest banks in the United States and Britain.
The terms of the deal have not been disclosed. But the Financial Times reported that IBM, which will form a cybersecurity software laboratory in Israel with more than 200 researchers from both companies, is believed to be forking up $800 million-$1 billion for Trusteer.
The Israeli outfit says its equipment can identify security threats that escape more traditional security software.
Trusteer software is designed to help ensure that bank customers can safely transfer funds on mobile devices by detecting malware that can infect a smartphone, allowing the bank to prevent fraudulent transactions taking place.
“The way organizations protect data are quickly evolving,” observed Trusteer’s chief executive, Mickey Boodaei, who founded the firm in 2006.
“As attacks become more sophisticated, traditional approaches to securing enterprise and mobile data are no longer valid.”
Unit 8200′s success as an incubator for Israel’s high-tech venture is likely to grow since under the military’s new strategic plan it’s downsizing conventional land, sea and air forces to meet the challenges of a new era of warfare with more agile, technology-oriented forces.
Farkash says 8200′s alumni are so successful because its organizational ethos encourages out-of-the-box thinking.
“We’re very tolerant of mistakes,” he explains. “It’s impossible to be creative when fear leads you.”