---BREAKAWAY CIVILIZATION ---ALTERNATIVE HISTORY---NEW BUSINESS MODELS--- ROCK & ROLL 'S STRANGE BEGINNINGS---SERIAL KILLERS---YEA AND THAT BAD WORD "CONSPIRACY"--- AMERICANS DON'T EXPLORE ANYTHING ANYMORE.WE JUST CONSUME AND DIE.---
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Saturday, October 26, 2013
IRS paid $110 billion in bogus tax credits to the wrong people
The Internal Revenue Service has a hard time making
friends, largely on account of it being the federal agency that collects
trillions of dollars in taxes from Americans every year. But for a
select few, the IRS has been nothing but generous as of late.
Perhaps too generous, in fact: According to the results of a
government-issued audit released this week by the Treasury
Department, IRS officials have erroneously handed out over $110
billion in tax credit to undeserving recipients during the last
decade.
The report — accurately titled “The Internal Revenue Service is
not in Compliance with Executive Order 13520 to Reduce Improper
Payments” — was completed in late August but only uncovered this
week.
In that audit, Treasury officials admit that the IRS has
continuously ignored warnings to abide by a 2009 executive order
which mandates the agency stop handing out improper Earned Income
Tax Credit (EITC) payments: refundable credits given out by the
government to low- and medium-income individuals and families.
President Barack Obama signed Executive Order 13520 four years
ago “in the interest of reducing payment errors and eliminating
waste, fraud and abuse,” and in doing so ordered the IRS to make
sure more Americans were aware of the program while also cracking
down on bogus payments. Years later though, the new report
indicates that Uncle Sam is wasting billions of dollars annually
by handing out money to American taxpayers not entirely deserving
of a few extra dollars.
According to the report, 21 to 25 percent of the ETIC payments
made during the last fiscal year were done so in error. Thiis
translates to roughly $13.6 billion in bogus claims under the
EITC program in just FY2012, and as much as ten times that — or
$132.6 billion — during the last decade, including in years when
a massive recession ravaged the American economy and
congressional leaders scrambled time and time again to increase
the country’s borrowing limit.
“The IRS must do a better job of reining in improper payments
in this and in other
programs
,” J. Russell George, the
agency’s inspector general, said in the report.
In response, the IRS said it “appreciates the inspector
general’s acknowledgement of all our work to implement processes
that identify and prevent improper EITC payments.”
The IRS claims on its part that it protected approximately $4
billion in erroneous EITC payments from being handed out during
the last fiscal year, but opponents are quick to criticize the
$100-billion-plus that was improperly given away during the last
10 years.
“Although significant amounts are being protected, the IRS has
made little improvement in reducing improper EITC payments as a
whole since it has been required to report estimates of these
payments to Congress,” the audit reads.
The report is quickly making waves in Washington, and Sen. Tom
Coburn (R-Oklahoma) issued a statement saying, “The waste
outlined in this report — more than $13 billion a year — equals
or exceeds the annual budgets of some federal agencies.”
Indeed, the $13 billion wasted during just the last fiscal year
exceeds the entire operating budget of both the Environmental
Protection Agency and the Department of Labor.
“Before we ask taxpayers to send even more of their own money
to Washington, we must do more to prevent these egregious
examples of waste,” said Sen. Coburn.
“That the IRS can’t figure out how to rein in the improper
Earned Income Tax Credit payments doesn’t bode well for the $1.1
trillion in ObamaCare subsidies,” Sen. Orin Hatch (R-Utah),
the leading Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, added in
response to the report.
Nearly 60 top corporations used loophole to avoid paying billions in US taxes
Verizon and News Corp. are among the dozens of
companies listed on the Standard & Poor’s 500 that paid a zero
percent tax rate in the last year. The so-called effective tax rate is
how investors explain the tax a company pays compared to its profit.
While it is not illegal in any way for major companies to pay a
zero percent tax rate - or in some cases even less - Friday’s
analysis by USA Today does highlight some of the creative methods
those corporations use to avoid dipping into their profit
margins, and how that may ultimately impact national policy on
corporate taxation.
The top federal income tax rate currently sits at 35 percent, a
number that has been the source of public frustration for many
company executives. Yet Seagate (a data storage manufacturer with
a market value of $15.9 billion), Public Storage (the largest
self-storage firm in the world with a $29.5 billion market
value), and others pay a lower tax rate than most individual
middle-class American families.
“Investors hope company management is doing everything they
can do to generate profit, legally,” Nick Yee of Gradient
Analytics told USA Today. “But the tax code is gray, and
there’s often no set guidance.”
Other notable companies on the list include MetLife (worth $53.9
billion), Regeneron Pharmaceuticals ($29.6 billion), Ventas
($19.3 billion), and Agilent Technologies ($16.9 billion).
Transferring payments to offshore accounts is one of the most
popular ways for companies to avoid heavy tax burdens. For
example, a company could organize foreign subsidiaries that make
raw materials in countries with low tax rates. Executives would
then buy the material from a foreign supplier at a price far
above cost, according to USA Today, thus keeping a large
profit.
The effective income and payroll tax rate for an American family
that earns an average $64,500 a year stands at 12.7 percent,
according to payroll tax statistics released in 2012.
The current federal tax code that applies to the corporations in
question even allows them to avoid paying taxes in years when
they earn a profit.
Sending finances offshore has become so commonplace that US
officials have sought to work with international leaders to close
the loophole. Tax avoidance cost the US approximately $300
billion last year and although much of that sum comes from
individuals, cracking down on corporations could prove difficult
because transfers of this sort are completely legal.
This tax analysis comes just months after a congressional
investigation found that Apple had set up a complicated web of
subsidiaries to avoid paying any taxes. Lawmakers found that some
of Apple’s subsidiaries listed zero employees and were
effectively stateless entities run from the company’s offices in
California.
“There is a technical term economists like to use for behavior
like this,” Edward Kleinbard, a former staff director at the
Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation, told the New York
Times in May. “Unbelievable chutzpah.”
Mike and Chantel Sacket,
from Priest Lake, Idaho, were preparing an 0.63 acre plot of land for
the construction of their new home when an order by the EPA was issued
to remove piles of fill material and replant the vegetation that they
had removed from their property. The couple paid $23,000 for their
property.
The order from the EPA was issued after the couple had gone through the
process of acquiring all of the necessary permits to begin construction.
Failure to comply with the EPA order would have resulted in a daily
fine of up to $37,500.
The Idaho couple sued, in an attempt to prove that their land did not
meet the criteria for being declared a wetland by the EPA; however, the
lower court refused to hear the case. Fortunately, the Supreme Court
sided with Mike and Chantel as well as several other property owners who
had been the victims of EPA tyranny. The details of the case are
provided here.
Eroding Property Rights - EPA's Expanding Authority Would Control Water - Judge Andrew Napolitano
What seemed like a victory for property owners against the EPA may prove
to be short-lived. The EPA is back and they are back with a renewed
vengeance. Under the Clean Water Restoration Act, the EPA is in control
of all “navigable waters.” On the surface, the term “navigable waters”
would seem to provide some measure of protection to the public from
invasive EPA enforcement by placing some reasonable limitations on the
EPA’s regulatory power. Alas, that is proving not to be the case.
The Clean Water Restoration Act
The Clean Water Restoration Act goes far beyond the original intent of
the law which was the protection of waterfowl and the conservation of
wetlands. The proverbial fly in the ointment has its roots in the recent
removal of the term “navigable waters”.
Under the new guidelines, if you use well water, the EPA has
jurisdiction over your property and can even forcibly evict you and your
family. If it rained overnight, or you have runoff from a recent
snowfall, and there is any resulting puddles on your property, this can
result in the loss of the free use of your property. You are also
subject to eviction from your land if your property resides above an
underground water aquifer.
A Thinly Veiled Excuse
In reality, this law has nothing to with preserving water and is simply a
thinly veiled excuse to separate as many Americans from their land as
possible. This strategy is straight out of the Agenda 21 playbook and it
is being used to attack private property rights throughout the West.
This strategy dovetails nicely with something I recently wrote about
with regard to the fact that many state governments in the West are
prohibiting the trapping and use of rainwater and the reuse of farm
irrigation water. The last thing the Federal government wants is to
allow Americans the right to fully control their property and to
experience any kind of water independence.
The underlying intent of these policies is to attack America by lashing
out at the food producers of America. The Wetlands legislation is being
used to force the food producers of this country off of their land as
the EPA begins to assess farmers $37,500 dollar, per day, fines for
having any kind of standing water on their properties. The EPA is all
too happy to provide relief for farmers and ranchers and acquire their
land to help these victims of federal tyranny to get out from underneath
their fines.
Most rural communities understand what is happening to them, but these
events are receiving almost no attention except for the exceptional news
blurb. The most dramatic reporting on this event occurred in the past
week on FOX News in which Judge Andrew Napolitano appeared on FOX and
recounted many of the claims which I have identified here.
A number of other water issues have been the subject of recent Congressional oversight
and subsequent legislation. Some legislators have been highly critical
of recent regulatory initiatives which have abused the personal property
rights of individual farmers, ranchers and homeowners. As of this date,
despite some scant interest in EPA abuses, Congress has failed to act
against the EPA for Fifth Amendment violations of property rights.
The True Intentions of the EPA
There is one person who has almost more water than God, but he is not
and he never will be regulated by the EPA and his name is T. Boone
Pickens.
Pickens could be found guilty of diverting rainwater to a house of
prostitution and he will never run afoul of the EPA and its enforcement
army from the Army Corps of Engineers, because Pickens is part of the
plot to hand off the nation’s water supply to private corporate
interests which will be beyond the reach of the EPA.
America is the victim of a three pronged attack which is designed to
control all water: (1) Through the Clean Water Act, the EPA controls all
water; (2) As a result of controlling all water, the EPA will come to
naturally control all food production; (3) Since all property has some
degree of water on it, the EPA is, in effect, the draconian landlord
over everyone’s property.
Rules for Thee but Not for Me
That one person which is not impacted by EPA regulations and that person
controls as much water as he wants. That infamous corporate raider and
robber baron of the oil industry, T. Boone Pickens, is leading the
charge to unscrupulously enrich himself as he leads the global
depopulation efforts to create a series of artificially contrived water
shortages. Pickens was one of the first to rush to capitalize on the
impending water shortage by his insidious acquisition of the largest
underground aquifer in the US, the Ogallala Aquifer, containing a
quadrillion gallons of water, This massive underground reservoir extends
from Texas to South Dakota.
In
Roberts County, TX., Pickens has purchased nearly 70,000 acres, as well
as the water rights to personally remove up to half of the Ogallala
Aquifer of which he plans to sell back to nearby residents in order to
enrich himself. Much of this aquifer extends into prime farm land
located in America’s bread basket. One man, T. Boone Pickens, is
acquiring the ability to turn the American heartland into a dust bowl.
Pickens will soon have the political power to charge so much for water,
that farmers will be forced to abandon their farms and ranches in a Hunger Games
rendition in which government sponsored interests will eventually
become the sole purveyor of the nation’s food and water supply as the
anti-humanist, Pickens, makes more money from water than he ever did
with oil.
In order to acquire the water and expand his control over the Ogallala Aquifer, Pickens needed more political power. In 2006, Pickens bought off the Texas State Legislature for $1.2 billion. This purchase of water-related law making power has allowed Pickens the ability to do accomplish four goals:
(1) He created an eight-acre town and an accompanying local government,
and subsequently made his tiny municipality into a powerful Water
Supply District; (2) As such, Pickens automatically acquired the right
to issue tax-free bonds and thereby, giving himself the lucrative
benefit of borrowing at a tremendous discount; (3) Now operating as a
public entity, Pickens is armed with the power of eminent domain which
will allow him to expand his water acquisition potential in which he
bullies local residents, along the aquifer, to sell their properties for
pennies on the dollar; (4) Pickens used his 1.2 billion dollar bribe
money to get the Texas legislature to pay for a 250 foot wide water
pipeline corridor all the way to Dallas where Pickens will make an
estimated yearly profit of $165 million at taxpayer expense. Pickens has
become the poster child for the phrase “crony capitalism.”
According to Business Week,
Pickens is now the number one owner of water in the United States. He
will soon possess the ability to create a waterless wasteland through
the heartland of America and who is going to stop him, Obama or the
corrupt Texas State Legislature?
Pickens isn’t content with his new-found power over Texas water
supplies. Pickens is in the process of greatly expanding his control
over water as he petitioned Congress
and the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee to expand his
private/public water district’s power of eminent domain and
right-of-way, so that he can operate across state lines as well. If this
is fully granted, Pickens will control all water between Texas and
South Dakota. Pickens is also in the process of doubling down as he has
added his previous wind projects to the water district by proposing a
vast $12-billion wind farm,
to sit on the same land he is acquiring for his water pipeline. The
cost of the water pipeline is estimated at $1.5 billion, which is being
financed at taxpayers’ expense through bonds and low-interest loans.
Pickens told Business Week that he is only planning on selling surplus water, but according to the United Nations
research and scientific studies report, nearly two-thirds of the entire
population inhabiting the planet will face severe, life-threatening
water shortages by the year 2025. So, Mr. Pickens, what surplus could
you be talking about? And you only thought you had to worry about Obama
collapsing the economy through his socialist policies.
Every bit of the Pickens plan violates the both the spirit and the
letter of the law with regard to the EPA’s claimed right regulate all
water. Pickens is not, and will not meet any EPA resistance.
Pickens Is Not Alone
The former CEO of Nestle, Peter Brabeck, does not believe that the common man has an inherent right to water. Brabeck stated in an interview for a documentary We Feed The World,
that he believes water should only be something only the wealthy have
access to. This is the same Nestle and Peter Brabeck which Jesse Ventura
Conspiracy Theoryepisode
“Blue Gold” featured in Ventura’s show about this rogue corporation. In
the Ventura program, he exposed Nestle for bribing public officials in
order to be able to take out massive amounts of water from the Great
Lakes and sell it to countries such as China.
Of course it has been well-chronicled that the Bush family is moving to acquire massive amounts of water in
South America including the continent’s larger underground water
aquifer. The Bush family has built an expansive ranch on 100,000+ acres
with the labor provided by the Army Corps of Engineers in another
example of crony capitalism.
Conclusion
It is quite clear that while the EPA is moving towards the control of
water, food and property rights, thus paving the way for globalist crony
capitalists to obtain control over the nation's water and food supply,
as well as usher in a society which has no private property rights.
It is also becoming increasingly clear that the globalists are buying up
our water rights and are planning to sell it back to us at exorbitant
rates. In this Hunger Games scenario, the elite will one day
control all water, food and property rights and can, therefore, hold
humanity hostage in servitude to the whims of the global elite.
Dave is an award winning psychology, statistics and research
professor, a college basketball coach, a mental health counselor, a
political activist and writer who has published dozens of editorials and
articles in several publications such as Freedoms Phoenix, News With Views and The Arizona Republic.
The Common Sense Show
features a wide variety of important topics that range from the loss of
constitutional liberties, to the subsequent implementation of a police
state under world governance, to exploring the limits of human
potential. The primary purpose of The Common Sense Show is to provide
Americans with the tools necessary to reclaim both our individual and
national sovereignty.
A new kind of antibiotic has been developed by researchers at Oregon
State University. The new antibiotics are called PPMOs, which stand for
peptide-conjugated phosphorodiamidate morpholino oligomers. They are
“a synthetic analog of DNA or RNA that has the ability to silence the
expression of specific genes.” (1)
The way that PPMO antibiotics will work is to, “specifically target the
underlying genes of a bacterium.” In plain English, PPMOs will
genetically modify bacteria.
This may not sound like a horrible thing on initial glance. Bacteria
are generally thought of as evil (soap commercials have conditioned us
all), something to fight because some bacteria can make people sick and
even kill them if their body is overwhelmed by “bad” bacteria. However,
bacteria and the other single-celled organisms that make up the human
microbiome are intimate parts of each human being.
Per the Human Microbiome Project:
The healthy adult body hosts ten times as many
microbial cells as human cells, including bacteria, archaea, viruses,
and eukaryotic microbes resident on nearly every body surface. The
metagenome carried collectively by these microbial communities dwarfs
the human genome in size, and their influences on normal development,
diet and obesity, immunity, and disease are under active research. (2)
The average 200 pound human body contains 6 pounds of microbiome organisms, including several billion bacteria (3).
These bacteria act symbiotically with us, helping to digest food,
extract vitamins and other nutrients from food, regulate the immune
system and even contribute to each individual’s personality. Per an
article published in Molecular Psychology, “CNS neurotransmission can be profoundly disturbed by the absence of a normal gut microbiota.” (4) Multiple neurochemicals are produced by gut bacteria, including 95% of the serotonin in each human body (5).
Studies of mice have shown that behavioral changes can be triggered by
changes in the gut bacteria and it has been observed that people with
Crohn’s Disease and other GI disorders often suffer from anxiety and
depression. The health of each person’s microbiome is intimately
connected to both their physical and the mental health.
The bacteria that compose our microbiome work so synergistically with
our human cells that the difference between “us” and “the bacteria” is
difficult to decipher. Where do “we” begin and “they” end? If all of
the bacteria in a person’s microbiome were killed off, that person would
die. Bacteria are an intimate and important part of “us.” In
genetically modifying “them,” are we genetically modifying “us?” How
could genetically modified bacteria affect the balance of the human
microbiome? How could they affect the bodily systems that the
microbiome controls? How could a GM bacteria adversely affect human
health including personality and behavior?
One of many other things to consider is that mitochondria, the energy
centers of our cells, are very similar in structure and design to
bacteria. (6) Mitochondrial DNA is also much more vulnerable to environmental toxins than the rest of the human DNA. (7)
Could PPMOs (or other drugs that genetically modify bacteria) modify
human mitochondria? If so, what are the consequences of having
genetically modified mitochondria? One consequence is that humans truly
would be genetically modified. Perhaps that should be taken into
consideration before developing drugs that genetically modify bacteria.
There
are thousands of medical and ethical questions that should be asked
about the development of drugs that genetically modify bacteria. Sadly,
I suspect that many people will look the other way, assuming that PPMOs
are just another antibiotic that are as innocuous as penicillin, rather
than asking the really difficult questions that should be asked before
our mitochondrial DNA is permanently and irreversibly altered. I
suspect that the questions about whether or not antibiotics that alter
the human microbiome should be created or not will not be asked though,
because human mitochondrial DNA has been being altered and damaged by a
certain class of antibiotics, fluoroquinolones, for years without anyone
saying a peep.
Genetic Modification via Antibiotics is Already Occurring
Fluoroquinolone antibiotics, more popularly known as Cipro
(Ciprofloxacin), Levaquin (Levofloxacin), Avelox (Moxifloxacin), Floxin
(Ofloxacin) and a few other less commonly used ones, are topoisomerase
interrupters. They unravel bacterial DNA and lead to apoptosis,
programmed cell death. This video explains how they work:
Fluoroquinolones: Mechanisms of Action and Resistance
The chemical backbone of fluroquinolone antibiotics, nalidixic acid, was developed in 1962 by George Lesher. (8)
They became popular starting in the 1980s when pharmaceutical
companies pressured the FDA to accept them as a “first line of defense”
antibiotic despite the fact that they had shown to be toxic to
mammalian cells. They increased in popularity after the 2001 anthrax
scare. They are used to treat urinary tract infections, sinus
infections, bronchial infections, strep throat, etc. despite the fact
that the side effects include psychosis (9)
and destruction of every tendon in the body. A side-effect that is
lightly referred to as “tendinitis” on the warning label. (A more
complete list of effects of fluoroquinolones can be found on www.ciproispoison.com.
The person who wrote that list of things that happened to him as a
result of taking Cipro was a happy, healthy, employed 31 year old when
he took Cipro. He is now disabled.)
Multiple studies have shown that quinolones/fluoroquinolones adduct to bacterial DNA. (10)(11)
This means that they attach to and change DNA, that the DNA has altered
molecules hooked onto it and that all duplicate versions of the cells
have been altered. An example of another chemical that adducts to DNA
is Agent Orange.
Some DNA tests performed on people who have experienced severe adverse
reactions to fluoroquinolone antibiotics have shown that the
quinolone/fluoroquinolone molecules have adducted to their human DNA,
attaching to and changing their DNA into perpetuity. (As cells
replicate, the altered DNA replicates too.) A DNA Adduct Mass
Spectrogram Analysis showed that the quinolone/fluoroquinolone molecules
had attached to every cell in the subjects’ bodies, not just the
bacteria that make up their microbiome; the drug adducted to their DNA,
to THEM.
They, along with thousands of other people who have had an adverse
reaction to a fluoroquinolone, have been genetically modified by an
antibiotic.
A
large portion of those who have been genetically modified by a
fluoroquinolone antibiotic have been subjected to irreversible damage to
their DNA for no sensible reason at all. Fluoroquinolone antibiotics
are given out to treat benign infections like sinus and urinary tract
infections, that can be treated with other, safer antibiotics. A 2011
study (12)
found that 39% of patients given fluoroquinolone antibiotics were given
them unnecessarily (and the necessity of them was determined without it
being taken into consideration that DNA damage can be done by these
drugs as this fact is not acknowledged, despite the peer reviewed
studies noted above.)
26.9 million prescriptions for fluoroquinolone antibiotics were dispensed in America in 2011 alone (13).
Similarly massive numbers of prescriptions of these drugs have been
dispensed each year since Bayer patented Cipro in 1983. Humanity has
not stopped existing since these DNA modifying drugs were introduced to
the market, but before you find that to be reassuring, the following
should be noted.
An article in the September, 2013 issue of Nature entitled
“Topoisomerases facilitate transcription of long genes linked to autism”
(14)
noted that, “Our data suggest that chemicals or genetic mutations that
impair topoisomerases, and possibly other components of the
transcription elongation machinery that interface with topoisomerases,
have the potential to profoundly affect the expression of long ASD
candidate genes.” Fluoroquinolone antibiotics impair topoisomerases. A
post about this is on Collective Evolution – (Source)
Anthraquinone was found in the subject who underwent The DNA
testing. Anthraquinone causes an inflammatory process within the body
and causes pain, burning, and hurting sensations, a condition that is
often confused with fibromyalgia. (15)
Fluoroquinolone antibiotics have been shown to damage mitochondria (16)(17)(18)
and “Damage to mitochondria is now understood to play a role in the
pathogenesis of a wide range of seemingly unrelated disorders such as
schizophrenia, bipolar disease, dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, epilepsy,
migraine headaches, strokes, neuropathic pain, Parkinson’s disease,
ataxia, transient ischemic attack, cardiomyopathy, coronary artery
disease, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, retinitis pigmentosa,
diabetes, hepatitis C, and primary biliary cirrhosis.” (19)
So, if you’re wondering what happens when humans are genetically
modified, the experiment is being conducted as you read this post.
Since fluoroquinolone antibiotics have been popularized, rates of
autism, schizophrenia, bipolar disease, dementia, Alzheimer’s disease,
epilepsy, migraine headaches, strokes, neuropathic pain, Parkinson’s
disease, ataxia, transient ischemic attack, cardiomyopathy, coronary
artery disease, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, retinitis
pigmentosa, diabetes, hepatitis C, and primary biliary cirrhosis have
risen substantially.
Perhaps the question of the intelligence of altering human DNA with
antibiotics can be questioned before PPMOs are introduced to the market,
as opposed to 30+ years afterward, as is the case with fluoroquinolone
antibiotics. It would show wisdom and desire for sustainability as a
species. Unfortunately, neither wisdom nor sustainability are valued at
the moment and I suspect that the travesty of people being genetically
altered by fluoroquinolones will continue and that the travesty of
people being altered by PPMOs will begin.
Post Script:
If
enough people gathered together, got their DNA tested, got those test
results interpreted by a Toxicologist, and appropriate research was
published on the results, this atrocity could stop. Please note that
both Bayer (producer of Cipro and Avelox) and Johnson and Johnson
(producer of Levaquin), and even the generic producers of these drugs,
have very deep pockets.
Mol Psychiatry. 2013 Jun;18(6):666-73. doi: 10.1038/mp.2012.77. Epub
2012 Jun 12. The microbiome-gut-brain axis during early life regulates
the hippocampal serotonergic system in a sex-dependent manner. Clarke G,
Grenham S, Scully P, Fitzgerald P, Moloney RD, Shanahan F, Dinan TG,
Cryan JF. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22688187
Carpenter, Siri. “That Gut Feeling: With a sophisticated neural
network transmitting messages from trillions of bacteria, the brain in
your gut exerts a powerful influence over the one in your head, new
research suggests.” Monitor on Psychology. American Psychological
Association. September 2012, Vol 43, No. 8 Print version: page 50 http://www.apa.org/monitor/2012/09/gut-feeling.aspx
Arkady B. Khodursky and Nicholas R. Cozzarelli. “The Mechanism of
Inhibition of Topoisomerase IV by Quinolone Antibacterials” The Journal
of Biological Chemistry. August 5, 1998. http://www.jbc.org/content/273/42/27668.full
Nicole L Werner, Michelle T Hecker, Ajay K Sethi and Curtis J
Donskey. “Unnecessary use of fluoroquinolone antibiotics in
hospitalized patients.” BMC Infectious Diseases. Volume 11. http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2334/11/187
“FDA Drug Safety Communication: FDA requires label changes to warn
of risk for possibly permanent nerve damage from antibacterial
fluoroquinolone drugs taken by mouth or by injection” 08/15/2013 http://www.fda.gov/downloads/Drugs/DrugSafety/UCM365078.pdf
Ian F. King, Chandri N. Yandava, Angela M. Mabb, Jack S. Hsiao,
Hsien-Sung Huang, Brandon L. Pearson, J. Mauro Calabrese, Joshua
Starmer, Joel S. Parker, Terry Magnuson, Stormy J.
Chamberlain, Benjamin D. Philpot & Mark J. Zylka. “Topoisomerases
facilitate transcription of long genes linked to autism.” Nature 501,
58–62 (05 September 2013) doi:10.1038/nature12504 Received 17 January
2013 Accepted 24 July 2013 Published online 28 August 2013 http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v501/n7465/full/nature12504.html
J W Lawrence, D C Claire, V Weissig and T C Rowe. “Delayed
cytotoxicity and cleavage of mitochondrial DNA in ciprofloxacin-treated
mammalian cells.” Molecular Pharmacology November 1996 vol. 50 no. 5
1178-1188 http://m.molpharm.aspetjournals.org/content/50/5/1178.abstract
Lisa Bloomquist - I am a Colorado native that enjoys the
mountains, pilates, blogging and my cat. I was severely adversely
effected by Cipro in 2011. Before I took Cipro I was in perfect health.
Since those fateful pills in 2011, I have been fighting for my health.
Most of my health has returned and now I am screaming about the dangers
of fluoroquinolones so that others can learn from my experience. I will
continue to scream until those in the medical professions start paying
attention to their Hippocratic Oath, proper informed consent is
established for administration of these drugs, and they stop giving them
to children. This article first appeared at Collective-Evolution.
how long American ..are we gonna ALLOW this trash to just keep pissing OUR $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ ...away ! how fucking long ?
Michelle Obama’s Princeton classmate is executive at company that built Obamacare website
10/25/2013
Patrick Howley
Reporter
First Lady
Michelle Obama’s Princeton classmate is a top executive at the company
that earned the contract to build the failed Obamacare website. Toni Townes-Whitley, Princeton class of ’85, is senior vice president at CGI Federal, which earned the no-bid contract to build the $678 million Obamacare enrollment website at Healthcare.gov. CGI Federal is the U.S. arm of a Canadian company. Townes-Whitley and her Princeton classmate Michelle Obama are both members of the Association of Black Princeton Alumni. Toni Townes ’85 is a onetime policy analyst
with the General Accounting Office and previously served in the Peace
Corps in Gabon, West Africa. Her decision to return to work, as an
African-American woman, after six years of raising kids was applauded by a Princeton alumni publication in 1998 George Schindler,
the president for U.S. and Canada of the Canadian-based CGI Group, CGI
Federal’s parent company, became an Obama 2012 campaign donor after his
company gained the Obamacare website contract. As reported by the Washington Examiner in early October, the
Department of Health and Human Services reviewed only CGI’s bid for the
Obamacare account. CGI was one of 16 companies qualified under the Bush
administration to provide certain tech services to the federal
government. A senior vice president for the company testified this week
before The House Committee on Energy and Commerce that four companies
submitted bids, but did not name those companies or explain why only
CGI’s bid was considered. On the government end, construction of the disastrous Healthcare.gov website was overseen by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), a division of longtime failed website-builder Kathleen Sebelius’ Department of Health and Human Services. Update: The Daily Caller repeatedly contacted CGI
Federal for comment. After publication of this article, the company
responded that there would be “nothing coming out of CGI for the record
or otherwise today.” The company did however insist that The Daily
Caller include a reference to vice president Cheryl Campbell’s House
testimony. This has been included as a courtesy to the company.
It happens every once in a while. When you come across stories and news
articles that are so unique you wonder to yourself, this has got to be a
first. Or perhaps you hear an odd story or even a plot in a movie or
real-life scenario when you say to yourself, ‘that’s incredible, this is
no doubt a first’, or ‘I’ve never seen such a thing’. It’s that feeling
of being blind sided with a fresh new item you are pretty sure you’ve
never seen or heard about before. That feeling occurred to me with a
recent article I came across.
Knowing the global government agenda and knowing the impetus of their
long-term plans for control and knowing how dependent they are on the
controlled media, didn’t prevent me from gasping at the level of
propaganda in this article. Despite knowing that no level of propaganda
is unobtainable to those pushing for a new world order of human slavery,
still I was taken aback in admiration of this possibly new or perhaps
recycled form of propaganda.
My admitted state of ignorance about this level of
propaganda notwithstanding, there it was, an article about the
“perceived American inaction” in Syria. Wow, I thought at first, I
didn’t know the U.S. was “inactive” in Syria, since the world has known
for months about the U.S. support and supplying of weapons including
chemical weapons to the terrorists (or “rebels”). As if there has been
no illegal funding of the opposition and support of terrorists leading
to the breakdown of order and leading to the arrest, detention, torture
and murder of civilians including Christians. As if none of this has
happened, the article implies all of the support given to the terrorists
(rebels) qualifies as non-intervention and shameful lack of action on
the part of the United States. Despite the known CIA ongoing operations
in Benghazi and throughout Syria, the article completely ignores the
existence of the CIA and all of the US illegal activities in Syria.
The narrative is accomplished with a few clever techniques. Perhaps the
question was asked - How can a news article be used to help advance the
global government agenda that is consistent with the Project for a New
American Century? This article answers that question. By simply
reporting the story framed so that the reader sympathizes with one of
the players (villains) in the game. Focus the message of the article to
the agenda of something you want them to consider, which you then hook
the audience to, and hope they ride on with the idea. This IS the
essence of propaganda. A mental tool (by distraction and appealing to
irrational emotions) to persuade the masses to believe an idea that will
push a particular political agenda. The idea is to present an
alternative argument that is unrelated to the ethical or legal issue.
For example, imagine a criminal considering why should I storm into a
bank, shoot everyone and take the money? Then rationalizing the action
in order to keep the (crime) boss happy who then will take care of me.
This is a similar type of logic being offered here.
Amazingly, “Reuters Reporter” provides this example of undeniable supreme propaganda with this article. (Saudi Arabia Severs Diplomatic
Ties With U.S. Over Response to Conflict in Syria). Why am I singling
out this article? It doubles up the propaganda nicely. The article first
wipes away all the U.S. war crimes in Syria, the known CIA operation in
Benghazi, the U.S. funded and supported slaughter of countless
civilians and much more. Since none of this ever happened, then by
presenting a random country's perspective, one can build an entire
article based on say the U.S. obligation to maintain a good relationship
with say, Saudi Arabia. In this paradigm the U.S. would be foolish to
do anything that would anger this important ally like, say, not attack
Syria or Iran…
This
is a blitzkrieg of propaganda for your mind. These attacks only occur
every once in a while. These occasional intense attacks of blatant
mind-bending propaganda cannot go by without proper acknowledgment, and
we owe the storm a little attention to recognize that it is there. Yes
this is a little deeper level of propaganda worth reviewing. To round up
our breakdown, note that the article skips from one talking point to
another. Since the U.S. should be concerned with keeping Saudi Arabia
happy, maybe it should then do the right thing (that is attack Syria… MORE than it is attacking it now and, yes, kill even more people) which will preserve the relationship with Saudi Arabia.
This relationship with Saudi Arabia is presented as the most important
goal. No mention in the article about human rights, war powers act,
Nuremberg Charter, the history of war and human suffering, ethics and
the legal ramifications of waging illegal war. Instead, the reader is
told all the reasons why it may not be a good idea to upset Saudi
Arabia. The article and talking points are then used to rationalize and
justify John Kerry’s aggressive position.
U.S. illegal intervention in Syria is already on record with many
calling for the immediate impeachment of Obama. No amount of propaganda
can change that. Not even making the audience view the crime from the
perspective of another country or political partner will change the view
of the people who are awakened. We are happy to call out their
propaganda and use it as a teaching tool for others to become better at
recognizing their lies.
This is an aggressive attempt to get readers to formulate an opinion on
the matter based on their irrational unconscious drive. This propaganda
attempts to steer the audience toward connecting emotionally with the
idea of keeping a potential friend (Saudi Arabia) happy.
These are the moments that pave the road to global tyranny one step at a
time. This is how they perptuate war. They do it with propaganda; and
seeing their lies and tricks is all one needs to be completely free of
their mental prison. Can you see the hand being played by the
globalists? Do you see the propaganda for what it is? Can it be any
clearer?
Bernie Suarez is an activist, critical thinker, radio host,
musician, M.D, Veteran, lover of freedom and the Constitution, and
creator of the Truth and Art TV project. He also has a background in psychology and highly recommends that everyone watch a documentary titled The
Century of the Self. Bernie has concluded that the way to defeat the
New World Order is to truly be the change that you want to see.
Manifesting the solution and putting truth into action is the very thing
that will defeat the globalists.
we better get back to the Mom & Pop ways (Businesses) & Local Farmers Producing OUR FOOD !!!....hows that MEGA~CORP'S working fer U.S..huh ? folks ..INVEST in each other ...that's we do
Ever feel like you can't keep up with all the doom and
gloom echoing around the internet? Motherboard's here to help. With
GIFs. Welcome to THIS WEEK IN HELL,
a feature that brings you hard-hitting animated coverage of the week's
most apocalyptic events, straight from the digital pen of Jay Spahr.
Meat is cheaper and more accessible in the US than it's ever been,
thanks to a highly-industrialized system that raises and slaughters an
estimated 9.8 billion animals a year. But at what cost? The push for
efficiency and scale has left us reliant on less diverse livestock,
who are raised in as small of space as possible, and given antiobiotics
regardless of whether they're sick or not. It's a fundamental shift in
agriculture that's caused traditional farmers to disappear and left the
US meat supply more susceptible to disease and contamination.
That's the takeway from a new report from the Johns Hopkins Center
for a Livable Future (CLF), which looks at what's changed since the Pew
Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production published a landmark
report five years ago. The original report highlighted a
number of critical concerns regarding the state of the meat industry,
and while many of them had been discussed prior to that report, the
attention it received led many to hope that reforms would be made.
According to CLF's new report, that hasn't happened.
The original report is fascinating in its detail of how US
agriculture became industrialized in the first place. It explains that
after World War II, a Baby Boomer-era concern with food security and
eliminating hunger globally resulted in a US-led effort to bring
highly-efficient, industrial farming practices worlwide. This Green
Revolution led to new heights of agricultural productivity, but also had
a number of resultant environmental concerns, including aquifer
depletion, fertilizer pollution, and overuse of pesticides.
That trend has only grown more intense in the last two decades,
according to the Pew Commission. The report states that "the current
trend in animal agriculture is to grow more in less space, use
cost-efficient feed, and replace labor with technology to the
extent possible," which mirrors the rest of the industrial economy. But
that also means that the "diversified, independent, family-owned farms
of 40 years ago that produced a variety of crops and a few animals
are disappearing as an economic entity, replaced by much larger, and
often highly leveraged, farm factories."
Centralized farms and processors now own animals from birth to
market, and often use them as collateral for leveraged growth. That's
left traditional farmers in the dust, with many livestock farmers now
working for corporations without ownership of their animals or their
land. This vertical integration produced a host of concerns the Pew
Commission's report hit on explicitly.
Along with animal welfare concerns, which have remained
controversial, there are systemic costs that are oft ignored. The loss
of livestock diversity caused by the push to only farm the
most productive breeds, along with the high reliance on nontherapeutic
antibiotics, has increased the risk of catastrophic disease. The push
for efficiency in slaughterhouses has increased the risk of contamination,
brought more low-quality meat to market, and increased rates of worker
injury. On top of that, the environmental costs—including processing
highly-concentrated animal waste, a heavy use of fossil fuels, and land
conversion for feed grain production—are immense.
It's important to note that the Pew Commission report was released
during the first year of the Obama administration, and hopes were high
that problems endemic to industrial farm animal production could be
addressed. What's changed? According to the CLF report, the problems
have actually gotten worse:
Contrary to expectations, the Obama administration has not engaged on
the recommendations outlined in the report in a meaningful way; in
fact, regulatory agencies in the administration have acted regressively
in their decision-making and policy-setting procedures. In addition, the
House of Representatives has stepped up the intensity of its attacks on
avenues for reform and stricter enforcement of existing
regulations, paving the way for industry avoidance of scrutiny and
even deregulation, masked as protection of the inappropriately termed
“family farmer.”
To be clear, the bulk of US meat production is done at massive,
industrial farms and processing is concentrated in large regional
slaughterhouses. This centralized system increases the risk of
large-scale contamination, like the salmonella outbreak
that California plants owned by Foster Farms have been struggling with
this year. But under the guise of protecting farmers—who increasingly
are employees of corporations, and no longer own their animals or
land—Washington has pushed for less oversight and fewer regulations. From the CLF report:
The assaults on reform have not been limited to blocking policies
that would hold IFAP operations accountable for hazardous environmental
pollution and other practices that endanger the public’s health.
Instead, the policy debate over IFAP has shifted to the implementation
of policies such as “ag-gag,” agricultural certainty, and right-to-farm
laws, all of which are designed to further shield unsavory industry
practices from the eye of the public and the intervention of regulators.
The end result is that our meat supply is more concentrated, more
susceptible to catastrophe, and less sustainable. The CLF report
highlights a number of critical actions to take, including banning the
use of nontherapeutic antibiotics, improving oversight and regulation of
industrial facilities, and supporting more competition within the
industry. If such change isn't undertaken, our meat supply chain will
continue to be at risk. @derektmead
Since retiring from a three-decade career at the NSA in 2001, a
mathematician named William Binney has been telling anyone who will
listen about a vast data-gathering operation being conducted by his
former employers. "Here’s the grand design," he told filmmaker Laura
Poitras last year. "You build social networks for everybody. That then
turns into the graph, and then you index all that data to that graph,
which means you can pull out a community. That gives you an outline of everybody in
that community. And if you carry that out from 2001 up, you have 10
years of their life that you can then lay out in a timeline that
involves anybody in the country. Even Senators and Representatives—all of them."
The invasive spying program Binney described—one that could build a
"social graph" of nearly any user of the American Internet, like some
massive, secret Facebook—was in the works, he says, when he left the
agency. The details of this program, known as "Stellar Wind," have never
been made explicitly public. Lawsuits and complaints about this and
other programs (for instance, by lawyers for Guantanamo Bay prisoners,
who suspect their phone calls were intercepted)
have been dismissed by the government because potential evidence—like
the court that administers these programs—is itself secret.
But now we know more about one aspect of the US's surveillance arsenal. A tool called PRISM, the top secret project described last week in the Guardian and The Washington Post,
is sucking in data directly from the big Internet companies to do much
the same thing that Binney warned about when he described "Stellar
Wind." Rather than going to Internet companies piecemeal with search
warrants and requests, a system like this provides "lock boxes" for data
co-located at companies' servers, allowing government analysts a far
more easier way to access entire troves of a person's data, and to do
with it what they will. Obama and others have insisted that even if
Americans' data is swept up, searches through this data are focused on
foreign nationals, and are "very narrowly circumscribed." But when
Senators asked for details last year about how many Americans have been
swept up in the NSA's dragnet, the agency replied that revealing that
number would "itself itself violate the privacy of U.S. persons."
Agencies like the FBI, which itself has been quietly pushing for a "back door" system like this,
call it crucial for national security. The leaker of the document,
government contractor Edward Snowden, who has sought asylum in Hong
Kong, calls it a recipe for "turnkey tyranny." With a single PowerPoint,
we've been teleported from shadowy hacker spy movies and giant Internet
conspiracy theories (it's the CIA who actually invented Facebook, right?) into
a reality that is simultaneously gut-wrenchingly alarming, and—unless
you've been hibernating for the past dozen years—not terribly
surprising.
This was not the kind of reality that Binney, like Snowden and other
recent espionage whistleblowers, signed up to build. For decades, he and
his colleagues were tasked with crafting systems for scanning the
communications of foreigners, not Americans. A program that Binney and
others championed, ThinThread, was designed to encrypt Americans'
communications, but was dropped by the NSA in favor of a more expansive
project (though reportedly not before it was tested on New Zealanders.) (Binney's story is told in Poitras' short film, "The Program," released last year by The New York Times, which you can watch it below; Poitras is also one of the journalists whom Snowden first contacted, and she filmed his interview with Glenn Greenwald for the Guardian.)
William Binney in Laura Poitras's "The Program," 2012.
NSA Whistle-Blower Tells All - Op-Docs: The Program
Edward Snowden in a video for the Guardian by Laura Poitras
PRISM Whistleblower — Edward Snowden in his own words
As another NSA whistleblower, Russ Tice, explained in 2005, "The
very first law chiseled in the SIGINT [signals intelligence] equivalent
of the Ten Commandments," a directive known as USSID-18, "is that 'Thou
shall not spy on American persons without a court order from FISA,'"
the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court. But, he said, "The very
people that lead the National Security Agency have violated this holy
edict of SIGINT."
After September 11, 2001, the enemy wasn't outside the US, but
potentially anywhere. Even as Congress outlawed a Bush administration
program called "Total Information Awareness," complete with a logo that
included an all-seeing eye, a new surveillance culture was mobilizing in
secret.
As J. Cofer Black, the former director of CIA, told Frontline,
"after 9/11, the gloves come off." The metaphor described the physical
war on terror but also the digital one. Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act
would give access to "any tangible thing" that is "relevant" to an
investigation "of foreign intelligence information not concerning a
United States person." Section 216 would specifically say that obtaining
the metadata of Internet communication—not the content of an email but
other details about it—does not constitute a "search." And Section 702,
passed in 2008, permitted intelligence officials to conduct surveillance
on the communications of “non-U.S. persons,” when at least one party on
a call, text or email is “reasonably believed” to be outside of the
U.S.
Technology was already well ahead of the law. As Binney and other
people who have stumbled on the government's warrantless wiretapping
programs have warned, after 2001, the new listening devices were turned
inward, to snoop on the country's own chatter, on the assumption that
some of that chatter contained "foreign" intelligence. The scale of that
chatter is hard to imagine, but the giant data center the NSA is
readying in Utah gives some idea; when it's finished next year, it will
be the largest data center in the world, capable of storing data on the
order of 1 quadrillion gigabytes, or an estimated hundred years’ worth
of the world’s electronic communications.
Google data center. Douglas County, Georgia. Photo: Google
DATA AND METADATA
It is thought that the secret FISA court must give the final order to
manually dig into, say, Google's servers and "intercept" an entire email
box. That is not necessarily the case for the data about that data,
which, as Senator Diane Feinstein pointed out, is not as protected: “Our
courts have consistently recognized that there is no reasonable
expectation of privacy in this type of metadata information and thus no
search warrant is required to obtain it,” she said on Friday.
This leads to the curious legal distinction drawn in the signals
intelligence world, between collecting data and searching it. The
collection of data does not constitute a search, or a so-called
"intercept"; Google, Facebook and other companies are already helping
the collection process anyway. It is the government's ability to search
that data and read it that legally constitutes an intercept. As
President Obama told reporters on Friday, "if anybody in government
wanted to go further than top line data and wanted to listen to Jackie's
phone call, they'd have to go to a federal judge and indicate why." But
consider how much that top line data tells us: enough to help determine one's location, medical issues, political and friend affiliations.
On Friday James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, released his own explanation of how PRISM meets FISA requirements. He
specifically cited its legality under Section 702, which is meant to
permit an unprecedented kind of data collection without a warrant,
provided it does not "intentionally" target a U.S. citizen. The law, he
adds, was "recently reauthorized by Congress after extensive hearings
and debate," and it is administered in a way to "minimize the
acquisition, retention and dissemination of incidentally acquired
information about U.S. persons."
Is there a "Facebook" or a "Google" for America's private data? Does
the NSA really keep a file on everyone? General Keith Alexander, the
head of the NSA, answered this question at the DefCon hacker conference last year
in Las Vegas. “No, we don’t. Absolutely no. And anybody who would tell
you that we’re keeping files or dossiers on the American people knows
that’s not true.” He continued: “We get oversight by Congress, both
intel committees and their congressional members and their staffs,” he
continued, “so everything we do is auditable by them, by the FISA court …
and by the administration. And everything we do is accountable to
them…. We are overseen by everybody. And I will tell you that those who
would want to weave the story that we have millions or hundreds of
millions of dossiers on people is absolutely false.”
Gen. Alexander even acknowledged PRISM, vaguely. The NSA scans the
Internet for national security threats, and the FISA law "allows us to
use some of our infrastructure to do that. We may, incidentally, in
targeting a bad guy, hit on somebody from a good guy. [But] we have
requirements from the FISA court and the attorney general to minimize
that, which means nobody else can see it unless there’s a crime that’s
been committed…. And so from my perspective, the people who would say
that we’re [targeting Americans] should know better.”
The issue with a system like PRISM isn't just the abuses that may have
already happened, but the risk of abuses in the future. History doesn't
offer much comfort, and especially not recent history. The rules that
oversee the NSA's collection of data remain cloaked in secrecy, rife with loopholes,
and, according to the government itself, easily subject to abuse. In
2009, the Justice Department acknowledged it had raised concerns about
the NSA's "unintentional" "overcollection" of Americans' personal data
through the FISA system, but said the concerns had been addressed.
Last year, Sens. Ron Wyden and Mark Udall revealed the existence of a
2011 opinion by the FISA court that found that collection activities
under FISA Section 702 "circumvented the spirit of the law” and violated the Fourth Amendment's prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures. But
that ruling, like much other evidence surrounding these programs,
remains secret, to be revealed only at the discretion of the
President. Meanwhile, a 2007 report by the Department of Justice Office
of the Inspector General (OIG) described "significant" violations of law
by the FBI in its use of the powerful national security letters that
the FISA court issues. It is also rare for FISA applications to be
turned down by the court. Through the end of 2011, over 30,000 FISA
court orders were granted, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Electronic Privacy Information Center; just 11 applications were rejected.
While controversy over warrantless wiretapping under Bush may have led
to changes to the program, there is still no telling just how large the
government's data mining operation is or how it's being used. It's not
clear, for instance, how extensive the government's cursory searches
are. If, hypothetically, I were to include the words "bomb" "Mexico" or
"pork" in a sentence in this article—keywords that the Dept. of Homeland Security watches for— do bots then go searching through other things I've written? (For everyone's sake, I hope not.)
One alarming possibility is that, with or without a program like
PRISM—or that other search tool known as a warrant—the government can
use past and current data to create an unprecedented kind of dossier on
anyone. With software built by government contractors like Palantir,
an agency could use all of my data to create a massive secret social
graph of my life—a portrait of me and my friends, neighbors, adventures,
preferences, and finances, across time—a file that can be mined
retroactively and even predictably for potential evidence. In fact, they
could build a rudimentary Alex Pasternack social graph without doing
anything illegal or clandestine, but simply by monitoring all the
information I already release publically online everyday, what is known to spies as "open source" data. A program like PRISM would simply enrich that portrait.
"Think of a domain as an activity, as a specific type of activity,"
Binney told Daniel Ellsberg in Poitras's short film. "Phone calls, or
banking is another domain. So you think of ‘graphing’ each domain and
then you take each graph, and turning it in the third dimension—the
trick now is to map through all the domains in that dimension—pulling
together all the attributes that any individual has in every domain. So
that now, I can pull your entire life together from all those domains,
and map it out and show your entire life, over time."
THE MOST THOROUGH LIBRARIES OF PERSONAL DATA EVER BUILT ARE BEING
BUILT BY US EVERYDAY. NOW THEY'RE THE MOST POPULAR WEBSITES ON THE
INTERNET.
In a 2006 academic paper partially
funded by the NSA's ARDA program (now called the Disruptive Technology
Office), the authors showed how social networks could be used to
identify conflicts of interest among academic peer reviewers. The ARDA
project, called "An Ontological Approach to Financial Analysis &
Monitoring," seems to have been dedicated to keeping tabs on money flows
and money laundering around the world (this was the pre-Bitcoin era).
"Although social networks can provide data to detect COI," the authors
write, "one important problem lies in the lack of integration among
sites hosting them. Moreover, privacy concerns prevent such sites from
openly sharing their data."
Those privacy concerns—about the things we keep in our drawers and the
"things" we keep in our inboxes—find their legal protection in the
Fourth Amendment:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses,
papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall
not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable
cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the
place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Now that nearly every real-world activity gets turned into data,
somehow, somewhere, we're all being spied upon. We're all spies too, if
not as potential data points in some software's network analysis, then
as its sensors, the uploaders of photos and videos, the writers of
emails and tweets, all feeding the big beast of data. The irony of all
this personal data collection of course is that we don't ourselves often
have it or control it; legally, it's not clear who even "owns" it.
Despite the preponderance of data, we're ignorant about exactly where
that data is going.
Our cell phones track us,
our websites know where we've been; for many of us, our inboxes are the
unconscious ledgers of our daily lives. Our data gets traded between
computers and people all the time for reasons and for prices unknown to
us. Between the PATRIOT Act, Facebook, airport x-ray scanners, and the
breathless excitement over big data, the idea of "privacy" has gone the
way of the "friend" and "liking." It's melted into bits. And this is to
say nothing of the cameras perched on every street corner, and soon, on our friends faces, and flying high up in our skies.
The most thorough libraries of personal data ever built have been
built by us, in public, and now they're the most popular websites on the
Internet. The question before this week was just exactly how the
government was going about mining this data. Now that we have a better
idea, the question is, how much do we care?
The revelations are uncomfortable, to say the least. The director of national intelligence has called the leak "literally gut-wrenching"; leaker
Edward Snowden is certain to be living an uncomfortable life for some
time too. And then there's everyone else, the people like us who are
being watched, unintentionally or not. (The revelation may not
discomfort foreign governments; if a low-level analyst at a government
contractor had access to this information, it seems possible that
America's adversaries already have more details than we do.)
But the revelations are discomforting for another reason: they ask us,
Americans and people everywhere, to think hard about our own
unacknowledged expectations about privacy, secrecy, and security at a
time when terrorist fears are immanent and, as importantly, when
technology has outpaced our ideas about what's possible.
As has been pointed out in series like "What they Know" at the Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post's "Top Secret America," at Motherboard and
elsewhere—our data is there for the mining, and billions of dollars are
spent every year, inside and outside government, to do just that.
Software designed by companies like Palantir and Ntrpeid (described in documents that were obtained by Anonymous from the security firm HBGary in
2011) is intended to build social graphs out of public and private
data. That year, for instance, Ntrepid used their software to chart “an amorphous network of anarchist and protest groups” within Occupy
Wall Street and Occupy D.C using information from social media. Ntrepid
is also one of a handful of government contractors that builds "persona management" software, used
by government agents to manage fake social media profiles that can be
used to extract information out of people on those networks.
What's a person on the Internet to do? For the most part, we choose to
live with the Internet as much as we choose to live in cities. We might
at least notice the surveillance camera in the room or on the street
corner—or otherwise assume it's there. By contrast, it's easy to live
online without thinking much about where the cameras are, without
knowing the rules and the limits. We know, say, that when we talk to
friends at a bar what we say exists then and there. We don't even tend
to think about, for instance, where our messages on friends' Facebook
walls go after we write them; when we do think about it, we're left with
few answers. That's a new way of being, of thinking and talking.
Who, though, could blame some people for being caught in a kind of
cognitive dissonance, between defending privacy and passively watching
it slide away? Even as we expect these companies to carefully guard our
data, and chafe at the notion that they wouldn't, we also readily give
it up. We "sign" legal contracts with these companies, their terms of
service, or TOS, by checking a box on a sign-up screen. Our data is
theirs.
The five largest data collectors said to be involved in PRISM at first denied involvement. On Friday, an article by Claire Miller in the Times clarified those denials:
...instead of adding a back door to their servers, the companies were
essentially asked to erect a locked mailbox and give the government the
key, people briefed on the negotiations said. Facebook, for instance,
built such a system for requesting and sharing the information, they
said.
The data shared in these ways, the people said, is shared after
company lawyers have reviewed the FISA request according to company
practice. It is not sent automatically or in bulk, and the government
does not have full access to company servers. Instead, they said, it is a
more secure and efficient way to hand over the data.
In the case of a program like PRISM, which is said to provide legal
immunity to the companies involved (and even give some of their
executives secret clearance), if not plausible deniability, terms of
service may not matter. Or clever mechanisms, like the use of a
third-party, might circumvent legal restrictions.
Then again, immunity can come in the form of these companies' terms of
service. Generally, a company dealing with your data gives itself the
right to disclose that data in cases of business transfers (like a
merger), service fixes, and when law enforcement comes calling. The
wording is often brief, delicate, and vague, but it's there. All of the
terms of service say essentially the same thing that Facebook's does:
Information we receive about you, including financial transaction
data related to purchases made with Facebook Credits, may be accessed,
processed and retained for an extended period of time when it is the
subject of a legal request or obligation, governmental investigation, or
investigations concerning possible violations of our terms or policies,
or otherwise to prevent harm.
We cede our expectations to privacy at the sign-in screen, perhaps keeping in mind Eric Schmidt's edict: "If you've got something to hide, then maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." Or, if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about. It's a line that reminds me of Truman, speaking in a Nixon sneer: "The only thing you have to fear is fear itself."
The White House's allies in Silicon Valley have been helpful in
contorting our definition of "privacy" in ways that are convenient for
big data miners, be they advertisers or governments. The entire Internet
economy, after all, depends on sharing. (The economy of sharing and
Liking — essentially, of increasing clicks and generating more ad
revenue — is not the same as the sharing economy, although sharing data
looks far more attractive when it's used to better share resources. I'm
happy to share my location with an app and its users if it means, for
example, it will help me find someone to share a taxi with*.)
(*Disclosure: this is precisely what Bandwagon, a company I co-founded, aims to do.)
And maybe, just maybe, we secretly like (or are even just okay with)
sharing our information with the government too, if it means being
safer. Maybe we agree with Obama that "there are some tradeoffs
involved," that "you can't have 100 percent security and also 100
percent privacy and zero inconvenience," that these programs "make a
difference to anticipate and prevent possible terrorist activity."
General Keith Alexander, director of the National Security Agency, speaking at Defcon 2012, the hacker conference. Photo: dr3x
"We are overseen by everybody," said the NSA director. "And I
will tell you that those who would want to weave the story that we have
millions or hundreds of millions of dossiers on people is absolutely
false.”
But even as we expect law enforcement to look out for own rights and
not break the law, we also know—even if we don't always acknowledge
it—that governments do ugly things in the name of security. Are those
things justified? What counts as illegal or suspicious? In cases where
we might think access to this data is reasonable (foiling a terrorist
plot), how much do we want to know? How much do we want revealed about
our government's secrets? How do we police those secret things? The
questions impinge upon the trials of leakers like Bradley Manning—one of
a record number of whistleblowers being prosecuted by the Justice
Department—but also on the "secret" things those leakers expose, like
extraordinary renditions and signature strikes by drones.
Put another way: if we already expect that our governments keep and sometimes steal secrets—among
other controversial things—in the name of safety and security, what do
we have to say about how that's done? And if it relates to us, our
personal and private information—and it has for a long time—what will we
have to say about how that data is used? If we thought that it was
helpful for spotting would-be terrorists, would we consent to the
government using that data to create its own private Facebooks? If we're
already signed up for the nanny state, like some secret social network,
are there ways of opting-out of part of it? How can we tweak our NSA
privacy settings?
Or, as Ethan Zuckerman asked a conference room on Friday at the
Personal Democracy Forum, "Have we given up the possibility of being
anonymous and not having our movements tracked?" We won't give up that
easily. But in the face of secret power, political methods feel woefully
inadequate. Zuckerman summed up his feelings: "What keeps me up at
night is not only the expansion of surveillance culture, but that people
in this room haven't found a way to be politically effective."
Foreigners only, federal judges, oversight, audits, private
contractors: those details about PRISM are important. But the new
details also emphasize much older questions, which people on the
Internet, foreigners and Americans, will need to contend with in order
to begin to separate what's technologically possible from what's
ethically responsible. We need to talk about the way we keep and steal
secrets in the future, especially because it relates to a digital space
where we expect information to run free and remain "ours," even while
we're largely ignorant of its limits and its rules. There has to be a
better way.
"We're going to have to make some choices as a society," Obama said on Friday, hours before mingling with donors in Silicon Valley.
But currently, the choices he describes look like false ones. We can't
make decisions or even have a conversation when what we're talking about
is kept hidden from us. And given the ugly optics here and the general
awareness of this surveillance, let alone the potential for abuse,
there's no reason that PRISM or programs like it, need to be secret.
Now we can write letters to our congressmen
or vote them out of office. We can exercise our right to protest,
online and off. The fight the Internet waged over bills like SOPA and
CISPA—the debate over who gets to control our data—was a precious,
electrifying moment of civic Internet consciousness. The campaign for
privacy on Facebook has been slow going but it's had its successes.
Meanwhile, groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and movements
like Do Not Track are helping draw thinker lines between private and
public online. Freedom of Information Act geeks like MuckRock are
helping keep governments open. Journalists are keeping governments
honest, and doing so in a climate where whistleblowers are often
suspected enemies. We'll need more of all of these things.
But we can't choose not to participate in the Internet anymore than we
can choose not to be a part of the economy. We can however choose what
kind of life we might like to live inside the panopticon. Both online
and off, we'll need to decide not just what kind of democratic public
spaces we want—the kind of public space that people are fighting for in
Istanbul, for instance—but also, what kind of democratic private
space we want too. If we are our data, then what expectations do we
have for that data, the data that we knowingly and unknowingly yield to
Facebook, and other, more secret Facebooks, every day?
