“Crisis Actors” Alison Parker and Adam Ward    ~ hehe we's STILL b'ing ..."played" & u's just keep "watch~in" that lame~stream~media~whore's ~psy~ops~cia~prop~a~gam~ya ~bull~shit  ...clap trap HUH & it looks like the "rest" of the World IS catch~ing a lil faster Oops ... what's say ...guys

by James Tracy • Documents • Tags: journalism, news media, public opinion

The “journalistic” duo were prone to elaborate get-ups and antics both on and off the air –  UK paper says

Photographs obtained from the social media accounts of slain reporters Alison Parker and Adam Ward posted by the Daily Mail on August 26 indicate the pair greatly enjoyed dressing up at work and play. At one point they are even photographed in a dressing room preparing “fake injuries” as combination crisis actor/reporters.

“The reporter and cameraman shared this photo of them being painted with fake injuries for a news segment,” the Mail remarks.

A photo comparison of Alison Parker and image of a person unknown captured seconds after the initial blast of the April 15, 2013 Boston Marathon bombing event. (Courtesy of Allan Powell)

“Ward and Parker are pictured in fancy dress in a photo posted on Facebook,” the Daily Mail muses.

“The pair were also snapped joshing around while filming a feature for WDBJ7 in an evening-wear store.”

“In the poignant album was this photo of Hurst and Parker enjoying themselves at a fancy dress party,” notes the Daily Mail.

$1.8 Billion IMF Ukraine Bailout Money Deposited in Ukraine Oligarch Kolomoyskyi’s Cyprus Offshore Bank Account

Funds Discovered in Kolomoyskyi's Cyprus Kitty   ~ hehe did "any~1" have any doubt "our" elites ...would B looting ??? & PUTIN is the ...bad guy !

By Sputnik

Global Research, August 31, 2015

Spunik 29 August 2015

Region: Russia and FSU

Theme: Global Economy

In-depth Report: UKRAINE REPORT

Investigative reporters have discovered that IMF bailout funds intended for Ukraine have mysteriously found their way to a Cyprus bank account controlled by notorious Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoyskyi.

A huge chunk of the $17 billion in bailout money the IMF granted to Ukraine in April 2014 has been discovered in a bank account in Cyprus controlled by exiled Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoyskyi, the German newspaper Deutsche Wirtshafts Nachrichten [DWN] reported on Thursday.In April last year $3.2 billion was immediately disbursed to Ukraine, and over the following five months, another $4.5 billion was disbursed to the Ukrainian Central Bank in order to stabilize the country’s financial system.

© Sputnik/ Mikhail Markiv

“The money should have been used to stabilize the country’s ailing banks, but $1.8 billion disappeared down murky channels,” writes DWN.
Ihor Kolomoyskyi, the former governor of Dnipropetrovsk, is one of Ukraine’s richest businessmen, with a business empire that includes holdings in the energy, media, aviation, chemical and metalwork industries. At the center of Kolomoyskyi’s wealth is PrivatBank, Ukraine’s largest financial institution, which claimed the bulk – 40 percent – of the bailout money which had been earmarked for stabilizing the banking system.

Theoretically, the IMF should retain direct control over the distribution of funds. In fact, it seems that the banks chose their own auditors.

DWN notes that the IMF reported in January 2015 that the equity ratio of Ukraine’s banking system had dropped to 13.8 percent, from 15.9 percent in late June 2014. By February 2015 even PrivatBank had to be saved from bankruptcy, and was given a 62 million Euro two-year loan from the Central Bank.
“So where have the IMF’s billions gone?”
The racket executed by Kolomoyskyi’s PrivatBank was uncovered by the Ukrainian anti-corruption initiative ‘Nashi Groshi,’ meaning ‘our money’ in Ukrainian.
According to Nashi Groshi’s investigations, PrivatBank has connections to 42 Ukrainian companies, which are owned by another 54 offshore companies based in the Caribbean, USA and Cyprus. These companies took out loans from PrivatBank totaling $1.8 billion.
These Ukrainian companies ordered investment products from six foreign suppliers based in the UK, the Virgin Islands and the Caribbean, and then transferred money to a branch of PrivatBank in Cyprus, ostensibly to pay for the products.The products were then used as collateral for the loans taken out from PrivatBank – however, the overseas suppliers never delivered the goods, and the 42 companies took legal action in court in Dnipropetrovsk, demanding reimbursement for payments made for the goods, and the termination of the loans from Privatbank.
The court’s ruling was the same for all 42 companies; the foreign suppliers should return the money, but the credit agreement with Privatbank remains in place.
“Basically, this was a transaction of $1.8 billion abroad, with the help of fake contracts, the siphoning off of assets and violation of existing laws,” explained journalist Lesya Ivanovna of Nashi Groshi.
In March Kolomoyskyi was dismissed from his position as governor of Dnipropetrovsk after a power struggle with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko; the fraud was carried out while he was governor of the region in East-Central Ukraine.
“The whole story with the court case was only necessary to make it look like the bank itself was not involved in the fraud scheme. Officially it now looks like as if the bank has the products, but in reality they were never delivered,” said Ivanovna.
Such business practices have earned Kolomoyskyi a fortune currently estimated by Forbes at $1.27 billion, and were known to investigators beyond Ukraine’s borders; Kolomoyskyi was once banned from entering the US due to suspicions of connections with international organized crime.
Despite these suspicions, it appears that Kolomoyskyi is unlikely to face justice, as he is currently living in exile in the US; he fled Ukraine earlier this year. Ukraine has been granted a further $3.6 billion in debt relief from creditors. Russia, despites its membership in development lending institutions, has refused to contribute funds to Ukraine due to concerns emanating from this and other instances of widespread graft.

Copyright © Sputnik, Spunik, 2015

The Dying Institutions Of Western Civilization. Nothing Is Left   ~  hehe "fascism"  is fucking THRIVING ....tho  HUH

By Dr. Paul Craig Roberts

Global Research, August 31, 2015

Paul Craig Roberts 31 August 2015

Region: USA

Theme: Global Economy, Law and Justice

Judiciary Branch Has Self-Abolished
The US no longer has a judiciary. This former branch of government has transitioned into an enabler of executive branch fascism.

Paul Craig Roberts

Privacy is a civil liberty protected by the US Constitution. The Constitution relies on courts to enforce its prohibitions against intrusive government, but if the executive branch claims (no proof required) “national security,” courts kiss the Constitution good-bye.
Federal judges are chosen by the executive branch. The senate can refuse to confirm, but that is rare. The executive branch chooses judges who are friendly to executive power. This is especially the case for the appeals courts and the Supreme Court. The Justice (sic) Department keeps tabs on district court judges who rule against the government, and these judges don’t make it to the higher courts. The result over time is to erode civil liberty.
Recently a three-judge panel of the US Appeals Court for the District of Columbia ruled that the National Security Agency can continue its mass surveillance of the US population without showing cause. The panel avoided the constitutional question by ruling on procedural terms that NSA had a right to withhold the information that would prove the plaintiffs’ case.
By refusing to extend the section of the USA PATRIOT Act—a name that puts a patriotic sheen on Orwellian totalitarianism—that gave carte blanche to the NSA and by passing the USA Freedom Act, Congress attempted to give NSA’s spying a constitutional patina. The USA Freedom Act allows the telecom companies to spy on us and collect all of our communications data and for NSA to access the data by obtaining a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court. The Freedom Act protects constitutional procedures by requiring NSA to go through the motions, but it does not prevent telecom companies from invading our privacy in behalf of NSA.
No one has ever explained the supposed threat that American citizens pose to themselves that requires all of their communications to be collected and stored by Big Brother. If the US Constitution was respected by the executive branch, Congress, the judiciary, law schools and bar associations, there would have been a public discussion about whether Americans are most threatened by the supposed threat that requires universal surveillance or by the loss of their constitutional protections. We all know what our Founding Fathers’ answer would be.
Florida Government Defies Voters, Misuses Earmarked Funds
By allocating funds set aside by law for the purchase of land and wildlife habitat to other purposes, Florida Republicans have negated the Water and Land Conservation Amendment that Floridians passed with a 75% majority last November. The amendment requires that one-third of the funds produced by real estate stamp taxes be used for conservation purposes.
Conservation runs counter to the interests of real estate developers and polluters who have done so much to destroy Florida’s unique environment. Real estate developers and polluters are major Republican contributors.
Faced with the people’s will, the Republican government is claiming that proper uses of the fund are to pay salaries for the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, to teach best management practices for privately owned lands, and to pay private agricultural operations to retain the pollution that results from their operations on their own property.
In typical Republican fashion, money legally mandated for purchasing public land is being used to pay state salaries and to make payments to private land owners. This is a good indication of the scant respect that American democracy has for the will of the people.
A Robot Will Take Your Job
Several recent studies conclude that robots are going to displace millions of human workers. An Oxford University study found that 47 percent of jobs are at risk. Another study concludes that one third of all jobs will be lost to robots during the next 10 years. Some claim that the net job loss will not be so large, because new jobs will be created in order to repair the robots, at least until robots learn to do this also.
Perhaps you remember the claims by economists Matthew Slaughter, Michael Porter, and other shills for jobs offshoring that moving American jobs offshore would create better and more jobs in the US. After many years I am still watching for any sign of these promised new jobs.
Despite promises to the contrary, the US economy has been halted in its tracks by jobs offshoring. US corporations have moved middle class manufacturing jobs abroad. The high speed Internet has made it possible for tradable professional skills, such as software engineering, information technology, research, design, and scan interpretations by medical doctors, to be performed offshore. This enormous giveaway of American middle class jobs and GDP to foreign countries has left the domestic economy with non-tradable service jobs.
Robotics is now attacking the remaining domestic service jobs. Robots are becoming sales assistants, providing room service to hotel guests, filling orders at delis, providing medical diagnosis, cooking and serving meals, and becoming incorporated into smart household appliances that reduce the need for electrical and repair services. All of us are familiar with customer service robots. We encounter them whenever we telephone about a bank or credit card statement or utility bill.
The unaddressed problem is: what happens to consumer demand, on which the economy depends, when humans are replaced by robots? Robots don’t need a paycheck in order to purchase food, clothes, shoes, entertainment, health care, go on vacations, or to make car, utility, credit card, rent or mortgage payments. The consumer economy has suffered from incomes lost to jobs offshoring. If robots replace yet more Americans, where does the income come from to purchase the products of the robots’ work? Any one firm’s owners and managers can benefit from lowering costs by replacing a human workforce with robots, but all firms cannot. If all firms replace their work forces with robots, the rate of unemployment becomes astronomical, and consumer demand collapses pulling down the economy.
Economists call what works in the singular but not in the plural the fallacy of composition. Keynesian macroeconomists teach that if everyone in society is thrifty with the consequence that savers save more than investors want to invest, aggregate demand falls, and with it incomes and savings. Thus, by trying to save more, savers end up with less.
With the advent of jobs offshoring and financial deregulation, the US has one of the most unequal distributions of income and wealth. As robotics patents are held by a mere handful of people, the concentration of income and wealth at the top will increase.
What kind of society would result? Will governments nationalize robotics or heavily tax the incomes of owners in order to issue monthly payments to people with which to purchase the work product of robots? What would a population living off the work of robots do with itself? Would population growth be tolerated? Or would the powerful owners of robotics use the governments that they control to reduce the surplus population?
Free market economists with their heads forever in the sand will say, “No worry, people thought that the industrial revolution would destroy the demand for labor, but industry employed ever more people.” A former MIT professor who has gone into business producing robots says robots will bring the jobs lost to offshoring home to America. But will they be jobs for humans or for robots? I am waiting to hear how robotics will expand the demand for human labor beyond a few repairmen to fix robots. And I am still waiting for the new and better jobs that offshoring promised. By the time they get here, if ever, robots will take them away.
Stock Market Supported By Corporate Buybacks
Pension funds purchase corporate bonds, and the corporations use the money to buy back their own stocks, thus driving up the price, enriching executives with bonuses and shareholders with capital gains, but leaving the company in debt. One study found that last year 95 percent of all corporate earnings were used either to pay dividends or to buy back the company’s stock. Read Mike Whitney’s report in CounterPunch: http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/08/28/looting-made-easy-the-2-trillion-buyback-binge/
The Ship Did It
The presence of The White Lady, a four-masted Chilean sailing ship, at the Tall Ships Festival in England is being protested. Protestors believe the ship is guilty of human rights violations as the ship was allegedly the site of torture inflicted by the Pinochet government as it put down the terrorism that followed the overthrow of the Allende government. Just as guns murder, ships torture.
The torture alleged to have occurred aboard The White Lady sounds like a small town performance of the torture sanctioned by Washington and London at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and numerous secret sites. How are the American and British democracies superior to Chilean military dictatorship if the former out-tortures the latter? To my knowledge, the Pinochet regime, unlike the Bush regime, never had John Yoo write a legal memo making torture legal. This is probably why, prior to stepping down and returning Chile to constitutional democracy, Pinochet issued pardons both to the military government and to the terrorists.
Demand for Silver Outstripping Supply But Price Is Falling

On numerous occasions Dave Kranzler and I have pointed out that despite high and rising demand for physical bullion and constrained supply, the prices of gold and silver are forced down by concerted manipulation in the futures market. Silver supplies are so tight that both the US and Canadian mints have had to suspend the production and sale of silver coins. Despite supply constraints, in the manipulated futures market the price of silver has been falling, but in the physical market the price of silver coins has risen with premiums over spot raising coin prices as much as 30 percent. Regulatory authorities have brought no action against the obvious manipulation in the futures market.
It is important to the value of the fiat currencies that are being printed in profusion that gold and silver be discredited as hedges against currency depreciation. Thus, authorities turn a blind eye to the obvious manipulation, the purpose of which is to show that inflating fiat paper currencies are gaining in value relative to gold and silver.
I am awaiting the explanation from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) why it is normal for inflating fiat currencies to gain value in relation to gold and silver bullion. Kranzler and I, supported by individuals thoroughly acquainted with the bullion market, have written to the CFTC asking how it is possible for price to fall when demand is rising and supply is constrained.
We will see if a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury can get an answer.
Good-bye To Cash
If all this isn’t enough, government now wants to deprive us of cash in order to deprive us of private and unreported payments and savings. The Financial Times, Britain’s equivalent to the Wall Street Journal, has published an anonymous article advocating that cash be abolished and all transactions be digital so that authorities can know and completely control our behavior. Clearly a big push in this direction is in the works. If the authorities succeed, we will have a situation in which the privacy guaranteed by the US Constitution becomes a myth that slowly fades from memory.

Copyright © Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, Paul Craig Roberts, 2015

NSA: Inside the FIVE-EYED VAMPIRE SQUID of the INTERNET

First published by The Register     -
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06/05/how_the_interenet_was_broken/
One year after The Guardian opened up the trove of top secret American and British documents leaked by former National Security Agency (NSA) sysadmin Edward J Snowden, the world of data security and personal information safety has been turned on its head.
Everything about the safety of the internet as a common communication medium has been shown to be broken. As with the banking disasters of 2008, the crisis and damage created - not by Snowden and his helpers, but by the unregulated and unrestrained conduct the leaked documents have exposed - will last for years if not decades.
Compounding the problem is the covert network of subornment and control that agencies and collaborators working with the NSA are now revealed to have created in communications and computer security organisations and companies around the globe.
The NSA's explicit objective is to weaken the security of the entire physical fabric of the net. One of its declared goals is to "shape the worldwide commercial cryptography market to make it more tractable to advanced cryptanalytic capabilities being developed by the NSA", according to top secret documents provided by Snowden.
Profiling the global machinations of merchant bank Goldman Sachs in Rolling Stone in 2009, journalist Matt Taibbi famously characterized them as operating "everywhere ... a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money”.
The NSA, with its English-speaking "Five Eyes" partners (the relevant agencies of the UK, USA, Australia, New Zealand and Canada) and a hitherto unknown secret network of corporate and government partners, has been revealed to be a similar creature. The Snowden documents chart communications funnels, taps, probes, "collection systems" and malware "implants" everywhere, jammed into data networks and tapped into cables or onto satellites.
The evidence Snowden has provided, by the bucketload, has shown that no country, no network, no communications system, no type of communication has been too small or trivial or irrelevant to attract attention and the ingestion of data into huge and enduring archives - under construction at NSA headquarters and already in operation at its new Utah Data Center.
Operations have ranged from the systematic recording of every mobile telephone call in the tiny 380,000 population Bahamas, through Angry Birds, World of Warcraft, Second Life, intimate Yahoo webcam images and direct cyber attacks on the data centre networks of Google (carried out by British allies at GCHQ from bases in the UK). Under the covernames of WINDSTOP and MUSCULAR, GCHQ data from UK cable taps, including direct intercepts of US email providers and ISPs, is provided wholesale to NSA. NSA has also deployed two overseas Remote Operations centres for malware management at Menwith Hill Station in Yorkshire and at Misawa, Japan.
There are parallels to the banking world, too, in the pervasive and longstanding networks of influence that have been created with the aim of influencing and controlling policymakers, and which have assured minimal political change when damage is done. Merchant banks like Goldmans have long worked hard to have their alumni in positions of political power and influence, in control at vital times.

Oman spy base revealed in The Register as part of GCHQ's £1bn project TEMPORA

Last month, accompanying his new book Nowhere to Hide, journalist Glenn Greenwald has published 180 new Snowden documents that lay out the NSA's global reach - 33 "Third Party" countries, 20 major access "choke points" accessing optical fibre communications, 80 "strategic partner" commercial manufacturers, 52 US, UK and overseas satellite interception sites, more than 80 US Embassies and diplomatic sites hosting floors packed with surveillance and monitoring equipment, and over 50,000 "implants" - malware and tampered hardware that has rendered most commercial VPN systems and software transparent to the NSA and its partners.
In GCHQ and NSA Sigint (signals-intelligence) jargon, common or garden "hacking" is never talked about: the insider term for such activity is "CNE" - Computer Network Exploitation.
NSA's access to optical fibre cables worldwide can be "covert, clandestine or co-operative," according to one of the leaked slides. The covert operations described in the Snowden documents include secret taps on other companies' cables installed by employees of such firms as AT&T and BT.
The published Snowden documents have not yet described NSA's special activities to get into cables even their overseas and corporate partners cannot access. For more than ten years, an adapted nuclear submarine - the USS Jimmy Carter - has installed underwater taps on marine cables, "lifting them up", installing taps and then laying out "backhaul" fibres to interception sites, according to a former Sigint employee. Cable companies have speculated that the submarine tapping activity may be connected to a rash of unexplained cable cuts in recent times affecting fibre cables in the Middle East and South Asia; the cable breaks could serve to prevent operators noticing as taps were installed elsewhere on the same cable.
One previously unrevealed outstation of Britain's secret internet tapping programme has been operating for almost five years in the autocratic Persian gulf state of Oman, according to documents obtained by Snowden in Hawaii. The station, known as Overseas Processing Centre 1 (OPC-1) is part of GCHQ’s massive £1bn project TEMPORA, which GCHQ wants to use to harvest all internet communications it can access and hold that data for up to 30 days.
The damage created to IT security is deliberate, sustained and protected even inside the agencies' compartmented planning cells by arcane contrivances of language. Breaking the safety and value of crypto systems, in sigint speak, is "enabling". Deliberately sabotaging security, in the inverted Orwellian world of the sigint agencies is said to be "improving security".
According to the leaked, detailed current US intelligence budget provided by Snowden, NSA's "Sigint Enabling Project ... actively engages the US and Foreign IT industries to covertly influence and/or overtly leverage their commercial products' designs. These design changes make the systems in question exploitable through SIGINT collection ... with foreknowledge of the modification. To the consumer and other adversaries, however, the systems' security remains intact."
Despite apologists' denials, the language of this major US government document is unambiguous in describing broken crypto and hardware and software "backdoors" as a much-desired NSA goal.

Top US companies are among more than 80 helping NSA "enable" backdoors and breaks in security protection, according to a top secret slide revealed by Edward Snowden

Tricking a company like RSA Security into promoting backdoored and sabotaged algorithms for default use in security products is "enabling". Physically sabotaging Cisco routers while they are being shipped out of the US to commercial customers - a serious crime when committed by anyone but the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the NSA - is "enabling".
Ensuring that communications security encryption chips "used in Virtual Private Networks and Web encryption devices" secretly ship with their security broken open, as specified in the current US "cryptologic capabilities plan", is "enabling". In the coming year, NSA's budget for such Sigint "enabling" is $255m.
Who plays in this corporate "enabling" game?
Since the days of Watergate in the 1970s, and the subsequent US Congressional investigations, AT&T - the world's 23rd largest company - has been identified as providing US government access to all its customers' communications passing in and out of the US. The intercepted communications passed on long ago included communications of 1960s US antiwar dissidents.
AT&T's secret role intercepting Americans' communications in a programme dubbed SHAMROCK was flushed out by Congressional enquiries in 1975, and largely stopped as illegal - for a few years. But it all began again in 1978 when a new US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was passed. SHAMROCK was reborn, the Snowden archive reveals, as BLARNEY. In the bizarre and boastful world of show-off Powerpoints that NSA geeks prepare for their colleagues, BLARNEY even has its own logo.
The identity of NSA's and GCHQ's corporate industrial and international partners are amongst the Sigint agencies' most closely guarded secrets. There are strict internal prohibitions in the US and the UK against revealing the true corporate identities behind covernames like FAIRVIEW or STORMBREW, both identified as providing "upstream" (meaning fibre cable tap) access to Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, and many other companies' internet communications.
More than once, the Snowden documents have revealed that siginters' NSA braggadocio can let cover slip. Among the new Snowden documents published last month by Greenwald is a potentially devastating slide listing NSA commercial "Strategic Partnerships".
The slide displays, with corporate logos, the names of major US IT companies who are listed under NSA's vaunted "alliances with over 80 Major Global Corporations". The companies identified are said to be "supporting both missions": that is, both Sigint attacks on global communications networks, and the more acceptable public face of collaboration - cyber defence activity.
The roll call of names and logos on the slide include most of the US's IT industry giants: Microsoft, HP, Cisco, IBM, Qualcomm, Intel, Motorola, Qwest, AT&T, Verizon, Oracle and EDS.
This document and many more like it shine a spotlight on the invidious position in which major US corporations have found themselves. Their trust has been compromised, with share valuations now tumbling to follow. Cisco, despite being reported as "supporting missions" in the classified slides, was reportedly devastated when last month Greenwald published photographs taken by NSA's hacking department of "interdicted" Cisco equipment, stolen in transit and then put back in the delivery system after being tampered with to open the kit up for NSA remote control.

NSA staff pictured breaking into to secretly divert Cisco shipments of equipment, so as to insert covert "beacons" to compromise the networks they support

The US corporations have also helped spy on their communications partners, both overtly and covertly, according to the documents. FAIRVIEW, a corporate partner "with access to int. cables, routers, switches", according to one recently published note "operates in the US, but has access to information that transits the nation and through its corporate relationships provides unique accesses to other telecoms and ISPs".
It is also "aggressively involved in shaping traffic to run signals of interest past our monitors". For these and other services, according to the classified US Intelligence budget leaked by Snowden to the Washington Post, FAIRVIEW will receive $95m from NSA in the current year.
According to another slide Greenwald has published this month, STORMBREW operates seven "choke points" on international communications on the US eastern and western seaboards, each covernamed for leading US ski resorts.

Verizon, codenamed STORMBREW by NSA has "choke points" on US communications

FAIRVIEW and STORMBREW are the covernames for the US's communications giants, AT&T and Verizon. In the UK, BT (GCHQ covername "REMEDY") and Verizon/Vodafone (GCHQ covername "GERONTIC") are described as actively intercepting their own and other companies' fibre networks, and linking them to GCHQ's processing sites at Cheltenham and Bude, Cornwall. BT and Verizon are also lavishly remunerated by GCHQ for their work in providing access to communications links in the UK, receiving payments of tens of millions of pounds annually, according to documents copied by Snowden.
In one of the most alarming slideshows, NSA's successes in smashing basic general internet cryptography security is described in classic style as "improving security". NSA's project BULLRUN was described thus:
For the past decade, NSA has led an aggressive, multipronged effort to break widely used Internet encryption technologies ... Cryptanalytic capabilities are now coming online. Vast amounts of encrypted Internet data which have up till now been discarded are now exploitable. Major new processing systems ... must be put in place to capitalise on this opportunity.
Listeners at this talk were also warned that the "groundbreaking capabilities" were "extremely fragile ... do not ask about or speculate on sources or methods". "Indoctrination" - special security briefings and signing new warnings - was required for access to information about how BULLRUN techniques work.
In the creation of such arcane rituals of access to sacred secrets that no-one may know and to the power they are believed to bestow, working life inside Sigint communities can seem to resemble nothing so much as the medieval churches. Like Latin chanted by medieval priests, NSA and GCHQ's extraordinary lexicons of "covernames" revealed by Snowden are all in fact unclassified - even BULLRUN. The ordinary mortal may hear them, but must never know their meanings, which are protected behind layers of secrecy beyond Top Secret: in the US, ECI for Extremely Compartmented Information, in the UK, STRAP 1, STRAP 2 or STRAP 3.
In another Snowden document prepared by NSA's Cryptanalysis and Exploitation Services unit in 2010, Project BULLRUN is described as involving "multiple sources, all of which are extremely sensitive. They include CNE [Computer Network Exploitation], interdiction, industry relationships, collaboration with other IC [Intelligence Community] entities, and advanced mathematical techniques".
The covert nature of NSA's relationships and their power to influence policy and compromise internet security technologies was unguardedly summarised in a chatty top secret blog provided by NSA's Foreign Affairs Directorate in 2009 and leaked by Snowden.
"What are we after with our third party relationships?" asked the spies.
In summary, the answer is that they get to wiretap their own countries and their neighbours, places to which NSA and GCHQ otherwise could not legally reach.

NSA's approved list of Second and Third Party partners

In return, collaborating allies may get high tech toys to impress their own masters - and better ones if they are willing to break rules or laws. According to the Foreign Affairs Directorate blog:
"NSA might be willing to share advanced technologies in return for that partner's willingness to do something politically risky."
The Third Party relationships with other nations' spooks and/or secret police are often kept secret even from the foreign governments in question, according to the blog:
"In many of our foreign partners' capitals, few senior officials outside of the defence-intelligence apparatuses are witting to any SIGINT connection to the USA/NSA."
Documents provided by Snowden show that GCHQ particularly prizes the data they get from Sweden, Israel and India.
A year past the first revelations, the US has begun a debate, as Snowden hoped, and changes and restrictions affecting American citizens' communications have started. But for foreigners, there is nothing. In the UK and across Europe, there has been much anger but little change. The new Snowden documents provide some of the answer, showing that virtually every EU member state has a covert surveillance "Sigint Exchange Agreement" with NSA. None of these agreements have been reported to or agreed by national parliaments.
The only European countries apparently not signed up to help break the internet are Luxembourg, Switzerland, Monaco, and Ireland. And Iceland.
That is the reach of the embrace of the internet's vampire squid. ®