Synthetic Environments for Analysis and Simulation

June 30th, 2007 http://www.cryptogon.com/?p=956 Simulex Inc.’s Synthetic Environments for Analysis and Simulation system is almost certainly how the priests of the technocracy are now maintaining “normal” operations.
The system allows for terra scale datasets with granularity of results down to one node (individual). It has a physics engine for tracking any number of people (or other elements) in virtual cities or spaces. It can correlate any amount of social, economic, political, environmental or other data with the behavior of groups or individuals on the ground. The U.S. Government, and some of the most powerful corporations on the planet are using the SEAS system.
There’s really no way to know how many ways this system is already being used against us. I tried to think about it for a few minutes and it’s mind boggling. “How isn’t it being used?” is probably a more interesting question. If the Architect was interested in tools that could help him more effectively run the Matrix, he’d have Simulex reps on the phone ASAP.
I thought about some of the high level but simple studies They could run to, for example, evaluate the overall effectiveness of the various control mechanisms most people have to contend with on a daily basis.
A status quo indicator could be easily devised that would show how effectively “normal” operations were being maintained. All They would need to do is track the time most people spend commuting to and from work, the amount of time spent at work, some guestimate about the time spent in front of television and computer screens at home and a final guestimate about the time spent on recreational activities outside of the home (live sporting events, movies, etc.). Plot those components as a single moving average. That’s it. If the line is sloping up, Their power is increasing. If the line is sloping down, Their power is decreasing. If the line is going sideways, Their power is staying the same.
Think about how powerful of an indicator that would be.
And that would be a boneheaded child’s exercise for the SEAS system.
The really weird and disturbing aspect of this is the level of granularity that it provides to the system operators. They admit that the system is designed to run simulations on a 1 to 1 basis. That is, it can simulate activities not just with some aggregate model based on limited samples, but with ALL nodes simultaneously in a population with terra scale data sets. Meaning, the focus could be on tracking and simulating the activities of any individual in the system.
If you’re like me, this is the point at which you will start to experience a vague feeling of foreboding because all of this seems somehow familiar, somehow related to something I’ve written about on Cryptogon recently…
In NSA, AT&T and the NarusInsight Intercept Suite, I wrote:

Are They building electronic dossiers on as many of us as they can? I don’t know, but it sure looks that way.

We must assume that they are using the full spectrum of surveillance information to try to PREDICT HOW EACH OF US IS LIKELY TO BEHAVE ON A DAY TO DAY BASIS. Where we go. Which routes we take. What we buy. Etc. All of these things can be broken down into a kind of moving average that wiggles around between an upper band and a lower band, kind of like a standard deviation from a mean. Stay within the bands, and the Magic 8 Ball probably won’t bother to flag your profile for closer analysis by some genius at the Terrorist Screening Center.
Obviously, most of us aren’t worth the attention of a human analyst, and they know it. Most of the sheep just go with the flock. They do what they’re told, shop at WalMart, pay their taxes, go to church, the end. More educated sheep read Business Week or the New York Times, etc. Within a fairly wide range of activities, it’s no more complicated, for the vast majority of the people out there, than the way pool balls behave as they bounce around the table and each other.
This is a key point, so I’m going to emphasize it:
These systems would excel at finding the artifacts, the outliers, the people who haven’t internalized the programming, but continue to act “normal.”
It would identify the thought criminals.
Recently, Michael Chertoff, the head of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, mentioned “clean skin” terrorists. These are people who appear “normal” in society, but are secretly plotting the next big terrorist event. How do you find the “clean skin” terrorists? Well, according to Chertoff, the U.S. Department of Magic-8 Ball Theories, Studies and Predictions requires every foreign traveler’s email address and credit card information. It didn’t occur to me before, but They already have this information—and much more—for Americans.
I’ve wondered why my site and thousands of sites like it are allowed to continue to operate…
Simple: More and better targeting data.
They don’t care about me, or what I’m saying.
They’re more interested in who’s paying attention to me, and people like me. Are those numbers increasing, or decreasing? What types of jobs do readers of these sites have? What is their income? What other sites do readers of these sites read? Do the people who read these sites continue to show up to work? (You haven’t been paying attention if you think that They don’t have this information.)
Whether or not you have anything to do with sleeper cells, “clean skin” terrorists, leaderless resistance movements, our outright “let’s shoot the bastards” insurgency movements, the list of usual suspects, I would almost bet my life, is being drawn up through the use of the NarusIntercept Suite systems for collection and the SEAS systems for analysis.
Who gets pulled for what probably depends on how seriously They feel threatened. The point is, these systems can model and assist with the visualization of any imaginable set of circumstances. We don’t know what criteria They’re using, but it is admitted that the terrorist watch list has ballooned to include over half a million individuals.
Do you think these systems have anything to do with the “out of control” expansion of that list?
I do.
This isn’t tinfoil. All I’ve done is make logical connections between two publicly admitted technologies that we know the U.S. Government uses. Look at how hungry that SEAS thing is for data.
Remember Russell Tice, the NSA SIGINT officer who had knowledge of a special access NSA operation that was so disturbing that he tried to tell the U.S. Congress about it?
What was Tice talking about here:

Tice said his information is different from the Terrorist Surveillance Program that Bush acknowledged in December and from news accounts this week that the NSA has been secretly collecting phone call records of millions of Americans. “It’s an angle that you haven’t heard about yet,” he said.

An angle that we haven’t heard about. Since everyone and his dog knows about the mass surveillance, what could that angle be?
More recently, Tice said that the NSA intercepts of civilian traffic is “the tip of the iceberg” and says, again, that there is something else, something we still don’t know about. Here’s part of the interview between Tice and Reason:

REASON: What prompted you to step forward now?
Tice: Well, I’ve known this for a long time and I’ve kept my mouth shut…
REASON: You’re referring to what James Risen calls “The Program,” the NSA wiretaps that have been reported on?
Tice: No, I’m referring to what I need to tell Congress that no one knows yet, which is only tertiarily connected to what you know about now.

Ok, so the outrage that Tice was willing to ruin his life over is only “tertiarily connected” to the operation we already new about.
Tice continues:

In my case, there’s no way the programs I want to talk to Congress about should be public ever, unless maybe in 200 years they want to declassify them. You should never learn about it; no one at the Times should ever learn about these things.

The surveillance side of this is the chickenfeed. There’s something far more sinister than the simple surveillance… an angle we haven’t heard about yet.
Tice never did tell his story to Congress about this different aspect of the program.
Well, my guess is that it has something to do with providing surveillance data for this SEAS World Sim thing, and that individual Americans are being watched and potentially targeted with it. Tice’s background seems to involve a lot of traditional electronic warfare, radar and ELINT stuff. Maybe Tice’s deal involved the collection of the mobile phone GPS and/or triangulation data which would provide realtime spacial/geographic data to the SEAS system. In other words, SEAS sees you. They could bring up a map of a city and plot your path based on the information that your phone is exchanging with the mobile network.
Via: The Register:
Perhaps your real life is so rich you don’t have time for another.
Even so, the US Department of Defense (DOD) may already be creating a copy of you in an alternate reality to see how long you can go without food or water, or how you will respond to televised propaganda.
The DOD is developing a parallel to Planet Earth, with billions of individual “nodes” to reflect every man, woman, and child this side of the dividing line between reality and AR.
Called the Sentient World Simulation (SWS), it will be a “synthetic mirror of the real world with automated continuous calibration with respect to current real-world information”, according to a concept paper for the project.
“SWS provides an environment for testing Psychological Operations (PSYOP),” the paper reads, so that military leaders can “develop and test multiple courses of action to anticipate and shape behaviors of adversaries, neutrals, and partners”.
SWS also replicates financial institutions, utilities, media outlets, and street corner shops. By applying theories of economics and human psychology, its developers believe they can predict how individuals and mobs will respond to various stressors.
SEAS can display regional results for public opinion polls, distribution of retail outlets in urban areas, and the level of unorganization of local economies, which may point to potential areas of civil unrest
Yank a country’s water supply. Stage a military coup. SWS will tell you what happens next.
“The idea is to generate alternative futures with outcomes based on interactions between multiple sides,” said Purdue University professor Alok Chaturvedi, co-author of the SWS concept paper.
Chaturvedi directs Purdue’s laboratories for Synthetic Environment for Analysis and Simulations, or SEAS – the platform underlying SWS. Chaturvedi also makes a commercial version of SEAS available through his company, Simulex, Inc (http://www.simulexinc.com).
SEAS users can visualise the nodes and scenarios in text boxes and graphs, or as icons set against geographical maps.
Corporations can use SEAS to test the market for new products, said Chaturvedi. Simulex lists the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and defense contractor Lockheed Martin among its private sector clients.
The US government appears to be Simulex’s number one customer, however. And Chaturvedi has received millions of dollars in grants from the military and the National Science Foundation to develop SEAS.
Chaturvedi is now pitching SWS to DARPA (http://www.darpa.mil) and discussing it with officials at the US Department of Homeland Security (http://www.dhs.gov), where he said the idea has been well received, despite the thorny privacy issues for US citizens.
…
Alok Chaturvedi wants SWS to match every person on the planet, one-to-one.
Right now, the 62 simulated nations in SEAS depict humans as composites, at a 100-to-1 ratio.
One organisation has achieved a one-to-one level of granularity for its simulations, according to Chaturvedi: the US Army, which is using SEAS to identify potential recruits.
Chaturvedi insists his goal for SWS is to have a depersonalised likeness for each individual, rather than an immediately identifiable duplicate. If your town census records your birthdate, job title, and whether you own a dog, SWS will generate what Chaturvedi calls a “like someone” with the same stats, but not the same name.
Of course, government agencies and corporations can add to SWS whatever personally-identifiable information they choose from their own databases, and for their own purposes.
And with consumers already giving up their personal information regularly to websites such as MySpace and Twitter, it is not a stretch to imagine SWS doing the same thing.
“There may be hooks through which individuals may voluntarily contribute information to SWS,” Chaturvedi said.

Sentient World Simulation (SWS)

Technocracy V: The Technocrats Tap in (2)

“What is the society we wish to protect? Is it the society of complete surveillance for the commonwealth? Is this the wealth we seek to have in common – optimal security at the cost of maximal surveillance?”

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– Tom Stoppard, author, playwright

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                                      Image credit: gizmag.com | infrakshun   https://infrakshun.wordpress.com/tag/sentient-world-simulation-sws/

In 2003, under the Bush Administration, the Total Information Awareness program was introduced in order to provide “large, distributed repositories” including “biometric signatures of humans” and “human network analysis and behavior modeling” provided by DARPA. It was a reiteration of what ECHELON and MAIN CORE had been doing for years. Congress defunded the program in the same year, prohibiting any such activities to target Americans.
The Total Information Awareness Office run by convicted Iran-Contra felon John Poindexter and featured a logo on its website resembling the popular occult mythology of the Illuminati. It was so blatant that some visitors thought it was a bad attempt at political satire. It wasn’t. It did however, beg the question as to why such a revealing caricature and its objectives was allowed the go ahead? Moreover, why was it derailed so quickly when other draconian legislation – including the highly controversial PATRIOT act – sailed through without any problems?
The reason for this was to provide a distraction so that yet another surveillance hub could be built away from the spotlight.
A 2012 article by online tech magazine Wired reports on Intel journalist James Bamford’s sources who claim that once again, NSA has been continuing its surveillance operations with a new spy data centre based in Utah: “… capable of breaking almost any encryption, reading any email and recording any phone call anywhere in the world, even if it’s not made over the Internet.” Where have we heard that before? This hub is just one of a number of networked sites based around a similar network 0f “ultra-sensitive satellites … with the unique ability to sniff electronic communications from a massive distance.” ^[1]Bamford’s sources say that the NSA is routinely violating the US constitution by dumping all of America’s communications data into the system for analysis. Perhaps most importantly, and which goes to the heart of the premise of this book is the opinion of another covert source to which Bamford made contact who claimed that: “… the NSA is on the verge of a massive coup, putting the U.S. inches away from ‘a turnkey totalitarian state.’” ^[2]

The Total Information Awareness logo as compared to the Great Seal found on the US dollar bill, a freemasonic emblem. A purposeful distraction?

Another heavy-weight whistleblower, William Binney, decided to grab the gauntlet and go against his superiors to warn of an Orwellian Superstate which is “ready” and “set up” so that one has to just “turn the key” and this would be an immediate reality. ^[3] A specialist in traffic analysis, Binney worked for the NSA for 37 years and knows its capabilities and technical now-how inside out. He joined Electronic Frontier Foundation’s case against the National Security Agency (Jewel v. NSA) filed in July 2, 2012, and their illegal domestic surveillance programs which, according to Binney, “are consistent, as a mathematical matter, with seizing both the routing information and the contents of all electronic communications” inside the U.S. He has stated that over 20 trillion files have been created since the September 11^th attacks.^[4]Amid significant civil liberty concerns, NSA head and commander of US Cyber Command department General Keith Alexander is still seeking to redesign the internet’s infrastructure so that the NSA may: “… know instantly when overseas hackers might be attacking public or private infrastructure and computer networks.” A trial of 17 US defence companies is already underway.
Tom Simonite from Technology Review tells us:

“Under the Defense Industrial Base (DIB) Cyber Pilot, Lockheed Martin and other companies set up their computer security systems to automatically alert the agency when the alarm is tripped. They automatically pass a summary of what was detected and the IP address associated with the event to the NSA over the Internet. ‘All you need to pass is the fact of a signature and IP address in real time, and we can take it from there,’ said Alexander.” ^[5]

Yet, there is more to MAIN CORE than high-level data collection and future detention. First, we need to keep in mind that targeting the thinking population is not just an Orwellian fantasy but an objective reality. The NSA and Homeland Security is collecting massive amounts of data on the US and European populations for another purpose which may well have something to do with “Synthetic Environments for Analysis and Simulation” or (SEAS). From their celebratory website we read: “What happens when you take gaming technology, inject it with the latest discoveries in management, economics, and psychology, and apply it to business, political, and social situations? The answer is Simulex’s Synthetic Environments for Analysis and Simulation (SEAS), the result of ten years of research conducted at Purdue University’s Krannert School of Management, in association with the United States Department of Defence and several Fortune 500 companies.” ^[6]
Looking at Simulex Inc. client base it is fairly easy to guess. As the bold heading that greets us on the client page attests, SEAS has a top heavy bias for the telecommunications industry. It assists the United States Joint Forces Command (USJFCOM) to “model the volatile regions of the world” while also providing their services to United States Department of Homeland Security in preparing “… for bio-terrorist attacks, and by Fortune 500 companies for strategic planning.”^[7]Other clients include: United States Department of Defence, United States Department of Justice, United States Army Recruiting Command and Crane Naval Surface Warfare Centre. Their private sector clients are global pharmaceutical corporation Eli Lilly and our old weapons friend Lockheed Martin who got rid of whistleblower Margaret Newsham for blabbing to the press about unwarranted surveillance.
Is it coincidence Lockheed turns up here?
Other Fortune 500 companies are apparently clients but we are not given a list. However, it would be right up the social engineering alley of the Rockefeller Foundation and Monsanto Corp.

(Photo: Mönch / STN)

Which brings us to another 2005 whistleblower Russell D. Tice, a former intelligence analyst for the U.S. Air Force, Office of Naval Intelligence, Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) and NSA Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) officer. His statements in an interview to online journal Think Progress Security.org claimed that the surveillance discovered so far was “… only the tip of the iceberg,” and there was “… an angle that you haven’t heard about yet…” ^[8]In another interview with the online culture journal Reason just prior to a congressional hearing on the NSA wiretapping scandal (which went nowhere) Tice infers that the wire-tapping was not the main issue and that he needed: “… to tell Congress that no one knows yet, which is only tertiarily connected to what you know about now … In my case, there’s no way the programs I want to talk to Congress about should be public ever, unless maybe in 200 years they want to declassify them. You should never learn about it; no one at the Times should ever learn about these things.”^[9]
So, surveillance was only scratching the surface. What then, are we to make of this military-corporate complex outsourcing in conjunction with MAIN CORE? What would you do if you wanted to predict how each of us may act in the future, most especially if your main objective was to control population in the face of a real or imagined threat against the Establishment power-base?
What is it that we “should never learn about?”
Could that be that each and every one of us who has expressed a level of awareness that thinks out of the box has an electronic kindle file packed full of interesting data? Moreover, this data is part of complex synergy of multi-layered simulations that uses a form of mass “pre-crime” software with a supercomputing power undreamt of.
>Blogger and commentator Kevin Flaherty from cryptogon.com makes it clear in the following analysis:

We must assume that They are using the full spectrum of surveillance information to try to PREDICT HOW EACH OF US IS LIKELY TO BEHAVE ON A DAY TO DAY BASIS. Where we go. Which routes we take. What we buy. Etc. All of these things can be broken down into a kind of moving average that wiggles around between an upper band and a lower band, kind of like a standard deviation from a mean. Stay within the bands, and the Magic 8 Ball probably won’t bother to flag your profile for closer analysis by some genius at the Terrorist Screening Center.
Obviously, most of us aren’t worth the attention of a human analyst, and They know it. Most of the sheep just go with the herd. They do what they’re told, shop at Wal-Mart, pay their taxes, go to church, the end. More educated sheep read Business Week or the New York Times, etc. Within a fairly wide range of activities, it’s no more complicated, for the vast majority of the people out there, than the way pool balls behave as they bounce around the table and each other.
This is a key point, so I’m going to emphasize it: These systems would excel at finding the artifacts, the outliers, the people who haven’t internalized the programming, but continue to act ‘normal.’ ^[10] [Emphasis mine]

Journalist and author Walter Bowart who wrote the seminal classic Operation Mind Control (1978) the NSA of the 1960s had computer systems decades in advance of public and governmental agencies of the time. And let’s not forget the capabilities of “Quantum Light Harvesting” which offers a revolutionary way to advance computational power to undreamt of levels and in a short space of time. That being so, what systems do we imagine the NSA playing with now in 2015?
Having explored the notions of depopulation or “managed genocide” and psychological operations in this series, Flaherty makes an interesting observation on the nature of this total surveillance and so called resource-grabbing. He draws our attention to a recent and on-going SEAS project in partnership with the US Department of Defence (DOD) called the Sentient World Simulation (SWS). According to the concept paper for the project, a parallel Planet Earth is being developed: “… with billions of individual ‘nodes’ to reflect every man, woman, and child this side of the dividing line between reality and AR… It will be a “synthetic mirror of the real world with automated continuous calibration with respect to current real-world information.” Apparently, the simulation: “… provides an environment for testing Psychological Operations (PSYOP),” so that military leaders can “develop and test multiple courses of action to anticipate and shape behaviors of adversaries, neutrals, and partners”.
SWS also:

“… replicates financial institutions, utilities, media outlets, and street corner shops. By applying theories of economics and human psychology, its developers believe they can predict how individuals and mobs will respond to various stressors.
SEAS can display regional results for public opinion polls, distribution of retail outlets in urban areas, and the level of unorganization of local economies, which may point to potential areas of civil unrest. Yank a country’s water supply. Stage a military coup. SWS will tell you what happens next.
“The idea is to generate alternative futures with outcomes based on interactions between multiple sides,” said Purdue University professor Alok Chaturvedi, co-author of the SWS concept paper. ^[11]

However, the Pentagon still isn’t content. Hundreds of additional spies are being sent overseas as part of a new espionage network that is set to rival the CIA in size according to the Washington Post. The report informs us that the a transformation of the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) is underway having been “dominated for the past decade by the demands of two wars” and which will now be a “spy service focused on emerging threats and more closely aligned with the CIA and elite military commando units.” With “collectors” numbering as many as 1,600 all over the world this is no small project. In fact, as we have explored, it seems to be part of an expansive operation to merge military and intelligence agencies into a more centralised system of espionage and domestic surveillance. As the Post mentions: “… the Pentagon’s plan to create what it calls the Defense Clandestine Service (DCS) reflects the military’s latest and largest foray into secret intelligence work. The DIA overhaul — combined with the growth of the CIA since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks — will create a spy network of unprecedented size.” ^[12]

Photo from Simulex, Inc. advert

On top of all this, in 2012, former CIA intelligence analyst turned Whistleblower Edward J. Snowden leaked more than 50,00 classified documents to the Wikileaks organisation and journalist Glenn Greenwald revealing in black and white just how pervasive and all-encompassing the surveillance capabilities of America’s NSA and Britain’s GCHQ truly is. For some, the jury is still out on Snowden’s motives, primarily due to the fact that much of this information had been known for many years by independent journalists and alternative media who had been trying to get the attention of the mainstream media, but to no avail. So, it was a little fishy that Snowden was all over every possible media outlet in a very short space of time as though he had single-handedly dismantled the apparatus himself. Yet, he is the first CIA agent to do so. Is he a patsy, a conscious agent or a hero?
Whether the NSA is using him to test the demographic water of mass perception is unclear. For one thing, it allows the public to ease their way into deeper issues surrounding the whole arena of US policy from drone attacks to terrorism. The latter reason has been trotted out to justify all kinds of unconstitutional measures and many are waking up to this fact. After all, so-called “terrorists” are acutely aware that they are always monitored. What Snowden has done is to show how surveillance is targeting innocent people, not the terrorists. The NSA, in all probability, may be extremely peeved that their methods have been revealed. Whether this is a CIA-NSA turf war suggested by some commentators remains to be seen. As the CIA grapples with increasing revelations about its torture and rendition programs and the NSA continues to try and stem the flow of leaked cables on its surveillance capabilities, the leviathan of soft totalitarianism still lumbers forward.

© infrakshun

By 2013, while the magnitude of surveillance of all and everyone was being digested it is true to say that there may be much more to be drawn out of the NSA shadows. On November 28^th,the BBC’s Hardtalk programme, Glenn Greenwald stated that there are still thousands of leaked cables to go through and make public. As it stands, the leaks have not made the slightest difference to its illegality as some commentators have been saying for quite some time. Far from being chastened, the NSA has romped ahead by creating a secret body of law which gives the agency carte blanche in accessing data on Americans justified by the war on terror and the threat of cyber-terrorism and underground nuclear proliferation.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) has eleven members whose job it was to approve illegal wire-tapping orders and which have  now been expanded to allow the NSA to do as it pleases while doffing its hat to feeble attempts to regulate intelligence surveillance. In a Guardian piece by Spencer Ackerman on August 16, 2013, it was reported that thousands of annual violations of its own restrictions continue to mount as reported by two US senators who sit on the US intelligence committee. As Rice, they stated that these were, also: “the tip of the iceberg.”
The bottom line is that everyone is presumed guilty rather than innocent simply due to the vast amount of data building on every citizen. The NSA can effectively trap you into suspected wrongdoing. As we have seen, the ubiquitous rise of entrapment operations may reflect something much deeper. Just because you have led a law-abiding life, it is no protection against mass spying programs seeping into every corner of our lives care of SMART technology. Indeed, the very definition of “law abiding” is changing; contoured towards government policy rather than what is ethically and morally sound. Whistleblower William Binney has warned for several years that the government is storing literally everything and creating a highly sophisticated, searchable database to be used for anything it wants. Snowden says much the same thing in an interview on June 12, 2013:

Because even if you’re not doing anything wrong you’re being watched and recorded. And the storage capability of these systems increases every year consistently by orders of magnitude … to where it’s getting to the point where you don’t have to have done anything wrong. You simply have to eventually fall under suspicion from somebody – even by a wrong call. And then they can use this system to go back in time and scrutinize every decision you’ve ever made, every friend you’ve ever discussed something with. And attack you on that basis to sort to derive suspicion from an innocent life and paint anyone in the context of a wrongdoer. ^[13]

On July 6, 2013, Eric Lichtblau writng for the New York Times commented on officials’ statements that: “… the court’s still-secret decisions go far beyond any single surveillance order.” Indeed, though European countries such as France and Spain have been found spying on their own citizens, even handing over data to the NSA it is the United States that has led the charge against the global population’s privacy. This in turn, has led the Surveillance State seeping into every avenue of American life. Even the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has routinely been snooping in order to extract largely unconstitutional taxation claims. It believes that it can continue to operate quite happily without using a warrant to read people’s emails and text messages. Just like the search engine Google Inc. (whom we will turn to presently) the Fourth Amendment and every person’s right to basic privacy is deemed irrelevant to the IRS and it’s highly dubious definitions of taxations laws. In summary, they have their ears and eyes tapped into every conceivable communication source while making up their own laws to maintain this illegal surveillance  well into the future. If you listened to the BBC you would think that it is Glenn Greenwald who should be on trial for daring to suggest that intelligence chiefs “routinely lie.”
But the shadow government and the NSA isn’t content – it needs more and more. Research into weaponisation, military capabilities and surveillance has now encompassed much of society. Corporations, multinational security firms and private contractors who act as “digital blackwaters” are all in the NSA bag. Outsourcing is key in terms of diluting accountability whilst encouraging innovation. In just a few examples from many, military-intel company Raytheon has “… secretly developed software capable of tracking people’s movements and predicting future behaviour by mining data from social networking websites.” The company admitted that it was a joint research & development project shared with the US government sincce 2010 in order “… to help build a national security system capable of analysing ‘trillions of entities’ from cyberspace.

Whistleblowers William Binney (left) and Edward J. Snowden (right)

The security of biometric data is a bad joke since the sale of private data is open to lucrative profits. In 2013, Richard Kerbaj and Jon Ungoed-Thomas reported in the May 13th, edition of The Sunday Times that data of 27m mobile phone users had been: “… offered for sale to the Metropolitan police, private companies and other bodies, enabling them to track users’ movements.” The company involved in the potential sale is: “Ipsos Mori, one of Britain’s biggest research firms, … claimed in meetings that every movement by users can be tracked to within 100 metres.” According to the newspaper, the company: “shelved any deal after being contacted by The Sunday Times.” The report continued: “Documents to promote the data reveal that it includes ‘gender, age, postcode, websites visited, time of day text is sent [and] location of customer when call is made’. They state that people’s mobile phone use and location can be tracked in real time with records of movements, calls, texts, also available for the previous six months.” ^[14]
To carry out these  games in order to “protect us” the NSA has resorted to impersonating Google in order to obtain its information and swell its billions of files.  Named in the business as a “man in the middle attack” it involves a hacker technique of “… using a fake security certificate to pose as a legitimate Web service, bypass browser security settings, and then intercept data that an unsuspecting person is sending to that service.” Once passwords have been collected users can then log in to genuine banking websites thereby acting as intermediary or “middle man” and re-routing requests to their bank and returning the information to the customer while gathering highly personal data from both participants without either having the slightest clue what has happened. (It also applies to email servers). This time it is not a lone hacker but the NSA and GCHQ, where massive amounts of information is being channelled back to their central hubs. ^[15]
The idea that informational roadmap of cyberspace has been compromised by Intel PSYOPS and NSA surveillance has become more of a probability that a possibility. It is foolish to believe that anything we do online is secure or private. Not only is the NSA breaking most forms of encryption on the internet but is likely replacing intercepting downloads of open-source encryption software and silently replacing these with their own versions. The NSA is re-calibrating the internet towards its own perception of reality.
Illegality is justified with the favourite canard that it is all to protect us from terrorism. It was confirmed just how manufactured the threat truly is when online journal allgov.net reported in October 2013 that NSA Director Keith Alexander admitted before a congressional committee that he lied when he claimed the agency’s wire-tapping program had thwarted 54 terrorist “plots or events.”  In June of 2013, while the Obama administration was busy denouncing the whistleblowing of Edward Snowden and locking away Bradley Manning for 35 years, the NSA was lying through its teeth once again. Only 13 of the 54 cases were connected to the United States and just one or two suspected plots were: “… identified as a result of bulk phone record collection.” This was nothing new. The head was merely following the “terrorist-under-your-bed” justification for all manner of constitutional abuses practiced by the government and military-intelligence apparatus.
Lying is an inherent part of the deal. Apart from using data and surveillance as a means to implement propaganda, cyber-warfare and the harassment of those deemed “enemies,” mass surveillance is key to Obama’s assassination programs still carried out without oversight. In combination with the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) the NSA and CIA effectively make a private army outside any democratic accountability. Special operations units utilising drones and US soldiers are deployed all around the globe, from Somalia to Yemen, Afghanistan to Iraq. The coordination and logistical support is given by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) who essentially decides who might be a suitable target and the means by which he or she will be murdered.
According to Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) the true purpose of the NCTC is the:

“massive, secretive data collection and mining of trillions of points of data about most people in the United States” …. In particular, the NCTC operates a gigantic data-mining operation, in which all sorts of information about innocent Americans is systematically monitored, stored, and analyzed. This includes “records from law enforcement investigations, health information, employment history, travel and student records” – “literally anything the government collects would be fair game”. In other words, the NCTC – now vested with the power to determine the proper “disposition” of terrorist suspects – is the same agency that is at the center of the ubiquitous, unaccountable surveillance state aimed at American citizens.
Worse still, as the ACLU’s legislative counsel Chris Calabrese documented back in July in a must-read analysis, Obama officials very recently abolished safeguards on how this information can be used. Whereas the agency, during the Bush years, was barred from storing non-terrorist-related information about innocent Americans for more than 180 days – a limit which “meant that NCTC was dissuaded from collecting large databases filled with information on innocent Americans” – it is now free to do so. Obama officials eliminated this constraint by authorizing the NCTC “to collect and ‘continually assess’ information on innocent Americans for up to five years”. ^[16]

As the NSA and Homeland Security can now, on a whim, label any American a potential terrorist, the most obvious question to ask is how long will it be before American citizens are assassinated on their own soil? (Assuming it hasn’t happened already).

Obama’s Drones ready to assassinate from a distance without trial or jury. Based on the woeful intelligence of the last decade chances are you are likely to be an innocent civilian.

Perhaps no better example illustrates how the NSA should be the last people we trust is from the recent confirmation that the agency wishes to defend none other than Wall Street. Rather than wire-tapping genuine criminals infesting the world of cartel economics, this bastion of financial terrorism is deemed worthy of protection.
Salon, journalist Natasha Lennard details how the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper released a statement in early 2013 noting: “It is not a secret that the Intelligence Community collects information about economic and financial matters, and terrorist financing. We collect this information for many important reasons: for one, it could provide the United States and our allies early warning of international financial crises which could negatively impact the global economy. It also could provide insight into other countries’ economic policy or behavior which could affect global markets.” ^[17]
The NSA could no doubt collect vast amounts of information on the continuing “irregularities” and corporate crimes still devouring any chance of a healthy economy. As journalist Michael Degerald mentioned regarding the admission: “If any part of American society or business had shown itself to be corrupt to the core, and thus in need of surveillance, it’s Wall Street.” ^[18]

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Notes
[1] ‘The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)’ By James Bamford, Wired, March 15, 2012.
[2] Ibid.
[3] RT report July 2012.
[4] ‘Sworn Declaration of Whistleblower William Binney on NSA Domestic Surveillance Capabilities’ July 16 2012. Public Intelligence.net, http://www.publicintelligence.net.
[5] ‘NSA Boss Wants More Control Over the ‘Net’by Tom Simonite, technologyreview.com, July 27, 2012.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid.
[8] ‘NSA Whistleblower To Expose More Unlawful Activity: ‘People…Are Going To Be Shocked’’ By Faiz Shakir, Thnik Progress Security, wwwthinkprorgess.org May 12, 2006.
[9]‘Inside the Puzzle Palace’ – A Reason interview with NSA whistleblower Russell Tice, by Julian Sanchez, http://www.reason.org, January 13, 2006.
[10] ‘Synthetic Environments for Analysis and Simulation’ By Kevin Flaherty, http://www.cryptogon.com, June 30th, 2007.
[11] ‘Sentient world: war games on the grandest scale – Sim Strife’ By Mark Baard, The Register, 23rd June 2007.
[12] ‘DIA sending hundreds more spies overseas’ By Greg Millar, The Washington Post, December 2.
[13] See: ‘Full Interview with Edward Snowden’at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdPbvKeRgpk
[14] ‘Secrets of 27m mobile phones offered to police’ by Richard Kerbaj and Jon Ungoed-Thomas Sunday Times, 12 May 2013.
[15] ‘NSA Disguised itself as Google’ by Edward Moyer CNET.com, September 2013.
[16] “The President’s Private Army”: NSA-CIA Spying is Central to Carrying Out the Obama Administration’s Assassination Program. By Washington’s Blog / Global Research, September 29, 2013.
[17] ‘Statement by Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper on Allegations of Economic Espionage’
Sunday, September 08, 2013.
[18] ‘Why doesn’t NSA spy on Wall Street?’by Michael Degerald Salon.com Sep 11, 2013.

Starbucks Cup Controversy & The Hidden Meaning Of The Starbucks Logo

November 11, 2015 by Jennifer Sodini.http://www.collective-evolution.com/2015/11/11/starbucks-cup-controversy-the-hidden-meaning-of-the-starbucks-logo/

Starbucks’ decision to stay “holiday neutral” on their cups this year has been a point of contention and a heated conversation over the past few days, agitating many to believe that this decision marked an intentional “war on Christmas” (see: Red Cup Controversy).

According to Jeffrey Fields, VP of Starbucks, the concept was for the holiday cups to be a blank canvas, allowing customers to create their own stories, “inspired by the doodles and designs that customers have drawn on white cups for years.” “In the past, we have told stories with our holiday cups designs,” Jeffrey explained. “This year we wanted to usher in the holidays with a purity of design that welcomes all of our stories.”

Yet the whole “red cup” controversy starts to look pretty silly when you take into account that Starbucks’ logo (which emblazons every cup) has been actually highly esoteric in nature from the beginning.

While The Little Mermaid portrays Ariel as a quirky, curious beauty with hopes of exploring the world, according to Greek mythology, mermaids, or sirens, were predatory seductresses that would seduce sailors with songs and promises of sex — and then kill them.

The original Starbucks logo had a twin-tailed mermaid, known as Melusine. According to Wikipedia the tale of Melusine is as follows:

The tale was translated into German in 1456 by Thüring von Ringoltingen, the version of which became popular as a chapbook. It was later translated into English c. 1500, and often printed in both the 15th century and the 16th century. A prose version is entitled the Chronique de la princesse (Chronicle of the Princess).
It tells how in the time of the Crusades, Elynas, the King of Albany (an old name for Scotland or Alba), went hunting one day and came across a beautiful lady in the forest. She was Pressyne, mother of Melusine. He persuaded her to marry him but she agreed, only on the promise — for there is often a hard and fatal condition attached to any pairing of fay and mortal — that he must not enter her chamber when she birthed or bathed her children. She gave birth to triplets. When he violated this taboo, Pressyne left the kingdom, together with her three daughters, and traveled to the lost Isle of Avalon.
The three girls — Melusine, Melior, and Palatyne — grew up in Avalon. On their fifteenth birthday, Melusine, the eldest, asked why they had been taken to Avalon. Upon hearing of their father’s broken promise, Melusine sought revenge. She and her sisters captured Elynas and locked him, with his riches, in a mountain. Pressyne became enraged when she learned what the girls had done, and punished them for their disrespect to their father. Melusine was condemned to take the form of a serpent from the waist down every Saturday. In other stories, she takes on the form of a mermaid.
Raymond of Poitou came across Melusine in a forest of Coulombiers in Poitou in France, and proposed marriage. Just as her mother had done, she laid a condition: that he must never enter her chamber on a Saturday. He broke the promise and saw her in the form of a part-woman, part-serpent, but she forgave him. When, during a disagreement, he called her a “serpent” in front of his court, she assumed the form of a dragon, provided him with two magic rings, and flew off, never to return.[1]

Beyond the tale of Melusine and the mythological mystery of the mermaid, the other gods of the sea are amongst the most powerful in history, as water represents the power of creation which can both give, and destroy life.

For example, the Christian iconography of the fish symbol is associated with Jesus — and although it is believed to be in relation to his statement to “Peter and Andrew that if they followed him, He would make them fishers of men” —  this mythology, too, dates back even before the Bible, and is actually relating to the Dagon god (or “fish god”) of the Philisitines.

From SeedofAbraham.com:

‘Dagon is the diminutive of dag, and signifies ‘little fish;’ not so much, however, in reference to size, as to the affection entertained for it; so that some would render it, ‘dear little fish.’ The Babylonians believed that a being, part man and part fish, emerged from the Erythraean Sea, and appeared in Babylonia in the early days of its history, and taught the people various arts necessary for their well-being. Representations of this fish-god have been found among the sculptures of Nineveh. The Philistine Dagon was of a similar character.’9

Whatever holiday you choose to celebrate, it is important to see beyond the symbols and the mainstream narrative which suits our cultural conditioning in order to find the root of what is (or was). Holidays are their own mythology (see: The Psychedelic Origin of Christmas), and history can be like the game of telephone at times, as stories get altered to suit the needs of those in control of what is written.

What you choose to believe is personal to you, and a cup shouldn’t dictate or deter your celebration. Whether the cup is red, purple, green, or decorated in Christmas design, the spirit of the holidays is within you, nobody else, and regardless, year round, the mermaid still will be on the Starbucks cup – luring people to pay $5.00 for a cup of coffee with her siren songs.

Corruption and Contempt: The Hidden Story of Hurricane Katrina

How the Bush Machine Destroyed America’s Emergency Response Agency

With tens of thousands trapped in the Superdome and looting out of control in the parts of the city still above water, FEMA was headed up by the least qualified person imaginable — Michael Brown. Photo Credit: Andrea Booher / FEMA Photo Library

WHO: Michael Brown, the disgraced head of FEMA during Hurricane Katrina
WHAT: The real story of how and why this hopelessly unqualified individual was placed in this sensitive post
WHY: A web of self-interest, undergirded by a philosophical contempt for government and the governed.

This article was originally assigned, accepted, and paid for in full by Vanity Fair — which never got around to publishing it, and graciously released it to the author. It tells the story of the cronyism, corruption, ineptness, contempt for the public and utter shamelessness of the Bush family apparatus and its extensive network. With yet another Bush now contesting the White House, and with the 10^th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina upon us, we would do well to study this closely. It documents unequivocally how greed and self-interest in high places can tear apart the very fabric of American society. Originally written within months of Hurricane Katrina, it will still make your blood boil.
This week we publish it in five parts. It has been slightly updated from the original.
Days after Louisiana’s Governor Kathleen Blanco declared a state of emergency and the National Hurricane Center warned the White House that Hurricane Katrina could top the New Orleans levee system, the only FEMA official actually in the city itself — Marty J. Bahamonde — was not even supposed to be there. He had been sent in advance of the storm and was ordered to leave as it bore down, but could not because of the clogged roads.
Michael Brown, the head of FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency), was known to have made it as far as Baton Rouge but seemed out of reach.
On Wednesday, August 31, with tens of thousands trapped in the Superdome and looting out of control in the parts of the city still above water, Bahamonde e-mailed Brown directly: “I know you know, the situation is past critical …. Hotels are kicking people out, thousands gathering in the streets with no food or water.’”
The response, when it came several hours later, was from a Brown aide, and did not address the warnings, but noted Brown’s desire to appear on a television program that evening. It included this key caveat: “It is very important that time is allowed for Mr. Brown to eat dinner.”
A week later, Brown would be replaced as on-site manager of the disaster.
Blamed for his role in one of the largest domestic debacles in American history, Brown was still thinking of his own comfort: “I’m going to go home and walk my dog and hug my wife, and maybe get a good Mexican meal and a stiff margarita and a full night’s sleep,” he told the AP.
In the midst of America’s worst natural — and manmade — disaster, it became clear that Brown was indeed lost in Margaritaville.

The response from Brown’s aide came several hours later: “It is very important that time is allowed for Mr. Brown to eat dinner.”

Katrina showed that much of the Bush-appointed federal leadership was every bit as unqualified as Brown. Each new crisis seemed to expose still more cronyism, patronage and nepotism at the very top of the country’s leading agencies: a Medicare administrator who came from the hospital association and stayed just long enough to do its bidding; judicial nominees without appropriate experience; dubious appointments to agencies touching everything from mine safety to immigration and customs. The list of shame goes on and on.
We still do not know the true extent to which the government was filled with Michael Browns. This is in part because of the media. At one time, major news organizations had a reporter assigned to each large federal bureaucracy, making it harder to sail these appointments through, and harder to hide incompetence and malfeasance. Now it takes a disaster to expose these things — when it is too late.
But Michael Brown will forever remain the poster child for federal incompetence — and worse. So a central question remains: Who is Michael Brown, and how did he end up at the helm of the Federal Emergency Management Agency?
Indeed, how did he and his predecessor and mentor, Joe Allbaugh, a Bush political operative, manage to turn FEMA, a once proud and effective disaster-relief agency, into a national disaster?
A Secret Relationship
On any level, it makes absolutely no sense that Michael Brown should have been holding any major government post. He had been a failed lawyer whose previous job ostensibly consisted of scrutinizing the ethics of judges in Arabian Horse competitions. In his highest pre-FEMA governmental job, he had been the quintessential neophyte: assistant to a city manager in a small Oklahoma city — and that had been decades before he came to Washington.
“Brownie” lacked any of the other usual connections or qualifications one might expect to see in such an appointee. He had done no known political work for George W. Bush — a typical path to patronage jobs.
He had no real background in emergency or logistics work of any kind. He was not a major donor. He was not even among the untold number of Bush family associates, allies, and friends.
The only answer the public has ever gotten as to why Michael Brown headed FEMA is peculiar and highly dissatisfying: Joe Allbaugh wanted him there.

George W. Bush and his buddy Joe Allbaugh managed to turn FEMA, a once proud and effective agency, into a national laughingstock.

Allbaugh is the brash and powerful but little-known Bush confidant who preceded Brown as FEMA director. When Allbaugh came to Washington, he brought Brown with him and rapidly promoted him until Brown was positioned to take over the agency.
But why Michael Brown? When pressed, the taciturn Allbaugh tersely replied that Brown was a lifelong friend in whom he had confidence. To this moment, that has remained the official, indeed only, explanation of how and why Michael Brown was running FEMA when Hurricane Katrina struck.
But a thorough investigation, encompassing scores of interviews and hundreds of documents, has uncovered another reality.
It begins with this astonishing fact: Nearly all of Joe Allbaugh’s friends and acquaintances say they had never heard of Michael Brown, never met him, never even seen the two men in each other’s presence. To them, Brown was a complete stranger.
The truth, as we have learned, is that the relationship between the two men had been hidden. The secret, decades-long partnership was designed to advance both men’s business and personal interests.
By all appearances, that explains why Allbaugh asked Bush to let him run FEMA, and why he then turned the place over to Brown. Indeed, as soon as Allbaugh left the agency, he began cashing in.
FEMA after the Allbaugh-Brown era was staffed by people put into position by the two men, and run by David Paulison, best known for advising Americans to stock up on duct tape as protection against future terrorist attacks.
Is this really just about incompetence? Or has a debilitating “culture of corruption” become deeply embedded in agencies like FEMA on which we literally rely for our lives?
Qualifications? Very Secret
In a more perfect world, the media, Congress, and engaged citizens would have wanted to know a great deal about Joe Allbaugh and Michael Brown before they were confirmed to serve in important positions. Even just a hard look at Brown’s last job before FEMA would have set off alarms.
For a decade, Brown was Commissioner of Judges and Stewards of the International Arabian Horse Association (IAHA). It is unclear what his qualifications were for that job; nonetheless it was the longest employment he ever had, and his most prestigious. But Brown knew it was a singularly inappropriate qualification for the leadership of FEMA: FEMA’s official Brown biography, posted on its website, did not mention this job at all. It turns out that Brown had good reason to be quiet about this chapter of his life.

While most folks who knew Brown were startled to see a person of such modest accomplishments in a high post, IAHA member Karl Hart was not: “Brown had been saying for six months or more that, if Bush was elected, he was going to have a high position in Washington.”

When the new IAHA post was created, members were told that their leadership had sought a person with several key characteristics: competency, experience — and total independence from the cronyism of the horse world.
In fact, what they got was the opposite. In retrospect, it looks like the fix was in for this position too.
Brown’s job was to address concerns about the integrity of the horse-judging process. But the main thing Brown did was to pursue an “investigation” of the sport’s most successful trainer, a man who had angered powerful people with connections at the top of the Republican Party.
Karl Hart, a Florida lawyer and longtime IAHA member who headed the group’s legal review committee, describes Brown’s efforts in this regard as an “obsessive vendetta.”
The trainer, David Boggs, was accused of cosmetically altering the appearance of a horse, a serious violation of competition rules. Brown ordered Boggs banned from the show circuit for five years, a Draconian punishment tantamount to putting the trainer out of business. Boggs’s competitors were delighted.
Boggs (who did not respond to interview requests) was, by most accounts, a talented and dedicated trainer. But according to Hart and others, he was hated by several Arabian Horse owners — who also happened to be very large Republican donors, including the late Bob Magness, a founder of the TCI cable giant; David Murdock, the Dole food company billionaire; and the late Alec Courtelis, a Florida developer.
Courtelis had been one of George H.W. Bush’s major fundraisers, and the elder Bush was a frequent overnight guest at Courtelis’s horse farm during his presidency. This was a very, very close relationship.
At an April 1990 fundraising dinner, Bush introduced Courtelis with the words, “Here’s a man who breeds racehorses for the same reason he works so hard for the party: only one place will do for Alec — first place.”
It is impossible to overstate the significance of George H.W. “Poppy” Bush’s taking a strong interest in helping this prominent backer. (As readers of my book Family of Secrets will know, the elder Bush had a well-concealed involvement with CIA covert operations throughout his life, long before his brief stint as a “civilian” CIA director — and long after.) Poppy Bush’s ability to make things happen and make certain problems disappear must be considered as one ponders how and why Michael Brown was moved into IAHA and proceeded to demolish Courtelis’s foe.
In any case, Hart and other IAHA elders say they’re not sure whether Boggs was guilty, but since the horse in question became the preeminent sire of the breed, Hart thinks genetics may have been a more likely factor in its near-perfect profile than cosmetic surgery. In any case, Boggs filed a battery of lawsuits against both the association and Brown, the financial toll of which contributed to the association’s near-bankruptcy.
There is no evidence that the big donors knew in advance about plans to hire Brown; Courtelis and Magness are deceased, and Murdock did not respond to an interview request. Yet, Brown’s performance clearly pleased influential sectors of the IAHA, as is apparent from the special treatment he was accorded.
While other staffers had to report to work each day, Brown, on a full salary, was allowed to work from his sprawling, mountain-air home in Lyons, a distant suburb of Denver, the city in which IAHA was located. His lifestyle was so pleasant and relaxed that some in Lyons assumed him to be semi-retired. James Van Dyke, chef-owner at Lyons’ Gateway Café, says Brown had leisurely lunches at the restaurant almost daily. “He seemed to have a lot of time on his hands,” says Van Dyke.
“He … pushed me into a closet”
Brown’s single-minded pursuit of Boggs contrasted sharply with a pronounced reluctance to pursue another case that seemed to have considerable merit — one involving Murdock’s trainer, who was accused of filing false papers for a show horse.
Ironically, it would be Murdock himself, in his zeal to help Brown, who would eventually sink him. One day, he mentioned to Hart that, at Brown’s request, he’d written him a $50,000 personal check, ostensibly for a legal defense fund to deal with Boggs’s suits. Hart was staggered to hear this, since the association was already paying Brown’s legal bills.
Hart took Brown aside at an IAHA board meeting and told him what he knew. Brown panicked. “He grabbed me, literally, and pushed me into a closet,” says Hart. “He said, ‘Is there any way you and I can work this out?’”
There wasn’t, and Brown was terminated immediately.
But only a few months later, in February 2001, he resurfaced as general counsel, and later deputy director and chief operating officer, of the vast bureaucracy at FEMA.
While most folks who knew Brown over the years were startled to see a person of such modest accomplishments in a high Washington post, the IAHA brass was not. As Hart recalls, “Brown had been saying for six months or more that, if Bush was elected, he was going to have a high position in Washington because he was very close to someone who was very active in Bush’s campaign.”
TOMORROW: In Part 2 of this series, we learn the hidden, real reason that Michael Brown, with no appropriate qualifications or experience, was brought into this important federal agency. We also discover shocking details of his past that should have disqualified him not only from running FEMA, but from any position of responsibility, period.
Related front page panorama photo credit: Greg Schaler / FEMA Photo Library / Wikimedia
Next:  Part 2