Read a article a while back about how Clinton screwed things up after the collapse of the Soviet Union. They wanted to normalize relations and to build a trading partnership that was beneficial for both countries. But Bill and the rinos rebuffed them because we were the big dog now. So, Russia turned to China and now we're fooked.
For years, the U.S. government has bought information on private citizens from commercial data brokers. Now, for the first time ever, American spymasters are admitting that this data is sensitive—but they're leaving it up to the spy agencies on how to use it.
Last week, Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Avril Haines released a "Policy Framework for Commercially Available Information." Her office oversees 18 agencies in the "intelligence community," including the CIA, the FBI, the National Security Agency (NSA), and all military intelligence branches.
In the 2018 case Carpenter v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled that police need a warrant to obtain mobile phone location data from phone companies. (During the case, the Reason Foundation filed an amicus brief against warrantless snooping.) As a workaround, the feds instead started buying data from third-party brokers.
Haines' new framework claims that "additional clarity" on the government's policies will help protect Americans' privacy. Yet the document is vague about the specific limits. It orders the agencies themselves to come up with "safeguards that are tailored to the sensitivity of the information" and write an annual report on how they use this data.
As national security journalist Spencer Ackerman points out in his Forever Wars newsletter, the framework doesn't require the feds to delete old purchased data. Earlier this year, Sen. Ron Wyden (D–Ore.) called on the NSA to purge all data that it bought without a warrant and without following the Federal Trade Commission's privacy policies.
"The framework's absence of clear rules about what commercially available information can and cannot be purchased by the intelligence community reinforces the need for Congress to pass legislation protecting the rights of Americans," Wyden tells Reason. "The DNI's framework is nonetheless an important step forward in starting to bring the intelligence community under a set of principles and policies, and in documenting all the various programs so that they can be overseen."
The senator says he will keep working to ensure "that Congress is fully informed of all these programs." He and Rand Paul (R–Ky.) have been trying to pass the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act, which would ban buying data from third-party brokers. Although the bill passed the House of Representatives last month, the Biden administration opposes it.
Wyden has been aggressively pushing for transparency on data purchases over the past few years. In 2021, he uncovered that the Defense Intelligence Agency was buying Americans' smartphone location data. That same year, he sent a letter to Haines and CIA Director Bill Burns complaining about a secretive CIA data collection program. (In an Orwellian turn, the letter itself was classified until 2022.) This year, Wyden revealed more details on NSA data purchases.
Some of this data is collected and sold directly by the apps. For example, an intelligence company called X-Mode once paid MuslimPro, an app that offers a daily prayer calendar and a compass pointing towards Mecca, to include a few lines of location tracking code. X-Mode then sold the data to U.S. government agencies. MuslimPro claims that it did not intend to sell the data to the government and ended the arrangement after the story broke.
In other cases, the data is siphoned from advertising markets. Every time a user opens a website with paid advertisements, their location and attributes appear on a real-time bidding (RTB) exchange, a virtual auction where companies buy ad space. Data brokers posing as advertisers scrape the listings for information on users.
"Any government with a halfway decent cyber intelligence program is participating in these RTB exchanges, because it's such an immensely valuable source of data," says Byron Tau, author of Means of Control: How the Hidden Alliance of Tech and Government Is Creating a New American Surveillance State.
As a demonstration of how powerful RTB data is, an intelligence contractor used data from the dating app Grindr to track gay government employees from their offices to their homes, Tau reported in his book. Another firm called Near Intelligence used RTB data to help anti-abortion groups track women who visited Planned Parenthood clinics.
Earlier this year, WIRED revealed that Near Intelligence had used RTB data to build a dossier on sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein's associates, tracing mobile phone owners from his private island to addresses in the continental United States and other countries.
The new U.S. intelligence policy is "sort of a recognition that this data is actually sensitive, which is a bit of a change," Tau notes. "Early on, government lawyers were saying basically it's anonymized, so no privacy problem here."
For example, U.S. Customs and Border Protection insisted in a 2018 privacy assessment that the agency "receives only anonymized data from commercial sources…with no associated PII," or personally identifiable information. But the border cops have used that supposedly anonymous data to track and arrest specific people.
Lawyers for the Internal Revenue Service, on the other hand, have argued that users voluntarily handed over the information, so the government is free to use it. Tau points out that users don't really know how their data is being resold, and even the RTB exchanges themselves aren't supposed to be used for data scraping.
"A lot of these companies that are collecting data from the global population don't have a real consumer relationship" with the people they're spying on, Tau says. "Unless you know how to decompile software and you're technically savvy, you can't even make informed choices."
We are already in the early stages of the collapse. It began in earnest withe the advent of covid. It's much more than just another great depression. It will be total...ie Biblical. Most likely America as we knew it will cease to exist.
“They Think There Are Too Many Of Us On The Planet” – Alex Newman Warns Of Tyrannical UN Plans For Our Future
Via Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com,
Award-winning journalist Alex Newman, author of the popular book “Deep State” and the new best-selling book called “Indoctrinating Our Children to Death,” says the UN’s quest for total tyrannical control of your life is coming sooner than you could imagine.
Newman explains, “The bigger story here that people are not paying attention to is the UN is coming together in September… and they are having ‘The Summit of the Future.’ “
“They are telling us they are going to bring out radical drastic reforms in the structure of the UN… and the power of the UN. Think of it as the biggest power grab ever at the global level. The Secretary General of the UN (António Guterres) has put out briefs where he is calling for the UN to be the one world global dictatorship with him at the helm. In emergencies, the UN would have all power in emergencies and have all power to oversee emergency response…
They say the crisis could be a climate crisis, an economic crisis, environmental crisis, pandemic crisis, black swan crisis or maybe something from outer space. So, basically, anything could be a crisis, and when the Secretary General declares a crisis, all power and authority would go to the UN. This is like a blank check on the wealth and liberty on every person on the planet, and this is coming soon. It is imminent. This is coming in September at the UN, and it is a power grab of historic proportions.
They know their time is short, and they are going for the big enchilada here. This is really a summit for a tyrannical future…
They want control of every aspect of your life.”
If you think the “depopulation” or murder program by the Deep State is some sort of conspiracy theory or myth, think again. Newman says:
“One of the interesting things about going to the UN conferences is they are totally open and totally transparent about the fact that they think there are way too many of us on this planet.
We are taking up their space and consuming their resources. They say this openly.
They say there are way too many people having way too many babies, and we have to drastically cut back on the number of people on the planet. They have a whole agency dedicated to this called the UN Population Fund.”
One sure fire way to kill a lot of people in a short amount of time is war. Newman says:
“They have understood, the globalists, the Deep State, the evil doers and the sick cabal, have understood for a very long time that war was the best mechanism for bringing about their totalitarian one world government.
This is not speculation on my part. This is what they say. Their game plan is war, famine, energy crisis and economic crisis. These are all tools and catalysts for accelerating this agenda.
If millions of people die in a third world war, and it does not matter if it is Iran and Israel, or China and Tiawan, or Ukraine and Russia, it really does not matter, they want millions and millions of people dead so people will give up their attachment to the nation state, self-government and individual liberty and give up anything, money or freedom, anything to make it stop.”
Don’t lose hope because Newman also talks about all the things you can do to not comply with tyranny.
Newman also points out what state and local governments can do and are doing to resist this UN total control of everything. Newman says, “We are at war, and everyone needs to put on the full armor of God.”
There is much more in the 40-minute interview.
Join Greg Hunter of USAWatchdog.com as he goes One-on-One with hard-hitting journalist Alex Newman, founder of LibertySentinel.org and author of the runaway best-selling new book called “Indoctrinating Our Children to Death,” for 4.20.24.
Top Military Official Lied About Jan. 6: Whistleblowers
Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
The secretary of the Army on Jan. 6, 2021, lied about multiple details regarding what unfolded as the U.S. Capitol was breached, National Guard whistleblowers said during a congressional hearing on April 17. Secretary of the Army Ryan McCarthy testifies to the Senate Armed Services Committee on Capitol Hill on Dec. 3, 2019. (Joshua Roberts/Reuters)
Then-Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy made multiple false claims, including that he spoke to the commanding general of the District of Columbia National Guard on two separate occasions after officials requested that the Guard be deployed to the Capitol, the whistleblowers said.
After Maj. Gen. William Walker conveyed a request from the U.S. Capitol Police for Guard personnel, Mr. McCarthy called Maj. Gen. Walker at 2:14 p.m. and instructed the Guard to stand by, according to a Guard timeline of Jan. 6, 2021. But that call and others that Mr. McCarthy or one of his top advisers were said to have made later authorizing the Guard for mobilization and deployment did not happen, according to the Guard officials.
“At no time did Gen. Walker take any calls, nor did we ever hear from the secretary on any of the ongoing conference calls or the secure video teleconferencing throughout the day,” Capt. Timothy Nick, who served as Maj. Gen. Walker’s personal assistant on Jan. 6, 2021, said during the hearing. “This I know because I was with the command general the entire time recording the events.”
National Guard Captain Blows Up J6 Narrative, Accuses U.S. Govt of Lying to the American People
“I’m here today to aid the subcommittee in resolving factual errors in the official record of what happened on January 6th, 2021, specifically regarding the alleged District of… pic.twitter.com/1hJAarFgdx
— Kyle Becker (@kylenabecker) April 18, 2024
Capt. Nick has not previously discussed publicly what transpired on Jan. 6, 2021, and neither has Brig. Gen. Aaron Dean, who was the National Guard’s adjutant general on the day that the Capitol was breached.
The Department of Defense (DOD) inspector general report on Jan. 6, 2021, which relied heavily on Mr. McCarthy and other military officials, was rife with “inaccuracies,” Brig. Gen. Dean said. “I believe it is my duty and moral obligation to stand before you today and illuminate the truth,” he told the hearing, which was held by the House Administration Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight.
Despite Mr. Walker conveying the request for assistance at about 1:50 p.m., the Guard was not deployed to the Capitol until about 5:10 p.m.
“This was a dereliction of duty by the secretary of the Army,” Rep. Greg Murphy (R-N.C.), one of the members of the committee, said.
Mr. McCarthy refused to appear before the panel, Dr. Murphy said.
Christopher Miller, the acting secretary of defense at the time, authorized Guard deployment at 3:11 p.m., but Mr. McCarthy took the order and decided to draw up a plan before ordering the deployment, according to military timelines and testimony from Mr. McCarthy and others.
“You never would employ our personnel, whether it’s on an American street or a foreign street, without putting together a [plan],” Mr. McCarthy told the now-disbanded House Jan. 6 committee.
Mr. McCarthy could not be reached for comment. The Army declined to comment.
“We stand by our January 6th Report and have no further comment at this time,” a DOD inspector general spokesperson told The Epoch Times via email.
The whistleblowers also testified that Army officials Lt. Gen. Walter Piatt and Gen. Charles Flynn, during a 2:30 p.m. conference call on Jan. 6, 2021, expressed concern about the optics of having the Guard at the Capitol.
“I did hear the word optics. And they did use it. Specifically, Gen. Piatt said ‘optics.’ And his concern was that he did not want soldiers or airmen on Capitol grounds, with the Capitol in the background,” Brig. Gen. Dean said. “They were giving every other reason why we should be around the Capitol, away from the Capitol, and not responding to the Capitol.”
The officials lacked familiarity with the Guard and the Guard’s capabilities, Brig. Gen. Dean said.
Lt. Gen. Piatt has been quoted by Maj. Gen. Walker and others as saying during the call: “I don’t like the visual of the National Guard standing a line with the Capitol in the background. I would much rather relieve USCP [U.S. Capitol Police] officers from other posts so they can handle the protestors.”
Lt. Gen. Piatt has told lawmakers that he did not recall using the words optics, visuals, or image during the call or in any other conversations on Jan. 6, 2021. But he later said, “I may have said that,” citing people who took notes during the call.
Gen. Flynn told the House Oversight Committee in 2021 that he “never expressed a concern about the visuals, image, or public perception of sending the D.C. National Guard to the U.S. Capitol.”
Col. Earl Matthews, a lawyer who was with Maj. Gen. Walker on Jan. 6, 2021, and who has challenged the Pentagon Jan. 6 narrative, and District of Columbia National Guard Command Sgt. Michael Brooks, a senior officer with the Guard until he retired in 2022, also testified during the hearing in Washington.
None of the Guard officials who testified were formally interviewed by the House Jan. 6 committee, which was primarily run by Democrats and disbanded at the end of the previous Congress.
The officials said the Guard was ready to act and could have made a difference if not for the delay.
“I know if we were able to deploy immediately when Gen. Walker made the request, the National Guard could have helped end civil disturbance and restore order quickly,” Capt. Nick said.
The results look pretty similar to the results from Iran's attack - much ballyhoo, but little real damage. An expensive show of force, more to placate their own citizenry than anything else.
