Say hello to America’s shadow government: a corporatized, militarized, entrenched bureaucracy that is fully operational and staffed by unelected officials who are, in essence, running the country. This shadow government represents the hidden face of a government that has no respect for the freedom of American citizens. No matter who sits in the White House or who allegedly represents us in Congress, this shadow government is here to stay. Indeed, as leaked documents by the FBI reveal, this shadow government—also referred to as “The 7th Floor Group”—essentially runs the government out of Washington DC. And as the Wikileaks data concerning the CIA’s tapping into all of our electronic devices reveals, everything we’re doing is being watched by government eyes.

https://www.newsbud.com/2017/04/04/the-path-to-total-dictatorship-americas-shadow-government-its-silent-coup-2/

Who remembers Echelon, the top-secret telecommunications spy network said to be run by the US and allied Anglophone nations, and to be triggered as soon as certain key words or phrases are spoken on the phone?

A lot of you, we'd guess. So it's interesting to note that Pentagon boffins have now stated that perhaps the most intriguing reputed capability of Echelon - the ability to automatically pick out words of interest and flag that conversation up as important to its human masters - doesn't work. Or anyway, it only works on good, clear lines: a noisy or degraded signal frustrates it.

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The European Union is developing a 21st century panopticon, a beast surveillance system that critics describe as “Orwellian,” “sinister,” and “positively chilling,” that would collate data from numerous sources, including surveillance cameras and personal computers, in order to detect “abnormal behavior” across the entire continent.

In a broader sense, this is part of the move towards creating a pan-European federal police force, where information and powers are shared as part of a centralized system. It is also a giant step towards the creation of a European CIA tasked not with keeping tabs on foreign enemies, but spying on its own population.

The surveillance system, known as Project Indect , promises to collect information by way of “continuous monitoring” of “web sites, discussion forums, usenet groups, file servers, p2p networks [and] individual computer systems”. It will also use CCTV feeds and other surveillance methods to develop models of “suspicious behavior” by analyzing the pitch of people’s voices (suggesting that private conversations will be recorded) as well as “the way their bodies move”.


Its main objective will be the “automatic detection of threats and abnormal behavior or violence”.

This is Echelon on steroids, a new version of the decades old NSA-run program that has already been spying on citizens for years, updated and expanded for the technological applications of the early 21st century.

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Secret Power gives us a heretofore unprecedented look at how the UKUSA surveillance machine is really run. This was published in 1996, and when I read it back then I couldn’t believe what I was holding in my hands.

The book has been notoriously difficult to find for sale, but good university libraries will have it—which is how I managed to read it. This book is, quite literally, one of the gems that should be in your personal collection.

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Secret Power, New Zealand’s Role in the International Spy Network by Nicky Hager»»

At least ten ECHELON stations operate around the world, and the network has the capacity to monitor huge volumes of international fax, phone and Internet communications. It operates on behalf of five states signed up to the UK-USA Security Agreement: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK, and the US.

No phone call you’ve made or text message you’ve sent is ultimately safe from their electronic eavesdropping. ECHELON is able to intercept and inspect the contents of communications via a global network of satellite stations and monitoring centres that capture radio, satellite, microwave, cellular and fibre optic traffic. It can automatically sift out flagged keywords and flagged addresses from masses of sent information.

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