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Eric Blair
Activist Post

One of the underhanded ways the feds are attempting to defeat legal medical marijuana is by preventing banks from doing business with dispensaries.

Because medical marijuana is illegal under federal law, federally insured banks even in states where it’s legal were notified in 2011 to be suspicious of marijuana-related banking activities. The warnings stated that the business of marijuana is a “high-risk area for money laundering” which would put the banks at risk of racketeering and laundering charges.

Even though banks were not directly ordered to deny services to lawful medical cannabis shops, most banks heeded the warnings and closed dispensary accounts anyways.  This forced patients and dispensaries into cash-only transactions.

Clearly, this presented legal dispensaries and patients with challenges; not least becoming an increased target of theft.  Additionally, it’s easier for these shops to hide actual profits now that they are forced into a cash operation, seemingly nullifying the scare of money laundering.

In other words, it’d be much easier to track their transactions if allowed to be properly funneled through banks.  In Colorado, around $20 million a year in state and local taxes may be at risk because the business is being forced to operate in the darkness of cash-based black markets.

Colorado lawmakers, seeking a solution, proposed establishing a cooperative financial institution (resembling a credit union) for the state’s 600 legal dispensaries. Colorado Congressman, Jared Polis, a supporter of the local measure, also proposed federal legislation to open financial services to lawful medical marijuana businesses.

Polis, perhaps realizing Colorado’s state lawmakers represented the only hope for a fast banking solution, confronted Attorney General Holder about interfering with state laws to regulate medical cannabis, where Holder assured him that they have not intention to do so:

Yesterday, the Colorado State Finance Committee debated the proposal for a local cooperative financial institution to help dispensaries process payments, store money, and even make loans to other depositors.

However, the Associated Press reported late last night that the proposal was rejected by the committee because lawmakers still feared federal intervention.

“This bill attempts to address this big problem for the industry, the lack of financial services. But what it cannot do is get around the federal money-laundering piece of this,” University of Denver law professor, Sam Kamin, told the Associated Press.

In June 2011, Obama reversed his stance of letting states decide their own medical cannabis policies with a Justice Department memo stating, “Those who engage in transactions involving the proceeds of such activity may also be in violation of federal money laundering statutes and other federal financing laws.”

The continued confusion as to how the feds will deal with state laws pertaining to medical marijuana is intimidating other states to suspend their progress in allowing patients to seek natural alternatives to medical ailments.

In May, 2011, Rhode Island suspended their dispensary program fearing federal crackdowns. This year Arizona sued the federal government to clarify how they would treat their approval of medical marijuana.  The suit was dismissed, and Arizona will now move forward.

However, most recently, Delaware also suspended its medical marijuana program. US Attorney for Delaware, Charles M. Oberly III, threatened that “state employees who regulated the medical marijuana industry might not be safe from federal prosecution.”

Oberly also pointed to the problem with banking as one of the reasons for recommending the suspension of the program: “Moreover, those who engage in financial transactions involving the proceeds of such activities may also be in violation of federal money laundering statutes.”

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Thus, even though the feds have made no direct orders for banks to refuse lawful dispensary business, the threats and intimidation of prosecution have been enough to not only halt mutual business relationships, but also to produce a domino effect of paralyzing medical marijuana legislation in other states.

What’s more, international banks have been caught repeatedly laundering money for major drug cartels and face nothing more than a slap on the wrist from the feds.  In fact, the U.N. and IMF estimated in 2010 that “Up to 1.5 trillion dollars in drug money are laundered through legal enterprises, accounting for 5% of global GDP.”

These illegal drug deposits are clearly more important to the banks than the measly fines they pay when they’re exposed and prosecuted.  Perhaps it’s time to put aside hypocrisy and start allowing legal enterprises to work with local credit unions.

Read more articles from Eric Blair here. 

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Eric Blair
Activist Post

Cannabis is becoming widely recognized for its diverse medical uses, and the trend toward marijuana legalization is clearly on the rise. But someone forgot to tell the Obama administration.

Despite Obama’s 2008 sympathetic campaign rhetoric that he would honor states rights and protect medical marijuana patients, he continues to crackdown on legal medical pot.

This time the Feds are going after the world’s largest medical cannabis dispensary, which is bound to infuriate marijuana advocates.

Reuters reported today:

Federal prosecutors have filed civil forfeiture actions against an Oakland medical marijuana dispensary that bills itself as the world’s largest, as part of a crackdown by U.S. authorities on California’s massive cannabis trade.

The lawsuits, filed on Monday in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, seek forfeiture of two properties where Harborside Health Center operates, said Melinda Haag, U.S. attorney for the Northern District of California. 

This is not the first time the Feds have tried to destroy Harborside using backdoor technicalities in lieu of overt SWAT raids.

The Harborside Health Center has also been targeted by the IRS. Although Harborside has gone above and beyond to report all income, they were slapped with a $2.5 million tax bill and denied the right to claim any legitimate business expenses.  To make matters worse, Harborside was also hit with abusive local taxes that were raised 4000% and had to be prepaid in advance.

For anyone who wants to know the lengths to which Harborside has complied with the endless regulations, their struggle is recorded on Discovery’s TV show Weed Wars.  Watch the clip below for a taste of their battle to delivery natural medicine to ailing patients:

The Feds announced last year that they would go after property owners who rent to lawful medical marijuana shops. This new property forfeiture (confiscation) case is the first high-profile case of this type.

It’s just one of the covert tactics Obama is using to intimidate and attack legalized medical cannabis.

Multiple polls show that over 75% of Americans support legalizing medical pot with over half the population supporting outright legalization. Seventeen states and the District of Columbia have legalized medical marijuana, while fifteen states have decriminalized personal possession.

Around the world other nations are finally beginning to see the folly of prosecuting cannabis crimes.  Colombia and Uruguay are leading full-scale legalization efforts in Latin America.

Obama and the Feds are clearly on the wrong side of history and risk facing universal ridicule for their continued war against marijuana.

Make your voice known and tell Feds what you think about their war on medical marijuana in states who voted to legalize it.  Please comment below.

Read other articles by Eric Blair HERE

Alternative news sites beware, Google is changing their algorithm to reduce your status to a spammer in an attempt to control the flow of information on the Internet.

Eric Blair 
Activist Post

Google has announced that it is fixing flaws in its algorithm that allows search results to be spammed, while also planning to weaken the search-ability of websites referred to as “content farms.”  Matt Cutts, head of Google’s anti-spam team, writes:

As “pure webspam” has decreased over time, attention has shifted instead to “content farms,” which are sites with shallow or low-quality content. In 2010, we launched two major algorithmic changes focused on low-quality sites. Nonetheless, we hear the feedback from the web loud and clear: people are asking for even stronger action on content farms and sites that consist primarily of spammy or low-quality content. (my emphasis)

The only clear reference from Google about problems occurring from “content farms” in regards to spamming search results is from China: “Last year Google faced a rash of webspam on Chinese domains in our index. Some spammers were purchasing large amounts of cheap .cn domains and stuffing them with misspellings and porn phrases.”  They claim this scheme led to “irrelevant” search results.

Yet, their goal seems to be to weaken what has been referred to as “news aggregating” websites as “one change that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content.” This clearly describes many sites that present alternative news. However, plenty of alternative news sites and blogs have original material which they freely share, in part or in full, purely to support one another in disseminating the truth. This is of key importance to spread information in the absence of government or foundation funding, as enjoyed by much of the mainstream media. It is also a counter to censorship, so that a free market of ideas can flourish where people can investigate facts for themselves, rather than have opinions dictated from a limited number of sources.

According to a recent cheerleading article by TechCrunch, content farms indeed include websites that post any duplicate content word-for-word, “Now, finally, it sounds like they’re going to do more to take on sites that just repurpose content from other sites (hopefully including the countless sites that repost TechCrunch articles verbatim).”

What’s odd is that everyone knows that original content already carries far more weight with Google algorithms than re-posted content. Additionally, backlinks from well-ranked relevant sites is also a huge factor in building a strong Google page rank, besides driving traffic to the source. Therefore, it would stand to reason that websites like TechCrunch should be overjoyed when other relevant sites post their content, as long as it is sourced with a hyperlink. Alexa ranks TechCrunch at 305 on the entire Internet, no doubt due to their 36,374 links that Alexa recognizes. Without allowing the sharing of their original content, this level of achievement would be impossible under the current Google algorithm.

For those who understand this concept, if they punish sites that re-post content such as news aggregators that link back to them, the source will surely lose traffic and overall ranking despite being heavy in original content.  Which begs the question, what people have been asking for “stronger action against content farms?”  Because gauging the rise in popularity of alternative media (i.e. news aggregators), it seems that Internet users themselves aren’t the ones complaining.

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It is obviously the entrenched dinosaur media that despises having to play on a level field, especially as it pertains to truthful reporting and analysis.  Former executive editor of the Washington Post, Leonard Downie Jr., addressed “old media vs. new media” in a September lecture where he excoriated so-called content farms as “parasites living off journalism produced by others.”  He even claims re-posting of material, even if sourced, is “stealing” as reported by Politico:

‘The aggregators fill their websites with news, opinion, features, photographs and video that they continuously collect – some would say steal – from other national and local news sites, along with mostly unpaid postings by bloggers who settle for exposure in lieu of money,’ Downie said. ‘Though they purport to be a new form of journalism, these aggregators are primarily parasites living off journalism produced by others. They attract audiences by aggregating journalism about special interests and opinions reflecting a predictable point of view on the left or right of the political spectrum, along with titillating gossip and sex. Revealing photos of and stories about entertainment and celebrities account for much of the highly touted web traffic to the Huffington Post site, for example.’

Downie rightly states that these sites attract an audience seeking a certain point of view, but ignores the fact that mainstream outlets do the same.  Some would argue that the real strength behind news aggregators is the ability to expose the establishment’s gross injustices and other inconvenient truths without all the “titillating” distractions.  As the masses become more aware of establishment lies, they are flocking to alternative sites who cut through the BS and present a clear path to the truth.

Google’s algorithm changes seem to be yet another tool being used to direct the flow of information away from the alternative media to selected mainstream news sources.  It compounds actions already taken by Google in their involvement in upending net neutrality in favor of mega-media machines; the attempt by Congress to crack down on copyright infringement by blacklisting domain names; and copyright extortionist lawyers suing over wording in links.

It’s obvious that the establishment will find a way to punish truth sites, either through technical penalization for re-posting material, reducing access speed, blogging taxes, lawsuits for copyright infringement, or by arbitrarily blacklisting the domain altogether.

At its core, this new Google algorithm seems to punish information sharing in favor of protectionist conglomerates with large writing staffs. We in the alternative media would do well to recognize that these actions being taken by the elite of the media world are just another sign of their weakened state.  Now is the time for the alternative media to seek more writers and more cooperation.

RELATED ARTICLES:
New Google Algorithm Is Live: Aggregators Will Be Punished
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Eric Blair
Activist Post

Did you know milk, cheese, and other dairy products could double in January if the farm bill isn’t passed before the new year?

At first I thought this was a veiled threat from the farm lobby to get their subsidies, but it looks like it goes deeper than that.  In fact, farmers don’t want the price to go up because they fear they’ll be swimming in unsold milk.

“Few will buy milk the USDA will be forced to sell at prices consumers can’t afford, so Congress has no alternative but to stop the change,” UW-Madison agriculture economist Bruce Jones told the Wisconsin State Journal. “We’ll be swimming in milk, with nobody to consume it.”

He added that the dairy industry would experience a short-term windfall but the lack of demand would cause milk prices to eventually plummet which would be a catastrophe for dairy farmers.

But what is responsible for the price of milk, and why would it double without a farm bill?

The price of milk is not set by the free market as Jones suggests.  It’s set by USDA regulators that claim to use market indicators and a “variety of pricing regulations”:

Over the past 125 years, a complex system of both public and private pricing institutions has evolved to deal with milk production, assembly, and distribution. The pricing of milk in the United States is part market-determined, and part publicly administered through a wide variety of pricing regulations. (Source: USDA)

This complex system is said to be used to create a balance between supply and demand to take the following into account:

• The need for producer prices to be high enough to maintain production, but not so high as to encourage surplus production;


• The willingness and ability of consumers to pay for milk and dairy products, and;


• The interest of producers, handlers, and the public in the orderly flow of milk and dairy products from the producers to the consumers. (Source: PDF)

Apparently this formula is constantly evolving primarily due to economic circumstances, international trade negotiations, and the restructuring of dairy conglomerates which alter pricing relationships, according to the USDA.

And without a modern farm bill to factor in today’s market costs, the pricing reverts back to a antiquated pricing system from 1949. According to the Wisconsin State Journal:

National agriculture policy forces the implementation of a 1949 system for pricing milk if the country does not have an active farm bill. That antiquated policy uses a complex formula — based on costs of producing milk by hand and including inflation and other adjustments — that will force the U.S. Department of Agriculture to buy milk at nearly double the recent market price.

There doesn’t seem to be much hope that the farm bill or even a stopgap measure will be passed before next year. “There was nothing on the schedule for (this) week to deal with any of this,” said Wisconsin Congressman Ron Kind.

“This is crazy. The thought to going back to mid-20th century policies when we’re in the 21st century now is inexcusable,” Kind added. “The dairy cliff is going to be amazing if no action is taken.”

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It seems the “fiscal cliff” crisis has cleared everything else from Congress’ agenda and America will go over the “dairy cliff”.

How far away have we gone from the free market when an act of Congress is needed to prevent the doubling of a core food in the United States? This is precisely the problem with the government “determining” the price of anything.

As soon as regulators touch anything in the market, its genuine value is tainted forever; and it usually requires more meddling to try to set it straight, but inevitably always makes it worse.

Meanwhile, consumers and farmers alike will suffer.

Read more articles by Eric Blair Here.

Eric Blair
Activist Post

Who needs SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) or the international ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) when companies can have websites or YouTube channels removed simply by claiming their content has been infringed?

That is exactly what happened to the hip hop blog Dajaz1.com when the US government seized and censored it for over a year at the behest of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). RIAA claimed, while providing no evidence, that Dajaz1 was infringing on their copyrights and demanded they be shut down.

The government obliged the request before receiving any proof of the infringement. As it turns out, the RIAA couldn’t provide any evidence and the government was forced to return the website with not so much as even an apology. Fortunately, Dajaz1 had their property returned to them, but not before they lost a year of revenue plus the aggravation involved in battling false claims.

This case illustrated that the burden of proof was not needed, nor was due process, to censor and seize properties that are accused of copyright crimes.

In the past, the Department of Homeland Security has committed mass seizures of websites and domains suspected of copyright piracy, and even shut down sites for merely linking to to copyrighted material confirming that the government and judges will do the bidding for large corporations with or without the authority to do so.

Incidentally, using this draconian tactic appears to be the only way that “authorities” can seize websites accused of copyright violations.  Every single case where copyright trolls like Righthaven have attempted to use proper court channels (i.e. due process), the lawsuits were either dismissed or ruled in favor “fair use rights.“

Because not one of these cases has proven to be genuine copyright infringement, one would think that they should be treated as “innocent until proven guilty” going forward. However, these preemptive seizures seem to be on the increase even without sweeping authority given in bills like SOPA, or more recently CISPA.

What’s worse, content hosting sites like YouTube have recently begun implementing automated copyright sensors which act to shut down channels of those who were flagged in the system.  And these actions have not even been prompted by legislation or corporate requests.

This week, YouTube restricted the channels of one of the most-viewed publishers on their platform because of an automated copyright claim by a third-party marketing company.  Radio news host Alex Jones, whose primary YouTube channel has over 200 million views, and affiliate channels combine for nearly a half-a-billion views, was put on notice by Google-owned YouTube.

What was Jones’ copyright crime?  He aired his radio interviews with Joe Rogan who is under contract with a web marketing company called Bent Pixels. Bent Pixels claims sole copyright ownership of Rogan’s voice and image.

Paul Joseph Watson, who works for Alex Jones, writes:

Although Bent Pixels had previously used its own software to place ads on You Tube videos that contain exclusive Rogan content, You Tube began using its own automated software to determine which videos contained the image or voice of Joe Rogan, and then threatened legitimate content owners with community violations if the clips were not removed. 

Not only our videos of Joe Rogan’s appearances on the Alex Jones Show but other Joe Rogan videos across You Tube were deleted on this pretext and channels were suspended. 

This software has been applied across the You Tube platform, which is why hundreds of thousands of videos are now being deleted even though they clearly represent fair use or are even exclusive content which doesn’t even pertain to fair use.

YouTube appears to be prosecuting an entirely new form of copyright infringement with no regard for fair use rights.  Watson refers to this disturbing new frontier of censorship as ‘Copyrighting People’.

Obviously, it’s not copyright infringement when a personality goes on an independent radio show who then publishes their own material online.  Any judge would laugh this supposed violation out of court.

The oft-used metaphor for identifying copyright infringement online is “It’s like porn; you know it when you see it.”

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But, it’s clear that an automated bot doesn’t have the judgement needed to prosecute potential crimes especially in light of fair use rights. Nor does a police agency like DHS have the judgement or authority in such cases.

It still remains unclear why online copyright laws need to be strengthened in the first place.  There are already paths for content creators to pursue if they feel violated.  They can simply request that a site remove their content or take them to court.  Of course, that would require that they provide evidence that is beyond fair use rights.

At best any sweeping legislation to further police copyrights is akin to using a sledgehammer when only a scalpel is needed.  Yet, it’s more likely that the sledgehammer is intended to be a tool of mass censorship to smash competition who threaten mega-corporations in the only genuine free market left – the Internet.

Read other articles by Eric Blair here.

Eric Blair
Activist Post

Over a month ago we featured an article titled The NWO Agenda Would Move Forward with This One Simple Act, which stated the one event that could accomplish all of the agenda’s goals in one shot would be “a false flag cyber attack on Western banking institutions that they can pin on Iran.”

Please watch this exact scenario unfold in this short ABC news clip from a few days ago:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fg3tpUCt8wY]

With President Obama ready to sign an executive order to control the Internet in the name of cyber security, could it be more obvious that this “cyber attack” is a total set up? Especially since all versions of Internet control legislation have failed to pass in normal government channels both domestically and internationally.

Are we expected to believe that sophisticated Muslim hacktivists attacked US banks because they were angry about a movie that was produced in America?  That’d be like attacking Afghanistan or Iraq after 15 Saudis supposedly attacked us, ohh wait…that did happen.

Is this really the best story they can come up with?  It was so predictable that it makes it that much more laughable. But the motive being pinned on the pathetic anti-Muslim movie is the real kicker.

It’s sad to see Richard Clark in the video above actually take this seriously.  Talk about an establishment sellout.

I call major bullshit on this story.  It stinks to high heaven.  What do you think?

Read other articles by Eric Blair HERE

Eric Blair
Activist Post

Desperate for Internet control, Senate leaders once again put the Cybersecurity Act of 2012 up for a vote yesterday, and yet again, it failed to pass. But this time it was one vote closer (51 to 47) to passing than its August defeat (52 to 46).

The Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act, first introduced in 2010 by Joe Lieberman, was quickly dubbed the Internet Kill Switch Bill because of the power it gives to the executive branch to seize or shut down parts of the Internet in a cyber emergency.

At the time Lieberman justified this draconian power grab by saying, “Right now, China, the government, can disconnect parts of its Internet in a case of war. We need to have that here, too.”

Here’s the interview where he made these statements along with some commentary on why this policy is so dangerous:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqzupZhgfXw]

Section 249 of the bill states that “the President may issue a declaration of a national cyber emergency to covered critical infrastructure,” in which case a response plan is implemented. This plan shall consist of “measures or actions necessary to preserve the reliable operation, and mitigate or remediate the consequences of the potential disruption, of covered critical infrastructure”. (Source)

This bill was incredibly unpopular two years ago when it was introduced and America has not been hit with any significant cyber attacks since. However, as the cyber threat propaganda has been thrust into overdrive, more legislators seem to be swayed. Yet, still, it failed to pass.

It seems that Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s warnings of a cyber “Pearl Harbor” or “9/11” and DHS Head Janet Napolitano’s urgent warnings after Hurricane Sandy were not strong enough fear mongering to move this law forward.

Just before Obama’s re-election we wondered how long it would take for him to pull the trigger on his cybersecurity executive order; “this persistent manufactured urgency would seem to indicate that they will not wait for Congress to pass a cybersecurity law. Rather, they will likely bypass the Constitution and dictate their authority to control the Internet by having Obama sign an executive order instead.”

And before yesterday’s vote, Lieberman assured us that would happen when he warned that if Senate didn’t act on cybersecurity, Obama will: “I’m confident that if we fail to act, the president will act,” Lieberman said. “I think he has a responsibility to act because if we don’t we’re leaving the American people extremely vulnerable to a cybersecurity attack.”

The Hill states “Wednesday’s vote opens the door for the White House to issue the executive order it started crafting after the Senate bill failed in August.”

Indeed, Obama is fully expected to sign the executive order as he told lawmakers in August, inaction “would be the height of irresponsibility” and it would “leave a digital backdoor wide open to our cyber adversaries.”

Perhaps Obama will sign it in the wee hours of New Year’s Eve as he did with the controversial NDAA last year. This way the countless year-end fluff stories by the corporate media will drown out any criticism.

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Unfortunately, this is just one of many threats to the free and open Internet.

UPDATE: The Washington Post is reporting that Presidential Obama signed a secret cybersecurity presidential directive: Presidential Policy Directive 20. Apparently this directive was signed in October:

Presidential Policy Directive 20 establishes a broad and strict set of standards to guide the operations of federal agencies in confronting threats in cyberspace, according to several U.S. officials who have seen the classified document and are not authorized to speak on the record. The president signed it in mid-October. 

The new directive is the most extensive White House effort to date to wrestle with what constitutes an “offensive” and a “defensive” action in the rapidly evolving world of cyberwar and cyberterrorism, where an attack can be launched in milliseconds by unknown assailants utilizing a circuitous route. For the first time, the directive explicitly makes a distinction between network defense and cyber-operations to guide officials charged with making often-rapid decisions when confronted with threats.

Read More from Eric Blair HERE.

Permission = Freedom?

Activist Post

“The secret in propaganda is that when you demonize, you dehumanize,” says James Forsher, a film historian. “When you dehumanize, it allows you to kill your enemy and no longer feel guilty about it.”

Apparently illegal immigrants have been sufficiently dehumanized to force them into biometric tracking. There’s no way the government would use biometrics to track the superior law-abiding natives, right?  More on this later.

Illegal immigration is a hot-button issue that genuinely affects many communities and the motivation to do something about it is understandable.  However, anti-immigration supporters may be playing right into Big Brother’s hands by being tricked into supporting the hi-tech enslavement of themselves.

Some have referred to the sweeping immigration reform bill in Congress as a “Trojan Horse for Biometrics.”  These systems are a clear indication that illegal immigration is being used to put the final touches on the full-spectrum surveillance grid in America.

And, shockingly, politicians are making the immigration reform bill more stringent instead of less, apparently fueled by anti-immigration zealots.

According to NBC News, the senate hopes to finalize a bill for a vote by the end of the week. The Senate Judiciary Committee has been debating many biometric identification mandates and have now approved a more stringent biometric “test system” for U.S. airports.

Carrie Dann of NBC News writes:

Members of the Senate Judiciary Committee approved an amendment sponsored by Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, a Republican considered to be a swing vote on the 18 member committee. That amendment, a less stringent version of a biometric proposal that failed last week, would require the Department of Homeland Security to establish a fingerprinting system at the 10 U.S. airports with the highest international traffic within two years. After six years, that system would have to be in place at the nation’s 30 biggest airports.

One of the key authors of the legislation, Marco Rubio (R-FL), said “The amendment adopted today is a good start and I will continue to fight to make the tracking of entries and exits include biometrics.”

Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) called it “a start” as well.

This legislation is becoming more stringent, not less, in its implementation of biometric systems and it’s just a “good start” for these lawmakers who ultimately want a “more complete biometric system”.

NBC reports; “Proponents of the Hatch measure said it would provide an important step towards implementing a more complete biometric system, which senators on both sides of the aisle agreed would provide the most failsafe method for tracking visa overstays as well as individuals who pose national security threats.”

This particular amendment is only to track the movements of foreigners in and out of America. However, we’ve learned from Wired that a biometric database for all Americans is already hidden in the legislation.

David Kravets of Wired reported:

The immigration reform measure the Senate began debating yesterday would create a national biometric database of virtually every adult in the U.S., in what privacy groups fear could be the first step to a ubiquitous national identification system. 

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Buried in the more than 800 pages of the bipartisan legislation (.pdf) is language mandating the creation of the innocuously-named “photo tool,” a massive federal database administered by the Department of Homeland Security and containing names, ages, Social Security numbers and photographs of everyone in the country with a driver’s license or other state-issued photo ID.

“The most worrying aspect is that this creates a principle of permission basically to do certain activities and it can be used to restrict activities,” said ACLU’s Chris Calabrese. “It’s like a national ID system without the card.”

And this is just the “start” of it.

How soon will Americans submit to full biometric IDs especially if it gets them out of the naked body scanners and invasive patdowns at airports? Or if they need it to legally work in their state?

Oh, sure, you can opt out, but not if you want to work or travel in society.

Permission now equals Freedom in America.

Read other articles by Eric Blair Here 

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“American officials have not offered any technical evidence to back up their assertions of Iranian authorship of the latest attacks.” – The New York Times

Eric Blair

Activist Post

The New York Times ran a story Friday from an unnamed source about an unconfirmed story with unnamed victims. Why would the paper of record run such a story? Propaganda of course.

Any chance the officialdom can demonize Iran while simultaneously inflating the fear of cyber attacks, they’ll take it, even if it’s completely fabricated.

The NYT article New Computer Attacks Traced to Iran, Officials Say is pure propaganda. Take a look at some of the excerpts to determine what is supposed to be news.

American officials and corporate security experts examining a new wave of potentially destructive computer attacks striking American corporations, especially energy firms, say they have tracked the attacks back to Iran. 

The targets have included several American oil, gas and electricity companies, which government officials have refused to identify. The goal is not espionage, they say, but sabotage. Government officials describe the attacks as probes looking for ways to seize control of critical processing systems.

Investigators began looking at the attacks several months ago, and when the Department of Homeland Security issued a vaguely worded warning this month, a government official told The New York Times that “most everything we have seen is coming from the Middle East.” 

They said the evidence was not specific enough to conclude with confidence that the attacks were state-sponsored, but control over the Internet is so centralized in Iran that they said it was hard to imagine the attacks being done without government knowledge. (emphasis added)

As always, no evidence was provided: “American officials have not offered any technical evidence to back up their assertions of Iranian authorship of the latest attacks,” and “The White House would not confirm that Iran was the source.”

The official White House stance is:

“mitigating threats in cyberspace, whether theft of intellectual property or intrusions against our critical infrastructure” was a governmentwide initiative and that the United States would consider “all of the measures at its disposal — from diplomatic to law enforcement to economic — when determining how to protect our nation, allies, partners, and interests in cyberspace.”

The only news in the story is that the New York Times unequivocally confirms that the Stuxnet attack on an Iranian nuclear enrichment plant was indeed a joint Israeli-American operation, and they admit this alleged attack by Iran may be blowback.

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The Obama administration has been focused on Iran because the attacks have given the Iranian government a way to retaliate for tightened economic sanctions against it, and for the American and Israeli program that aimed similar attacks, using a virus known as Stuxnet, on the Natanz nuclear enrichment plant. 

That effort, code-named Olympic Games, slowed Iran’s progress for months, but also prompted it to create what Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps calls a cyber corps to defend the country.

Iran emphatically denies any such attacks. When accused of cyber attacking a Saudi oil company earlier this year, Iran U.N. spokesman said Iran “never engaged in such attacks against its Persian Gulf neighbors” but added, “Unfortunately, wrongful acts such as authorizing the 2010 Stuxnet attack against Iran have set a bad, and dangerous, precedent in breach of certain principles of international law.”

Jumping the gun to accuse state-sponsors of cyber attacks by unnamed sources, and with no evidence, seems to be a trend by the establishment to compile uncorroborated data points to reinforce future propaganda and justify taking possible action.

“Government officials also say Iran was the source of a separate continuing campaign of attacks on American financial institutions that began last September and has since taken dozens of American banks intermittently offline, costing millions of dollars,” writes the NYT.  Of course, that alleged denial of service attack on banks by Iran never had any evidence either.

Also, in November 2011, the DHS and the media got caught inflating a supposed cyber attack on a U.S. water plant. According to the Washington Post, “Foreign hackers targeted U.S. water plant in apparent malicious cyber attack, expert says.” The “expert” said it was a “big deal” that foreign hackers were involved because other plants could be affected; the expert called it “unconscionable” that America wasn’t prepared. Oh, and this “expert” happens to run a cyber security company that is salivating over potential government contracts.

That fear-mongering story also had no “credible corroborated data” and the “original source of the information was unknown and impossible to immediately verify.” Yet, it was still force-fed through the mainstream media. Finally, after intense alternative media scrutiny, the Feds were forced to admit that it was not a cyber attack that caused the water pumps to fail after all.

This new non-story is just a drip-drip reminder that CISPA must be passed so that the U.S. government can hijack the Internet to combat the shadowy hacker threat from Iran and China. The establishment creating the problem-reaction-solution story-line has never been clearer.

Read other articles by Eric Blair Here

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Eric Blair
Activist Post

Give them an inch and they will take a mile. That is how power-hungry tyrants interpret any law.

The PATRIOT Act and the FISA court led to the blanket wiretapping of every American citizen and a PRISM lens into all Internet activity for the NSA.

Now we are supposed to trust this Peeping Tom government by giving them more authority for “cybersecurity” with the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA)?

As George W. Bush once eloquently said with his patented deer-in-the-headlights conviction “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me, you can’t get fooled again, see.”

Oh, I bet the American people will get fooled again. But it’s not their fault. When authority figures tell bald-faced lies to the public, most people instinctively want to believe them because the majority of people are honest and perceive others to be honest.

Obama won the presidency promising to overturn Bush’s draconian destruction of civil liberties in the name of fighting terror. The majority of Americans took Obama at his word and gave him the benefit of the doubt. Until now.

Reuters reports today that the NSA spying scandal may “complicate” Obama’s agenda for cybersecurity:

Renewed concerns about the spy agency’s domestic surveillance programs could also hamper efforts to give it a broader role in defending the country’s infrastructure, and put pressure on lawmakers to update laws protecting online privacy, say congressional aides and defense and security experts. 

“They’re going to make it harder to do the work that is now going on,” said former chief Pentagon weapons buyer Mike Wynne, who also served as Air Force secretary from 2005 to 2008. 

Wynne said growing unease about domestic surveillance could have a chilling effect on proposed cyber legislation that calls for greater information-sharing between government and industry.

But this is laughable. The U.S. government already has been illegally using the authority in CISPA prior to it being codified into law. At least everything Hitler did was “legal” before he did it.

PRISM reportedly forces Internet companies to hand over information to the NSA and FBI. Some even allow a backdoor to their servers. This program has been in place for several years according to reports.

The only difference between the secretive PRISM project and CISPA is that under CISPA personal data will be given to the civilian Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon by communications companies instead of the NSA. Like that matters.

But even this is just window dressing for public consumption because Obama already has authorized these moves with the secret Presidential Policy Directive 20 and an Executive Order.

Presidential Directive 20 shows that the government is drawing up a target list for offensive cyber strikes overseas, and the Executive Order outlines the flow of illegally obtained data of online activity to the DHS, NSA, and other agencies.

Yes, the Pentagon already assumed the role of engaging in cyber war as part of their “operational domain” for “offensive operations”, again prior to any legal authority. In July 2011, the Pentagon announced “The United States reserves the right, under the laws of armed conflict, to respond to serious cyber attacks with a proportional and justified military response at the time and place of our choosing.”

Their “authority” was later affirmed in the infamous 2012 NDAA which gave the U.S. military the right to launch a global offensive cyber war against perceived threats.

Section 954 of the NDAA titled Military Activities in Cyberspace received no debate in Congress as well as in the media. The section states clearly:

Congress affirms that the Department of Defense has the capability, and upon direction by the President may conduct offensive operations in cyberspace to defend our Nation, Allies and interests.

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And thanks to whistleblowers we know that telecom companies have been cooperating with government spooks for years.

Significantly, all of this occurred without any public debate, probably because lawmakers understand that it’s a gross violation of the 4th Amendment which guarantees privacy to American citizens.

Indeed, the NSA issued a secret memo urging lawmakers to “rethink” the 4th Amendment. This recently declassified memo from 2001 reads:

The Fourth Amendment is as applicable to eSIGINT as it is to the SIGINT of yesterday and today. The Information Age will however cause us to rethink and reapply the procedures, policies and authorities born in an earlier electronic surveillance environment.

Is it any wonder why Americans no longer trust their government?

As President Obama said in his press conference defending the secret spying program: “If Americans don’t trust government, we’re going to have some problems.”

Yes, as Reuters reports, the Administration may have problems legalizing their illegal activity. And if the people are paying attention, this Administration may have even bigger problems than that.

Read other articles by Eric Blair Here

Eric Blair
Activist Post

After the initial surge of web traffic to alternative news websites following The Guardian breaking the NSA spying story, traffic has slowed considerably despite the continued interest in the NSA story as well as other alternative headlines.

This dramatic drop in traffic may be due to broad censorship by the Department of Defense on “millions of computers”.

What began as a rumor that the military brass was ordering soldiers not to view news about the whistleblower leak about the NSA has swelled into a confirmed military-wide censorship campaign using a high-tech computer filtering system.

The US News and World Report is reporting that the DoD is blocking access to all articles related to the NSA scandal from all DoD computers. The filter reportedly effects millions of computers and potentially thousands of alternative news and civil liberties websites.

According to U.S. News:

The Department of Defense is blocking online access to news reports about classified National Security Agency documents made public by Edward Snowden. The blackout affects all of the department’s computers and is part of a department-wide directive.

“Any website that runs information that the Department of Defense still considers classified” is affected, Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Damien Pickart told U.S. News in a phone interview. 

According to Pickart, news websites that re-report information first published by The Guardian or other primary sources are also affected. 

“If that particular website runs an article that our filters determine has classified information… the particular content on that website will remain inaccessible,” he said.
Pickart said the blackout affects “millions” of computers on “all Department of Defense networks and systems.”

This is perhaps one of the most shocking displays of blatant censorship in the history of the United States. The idea that classified information should still be treated as “off limits” to regular military personnel after its broad release to the public makes no sense.

Unless, of course, they don’t want soldiers learning the truth about what their government is doing for fear that they may recognize who the true enemies of the Constitution are.

Or this may simply be a beta test of the government’s technical capability to filter Internet traffic away from certain news stories and the websites that carry them.

In either case, this should be a HUGE story in itself.  Draconian Internet censorship has finally arrived in a big way.

Read other articles by Eric Blair Here

Here is the real problem with the Internet Dees Illustration

Eric Blair
Activist Post

The totalitarian tip-toe is tap dancing to tyranny with the proposed Internet censorship bill in the United Kingdom. In the name of keeping children safe from porn, the UK law will impose Internet filters on far more than just porn.

According to Wired:

As well as pornography, users may automatically be opted in to blocks on “violent material”, “extremist related content”, “anorexia and eating disorder websites” and “suicide related websites”, “alcohol” and “smoking”. But the list doesn’t stop there. It even extends to blocking “web forums” and “esoteric material“, whatever that is. “Web blocking circumvention tools” is also included, of course.

The definition of “esoteric” makes clear that censorship of broad topics is the goal of this so-called ISP filter:

es·o·ter·ic [es-uh-ter-ik] adjective
1. understood by or meant for only the select few who have special knowledge or interest;
2. belonging to the select few.
3. private; secret; confidential.

Translation: anything outside the acceptable mainstream narrative will be filtered. In short, the free flow of information is under assault with this law.

The organization Open Rights Group refers to this totalitarian tip-toe as “sleepwalking into censorship“:

What’s clear here is that David Cameron wants people to sleepwalk into censorship. We know that people stick with defaults: this is part of the idea behind ‘nudge theory‘ and ‘choice architecture’ that is popular with Cameron. 

The implication is that filtering is good, or at least harmless, for anyone, whether adult or child. Of course, this is not true; there’s not just the question of false positives for web users, but the affect on a network economy of excluding a proportion of a legitimate website’s audience.

Open Rights also says the law could be used to play economic favorites, thus undermining the free market on the Internet:

There comes a point that it is simply better to place your sales through Amazon and ebay, and circulate your news and promotions exclusively through Facebook and Twitter, as you know none of these will ever be filtered.

It seems Western government’s voracity for Internet censorship has increased many fold since the Snowden revelations about digital spying.

Direct Internet censorship was imposed on millions of U.S. government computers blocking them from viewing any material related to the Snowden leak, which at the time of the leak and even now represents a large percentage of all political and technical news stories.

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And as John Naughton of the Guardian points out today, the real story about the Snowden leak that everyone is ignoring are the implications on Internet freedom, which he lists as the following:

The first is that the days of the internet as a truly global network are numbered. It was always a possibility that the system would eventually be Balkanised, ie divided into a number of geographical or jurisdiction-determined subnets as societies such as China, Russia, Iran and other Islamic states decided that they needed to control how their citizens communicated. Now, Balkanisation is a certainty. 

Second, the issue of internet governance is about to become very contentious. Given what we now know about how the US and its satraps have been abusing their privileged position in the global infrastructure, the idea that the western powers can be allowed to continue to control it has become untenable. 

Third, as Evgeny Morozov has pointed out, the Obama administration’s “internet freedom agenda” has been exposed as patronising cant. “Today,” he writes, “the rhetoric of the ‘internet freedom agenda’ looks as trustworthy as George Bush’s ‘freedom agenda’ after Abu Ghraib.”

As a final note, porn filters already exist for parents in the private marketplace if they choose to use them.  So, there is no need for governments to make them mandatory, which indicates that the real agenda behind these new proposed laws is much more about censorship than protecting children.

Read other articles by Eric Blair Here

The most ridiculous provisions of the defeated SOPA are put back on the table. Obama Administration wants online streaming to be a felony.

Eric Blair
Activist Post

As a pro-marijuana activist, it’s a joy to watch the Berlin Weed Wall come tumbling down. I even found some pleasure this week in Attorney General Eric Holder’s announcement for reduced sentencing for non-violent drug offenders.

It’s not everyday some liberty is yielded back to the people, however small.  Yet my joy is tempered by cynicism.

The private prison-industrial complex could not have been happy with Holder’s recent announcement, but there’s a strange silence. There’s not a single bought-and-paid-for politician coming to the defense of longer prison terms for non-violent drug offenders. So what gives?

Surely there must be intense lobbying efforts underway to stop this.  I mean, any industry evil enough to bribe judges to throw innocent children in cages would clearly scratch and claw for every dollar of potential profit, right?

But what if they can replace drug offenders with other warm bodies — like copyright offenders (file sharers)? The NSA likely has a whole list of offenders ready to go. They’re an easy target as they don’t typically travel in armed cartels. Who cares that they, too, are non-violent offenders? Make file sharing a felony, says the Obama Administration.

The Washington Post reports:

You probably remember the online outrage over the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) copyright enforcement proposal. Last week, the Department of Commerce’s Internet Policy Task Force released a report on digital copyright policy that endorsed one piece of the controversial proposal: making the streaming of copyrighted works a felony.

As it stands now, streaming a copyrighted work over the Internet is considered a violation of the public performance right. The violation is only punishable as a misdemeanor, rather than the felony charges that accompany the reproduction and distribution of copyrighted material.

SOPA attempted to change that in Section 201, aptly titled “Streaming of copyrighted works in violation of criminal law.” Some have suggested that the SOPA version and an earlier stand-alone piece of legislation from Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) would have criminalized covers of songs shared on Youtube.

A slightly more colorful explanation of this development is in the video below:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-0vnxDLe0o]

Hollywood’s lobby is almost certainly joined by the prison lobby in pushing this new SOPA provision. Heck, the entire Department of Homeland Security, with an infrastructure that constantly needs justification for its existence, would benefit from locating and taking down a new class of felons.

No doubt the entire terror-surveillance apparatus would be used for this endeavor, too. The Bush Administration already laid the groundwork of equating copyright pirates with terrorists.

CNET reported in 2005, “An invocation of terrorism, the trump card of modern American politics, could ease the passage of the next major expansion of copyright powers” following Congressional testimony where an investigator testified that “Some associates of terrorist groups may be involved in IPR (intellectual property) crime.”

The same pressure to use anti-terror mechanisms to track down a pimply teenager with a killer movie library on a hard drive also began in Europe around the same time.

The Guardian reported in 2005 that “The music and film industries are demanding that the European parliament extends the scope of proposed anti-terror laws to help them prosecute illegal downloaders.”

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So this plan to take on online piracy as a form of terrorism has been in the works through two administrations. Obama has been seeking to take this battle to the next level during his time in office with his support for SOPA, PIPA, CISPA, ACTA, and various executive orders.

And since the government has been caught using warrantless spying, supposedly reserved for stopping imminent terror attacks, for IRS and DEA investigations, we can only assume it will also be used to prosecute all felonies — online crimes in particular.

We’ve seen the DHS seize websites for merely posting links to copyright material. And we see them prosecuting hacktivists like Barrett Brown for 100 years for posting a link.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hm-QE28p318]

They’re setting up the laws to treat all citizens like terrorists to catch with dragnet surveillance by criminalizing more non-violent behavior.  It’s a recipe for a steady stream of new business for law enforcement and private prison complex.

Although it’s genuinely a good thing that the DOJ is easing up on drug sentences, as usual they give a little crumbs out of one hand while stealing the whole loaf with the other.

See more by Eric Blair here.