podium and denounced the sweeping measures of the tyrants in New York asking them “Why is dead children your battle cry?”
Weiss said that he had attended the previous meeting in regards to the resolution to repeal the massive gun control law known as the NY SAFE Act, signed into law earlier this year by Governor Andrew Cuomo. His attendance at the first meeting was simply to hear what everyone had to say. He remained silent, but not on this day.
“I heard some shocking things from some people and some legislators,” Weiss said of the previous meeting. “They said it took a lot of courage to pass the SAFE Act. Apparently, my definition of courage differs from yours.”
“You see,” Weiss continued, “if it was really so courageous a bill, and it took so much courage to pass it, then why was it done in the middle of the night when no one could see it or read it? That’s not courage. That’s a mafia style sit-down to divvy up what’s good for the bosses.”
“Courage,” he added, “is taking the right and true course of action, not the politically expedient one and anyone who is proud of this law must also be proud of the PATRIOT Act, the TSA (Transportation Security Agency), imprisoning Japanese citizens in World War II, since all these actions were spurred on by emotional fear and rammed through in the name of public safety.”
He then took a direct shot at all the anti-Second Amendment politicians who used the tragedy of Sandy Hook to advance their agendas.
“Another issue is the insistence of certain people to stand on the graves of dead children and challenge those that disagree to say it to the parent’s faces,” he blasted. “Well, I, for one, will pick up that gauntlet.”
“First off, why is ‘dead children’ your battle cry?” Weiss asked passionately. “You didn’t say anything about the hundreds of Chicago children being killed and for some reason you only screamed when it happens to wealthy white ones.”
http://freedomoutpost.com/2013/07/iraq-vet-aaron-weiss-slams-ny-safe-act-before-legislators-my-right-trumps-your-dead-i-earned-it-in-blood/
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d at rooting out future leakers and other security violators, President Barack Obama has ordered federal employees to report suspicious actions of their colleagues based on behavioral profiling techniques that are not scientifically proven to work, according to experts and government documents.
The techniques are a key pillar of the Insider Threat Program, an unprecedented government-wide crackdown under which millions of federal bureaucrats and contractors must watch out for “high-risk persons or behaviors” among co-workers. Those who fail to report them could face penalties, including criminal charges.
Obama mandated the program in an October 2011 executive order after Army Pfc. Bradley Manning downloaded hundreds of thousands of documents from a classified computer network and gave them to WikiLeaks, the anti-government secrecy group. The order covers virtually every federal department and agency, including the Peace Corps, the Department of Education and others not directly involved in national security.
Under the program, which is being implemented with little public attention, security investigations can be launched when government employees showing “indicators of insider threat behavior” are reported by co-workers, according to previously undisclosed administration documents obtained by McClatchy. Investigations also can be triggered when “suspicious user behavior” is detected by computer network monitoring and reported to “insider threat personnel.”
Federal employees and contractors are asked to pay particular attention to the lifestyles, attitudes and behaviors – like financial troubles, odd working hours or unexplained travel – of co-workers as a way to predict whether they might do “harm to the United States.” Managers of special insider threat offices will have “regular, timely, and, if possible, electronic, access” to employees’ personnel, payroll, disciplinary and “personal contact” files, as well as records of their use of classified and unclassified computer networks, polygraph results, travel reports and financial disclosure forms.
Over the years, numerous studies of public and private workers who’ve been caught spying, leaking classified information, stealing corporate secrets or engaging in sabotage have identified psychological profiles that could offer clues to possible threats. Administration officials want government workers trained to look for such indicators and report them so the next violation can be stopped before it happens.
“In past espionage cases, we find people saw things that may have helped identify a spy, but never reported it,” said Gene Barlow, a spokesman for the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive, which oversees government efforts to detect threats like spies and computer hackers and is helping implement the Insider Threat Program. “That is why the awareness effort of the program is to teach people not only what types of activity to report, but how to report it and why it is so important to report it.”
But even the government’s top scientific advisers have questioned these techniques. Those experts say that trying to predict future acts through behavioral monitoring is unproven and could result in illegal ethnic and racial profiling and privacy violations.
“There is no consensus in the relevant scientific community nor on the committee regarding whether any behavioral surveillance or physiological monitoring techniques are ready for use at all,” concluded a 2008 National Research Council report on detecting terrorists.
TSA officers watch for suspicious behavior at airports (Carey Wagner/Sun Sentinel/MCT)
“Doing something similar about predicting future leakers seems even more speculative,” Stephen Fienberg, a professor of statistics and social science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and a member of the committee that wrote the report, told McClatchy.
The emphasis on individual lifestyles, attitudes and behaviors comes at a time when growing numbers of Americans must submit to extensive background checks, polygraph tests and security investigations to be hired or to keep government or federal contracting jobs. The U.S. government is one of the world’s largest employers, overseeing an ever-expanding ocean of information.
While the Insider Threat Program mandates that the nearly 5 million federal workers and contractors with clearances undergo training in recognizing suspicious behavior indicators, it allows individual departments and agencies to....MORE MORE
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I, written in the 1970s, when there was still something to be proud about in America, and when there were still enough people around who could remember the horrors of WWII.
The story takes place in post-WWII England, and is about a libel suit brought by a Polish Nationalist doctor (Kelno), a former POW in Jadwiga concentration camp, against a Jewish-American author (Cady) who names him as performing surgeries for German doctors who were experimenting on Jewish prisoners.
This is part of the opening statement made by the defense attorney (for Cady) in the British courtroom:
“ “Well, as a matter of fact there were some Germans, soldiers, officers, priests, doctors, and ordinary civilians who refused to obey these orders and said, ‘I am not going to do this because I would not like to live and have this on my conscience. I’m not going to push them into gas chambers, and then say later I was under orders and justify it by saying that they were going to be pushed in by someone anyhow and I can’t stop it and other people will push them more cruelly. Therefore, it’s in their best interest that I shove them in gently.’ You see, the trouble was, not enough of these people refused.” 1”
When my tears subsided I thought, what an amazing time to be reading this. How appropriate to what is happening in our country now.
Day after day we see headlines about the indignities suffered by air travelers at the hands of TSA agents who are content to place their hands on the genitals of passengers of no matter what ages for their daily ration of bread (read: HFCS, MSG, GMO, etc.). And still the passengers line up for the privilege of being “man-handled” so that they can get to grandma’s house or their next business meeting a little faster instead of saying, “I am a free American and you may NOT touch me without cause,” or even, “I will not ride your airplane if I must be accosted so.”
Day after day we see headlines about some police officer tazering an elderly citizen for asking a question, or throwing the occupant of a wheelchair to the ground to prove that he is handicapped... or killing a veteran for having a gun in his own home. And still we say, “Yes, sir” to the police and skulk away in fear, instead of saying, “Don’t do that to this person!”
Day after day we see headlines about what a potential criminal/terrorist -- someone to be suspected regardless of their actions -- is the person who cites the U.S. Constitution to affirm their rights, or likes a certain political candidate, or has served his or her country in the military, or just wants to be left alone by “the system”, or has the audacity to disagree with the current administration -- or who asks for acknowledgement of the truth instead of ridicule on a point of fact. And still we say, “Thank goodness you’re taking care of my safety and security, because I don’t want to get my hands dirty,” instead of saying, “I have a right to my opinion, to think my own thoughts.”
Day after day we see headlines about the millions cheated out of their homes, loosing their jobs, forced to beg the government for poisoned food that will make their children imbeciles compared to who they could have been so that those who control the money can amass more and more for themse
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nt that this sweeping search must be kept secret from the terrorists is laughable. Terrorists already assume this sort of thing is being done. Only law-abiding American citizens were blissfully ignorant of what their government was doing.
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If the government wanted a particular set of records, it could tell the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court why — and then be granted permission to access those records directly from specially maintained company servers. The telephone companies would not have to know what data were being accessed. There are no technical disadvantages to doing it that way, although it might be more expensive.
Would we, as a nation, be willing to pay a little more for a program designed this way, to avoid a situation in which the government keeps on its own computers a record of every time anyone picks up a telephone? That is a question that should have been openly asked and answered in Congress.
William Binney – the head of NSA’s digital communications program – says that he set up the NSA’s system so that all of the information would automatically be encrypted, so that the government had to obtain a search warrant based upon probably cause before a particular suspect’s communications could be decrypted. But the NSA now collects all data in an unencrypted form, so that no probable cause is needed to view any citizen’s information. He says that it is actually cheaper and easier to store the data in an encrypted format: so the government’s current system is being done for political – not practical – purposes. Binney’s statements have been confirmed by other high-level NSA whistleblowers.
Binney also says:
Massive surveillance doesn’t work to make us safer
The government is using information gained through mass surveillance in order to go after anyone they take a dislike to (a lieutenant colonel for the Stasi East German’s agrees)
NSA whistleblower J. Kirk Wiebe has long said that such intrusions on Americans’ privacy were never necessary to protect national security. NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake agrees. So does NSA whistleblower Russell Tice.
Israeli-American terrorism expert Barry Rubins points out:
What is most important to understand about the revelations of massive message interception by the U.S. government is this:
In counterterrorist terms, it is a farce. Basically the NSA, as one of my readers suggested, is the digital equivalent of the TSA strip-searching an 80 year-old Minnesota grandmothers rather than profiling and focusing on the likely terrorists.
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And isn’t it absurd that the United States can’t … stop a would-be terrorist in the U.S. army who gives a power point presentation on why he is about to shoot people (Major Nadal Hassan), can’t follow up on Russian intelligence warnings about Chechen terrorist contacts (the Boston bombing), or a dozen similar incidents must now collect every telephone call in the country? A system in which a photo shop clerk has to stop an attack on Fort Dix by overcoming his fear of appearing “racist” to report a cell of terrorists or brave passengers must jump a would-be “underpants bomber” from Nigeria because his own father’s warning that he was a terrorist was insufficient?
And how about a country where terrorists and terrorist supporters visit the White House, hang out with the FBI, advise the U.S. government on counter-terrorist policy (even while, like CAIR) advising Muslims not to cooperate with law enforcement….
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Or how about the time when the U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem had a (previously jailed) Hamas agent working in their motor pool with direct access to the vehicles and itineraries of all visiting US dignitaries and senior officials.
***
Suppose the U.S. ambassador to Libya warns that the American compound there may be attacked. No response. Then he tells the deputy chief of mission that he is under attack. No response. Then the U.S. military is not allowed to respond. Then the president goes to sleep without making a decision about doing anything because communications break down between the secretaries of defense and state and the president, who goes to sleep because he has a very important fund-raiser the next day. But don’t worry because three billion telephone calls by Americans are daily being intercepted and supposedly analyzed.
In other words, you have a massive counterterrorist project costing $1 trillion but when it comes down to it the thing repeatedly fails. In that case, to quote the former secretary of state, “”What difference does it make?”
If one looks at the great intelligence failures of the past, these two points quickly become obvious. Take for example the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. U.S. naval intelligence had broken Japanese codes. They had the information needed to conclude the attack would take place. [Background.] Yet a focus on the key to the problem was not achieved. The important messages were not read and interpreted; the strategic mindset of the leadership was not in place.
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And remember that the number of terrorists caught by the TSA hovers around the zero level. The shoe, underpants, and Times Square bombers weren’t even caught by security at all and many other such cases can be listed. In addition to this, the U.S.-Mexico border is practically open.
**
The war on al-Qaida has not really been won, since its continued campaigning is undeniable and it has even grown in Syria, partly thanks to U.S. policy.
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So the problem of growing government spying is three-fold.
–First, it is against the American system and reduces liberty.
–Second, it is a misapplication of resources, in other words money is being spent and liberty sacrificed for no real gain.
–Third, since government decisionmaking and policy about international terrorism is very bad the threat is increasing.
Continue reading at: http://www.blacklistednews.com/The_Fact_that_Mass_Surveillance_Doesn%E2%80%99t_Keep_Us_Safe_Goes_Mainstream/27200/0/0/0/Y/M.html
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