REVEALED: THE GOP STRATEGY

Panel on Bradley Manning and WikiLeaks - C-SPAN Video Library

Panel on Bradley Manning and WikiLeaks - C-SPAN Video Library

Chase Madar and Kevin Gosztola had each authored a book about Bradley Manning, accused of passing classified material to the Website WikiLeaks. They talked about PFC Manning's upcoming court-martial and the treatment he received since being detained. Additional commentary was provided by Mark Doten and Ted Hearne, who were working on an opera about Manning. The panelists, who had attended Manning's hearings, responded to questions from members of the audience at this "Manning Monday" Brecht Forum in New York City. Kevin Gosztola participated by video link from Chicago.

Policing for Profit - The Abuse of Civil Asset Forfeiture

Learn more at http://www.ij.org/PolicingForProfit

Civil forfeiture laws represent one of the most serious assaults on private property rights in the nation today. With civil forfeiture, police and prosecutors can seize your property and use it to fund their budgets—all without charging you with a crime. Americans are supposed to be innocent until proven guilty, but with civil forfeiture, your property is guilty until you prove it innocent—and law enforcement has a huge incentive to police for profit, not justice.

If police suspect that you committed a crime, they can arrest you and put you on trial. At that trial, prosecutors must prove you are guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

But if police suspect your car was involved in a crime, they can take it, sell it and, in most places, pocket the proceeds to pad their budgets. They need not prove you committed any crime—or even arrest you—to take your property away.

Welcome to the upside-down world of civil asset forfeiture. 
With civil forfeiture, your property is guilty until you prove it innocent to get it back. 

And because most state and federal laws allow police and prosecutors to pocket the proceeds, they have a big incentive to pursue profits, not justice.

How big? In 1986, the Justice Departments forfeiture fund took in 94 million dollars. Now it has more than a billion. State and local agencies receive forfeiture funds, too—but we don't know how much because most states don't publicly report on forfeiture.

No surprise—abuse is rampant. One New York police department spent forfeiture funds on food, gifts and entertainment. In Georgia, forfeiture funds paid for football tickets for a DAs office. In Louisiana, cops used funds to pay for ski trips to Aspen. And a DA in Texas used forfeiture dollars to buy TV ads for his re-election campaign. 

Meanwhile, citizens are seeing cash, cars and other property taken away for the flimsiest of reasons. Carrying too much cash? Police can accuse you of selling drugs or laundering money and seize it, no conviction or even arrest required.

An Institute for Justice study grades state laws on how well they protect people from wrongful forfeitures. Only three states receive a B or better. The rest range from mediocre to awful—and so does federal law.

Worse, a federal legal loophole allows police and prosecutors to bypass state protections and keep pocketing forfeiture money. IJ's research shows that the easier and more profitable these laws make forfeiture, the more it is used and abused.

Its time to end civil forfeiture. People shouldn't have their property taken away without being convicted of a crime. And law enforcement shouldn't be policing for profit

Learn more at http://www.ij.org/PolicingForProfit

Reverend Billy's Freakstorm: Rev. McKibben's Fire & Brimstone

Anonymous, WikiLeaks, Abraxas, Stratfor, and the TrapWire Surveillance System - Mystic Politics

Anonymous, WikiLeaks, Abraxas, Stratfor, and the TrapWire Surveillance System - Mystic Politics

Anonymous, WikiLeaks, Abraxas, Stratfor, and the TrapWire Surveillance System

Former Intelligence Operatives have created and installed an Orwellian surveillance system called Trapwire, according to emails hacked by Anonymous.

| This article originally appeared on RT America.

Former senior intelligence officials have created a detailed surveillance system more accurate than modern facial recognition technology — and have installed it across the US under the radar of most Americans, according to emails hacked by Anonymous.

Every few seconds, data picked up at surveillance points in major cities and landmarks across the United States are recorded digitally on the spot, then encrypted and instantaneously delivered to a fortified central database center at an undisclosed location to be aggregated with other intelligence. It’s part of a program called TrapWire and it’s the brainchild of the Abraxas, a Northern Virginia company staffed with elite from America’s intelligence community. The employee roster at Arbaxas reads like a who’s who of agents once with the Pentagon, CIA and other government entities according to their public LinkedIn profiles, and the corporation’s ties are assumed to go deeper than even documented.

The details on Abraxas and, to an even greater extent TrapWire, are scarce, however, and not without reason. For a program touted as a tool to thwart terrorism and monitor activity meant to be under wraps, its understandable that Abraxas would want the program’s public presence to be relatively limited. But thanks to last year’s hack of the Strategic Forecasting intelligence agency, or Stratfor, all of that is quickly changing.

Hacktivists aligned with the loose-knit Anonymous collective took credit for hacking Stratfor on Christmas Eve, 2011, in turn collecting what they claimed to be more than five million emails from within the company. WikiLeaks began releasing those emails as the Global Intelligence Files (GIF) earlier this year and, of those, several discussing the implementing of TrapWire in public spaces across the country were circulated on the Web this week after security researcher Justin Ferguson brought attention to the matter. At the same time, however, WikiLeaks was relentlessly assaulted by a barrage of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, crippling the whistleblower site and its mirrors, significantly cutting short the number of people who would otherwise have unfettered access to the emails.

On Wednesday, an administrator for the WikiLeaks Twitter account wrote that the site suspected that the motivation for the attacks could be that particularly sensitive Stratfor emails were about to be exposed. A hacker group called AntiLeaks soon after took credit for the assaults on WikiLeaks and mirrors of their content, equating the offensive as a protest against editor Julian Assange, “the head of a new breed of terrorist.” As those Stratfor files on TrapWire make their rounds online, though, talk of terrorism is only just beginning.

Mr. Ferguson and others have mirrored what are believed to be most recently-released Global Intelligence Files on external sites, but the original documents uploaded to WikiLeaks have been at times unavailable this week due to the continuing DDoS attacks. Late Thursday and early Friday this week, the GIF mirrors continues to go offline due to what is presumably more DDoS assaults. Australian activist Asher Wolf wrote on Twitter that the DDoS attacks flooding the servers of WikiLeaks supporter sites were reported to be dropping upwards of 40 gigabits of traffic per second. On Friday, WikiLeaks tweeted that their own site was sustaining attacks of 10 Gb/second, adding, ”Whoever is running it controls thousands of machines or is able to simulate them.”

According to a press release (pdf) dated June 6, 2012, TrapWire is “designed to provide a simple yet powerful means of collecting and recording suspicious activity reports.” A system of interconnected nodes spot anything considered suspect and then input it into the system to be “analyzed and compared with data entered from other areas within a network for the purpose of identifying patterns of behavior that are indicative of pre-attack planning.”

In a 2009 email included in the Anonymous leak, Stratfor Vice President for Intelligence Fred Burton is alleged to write, “TrapWire is a technology solution predicated upon behavior patterns in red zones to identify surveillance. It helps you connect the dots over time and distance.” Burton formerly served with the US Diplomatic Security Service, and Abraxas’ staff includes other security experts with experience in and out of the Armed Forces.

What is believed to be a partnering agreement included in the Stratfor files from August 13, 2009 indicates that they signed a contract with Abraxas to provide them with analysis and reports of their TrapWire system (pdf).

“Suspicious activity reports from all facilities on the TrapWire network are aggregated in a central database and run through a rules engine that searches for patterns indicative of terrorist surveillance operations and other attack preparations,” Crime and Justice International magazine explains in a 2006 article on the program, one of the few publically circulated on the Abraxas product (pdf). “Any patterns detected – links among individuals, vehicles or activities – will be reported back to each affected facility. This information can also be shared with law enforcement organizations, enabling them to begin investigations into the suspected surveillance cell.”

In a 2005 interview with The Entrepreneur Center, Abraxas founder Richard “Hollis” Helms said his signature product“can collect information about people and vehicles that is more accurate than facial recognition, draw patterns, and do threat assessments of areas that may be under observation from terrorists.” He calls it “a proprietary technology designed to protect critical national infrastructure from a terrorist attack by detecting the pre-attack activities of the terrorist and enabling law enforcement to investigate and engage the terrorist long before an attack is executed,” and that, “The beauty of it is that we can protect an infinite number of facilities just as efficiently as we can one and we push information out to local law authorities automatically.”

An internal email from early 2011 included in the Global Intelligence Files has Stratfor’s Burton allegedly saying the program can be used to “[walk] back and track the suspects from the get go w/facial recognition software.”

Since its inception, TrapWire has been implemented in most major American cities at selected high value targets (HVTs) and has appeared abroad as well. The iWatch monitoring system adopted by the Los Angeles Police Department (pdf) works in conjunction with TrapWire, as does the District of Columbia and the “See Something, Say Something” program conducted by law enforcement in New York City, which had 500 surveillance cameras linked to the system in 2010. Private properties including Las Vegas, Nevada casinos have subscribed to the system. The State of Texas reportedly spent half a million dollars with an additional annual licensing fee of $150,000 to employ TrapWire, and the Pentagon and other military facilities have allegedly signed on as well.

In one email from 2010 leaked by Anonymous, Stratfor’s Fred Burton allegedly writes, “God Bless America. Now they have EVERY major HVT in CONUS, the UK, Canada, Vegas, Los Angeles, NYC as clients.” Files on USASpending.gov reveal that the US Department of Homeland Security and Department of Defense together awarded Abraxas and TrapWire more than one million dollars in only the past eleven months.

News of the widespread and largely secretive installation of TrapWire comes amidst a federal witch-hunt to crack down on leaks escaping Washington and at attempt to prosecute whistleblowers. Thomas Drake, a former agent with the NSA, has recently spoken openly about the government’s Trailblazer Project that was used to monitor private communication, and was charged under the Espionage Act for coming forth. Separately, former NSA tech director William Binney and others once with the agency have made claims in recent weeks that the feds have dossiers on every American, an allegation NSA Chief Keith Alexander dismissed during a speech at Def-Con last month in Vegas.

| Sources: Article (RT America) / Image (Google Image ‘surveillance’).

Keep Mystic Politics online and advertisment free. A small contribution helps us deliver edgy, honest, and inspiring independent media.

I can give a few bucks

Help us by sharing:

More in Articles

Tags: Abraxas and TrapWire, america's intelligence community, american intelligence community,anonymous, Anonymous collective, anonymous hackers, antileaks, antileaks wikileaks stratfor trapwire,biometrics, central database, cia, ddos, department of defense, Department of Homeland Security,Espionage Act, facial recognition, facial recognition software, facial recognition technology, fbi, Fred Burton,GIF, Global Intelligence Files, Global Intelligence Files GIF, hacked emails, hackers, hacking, hacktivists,Hollis Helms, Homeland Security, intelligence, intelligence agency, julian assange, monitor private communication, national security, nsa, pentagon, Richard Hollis Helms, Strategic Forecasting, Strategic Forecasting intelligence, Strategic Forecasting intelligence agency, stratfor, stratfor email dump, stratfor emails, surveillance, surveillance points, surveillance system, terrorism, terrorist attack, terrorist surveillance,Trailblazer Project, trapwire, trapwire abraxas, TrapWire Surveillance System, u.s. intelligence, United States, US Department of Homeland Security, US Diplomatic Security Service, wikileaks, wikileaks anonymous stratfor

Related posts

Is the CIA using Syrian Propaganda to frame Iran?The CIA / Free Syrian Army claims to have captured 48 Iranian spies after receiving US intelligence that Iran had planted people in Syria. | This article originally appeared on Occupy Corporatism / by Susanne Posel.The CIA-controlled Free Syrian ...

Researchers prove Predator Drones can be hacked via GPSby Susanne Posel - Researchers at the University of Texas  demonstrated  to officials at the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) how drones could be hacked into through their navigation systems.Known as “spoofing”, a false signal through the Global ...

U.S. Analyst: Damascus Bombing Smells of MossadA former U.S. intelligence analyst said Israeli spy network Mossad could be linked to a fatal bombing in Damascus. | This article originally appeared on Hurriyet Daily News  (h/t Turkish Weekly ).A former U.S. intelligence analyst said Israeli spy ...

Speak Your Mind

Name *

Email *

Website

 Notify me of followup comments via e-mail

Outtros from The Big Up 2011 : Spiral Glyphics & Sky Spiral Hoops

How Do You Call the Cops on the Cops? Sobering Accounts of Abuse by Border Patrol - Maryada Vallet | Christians for Comprehensive Immigration Reform

How Do You Call the Cops on the Cops? Sobering Accounts of Abuse by Border Patrol - Maryada Vallet | Christians for Comprehensive Immigration Reform

How Do You Call the Cops on the Cops? Sobering Accounts of Abuse by Border Patrol - Maryada Vallet

What would you do if you were offering a voluntary service, like medical or pastoral care to a vulnerable population, and the clients repeatedly spoke of abuses by a specific perpetrator? You would be a “mandated reporter,” which for the caring professions means you must report certain cases of abuse to authorities. But then you find out that federal employees—law enforcement, in fact—are committing the atrocities. How do you call the cops on the cops?
This was my dilemma as I started working on the Mexico-side of the Sonora-Arizona border washing blistered feet and bandaging wounds of migrants who were just repatriated back to Mexico.
We set up the Nogales Migrant Aid Station to provide basic care to upwards of 1,200 deported people each day. But we did not expect that human rights documentation would become the most pressing part of that work. With each Homeland Security busload of migrants being released from Border Patrol custody, we listened and then documented case after case of abuse.
The abuse involved cussing and yelling, being pushed into barbed wire fencing, sexual assault, denial of life-saving medical care, denial of adequate food and water to children and the list continues.
“They treated us like dogs,” I heard many times. With every tear and bruise, the fury was building inside of me. No one deserves this kind of treatment. As Americans, we felt responsible to do something to change the system that allowed this abuse to occur, not even knowing at the time what we were up against.
That was in 2006. We (No More Deaths, with partners) have now released two groundbreaking reports on thousands of Border Patrol violations of human rights. We have spoken before Congress and international groups like the United Nations. We have sat down with the heads of Border Patrol, and we worked within their system of reporting incidents—proving to be ineffective and lacking transparency.
U.S. Border Patrol is the largest law enforcement agency in the country, and they have no legally enforceable standards for how they treat people in their custody, nor do they have (or allow) community and independent oversight.
When Border Patrol shoots and kills a migrant, border human rights groups have to fight for investigation, let alone a prosecution.
When humanitarians leave full jugs of water on heavily traveled migrant trails in the remote desert, they have been charged with criminal littering, yet there is evidence that Border Patrol slashes and stomps on this same water that could simply save a life.
The political climate around immigration and border enforcement is trying to convince us that through cruelty we attain our security. This culture of impunity occurs in the name of Homeland Security, and in my name and your name, too. But border security that is built by degrading life and dignity is not real security.
This has now been declared a “Need to Know” issue. On July 20, PBS aired the second in a series covering human rights abuses on the border. Watch the trailer and both episodes online. If momentum builds through the concern of people like us, there will have to be more accountability and transparency in this system.
In Proverbs 31 there is a warning about kings and rulers who drink wine and end up trampling their own decrees and the rights of the vulnerable. In response to this, we are admonished “Open your mouth, judge righteously, and defend the rights of the afflicted and needy,” (verse 9).
The leaders of Homeland Security appear to be acting intoxicated by their power and impunity. As Christians, we are mandated reporters, not through federal law, but God’s law. When we open our mouths with those who have suffered and reject violent systems, those abusing power will be sobered.
Maryada Vallet works with No More Deaths, a humanitarian initiative on the U.S.-Mexico border, which promotes faith-based principles for immigration reform. This post originally appeared on God’s Politics blog.

admin's blog

Immigration Blogs

Border Realities
Citizen Orange
Immigration: It’s Our Community

Immigration Impact
Interfaith Immigration
Loving the Stranger
People Migrate
Standing FIRM
Undocumented.tv
We Are One America