National Security Agency whistleblower William Binney reveals he believes domestic surveillance has become more expansive under President Obama than President George W. Bush. He estimates the NSA has assembled 20 trillion “transactions” — phone calls, emails and other forms of data — from Americans. This likely includes copies of almost all of the emails sent and received from most people living in the United States. Binney talks about Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act and challenges NSA Director Keith Alexander’s assertion that the NSA is not intercepting information about U.S. citizens.(This interview is part of a 4-part special @ Democracynow.com. Click here to see segment 1, 2, and 4.)
NEW statistics show an ever-more-startling divergence between the fortunes of the wealthy and everybody else… In 2010, as the nation continued to recover from the recession, a dizzying 93 percent of the additional income created in the country that year, compared to 2009 — $288 billion — went to the top 1 percent of taxpayers, those with at least $352,000 in income. That delivered an average single-year pay increase of 11.6 percent to each of these households.
Still more astonishing was the extent to which the super rich got rich faster than the merely rich. In 2010, 37 percent of these additional earnings went to just the top 0.01 percent, a teaspoon-size collection of about 15,000 households with average incomes of $23.8 million. These fortunate few saw their incomes rise by 21.5 percent.
The bottom 99 percent received a microscopic $80 increase in pay per person in 2010, after adjusting for inflation. The top 1 percent, whose average income is $1,019,089, had an 11.6 percent increase in income….
The NSA is building the largest spy center in the country in Bluffdale, Utah, as part of a secret NSA surveillance program codenamed “Stellar Wind.” The NSA has established listening posts throughout the nation to collect and sift through billions of email messages and phone calls, whether they originate within the country or overseas. The Utah spy center will contain near-bottomless databases to store all forms of communication collected by the agency. This includes the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails — parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases and other digital data…
The earliest evidencethat federal authorities in the United States were aware of Occupy Wall Street and preparing to squash it comes from a September 1 Department of Homeland Security briefing. Warning of an upcoming protest on Wall Street, the leaked memo explained that the unique conjunction of culture jammers with politicized hackers was cause for alarm. “The ideologies set forth by Adbusters seem to align at a basic level with the stated intent of Anonymous’ newly adopted Hacktivist agenda … These protests are highly likely to occur,” the report declared. We also know now that the FBI was investigating Occupy at least two days before occupiers seized Zuccotti. In a leaked chat log Sabu, an FBI informant and prominent member of LulzSec, a hacktivist affinity group, pumped for information about Anonymous’s plans for Occupy. He is recorded asking: “Lets talk about OpWallStreet. I plan on going to Wall Street, do we have anything planned?” Shortly after, despite these counterintelligence efforts, Occupy Wall Street was born and Zuccotti Park became the spiritual center of an international movement…
H. R. 347 makes protest of any type potentially a federal offense with anywhere from a year to 10 years in federal prison, providing it occurs in the presence of elites brandishing Secret Service protection, or during an officially defined ‘National Special Security Event’ (NSSE). NSSEs , ( an invention of Bill Clinton) are events which have been deemed worthy of Secret Service protection, which previously received no such treatment. Justified through part of ‘Presidential Decision Directive 62 in 1998; Bill Clinton created an additional class of special events explicitly under the authority of the U.S. Secret Service.
Past NSSE events included the funerals of Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan, and the national security concern that was Superbowl XXXVI. Other NSSE protected events include the Academy Awards and the 2008 Democratic and Republican National Conventions. I suppose presidential candidates, no matter how insane they may be are deserving as much security protection as Brad and Angelina’s sex life. The dangerous part of this ‘executive order’ lies not in the triviality of a SuperBowl receiving taxpayer funded Secret Service protection — but in the convenience manufactured for any President desperate to hide deliberations of groups like the G-8, the G-20 and the World Trade Organization. The classification of such events as NSSE — insures the rich and powerful against any pesky accountability or transparency to the unwashed minions — namely the US public. HR 347 & S. 1794 insulates such events as the G-8, WTO and presidential conventions against tough questions and politically justified protests…
