Echelon Spy Network Revealed

The Echelon spy network revealed

By Dark Politricks

This article has been taken from the BBC Website and I am reproducing it here, as it was from my old site and the article was not copied across when I moved here. So I used the Wayback Machine to get a copy. I did this in case the original ever disappears so that there is record of an “official”  news establishment admitting that such an all invasive privacy destroying system exists and has done so for quite a while.

By Andrew Bomford of BBC Radio 4′s PM programme

Imagine a global spying network that can eavesdrop on every single phone call, fax or e-mail, anywhere on the planet.

It sounds like science fiction, but it’s true.

Two of the chief protagonists – Britain and America – officially deny its existence. But the BBC has confirmation from the Australian Government that such a network really does exist and politicians on both sides of the Atlantic are calling for an inquiry.

On the North Yorkshire moors above Harrogate they can be seen for miles, but still they are shrouded in secrecy. Around 30 giant golf balls, known as radomes, rise from the US military base at Menwith Hill.

Linked to the NSA

Inside is the world’s most sophisticated eavesdropping technology, capable of listening-in to satellites high above the earth.

The base is linked directly to the headquarters of the US National Security Agency (NSA) at Fort Mead in Maryland, and it is also linked to a series of other listening posts scattered across the world, like Britain’s own GCHQ.

The power of the network, codenamed Echelon, is astounding.

Every international telephone call, fax, e-mail, or radio transmission can be listened to by powerful computers capable of voice recognition. They home in on a long list of key words, or patterns of messages. They are looking for evidence of international crime, like terrorism.

Open Oz

The network is so secret that the British and American Governments refuse to admit that Echelon even exists. But another ally, Australia, has decided not to be so coy.

The man who oversees Australia’s security services, Inspector General of Intelligence and Security Bill Blick, has confirmed to the BBC that their Defence Signals Directorate (DSD) does form part of the network.

“As you would expect there are a large amount of radio communications floating around in the atmosphere, and agencies such as DSD collect those communications in the interests of their national security”, he said.

Asked if they are then passed on to countries like Britain and America, he said: “They might be in certain circumstances.”

But the system is so widespread all sorts of private communications, often of a sensitive commercial nature, are hoovered up and analysed.

Journalist Duncan Campbell has spent much of his life investigating Echelon. In a report commissioned by the European Parliament he produced evidence that the NSA snooped on phone calls from a French firm bidding for a contract in Brazil. They passed the information on to an American competitor, which won the contract.

“There’s no safeguards, no remedies, ” he said, “There’s nowhere you can go to say that they’ve been snooping on your international communications. Its a totally lawless world.”

Breaking the silence

Both Britain and America deny allegations like this, though they refuse to comment further. But one former US army intelligence officer has broken the code of silence.

Colonel Dan Smith told the BBC that while this is feasible, it is not official policy: 

“Technically they can scoop all this information up, sort through it, and find what it is that might be asked for,” he said. “But there is no policy to do this specifically in response to a particular company’s interests.”

Legislators on both sides of the Atlantic are beginning to sit up and take notice. Republican Congressman Bob Barr has persuaded congress to open hearings into these and other allegations.

In December he is coming to Britain to raise awareness of the issue. In an interview with the BBC he accused the NSA of conducting a broad “dragnet” of communications, and “invading the privacy of American citizens.”

He is joined in his concerns by a small number of politicians In Britain. Liberal Democrat MP Norman Baker has tabled a series of questions about Menwith Hill, but has been met with a wall of silence.

“There’s no doubt it’s being used as a listening centre,” he said, “There’s no doubt it’s being used for US interests, and I’m not convinced that Britain’s interests are being best served by this.”

The original article on the BBC news site has actually been removed but you can still find a copy on the Wayback Machine Archive. I wouldn't be surprised if that site is removed soon due to "Cancel Culture", when people want all their Internet History "Scrubbed" from the web this is one site that they ask to have archived content remove from.

Here is a direct link to it > news.bbc.co.uk.

By Dark Politricks

© 2012 Dark Politricks

Amerika, A modern day East Germany

Amerika, A modern day East Germany

By Dark Politricks

The definition of a Police State is:

"A state in which the government exercises rigid and repressive controls over the social, economic, and political life of the people, especially by means of a secret police force."

History shows that mankind has been plagued by authoritarian governments since the dawn of collective governance. We have many instances of governments that fit the definition of a Police State from the East German Stasi, Soviet KGB to the current Chinese government who still utilise whole teams of agents to follow westerners of interest around when they visit the country.

However these countries have all been authoritarian one party states and it has always been presumed that within western democracies the idea of a police state only existed in the nightmares of those sections of society who mistrusted the government no matter what it did.

However with the recent Washington post investigation into the size of the intelligence community within the United States of America it may be successfully argued that the time for nightmares has arrived.

The Washington Post expose looked into the huge expansion of the security services and other intelligence agencies since the attacks of 9/11 and revealed some stunning facts such as:

Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counter terrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.

An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.

In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings - about 17 million square feet of space.

In case that second point escapes due attention it means that roughly 1 in every 150 adults within the USA has top secret security clearance and if that many people have the top level clearance how many more have one of the many lower levels? 

It does seem from this study alone that the USA is awash with spooks and spies and as we know from the past ten years of abuse they are not all engaged in fighting the war on terror and looking for the supposed architect of 9/11 Usama bin-Laden.

Instead the government has directed this huge intelligence apparatus onto the people they are supposed to protect and one can only wonder whether this was the original aim in the first place. No democratic country would have ever accepted such a huge intrusion of privacy, destruction of civil liberties and total disregard to the rule of law had the threat of terrorism not existed and been used as the excuse of the century to implement such draconian measures.

Like many governments throughout the ages from Roman times with Julius Caesar, to Hitler and the Reichstag fire, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 were used by politicians to expand the power of the state at the expense of the citizenry using an outside enemy as the excuse. Whether you believe the attacks of 9/11 were staged or not is not the point as it is clear from succeeding events that they were used by the Bush government, and now the Obama administration to increase the power of the government to intrude into the lives of the public.

The main piece of legislation that started the ball rolling towards a Police State was the Patriot Act. This law was rushed through congress without proper consultation and debate and many senators later admitted that they didn't even read the bill. The very suspiciously timed Anthrax attacks on likely opponents of the bill  ensured that the politicians passed through a truly anti-libertarian bill that had been sitting around for years just waiting for the right "event" to occur.

The law expanded the definition of terrorism to include many domestic activities and it enabled the federal government to increase it's surveillance of the public through a systematic warrant-less wire-tapping campaign that trawled through every conceivable piece of electronic information from phone calls, emails, Internet traffic and credit card transactions whilst it built up a huge database of real time events in which it hoped to find signs of terrorist connections in a huge game of connect the dots.

The loosening of the terms that define what is and not terrorism should be a chilling warning to anyone concerned with the war on terror. We have seen here in the UK how the numerous anti terrorism laws have been misused by Police officers to prevent photographers from recording police assaults on the streets and in preventing legitimate protest. 

We have also seen our government abuse powers that were supposedly only there for exceptional purposes for non exceptional means such as when the UK froze the bank accounts of Iceland during the banking crisis.

The US government has now gone one step further in it's expansion of the war of terror against it's own citizens by enacting presidential powers that allow for the assassination of US born citizens throughout the world. The US government it seems is now perfectly willing to execute it's own citizens if they believe them to be linked to terrorism. No trial is required to contest any evidence that may or may not exist and the defendant is not allowed to answer any charges to a jury of his peers. If the government deems you to be a terrorist with it's newly relaxed definition of what constitutes terrorism then you may be assassinated.

Not only is the US government cranking up the war on terror by attacking those citizens it decides fall into the category of domestic or foreign terrorist it is also trying to crack down on the only forum in which free speech and dissent of government still exists e.g the internet.

In an age in which the dying print media is being deserted en mass and those that control it are scared of losing a major propaganda tool the attacks on the alternative media have increased tenfold. Claims that the old media is in the pocket of government and not doing it's job properly have increased since the 9/11 attacks and the war in Iraq. This was a war which was miss-sold to the public with the help of national newspapers prepared to look the other way as the government used them to drip feed false stories to a public who knew no better.

The only real voices of opposition are to be found in the blogosphere and the powers that be hate that they cannot control the news in the same way as they could buy off newspaper owners, editors and journalists. Instead of only worrying about a dozen or so national newspapers the government has to contend with millions of blogs and alternative news sites and the only tactic that would work is one that limits ownership of such a site or makes the available content illegal in some way or other. This is why there are now calls to regulate Internet bloggers such as the bill being brought forward by Bruce Patterson.

Obama's Information Czar, Cass Sunstein, has already wrote about his desire to crack down on blogs and sites that dare discuss topics that the government deems as conspiracy theory. This would include discussion of alternative theories surrounding the 9/11 attacks, or concluding that the JFK assassination involved more hit-men than Lee Harvey Oswald on his own. In fact it would cover anything that the government might deem beyond the limits of discussion by those who want to look beyond the official story immediately rolled out whenever a high crime is committed.

Then there are bills being introduced such as Senator Joe Lieberman’s 197-page Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act, which aims to mimic China’s firewall and which would give the President powers to control IT networks and the flow of information in times of emergency such as a cyber attack.

Disabling the internet may be an extreme option to consider but deleting content that is deemed unsuitable is already a daily occurrence. With the merger of leading internet companies such as Google and the CIA it has become very easy for media deemed anti government to be pulled from sites such as YouTube or for search results to be tweaked to hide popular anti government search terms.

We already know how Google and the NSA are working together since the attack on Google by China earlier this year and there have also been claims that the CIA helped fund Google when it was starting up.

With all these links to the intelligence agencies it can safely be assumed that Google's massive database of user traffic, search terms, blogs, emails, videos and much more is seen as a prized asset by the intelligence community and who knows at what level they already co-operate when it comes to sharing data.

Whereas old school Police States were very obvious in their surveillance and monitoring techniques the modern day Amerika has no need to put half a dozen handlers onto someone they wish to monitor (not that they don't have the staff) as through their close links with Google and Microsoft and their new plans to access private information without a warrant they can literally let the information come to them.

We live in a semi virtual world where an online persona is just as important as your real one and due to the amount of social time people spend on social networking sites and the dependence of key infrastructure on the Internet means that control of the network literally can mean control over society.

We already know our governments monitor all our phone calls through the ECHELON system and there is no technical or it seems legal limitation preventing them from analysing every single packet of data transferred over the Internet if they so wished.

Therefore due to a political class that seems to be bought and paid for by those wanting to maintain the war on terror and the surveillance society it has sprung up at home there seems little hope of stopping the high tech police state we are now living in. The solutions are available to those with the means to implement them but in the end it comes down to a choice between a public uprising against the state or a change in the political class running it.

With elections in America due very soon it is a great opportunity to show the ruling elite that the public is not prepared to swap liberty and freedom for fear and the police state that enables it. Judge Napolitano always asks his guests the following question:

"which is more threatening to our way of live, terrorism or an ever increasing secretive and authoritarian state?"

The answer is clearly the latter and we need to elect officials that believe so too.

Only when the phony war on terror is seen for what it is can we start to rollback all the police state apparatus that has build up around us over the last decade. A large section of the population has fallen for the tricks played out by power hungry politicians throughout history and willingly handed over liberty in return for perceived security. 

The time has come to realise this was a false trade and that Thomas Jefferson was correct when he said:

“Those who would trade safety for freedom deserve neither.”

Can we escape ECHELON?

Can we escape ECHELON?

By Dark Politricks

How funny is it that Edward Snowden has released information that shows the outcries of European nations to be false, hypocritical and superficial at the very least.

It has been known for over a decade that the main western nations including the US, UK, Canada, Australia and to a lesser extent Germany and other Euro nations were engaged in massive data collection through the ECHELON system.

I remember reading about it back when I had just left school. Trying all the online tests to "prove" that emails were being re-routed by keyword analysis.

I remember one such test involved sending two emails. The first with known flagged keywords such as bomb or AK47 and then another without. The first email was supposed to arrive in your other inbox after the second one due to it having been re-routed and checked by the ECHELON system. Checking timestamps on spoofed emails mentioning bombs and guns was a fun way to spend an afternoon at school.

Anyone who knows about ECHELON knows that the idea was that countries would spy on each other and then share the data to bypass laws preventing the countries snooping on their own citizens. 

However that all seems to have changed since 9.11. Now they just hoover up the data and our politicians claim it's for our own safety and that "sufficient oversight" exists to prevent mis-use of the technology.

Yes and I believe everything our Home or Foreign Secretary says....

Apparently in this free for all, data grabbing world, real sim cities are being built by the NSA/GCHQ nexus.

 It seems they are trying to replicate a whole world on their super computers so that they can monitor our behaviour and spot when someone acts outside their "natural boundaries". This could be shopping at a different store than usual, driving a new route to work or speaking to different people on or offline.

All our data is combined, merged and analysed. The lines between private and state data monitoring no longer exist.

Those Tesco points you have been earning are most likely filling up just one section of your own virtual profile at GCHQ - don't dare to go on a diet suddenly, they might think you are acting "strangely" and upgrade your monitoring status a few grades!

As attested to by cryptome.org in a recent article they are literally creating computer models where each human being is a "node" to be measured and monitored.

By combining all the various pieces of private, public and stolen data from the cables that take all the telecom communications under the Atlantic from the UK to the USA, the NSA & GCHQ can literally virtualise our lives and then run models to predict what would happen in certain scenarios.

What would be the normal behaviour of society if the water or electricity was cut off for 3 days?

Who would be likely to riot or take to the Internet and demand changes?

What groups of people are more likely to complain about their situation when taxes are increased than others?

What quantity of benefits and state handouts does it take to produce a dumbed down nation of uninquisitive fools?

What about a terrorist attack or police shooting?

Will the neighbourhood you live in be compliant and lock the doors as they did in Boston or would a single shooting of a known drug dealer in LONDON cause massive riots around the country?

It is getting to the stage that your actions can be accurately predicted and any variation from the norm is automatically noticed, flagged and probably checked for signs of malcontent.

Just as they know I have time to write a couple of articles for this blog a week, drive a certain way to work, shop at local stores and like the odd flutter on the horses they would know the same about you without having to do too much data analysis.

Give me enough data points and a big enough database and I could probably write a half decent programme to do the same.

I can only imagine the tools available to the GCHQ coders.

Plus it doesn't really help our cause when we are so keen to hand over our data to known intelligence agency linked companies such as Microsoft or Google. Got a Facebook page? Comments and quotes all logged and flagged. Mentioned anything about the government lately? Maybe you are already halfway towards getting your name onto a watch-list. Visited anyone in Pakistan lately? Your probably on at least a few already!

When Google analyses your email contents and search terms to show "appropriate" advertising just think what the NSA and GCHQ are analysing with their super computers. They don't want to show you adverts, that's for sure.

So whilst some of us have known about ECHELON for decades, to some the revelations coming from Snowden are a shock. However what we actually know is guaranteed to be only the tip of a humongous iceberg, the tip of which is scary enough, but we probably can't even comprehend what is below the water line!

I am just waiting for the first properly real virtual world computer games.

Ones which people will flock to, thinking they can escape the drudgery of work and the meaningless lives they have.

Terrorists will probably meet up in virtual worlds just to chat, thinking they will escape real world monitoring.

It is only a matter of time until a true "Second Life" is produced.

One in which people can touch, taste and pretend they are something when their real life is nothing.

It might sound like fun, even idealistic.

The problem is, that when that day comes, you can safely assume that the NSA/GCHQ nexus will already have virtual informants to monitor your virtual life.

Escape? I don't think we ever will.

View the original article Escape from ECHELON at darkpolitricks.com.

America - What Happened To You?

America - What Happened To You?

By Dark Politricks

On the 4th of July, 2013 there is only one question that needs to be asked to all Americans who are actually celebrating 4th of July, Independence Day.

"What are you actually celebrating?"

It cannot be the freedom of speech you used to cherish. No you have to have permits and free speech zones for protests now. Plus your constant chatter on the phones, Internet and in public is constantly monitored by technological mammoth like NSA's PRISM and the much older ECHELON.

It cannot be the free movement around the country without fear of harassment, secure in your papers from unreasonable searches. Not when the Police, TSA, Transport Cops, Border Guards and other agencies can now forcibly take blood and DNA samples from you, scan your naked body and grope your genitals if you refuse to be scanned, stored and studied as you go about your way.

It cannot be freedom from a tyrant, a King George like figure who thinks he has a God given right to take your life. No the President now has the authority to take your life without even bothering with the charade that passes for a trial if he thinks you are a danger to your country.

Freedom from drone strikes? Nope.

Freedom from assassination squads? Nope.

Freedom to blow the whistle when you find that your government has broken the law, spied on people without warrants or committed massacres in war zones?

Nope, you will be hunted down like a dog and tried for being a spy. The papers and journalists who dare print your stories of government abuse will also be attacked, spied upon and harassed. Even people who should know better will call for your execution on live TV. Who knows who is even a real TV presenter anymore and who is really a COINTELPRO agent stirring up hate against "enemies of the state" who dare speak truth to power.

Is it the freedom to work long hours for little pay? Forced to hand over large amounts of your earnings for goods that your Government mandates you "must" purchase and then watch as the endless cycle of your Government buying it's own printed money through the convoluted and corrupt Federal Reserve system means that the value of your wage decreases in real terms every month?Well you don't have any choice in that now do you?

It has now come to the stage that you are monitored so much in real life through linked up CCTV systems such as TRAPWIRE, massive city sized computer systems that can log every purchase you make, every movement you make through your cars GPS tracking systems or even that useful bug you so happily carry around with you for others to track you with, your phone, that you cannot even escape into cyberspace anymore. A virtual world is just as monitored as the real one. 

Are even the virtual homes you visit in virtual worlds like Second Life bugged and monitored by virtual agents of the state? Probably.

Facebook, Google, Skype, Apple and all the other big techno giants we are being shepherded into using 24/7 are all just front ends to those 3 letter acronyms that litter the American landscape. Acronyms like NSA, CIA, FBI and the  TSA are all hankering after those data packets that log every URL, website, file, instant message and email you have ever written.

These are the modern day "papers" of the 21st century, and secure is not something you can expect to be, especially when you willingly hand over your data to the "cloud" for safe storage.

So if you are celebrating "Independence Day" today then I would be interested to know what is so special about your independence when compared to a dictatorship?

You have been living under emergency laws since 9.11.

Laws that give the President dictatorial like powers through Orwellian pieces of legalese like the PATRIOT ACT which was written years before the date and then eagerly dusted off when the events of 9.11 unfolded.

All to be enacted under a climate of fear and patriotism, where politicians didn't even bother reading what they voted for and detractors were attacked with Anthrax or declared "unpatriotic". All because they were not willing to hand over their basic rights such as habeas corpus, a fair trial, freedom from torture or the right to know what you have been accused of in an open court of law.

This was back when we had a far right government running the USA. Now we are supposedly living under a liberal, left wing, Democrat! How I laugh when I hear Americans call Obama left wing or socialist! Society is not something he is promoting with Homeland Security asking neighbours to become de-facto spies and inform on each other or where over a million Americans have top secret security clearance.

There is nothing democratic or liberal about the NDAA, drone strikes at will or the President declaring that he can spy on anyone in the world without due process.

I have to wonder on this day what President Obama see's when he looks in the mirror.

Does he see the leader of a once great free nation that has succumb to fear, militarism, war mongering and the all pervasive surveillance state.

If not, does he honestly believe he's a liberal in charge of a "free nation"?

If so does he not feel the slightest bit of guilt when he looks at that Nobel Peace prize he was so, so prematurely given in the hope that pre-election rhetoric would be converted into real "hope and change" from the Bush/Cheney years?

Instead he has taken the ball from the GOP and kicked it out the stadium, far surpassing anything the Republicans did to kill liberty and freedom in America.

Wars have increased, with covert action and drone strikes occurring in more places across the world than ever before. All under the never ending "war on terror" banner.

Liberty at home has decreased and a true liberal POTUS would have at least stood up for the freedoms he attacked Bush for removing when he was only a Senator. Does he honestly not believe he is the hypocrite is blatantly is.

It is funny how power corrupts.

It is not so funny to look at the state of Amerika on this once special day.

View the original article What happened America? at the main site www.darkpolitricks.com.

We are sleep walking into a surveillance society created by our own consent

We are sleep walking into a surveillance society created by our own consent

By Dark Politricks

Most of us don't even realise it but we are all sleep walking into a surveillance society by our own consent.

Here in the UK the previous governments plans to introduce identity cards were scrapped by the incoming Tory Liberal coalition and we were offered a watered down version of a very good Freedom Bill as an attempt to restore some lost liberties. However in the great scheme of things this has meant very little for the young generation who have grown up with the Internet.

The billions of users that make use of social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter and communicate by Skype and iPhones when they are not on the Internet can forget the old conspiracy theory that many people subscribed to regarding the micro-chipping of the population like dogs as it is no longer required because we are already living in a state of total surveillance where are every move is monitored.

Can you imagine someone living in the 1960's being told that in the future all the following would be true.

What would they say.

Would they call you a paranoid conspiracy freak or would they believe that we would have to be living in some of fascist government for all this to happen?

Whatever they would say I doubt they would believe you if you told them that it would all be by choice and that the public has willingly traded privacy for the the sake of consumerism and a fake sense of "security" from terrorism.

So what kind of world have we walked into?

• A world in which millions of  CCTV cameras adorne public walls (over 4 million in the UK), indoor shops and streets capturing your every move hundreds of times a day. Not only has the technology progressed so that the cameras have inbuilt facial recognition and can identify criminals and others on the myriad of central databases (such as TRAPWIRE) as they enter specific areas they have now built cameras that can actually identify criminal activity by analysing the movements of the subjects being watched and identifying suspicious moves such as fights, objects being thrown and voices being raised. This is all compiled and stored in huge super computers the size of cities such as the one being built under UTAH.

• A world in which to get on a plane you have to be virtually strip searched by potentially dangerous X-Ray machines that can see your naked body through your clothes. Not only have these scanners been proved to be infective when it comes to identifying certain materials that can be used to create an explosive device on board a plane they have yet to catch a single terrorist in the act trying to board a plane and are instead used to demean and humiliate travellers who's only wish is to go on holiday.

• A world in which there is no need to microchip everybody as the majority of people carry around mobile phones with them that constantly keep track of their location by GPS or GPRS. Modern smart phones log the users current geographical location wherever they are and the police have been caught  out downloading this data without a warrant using handheld devices.

• A world in which all telephone and email conversations are routed through huge super computers run by western nations such as the USA, UK, Canada and Australia to look for suspicious content. The Echelon system has been running for decades now intercepting billions of communications between people and whilst it was originally set-up during the Cold War it has now progressed to general snooping on the population supposedly to aid the fight against terrorism but in reality it has been used for industrial espionage as well as other spurious and   probably illegitimate reasons.

• A world in which all your banking transactions, credit card purchases and wire transfers are handed over without question to the USA. You would have thought that being a European country the USA wouldn't have any legal right to such personal data but you would be wrong. At first they just took it and then once the EU found out about it they kicked up a fuss for a bit before bending over like they usually do and signing an agreement which allows the US to monitor all our banking transactions under the SWIFT agreement.

• A world in which millions of people have been slowly conditioned over time to consider privacy as an antiquated concept. Through the use of social media Internet sites such as Facebook and MySpace people post every conceivable kind of personal information from "checking in" to their current location, to tagging friends in photographs and posting details about their habits, hobbies and social activity. Whilst many people only see this as harmless fun the huge database that is generated is worth billions not only to advertisers who can then target specific adverts as well as government sources who have intimate links with companies such as Google, Mircorsoft and Facebook and see this data as a goldmine for recording networks of people and identifying possible malcontents for further investigation.

• A world in which all our Internet traffic is tracked and monitored by various government agencies and front companies that work for them. The US government has had close links with the big IT companies for a number of years and this is confirmed by the attendance of their CEO's at yearly Bilderberg meetings.

• A world in which people have gotten so used to be spied on from the skies, through Google Earth, and monitored by CCTV and their computers that they can see nothing wrong with the full spectrum surveillance society they actively participating in. They actively search on Google Maps to see if they can spot their car, house or building as if it's "fun" to be recorded forever in a publicly accessible database as well as the myriad of government owned ones.

When the head of Google Eric Schmidt, the co-founder of Facebook Chris Hughes, and the creator of Microsoft, Bill Gates, all attend their yearly Bilderberg meeting we can only guess what they discussed with all the government officials who always deny being there and the globalists who want full control over the worlds resources.

Remember we are just a resource to these capitalists, nothing more, nothing less and if it meant an extra few bucks in profit to some company somewhere they wouldn't even ask before throwing us under a bus.

However we know that these companies are very closely linked with the US Government and the CIA and not only has Microsoft build in backdoors into their PC's so that the NSA can access computers but Google was helped to startup with CIA seed money and has helped American security agencies develop real time monitoring systems that trawl the net looking for data that can help identify persons of interest whether they be terrorists, dissidents or just people brave enough to still exercise their freedom of speech.

Our technological world which more and more people depend on for every day activities is slowly becoming part of the prison wall that surrounds us.

As new advances in computing come on the scene and get taken up by large numbers of users it isn't long before one of the big government linked companies come along and buy it up. Google has bought up so many applications that it has been a common joke in the developing world that the only profitable business model on-line is to write an application and hope it gets bought up Google.

An example of a recent buy-out was the popular but loss making Skype Voice over IP service that allowed users to make long distance phone calls over the Internet which was bought out by Microsoft for £5.2 billion.

Some people might wonder why Microsoft would want to spend so much money on a loss making service but when you consider their close ties with the NSA it becomes quite clear. Instead of having to spend huge amounts of money building tools to tap into the major Internet connections to then decrypt and listen into the traffic they now have access to the front end application.

Why build back doors when you have a front door key?

Why even open the door when the people using the house are willing to let you in and take photos of everything they have?

This is the stage our future generation is at with their constant finger flicking and tapping of the latest iPhone. Gadgets that let advertisers and the government know your interests, your friends, your plans, your whereabouts and much, much more.

Because the common Internet user perceive tools like Google Earth and Facebook as beneficial to their own lives they pay little attention to the other users of such tools and bit by bit we are slowly succumbing to a modern high tech police state in which soon the only privacy that will be available will be virtual worlds such as a better version of Second Life. A world where people can escape and be who they want to be as the world outside has become so cold and horrible to live in the only pleasure they get is pretending to be someone else, somewhere else.

All these points are signs that we are already living in a high tech surveillance society. You might brush all this off as inconsequential paranoia and see these intrusions as important tools in the never ending fight against terror and for most people it is most certainly a case of "if you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to worry about".

However we only have to remember the years of communism in which hunts for dissidents and free thinkers were the primary job of the Stasi and KGB to realise that when such a huge spy apparatus exists the scope of it's remit only grows and grows until the number of innocent people caught up in its web eventually outnumbers the guilty. America is already there with it's million citizens with high security clearance, it's dozens of security agencies and it's Orwellian double speak when it introduces bills that limit peoples liberties such as the PATRIOT ACT.

It for this reason that we should all be worried and if history teaches us anything it is that we never learn from it.

Our power hunger leaders are most certainly prone to repeating the worst excesses of previous surveillance states only this time round they will have super high tech tools with which to do the job.

For our own sake we need to keep a very close eye on the people that are supposedly meant to protect us as it might already be too late for logic and reason to reverse this move to neo-fascism. The fear of real and fake terrorists added to the excitement of a child with all the electronic monitoring toys they could posses is a lethal combination, and without proper balances and checks it will grow and grow until there is no stopping it.

One thing is for sure and that is we are not helping by just handing over our most private data and information.

View the original article at www.darkpolitricks.com.

Internet giants Facebook, Google and Twitter pretend to stick up for our privacy whilst selling our personal data to advertisers

Internet giants Facebook, Google and Twitter pretend to stick up for our privacy whilst selling our personal data to advertisers

By Dark Politricks

A story in yesterday's Daily Mail tells how the "big 3" Internet giants, Twitter, Google and Facebook are planning to block a bill being introduced in the UK parliament which requires them to store all data for a year so that security agencies, police and councils can request its disclosure at a later date.

The Internet giants were interviewed by a cross party committee of UK MP's and they have all come out apparently fighting the draft Communications Data Bill.

From the article in the Daily Mail.

"They reveal directors from Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, Microsoft and Twitter believe the Bill would breach users' privacy and allow repressive regimes to spy on Britons."

"Facebook said it might go to court to resist the new law, while Google and Twitter executives said they could refuse to unlock encrypted data if the Government were to seek the information via third-party providers such as BT."

"Facebook said it might go to court to resist the new law, while Google and Twitter said they could refuse to unlock encrypted data."

"Facebook director Simon Milner accused the Government of using a 'sledgehammer to crack a nut', and claimed the potential for nations with poor human-rights records to obtain data 'should be a real concern'."

Now I'd say that it doesn't even matter if these companies, which are all spying on us for their own marketing purposes anyway, say they are sticking up for privacy. Especially when it has been shown time and time again that companies like Microsoft and Google help the NSA and other US secret service 3 letter acronyms anyway.

We now have the all invasive TRAPWIRE system that is linking up CCTV cameras and spying on US citizens constantly, along with the city sized computer base under UTAH to hold and analyse all the data that is being constantly collected on US citizens which is apparently now all perfectly legal.

There is no doubt in my mind after the EU caved in on banking data transactions that these systems will be linked up in future to the UK who is already the most surveillance country if you go by the number of CCTV cameras that follow us around day and night.

Is it another case of let the "plebs"' think they are pushing big brother back a bit whilst all the time lying to our faces as our personal data is stored by a multitude of electronic databases.

Systems as old as ECHELON which was created by the West to spy on the USSR and Eastern Bloc countries but after the cold war was turned on our own citizens.

To get round laws preventing the trawl method of spying that ECHELON does on their own citizens the countries involved decided to spy on each other and share the data. Australia would spy on the UK and the UK would spy on the USA and the USA on Australia. This way the national laws were bypassed and the data was shared among the countries anyway.

However with more and more spying methods and snooping laws being introduced in western nations there seems little need for these pleasantries and our own countries are freely admitting to spying on us all. For our own safety of course.

You never know when those 20-30 real remaining al-Qaeda members left over from the times of "the base" in the 80's war against the USSR in Afghanistan might pop out under your bed.

Fighters who we helped train and fund and at that time we called them freedom fighters or more accurately the Mujahideen. Our proxy fighters who over time turned into our mortal enemy/de-stabalising friends.

Al-Qaeda terrorists who we obviously have some control over and are used whenever required to overthrow nations we suddenly dislike such as Libya and Syria.

So it might seem like a "win" when these Internet giants say to our government they will refuse to help them spy on us whilst at the same time collecting and keeping the same data for over a year, who knows for how long, by selling adverts, email lists, and details of our friend networks and who knows what else to advertisers to make money.

Obviously there is an easy solution - don't use the Internet.

However it's just too damn addictive isn't it?

So if you don't want to be spied on then you better go and buy a shack in the woods and wrap tin foil round your head but then it isn't going to stop those thousands of satellites spinning round the globe spying on you is it?

We do truly live in a world of hypocrisy and George Orwell would be dismayed how we have just allowed ourselves to walk into a world of high tech police state style surveillance.

You can read the full Daily Mail article at www.dailymail.co.uk

Hopefully Gorgeous George can help defeat the new governments Police State agenda

By Dark Politricks

In another reminder why we cannot trust anything a politician says, the Tory/Lib Dem government are to revise plans to snoop on all emails, social media and web site traffic that Labour abandoned after the government (then the opposition) kicked up a huge fuss about civil liberties.

Obviously GCHQ, ECHELON and all the other taps into the backbones and keylogger botnets controlled by the "government" allow them to do this already however any new law is just going to legalise the practise.

If you don't believe me just check out a few of these links.

1. US linked company builds back-doors into their PC's for NSA to access them and buys out popular web company for easy access to private conversations.
2. What is ECHELON and how does it work and why is it being used to spy on us now that the Cold War is over?
3. Why we are walking into a surveillance society by consent, where our phones, satellites and CCTV cameras on most walls and shops track our every move.
4. The death of the "Free" Internet, how China is being used as a template for our own Internet freedom crushing bills in the west.

And those are just a few of the articles I have linked to or written myself. There are literally hundreds more and each article contains links to other sites where more information can be found but the key point to remember is this - we are being watched and we are not paranoid because it's been admitted and it's true.

Take as many anti-psychotic pills the doctors want to prescribe/sell you but that won't stop the key fact that the days of our free internet are long over and just staying under the radar is getting harder and harder.

The best way not to be tracked by our global surveillance system is to go a live in an underground cave in the middle of nowhere, speak to no-one and do nothing involving a modern electronic device.

Pretty boring I admit but unfortunatley in this age it's the only think that will work.

Do you really think the old adage of "If you have nothing to fear you have nothing to hide" is really true when huge super computers the size of cities are being built in the USA to trawl like fisherman all internet traffic and then sift it for anything useful. 

Do you really think that you won't have at least a few emails to Aunty Vira or Cousin Dave sifted through because you mentioned the word terrorist or Muslim?

As the now "pay to read" Sunday Times says today:

THE government is to expand hugely its powers to monitor email exchanges and website visits of every person in Britain.

Under plans expected to be announced in the Queen’s speech next month, internet companies will be told to install thousands of pieces of hardware to allow GCHQ, the government’s eavesdropping centre, to scrutinise “on demand” every phone call made, text message and email sent and website accessed in real time.

Under the current law, companies must keep records for some traditional types of phone and electronic communication for a year.

The new legislation would extend this provision to cover a much wider field, including social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter and online video games.

An effort by Labour to introduce a similar law was shelved in 2006 after fierce opposition from the Tories, Liberal Democrats and privacy campaigners.

I won't even pretend to be surprised anymore when I hear that our government brings out plans that they opposed in opposition and it only goes to show that anything Ed Miliband and co say at the moment should be taken with more than a large pinch of salt.

They will literally say anything to get your vote and once gained they treat it with disdain.

In fact it won't be long until the idea of National ID cards and "Real Online Personalities" are brought up by the once considered liberterian-ish Tory/LibDem coalition.

Who can forget the huge let down that the "Freedom Bill" turned out to be when it changed into the "Protection of Freedoms Bill (HC Bill 146)"

A bill that the Lib Dem's promised to bring into law once they gained power to roll back all the police state measures enacted by Labour's 13 years of CCTV, RIPA, Mega Databases, ID cards and unbalanced and unfair extradition treaties with the USA that have seen UK citizens in the dozen flown off to America to probably never be seen again without an orange jump suit on.

You can read the original Freedom bill here and it was a good bill.

A bill that was needed to restore our right to protest and our right to silence in the face of bent cops looking for  short cut.

However when the bill was actually published it was a cut down version with anything good removed and was heralded as nothing more than a bill to stop rouge wheel clampers from clamping your car.

Whatever happened when those Lib Dem's walked through the doors of power....

So d0n't hold out out too much hope of fairer taxes, banker bashing, or any of the actual Labour policies that are known at the moment as anything said over the next 3 years is just bullshit to trick you into voting for them.

Once they are in power they will forget them all and do whatever they are told from above.

Lets not forget MI5 spent a long time spying on Labour when it was a real party of opposition that offered real change and there is more than a good argument that Tony Blair was groomed by the agency to become their leader and turn it into the New Labour, third way, bland centrist party we now see before us.

Take away the choice - control the sheeple and still let them think they decide their own fate.



Therefore I am glad Gorgeous George Galloway recently won the "safe" Labout seat in Bradford the other night and for his Respect party.

With the war in Iran about to kick off, and talk of another 10 years of death and destruction in the Middle East about to start to "spread democracy", as we have so poorly done in Libya.

I am grateful there will be at least one member of Parliament that can give a good speech to attack the war mongering policies that will no doubt be put forward by our coalition government.

Good on you George!

I hope you give them hell in Westminster. I might not agree with everything you say or stand for but I defend your right to say it, and on the matter of Palestine v Israel and the illegal wars of terror there is no better orator than you when it comes to defending the Palestinians against the might of Israel and their US paymasters.

Hopefully you can help kick up a fuss about the new surveillance state the Tory / LibDem government is planning for us as well.

Twitter Apps caught stealing iPhone users address books

By Dark Politricks

Another example of modern technology being used to implement the surveillance state by consent has come to light with the recent news that Twitter has been caught out invading it's millions of iPhone users privacy by uploading the entire contents of the phone users address books to their servers without permission.

From a story in the Irish Times:

TWITTER HAS promised to make changes to its privacy policies after admitting to uploading entire address books from users’ iPhones and storing them on its computers for up 18 months.

The social network uses the information to help users find existing contacts who already have a Twitter account.

It is the latest internet company revealed to have been copying and storing entire address books from smartphones to provide a “Find Friends” service.

Last week Arun Thampi, a programmer in Singapore, revealed that Path, a social network app created by a former Facebook engineer, was copying address-book data from users’ iPhones without notifying them.

Mr Thampi’s blog post about the practice received worldwide attention, with the result that programmers and privacy advocates began checking to see if other popular apps also uploaded user data without user permission.

Other popular apps – including Yelp, Foursquare, Foodspotting and Instagram – were found to be uploading user data without making it clear they were doing so.

The issue attracted attention from the US Congress. Two members of the subcommittee on commerce, manufacturing and trade have written to Apple chief executive Tim Cook seeking further information on its privacy guidelines for apps. The letter makes reference to one appmaker who claims to have a database including “Mark Zuckerberg’s cell phone number, Larry Ellison’s home phone number and Bill Gates’s cell phone number”.

Apple has responded by saying that in future any app accessing contact information will need explicit approval from the user.

An Apple spokesman said that “Apps that collect or transmit a user’s contact data without their prior permission are in violation of our guidelines”.

So Apple are basically admitting any application that collects or stores users contact data is in breach of their terms of service but somehow I doubt that Twitter is going to be punished in the same way anyone else would if they had been caught breaking the Terms of Service of a global technology giant like Apple.

This comes not so long after the last iPhone related story about your privacy being nothing but an antiquated concept when it was realised that iPhones were secretly tracking every users movements through their inbuilt GPS systems and logging them to a database which could then be taken from the phone by anyone with the right tools. This included Police forces who would pull over drivers and use mobile scanners to transmit the database from the drivers phone to their own computers so that they could see where the person had been travelling to.

Even though stories like this come around every few months or so causing big outcries until the technology device manufacturer promises to fix the "bug" in their software. People need to realise that it doesn't matter if the phone or computer they are using is fitted with key-logging detector software and have their GPS turned off or any other method they think will avoid them being tracked. The only way to avoid being tracked and monitored is to go and live in the woods with no modern electrical devices and divorce yourself from society altogether.

I have documented on this site many times how the big technology players all have links to the global surveillance network in some cases working closely together with agencies such as the CIA and NSA. Even if you disable every possible app and feature on your smart-phone you are still going to be tracked by the cellphone towers that provide your signal and all the modern super computers that reside at those huge data centres monitoring your calls, emails, web traffic and emails for signs of terrorism, malcontent or displeasure at our utopian society.

If you don't believe me just spent a minute or two reading up on ECHELON, and that is a system that has been around for decades. Just imagine what the NSA is capable of now in this post 9-11 world of fear where a terrorist is living in every street and citizens are being asked by Big Brother and Big Sis to keep an eye out for anything "unusual".

This includes people paying with cash, texting in public, supporting the right to bear firearms, ex servicemen, patriots, supporters of Ron Paul or the Occupy movement, belief in outlandish conspiracies like 9.11 or any of the other lies that started our decade of war or anything else on the many leaflets given out to shop keepers and citizens eager to do their duty by snitching on others trying to change the world for the better.

So it comes as no surprise to find yet another example of one of the huge Internet companies breaking privacy laws and stealing personal info at every opportunity as that's the name of the game nowadays.

We have Microsoft building backdoors into their PC’s so that the NSA can bypass local security measures and access them remotely, Google helped to get going with CIA money as well as helping the myriad of US security companies come up with real time monitoring systems. We also have these huge companies buying up smaller enterprises at every opportunity and with most of the world on Facebook (who seem to have issues with their users privacy on a monthly basis) it makes sense for the intelligence community to have close links with any web outfit who's only product is YOUR personal information.

As with Microsofts recent purchase of SKYPE and Googles purchase of most new web technologies that make communication easier the introduction of IPv6 will soon mean that every computer, smart phone, TV and digital appliance connected to the Internet will have it's own unique static IP address enabling any organisation to easily monitor a "person of interest". I can only imagine the size of the databases required at Langley and GCHQ to keep all the information logged about everybody.

8.30 am Mr X's alarm clock went off

8.45 am Mr X emptied his dishwasher, he unloaded 6 plates, 3 forks and 2 tea spoons.

9.30 am Mr X made a phone call to Mr Y lasting 5 minutes 30 seconds in which the following sentences were mentioned: "The government sucks", "I wish someone would do something about the debt crisis" and "I think someone shoot punch David Cameron".

9.50 am Mr X left his house and walked 0.4 miles to the shops at these co-ordinates X,Y. His phones GPS logged his journey and 5 CCTV cameras caught his travels in real time.

10.15 am Mr X visited Tesco's where he bought the following items: A pack of batteries, a torch, the Guardian and some cigarettes. He paid in cash!

10.22 am A CCTV camera recorded a conversation Mr X had with someone outside the shop. The facial recognition software has identified this person as Mr Q who has a criminal record for public order offences as well as being logged as attending a recent Occupy Wall St protest in London.  The nearest voice activated lamppost recorded the full conversation which is ranked the malcontent level of the people as 8.2 out of 10.

10.45 am Mr X logged onto his computer with the following password XXXXX. He went to the following flagged website www.infowars.com where he made the following comment on an article titled "why we need a revolution". His comment suggests that he is a potential threat to society and a believer in conspiracy theories. He is currently being processed by the new database at GCHQ for possible signs of danger to society.

10.40 am Mr X has been flagged as domestic extremist and a SWAT team is proceeding to his residence to extract him for questioning.

I'm sure that was all just the fantastical ramblings of a wild imagination and nowhere near the realms of possibility but at least we can rely on the youth of today to sort things out for us before things get too far down the road to a total surveillance state - oh wait they don't know what privacy means. Looks like we're screwed then.