‘You can fool some of the people all the time — and those are the ones you have to concentrate on‘ George W Bush, 2001.

Long Long LTG mostly because I have again been researching for what may become a future film project on surveillance.

1. SURVEILLANCE

1.1 Google in bed with U.S. intelligence. Via Homeland Stupidity [2006].

IT contractors and intelligence officials familiar with the arrangement confirmed to HSToday.us that Google had been providing assistance to the intelligence community… The intelligence community appears to be interested in data mining Google’s vast store of information on each user who uses Google’s services. Google collects data on each user’s search queries, which web sites users visited after making a query, and through its Google Analytics service, can also track users on cooperating web sites. The contractor, who spoke on a not-for-attribution basis, said that at least one US intelligence agency he declined to identify is working to “leverage Google’s [user] data monitoring” capability as part of an effort by the IC to glean from this data information of “national security intelligence interest” in the war on terror. . . [my italic]

Robert David Steele, intelligence veteran and CEO of OSS.Net, Inc. which sponsored last week’s event, told HSToday.us Tuesday evening that “Google is being actively hypocritical and deceptive in playing up its refusal to help the Department of Justice when all along it has been taking money and direction for elements of the US Intelligence Community, including the Office of Research and Development at the Central Intelligence Agency, In-Q-Tel, and in all probability, both the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Army’s Intelligence and Security Command.”

1.2 Privacy in the Age of AT&T, Google and the NSA Streaming Audio link via Free Press.

Components of Total Information Awareness Programme Still Under Development via Wikipedia

Despite the withdrawal of funding for the TIA and the closing of the IAO, the core of the project survived. ^[10] Legislators included a classified annex to the Defense Appropriations Act that preserved funding for TIA’s component technologies, if they were transferred to other government agencies. TIA projects continued to be funded under classified annexes to Defense and Intelligence appropriation bills. However, the act also stipulated that the technologies only be used for military or foreign intelligence purposes against foreigners. ^[11]

TIA’s two core projects are now operated by Advanced Research and Development Activity (ARDA) located among the 60-odd buildings of “Crypto City” at NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, MD. ARDA itself has been shifted from the NSA to the Disruptive Technology Office (run by to the Director of National Intelligence). They are funded by National Foreign Intelligence Program for foreign counterterrorism intelligence purposes.

One technology, now codenamed “Baseball” is the Information Awareness Prototype System, the core architecture to integrated all the TIA’s information extraction, analysis, and dissemination tools. Work on this project is conducted by SAIC through its Hicks & Associates, consulting arm that is run by former Defense and military officials and which had originally been awarded US$19 million IAO contract to build the prototype system in late 2002. ^[12]

The other project has been re-designated “TopSail” (formerly Genoa II) and would provide IT tools to help anticipate and preempt terrorist attacks. SAIC has also been contracted to work on Topsail, including a US$3.7 million contract in 2005.

1.3 Disruptive Technology Office via Wikipedia

The Disruptive Technology Office, or DTO, is a funding agency within the United States Intelligence Community. It was until recently known as Advanced Research and Development Activity (ARDA).

ARDA was created in 1998 after the model of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) by the Director of Central Intelligence and the Department of Defense, and took responsibility for funding some of DARPA’s projects. ARDA evaluates proposals and funds speculative research, particularly in the fields of data mining, video processing, and quantum computing.

There has been speculation that the DTO is continuing research efforts started under the Total Information Awareness program (TIA) in DARPA’s Information Awareness Office (IAO). [1] Data-mining activities within the U.S. Department of Defense are controversial and have met with public and congressional disapproval.

Although ARDA’s budget is presumably classified as part of the intelligence budget, the New York Times quoted an unnamed former government official saying the agency spent about $100 million a year in 2003. The Associated Press reports that ARDA had a staff of only eight in 2004.

Headquartered at Fort George G. Meade in Maryland, site of the headquarters of the National Security Agency, ARDA/DTO has kept a low profile, quietly funding research of interest to the intelligence community.

In December of 2007, DTO was folded into the newly created IARPA [2]. A move to a research park near the University of Maryland, College Park was announced at about the same time [3].

1.4 Report: NSA continues controversial data-mining program in CS Monitor

During a hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Ron Hayden (D) of Oregon, one of the chief critics of TIA, asked John Negroponte, the head of Domestic Security, Robert Mueller, head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Gen. Michael Hayden, the former head of the NSA, if ” Poindexter’s programs are going on somewhere else?” While Mr. Negroponte and Mr. Mueller said they did not know the answer to the question, Gen. Hayden said he would only answer the question in closed session. In early February, the Christian Science Monitor reported on the government’s plan for a massive data sweep that “could troll news, blogs, even e-mails.” The program that would do this is called “ADVISE,” Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight, and Semantic Enhancement.

ADVISE “looks very much like TIA,” [Lee Tien, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation] writes in an e-mail. “There’s the same emphasis on broad collection and pattern analysis.”

But [Peter Sand, director of privacy technology], the DHS official, emphasizes that privacy protection would be built-in. “Before a system leaves the department there’s been a privacy review…. That’s our focus.”

1.5 Pentagon sets its sights on social networking websites in The New Scientist

A paper, entitled Semantic Analytics on Social Networks, by a research team led by Amit Sheth of the University of Georgia in Athens and Anupam Joshi of the University of Maryland in Baltimore reveals how data from online social networks and other databases can be combined to uncover facts about people. The footnote said the work was part-funded by an organisation called ARDA.

The research ARDA funded was designed to see if the semantic web could be easily used to connect people. The research team chose to address a subject close to their academic hearts: detecting conflicts of interest in scientific peer review. Friends cannot peer review each other’s research papers, nor can people who have previously co-authored work together.

So the team developed software that combined data from the RDF tags of online social network Friend of a Friend (www.foaf-project.org), where people simply outline who is in their circle of friends, and a semantically tagged commercial bibliographic database called DBLP, which lists the authors of computer science papers.

Joshi says their system found conflicts between potential reviewers and authors pitching papers for an internet conference. “It certainly made relationship finding between people much easier,” Joshi says. “It picked up softer [non-obvious] conflicts we would not have seen before.”

The technology will work in exactly the same way for intelligence and national security agencies and for financial dealings, such as detecting insider trading, the authors say. Linking “who knows who” with purchasing or bank records could highlight groups of terrorists, money launderers or blacklisted groups, says Sheth.

1.6 TIA Lives On via National Journal [project Basketball].

A publicly available Defense Department document, detailing various “cooperative agreements and other transactions” conducted in fiscal 2004, shows that Basketball was fully funded at least until the end of that year (September 2004). The document shows that the system was being tested at a research center jointly run by ARDA and SAIC Corp., a major defense and intelligence contractor that is the sole owner of Hicks & Associates. The document describes Basketball as a “closed-loop, end-to-end prototype system for early warning and decision-making,” exactly the same language used in contract documents for the TIA prototype system when it was awarded to Hicks in 2002.

As recently as October 2005, SAIC was awarded a $3.7 million contract under Topsail. According to a government-issued press release announcing the award, “The objective of Topsail is to develop decision-support aids for teams of intelligence analysts and policy personnel to assist in anticipating and pre-empting terrorist threats to U.S. interests.” That language repeats almost verbatim the boilerplate descriptions of Genoa II contained in contract documents, Pentagon budget sheets, and speeches by the Genoa II program’s former managers.

It is unclear when funding for Topsail was terminated. But earlier this month, at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, one of TIA’s strongest critics questioned whether intelligence officials knew that some of its programs had been moved to other agencies. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., asked Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte and FBI Director Robert Mueller whether it was “correct that when [TIA] was closed, that several … projects were moved to various intelligence agencies…. I and others on this panel led the effort to close [TIA]; we want to know if Mr. Poindexter’s programs are going on somewhere else.”

Negroponte and Mueller said they didn’t know. But Negroponte’s deputy, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, who until recently was director of the NSA, said, “I’d like to answer in closed session.” Asked for comment, Wyden’s spokeswoman referred to his hearing statements.

Tom Armour, the Genoa II program manager, declined to comment for this story. But in a previous interview, he said that ARDA — which absorbed the TIA programs — has pursued technologies that would be useful for analyzing large amounts of phone and e-mail traffic. “That’s, in fact, what the interest is,” Armour said.

1.7 Inside Donnie Rumsfeld’s Orwellian Pentagon via Jim Hightower.

… A secret Pentagon memo from Nov. 5, 2001, has now surfaced. In it, the Army’s chief intelligence officer insists that while the Pentagon cannot “collect” information on citizens who have no connection to foreign terrorists, it can “receive” such information. “Remember,” he wrote with Machiavellian delight, “merely receiving information does not constitute ‘collection’ [Military intelligence] may receive information from anyone, anytime.”

Three years ago, the Pentagon set up a new, ultrasecret agency called CIFA, for Counterintelligence Field Activity. Its initial task was to detect terrorist plots against military installations in the United States, but two years ago, a directive from the Pentagon’s top ranks ordered CIFA to broaden its scope by creating and maintaining “a domestic law enforcement database.” The agency’s motto became “Counterintelligence to the Edge.”

In May 2003, Rumsfeld’s top deputy, “Howling Paul” Wolfowitz, authorized a new snooping operation code-named TALON (Threat And Local Observation Notice). It directed military officers throughout the country to collect raw information about suspicious activities by local people and to feed reports on them into CIFA’s humming computers. In its first year alone, TALON’s far-flung network of military snoops fed more than 5,000 “local activity” reports into the electronic maw of CIFA.

Nearly everything about CIFA, including its budget, is kept secret, but it is known that the agency has generously spread its budgetary wealth to Pentagon contractors. Northrop Grumman, for example, received funds to develop a CIFA database dubbed “PersonSearch,” and Computer Sciences Corp. got a grant for an electronic system to detect and monitor people’s “abnormal activities and behaviors.”

2. WAR / OIL

2.1 The Iraq War Was About Oil, All Along
via Alternet.

Fast forward to Cheney’s first heady days in the White House. The oil industry and other energy conglomerates were handed backdoor keys to the White House, and their CEO’s and lobbyists were trooping in and out for meetings with their old pal, now Vice President Cheney. The meetings were secret, conducted under tight security, but as we reported five years ago, among the documents that turned up from some of those meetings were maps of oil fields in Iraq — and a list of companies who wanted access to them. The conservative group Judicial Watch and the Sierra Club filed suit to try to find out who attended the meetings and what was discussed, but the White House fought all the way to the Supreme Court to keep the press and public from learning the whole truth.

Think about it. These secret meetings took place six months before 9/11, two years before Bush and Cheney invaded Iraq. We still don’t know what they were about. What we know is that this is the oil industry that’s enjoying swollen profits these days. It would be laughable if it weren’t so painful to remember that their erstwhile cheerleader for invading Iraq — the press mogul Rupert Murdoch — once said that a successful war there would bring us $20-a-barrel oil. The last time we looked, it was more than $140 a barrel. Where are you, Rupert, when the facts need checking and the predictions are revisited?

3. False Flags

3.1 Even Fort Detrick Scientists Themselves Think the Killer Anthrax Came from their Facility via George Washington Blog.

“In an e-mail obtained by FOX News, scientists at Fort Detrick openly discussed how the anthrax powder they were asked to analyze after the attacks was nearly identical to that made by one of their colleagues.

“Then he said he had to look at a lot of samples that the FBI had prepared … to duplicate the letter material,” the e-mail reads. “Then the bombshell. He said that the best duplication of the material was the stuff made by [name redacted]. He said that it was almost exactly the same … his knees got shaky and he sputtered, ‘But I told the General we didn’t make spore powder!’”

Indeed, 3 of the 4 suspects the FBI is investigating are employees of Fort Detrick, which is run by the Army.

here is strong evidence that the anthrax attacks were a false flag attack. Indeed, the bioweapons expert who actually drafted the current bioweapons law (the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989) while working for President George H.W. Bush has said that he is convinced the October 2001 anthrax attacks that killed five people were perpetrated and covered up by criminal elements of the U.S. government. The motive: to foment a police state by killing off and intimidating opposition to post-9/11 legislation such as the USA PATRIOT Act and the later Military Commissions Act. See also this.

4. Economy

4.1 The Inflation Monster Is Back via Spiegel Online International

the center-left Süddeutsche Zeitung wrote:

“Humanity thought they had won, but now the monster’s back. All the books that declared its death are just a heap of paper. The monster creeps back, it feeds on your savings, steals money from your paycheck and makes it harder to buy a tank of gas and a plate of noodles. In Europe prices are climbing faster than they have since the introduction of the euro in 1999. Globally, prices are rising faster than they have in a decade. A threat to savings, employees and customers.”

“The inflation monster is back, and with him the memories of how dangerous he can be are coming back. … Across the world, people are reacting to the new attacks with fear and anger. In Haiti and Somalia, the poor are protesting higher rice prices and Spanish fishermen are lighting cars on fire outside the offices of the European Commission because the cost of marine diesel has become unaffordable. …”

4.2 World Bank Chief: World Entering Danger Zone

“What we are witnessing is not a natural disaster — a silent tsunami or a perfect storm: It is a man-made catastrophe, and as such must be fixed by people,” Zoellick said in the letter made available to Xinhua on Wednesday.

“The international community is facing an unprecedented test in this new era of globalization: the question is whether we can act swiftly to help those most in need, “he said.