I am a former Google employee and I am writing this to leak information to the public of what I
witnessed and took part in while being an employee. My position was to deal with AdSense accounts,
more specifically the accounts of publishers (not advertisers). I was employed at Google for a period of
several years in this capacity.
Having signed many documents such as NDA’s and non-competes, there are many repercussions for me,
especially in the form of legal retribution from Google. I have carefully planned this leak to coincide with
certain factors in Google such as waiting for the appropriate employee turn around so that my identity
could not be discovered.
To sum it up for everyone, I took part in what I (and many others) would consider theft of money from
the publishers by Google, and from direct orders of management. There were many AdSense employees
involved, and it spanned many years, and I hear it still is happening today except on a much wider scale.
No one on the outside knows it, if they did, the FBI and possibly IRS would immediately launch an
investigation, because what they are doing is so inherently illegal and they are flying completely under
the radar.
It began in 2009. Everything was perfectly fine prior to 2009, and in fact it couldn’t be more perfect from
an AdSense employees perspective, but something changed.
Google Bans and Ban Criteria
Before December 2012:
In the first quarter of 2009 there was a “sit-down” from the AdSense division higher ups to talk about
new emerging issues and the role we (the employees in the AdSense division needed to play. It was a
very long meeting, and it was very detailed and intense. What it boiled down to was that Google had
suffered some very serious losses in the financial department several months earlier. They kept saying
how we “needed to tighten the belts” and they didn’t want it to come from Google employees pockets.
So they were going to (in their words) “carry out extreme quality control on AdSense publishers”. When
one of my fellow co-workers asked what they meant by that. Their response was that AdSense itself
hands out too many checks each month to publishers, and that the checks were too large and that
needed to end right away. Many of the employees were not pleased about this (like myself). But they
were successful in scaring the rest into thinking it would be their jobs and their money that would be on
the line if they didn’t participate. The meeting left many confused as to how this was going to happen.
What did they mean by extreme quality control? A few other smaller meetings occur with certain key
people in the AdSense division that furthered the idea and procedure they planned on implementing.
There were lots of rumors and quiet talking amongst the employees, there was lots of speculations,
some came true and some didn’t. But the word was that they were planning to cut off a large portion of
publisher’s payments.
After that point there was a running gag amongst fellow co-workers where we would walk by each other
and whisper “Don’t be evil, pft!” and roll our eyes.
What happened afterwards became much worse. Their “quality control” came into full effect. Managers
pushed for wide scale account bans, and the first big batch of bans happened in March of 2009. The
main reason, the publishers made too much money. But something quite devious happened. We were
told to begin banning accounts that were close to their payout period (which is why account bans never
occur immediately after a payout). The purpose was to get that money owed to publishers back to
Google AdSense, while having already served up the ads to the public.
This way the advertiser’s couldn’t claim we did not do our part in delivering their ads and ask for money
back. So in a sense, we had thousands upon thousands of publishers deliver ads we knew they were
never going to get paid for.
Google reaped both sides of the coin, got money from the advertisers, used the publishers, and didn’t
have to pay them a single penny. We were told to go and look into the publishers accounts, and if any
publisher had accumulated earnings exceeding $5000 and was near a payout or in the process of a
payout, we were to ban the account right away and reverse the earnings back. They kept saying it was
needed for the company, and that most of these publishers were ripping Google off anyways, and that
their gravy train needed to end. Many employees were not happy about this. A few resigned over it.
I did not. I stayed because I had a family to support, and secondly I wanted to see how far they would
go.
From 2009 to 2012 there were many more big batches of bans. The biggest of all the banning sessions
occurred in April of 2012. The AdSense division had enormous pressure from the company to make up
for financial losses, and for Google’s lack of reaching certain internal financial goals for the quarter prior.
So the push was on. The employees felt really uneasy about the whole thing, but we were threatened
with job losses if we didn’t enforce the company’s wishes. Those who voiced concerned or issue were
basically ridiculed with “not having the company’s best interest in mind” and not being “team players”.
Morale in the division was at an all-time low. The mood of the whole place changed quite rapidly. It no
longer was a fun place to work.
The bans of April 2012 came fast and furious. Absolutely none of them were investigated, nor were they
justified in any way. We were told to get rid of as many of the accounts with the largest
checks/payouts/earnings waiting to happen. No reason, just do it, and don’t question it. It was heart
wrenching seeing all that money people had earned all get stolen from them. And that’s what I saw it as,
it was a robbery of the AdSense publishers. Many launched appeals, complaints, but it was futile
because absolutely no one actually took the time to review the appeals or complaints. Most were simply
erased without even being opened, the rest were deposited into the database, never to be touched
again.
Several publishers launched legal actions which were settled, but Google had come up with a new policy
to deal with situations such as that because it was perceived as a serious problem to be avoided.
So they came up with a new policy.
After December 2012: The New Policy
The new policy; “shelter the possible problem makers, and fuck the rest” (those words were actually
said by a Google AdSense exec) when he spoke about the new procedure and policy for “Account
Quality Control”.
The new policy was officially called AdSense Quality Control Color Codes (commonly called AQ3C by
employees). What it basically was a categorization of publisher accounts. Those publisher’s that could
do the most damage by having their account banned were placed in a VIP group that was to be left
alone. The rest of the publishers would be placed into other groupings accordingly.
The new AQ3C also implemented “quality control” quotas for the account auditors, so if you didn’t meet
the “quality control” target (aka account bans) you would be called in for a performance review.
There were four “groups” publishers could fall into if they reached certain milestones.
They were:
Red Group: Urgent Attention Required
Any AdSense account that reaches the $10,000/month mark is immediately flagged (unless they are part
of the Green Group).
– In the beginning there were many in this category, and most were seen as problematic and were seen
as abusing the system by Google. So every effort was taken to bring their numbers down.
– They are placed in what employees termed “The Eagle Eye”, where the “AdSense Eagle Eye Team”
would actively and constantly audit their accounts and look for any absolute reason for a ban. Even if
the reason was far-fetched, or unsubstantiated, and unprovable, the ban would occur. The “Eagle Eye
Team” referred to a group of internal account auditors whose main role was to constantly monitor
publisher’s accounts and sites.
– A reason has to be internally attached to the account ban. The problem was that notifying the
publisher for the reason is not a requirement, even if the publisher asks. The exception: The exact
reason must be provided if a legal representative contacts Google on behalf of the account holder.
– But again, if a ban is to occur, it must occur as close to a payout period as possible with the most
amount of money accrued/earned. Yellow Group: Serious Attention Required
Any AdSense account that reaches the $5,000/month mark is flagged for review (unless they are part of
the Green Group).
– All of the publisher’s site(s)/account will be placed in queue for an audit.
– Most of the time the queue is quite full so most are delayed their audit in a timely fashion.
– The second highest amount of bans occur at this level.
– A reason has to be internally attached to the account ban. Notifiying the publisher for the reason is not
a requirement, even if the publisher asks. The exception: The exact reason must be provided if a legal
representative contacts Google on behalf of the account holder.
– But again, if a ban is to occur, it must occur as close to a payout period as possible with the most
amount of money accrued/earned. Blue Group: Moderate Attention Required
Any AdSense account that reaches the $1,000/month mark is flagged for possible review (unless they
are part of the Green Group).
– Only the main site and account will be place in queue for what is called a quick audit.
– Most bans that occur happen at this level. Main reason is that a reason doesn’t have to be attached to
the ban, so the employees use these bans to fill their monthly quotas. So many are simply a random pick
and click.
– A reason does not have to be internally attached to the account ban. Notifying the publisher for the
reason is not a requirement, even if the publisher asks.
– But again, if a ban is to occur, it must occur as close to a payout period as possible with the most
amount of money accrued. Green Group: VIP Status (what employees refer to as the “untouchables”)
Any AdSense account associated with an incorporated entity or individual that can inflict serious
damage onto Google by negative media information, rallying large amounts of anti-AdSense support, or
cause mass loss of AdSense publisher support.
– Google employees wanting to use AdSense on their websites were automatically placed in the Green
group. So the database contained many Google insiders and their family members. If you work or
worked for Google and were placed in the category, you stayed in it, even if you left Google. So it
included many former employees. Employees simply had to submit a form with site specific details and
their account info.
– Sites in the Green Group were basically given “carte blanche” to do anything they wanted, even if they
flagrantly went against the AdSense TOS and Policies. That is why you will encounter sites with AdSense,
but yet have and do things completely against AdSense rules.
– Extra care is taken not to interrupt or disrupt these accounts.
– If an employee makes a mistake with a Green Level account they can lose their job. Since it seen as
very grievous mistake. New Policy 2012 Part 2:
Internal changes to the policy were constant. They wanted to make it more efficient and streamlined.
They saw its current process as having too much human involvement and oversight. They wanted it
more automated and less involved.
So the other part of the new policy change was to incorporate other Google services into assisting the
“quality control” program. What they came up with will anger many users when they find out. It
involved skewing data in Google Analytics. They decided it was a good idea to alter the statistical data
shown for websites. It first began with just altering data reports for Analytics account holders that also
had an AdSense account, but they ran into too many issues and decided it would be simpler just to skew
the report data across the board to remain consistent and implement features globally.
So what this means is that the statistical data for a website using Google Analytics is not even close to
being accurate. The numbers are incredibly deflated. The reasoning behind their decision is that if an
individual links their AdSense account and their Analytics account, the Analytics account can be used to
deflate the earnings automatically without any human intervention. They discovered that if an individual
had an AdSense account then they were also likely to use Google Analytics. So Google used it to their
advantage.
This led to many publishers to actively display ads, without earning any money at all (even to this day).
Even if their actual website traffic was high, and had high click-throughs the data would be automatically
skewed in favor of Google, and at a total loss of publishers. This successfully made it almost impossible
for anyone to earn amounts even remotely close what individuals with similar sites were earning prior
to 2012, and most definitely nowhere near pre-2009 earnings.
Other policy changes also included how to deal with appeals, which still to this day, the large majority
are completely ignored, and why you will rarely get an actual answer as to why your account was
banned and absolutely no way to resolve it.
—- The BIG Problem (which Google is aware of)
There is an enormous problem that existed for a long time in Google’s AdSense accounts. Many of the
upper management are aware of this problem but do not want to acknowledge or attempt to come up
with a solution to the problem.
It is regarding false clicks on ads. Many accounts get banned for “invalid clicks” on ads. In the past this
was caused by a publisher trying to self inflate click-throughs by clicking on the ads featured on their
website. The servers automatically detect self-clicking with comparison to IP addresses and other such
information, and the persons account would get banned for invalid clicking.
But there was something forming under the surface. A competitor or malicious person would actively go
to their competitor’s website(s) or pick a random website running AdSense and begin multiple-clicking
and overclicking ads, which they would do over and over again. Of course this would trigger an invalid
clicking related ban, mainly because it could not be proven if the publisher was actually behind the
clicking. This was internally referred to as “Click-Bombing”. Many innocent publishers would get caught
up in bans for invalid clicks which they were not involved in and were never told about.
This issue has been in the awareness of Google for a very long time but nothing was done to rectify the
issue and probably never will be. Thus if someone wants to ruin a Google AdSense publishers account,
all you would have to do is go to their website, and start click-bombing their Google Ads over and over
again, it will lead the servers to detect invalid clicks and poof, they get banned. The publisher would be
completely innocent and unaware of the occurrence but be blamed for it anyways.
—-
Their BIG Fear
The biggest fear that Google has about these AdSense procedures and policies is that it will be publicly
discovered by their former publishers who were banned, and that those publishers unite together and
launch an class-action lawsuit.
They also fear those whose primary monthly earnings are from AdSense, because in many countries if a
person claims the monthly amount to their tax agency and they state the monthly amount and that they
are earning money from Google on a monthly basis, in certain nations technically Google can be seen as
an employer. Thus, an employer who withholds payment of earnings, can be heavily fined by
government bodies dealing with labor and employment. And if these government bodies dealing with
labor and employment decide to go after Google, then it would get very ugly, very quickly ….. that is on
top of a class-action lawsuit.
Snowden made video to teach reporter how to speak with him securely
It explains how to use Public Key Encryption to scramble online messages
Privacy campaigners call on ordinary people to learn how to use the method
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Whistleblower: The tutorial Edward Snowden made for reporters on to avoid NSA email surveillance has been made public for the first time
Ordinary people must learn to scramble their emails, privacy campaigners said today, as an encryption how-to video made by Edward Snowden was made public for the first time.
The former NSA employee who blew the whistle on the agency’s all-pervasive online surveillance made the video to teach reporters how to communicate with him in secret.
The 12-minute clip, in which Mr Snowden has used software to distort his voiceover, explains how to use free software to scramble messages using a technique called Public Key Encryption (PKE).
The video’s description on Vimeo says: ‘By following these instructions, you’ll allow any potential source in the world to send you a powerfully encrypted message that ONLY YOU can read even if the two of you have never met or exchanged contact information.’
Mr Snowden made the video last year for Glenn Greenwald in an effort to get the then-Guardian reporter to communicate securely with him online so he could send over documents he wanted to leak.
Viewers may find the video difficult to follow. Mr Greenwald himself admitted he wasn’t able to finish it. It took him seven weeks and help from experts to finally gather the expertise to get back to Snowden.
The video’s publication comes as more and more internet users are adopting encryption techniques after the alarm caused by Mr Snowden’s revelations about communications surveillance.
He leaked documents which showed the NSA and its UK counterpart GCHQ were able to spy on virtually anybody’s communications and internet usage, monitor social network activity in real time, and track and record the locations of billions of mobile devices.
There was outrage when it emerged that, contrary to promises the NSA made to Congress, these technologies were being used to track U.S. citizens without warrants and to tap the communications of leaders of allied countries.
One answer to the risks to freedom that such surveillance pose is to scramble online communications so that government agencies can no longer eavesdrop at will.
However, the encryption technologies currently available can be difficult to use and privacy activists have called on internet companies to include them in their products at the source.
Meanwhile, the campaign to end blanket surveillance continues as experts warn encryption tools are unlikely to make their way into the mainstream while internet firms continue to make their profits on the back of users’ personal information.
Scroll down for video
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How-to guide: The video begins with a basic outline of the theory behind Public Key Encryption. It is voiced over by Mr Snowden, who has disguised his voice to avoid detection by NSA or GCHQ spies
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Detailed: The video then explains how to use a free program called GPG4Win to scramble messages using Public Key Encryption then send them over Tor, software that allows people to use the internet anonymously
In Mr Snowden’s video, he explains how traditional emails are sent as plain text – unencrypted by default – across the internet, allowing anyone able to intercept them to easily read their contents.
‘Any router you cross could be monitored by an intelligence agency or other adversary [such as] a random hacker. So could any end points on the way there, a mail server or a service provider such as Gmail.
‘If the journalist uses a web mail service personally or its provisioned by their company, the plain text could always be retrieved later on via a subpoena or some other mechanism, legal or illegal, instead of catching it during transit. So that’s doubly dangerous
‘The solution to that is to actually encrypt the message. Now one of the problems with encryption typically is that it requires a shared secret, a form of key or password that goes between the journalist and the source.
‘But if the source sends an encypted file across the internet to the journalist and says “Hey, here’s an encrypted file. The passwork is cheesecake,” the internet is going to know the password is cheesecake.
‘But public key encryption such as GPG allows the journalist to publish a key that anyone can have based on the design of the algorithm, and it doesn’t provide any advantage to the adversary.’
The video goes on to specifically explain how to use a free program called GPG4Win to scramble messages using Public Key Encryption then send them over Tor, a piece of software that allows people to use the internet anonymously.
It’s lessons, as well as help from experts, allowed Mr Greenwald to communicate securely with Mr Snowden to publish what has since been called the most significant leak in U.S. history. It has been made public to coincide with the release of Mr Greenwald’s book, No Place To Hide, in which he tells the story of the scoop.
Privacy campaigners told MailOnline today that all internet users should be now using encryption technology to preserve their privacy and maintain freedom of speech in the face of government spying.
Javier Ruiz, director of policy at the Open Rights Group, said: ‘Emails are like postcards and encryption is a tamper-proof envelope.
‘It’s probably obvious that journalists, MPs, doctors, lawyers or anyone transmitting confidential information online should always encrypt their emails to keep that information secure.
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http://youtu.be/jo0L2m6OjLA
‘But since the Snowden revelations, more and more ordinary citizens are adopting encryption software to help keep their emails private.
‘If encryption is to be used on a mass scale, it will require companies like Google, Apple and Microsoft to embed encryption in their tools.’
But TK Keanini, chief technology officer at internet security firm Lancope, said that it was unlikely that major internet companies would begin including encryption functions in their services as standard.
‘PGP and similar programs are just too complicated for the masses,’ he said. ‘Managing key pairs, understanding revocation and all that stuff is too complicated for most, and thus adoption over the past 20 years has been limited to the highly technical – the uber geeks.
‘Now, if a service like gmail.com had an option in there to perform digital signing and encryption in a way that most people could use it, that would have a huge impact; but it will never happen because Google and other ‘free’ services make their money on the fact that your data is in the clear and they can use it to market services to you.
‘People need to understand that when people offer free services, you and your information are the payment.’
‘While people can use technology to empower themselves, we must also challenge the policies of Government and intelligence agencies to end the unlawful mass surveillance of people around the world’
Mike Rispoli, a spokesman for Privacy International, echoed those sentiments, but added that there needs to be more pressure on government to stop them from snooping on the private lives of ordinary people.
‘It is critical that people use all technology at their disposal to keep their communications private and secure,’ he said.
‘We should all support the creation and widespread use of these tools. Ultimately, however, people should never have to do more or go to extra lengths to protect their rights.
‘This is why we need political, legal, as well as technological, solutions to ensure that our privacy rights are protected.
‘While people can use technology to empower themselves, we must also challenge the policies of Government and intelligence agencies to end the unlawful mass surveillance of people around the world.’
It’s time to demand an end to the cover-up of the leading cause of breast cancer – tight bras.
It’s been 20 years since our research showing a major link between breast cancer and the wearing of tight bras for long periods of time daily was announced to cancer experts in our book, Dressed To Kill: The Link Between Breast Cancer and Bras.
Cancer charities don’t care about a cure
This breakthrough information was promptly ignored, ridiculed, and censored by the very people and organizations whose mission is to find a cure and cause of this modern day epidemic.
Despite the resistance, our message did get out to millions of women, some of whom discovered on themselves that ending the habit of constricting their breasts with bras improved overall breast health – including reducing breast pain, cysts, and tenderness.
Boycott breast cancer charities: Send you’re your bra instead of money!
While the cancer industry still thinks of the lymphatic system as merely the pathway for the spread of cancer, leading them to remove lymph nodes creating painful and disabling lymphedema in their patients, there are now more healthcare providers who understand the vital role the lymphatic system plays in disease prevention.
They understand how constriction of the lymphatic drainage from the breasts caused by tight bras can result in tissue toxification, cysts, pain, and ultimately, cancer.
But, despite the successes of women regaining breast health by altering their bra wearing habits, the cancer detection and treatment industry has consistently and arrogantly dismissed the bra-cancer link.
Does a bra really contribute to breast cancer?
It does, according to at least 5 research studies and numerous healthcare providers, including oncologists and MD’s. Even some lingerie manufacturers have developed new bra designs hoping to minimize lymphatic constriction and thereby help prevent breast cancer – citing the bra-cancer theory for their patents.
But it doesn’t, according to the American Cancer Society (ACS) and the Susan G. Komen Foundation, fundraising giants of the cancer detection and treatment world – which consider the link absurd and unworthy of serious consideration, and unquestionably assume that research showing a link must have some other explanation besides bras.
Shrugging off the bra-cancer link is killing hundreds of thousands of women and wasting billions of dollars in unnecessary detection and treatment.
As breast cancer researchers, we are calling for a boycott of these organizations until they stop dismissing the bra-cancer link, and begin educating doctors and women about the cancer hazards of wearing tight bras.
What is the risk of wearing a bra?
Our research showed that bra-free women have about the same incidence of breast cancer as men, and that the tighter and longer a bra is worn the higher the incidence rose, up to 100 times greater for 24/7 bra wearers.
Why are women not hearing about this from the ACS and Komen Foundation? Why are these organizations, so eager to fund raise for a cure, so opposed to preventing this disease by addressing the bra-cancer link?
Could it be because lingerie companies donate to their charities? Could it be that preventing this disease by challenging the cultural norm of bra wearing is too taboo for these detection and treatment focused organizations?
Whatever their reason, it is wrong for the bra-cancer link to be dismissed and ignored. Because of this unscientific stonewalling of this information, over the past 20 years 2,000,000 women in the United States alone have gotten breast cancer – which may have been prevented by simply loosening their bra and wearing it less often, each day.
So, when the ACS or Komen Foundation ask for a donation, send them your bra, instead. This will give them the message, and help you prevent breast cancer at the same time.
About the author: Sydney Ross Singer is a world-renown medical anthropologist, author, and director of the Institute for the Study of Culturogenic Disease, located in Hawaii. A pioneer in the field of applied medical anthropology, Sydney, along with his wife and co-author, Soma Grismaijer have written numerous groundbreaking books that provide new theories, research, and revelations on disease causation and prevention, including the internationally acclaimed book, Dressed To Kill: The Link Between Breast Cancer and Bras. For more information – visit:KillerCulture.com
“Scientific evidence does not support a link between wearing an underwire bra (or any type of bra) and an increased risk of breast cancer. There is no biological reason the two would be linked, and any observed relationship is likely due to other factors.”
Internet e-mail rumors and at least one book have suggested that bras cause breast cancer by obstructing lymph flow. There is no good scientific or clinical basis for this claim.
1991 Harvard study (CC Hsieh, D Trichopoulos (1991). Breast size, handedness and breast cancer risk. European Journal of Cancer and Clinical Oncology 27(2):131-135.). This study found that, “Premenopausal women who do not wear bras had half the risk of breast cancer compared with bra users…”
1991-93 U.S. Bra and Breast Cancer Study by Singer and Grismaijer, published in Dressed To Kill: The Link Between Breast Cancer and Bras (Avery/Penguin Putnam, 1995; ISCD Press, 2005). Found that bra-free women have about the same incidence of breast cancer as men. 24/7 bra wearing increases incidence over 100 times that of a bra-free woman.
Singer and Grismaijer did a follow-up study in Fiji, published in Get It Off! (ISCD Press, 2000). Found 24 case histories of breast cancer in a culture where half the women are bra-free. The women getting breast cancer were all wearing bras. Given women with the same genetics and diet and living in the same village, the ones getting breast disease were the ones wearing bras for work.
A 2009 Chinese study (Zhang AQ, Xia JH, Wang Q, Li WP, Xu J, Chen ZY, Yang JM (2009). [Risk factors of breast cancer in women in Guangdong and the countermeasures]. In Chinese. Nan Fang Yi Ke Da Xue Xue Bao. 2009 Jul;29(7):1451-3.) found that NOT sleeping in a bra was protective against breast cancer, lowering the risk 60%.
2011 a study was published, in Spanish, confirming that bras are causing breast disease and cancer.http://www.portalesmedicos.com/publicaciones/articles/3691/1/Patologias-mamarias-generadas-por-el-uso-sostenido-y-seleccion-incorrecta-del-brassier-en-pacientes-que-acuden-a-la-consulta-de-mastologia- It found that underwired and push-up bras are the most harmful, but any bra that leaves red marks or indentations may cause disease.
For those who are completely new to the Palantir Platform or could simply use a refresher, this talk will start from scratch and provide a broad overview of Palantir’s origins and mission. A live demonstration of the product will help to familiarize newcomers with Palantir’s intuitive graphical interface and revolutionary analytical functionality, while highlighting the major engineering innovations that make it all possible. -Palantir
The @YourAnonNews Twitter account has been at the centre of a major upheval in the Anonymous community in the last few days, centring on missing funds of $35,000. Twitter
“A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on. Ideas have endurance without death.” – John F. Kennedy
Anonymous is just such an idea.
However details about in-fighting, backstabbing and missing fundraising donations which were made public over the weekend, threaten to undermine the trust people have in the movement – and especially one of its most prominent voices.
Your Anonymous News (@YourAnonNews) is one of the best known and loudest voices within the Anonymous group of hacktivists, but the person most associated with its operation, Christopher Banks (aka Jackal) has been accused of stealing $35,000 (£20,720) from a fundraising campaign which was designed to help build a new website for the account.
The details about what has happened over the weekend and prior to the events beaming public are confusing and contradictory depending on who you talk to, so let’s first go back to the beginning.
Anonymous’ powerful voice
As I said, Anonymous is an idea rather than a specific group of people, but certain voices within the movement came to the fore in the last few years.
Chief amongst these was the Twitter account @YourAnonNews which was created in April 2011 and was run primarily by a member of Anonymous known as Jackal.
Jackal was in fact Christopher Banks who lived in Denver, and over the next three years the account grew to become the most powerful voice within Anonymous. It currently has over 1.24 million followers.
While Jackal was in charge, running the account alone became too much work and so multiple members of Anonymous were brought on board to help out. At one point up to 25 people had access to the account and it was so well organised, it even had a highly detailed style guide.
Crowd-funding anarchy
In early 2013, Jackal and a few of the other prominent people running the account decided that they wanted to build a website with the goal of creating “a weekly news show, provide embedded coverage of direct actions, and run a new website to help ignite protest and DIY journalism around the world.”
The group turned to Indiegogo, the crowd-funding website and having set out with a goal of raising just $2,000, within weeks it saw 1,307 people donating a total of $54,668.
There were questions raised at the time about the logic of donating money to a project which was so ill-defined – and over a year later those concerns look to have been validated.
Truth and reconciliation
According to a Truth and Reconciliation document published this weekend, the donations were received by Jackal minus deductions from Indiegogo (4%) and credit card fees (3%).
The money was then used to pay for the merchandise which was promised in return for donations, including t-shirts, mugs, buttons, and stickers. The money was also used to buy laptops, broadband access and server time.
The total amount of money accounted for was $19,959, meaning that $34,709 remains unaccounted for.
This was to become the crux of a dispute among those who took charge of YourAnonNews in late 2013.
In October of 2013, Dell Cameron, a reporter with the Daily Dot and someone who had been involved with the Anonymous movement since the Arab Spring, got involved with the account and quickly realised there was something wrong.
None of the merchandise had been posted and there was no sign of the remaining money.
Cameron decided that he needed to get legal advice because, as he told IBTimes UK: “I was taking ownership of an account that had been used to commit a crime.”
Creating a non-profit
Cameron along with others involved with the account including Nicole Powers, Gregg Housh and lawyer Tor Ekeland, came together to form a de facto board to try and administer the account. Their plan was to move the intellectual property into a non-profit organisation which would run the account in the future.
The first point of business was to raise money in order to send out all the merchandise, which was done by raising private donations of $9,000.
At this point Banks still had access to the @YourAnonNews account and this was something Cameron was not happy with, but he was willing to let it be while the group tried to get answers from him about the missing money.
This situation continued until last week, when Cameron – along with Dan Stuckey, a reporter for Vice who was brought on board the @YourAnonNews account – told Ekeland at a meeting in New York that they were going to take control of the account and shut everyone else out.
Ekeland was able to talk them out of making a rash decision at the time, but in the middle of the night on Friday morning, Cameron went ahead with his plan and locked Ekeland, Powers and Housh out of the account, as well as Banks – a move Cameron claims was done with the consent of seven other YourAnonNews contributors.
Imploding
What followed was the cyber equivalent of mud-slinging with wild rumour and speculation being thrown around on social media channels.
Gabriella Coleman, professor at McGill University and an expert on Anonymous, told IBTimes UK that she has never seen anything like what happened on Thursday and Friday last week, when there were so many rumours being slung around various channels online.
It led the three exiled account members to publish the Truth and Reconciliation document on Saturday in an attempt to explain the situation.
By the time the document was published however, Cameron had already relinquished control of the account, following widespread criticism of his usurping of power. Control of the account was handed over to a group of Anonymous members based in Denver, who continue to operate it.
A deal with the devil
Speaking to both Cameron and Ekeland to try and find out exactly what happened, it’s clear there is a difference in opinion.
Cameron believes that Ekeland had done a deal with Banks which would simply brush the missing $35,000 under the carpet and allow him continue using the account – though without anyone knowing this publicly. This was unacceptable to Cameron.
Ekeland admitted he was indeed talking to Banks, but that they were only at the point of negotiation, and that any deal would have been brought to the board for approval, something Ekeland says Cameron was fully aware of.
A email sent by Cameron relating to the situation was also leaked over the weekend, in which Cameron makes potentially libellous and unsubstantiated claims about where the $35,000 went.
“You’re going to f**king regret it”
Cameron says he has personally asked Banks 12 times where the money is, and each time he has refused to give an answer. So far, Banks has remained silent on Twitter about anything to do with this debacle.
Cameron claims he was threatened by Ekeland before the email was leaked, saying: “He didn’t get specific, but he said if you publish a letter like this, you’re going to f**king regret it.”
Ekeland flatly denies that he threatened Cameron adding that he is happy to be no longer involved with the account, having immediately resigned from the board once Cameron locked him out of the account on Friday morning.
Ekeland likened the in-fighting over the @YourAnonNews account to the ring in The Lord of the Rings: “It drives people crazy, they get greedy for it, everyone wants it.”
Ekeland accused Cameron of wanting control of the feed for personal gain, something the Daily Dot reporter denies, claiming he only wanted “to do good” when he joined up.
Despite being the opposite side of the argument, Cameron echoes Ekeland’s sentiments:
“At the end, this is not about Anonymous, this is about a group of people fighting over a social media account. These are grown people squabbling like kids over the equivalent of a toy in the sandbox.”
The future of @YourAnonNews?
Coleman believes that YourAnonNews was close to imploding and that while the Truth and Reconciliation statement which was published on Saturday “may not be enough to save them, it is the wedge that gives them a chance [to survive].”
Numerous Anonymous accounts have been highly critical of the group over recent months for failing to make a public statement on the matter.
In the wake of the statement being made, while there is some appeasement, others believe that the YourAnonNews brand is tarnished forever and should be let to disappear completely.
Coleman counters that the rebirth like this should be expected:
“The strength of Anonymous is to have some points of stability but to be ad hoc and reborn. And it is definitely a great period to be reborn – whether that is going to happen or not is always an open questions.”
What the long-term impact this fiasco will have on @YourAnonNews – and more widely on the Anonymous movement – isn’t clear at this point.
What is clear is that $35,000 of donor’s money is still missing and unaccounted for, and the fight for control of the hugely popular and powerful @YourAnonNews account looks to be only just beginning.
* Use the hashtag #PayPal14. Respond to tweets from @Pierre and @ggreenwald. Don’t forget Greenwald’s Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/glenn.greenwald.5
PRESS RELEASE
The PayPal14 were arrested nearly three years ago on the front lines of the digital information war, helping put the hacktivist movement and specifically Anonymous on the map. Now the whistleblower/hacktivist culture they helped launch into the global spotlight is being co-opted by journalists and “tech bros” all over to advance their careers, most notably journalist Glenn Greenwald’s.
As Greenwald gets a book tour, the PayPal14 get sentencing hearings. He is traveling the world to promote his book about Snowden’s NSA leaks, and the 14 are struggling to raise more than $80,000 in court-ordered restitution for eBay/PayPal, companies ultimately overseen by Greenwald’s billionaire backer, Pierre Omidyar. The brand that popularized Pierre-Greenwald’s Snowden leaks is only so “edgy” and “cool” because heroes like the PayPal14 took direct action.
When PayPal, part of Pierre’s eBay, blocked donations to WikiLeaks, the 14 and many others saw that the company wasn’t just a means of transferring money. It was also a means of control. PayPal’s blockade attacked our ability to vote with our dollars. Bank of America, VISA, MasterCard, and Western Union also participated in the financial blockade, a blatant corporate attempt at silencing dissent and suppressing information. The blockade destroyed 95% of WikiLeaks’ revenue.
The 14 along with countless others bravely launched DDOS attacks, the digital equivalent of sit-ins, against PayPal to protest the unjust blockade. They shut down PayPal’s public website briefly without interfering with backend financial transactions or causing lasting harm, contrary to Department of “Justice” claims in court. After having their lives disrupted for years, 11 of the PayPal14 still face federal charges. Greenwald faces applause.
Sure, Greenwald and Pierre occasionally express tepid “support” for the PayPal14. But where’s the $80,000? That’s lunch money to Greenwald or Pierre. For the PayPal14, it’s a crushing financial burden. Pierre, according to Forbes, rakes in $7.8 billion per year while the PayPal14 struggle to stay afloat. Pierre started off First Look, Greenwald’s news media outlet, with $50 million in funding–tens of millions more than $80,000.
Greenwald and Pierre aren’t just riding the hacktivist movement–they’re watering it down. As a consequence, most of Snowden’s NSA leaks go unpublished. What is published is heavily redacted, preventing more aggressive, non-celebrity journalists from finding answers and pro-freedom hackers from building better defenses.
Ask yourself, Why isn’t Greenwald facing charges? Why isn’t he asking countries for asylum?
The PayPal14 put themselves on the front lines for something genuinely revolutionary. They grabbed the mainstream media’s attention and helped establish the “digital information war” culture that boosts this new kind of journalism. But the mainstream media has finished enjoying the spectacle of the PayPal14’s arrests. Now they’re watching Greenwald sign books, while the PayPal14, largely forgotten, sign plea deals.
Some rising players in the digital information war have confided that they believe we should make noise for the
PayPal14 at Greenwald’s book tour stops. But they’ve also confessed that doing so would put their financial interests in jeopardy. The tentacles of Greenwald/Pierre/First Look are spreading and snatching up people right and left. Thanks to Jeremy Hammond’s Stratfor leak, we better understand how corporate interests isolate radicals who try to create change. The “Duchin formula,” continued by the private intelligence firm Stratfor, states that opportunists “by definition … take the opportunity to side with the powerful for career gain” and bring the realists and idealists along with them, leaving the radicals exposed and unsupported.
We ask you to support the radicals and not the careerists. Your worst enemy is not the person in opposition to you. It is the person occupying the spot you would be fighting from and doing nothing.
The goal is to raise that $80,000. If we do that, we win this battle. For now, everything else is secondary. Supporting the PayPal14 doesn’t just mean one tweet and you’re done. It means constant effort.
Specifically, attend Greenwald’s book tour stops listed below. If they’re sold out–and most are NOT–still go and make noise outside (or get inside anyway!). For sold-out events, there are often stand-by lines in case extra seats become available. Take the steps below, inside or outside the event–or both!
1. This is crucial: Make sure people are equipped to record videos of the protest, including Greenwald’s responses, and upload them as soon as possible. Share them with the hashtag #PayPal14. If possible, videos should include the donation link – http://www.gofundme.com/PayPal14 – and text accompanying the video should include the link also.
2. Explain why you’re protesting the book tour, by mic-checking, passing out fliers, waving signs, or any other useful method. Get creative! “Pay Back the PayPal14” and “Obey eBay” and “Glenn Greenbacks” would make good slogans. Above all, make sure people get the donation link: http://www.gofundme.com/PayPal14 This can be done online, but it is critical that it be done in person at the book tour stops as well, making as much noise as possible. Occupy the book tour stops!
3. When are Greenwald and Pierre donating? You find out!
BOOK TOUR STOPS AND LINKS FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON THE PAYPAL14:
1. New York City, Tuesday May 13. 7:00-8:30 pm
Cooper Union’s Great Hall, in the Foundation Building
7 East 7th Street, between Third and Fourth Avenues
East Village in Manhattan
May 13, 2014 7:00 pm
Admission is free and open the public on a first-come first-served basis.
http://www.cooper.edu/events-and-exhibitions/events/authors-talk-glenn-greenwald-edward-snowden-and-nsa
2. Washington DC, Wednesday May 14. Doors at 6 pm, event at 7 pm.
Politics & Prose Bookstore
5015 Connecticut Ave. NW
Washington, DC 20008
May 14, 2014 7:00 pm
Doors and Will-call open at 6pm
1 General Admission Ticket: $17.00
http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/639084
3. Boston, Thursday May 15. 7 pm.
First Parish Church
1446 Massachusetts Avenu
Cambridge, MA 02138
May 15, 2014 7:00 pm
Ticket costs $5, stand-by only
http://www.harvard.com/event/glenn_greenwald2/
http://www.harvard.com/about/sold_out_event_faq/
4. Amsterdam, Tuesday May 20. 20:00-21:30
Stadsschouwburg Amsterdam – Rabozaal
Leidseplein 26
1017 PT Amsterdam
May 20, 2014 20:00 – 21:30
http://www.ssba.nl/page.ocl?pageid=3&ev=56684
https://shop.ticketscript.com/channel/web2/get-dates/rid/CC235T4A/eid/210218/language/nl/format/html
Tickets range from € 18,27 to € 26,27
5. Seattle, Los Angeles, San Fransisco, and San Diego: Mid-June. (No information available yet.)
* Updated book tour information may become available here https://twitter.com/ggreenwald here https://www.facebook.com/glenn.greenwald.5 or here https://www.facebook.com/glenn.greenwald.5/posts/10152804684159112
MOST IMPORTANTLY, ask people to donate to the PayPal14 by going here:
http://www.gofundme.com/PayPal14
PayPal 14 Homepage (in progress):
http://thepaypal14.com/support.htm
Microfinancing by Pierre’s Omidyar Network is loan-sharking the world’s most vulnerable:
https://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/extraordinary-pierre-omidyar/
News articles about the PayPal14:
https://medium.com/quinn-norton/66077450917e
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/12/05/inside-the-paypal-14-trial.html
Pierre Omidyar profile on Forbes:
http://www.forbes.com/profile/pierre-omidyar/
WikiLeaks on the financial blockade:
https://wikileaks.org/Banking-Blockade.html
Pierre started off First Look with $50 million in funding:
http://omidyargroup.com/firstlookmedia/pierre-omidyar-provides-initial-funding-of-50m-to-establish-first-look-media/
SPECIAL NOTE: This press release is intended to make sure people’s voices are heard in a way that educates the public.
Self-sufficiency has gone mainstream, which means that more and more people, including many urban dwellers, are looking for easy and effective ways to produce food and care for their families without having to rely on the system for sustenance. Since knowing where to start with all this is half the battle, here are some amazing homesteading ideas to get you and your family on track to becoming more autonomous in an increasingly centralized and unstable world:
1) Build an aquaponics system for high-output vegetables
It might seem daunting at first, but raising fish and using their waste to grow food crops without soil, a process more popularly known as aquaponics, can actually be quite simple. Raising fish in small water tanks generates ammonia-containing waste, which can then be converted into nitrite for fixation in growing soils. Nitrite is then converted into both nitrobacter and nitrospira, two substances that are crucial for maintaining the necessary nitrogen cycle, which promotes plant growth.
“Fish excrete ammonia in their wastes and through their gills,” explains aquaponics expert Rebecca Nelson in a piece for the Aquaponics Journal, which explains how to build your aquaponics system at home. “Nitrifying bacteria, which naturally live in the soil, water and air, convert ammonia first to nitrite and then to nitrate… [which] is used by plants to grow and flourish.”
Since pre-built aquaponics systems can cost thousands of dollars, building your own may be the preferable option. Nelson’s article explains how to build a simple aquaponics system for around $100 that, depending on its size, can stow away nicely in a space as small as the floor of a closet: http://aquaponics.com.
2) Construct a backyard chicken coop for fresh eggs
In many ways, owning chickens is a lot like owning a dog, except chickens do not need to be walked and aren’t really interested in playing fetch. And what they lack in terms of love and companionship, they easily make up for with their eggs, the unique, golden yolks of which are unmatched by the commercial imitators sold at your local supermarket.
Contrary to popular belief, chickens require a surprisingly small amount of space to roam — although the more you have, the better! Studies show that chickens raised on pasture or backyard grass, where they are free to roam and peck at worms and insects, produce eggs that are more nutritious, higher in beneficial omega-3 fatty acids and tastier than eggs from chickens raised on factory farms.
“They’re omnivores and will eat just about anything that comes out of the kitchen, including meat,” says Andrew Malone of Funky Chicken Farm in Melbourne, Florida, as quoted by the Green American.
Websites like BackyardChickens.com offer ready-made coops and all sorts of other resources to get you started on your journey to obtaining fresh eggs daily from your own backyard. Or if you’re feeling particularly handy and willing to take on a small project, building your own backyard chicken coop is another option that could save you money: http://www.backyardchickens.com.
Culture your own vegetables, dairy products and healing elixirs
If you’re noticing a trend here with food recommendations, it’s because proper nutrition is an absolutely essential component of long-term survival, especially in an “off-the-grid” situation where local grocers may or may not have a ready supply of food. And one of the best ways to maximize your nutritional input is to culture, or ferment, nutrient-dense foods using traditional methods, many of which date back centuries or even millennia.
More of an art than a science, the fermentation process not only allows for the extended preservation of food — fermented and cultured foods do not require refrigeration if properly prepared and stored — but it also unlocks key nutrients that simply cannot be attained from commercially prepared foods, including beneficial bacteria that maintain a healthy gut and promote optimal digestion.
“Getting started with fermented food and beverages is an important step to incorporating Traditional Diet in one’s home,” writes Sarah Pope of TheHealthyHomeEconomist.com, which contains more than 20 instructional videos and other resources on how to make things like yogurt, kefir (fermented dairy), kombucha (fermented tea), kvass (fermented beverage made from bread), kimchi (fermented vegetables), miso (fermented, high-protein seasoning) and much more: http://www.thehealthyhomeeconomist.com.
The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Fermenting Foods by Wardeh Harmon, which is recommended by the Weston A. Price Foundation, is another excellent resource to get you started on your journey to culturing and preserving your own nutrient-rich foods at home: http://www.westonaprice.org.
Knit your own fabrics for making clothes, blankets
The availability of cheap clothing made by grossly underpaid workers at third-world sweatshops has become the norm in much of the developed world, obscuring the rich and artful histories of fabric production that have long sustained civilizations. Knowing how to knit a coat or blanket might not seem like much of a marketable skill in today’s globalized economy, but should the lights suddenly go out and the heat stop running, possessing such a skill could save your life.
Once you understand the basics of how to knit and create fabric, this powerful skill can be expanded to include the crafting of materials like rope, matting and even walls and roofing for shelter. Each of these items is essential to long-term survival, and knowing how to make them yourself is an invaluable skill that should not be underestimated.
The Homesteading Handbook: A Back to Basics Guide to Growing Your Own Food, Canning, Keeping Chickens, Generating Your Own Energy, Crafting, Herbal Medicine, and More by Abigail R. Gehring is just one resource out of many to this end. It also contains a wealth of other useful information for homesteaders, both urban and rural: http://www.amazon.com.
You can also access the free resource The Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency by John Seymour, in PDF form at the following link: http://thehomesteadsurvival.com.
A while ago you had a chance to ask John McAfee about his past, politics, and what he has planned for the future. As usual, John answered with extreme frankness, with some interesting advice for anyone stuck at a checkpoint in the third world. Below you can read all his answers to your questions.
Travel tips? by timothy
John: You’ve had the chance to travel (sometimes in extraordinary circumstances!) through some very interesting places, and I’m wondering if you have as a result any concrete advice or suggestions to give about intelligent traveling.
– Do you have anything you’d consider unusual or otherwise notably every-day carry gear? – How do you keep documents safe / backed up / safe from prying eyes and fingers? – Are there places that, however adventurous you are, you avoid because you consider them too dangerous?
McAfee: As all of my close friends know, I have not always been a drug free citizen. Prior to 1983 I was a synthesis of corporate manager and drug dealer. The drug dealer profession took priority, and for a period of time that was my only occupation. Well .. taking the drugs that I sold also became a principal occupation. I gave up taking drugs and dealing drugs in 1983.
During my drug dealing days I became adept at those talents required of a successful drug dealer: clandestine travel through the Third World countries that produce and transport the goods; dealing with corrupt officials; dealing with drug lords and drug traffickers; successfully passing checkpoints; bribery, and in emergencies, the methods of escape.
In order to make the most of your travels, you need to first understand that, throughout much of the Third World, there is a smoothly functioning “system” in place that has evolved over centuries. From the First World perspective it is a “corrupt” system, but that’s not a helpful word if you want to acquire the most effective attitude for dancing with it. I prefer “negotiable”. It focuses the mind on the true task at hand when dealing with officialdom and removes any unpleasant subconscious connotations. So if you can view the following tools and tips as negotiation guidelines it will help bring the necessary smile to your face when the situation requires one.
Press Credentials
The most powerful tool a traveler can possess is a Press card. It will allow you to completely bypass the “documentation” process if you have limited time or limited funds and don’t want to deal with it. I have dozens stashed in all my vehicles, in my wallet, in my pockets, in my boats.
I am paranoid about being caught without one when I need one. They have magical properties if the correct incantations are spoken while producing them. A sample incantation at a police checkpoint (this will work in any Third World country):
“Hi, I’m really glad to see you.” (produce the press card at this point). I’m doing a story on Police corruption in (fill in country name) and I would love to get a statement from an honest police officer for the story. It’s for a newspaper in the U.S. Would you be willing to go on record for the piece?” You can add or subtract magic words according to the situation. Don’t worry about having to actually interview the officer. No sane police person would talk to a reporter about perceived corruption while at the task of being perceived to be corrupt. He will politely decline and quickly wave you through. If you do find the rare idiot officer who wants to talk, ask a few pointed questions about his superiors and it will quickly awaken his sensibilities. He will send you on your way.
The press card is powerful, but has risks and limitations. Do not attempt this magic, for example, at a Federale checkpoint in Mexico on a desolate road late at night. You will merely create additional, and unpleasant work for the person assigned to dig the hole where they intend to place you.
Documentation
Documentation is the polite word for “cash”.
The real art of producing documentation is the subtle play of how much to produce. In some countries, a policeman makes less than a dollar an hour. At a checkpoint, a policeman will usually share his proceeds with the other officers lounging by the side of the road and with the police Chief. The Chief will get about 25% in countries like Colombia and Panama, so if there are three officers total, then a ten-dollar contribution will end up with about $2.50 in each person’s pocket – a good take for someone making about a dollar an hour in legitimate salary.
Nothing irks locals more than someone who produces documentation in excess of what is expected. It ruins the system for the rest of the population. The Police begin to expect more from everyone, and the populace is then burdened beyond any sense of reasonableness. I might mention that checkpoints for any given location in most countries are set up no more than once a week, and frequent travelers reach accommodations with the authorities so that they are not unnecessarily burdened to the point that they are single-handedly putting the policeman’s children through school. The police are, by and large, honest people with hearts, and few truly abuse the system.
So to give more than is reasonable is a crime against humanity. The following are some hard and fast formulas that I have learned from trial and error over the years:
Documentation is inversely proportional to traffic density – the higher the traffic, the less you pay, the lower the traffic the more you pay. This is simple economics: The police must make their personal quota from whatever traffic there is.
If you stop at a checkpoint and there are four or five cars in line, you can be assured that less than a couple of dollars will be expected from a Gringo. Smart folks carry a half dozen cold cokes and beers in a cooler in the backseat and simply reach around, grab one or the other and hand it out the window with a smile. In the late afternoon on a hot day, this will be received with far more appreciation than a few small coins. If you hand a cold drink to all of the officers, you could easily talk them into giving you a protective escort to the next town.
In low traffic areas, in addition to having to pay more, you will also entail more risk. It’s never good to travel lonely roads in Central America, unless you are very experienced or closely wired in to the authorities. However, if you’ve come down to do a dope score or are determined to visit Crucita or her sister in some remote village and have no other choice, then strictly adhere to the following:
Do not get out of the car, even if ordered to do so. Your car is your only avenue of escape. It’s a ton or more of steel capable of doing serious harm to anyone foolish enough to stand in front of it, and once underway is difficult to stop. The checkpoint police in Central America never chase anyone down, in spite of years of watching U.S. Television and action movies. It’s too much work, plus they could have an accident. It’s not worth it for an unknown quantity. And they won’t shoot, unless you’ve run over one of them while driving off. It makes noise and wastes a round that they must account for when they return to the station – creating potential problems with the higher-ups. Not that I recommend running. It’s just that outside of the car you have lost the only advantage you have.
Smile and, if possible, joke. Say something like: “I’d like to stay and chat but I’m in a hurry to meet a girl. Her husband will be back soon.” This will go a long way toward creating a shared communion with the officers and will elicit a shared-experience type of sympathy.
Don’t wait for them to talk. Take the initiative. Have your documentation ready as you pull up and simply present it to the policeman while beginning your patter similar to the above, or whatever patter is comfortable for you. Never hand cash directly. Slip it in inside your insurance papers, or some other paperwork relating to your car or your journey, with about an inch of the banknote discretely sticking out. I use a Cannon Ixus 530 setup manual with the front and back cover removed. It’s small, light, and looks like it could be important paperwork for almost anything.
Remember: 50% of the police who stop you in most Third World countries can’t read. This is a powerful piece of information for the wise.
Once the officer has removed the banknote, which will be immediate, reach out and retrieve your laptop manual (or whatever you choose to use), smile, wave and drive off immediately without asking permission, but slowly, without looking back. Doing the job and leaving quickly without appearing to hurry off is the key here. Don’t give them enough time to assess you.
The above is a fail-safe formula for back roads of Central America if adhered to explicitly. Expect to part with at least 20 bucks. If, on approaching the checkpoint, you judge the police body language to be insolent or agitated, change the twenty for a fifty.
If something goes awry and the above, for some reason, has not worked, then pretend stupidity. Ask them to repeat everything they say and act bewildered. If ordered to get out of the car, smile broadly and simply drive off. Again – slowly.
If drugs or other contraband are planted in your vehicle by one of the police while another has your attention (a very common occurrence), understand, above all, that there is a zero probability that you will be arrested, unless you add to the “offense” by pissing someone off or otherwise acting unwisely. The intent is to scare. Under no circumstances deny that it is yours. Say something like “Damn, I thought I left that at home”, or “That’s the second time I’ve been caught this week.” This will show them that you are a good natured player and will probably negotiate. Denying ownership of the contraband will be seen as confrontational – an attitude that brings high risk when dealing with Third World authorities. The “documentation”, however, need not be much. They have chosen an approach to making a living that is universally considered by the locals as “not fair play”, and they should not be unjustly rewarded for it. Sure, they did go to the effort of distracting you, and someone had to go to the trouble to plant the dope, so they deserve something, but $5 is the maximum you need to pay. If they ask for more, then you can safely become indignant. They will shut up. The locals won’t tolerate police that take too much unfair advantage of the system, and your obvious awareness of the correct protocols will alert them to potential trouble if they push things.
If you actually are carrying contraband, of any kind – drugs, guns, Taiwanese sex slaves – whatever, and are caught, then the actions that you take within the first few seconds of discovery will have a profound impact on the rest of your life. The reality is: You have been caught. The officers have options:
1. Arrest you and charge you, where you are likely to confess to other people about exactly what you were carrying and how much – thereby limiting the policemen’s ability to make off with much of the cache. 2. Come to some arrangement with you that is mutually beneficial and that does not include your demise, or create any undue risks to the officers’ jobs or safety.
Option 2 is obviously preferable. To anyone not fond of prisons, that is.
Your first order of business is to assess your situation. If you are in a town or even near one with reasonable traffic driving by, then the chances of your demise, or incurring harm to yourself, are virtually nil if you keep your wits about you. If you are on a lonely country road, and there is only one officer, or even two, your risks could be high, so you will be handicapped in your negotiations.
On your side, you have the option to go to jail and tell your story to lots of people, which generally restricts the officers’ abilities to make money on the encounter – the higher-ups will take it. On their side, they have the guns, and threats. Ignore the threats. You are fully cognizant of the fact that their sincere hope is that some accommodation can be reached that enriches their pockets and allows you to leave the area without compromising them.
So — first things first. Smile. There is no circumstance under which a smile will handicap you when dealing with authorities.
Be friendly in your speech and immediately and fully acknowledge your situation, and theirs. This puts them at ease and sets the framework for negotiation. Be polite but firm. Let them know that they will not be able to walk off with your entire stash, and do this early on. It creates more reasonable expectations in their minds. If your contraband is drugs, offer them a small hit while talking. It re-enforces, subconsciously, the idea that the dope is your possession and that they are partaking due entirely to your good will. If you are transporting sex slaves, then I must say first that I cannot possibly condone your chosen occupation, but -offering each one of the policemen a taste of the goods may well seal the deal without any additional cash thrown in.
It’s important to be firm without any semblance of hostility. If the policemen tell you, for example, that they are going to confiscate all of the goods, then, with an apologetic manner that implies an unfortunate certainty, say “I’m sorry, but that won’t be possible”. Shake your head sadly as if you had divulged: “My mom just died”. And this is the point to present them with an absurdly low offer. If you are carrying 20 keys of cocaine or a half ton of marijuana, then offer them $50. Alternatively, you could offer them a one ounce bag of the weed or a gram or so of the coke. If it’s sex slaves, tell them they can look at the bare breasts of one of the least attractive women (in parts of Southern Mexico, this might actually be sufficient).
They will be taken aback at your offer, but it will place any unreasonable expectations they may have in stark perspective. As a rule of thumb, if you are near a populated place, you will ultimately settle by parting with an amount of cash equal to about 10% of the wholesale value of the goods. On a road with infrequent and unpredictable traffic, maybe 20%. If you are on a desolate road, especially if the body language is not comforting, you may have to bite the bullet, give them the entire wad, plus your car, and ask for a ride to the bus station. Don’t expect the police to accept the drugs or contraband as payment if you are near a populated area. They would obviously be seen transferring the goods to their vehicles. If you are not carrying sufficient cash, then you are unprepared, and shouldn’t be doing shady deals in Central America.
Never display fear or hostility. Smile throughout, and crack what jokes you can.
Name Dropping
Knowing the name of the country’s Police Commissioner and Armed Forces Chief, and the Chief of Police for each county or town you will be driving through can be very helpful. Knowing all the mayor’s names will not hurt any either. Name-dropping is a powerful tool in the Third World, especially for gringos, if used appropriately. Telling a cop in America that you are friends with the mayor or the police chief will seldom help you avoid a traffic ticket, and may even increase the charges. In Central America, offending a Police Commissioner will immediately get a policeman fired, with no repercussions to the Commissioner, and, depending on the offense, may even get the officer “erased”. So it gives an officer serious pause when you say: “The drugs belong to Commissioner (insert name). I am delivering them to a friend for him”. If spoken with authority and condescension, they can have a dramatic effect. No policeman in his right mind would try to validate the story. Resident Gringos, for odd reasons, are prized as friends by wealthy and prominent locals, so it would not be out of the question to be close with the Country’s Police Commissioner. If the cop asks any specifics, like, how you know the Commissioner, pull out your cell phone and say: “I have the commissioner’s number, why don’t we call him and you can ask him yourself.” You need to have solid self-assurance, or at least some large cojones, to pull this off, but in a tough situation this can work miracles.
A small amount of research is necessary before using this approach. You need to know, for example, whether the police commissioner is really dealing drugs (almost all are). Every local inhabitant in the country will know this information (there are no secrets in the Third World). The policeman will certainly know.
You don’t have to be doing something illegal in order to use the name-dropping approach. It should work under any circumstances: You have no money; You are in a hurry and cant waste the time to answer questions; you are bored and just want to f*** with someone — whatever.
Generally, the tactic of planting drugs on people is only practiced in heavily trafficked tourist areas. The police in tourist areas are handicapped because tourists generally don’t “pay their due” to the police, or to any other functionary. Tourists consider it “corrupt” to have to pay policeman to do their jobs, or to pay them in order to have the freedom to drive down the street on checkpoint day. The police therefore are forced to resort to unethical means in order to make a living in these places.
Gifts
Gifts occupy a different strata in the system of negotiation. They are used when some future consideration is required, or after an official favor has been provided. Gifts can be small or large, depending on the circumstances and the wise person will have an ample supply ready for any event. I operated seven small businesses in Central America and socked an ample supply of gifts:
Favors, likewise, are part of the system. They have no negative connotation, and they require offers whose magnitude reflects the magnitude of the favor.
One common “favor” that is considered questionable is to gift an officer in the armed forces to provide armed support for a drug deal, a revenge raid, an armored car heist, or similar function. It’s a very common occurrence but it’s deemed to be morally sketchy by most of the populace. The reason for this, I believe, is the sense of unease created by the image of highly organized, insolent, largely illiterate men with fully automatic weapons catering to the whims of anyone with spare change. The general consensus is that the system of “negotiation” should stop at the gates of the military. The military should uphold the system, not practice it, as my friend and philosopher Paz once said. This is nothing more illogical than policemen as “officers of the peace”. The fact that SWAT teams exist and every policeman carries a gun and is trained in violent tactics, should alert us to the fact that practicing peace is not the means of choice for maintaining peace.
If you take the above advice to heart you should enjoy your adventures heartily.
Book and Movie? by Anonymous Coward
Is Boston George still working on your biography? Have you thought about making your story into a movie? Who would you like to see play you, besides Charlie Sheen of course.
McAfee: George, as you probably know, is still in prison. Prison is an environment that abhors haste, and projects are drawn out for as long as possible so that the overwhelming amount of time on one’s hands can be efficiently consumed. I would expect the book to be out about the same time that George is out — in a few years, if it were being authored by him alone. There are multiple authors, however, each doing their part and I expect the book to be out shortly.
Warner Brothers has already announced a movie. The screenplay is based on the E-book by Josh Davis. Interesting story here: Josh Davis was approached by Conde Naste media June of 2012 and asked if he would be willing to write a story about me that could be turned into a movie. This was six months prior to the murder of Gregory Faul. Josh said yes and Wired Magazine, owned by Conde Naste, was chosen as the vehicle. Josh called me and asked if he could interview me for a Wired piece and I said “yes”. Had he told me it would be turned into a movie I would have said “no”. No one in their right mind would say “yes”. Movies require a number of elements in order to be successful. If your story does not have these elements, then they must be manufactured or inferred.
Josh came down and spent two weeks in Belize and a couple of days with me. Those couple of days has become “a significant part of a year” according to Davis’s resume today. He passes himself of as the “John McAfee” expert.
Impact Future Media is also doing a movie. I am co-operating fully with them, mostly because the CEO of the company, Francois Garcia, is Argentinian and I am too afraid of him not to co-operate. He is a nice man although not the sort of person you would want to piss off.
As to who should play me, I think we would all agree that Morgan Freeman is the obvious choice.
Google: Doing no harm? by globaljustin
Mr. McAfee, thanks for taking questions! My question: Do you consider Google in its current incarnation to be a “good company”? I ask in the context of revelations about the level of Gmail snooping, Google bus controversy, Google Glass failure, “only criminals want privacy”, Larry Page refusing to donate to charity, Google Maps interface changes, etc. You used to be in security, so applying that experience & your recent public issues, do you “trust” Google?
McAfee: Good God what a question. First and foremost: I don’t trust anything or anyone. I’m not remotely cynical, I’m just old and I’ve seen a lot. I trust people to be human, meaning all the weaknesses known to humanity exist in all of us. And everyone has a price. For some people it may not be money. It may be a daughter or a wife, which is why Cartel operatives are so fond of kidnapping family members. If someone sends you your daughter’s ear, then to get the other ear back with daughter attached you might happily betray all of your friends. If not that, then maybe it is your reputation, or your job, or torture, or even your life. Everyone has a price. It’s always something. If the previous two axioms are taken as given, then clearly, you can trust no-one.
Companies are even worse. They have all of the weaknesses that humans possess (they are made up of humans after all) and absolutely none of the virtues. They are a derivative of profit, and profit is amoral.
Is Google good or bad. It’s good, because all of the information in the world is now at my fingertips, thanks to Google. It’s bad because it wants to track me and invade my privacy so that it can increase its profits. It’s good because it has streamlined the world around us and caused unimagined efficiencies. It’s bad because it co-operates with agencies that don’t have our best interests at heart. It’s good because it has created astonishing new industries. It’s bad because it controls the rankings of those industries and uses it’s own beliefs to moderate that ranking. It’s good because it allows me to make my own decisions about events rather than having to rely on the news and other media. It’s bad because the delivery of such information can be, and is, listed in ways that one opinion or the other can be highlighted. Etc. It’s good for Google stockholders. It’s bad for any competitor’s stockholders. It’s good for the realtors who rent or sell Google their needed office space. It’s bad for everyone else because rents go up. I hope I’ve answered your question.
Why didn’t you ask Intel to rebrand before? by sandytaru
Seems like if you didn’t want to be associated with the software, you could have asked them to remove the name years ago.
McAfee: I did.
Any advice for Peter Norton? by HornWumpus
what advice would you give to Pete to get his name off the second worst software on the planet?
McAfee: Yes. Grow a beard.
Re:Belize by Anonymous Coward
Has there been any new developments or investigation into the fire that burned down your compound? Do you still maintain the government was involved? Since there was never charges brought against you in the murder case, would you go back?
McAfee: The fire was never investigated. Investigation as a method of solving crimes is a novel idea that has not yet caught on in Belize, or much of Central America for that matter. Police investigators are engaged primarily in uncovering indiscretions within the general population for which they can demand money for keeping their mouths shut – an intricate and beautiful art that reached its zenith with incarnation of J. Edgar Hoover here in in America.
What does happen, and it seems to work reasonably well, is that when a crime is committed, a random person who everyone believes should belong in jail is arrested. Sometimes more than one. If the person or persons, does not have an airtight alibi, such as being in attendance at some other jail during the time of the crime, or performing at a live concert with hundreds of people watching during the time of the crime, then the person, or persons, is charged and generally goes to jail. Exceptions are relatives and friends of powerful people who are never charged for anything under any circumstances, even if an entire town witnesses them engaging in any illegal act, including murder. Local judges are instructed in how to decide cases by the most powerful person in the town and it all seems to work smoothly and efficiently. In the case of the fire that consumed my property, a woman who was a neighbor of mine was arrested. She is a nice lady who happened to refuse the advances of the local political party representative and was chosen for discipline. I refused to press charges and she was released.
Of course the government was involved. And of course I would never go back.
Re:Belize by Anonymous Coward
Whatever happened to your girlfriend Samantha? Why didn’t she leave the country with you after running from authorities?
McAfee: Within a few days of my exit from Guatemala she was happily engaged in the monumental task of seducing every male, and female, in Southern Guatemala. It was an extravagant objective and one which, given the population density of the region, had a limited chance of success, I felt. I ran the numbers by her but she tirelessly kept at this task, with no letup. She entertained me throughout with her stories and outrageously effective pickup lines. While she was thus entertaining herself I hired lawyer after lawyer to get her a visa with no success. Ultimately we mutually agreed to abandon the pursuit, whereupon she moved back to Belize and, with perseverance and courage, began the same process with Orange Walk district as her objective. There is some slight probability that she could succeed. After it was over I tattoo’d her name on my back, along with the name of total stranger who I met in the tattoo shop – and who I have not seen since.
Drug Cartel by Anonymous Coward
I saw yesterday in USA Today that you were on the run because a drug cartel had a $600,000+ hit on you. If you got out of the business of doing and dealing drugs in the ’80s, why are the drug cartels still interested in you?
McAfee: For yourself, and anyone else who chose not to read the USA Today story (I don’t blame you, I also only read headlines in newspapers), this is the answer:
While I chose to get out of the drug business, the Government of Belize has not so chosen. My problem with the government is not drugs, but the fact that I uncovered rampant corruption of all kinds throughout the Government. The government is closely associated with cartels and has limited pull outside of Belize. So asking the Cartel to help them is a reasonable solution for them.
“Buy Belize” ads by Ungrounded Lightning
An observation more than a question, but feel free to comment (especially if you have information on the subject). Starting shortly after your Belizian adventure I’ve noticed a rash of radio advertising, touting Belize as a tax haven and secure retirement site for those with substantial assets, and trying to sell land to them. These adds always strike me as funny. Since their authorities went after you, has Belize suffered a sudden drop in interest as a “safe haven” for the retiring well-off, or perhaps an exodus of others already there?
McAfee: Belize hired a Colombian based tourism crisis management firm, among other things they have been buying mass advertising in print, tv in order tochange their image.
Additionally they started an official rumour that I was a good thing for Belize, ever since I came into the news, real state has boomed in the country… we tracked down the original source of that press release and was issued by Remax Belize.
This is all I know.
Device Technology / Licensing by pariah99
Hey John, I ended up spending a week sailing with friends in Belize last year over summer vacation – lovely place! We actually ended up sailing with a skipper who used to work with you, and he told me you had some wild times together! We didn’t spend a lot of time together, but he left a huge impression on me and my sailing buddies. Unfortunately, he very recently passed away, as I’m sure you’ve heard. Okay, that’s a bit besides the point, so on to my question: I was seriously wondering on what kind of technology your device incorporates. Does it use existing technologies like Tor, or is it based on a new protocol. If it’s a new thing, is the technology dependent on a number of exit nodes a la Tor, or does it depend on the number of peers using the software in order to obfuscate identifying information. In either case, will you consider releasing the software side of things under an open license?
McAfee: The captain’s name was Freddy Waite. The finest skipper that ever sailed. He could tell jokes and stories all day long and the tougher the sailing conditions the more fun he had. I’ve probably spent a thousand hours at the helm with Freddie, talking or just sitting together in silence. He was my full time captain for four years. It was a sad day for me when he recently died.
As to the technology — at this point, for competitive reasons, we are not discussing it. The rumor that it was a gift to me from aliens, is, however, totally false. However, our first privacy application is out on Google Play as of 3 days ago. It is called DCentral1. With DCentral1, you can see what information installed applications have been granted access to. One touch starts a scan that scores apps based off of their requested uses. It will tell you which apps listen to you by accessing the phone’s microphone, which apps watch you using the built in camera and video capabilities, which apps are reading your e-mails and text messages, which apps are sending messages or emails without alerting you, etc. You will be shocked at the results of a scan, I can guarantee you. You can customize the score value for each permission and receive a score tailored to your preferences. You can determine which applications you want to continue to trust after the scan. Those you distrust will be removed if you so choose.
With DCentral1, our goal is to offer more freedom to users through awareness. Information is currency in the digital age, and it’s important to know what information (and to whom) you’re giving away. DCentral1 is available for free on Android, and we hope to have it available on iOS in the near future!
Can gov backed spyware last in the wild? by AHuxley
We have seen huge efforts by contractors to sell malware with key logging or tracking to different govs using deep insights into consumer OS over many years. With quality AV efforts from around the world and more realtime networked behaviour analysis who is winning the dissident watching game?
McAfee: As always, the battle tilts first one way then the other. If your question is: “Will there ever be an ultimate winner?”, the answer is no. The same tools are available to each side, just as soon as one side steals the newer tools from the other side, so there is no way for either side to maintain the upper hand. The white hats have the advantage of numbers, support and the fact that they can co-operate openly. The dark hats have the advantage of relative anonymity and the never-ending support of dissatisfied people everywhere.
Politics? by Anonymous Coward
Did anyone from the GOP contact you about Obamacare or were they just using your name. Have they talked to you about running for office or has your stance on Snowden turned them off? Would you consider running as a third party candidate?
McAfee: The attorney for the House Ways and Means Committee contacted me and asked if I would help. I said “no”. I would never run for office, neither would I want to be in office, of any kind. I would rather drive a nail through my foot.
The Florida State’s Attorney for the Orlando region, Jeffrey Ashton, yesterday released his conclusion at the end of a 10-month investigation into the FBI slaying of Ibragim Todashev, a suspected witness in the Boston bombing case, saying that he will not be prosecuting the agent. Ashton ruled that the killing, in which the agent, at the end of a nearly 5-hour May 21 interrogation in Todashev’s Orlando apartment, fired seven bullets into Todashev, killing him justifiably, after being attacked.
However the evidence submitted to Ashton’s office by the FBI, the local coroner’s office and his own investigators, on examination, actually leads to a different conclusion from the one of justifiable homicide which he, and the FBI in its own internal probe, have reached.
For one thing, the two accounts of what happened offered by the FBI agent who shot Todashev, and by a Massachusetts State Trooper who was also in the room at the time of the shooting, are significantly at odds.
Why should we care about the FBI slaying of a Russian Chechen immigrant during an investigation into a Boston murder case? Because, as I wrote recently in Counterpunch magazine, Todashev was actually also a close friend of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the elder of the two brothers suspected of being the Boston Marathon bombers. The FBI had started investigating Todashev a day after the bombing when it learned he was a friend of the elder brother, but perhaps were more interested in preventing him from talking about what he knew than in learning what he had to say.
First a scene setter: According to all witnesses who came onto the scene after the shooting, Todashev’s body ended up in a foyer leading to the front door from the apartment’s living room, where the interrogation happened, his feet pointing to the front door, and his head and shoulders on the floor in the living room. He was found positioned face down by an investigator from the local Medical Examiner’s office lying there on top of a red broomstick, a point made by every witness to the scene.
The Massachusetts State Trooper, in a May 29 interview with FBI internal investigators of the shooting, explains that stick in his account of the shooting. He says that late in the evening, towards midnight, Todashev had begun to confess to having been involved in a 2011 triple murder in Waltham, Mass., which the a Massachusetts prosecutor was investigating, and had agreed to write a confession, when he suddenly yelled, flipped the table he was writing on at the FBI agent questioning him, and raced towards the front door. He says Todashev, a martial arts expert, ran toward the door, but then “grabbed a rod, approximately five-foot-long pole that was lying against the wall near the door,” and then “raised the pole in his hands kind of with both hans which appeared to me to be a trained fighting position and charged me as if he was going to impale me with the pole.”
At that point the trooper says he heard shots fired from his right as he was standing in the living room facing the charging Todashev, and “saw Todashev make two movements which indicated he had been injured by the shots. “He fell to his hands and knees, and then, almost instantly, he sprang forward, coming up in a fighting stance. I heard more shots and he fell to the ground, this time apparently incapacitated.”
But the FBI agent who shot Todashev has a different story. Interviewed a day earlier in the course of same FBI investigation, he says Todashev was just at the point of writing out a confession and continues:
“I was reading my notepad when I heard a loud noise and suddenly felt a blow to the back of my head. I was knocked partially off my chair but I caught myself. I saw Todashev running past me and I tried to grab him. I removed my weapon from the holster and aimed the gun at Todashev, who had run towards the kitchen (actually a kitchen unit separated from the living room area by a waist-high counter). I shouted ‘Show your hands!’ I saw the trooper to my left, but didn’t know if he had his weapon. I stood in the middle of the room and saw Todashev partially in the kitchen. I constantly yelled for Todashev to show me his hands, but he did not comply. I heard the sound of metal banging together like knives in a very hurried fashion. I believe that Todashev was trying to retrieve a weapon and that he was successful in doing so. Todashev instantly ran at full speed from the kitchen towards me and the trooper. I saw Todashev’s left shoulder drop as he rounded the corner from the kitchen to the living room. It was obvious that Todashev was in an attacking pattern.”
He continues:
“In the split second available to me to assess the threat posed by Todashev’s wholly non-compliant actions I was in fear for my life and the life of the trooper. In order to stop the threat I shot Todashev three to four times. Todashev fell backwards (my emphasis) but did not go to the ground. He then re-established his footing and suddenly rushed toward us. I then shot him three to four more times in order to stop his clearly deadly threat. This time, Todashev fell to the ground face first and I believed the threat had been eliminated.”
These two tales don’t work together of course. Either one taken alone, if true, would certainly justify the shooting of the suspect, but when they diverge so wildly — in one version Todashev remains in the foyer, and grabs the red broomstick, while in the other he rummages through a drawer in the kitchen and evidently finds a weapon, presumably a knife — it’s a red flag that something’s amiss.
And when the only two eye-witnesses to this killing, only a week after the event, cannot get their stories straight, we have to assume that something is badly wrong with the whole scene.
It’s also worth noting that an expert from the Medical Examiner’s Office, who arrived only at about 2 am on May 22 almost two hours after the shooting, was prevented from entering the room until an FBI unit, which had arrived at 12:30 am, shortly after the agent shooting of the suspect, had finished “documenting the room.”
If the FBI’s agent were telling the truth, there would be no broom handle lying under Todashev’s dead body. Perhaps “documenting the room” meant slipping that rod under Todashev’s body?
On the other hand, if the Massachusetts State Trooper was telling the truth, how did Todashev get shot three times in the back and once in the top back of the head — a shot that the Medical Examiner says would have immobilized him instantly?
It is agreed by most witnesses, including those outside the apartment, that the sequence of shots was three and then four. According the Medical Examiner’s report, two shots hit Todashev in the arm. One hit him in the chest near the right nipple, which perforated the left ventricle of the heart and the aorta. And two hit his left upper arm, also from the front — one a bullet that re-entered the chest cavity and also perforated the left ventricle.
The head shot was clearly among the last or the last shot to hit Todashev, as it would have caused his total collapse instantly, according to the Medical Examiner. Yet if Todashev were first shot as he was charging the trooper, running through the foyer from the direction of the door with his arms raised holding a broomstick, the shots hitting him would have had to come from the front. That would necessarily be the one shot to the chest, which perforated not just his heart, but his aorta and esophagus, plus the two shots to the left arm, one bullet of which also ricocheted hitting his left ventricle. That would explain Todashev dropping to his knees, but makes the claim that he rose again and attacked hard to imagine. The aorta, remember, is the main artery out of the heart carrying blood to the body under maximum pressure. Ruptured, it causes an almost instant precipitous and debilitating drop in blood pressure. But even if Todashev somehow managed through sheer will to rise from his hands and knees and charge his antagonists again after those grievous wounds, how did the three subsequent shots end up hitting his back?
We could imagine the head shot if he were charging low down, but not the other three bullets to the back in that scenario.
Meanwhile, back to the agent’s quite different account. He claims Todashev, not armed with a five-foot pole, but with whatever he succeeded in finding in a kitchen drawer, was shot as he ran at the agent and staggered backwards, clearly indicating that he had been hit from the front. Again we had three shots, so it had to be the chest and the left arm. Now he “rights himself” and charges forward again, taking four more shots. But these, remember, are all either into the back, near the centerline of the body, or into the top of the head. The head shot couldn’t have been number one in the second volley, because that would have been the shot that dropped him. So what would have caused his body to turn around exposing his back?
Never mind. The FBI investigators (who have managed to exonerate 150 out of 150 agent shootings of suspects and witnesses over the last 18 years) managed to conflate the two accounts, subtly shifting each, and changing some of the witness statements, to create one smooth “alternative reality” in which the shots all fit together nicely.
Here’s the FBI’s summary of what happened, in a document provided to the Medical Examiner and the State’s Attorney’s Office by the Bureau:
“When Todaschev ran to the kitchen he frantically grabbed at the counter but came out empty handed and instead grabbed a long metal pole, similar to a mop handle next to the kitchen.”
And the shooting itself? From the FBI internal investigation, as provided to the State’s Attorney on a “do not share” basis:
“He flipped the table he was writing on which was believed to have struck BS SA [the Boston Special Agent] in the head and ran to the kitchen. Todaschev was heard frantically grabbing items in the kitchen and reappeared in the doorway wielding a long metal handle of a mop or broom. He took an attack stance with the weapon, [Special Agent BLANK] issued verbal commands, to which Todaschev did not comply, and violently lunged towards SA and MSP Trooper . Having already been wounded and fearing for his safety, [Special Agent] fired 3-4 rounds striking Todaschev. Todaschev went down on his knees momentarily then “sprang” to his feet and launched to attack again. [Special Agent] fired another 3-4 rounds dropping Todaschev to the floor. SA fired seven shots in total, Todaschev was hit seven times with fatal shots to his head and piercing his heart. He was instantly incapacitated and died on the scene.”
There are so many things wrong with this merged and massaged account it is hard to see how Florida State’s Attorney Ashton could have accepted them, but he apparently has. Firstly, Todashev wasn’t just “heard” grabbing items in the kitchen, he wasvisible over the countertop, according to the agent’s initial report of the incident. And in that initial account he never grabbed that broom handle, which the trooper said had been leaned against the front door jamb, not “next to the kitchen.” In any case, the trooper never said anything about Todashev going into the kitchen area, but rather had him running straight to the front door for the stick. He also claimed Todashev had fallen on hands and knees, not just his knees, while the agent had him staggering backwards, not falling forward.
State’s Attorney Ashton’s office declined to take a call asking for a chance to ask questions about his report.
A key witness in this case was never questioned. That is Khusen Taramov, who even the two agents and two state troopers who went to Todashev’s home to interrogate him agree was there for most of the evening, being kept at bay from the interview by a local Orlando FBI agent known to Todashev and his friends as agent “Chris.” Taramov had said on several video interviews including one with a local television station, that he had gone to the apartment at the request of Todashev, who wanted him around when the agents came, as he suspected “something bad” might happen to him.
He reported that Agent “Chris” had kept him in the parking lot from 7:30 to 11:30, talking about meaningless things (a claim the agent supports in his own interview). Then, according to Taramov, “Chris” told him he had to leave, and, as I wrote earlier, accompanied him in his car to a remote restaurant, then calling another car to return to the scene. When Taramov himself, concerned about his friend, drove back, arriving after midnight, he found a crime scene and Todashev dead.
He wasn’t questioned by Ashton because when he went back to Russia to attend Todashev’s funeral he found upon trying to return to Orlando that the FBI had gotten him barred from re-entry to the US, despite his having a valid Green Card and no criminal record. He is only one of many Todashev friends and family members who were driven out or deported from the the US by the FBI and ICE following Todashev’s slaying, rendering them all unavailable for questioning.
Taramov’s unavailability to Ashton, assuming the State’s Attorney really wanted to conduct an independent inquiry, is a critical issue. This is because it gets to the question of why, if the FBI was investigating Todashev, who was a close friend of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the Boston bombing suspects, only one agent was in that apartment doing the questioning, along with a state trooper. The FBI always works interviews and interrogations in pairs because the agency doesn’t tape interviews. It has the interrogating agent fill out a Form 302 report, and the second agent witnesses the interview and signs the first agent’s write-up verifying it as accurate.
Perhaps, as the troopers claim, this was all about their case — a three-year-old unsolved triple murder of three small-time drug dealers in Waltham in which Tsarnaev, and possibly Todashev, was a suspect. But if that was the case, why was the FBI doing the questioning and not a trooper? The FBI had been investigating Todashev as at least a witness in the Boston Marathon bombing. Indeed one document sent to Ashton’s office by the FBI is from the Supervising Agent for the case, who is listed as being the supervisor of the Tampa Joint Terrorism Task Force.
Suspiciously, the troopers too didn’t seem too concerned about documenting their interview of Todashev. They say they brought along a JVC recorder, but its battery ran out of juice well before the confession, and just when they claim Todashev was getting to the good stuff in his alleged “confession” prior to allegedly writing it down, one of the two troopers in the room, who said he had been recording the session on his cell phone as a backup, turned off the recording function and went outside to use his phone to call the Massachusetts Assistant Attorney on the murder case “for instructions.”
So there is no confession, oral or written, except for the word of the trooper and the FBI agent who witnessed and participated in Todashev’s slaying.
As for that fatal head-shot, the FBI claims, in its investigation into its agent’s shooting of Todashev, that everything comports with the official merged story of how the shooting went down. Indeed, they write:
“The Chief ME advised the trajectory of the head and shoulder wounds, the combination of the seven entrance wounds to include the paths of the bullets, were inconsistent with other possible scenarios. First, due to the extreme downward trajectory of the wounds to the head and upper shoulder were inconsistent with the shooter being behind Todashev as if Todashev was running away. Rather, those extreme downward trajectories could have occurred when Todashev had his back to the shooter, only if:
1.) Todashev leaned backwards at a severe angle toward the shooter; or
2.) Todashev was standing below a shooter who was above him; or
3.) Todashev was shot while both he and the shooter were prone on the floor.”
They left out one other possibility, though: namely that Todashev, who fell face forward in the foyer, with his head and shoulders ending up protruding inside the living room, was shot by the FBI agent one more time, with the agent firing that final shot from his position five to 10 feet into the living room, straight into the back of Todashev’s head.
Aspartame has been renamed – AminoSweet – and is now being marketed as a natural sweetener
Aspartame, the artificial sweetener linked to cancer, heart palpitations, seizures, weight gain and other severe medical issues, is now going by the name AminoSweet. The toxic sweetener, Aspartame, has been around over 25 years after it was accidentally discovered by chemist, James Schlatter while working for the drug company G.D. Searle & Company. It was created as an anti-ulcer pharmaceutical drug, but the chemist discovered it had a sweet taste, so the drug company switched its application to the FDA from a drug to a food. It was none other than Donald Rumsfeld, who was the CEO of Searle who pushed for Aspartame to be sold on the market in 1985. If that name sounds familiar, your right, he is the same Donald Rumsfeld, former U.S. Secretary of Defense who served under George W. Bush. He is a perfect example of someone taking advantage of the “revolving door” between our government and corporations.
AminoSweet is Aspartame, it changed its name to fool the public, and I am guessing it did so because consumers figured out that their product made them sick. Aspartame is made up of three chemicals: aspartic acid, phenylalanine, and methanol. The book Prescription for Nutritional Healing, by James and Phyllis Balch lists aspartame under the category of “chemical poison.”
WARNING! Read labels before buying foods with the name Phenylalanine. I will go one step further — if you need to bring along a chemistry book to the store in order to understand the ingredients on the labels — DO NOT BUY IT!
Phenylalanine is an essential amino acid (that is, an amino acid which our bodies cannot make and which we must obtain from our diet). It is also one of the amino acids which is used to make aspartame. Phenylalanine is found in all protein-containing foods including milk, cheese, eggs, meat and fish.
Products which contain aspartame have a label which says ‘Contains a source of phenylalanine’. This label is there to help people with a rare inherited genetic disorder called phenylketonuria (PKU). These people cannot metabolise phenylalanine from any source and need to follow a strict diet to control their intake of this amino acid. The disorder affects approximately 1 in 10,000 babies, and is identified by screening shortly after birth. [Source]
Ten percent of this sweetener contains methanol. When it is absorbed by our intestines, it breaks down into formic acid and formaldehyde. Formaldehyde is a deadly neurotoxin that causes cancer, retinal damage, interferes with DNA replication and causes birth defects.
I went to the AminoSweet website to see what kind of “spin” they are putting on their repackaged product to entice shoppers to buy their so-called “natural” sweetener and here is their selling point:
AminoSweet aspartame is the low calorie sweetener that tastes just like sugar. It is made from two building blocks of protein just like those found naturally in many everyday foods. Aspartame is digested by the body in exactly the same way as these other protein foods and so does not bring anything new to our diet.
Makers of this artificial sweetener claim it is made from protein found “naturally” in many everyday foods. So what is the meaning of ‘natural’ when it comes to the labeling of food? The FDA’s website writes:
“From a food science perspective, it is difficult to define a food product that is ‘natural’ because the food has probably been processed and is no longer the product of the earth. That said, FDA has not developed a definition for use of the term natural or its derivatives.” [Source]
The word ‘natural’ is being thrown around to describe all sorts of genetically modified foods and AminoSweet is genetically modified. There is nothing natural about it. Why do you think these drug companies buy patents? They create them in a lab and they own it. And they know exactly what they are doing and choose to fool consumers into thinking their foods are safe when science proves differently.
In June 2013 Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream and Campbell’s Soup became defendants in class action lawsuits that allege they misrepresented the nature of the ingredients on their product labels. The Campbell’s Soup Company is currently being sued by Florida residents for misrepresenting the genetically modified (GMO) corn in its soup as “natural.” Ben & Jerry’s decided to stop using genetically modified ingredients as a result of their suit.
Ben & Jerry’s used to be known for their healthy ‘natural’ ice creams, but I guess when they sold out to British-Dutch conglomerate Unilever, they sold their souls along with it. It looks like they haven’t updated their website since the sale either, even though Unilever has owned them since 2001. They portray themselves as another American success story — but according to the lawsuit, they are just another corporation choosing to deceive the public — much like another American success story — Monsanto who purchased Searle & Company in 1985– who make Aspartame now called AminoSweet.
The comical geniuses over at College Humor recently released a new short video that is capturing the attention of many across the internet due to its comedy, but even more so due to its factual backing. The 4 minute video takes us through the history of the engagement ring, a material good that so many of us now both associate and expect as a “symbol of love.” The video shows us how this now commonly accepted viewpoint was molded into all of us by nothing more than an advertising campaign by the diamond juggernaut De Beers. Check it out:
Science fiction novels and films, historically speaking, provide writers and directors with imaginative vessels for social commentary. And even though they are always a reflection of the idiosyncrasies and anxieties which permeate society in the present, they do, on occasion, manage to predict something about the future with startling accuracy.
Previously, we’ve looked at the degree to which Orwellian projections of a dystopian future have come true, particularly fears about the misapplication of technology as a means of oppressing the general public. Another set of issues that science-fiction auteurs of the past have managed to predict relates to the proliferation of genetically modified, factory produced food.
Consider Richard Fleischman’s cult-classic film Soylent Green (1973), which was an adaptation of Harry Harrison’s novel Make Room! Make Room! (1966). The story takes place in New York City in the year 2022. The world is in shambles. Overpopulation, abject poverty, depleted natural resources, scarce food, and general demoralization and desperation, have all created for a world that is fraught with tension. Things are especially bad in NYC, where the population totals around 40 million. The general public has become entirely dependent upon the Soylent Corporation, who disperse food rations. Their latest advance is a product called Soylent Green, which is said to be made chiefly of plankton, and is also said to be more nutrient dense than any of the company’s earlier products. Robert Thorn (Charlton Heston) is a NYPD detective who is tasked with investigating the mysterious death of a man who, we learn, discovered the grim secret about Soylent Green. Soylent Green wasn’t made from Plankton…but from human remains.
Within the context of these speculative fiction narratives, it all sort of makes sense in a macabre way. Post-World War II science fiction commonly depicted future societies which struggled with both population surpluses and food shortages. Thanks to Soylent Green, accidental cannibalism has become something of a trope unto itself.
The recent film Cloud Atlas(2012) dealt with a similar theme. The film was directed by Tom Tykwer and the Wachowski’s (the latter of whom are clearly not strangers to making thrillers with subversive undertones, having made The Matrix series and V for Vendetta). The film skips around quite a bit, historically and geographically. The story begins with a violent voyage along the South Pacific during the 1800’s, and addresses mounting fears about nuclear proliferation in the seventies, and ends up showing a dystopian vision of the future wherein people are routinely “recycled” to make food.
The issues, in both real life and the classic science fiction tropes, have everything to do with the scarcity of resources. As natural resources are depleted, governments resort to ethically dubious practices at mass scale. What is somewhat comforting today is that companies who offer more ecologically friendly alternatives are gaining traction in the marketplace. In terms of nutrition and agribusiness, there have been several alternative farms sprouting up all over the country, and some smaller farmers have even become confident enough to take legal action against Monsanto. In terms of eco-friendly energy consumption, solar energy is becoming increasingly common in the United States, and in Canada you can even find alternative eco-friendly energy plans through various informational websites that can let consumers bypass the main fossil-fuel based providers altogether.
What’s especially chilling about these stories, though, is that they do offer interesting comments about the current crises surrounding agribusiness – particularly with all of the stories in recent years about the Monsanto corporation’s destructive tendencies. While there’s no disputing the fact that government farm subsidies and agriculture becoming subservient to major fast food corporations has created a lot of problems, some degree of responsibility falls on consumers. It is critical, now more than ever, that we consume conscientiously…lest we desire a future society wherein people subsist exclusively on human flesh.
Anonymous has released the bombshell new video report below on Illuminati billionaire Jacob Rothschild’s connection to the missing Malaysia Air 370 flight that has been missing for nearly a month now. Sharing information totally classified by the mainstream media, Anonymous busts the MH370 mystery wide open.
Videos have sprung on YouTube alleging that the US private security service formerly known as Blackwater is operating in the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk. Western press is hitting back, accusing Russia of fabricating reports to justify “aggression.”
The authenticity of videos allegedly made in downtown Donetsk on March 5 is hard to verify. In the footage, unidentified armed men in military outfits equipped with Russian AK assault rifles and American М4А1 carbines are securing the protection of some pro-Kiev activists amidst anti-government popular protests.
The regional administration building in Donetsk has changed hands many times, with either pro-Russian protesters or pro-Kiev forces declaring capture of the authority headquarters. In the logic of the tape, at some point the new officials appointed by revolutionary Kiev managed to occupy the administration, but then – as the building was surrounded by angry protesters – demanded to secure a safe evacuation.
This is where the armed professionals come in. The protesters, after several moments of shock, start shouting, “Blackwater!,” and “Mercenaries!,” as well as “Faggots!,” and “Who are you going to shoot at?!” But the armed men drive off in the blink of an eye without saying a word.
Surely these men were not Blackwater – simply because such a company does not exist anymore. It has changed its name twice in recent years and is now called Academi.
The latest article on the case, published by the Daily Mail, claims that though these people did look like professional mercenaries, they conducted the operation too openly.
“On the face of it, the uniforms of the people in the videos are consistent with US mercs – they don’t look like Russian soldiers mercs. On the other hand, why run around in public making a show of it?” said DM Dr Nafeez Ahmed, a security expert with the Institute for Policy Research & Development.
“I think the question is whether the evidence available warrants at least reasonable speculation.”
Ahmed also added that “Of course the other possibility is it’s all Russian propaganda.”
Why would Russia need to make such provocation? The Daily Mail explained that “any suggestion that a US mercenary outfit like Blackwater, known now as Academi, had begun operating in east Ukraine could give Russian President Vladimir Putin the pretext for a military invasion.”
Other western media outlets are maintaining that a “Russian invasion” has already began, because the heavily armed military personnel now controlling all major infrastructure in Crimea are “obviously” Russians.
Armed men march outside an Ukrainian military base in the village of Perevalnoye near the Crimean city of Simferopol March 9, 2014.(Reuters / Thomas Peter )
The Daily Beast media outlet went even further. On the last day of February, it published an article alleging that “polite Russians” in Crimea are actually…employees of Russian security service providers.
While there are indeed several military-oriented security service providers in Russia, it however appears highly unlikely that all of them combined could provide personnel for such a wide-scale operation.
At the beginning of the week, Russian state TV reported that several hundred armed men with military-looking bags arrived to the international airport of Kiev.
It was reported that the tough guys are employees of Greystone Limited, a subsidiary of Vehicle Services Company LLC belonging to Blackwater/XE/Academi.
Greystone Limited mercenaries are part of what is called ‘America’s Secret Army,’ providing non-state military support not constrained by any interstate agreements, The Voice of Russia reported.
But they are not the only ones. A Russian national that took part in clashes in Kiev was arrested in Russia’s Bryansk region this week. He made a statement on record that he met a large number of foreigners taking active part in the fighting with police.
He claimed he saw dozens of military-clad people from Germany, Poland, and Turkey, as well as English speakers who were possibly from the US, Russkaya Gazeta reported earlier this week.
Was Peaches Geldof murdered by the illuminati and the Knights of Malta for exposing pedophiles just months ago? Peaches, daughter of legendary rocker Bob Geldof, had recently tweeted the names of two mothers who had offered their babies to be raped by an alleged illuminati member who later admitted to the crimes after being outed by Geldof.
For those who don’t know Geldof, she was considered the ‘Paris Hilton’ of the UK, and she was highly involved in exposing pedophilia in the illuminati realm. She also faced charges for exposing a prominent UK pedophile on Twitter as shared in the videos as screenshots below. BeforeItsNews videographer pressResetEarth clearly proves in the first video below that Peaches untimely death has all the tell tale signs of being an ‘illuminati hit’.
All evidence shows that a massive cover-up surrounding flight 370 has taken place, likely implementing U.S. military factions
INDIAN OCEAN (INTELLIHUB) — It’s now been 30-days since Malaysian Airlines flight 370 went missing after departing from the Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA) on route to China and search and rescue teams have still found no trace of the Boeing 777 aircraft or any of its 239 passengers, after being fed botched search area data by Malaysian officials.
In fact, it has been reported that family members of the missing believe that the Malaysian government is involved in a massive cover-up of what really took place on Mar. 8, after the aircraft’s transponder was manually overridden via human intervention. Moreover, Malaysian authorities have suspiciously failed to release the plane’s cargo hold manifest and actual cockpit voice recordings which have been repeatedly requested by various family members, investigators and search and rescue teams to aid in the search for the missing plane.
Now according to Sara Bajc the girlfriend of Phillip Wood, a missing passenger aboard flight 370, there is a general consensus amongst flight 370′s family members, based in Malaysia, that possibly a U.S. militarized faction may have intercepted and commandeered the airliner. In fact, Bajc even stated that there is some witness to two fighter jets accompanying MH370 after the flight went dark, evading radar.
“I am sure that the military in Malaysia knew that plane was there and has tracked that plane in some way. Now whether they were in control of it or not we don’t know. Many people are saying that the United States is involved […] but the general thinking across the families here and even non-families […] believe this was a military operation of some sort.”, said Bajc, demonstrating her true inner feelings.
So what do we know?
Based on radar data supplied from several other countries and early on reports, we know that MH370, under intelligent human control, turned-back to the west at about 1:21am on the morning of Mar 8., just after the planes transponder was shut off. It was then reported by Intellihub News that the plane then took a zig-zag course heading Northwest toward the Straights of Malacca and the Andaman Islands where it was later intercepted on radar by a Malaysian and military installation. However, the Malaysian military, press and government quickly covered up the leaked report. Then 10-days later officials in Thailand released their radar data willingly, which matched the leaked original leaked Malaysian military radar blips putting MH370 just North of Malaysia before turning to the South. Interestingly, Thai officials claim that no one ever asked for their radar data, that’s why they willingly submitted it 10-days after MH370 went missing.
New information obtained by CNN Sunday, tells us that “flight 370 may have been flown on purpose along a route designed to avoid radar detection”, signifying a highly contrived and likely militarized plan to commandeer the aircraft, its cargo, and 239 passengers. Shockingly this information dovetails with a report by Shepard Ambellas titled YouTube investigator: ‘Flight 370 landed at Diego Garcia military base, plane and passengers then put in a Faraday style hangar’ which was released on Mar. 24, detailing how flight 370 was spotted by locals flying low over the Maldives Islands between 6:15am and 6:40am on the morning of Mar. 8, the day flight 370 went missing. This sighting was also independently confirmed by American investigator John Halloway, after interviewing an eyewitness living on the island of Kudahuvadhoo, via telephone, who saw the massive white jumbo-jet bearing a red and blue stripe down its side. The eyewitness testimony also revealed that the plane was flying “Northwest to Southeast”, which would have set the plane up for a backdoor westwardly approach to U.S. military base Diego Garcia avoiding all sightings from any straggler base personnel on the remote island in the Indian Ocean.
Moreover, investigators also determined that out of 5 simulations that were loaded into the captain’s home flight simulator, one was of Diego Garcia. The police confiscated the flight simulator from the pilot’s house in Shah Alam and reassembled it at the police headquarters where experts are currently conducting checks.
“The simulation programmes are based on runways at the Male International Airport in Maldives, an airport owned by the United States (Diego Garcia), and three other runways in India and Sri Lanka, all have runway lengths of 1,000 metres. We are not discounting the possibility that the plane landed on a runway that might not be heavily monitored, in addition to the theories that the plane landed on sea, in the hills, or in an open space,” an unnamed source told Berita Harian.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKM7q56OQSw
Intentional diversions and distractions
Since the disappearance of flight MH370, loved ones of missing passengers have been on an emotional roller coaster ride as the mainstream media and the governments involved with the search continue to create diversions and spread false information. Two weeks ago, the Malaysian government claimed to have found wreckage of the missing aircraft. Their information came from a satellite search crew, but was not verified. Based on this flimsy evidence, the Malaysian government was quick to announce that the wreckage had been found and that everyone on board the plane had been killed. This information was callously passed on to the loved ones of missing passengers through a standard text message from the government.
Malaysian officials claimed that the mystery had been solved and seemed to be celebrating the terrible news that the plane was found in pieces. However, the announcement of the crash was made prematurely and soon after it was discovered that the large masses detected in the ocean were just large swaths containing junk and trash, but no airplane.
After weeks of false alarms and wild goose chases the Malaysian government said that the plane may never be found, but the vast majority of the passengers family members refuse to believe the official story.
As of now, 30-days into it, the current goose chase is locating the black box “ping” that has allegedly being detected somewhere in the Indian Ocean.
The head of the multinational search for the missing flight recently told CBS News that two electronic pulses were picked up by a Chinese ship, which could be the missing planes black box. However, it was later admitted that the reports in question were published before they were verified, expanding the endless rabbit hole of propaganda for onlookers to get lost in. While reports of the black box pings have yet to be verified, they continue to get constant mainstream media coverage.
The contents of flight 370
As of now the motive for such an elaborate crime is not yet fully known.
What we do know is that 20 employees from the multi-billion dollar Austin Texas-based tech firm Freescale Semiconductor along with one IBM executive were aboard the flight.
Adding to the mystery, the Lord Jacob Rothschild (Blackstone Group) controlled Freescale Semiconductor Ltd. has kept the flow of any information regarding their employees at a minimum.
The Voice of Russia reported on Mar. 31 in an article titled MH370 kept hidden at top-secret US military base – media reports:
Interestingly, that leading innovative company [Freescale Semiconductor Ltd.] has been oddly unwilling to provide information on the missing people. Only the nationalities of the employees were made public: 12 of them were from Malaysia and eight from China. However, Freescale has persistently declined to release their identities. “Out of respect for the families’ privacy during this difficult time, we will not be releasing the names of the employees who were on board the flight at this time,” Freescale spokeswoman Jacey Zuniga said.
Nevertheless, Mitch Haws, Freescale’s vice president, described them as “people with a lot of experience and technical background,” adding that “they were very important.” According to Reuters, the vanished employees were engineers or specialists involved in projects to streamline and cut costs at key manufacturing facilities in China and Malaysia.
While it had been reported previously that 4 of the Freescale Semiconductor employees aboard flight 370 were patent holders, their names did not appear on the official flight manifest released by the Malaysian government, adding even a deeper element for independent investigators.
The Blaze A high-ranking Mexican drug cartel operative currently in U.S. custody is making startling allegations that the failed federal gun-walking operation known as “Fast and Furious” isn’t what you think it is.
It wasn’t about tracking guns, it was about supplying them — all part of an elaborate agreement between the U.S. government and Mexico’s powerful Sinaloa Cartel to take down rival cartels.
The explosive allegations are being made by Jesus Vicente Zambada-Niebla, known as the Sinaloa Cartel’s “logistics coordinator.” He was extradited to the Chicago last year to face federal drug charges.
Zambada-Niebla claims that under a “divide and conquer” strategy, the U.S. helped finance and arm the Sinaloa Cartel through Operation Fast and Furious in exchange for information that allowed the DEA, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal agencies to take down rival drug cartels. The Sinaloa Cartel was allegedly permitted to traffic massive amounts of drugs across the U.S. border from 2004 to 2009 — during both Fast and Furious and Bush-era gunrunning operations — as long as the intel kept coming.
This pending court case against Zambada-Niebla is being closely monitored by some members of Congress, who expect potential legal ramifications if any of his claims are substantiated. The trial was delayed but is now scheduled to begin on Oct. 9.
Zambada-Niebla is reportedly a close associate of Sinaloa Cartel kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman and the son of Ismael “Mayo” Zambada-Garcia, both of which remain fugitives, likely because of the deal made with the DEA, federal court documents allege.
Based on the alleged agreement ”the Sinaloa Cartel under the leadership of defendant’s father, Ismael Zambada-Niebla and ‘Chapo’ Guzman, were given carte blanche to continue to smuggle tons of illicit drugs into Chicago and the rest of the United States and were also protected by the United States government from arrest and prosecution in return for providing information against rival cartels which helped Mexican and United States authorities capture or kill thousands of rival cartel members,” states a motion for discovery filed in U.S. District Court by Zambada-Niebla’s attorney in July 2011.
A source in Congress, who spoke to TheBlaze on the condition of anonymity, said that some top congressional investigators have been keeping “one eye on the case.” Another two members of Congress, both lead Fast and Furious Congressional investigators, told TheBlaze they had never even heard of the case.
One of the Congressmen, who also spoke to TheBlaze on the condition of anonymity because criminal proceedings are still ongoing, called the allegations “disturbing.” He said Congress will likely get involved once Zambada-Niebla’s trial has concluded if any compelling information surfaces.
“Congress won’t get involved in really any criminal case until the trial is over and the smoke has cleared,” he added. “If the allegations prove to hold any truth, there will be some serious legal ramifications.”
Earlier this month, two men in Texas were sentenced to 70 and 80 months in prison after pleading guilty to attempting to export 147 assault rifles and thousands of rounds of ammunition to Mexico’s Los Zetas cartel. Compare that to the roughly 2,000 firearms reportedly “walked” in Fast and Furious, which were used in the murders of hundreds of Mexican citizens and U.S. Border Agent Brian Terry, and some U.S. officials could potentially face jail time if they knowingly armed the Sinaloa Cartel and allowed guns to cross into Mexico.
If proven in court, such an agreement between U.S. law enforcement agencies and a Mexican cartel could potentially mar both the Bush and Obama administrations. The federal government is denying all of Zambada-Niebla’s allegations and contend that no official immunity deal was agreed upon.
To be sure, Zambada-Niebla is a member of one of the most ruthless drug gangs in all of Mexico, so there is a chance that he is saying whatever it takes to reduce his sentence, which will likely be hefty. However, Congress and the media have a duty to prove without a reasonable doubt that there is no truth in his allegations. So far, that has not been achieved.
Zambada-Niebla was reportedly responsible for coordinating all of the Sinaloa Cartel’s multi-ton drug shipments from Central and South American countries, through Mexico, and into the United States. To accomplish this, he used every tool at his disposal: Boeing 747 cargo planes, narco-submarines, container ships, speed boats, fishing vessels, buses, rail cars, tractor trailers and automobiles. But Guzman and Zambada-Niebla’s overwhelming success within the Sinaloa Cartel was largely due to the arrests and dismantling of many of their competitors and their booming businesses in the U.S. from 2004 to 2009 — around the same time ATF’s gun-walking operations were in full swing. Fast and Furious reportedly began in 2009 and continued into early 2011.
According Zambada-Niebla, that was a product of the collusion between the U.S. government and the Sinaloa Cartel.
Soldiers and police officers guard packages of seized marijuana during a presentation for the media in Tijuana, Mexico. (AP Photo/Guillermo Arias)
The claims seem to fall in line with statements made last month by Guillermo Terrazas Villanueva, a spokesman for the Chihuahua state government in northern Mexico who said U.S. agencies ”don’t fight drug traffickers,“ instead ”they try to manage the drug trade.”
Also, U.S. officials have previously acknowledged working with the Sinaloa Cartel through another informant, Humberto Loya-Castro. He is also allegedly a high-ranking member of the Sinaloa Cartel as well as a close confidant and lawyer of “El Chapo” Guzman.
Loya-Castro was indicted along with Chapo and Mayo in 1995 in the Southern District of California in a massive narcotics trafficking conspiracy (Case no. 95CR0973). The case was dismissed in 2008 at the request of prosecutors after Loya became an informant for the United States government and subsequently provided information for years.
In 2005, “the CS (informant Loya-Castro) signed a cooperation agreement with the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of California,” states an affidavit filed in the Zambada-Niebla case by Loya-Castro’s handler, DEA agent Manuel Castanon.
“Thereafter, I began to work with the CS. Over the years, the CS’ cooperation resulted in the seizure of several significant loads of narcotics and precursor chemicals. The CS’ cooperation also resulted in other real-time intelligence that was very useful to the United States government.”
Under the alleged agreement with U.S. agencies, “the Sinaloa Cartel, through Loya-Castro, was to provide information accumulated by Mayo, Chapo, and others, against rival Mexican Drug Trafficking Organizations to the United States government,” a motion for discovery states.
In return, the United States government allegedly agreed to dismiss the charges in the pending case against Loya-Castro (which they did), not to interfere with his drug trafficking activities and those of the Sinaloa Cartel and not actively prosecute him or the Sinaloa Cartel leadership.
“This strategy, which he calls ‘Divide & Conquer,’ using one drug organization to help against others, is exactly what the Justice Department and its various agencies have implemented in Mexico. In this case, they entered into an agreement with the leadership of the Sinaloa Cartel through, among others, Humberto Loya-Castro, to receive their help in the United States government’s efforts to destroy other cartels.”
“Indeed, United States government agents aided the leaders of the Sinaloa Cartel.”
The government has denied this and says the deal did not go past Loya-Castro.
Zambada-Niebla was arrested by Mexican soldiers in late March of 2009 after he met with DEA agents at a Mexico City hotel in a meeting arranged by Loya-Castro, though the U.S. government was not involved in his arrest. He was extradited to Chicago to face federal drug charges on Feb. 18, 2010. He is now being held in a Michigan prison after requesting to be moved from Chicago.
“Classified Materials”
During his initial court proceedings, Zambada-Niebla continually stated that he was granted full immunity by the DEA in exchange for his cooperation. The agency, however, argues that an “official” immunity deal was never established though they admit he may have acted as an informant.
Zambada-Niebla and his legal council also requested records about Operation Fast and Furious, which permitted weapons purchased in the United States to be illegally smuggled into Mexico, sometimes by paid U.S. informants and cartel leaders. Their request was denied. From the defense motion:
“It is estimated that approximately 3,000 people were killed in Mexico as a result of ‘Operation Fast and Furious,’ including law enforcement officers in the state of Sinaloa, Mexico, the headquarters of the Sinaloa cartel. The Department of Justice’s leadership apparently saw this as an ingenious way of combating drug cartel activities.”
“It has recently been disclosed that in addition to the above-referenced problems with ‘Operation Fast & Furious,’ the DOJ, DEA, and the FBI knew that some of the people who were receiving the weapons that were being allowed to be transported to Mexico, were in fact informants working for those organizations and included some of the leaders of the cartels.”
Zambada’s attorney has filed several motions for discovery to that effect in Illinois Federal District Court, which were summarily denied by the presiding judge who claimed the defendant failed to make the case that he was actually a DEA informant.
In April, 2012, a federal judge refused to dismiss charges against him.
From a Chicago Sun Times report: “According to the government, [Zambada-Niebla] conveyed his interest and willingness to cooperate with the U.S. government, but the DEA agents told him they ‘were not authorized to meet with him, much less have substantive discussions with him,’” the judge wrote.
In this courtroom artist’s drawing Jesus Vincente Zambada-Niebla appears before U.S. District Judge Ruben Castillo Tuesday, Feb. 23, 2010, in Chicago. (AP Photo/Verna Sadock)
In their official response to Zambada-Niebla’s motion for discovery, the federal government confirmed the existence of “classified materials” regarding the case but argued they “do not support the defendant’s claim that he was promised immunity or public authority for his actions.”
Experts have expressed doubts that Zambada-Niebla had an official agreement with the U.S. government, however, agree Loya Castro probably did. Either way, the defense still wants to obtain DEA reports that detail the agency’s relationship with the Sinaloa Cartel and put the agents on the stand, under oath to testify.
The documents that detail the relationship between the federal government and the Sinaloa Cartel have still not been released or subjected to review — citing matters of national security.
NSA Tracking Capabilities – Everything means Everything
Diego Garcia – USA’s Secret Military Base
The Clone Plane in Tel Aviv
Freescale Semiconductor – Classified Technology
China vs USA Black Ops?
The Military Drills! Cope Tiger / Cobra Gold
Man in the Middle Attack? Hit? Kidnapping?
The Phillip Wood Picture Message – Legit Exif data?
Fake Girlfriend of Phillip Wood in Media!?
In a somewhat disturbing case of life imitating art, it seems that real world turmoil is catching up with classic science fiction projections of a dystopian future as envisioned by writers like George Orwell and Ray Bradbury — a world where the general populace is under constant surveillance, and the technology that we’ve become overly dependent on has become our greatest liability.
If the recent NSA debacle wasn’t alarming enough for you, Google recently acquired Nest, the smart device firm and home automation pioneer. Home automation, of course, means having multiple devices (kitchen appliances, thermostats, locks and security cameras, etc.) equipped with wireless capability and controllable through an app on a smart device. Your phone, in essence, becomes a remote control for your entire house. Some systems, like the one which Samsung recently premiered at CES 2014, will only enable the company’s own products to interact with one another, and the more glitzy products like the ADT home security systems allow homeowners to control their thermostats and other electronics (regardless of brand) with their smart phone.
If it sounds too good to be true…that’s because it potentially is, as this article from Trend Labs explains. The IP configuration on the devices is simple and the security options are quite limited, leaving them easily penetrable by hackers and thieves. Part of the risk, of course, is that if you have a home security system that can be entirely disabled through a smartphone, a thief could hack into your accounts, deactivate your entire security system with the push of a mere button, and enter your home freely. All of your data becomes more accessible to hackers, and now Google will have even more comprehensive data to sell to third party candidates who can market products even more aggressively to you.
Orwell and Bradbury basically called the whole thing…
One of the great things about science-fiction is that, whatever paranoid projections it makes about future global conditions, it’s always very much a product of its own time.This news raises all sorts of issues for an overly imaginative person.
The situation is like George Orwell’s 1984, where the general public can’t even so much as think in privacy. Everyone is under constant surveillance, and the entire system is under the pretense that this is somehow what’s best for society.
The citizens of Orwell’s fictional Oceania all have “telescreens” in their apartments, which enables Big Brother (whether that’s merely a governmental agency monitoring the public or one chief observer is never entirely clear) to supervise every given moment of everyone’s lives, and to possess an absurd level of intel on every given person under the jurisdiction of their central government. Replace telescreens with tablets, and Big Brother with Facebook and Google, and ask yourself how much of a deviation this setup is from life as we know it today.
It also calls to mind a particularly eerie story penned by Ray Bradbury 1950 entitled August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains. The story focuses on “a-day-in-the-life” of a fully automated home after the extinction of the human race. The house prepares meals, recites important dates and reminders through an intercom system with a pre-recorded voice. We come to learn, throughout the course of the story, that the family who owned the house have been wiped out. We hear about silhouettes permanently fixed unto the side of the homes, in a manner that evoked the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki who were vaporized in an atomic blast.
So Bradbury’s grim musings couldn’t have been more fitting for his time, and they are startlingly relevant now. Just as humans channel their ingenuity and creativity into constructive things, or things which enhance life for humanity (all of the advancements in home technology, for instance) the misapplication of that creativity — and the misapplication of technology itself– can have dire, even catastrophic, consequences on humanity.
Is it really as bad as all of that?
Only time will tell, but it does seem more and more likely that whatever minor conveniences the technology yields will hardly justify the potential security risks.
You would hope that, in some cases, paranoid science-fiction literature would help prevent future atrocities from occurring by anticipating them. It’s sort of comforting that we’ve not yet reached the place anticipated by Arthur C. Clarke, where computers have superior intellect to humans and can function, not only with autonomy, but willfully against people. It’s pretty disconcerting, however, that we seem to be drawing nearer and nearer to those imagined realities, not merely a novel thought and fodder for pop literature, but a grim facet of our day to day lives.
Hmm. Hold up. So if we go by this Wikipedia entry..
“Founded as an independent company in 1982, RSA Security, Inc. was acquired by EMC Corporation in 2006 for US$ 2.1 billion and operates as a division within EMC.[5]”
People need to understand, this means RSA took around 2% of what they’d make in one year. FOR A BACK-DOOR OMG. Does this not sound more like a tax, than a payment (never mind a bribe!)? How much would you care about an extra 2% per year? Exactly. Thats all I got. Someone else needs to close that gap. -Max
What’s an encryption backdoor cost? When you’re the NSA, apparently the fee is $10 million.
Intentional flaws created by the National Security Agency in RSA’s encryption tokens werediscovered in September, thanks to documents released by whistleblower Edward Snowden. It has now been revealed that RSA was paid $10 million by the NSA to implement those backdoors, according to a new report in Reuters.
Two people familiar with RSA’s BSafe software told Reuters that the company had received the money in exchange for making the NSA’s cryptographic formula as the default for encrypted key generation in BSafe.
“Now we know that RSA was bribed,” said security expert Bruce Schneier, who has been involved in the Snowden document analysis. “I sure as hell wouldn’t trust them. And then they made the statement that they put customer security first,” he said.
RSA, now owned by computer storage firm EMC Corp, has a long history of entanglement with the government. In the 1990s, the company was instrumental in stopping a government plan to include a chip in computers that would’ve allowed the government to spy on people.
The new revelation is important, Schneier said, because it confirms more suspected tactics that the NSA employs.
“You think they only bribed one company in the history of their operations? What’s at play here is that we don’t know who’s involved,” he said.
Other companies that build widely-used encryption apparatus include Symantec, McAfee, and Microsoft. “You have no idea who else was bribed, so you don’t know who else you can trust,” Schneier said.
RSA did not return a request for comment, and did not comment for the Reuters story.
Competing with the US during the Arms Race, the Soviet Union put extensive effort in unconventional research seeking to outflank its rival in understanding behavior control, remote influencing and parapsychology, a new survey by Cornell University Library has revealed.
The survey published by Cornell University Library is based on open scientific and journalistic materials and provides an overview of unconventional research in the USSR and then in its successor, Russia, in the period between 1917 and 2003 – as compared to the USA.
The report by Serge Kernbach showed that unconventional weapons took the scientists in both countries to areas bordering sci-fi which nowadays would be seen in TV programs featuring UFOs, the supernatural and superpowers.
Due the Iron Curtain, Soviet and American scientists knew little about each other’s secret work – still, they focused on same themes.
In the Soviet Union, among the areas of particular interest, were, for instance, “the impact of weak and strong electromagnetic emission on biological objects, quantum entanglement in macroscopic systems, nonlocal signal transmission based on the Aharonov-Bohm effect, and ‘human operator’ phenomena,” the survey says.
Soviet scientists were developing a field they dubbed “psychotronics.” The country spent between $0.5-1 billion on research of the phenomena, Kernbach who works, at the Research Center of Advanced Robotics and Environmental Science in Stuttgart, Germany, found out.
Some of the programs in psychotronic research – even those launched decades ago – have not been officially published.
“For instance, documents on experiments performed in OGPU and NKVD – even 80 years after – still remain classified,” Kernbach noted. The OGPU (Joint State Political Directorate) was the Soviet secret police and the NKVD (The People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs) was the main law enforcing body, which was later transformed into the Internal Ministry and a security organization which was part of it – into the KGB.
According to the survey, Soviet and American areas of interest often mirrored each other. In particular, Kernbach recalls the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) scandalous human research program MKUltra which involved the use of various methods to manipulate an individual’s mental states and alter brain functions.
“As mentioned in the public documents, the program to some extent was motivated by the corresponding NKVD’s program, with similar strategies of using psychotropic (e.g. drugs) substances and technical equipment,” Kernbach said.
In the 60s and the 70s, the Soviet Union was actively researching the influence of electromagnetic fields on human physiological and psychological conditions. Several authors point to the application of research results in the form of new weapons in the USA and the Soviet Union.
“Over the past years, US researchers have confirmed the possibility of affecting functions of the nervous system by weak electromagnetic fields (EMFs), as it was previously said by Soviet researchers. EMFs may cause acoustic hallucination (’radiosound’) and reduce the sensitivity of humans and animals to some other stimuli, to change the activity of the brain (especially the hypothalamus and the cortex), to break the processes of formation processing and information storage in the brain. These nonspecific changes in the central nervous system can serve as a basis for studying the possibilities of the direct influence of EMFs on specific functions of CNS,” read an article in Nauka (Science) magazine in 1982.
A US Marine Corps truck is seen carrying a palletized version of the Active Denial System, March 9th, 2012, at the US Marine Corps Base Quantico, Virginia. It is a US DoD non-lethal weapon that uses directed energy and projects a beam of man-sized millimeter waves up to 1000 meters that when fired at a human, delivers a heat sensation to the skin and generally makes humans stop what they are doing and run. (AFP Photo/Paul J. Richards)
Kernbach’s analysis lacks details on practical results of unconventional research in the USSR.
He mentions though a device invented by Anatoly Beridze-Stakhovsky – the torsion generator ‘Cerpan’. The exact structure of the device is unknown, as the scientist feared it would be put to unethical uses. Cerpan was designed on the “shape effect” produced by torsion fields. Some sources claim that the device – a 7-kilo metal cylinder – was used to heal people, including Kremlin senior officials.
Kernbach’s overview of unconventional research in USSR and Russia suggests that following the collapse of the USSR in 1991, these programs were first reduced and then completely closed in 2003.
“Due to academic and non-academic researchers, the instrumental psychotronics, denoted sometimes as torsionics, still continue to grow, but we cannot speak about government programs in Russia any longer,” he said.
However, based on the number of participants at major conferences, the number of psychotronics researchers in Russia is estimated between 200 and 500, the report said.
Last year, the now-fired Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov said his ministry was working on futuristic weaponry.
“The development of weaponry based on new physics principles; direct-energy weapons, geophysical weapons, wave-energy weapons, genetic weapons, psychotronic weapons, etc., is part of the state arms procurement program for 2011-2020,”Serdyukov said at a meeting with the then Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, cited RIA Novosti.
That followed a series of Putin’s presidential campaign articles, one of which focused on national security guarantees. Speaking about new challenges that Russia may face, and which armed forces should be ready to respond to, he wrote:
“Space-based systems and IT tools, especially in cyberspace, will play a great, if not decisive role in armed conflicts. In a more remote future, weapon systems that use different physical principles will be created (beam, geophysical, wave, genetic, psychophysical and other types of weapons). All this will provide fundamentally new instruments for achieving political and strategic goals in addition to nuclear weapons.”
“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.” — Aldous Huxley
So who really controls the world?
The Illuminati? Freemasons? The Bilderberg Group?
Or are these all red herrings to distract your prying eyes from the real global elite? The answer, like most topics worth exploring, is not quite so simple. Have no doubt, there aresecretive global powers whose only goal is to keep and grow that power. But it really may not be as secretive as you’d think. And that’s what makes it even more nefarious…
But don’t take my word for it, we have both science and insider testimony to back it up…
We’re going to break this down into three categories: Financial, Political and Media. This is a harder task than you may imagine, since they all work in concert by design.
Financial Elite
Thanks to the science of complex system theory, the answer may actually be right in front of our faces.
This scientific process sheds light on the dark corners of bank control and international finance and pulls some of the major players out from the shadows.
And it goes back to the old credo: Just follow the money…
Systems theorist James B. Glattfelder did just that.
From a massive database of 37 million companies, Glattfelder pulled out the 43,060 transnational corporations (companies that operate in more than one country) that are all connected by their shareholders.
Digging further, he constructed a model that actually displays just how connected these companies are to one another through ownership of shares and their corresponding operating revenues.
The 1318 transnational corporations that form the core of the economy.
Superconnected companies are red, very connected companies are yellow. The size of the dot represents revenue.
I’ll openly admit that this graphic almost scared me off. Complex scientific theories are not my forte, and this looks like some sort of intergalactic snow globe.
But Glattfelder has done a remarkable job of boiling these connections down to the main actors — as well as pinpointing how much power they have over the global market. These “ownership networks” can reveal who the key players are, how they are organized, and exactly how interconnected these powers are.
From New Scientist: Each of the 1318 had ties to two or more other companies, and on average they were connected to 20. What’s more, although they represented 20 per cent of global operating revenues, the 1318 appeared to collectively own through their shares the majority of the world’s large blue chip and manufacturing firms — the “real” economy — representing a further 60 per cent of global revenues.
When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a “super-entity” of 147 even more tightly knit companies — all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity — that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network.
According to his data, Glattfelder found that the top 730 shareholders control a whopping 80% of the entire revenue of transnational corporations.
And — surprise, surprise! — they are mostly financial institutions in the United States and the United Kingdom.
That is a huge amount of concentrated control in a small number of hands…
Here are the top ten transnational companies that hold the most control over the global economy (and if you are one of the millions that are convinced Big Banks run the world, you should get a creeping sense of validation from this list):
1) Barclays plc
2) Capital Group Companies Inc.
3) FMR Corporation
4) AXA
5) State Street Corporation
6) JPMorgan Chase & Co.
7) Legal & General Group plc
8) Vanguard Group Inc.
9) UBS AG
10) Merrill Lynch & Co Inc.
Some of the other usual suspects round out the top 25, including JP Morgan, UBS, Credit Suisse, and Goldman Sachs.
What you won’t find are ExxonMobil, Microsoft, or General Electric, which I found shocking. In fact, you have to scroll all the way down to China Petrochemical Group Company at number 50 to find a company that actually creates something.
The top 49 corporations are financial institutions, banks, and insurance companies — with the exception of Wal-Mart, which ranks at number 15…
The rest essentially just push money around to one another.
Here’s the interconnectedness of the top players in this international scheme:
Here’s a fun fact about the number one player, Barclays:
Barclays was a main player in the LIBOR manipulation scandal, and were found to have committed fraud and collusion with other interconnected big banks. They were fined $200 million by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, $160 million by the United States Department of Justice and £59.5 million by the Financial Services Authority for “attempted manipulation” of the Libor and Euribor rates.
Despite their crimes, Barclays still paid $61,781,950 in bonuses earlier this year, including a whopping $27,371,750 to investment banking head Rich Ricci. And yes, that’s actually his real name…
These are the guys that run the world.
It’s essentially the “too big to fail” argument laid out in a scientific setting — only instead of just the U.S. banks, we’re talking about an international cabal of banks and financial institutions so intertwined that they pose a serious threat to global economics.
And instead of “too big to fail,” we’re looking at “too connected to fail”…
Glattfelder contends that “a high degree of interconnectivity can be bad for stability, because stress can spread through the system like an epidemic.”
Industrialist Henry Ford once quipped, “It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and money system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.”
It’s one thing to have suspicions that someone is working behind the scenes to control the world’s money supply. It’s quite another to have scientific evidence that clearly supports it.
But these guys can only exist within a political system that supports their goals. And those political systems are pretty much operating in the open…
POLITCAL ELITE
For the sake of brevity, let’s cut right to the chase. Every major geopolitical decision of the last few decades has been run through one of these three organizations: the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations and the World Bank/International Monetary Fund (IMF).
The Trilateral Commission
In 1973, the infamous David Rockefeller created a group of the world’s power brokers to work together — outside of any official governmental or political allegiance — to bring about cooperation of North America, Western Europe and Japan.
They launched under the guise of working together to solve the world’s problems. A noble goal — but “problems” are very subjective.
Here’s the rundown of members:
The North American continent is represented by 120 members (20 Canadian, 13 Mexican and 87 U.S. citizens). The European group has reached its limit of 170 members from almost every country on the continent; the ceilings for individual countries are 20 for Germany, 18 for France, Italy and the United Kingdom, 12 for Spain and 1–6 for the rest. At first, Asia and Oceania were represented only by Japan. However, in 2000 the Japanese group of 85 members expanded itself, becoming the Pacific Asia group, composed of 117 members: 75 Japanese, 11 South Koreans, 7 Australian and New Zealand citizens, and 15 members from the ASEAN nations (Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore and Thailand). The Pacific Asia group also included 9 members from China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Currently, the Trilateral Commission claims “more than 100″ Pacific Asian members.
It’s a global who’s-who of power brokers. And while the Trilateral Commission excludes anyone currently holding public office from membership, it serves as a revolving door of the rich and powerful from the financial, political and academic elite.
Most suspicions of the group began during the Jimmy Carter administration, when Carter — himself a member of the Trilateral Commission — made Zbigniew Brzezinski his National Security advisor. Brzezinski was the Trilateral Commission’s first executive director. Carter’s Vice President Walter Mondale was also a member.
And perhaps most importantly, Trilateral member Paul Volker served as Carter’s Chair of the Federal Reserve. He is still the North American Honorary Chairman.
Such a concentration of power in a U.S. president’s cabinet obviously made people nervous,
Notable recent additions include Austan Goolsbe — former chairman for Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors. I’d suggest you familiarize yourselves with the entire member list here.
You’ll be shocked at who else is part of this secretive organization.
Follow the Outsider Club for Part II of this important subject.
One Bank to Rule Them All: World Bank Whistle-blower Reveals Bank Conspiracy
If you had any doubt, we now have science and first-hand testimony to prove it.
Note: This is not some wild conspiracy theory. It’s systems theory, a serious scientific discipline, used by researcher James B. Gladfelder to prove that a small group of banks essentially control the world’s finances.
Gladfelder’s research proved that the top 730 shareholders control a whopping 80% of the entire revenue of transnational corporations.
But the truth is the global banking elite simply cannot maintain a stranglehold on the world’s power all by themselves. And so, while they run off with the money, their lackeys in the political sphere acts as gatekeepers.
Again, we’re not relying on labyrinthine explanations and vague fears of domination; we’re looking at the matter through scientific discipline and actual admissions from the power brokers themselves.
The fact is we simply cannot talk about global control without talking about the World Bank…
The World Bank represents 188 different countries from Albania to Zimbabwe. However, it is controlled by a small number of powerful countries, each with its own serious economic interests.
Since there is no voting for the leadership and chief economists at the bank, the United States and other large countries have complete control to appoint who they’d like to do their bidding — and they have appointed some highly questionable folks to run the behemoth:
Robert McNamara – JFK’s former secretary of defense and president of Ford Motor Company was chosen to lead the Bank in 1968, fresh off his disastrous handling of the Vietnam War.
Lewis T. Preston – a bank executive with J.P. Morgan. We all know J.P. Morgan doesn’t have the interest of the working poor at heart, as evidenced by years of abuse of regular folks, culminating in their record $13 billion fine this year.
Robert Zoellick – a bank executive with Goldman Sachs. Again, if the head of Goldman Sachs is at the helm, you know the bidding of the powerful will get its due… After all, you don’t earn a nickname like “The Great Vampire Squid” for your altruism.
Paul Wolfowitz – Much like McNamara, Wolfowitz was handed the reigns to the World Bank after helping orchestrate George Bush’s outrageous war on Iraq. While president of the Bank, he gave his girlfriend massive pay raises — more than double what she was entitled to! The fact that the head of the World Bank could engage in such petty corruption doesn’t bode well for the bank at large, considering the immense power they wield. Wolfowitz was eventually forced to resign.
Perhaps more alarmingly, the World Bank also receives complete immunity from any and all countries it does “business” with, so it cannot be held legally accountable for its actions.
The United States has complete veto power over the Bank’s actions as well, which it can use to block any action by the Bank that may threaten national interests — and the interests of the global financial powers that control them.
The World Bank’s stated purpose is to help poor and developing countries by providing loans.
The catch? To obtain one of these loans, you have to comply with the Bank’s draconian wish lists.
Examples of the conditions countries must meet to gain access to a loan include suppressing wages, cutting programs like education and health care, and easing limits on foreign investment.
How do the results stack up with its stated mission?
Not well. In fact, data shows most countries that have taken the World Bank’s money and agreed to its terms are no better off today then they were when they received their first loan — and many are actually worse off.
From the Heritage Foundation:
Of the 66 less-developed countries receiving money from the World Bank for more than 25 years (most for more than 30 years), 37 are no better off today than they were before they received such loans.
Of these 37 countries, most (20 in all) are actually poorer today than they were before receiving aid from the Bank.
Former less-developed countries that have prospered over the past 30 years did so by freeing up the productive forces of their economies. The best examples are Hong Kong and Singapore: Even though a country like Singapore received a small amount of money from the World Bank, the evidence shows that what most affected economic growth was not World Bank aid, but economic freedom.
What’s more, an ex-World Bank employee described something far more nefarious than ineptitude…
Karen Hudes watched first-hand as the World Bank manipulated and covered up corruption in its economic development projects.
It’s important to know Hudes wasn’t some disgruntled lackey; she served as Senior Counsel and worked for the bank for 20 years. During those two decades at the World Bank, Hudes saw systematic and widespread corruption.
“It’s a mafia,” she told the New American.
“These culprits that have grabbed all this economic power have succeeded in infiltrating both sides of the issue, so you will find people who are supposedly trying to fight corruption who are just there to spread disinformation and as a placeholder to trip up anybody who manages to get their act together. Those thugs think that if they can keep the world ignorant, they can bleed it longer.”
Hudes saw large-scale enrichment of the powerful, while the poor the Bank was supposed to be helping were getting stiffed.
“I realized we were now dealing with something known as state capture, which is where the institutions of government are co-opted by the group that’s corrupt,” she noted.
Hudes was eventually fired after she spoke out against the Bank’s attempt to cover up a botched bailout of a crooked bank in the Philippines.
Here are a few choice examples of what happens to the $2.5 billion in U.S. taxpayer money that is funneled into the World Bank each and every year, from the American Enterprise Institute:
38 countries have amassed $71 billion in unpayable multilateral loans, encouraged by the Bank’s self-serving projections of country growth, on which rich-country taxpayers must now make good.
Corruption has been exposed both within the World Bank and in its programs, and is now estimated at more than $100 billion.
Protest is rising among leading African scholars who seek to stop all aid because it serves only to entrench and enrich a series of corrupt elites. Massive anecdotal evidence of waste, ineptitude, and outright theft can no longer be ignored.
Not exactly the poverty-fighting superhero the institution makes itself out to be.
The World Bank works in conjunction with the International Monetary Fund, which operates in the same vein of enriching Wall Street and supporting dictators. We’ll pull the curtain back on the IMF next week.
Jimmy is a managing editor for Outsider Club and the Investment Director of the personal finance advisory The Crow’s Nest. You may also know him as the architect behind the wildly popular finance and investing website Wealth Wire, where he’s brought readers the stories behind the mainstream financial news each and every day. For more on Jimmy, check out his editor’s page.
Perhaps Edward Snowden’s hoodie should have raised suspicions.
The black sweatshirt sold by the civil libertarian Electronic Frontier Foundation featured a parody of the National Security Agency’s logo, with the traditional key in an eagle’s claws replaced by a collection of AT&T cables, and eavesdropping headphones covering the menacing bird’s ears. Snowden wore it regularly to stay warm in the air-conditioned underground NSA Hawaii Kunia facility known as “the tunnel.”
His coworkers assumed it was meant ironically. And a geek as gifted as Snowden could get away with a few irregularities.
But an NSA staffer who contacted me last month and asked not to be identified–and whose claims we checked with Snowden himself via his ACLU lawyer Ben Wizner—offered me a very different, firsthand portrait of how Snowden was seen by his colleagues in the agency’s Hawaii office: A principled and ultra-competent, if somewhat eccentric employee, and one who earned the access used to pull off his leak by impressing superiors with sheer talent.
The anonymous NSA staffer’s priority in contacting me, in fact, was to refute stories that have surfaced as the NSA and the media attempt to explain how a contractor was able to obtain and leak the tens of thousands of highly classified documents that have become the biggest public disclosure of NSA secrets in history. According to the source, Snowden didn’t dupe coworkers into handing over their passwords, as one report has claimed. Nor did Snowden fabricate SSH keys to gain unauthorized access, he or she says.
Instead, there’s little mystery as to how Snowden gained his access: It was given to him.
“That kid was a genius among geniuses,” says the NSA staffer. “NSA is full of smart people, but anybody who sat in a meeting with Ed will tell you he was in a class of his own…I’ve never seen anything like it.”
When I reached out to the NSA’s public affairs office, a spokesperson declined to comment, citing the agency’s ongoing investigation into Snowden’s leaks.
But over the course of my communications with the NSA staffer, Snowden’s former colleague offered details that shed light on both how Snowden was able to obtain the NSA’s most secret files, as well as the elusive 30-year old’s character:
Before coming to NSA Hawaii, Snowden had impressed NSA officials by developing a backup system that the NSA had widely implemented in its codebreaking operations.
He also frequently reported security vulnerabilities in NSA software. Many of the bugs were never patched.
Snowden had been brought to Hawaii as a cybersecurity expert working for Dell’s services division but due to a problem with the contract was reassigned to become an administrator for the Microsoft intranet management system known as Sharepoint. Impressed with his technical abilities, Snowden’s managers decided that he was the most qualified candidate to build a new web front-end for one of its projects, despite his contractor status. As his coworker tells it, he was given full administrator privileges, with virtually unlimited access to NSA data. “Big mistake in hindsight,” says Snowden’s former colleague. “But if you had a guy who could do things nobody else could, and the only problem was that his badge was green instead of blue, what would you do?”
As further evidence that Snowden didn’t hijack his colleagues’ accounts for his leak, the NSA staffer points to an occasion when Snowden was given a manager’s password so that he could cover for him while he was on vacation. Even then, investigators found no evidence Snowden had misused that staffer’s privileges, and the source says nothing he could have uniquely accessed from the account has shown up in news reports.
Snowden’s superiors were so impressed with his skills that he was at one point offered a position on the elite team of NSA hackers known as Tailored Access Operations. He unexpectedly turned it down and instead joined Booz Allen to work at NSA’s Threat Operation Center.
Another hint of his whistleblower conscience, aside from the telltale hoodie: Snowden kept a copy of the constitution on his desk to cite when arguing against NSA activities he thought might violate it.
The source tells me Snowden also once nearly lost his job standing up for a coworker who was being disciplined by a superior.
Snowden often left small, gifts anonymously at colleagues’ desks.
Snowden’s former colleague says that he or she has slowly come to understand Snowden’s decision to leak the NSA’s files. “I was shocked and betrayed when I first learned the news, but as more time passes I’m inclined to believe he really is trying to do the right thing and it’s not out of character for him. I don’t agree with his methods, but I understand why he did it,” he or she says. “I won’t call him a hero, but he’s sure as hell no traitor.”
A fox raids a chicken coop, killing all the chickens. With feathers sticking out of the sides of his mouth, stinking of blood, he swears he didn’t do it. He wasn’t even there! Days later, in response to sustained cries of protest from the animals, the farmer commissions an investigation to determine who was responsible for the grisly scene. To the shock and horror of the farm animals, he appoints the fox to lead the investigation. The fox issues a statement pledging to regain the public trust.
The government is the farmer, we are the farm animals, and James Clapper is the fox.
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, the all-powerful spy infamous for lying to congress about the Section 215 bulk metadata program, will establish a “review group to examine intelligence collection,” the government tells us. This incredible turn of events comes, as Marcy Wheeler points out, only 72 hours after President Obama promised a thorough review of intelligence programs conducted by “outside,” “independent” actors.
James Clapper is about as inside as it gets. As Jameel Jaffer observed on Twitter, appointing Clapper to oversee a review of intelligence programs is akin to assigning the author of the Bush administration torture memos, John Yoo, “to lead [an] independent inquiry into the CIA torture program.”
That’s bad enough. But it gets worse.
When the government announced the Clapper ‘review,’ it offered us this quote from the perjurer himself, describing what his ‘review group’ sets out to do:
The review group will assess whether, in light of advancements in communications technologies, the United States employs its technical collection capabilities in a manner that optimally protects our national security and advances our foreign policy while appropriately accounting for other policy considerations, such as the risk of unauthorized disclosure and our need to maintain the public trust.
Read that sentence very carefully. Completely absent from the passage is any reference to the legality, democratic compatibility, or constitutionality of the surveillance programs.
Not only is the fox set to investigate the incident at the hen house. He has told us up front that the programs’ impact on civil liberties is not even up for discussion. Instead, the review will assess whether US surveillance programs are thorough enough, and whether they’ll continue ‘advanc[ing] our foreign policy’ interests amidst ‘the risk of unauthorized disclosure.’ (This, I imagine, is code for: How can we keep these programs secret so as not to thoroughly piss off our allies?)
Instead of looking at the ways in which his spy programs kill democracy and obliterate any possibility for political freedom, Clapper admits at the outset that his ‘review group’ will seek to determine whether and how the intelligence agencies can keep a tighter lid on their global surveillance operations.
And then there’s the horrifying kicker. The review group will seek to ‘account for’ one last ‘policy consideration,’ he says: ‘our need to maintain the public trust.’
The public trust! James Clapper!
At least Clapper isn’t totally unaware of what’s going on around him; it’s true that the public does not trust the intelligence apparatus. But while public trust in government is important, more important than trust is a transparent and accountable architecture that deserves to be trusted. Clapper’s announcement of his intention to figure out how to regain the public trust in the absence of even one mention of reforming the spy programs to conform with constitutional or democratic principles is positively chilling. It is an acknowledgement that our government is more interested in appearances than it is in actual accountability. And it suggests that the primary lesson the establishment has learned in the past few months has been that it should do a better job lying to the public — not that it should roll back the monstrous surveillance state.
This statement about ‘the public trust’ makes clear that the administration views the fallout from the Snowden leaks, and American and global outrage over NSA surveillance and government mendacity, as just another public relations war. That’s too bad, because the leaks have in fact ignited a war over the soul of this country, raising absolutely critical questions about the possibility for democracy in the 21st century.
Clapper is set to deliver his interim findings to the President within two months, and will publish a report with recommendations by mid-December. When those recommendations become public, don’t forget who put them together, and what his intentions were from the outset: not to examine the programs’ constitutionality, but rather to figure out how to spin, entrench, and prolong them.
UPDATE: In a bizarre about-face, the Obama administration is now fiercely denying that Clapper will control the “review group.” Maybe this Huffington Post page pushed them over the edge:
It’s time to demand an end to the cover-up of the leading cause of breast cancer – tight bras.
