The problem with repeated false flags and staged events executed for a particular political purpose is that they demand a commitment from the minds of the masses and it has to happen in real-time. You either get it right away that the event is staged or you don’t. That is, you require “proof”. Until you receive that proof or should I say, until you consciously register a series of information that convinces you that it must have been fake, you will choose to believe mainstream media news and accept it as truth. On the other hand, those that are fully awakened to the overall agenda in full motion now know right away as soon as another staged shooting takes place. They know exactly which signs to look for or more specifically, which group of signs to look for. Also there is a sequence of events that usually play out exactly almost every time. Once the working minds of these people see that sequence of events play out their natural brain does not allow them to believe the official story no matter how much “proof” the mainstream media presents to convince their viewers that the story is true. This is the natural resistance that humanity is creating to government lies which I’ve discussed in the past.
That said, without getting too deep into what I believe could likely be another staged shooting event to advance the federal governments gun control agenda, let’s just zip through a list of oddities that every single person must reconcile surrounding the recent Virginia TV reporter shooting of Allison Parker and cameraman Adam Ward by alleged shooter Vester Lee Flannigan. Here are 19 intriguing coincidences surrounding the Virginia shooting, and perhaps you can explain away some of these. If you can, more power to you but good luck tackling the entire list. Ultimately, it’s not about one person being right or wrong but about lining yourself up with truth. Keep in mind that all of these things are happening at once and you have to let your natural instincts, intuition and common sense kick in and take this information in and then file it under one of two categories, orchestrated event or coincident or perhaps I don’t know. You decide:
1- Big black man with gun pointed directly at 2 people just a few feet away. No one notices, no one cares!
No one looks at the gunman even once despite his brandishing a normal sized gun. Peripheral vision must be a conspiracy also! Instead the 2 women carry on with their conversation as usual! You couldn’t make this up. Don’t believe it? Watch the video for yourself.
2- After clearly pointing gun at his victims shooter doesn’t shoot!
The video shows what turns out to be some kind of rehearsal pointing. Ask yourself what killer has ever done this outside of a Hollywood movie set? Put yourself for a second inside the mind of the supposed killer. Who points a gun at people in broad daylight, practices what he’s going to do and then after not pulling the trigger waits around to re-point the gun again a minute later?
3- Cameraman conveniently pointing camera away even though the interview is taking place now.
Watch as the cameraman is inexplicably shooting in a direction unrelated to the interview taking place providing the perfect entrance for the apparently invisible shooter. Ask yourself, why would the cameraman do this? Was the interview that boring or that long that he needs to amuse himself by aimlessly panning across the scenery while the interview is happening? What are the odds of this coincidence?
4- Shooter is super close to cameraman who somehow has no idea he’s there!
How does cameraman Adam Ward not see, hear, sense or even smell that there is someone standing right next to him? The shooter doesn’t even have a shadow! The scene takes place in a super quiet remote area and it’s a big man with a gun who is also invisible. This defies logic and reason, does it not? Coincidence? You decide.
5- How did cameraman know they were shooting that day, that location?
Simple questions that beg good answers. What’s a shooter doing in this remote area anyway? And how does the shooter know to be there at that exact time?? Was he just wandering around in the neighborhood and decided to do this? Or did the shooter have a copy of the WDBJ production schedule? Maybe he did. Just wondering.
6- Reporter never goes down or twitches after being shot multiple times!
Magic bullet part 2? Could this be an example of the adrenaline bullet initial impact resistance theory? Perhaps it happened so fast she didn’t know she was shot? Everyone should go back and watch other videos of people being shot and look for the quick body twitch, the jolt and the instant collapse that happens when people get shot at point blank range which is when bullets do the most damage. Then go back and watch videos of people getting shot multiple times at point blank range and see if anything in this recent shooting looks different. Also ask yourself, where is the blood?? Where is the staggering struggle of someone who has just been shot?
Where have we seen this before? Back in January of this year (2015) during the Charlie Hebdo shooting incident we saw a supposed point blank head explosion shooting of a Paris police officer with a AK47 assault rifle only the video shows the shot hitting at least a foot away, no head jolt and no blood. This might lead us to think they are playing out of the same script again. But who knows? You decide.
7- Shooter commits the usual suicide.
Dead men tell no tales. Once again the shooter, this time Vester Lee Flannigan does not live to tell the story. The perfect ending once again for the controllers. Shooters who contribute to possible future gun legislation apparently almost always conveniently kill themselves now. The end results of shootings these days almost seem automated.
8- Shooter puts out the usual manifesto!
The “manifesto” has become a standard part of the script but we must all start to wonder- is the “manifesto” now being over-played? I don’t know anyone, or know of anyone who has ever met someone who has written or even considered writing a manifesto of their life intent, yet government rolls out manifestos on all killer patsies nowadays. What’ the deal with the automated manifestos? What everyone should realize is that the manifesto is the perfect ‘fill-in-the-blank’ propaganda document to sway the masses on anything they want them to believe. If the manifesto says you did it, then you did it. The manifesto conveniently fills in the blank to create perception of intent. How perfect!
9- Video of shooting seems intended exclusively for shock value, no other purpose.
This may be coincidental as well but like the James Foley fake beheading and all other ISIS videos, this point-of-view video seems like it is mostly intended to shock you and get a reaction from you as in problem-REACTION-solution. Ask yourself, why would the government and media want to shock everyone? Is the story itself not enough?
10- Video conveniently now being censored by YouTube Charlie Hebdo and James Foley-style
Once the shock value is accomplished by the mainstream media as we’ve seen in recent shock value videos like the James Foley fake beheading video or the Charlie Hebdo fake police officer execution video, it seems once the mainstream media pushes the initial shock value video to create the reaction there is no need to allow the world to watch the video and scrutinize it. And seems to be when the censorship of the same video begins. The controllers would rather you not watch the video on your own on YouTube where you might come across alternative media links and explanations of their false flags and crisis actors. Instead they would rather you just trust the mainstream media’s presentation of the video evidence and leave it at that.
11- Image of shooter produced by a video without such frame?
Others have point out how the media put out an image of the shooter based on the video camera footage but we never see this footage so where did they get this frame from? Yes, this may be a coincidence, who knows but given all the other oddities it makes you wonder.
12- Audio file of shooting after camera cuts off sounds very different.
I’m no sound expert but from my military experience I know the sound of rounds shot at a range. Admittedly, the audio of the shooting sounds very different from the camera version due to its much more pronounced echoes. I find this a little odd but who knows.
13- Police order BBC Journalist to delete video footage of shooters crash.
Anytime we hear police forcing anyone especially a journalist to destroy evidence this should set off a red flag in your mind and it’s got to make anyone at least wonder why. Why destroy evidence?? Who or what threat does this evidence represent and to who? This is very troubling.
14- Family members quickly on TV calling for gun control, Sandy Hook style!!
This is one of the most disturbing issues for me when I first watched an interview with family member Andy Parker. Once again supposed family members in lightning speed are propped up on TV bypassing the mourning, sincerity and humility stage that comes with grieving for a recently murdered family member and they are instead calling for gun control and political agendas. Parker delivers his shocking political call to action to America within seconds:
“We’ve got to do something about crazy people getting guns”
Is anyone not reading through this?
15- Andy Parker, alleged father of murder reporter happens to be a former Broadway actor
Should it matter that Andy Parker is a former Broadway actor? Under any other circumstances it might not matter but unfortunately this is not an ordinary situation.
16- Andy Parker- Director of Human Resources for Virginia National Bank
Should it matter that coincidentally Andy Parker is directly tied to the banking system in addition to being a proven professional actor? You decide.
17- White House Press Secretary, Josh Earnest rolls out direct propaganda!
The White House quickly urges Congress to use “common sense” in order to reduce gun violence in America- Timing is everything isn’t it?
18- Obama administration quickly links the incident to a race war and gun owners perfectly in line with the Flanagan’s manifesto.
Just in case no one believes the manifesto, here comes the White House to reiterate the race theme in the manifesto and to push their propaganda.
19- Shooting takes place 2 days after the UN Arms Trade Treaty in Mexico!
In the end this is about gun control so should it shock you that this shooting took place 2 days after the United Nations’ Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) in Mexico? Lucky timing? Is it a coincident that Obama is trying to claim that Congress ratified the UN’s Arms Trade agreement in 2013 when in fact Congress did not? Does it surprise you that the timing is perfect with these treaty talks? There seems to always be a shooting right around the time the UN Arms Trade Treaty comes up or whenever there is an event or Arms bill being discussed. Coincidence? Again, you decide.
Summary
The globalist have clear cut stated goals to have the United Nations act as the bullies of the world to enforce regulation on guns and arms in complete violation and disregard of the U.S. Constitution which grants every American the inalienable right to bear arms to protect themselves from tyrannical government.
Obama’s cooperation with this UN treaty is an attempt to destroy the second amendment and transfer gun control power to the UN. What this means for freedom lovers and those that oppose tyranny is that the permanent enslavement of humanity is in the balance. Resist now. Do not allow our criminal government and their CIA controlled mainstream media to use shooting events whether real or staged to be used as tools to disarm Americans. This will give ALL the power to an evil oppressive and corrupt totalitarian global government and permanent enslavement of humanity. Don’t miss the bigger picture for a staged comparatively insignificant shooting.
Finally, you decide what happened in this latest Virginia TV reporter shooting. Is this another staged shock and awe psyop for Jade 2 software to monitor and track the reaction from the masses being that we are in the middle of Jade Helm operation? Is this a staged event to boost the likelihood of a UN Arms Trade Treaty signing? Is this a great story to get attention away from Hillary scandals and collapsing economy? Is it all the above? I believe it very well could be. You decide for yourself.
Solutions
Know that the new world order is here and no huge news story is randomly being told by coincidence. There is an argument to be made that if the government and media did that now that might be considered wasted resources. All stories now have a specific purpose.
Find out your purpose and separate yourself from the control system which very much includes the mainstream media. Realize that your mind is just like your laundry or your dishes. It can get dirty or polluted and if so it needs cleansing. Purge their lies out of your mind and stop assuming that those who don’t believe mainstream media are lunatic conspiracy theorist. Now is the healthiest time in history to question every single news piece. Your survival depends on it.
Let’s all exercise short term memory and let’s quickly go back to focusing on solutions instead of dwelling on their crisis actor laced convenient and staged shootings. Instead stay focused on knowing your rights and how special each and every person is. We are born free and we are conscious human beings. See the nature of the cage and purpose to free yourself from their mental enslavement which keeps you bound. Realize that when people forget about a shooting this hurts the controllers and the new world order plans. They want and they need you to keep dwelling on these staged stories for the stories to be effective. Recall the-“I shot Bin Laden” story earlier this year(2015) desperately trying to revive the Bin Laden hoax only no one cared.
The faster the globalist move it only makes me wonder if the new world order is slowly dying. We are seeing many ways every day how humanity is turning things around but you have to look for them. Without looking for and seeing that silver lining it can easily seem like things are really bad and only getting worse without hope of things changing. It’s a classic glass half full situation. How full is the glass from your point of view?
Bernie Suarez Creator of Truth and Art TV Project
Bernie is a revolutionary writer with a background in medicine, psychology, and information technology. He has written numerous articles over the years about freedom, government corruption and conspiracies, and solutions. A former host of the 9/11 Freefall radio show, Bernie is also the creator of the Truth and Art TV project where he shares articles and videos about issues that raise our consciousness and offer solutions to our current problems. His efforts are designed to encourage others to joyfully stand for truth, to expose government tactics of propaganda, fear and deception, and to address the psychology of dealing with the rising new world order. He is also a former U.S. Marine who believes it is our duty to stand for and defend the U.S. Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic. A peace activist, he believes information and awareness is the first step toward being free from enslavement from the globalist control system which now threatens humanity. He believes love conquers all fear and it is up to each and every one of us to manifest the solutions and the change that you want to see in this world, because doing this is the very thing that will ensure victory and restoration of the human race from the rising global enslavement system, and will offer hope to future generations.
She’s also one of the most popular. She claims to have interviewed hundreds of “above Top Secret” subjects; ex-military or government officials who are in the know about the way things really are. Kerry says that she’s seen or heard evidence of a veritable checklist of illuminati conspiracies: alien contact with the human race (including trade and commerce, some of which involves exchanging live humans for alien technology), interstellar war, human access to technologies 10,000 years beyond what’s been revealed to the average person… and genetically and biologically engineered supersoldiers. She was recently in Australia and we caught up with her to talk about all the things you’re (allegedly) not being told.
How have you found the response you’ve gotten to your ideas in Australia? I imagine there are some people who might label you a crackpot…
They don’t call me that to my face! So I don’t know!
So what do you mean by “above Top Secret” informants?
If you think of, say, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden as dealing with “Top Secret” information, I deal with information above that level.
What’s an example of that?
“Black Projects”, as we call them. Usually secret scientific projects that can be anything from genetic engineering to interstellar travel, building bases underground around the world, as well as building bases on other planets. Sending troops off the planet… any kind of project that the government doesn’t want the public to know about. And those things are vast. It could be something to do with a bio-weapon, it could be a plan to depopulate or take over a certain area. It could be regarding treaties with extra terrestrial races who’ve made contact with or have an interest in affairs on Earth. Whatever is entailed in running the world from behind the scenes.
Wow! So… one of your beliefs, and you claim to have proof of this, is that we’ve made contact with aliens. You’ve mentioned that United States President Dwight Eisenhower met with these extra terrestrials, and since then the human race been able to reverse engineer a number of alien technologies, even though the majority of us are being kept in the dark about it…
It’s not a belief. There is evidence. And it’s been happening since way before Eisenhower. Extra terrestrials have been interacting with humans for millennia. Other races, be they humanoid or not, have been involved with Earth, and some even consider Earth to be their home – they were here first. Eisenhower actually met with three races of aliens who were trying to make deals with the US Government.
Is it just the US Government they’d been dealing with?
They’d also been dealing with the Germans during World War Two, and they gave the Nazis technology. There’s also evidence that Tesla was assisted by ETs in his work.
OK. I see. So why do you think aliens have such an interest in Earth? What’s so good or special about us?
There are many things on Earth they find quite desirable, and I have a good number of whistleblowers who have given me information to that effect. My whistleblowers are predominantly ex-military, some of whom are still working for the Secret Government and who have spoken to me off the record. They [the aliens] are very interested in our gold, for example.
Our gold?
Yes. I’m told that gold on Earth is relatively easy to access when compared to getting it off an asteroid, which obviously would have issues when it comes to mining for gold.
You also mentioned aliens wanting to do business and form alliances with us…
Yes. Earth is also a very pleasurable place to do business. There’s also reason to use Earth as a jumping off point to explore the rest of the solar system and the galaxy. Also, apparently human females are considered to be extremely useful for breeding and genetic experimentation. [The extra terrestrials] also come here for food – certain reptilian races consider us as a food source. And then there are those that simply want to do commerce with us and utilise us as allies. We’re very good at building things and we’re also sending troops to conflicts around the universe.
Human soldiers are being sent to interstellar conflicts?
Soldiers who are alleged to be going to Iraq or Afghanistan are actually being sent off planet to places like Mars to fight battles alongside other alien races. Those men and women will have their minds wiped when they come back. This is why we’re having a lot of suicides with ex-soldiers. In some cases their minds have been wiped so many times they become unbalanced as a result. When they return, they don’t know where they’ve been. They think they’ve been to the Middle East, but they’ve actually been elsewhere.
Why do you think our governments and militaries are trying to keep this from us?
They make deals. A lot of the ET races we’re dealing with are extremely technologically advanced. They’re coming to Earth from far away places. They’re jumping through space – through portals – to get here, and they exchange technology for what they want on Earth.
You’ve mentioned that, on occasion, humans have been exchanged for alien technology.
Our governments exchanged humans. There are millions of children, and even adult humans, who have disappeared from the Earth. Humans have been exchanged for technology, and those humans have become slaves, or food sources… or used for breeding purposes. Some extra terrestrials are relatively friendly, others… not so much.
So I’m trying to get a grasp of your world view. Your hypothesis, which you’ve come to from interviewing people you believe to be “above Top Secret” informants, is that aliens exist. That they’ve been making contact with Earth for at least as long as humans have been around, and that there are “above Top Secret“ government and military programs through which we conduct commerce and, on occasion, form military alliances with said aliens. Some of that commerce involves exchanging humans for alien technology. Is that accurate?
Again, I don’t view it as a belief. It’s simply a reality. It doesn’t matter whether someone chooses to believe it or not. It’s like saying: “Does it rain?”. In my view, based on the eight-and-a-half years of investigations I’ve made and the huge amount of above Top Secret witnesses I’ve spoken to, I have to conclude that it’s not open to conjecture. Now, there are lot of people who would like to deny that reality, and there are governments that want to keep people in the dark. So my mission, if you will, is to wake people up to the reality of our interactions with alien races and also to the Secret Government that we know is in operation.
Are there aliens living among us?
We had a witness by the name of Tony Dodd, who was ex-military and very high up in the United Kingdom police. He contacted us behind the scenes. He came forward about some contacts he had within the British monarchy, government and military, and he revealed that they had teams of agents who would track down various aliens around the world. In some cases these teams were just keeping an eye on the aliens, in some cases they were tracking them and in some cases they were killing them. He told us we could be killed for using that information. But he was a very well respected individual in the police force in Britain.
If what you say is true – and whether or not anyone believes you’re a crazy person or whether you’re legitimate, I don’t doubt that you believe it’s true – then you must feel as though you’re in some kind of risk from the powers that be.
There have been people – a man named William Cooper is one, as is another man named Bill Schneider – who worked in above Top Secret for the military. They were killed for revealing information to the public. The bottom line is that yes, I’ve had my life threatened. I’ve had interference, because I have what you might call friends in high places: some extra terrestrials and some “white hats” – people high up in the government and the military who want disclosure. They’re fighting behind the scenes to leak information to the public. They use organisations like mine to help. So I’m being kept alive by a number of those individuals.
OK. So I was also interested in what you described as “supersoldiers”. You believe – or you’ve seen evidence to this effect – that there are humans who have been modified to become interstellar soldiers? How is this achieved? What are they used for?
There are a number of supersoldiers whom I’ve interviewed. They’re usually brought in from the military, but then they’ll have some of their powers enhanced – some by nanotechnology, some by genetic engineering. The ones who I’ve met have enhanced physical powers – they’re stronger, they’re faster, they have enhanced intelligence and psychic ability. They have superpowers. It’s almost like the X-Men films. In the case of a man named Dan Sherman, he was genetically altered. He’s written a book called Above Black. As a result of genetic enhancement and manipulation he has some special powers in terms of his ability to communicate with certain races of ETs in a telepathic capacity.
So who do you think is really in charge of Earth?
Call it what you want, some might call it the illuminati. There are different levels of illuminati, actually. Some are dark magicians – they use black magic. They go by certain occult philosophies. And they’re also Nazis. These are individuals who have banded together to create a new world order. They’re infiltrating all our governments, and they have been for some time now. They’re very much active in Australia, The United States, Europe, Britain… they’re building to a new world order.
Heavy. So am I gonna end up on some kind of government watch list as a result of this interview?
Well, fear is something that everyone needs to get over. That is the reptilian state of mind. A lot of the DNA in our leaders is reptialian- based, and they like to keep people cowering and under control. So I encourage everyone to investigate what I have to say and to watch the over 300 interviews I’ve done with people on the subject. There’s a tremendous amount of information out there. It’s about having an open mind and wanting to investigate what’s real and what’s not.
GLOBAL BANKING MACHINE The global banking industry is the largest organised crime syndicate in human history – getting away with it because of our ignorance, their forceful control of our governments and almost everything else in our lives.
Courtesy to the activist from Occupy Wall Street who sent a strong message to the world.
All the major banks in the world are owned and controlled by the banking families.
They control the entire process of the creation, the printing, and supply of money around the world.
The three biggest names in this cartel are the Rothschilds; Rockefellers and Morgans, and they ultimately own or control all the banks in the world, together with a small number of other powerful banking families, like Carnegie, Harriman, Schiff, and Warburg.
Collectively they have become known as the “banksters” by those who became aware of their devious activity.
All the major central banks of the world, including the Reserve Bank of South Africa, just like the Federal Reserve Bank in the USA, are privately owned corporations with complete control of the financial markets.
These banking families and central banks are a law unto themselves and do not have to answer to anyone. For example, section 33 of the South African Reserve Bank Act allows them to keep their actions secret.
The global financial system created around the supply of money is so convoluted and complex that only a few people truly understand it. This is always used as an excuse to exclude the involvement of ordinary people.
The deeply complex legal system is used in the same way to manipulate and support this structure, denying the ordinary person access to lawful justice.
Lawful justice cannot exist under the situation where the country is a corporation; the president appoints the judges, therefore the judges work for the corporation and have to uphold the wellbeing of the corporation – not the people. And the courts are mere enforcers of the banking policy.
Banks officially do not work with money. They work with Bills of Exchange, Negotiable Instruments and Promissory Notes.
The word ‘money’ does not even have a definition in the Bank Act of South Africa, neither is the word ‘payment’ defined.
All the major money of the world is ‘FIAT’ money – this basically means that it has no intrinsic value AND it is not supported by any precious metals like gold or silver, as it was a long time ago. FIAT money is created by banks, out of thin air, when you take out a “loan.” There is actually no real loan – nothing physical is exchanged – this is the equivalent of counterfeiting. South Africa’s money supply has quadrupled in the past decade, and yet this increase supply has not seen a parallel increase in gold, silver or other real commodity reserves.
This means that the paper/plastic money we use is completely worthless. They are just fancy pieces of paper with some fancy logos printed on them with no value at all. The ‘value’ is derived purely from the masses of people who have confidence in their currency and keep using it as a method of exchange.
For example, very few people know that a payment / commission / legal bribe is paid to the South African government every time a worn note or coin is returned to the SA Reserve bank. This payment is called seigniorage and allows our government to profit from the exploitation of the people by the paper/plastic money controlled by the Reserve Bank, and ultimately the Bank For International Settlements from whom our Reserve Bank receives their orders.
Yet it is illegal to destroy these worthless pieces of paper, and people who introduce alternative pieces of paper, or copy these pieces of paper are jailed for infringement of its copyright.
The only reason our money has any value, is because we give it value – our perception of value is the only value it has. If the people lose faith in their money, the money will collapse, because nothing supports it. In fact the word ‘credit’ comes from the Latin credere which means “to believe.” Evidence of this is found almost every time a central bank governor opens their mouth. You will hear the word “confidence” uttered over and over and over again because the prime directive of a central bank governor is to maintain confidence in banking at all costs. Erosion in confidence leads to the collapse of the system. This is precisely why they placed Nelson Mandela’s face on the new South African notes – to instil and renew confidence in our money and abuse the man’s commitment to freedom.
Banks create money out of “THIN AIR” by simply creating debits and credit on the accounting computer system. This is called the Matching Principle and is governed by the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP). A “loan” is not a loan in the ordinary sense of the word, it is an instruction that you, the customer signs, in the process creating a promissory note, which you “submit” to the bank authority, giving the bank permission to issue one of their promissory notes in return. Their promissory note (which comes in the form of a computer generated bank statement) is designed to look like a loan. So, their promise back to you (in exchange for your promise to them) is the loan you are receiving. So, in essence, you instructed the bank to make money out of thin air. Because you are none the wiser, you agree to the exploitative terms and conditions outlined in the agreement which, of course, the courts will enforce in their favour.
Banks do not have money of their own to lend you as most people believe. No money existed in the system before the so called “loan” was granted to you.
Banks create money on the signatures of their clients and the so-called contracts and loans they make the customer sign. These contracts are sold in a process called securitisation to third parties, who in turn sell it on the global stock markets. This is a highly secretive and well guarded technique in which they profiteer and create undue enrichment. Then they bundle such loans and sell them back to the people via pensions funds and insurance policies. Are you confused yet? You should be – many lawyers and most judges do not understand this and this is why we had to study this ourselves to be able to defend ourselves in the courts against those lawyers who defend the banksters and understand it well. The people have to know.
By selling your signature or ‘promissory note’ or mortgage bond contract, they lose all legal rights to any property that they financed. In legal terms this is called losing ‘locus standi’.
When the bank securitises a loan, they get paid the full capital amount of the loan, plus interest, up front. This means that your loan has actually been pre-settled by a third party who is insured in case you default, while you have no idea that this is going on behind the scenes.
The banks break contract law by claiming to lend what they do not possess – money. They only create money, in most cases cyber-money, after you signed all the documents and they sold your promissory note to the third party who then on-sells it, sometimes many times, to other parties by trading it on the global stock markets. This is why securitisation is a ponzi / pyramid scheme that everyone must become aware of. It is also known as “shadow banking” which is easy to research online.
They do not disclose any of this to their customers, keeping us in the dark. You believed that they actually loaned real money. This is a lie. They never loaned you anything of any value and therefore there was never “equal consideration” where both you and the bank stands to lose something. This flies in the face of basic contract law, never mind common morality among people. But then banks are not people – they are legal fiction corporations.
You created all the value with your own mind and it was your signature that caused the release of money from the third party buyer, which the bank received on your behalf – except they never informed you of that, did they?
The banks act as intermediaries, like estate agents, because they do not lend us THEIR money. Since they do not lend us anything, but only obtain it on the strength of our signatures, from a third party, any interest they charge is pure extortion and fraud. Disclosure must take place for a valid agreement to occur.
The money in South Africa is printed by the South African Mint – also a private company that simply profiteers on the hard work of our people. However, recently this has been outsourced to Sweden which was a disaster, causing huge embarrassment for the Reserve Bank after several billion Rands worth of notes were printed incorrectly with the wrong dimensions and had to be destroyed.
The Reserve Bank, which is a private company, is in charge of printed money, which it sells or loans it to the banks at a fraction of the face value of the bank notes.
When the banks return the used bank notes to the Reserve Bank, they get paid almost the entire full face value of those bank notes, creating enrichment out of thin air for themselves, by creating money out of thin air from shuffling paper.
Banks practice what is called “Fractional Reserve Banking”. This means that they only have to retain a small percentage of any deposit and can lend out the rest many times over to the public, creating a spiral of debt on money that does not even exist.
For example: For every $100 you deposit, the bank lends out about $900 of imaginary fictitious money to their clients. The real fraud is that they charge compounded interest on this non-existent money. This is blatant fraud and anyone else would be jailed for a long time for doing this.
Interest is charged up front. Interest is considered “real money” by the bank, and so they can make more loans, out of thin air, against that interest, that did not exist in the first place.
As it stands today, there is not enough money in the world to pay off all the debt in the world, because of interest. This is exactly the situation the banksters wanted to create. A situation that gives them complete control over property and other assets that can be repossessed by the banks only to re-sell it to another naive person who will most likely end up in the same debt situation.
All this activity is continually supported by the legal system and the ignorant judges who just perpetuate the fraud in the face of clear evidence.
In some countries, hard working people are jailed for not being able to repay their debt. This a blatant crime against humanity for which the bankers should be jailed and the judges should be answerable to the people they serve. But then, they don’t serve the people, they serve the corporation that employs them – THE REPUBLIC OF SOUTH AFRICA and other corporations that masquerade as countries.
The printed notes we call money are really instruments of debt and should be illegal. Money as we know it today can only be issued as debt. In fact, about 40% of the debt of the USA is fictitious / counterfeit debt, owed to the Federal Reserve Bank who initially created it out of nothing and then charged interest on that debt. All the income tax collected in the US is used to pay off just the interest portion of the debt to the Federal Reserve Bank owners.
This is just a small taste of the convoluted web of deception that has been created to keep us ignorant and completely enslaved to the global control of the banksters.
There is no reason why we, the people, cannot create our own new form of money as an alternative to the banks’ tools of enslavement and use this new money as an interim tool to stabilise the economic crisis. A lawful kind of money that serves the people.
Money for the people by the people – Tax-free and Interest-free – no inflation – no levies – no duties – no vat – no debt slavery.
There are 8 Major Threats numerous inherent dangers in our world that can change life as we know it and even threaten our very existence, but many people choose to ignore the warning signs or simply don’t believe anything could happen to them.
Those among us who are more cautious and savvy would rather not take the risk of being unprepared for any eventuality that could put the future of a global power like America into question.
World Economic Forum lists the dangers
A good starting point when trying to assess the potential dangers that the world faces is to take a look at what the World Economic Forum considers to be the biggest dangers that threaten our stability.
The world is smaller than before and global events are increasingly likely to have a major impact on any country, regardless of where the event occurs. So even if it does not actually happen on American soil, it is likely that the impact of such an event will effect change in our lives and create a sense of panic for those that are unprepared for a geopolitical, environmental or any other crisis that might strike.
The World Economic Forum – made up of about 900 experts from around the world – have highlighted no fewer than 28 risks they believe could threaten our stability.
Geopolitical tensions
Number one of 8 Major Threats on their list, and the biggest perceived threat to world stability, is state conflict.
The crisis that is developing in Ukraine and the distinctly uneasy relationship between Russia and its European neighbors and the rest of the world, as well a stand-off between China and Japan, all suggest that there is currently a strategic power battle going on which could spill over into conflict at some point.
This is the first time in the history of the Economic Forum list of threats that geopolitical threats have made their number one spot and, just 25 years after the historic fall of the Berlin Wall, it seems that there is a very real risk of major conflict – a conflict which could drag all major powers into a scenario which could even involve nuclear power.
In search of water
Environmental concerns are rated as the second biggest threat to world stability. A lack of resources has led some commentators to suggest that water is the new oil, meaning that countries that have it will come under threat from an invasion of people who don’t have access to it.
As an estimated five billion people on the planet already have problematic access to clean water, we could easily witness the same tensions around water that we have seen surrounding the control of oil in the past.
Basically, we already need about 70% of the world’s water supply to support the agriculture that feeds the world. When you consider that the World Bank estimates that we need to increase food production by 50% by 2030 to meet the needs of the world population, it is understandable that there could be war over the control of freshwater supplies.
Be prepared
In the event of an emergency situation where your access to normal water supplies is cut off, you will need to be prepared by having a stockpile of bottled water as well as having a long term plan that goes beyond your immediate resources.
There are numerous guides on how to create an emergency water supply and how much water you might need. You might also consider reading a guide on how to create a well for your own personal water supply.
Toxins in water is another consideration. There are toxins in our water supply that present a serious health risk for humans after prolonged exposure. A simple way of combatting this threat of contaminated water is prepare your own super-water which is free of toxins, using an ingredient like Bragg Apple Cider Vinegar which will help to purify the water supply until you again have access to fresh water.
Large-scale terrorism
The terrible events that were witnessed with 9/11 set a new and unwelcome benchmark in terms of large-scale terrorism, but there are fears that further atrocities – even the use of weapons of mass destruction – could take place in the U.S and other parts of the world in the future.
The rise of Islamic State (Isil) highlights in particular how terrorism knows no boundaries. When you consider that Isil managed to grab land and mobilize some 30,000 fighters for their cause in a short space of time, large-scale terrorism is a very real threat that we should be prepared for.
Be prepared
You may be forced to defend your property and your family from a localized attack and the best way to do this is to ensure that you have a suitable cache of weapons to be able to provide the protection you need.
The Prepper Journal lists the top five firearms that you need to get your hands on, including, perhaps not surprisingly, a handgun and a shotgun.
Handguns and shotguns are relatively easy to use and if you are forced into a home defense situation that requires engaging with someone who is threatening your personal security, you can find a model that is quite forgiving if you are not an experienced shot, but still very effective. You may also consider an Aimpoint red dot sight to improve your aim.
A shotgun is also very useful if you need to hunt down small game and even larger animals if you need to go in search of food.
Trigger-happy Putin
The potential of large-scale terrorism by extremist groups like Islamic State to threaten our stability should never be underestimated but a danger that America in particular is facing is more likely to come from Russia and Vladimir Putin.
When you consider America’s history of predicting future threats, it doesn’t really inspire a great deal of confidence that Washington will judge Putin’s moves correctly or timeously.
Past events like Pearl Harbor, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the collapse of South Vietnam in the 1970’s are all major events that America’s policy elite at the time failed to predict and act accordingly.
Imposing damaging economic sanctions on the Russian president would currently appear to hurt the powerhouse based in the Kremlin. Russia has the firepower and resources to threaten America’s survival and the danger that they pose is much larger than the challenges we are currently facing in dealing with threats from ISIS.
President Putin is widely considered to believe that the revolution in Ukraine was a U.S-backed coup aimed at weakening Russia and his government has consistently and repeatedly warned against Western economic and political intervention.
In fact, America and Russia have control of over 90% of the world’s nuclear arsenal but, on the other hand, the Russians are currently struggling to keep up the U.S when it comes to investing in new warfighting technology.
The relevance of this imbalance is that Putin would consider a preemptive nuclear strike to be the best strategy to ensure they gain the upper hand. A senior Russian officer recently stated that 96% of their strategic rocket force could be launched within a matter of minutes, so pushing Putin into a corner could have serious consequences for the United States and its citizens.
Some military commentators believe that the U.S is vulnerable to a nuclear strike from Russia and it is only a matter of time before this happens.
Chemical warfare
In terms of weapons of mass destruction, chemical weapons are often perceived to be less of a danger than the one posed by nuclear and biological threats.
This is in stark contrast to the historical record of the use of chemical weapons, which are in fact the most widely used and extensively proliferated weapons of mass destruction. The effect of chemical weapons for the victim of an attack varies from experiencing severe discomfort, physical harm to death, all of which can be achieved with a relatively small amount of chemical weapons.
Many countries have stockpiled and amassed thousands of tons of chemical weapons that date back to the Cold War. The reason for this reliance on chemical weapons is that producing biological or nuclear weapons is more technologically demanding and therefore not within the capabilities of some of the potential aggressors.
There are 188 countries which have joined the Chemical Weapons Convention which means they have agreed not to develop, produce, stockpile or use chemical weapons. However, crucially, there are a number of key countries, mainly in the Middle East, which have not signed up to this treaty.
This means that one of the most volatile regions in the world could witness a rogue nation or terrorists acquiring access to these chemical weapons, which would create a very real threat to the rest of us.
Be prepared
The government has issued a guide to dealing with chemical threats and you need to be aware that these poisonous vapors, liquids or solids have a number of different effects on us, depending on which chemical is involved.
Some chemical agents can be totally odorless or tasteless and they can either affect you immediately or you might suffer a delayed effect which could take anything up to 48 hours to deliver their potentially lethal consequences.
If you have advance warning that an attack is imminent, ensure you have a supply of duct tape and plastic for doors, windows and vents as well as some scissors, so that you can create an emergency sealed shelter with some pre-measured plastic sheeting for each opening.
You should look to choose an internal room for your shelter, preferably one that is on the highest level of the house and without windows.
Cyber attacks
Congress was recently informed by U.S intelligence agencies that cyber attacks pose a greater threat to our national security than terrorism.
The report stated that intelligence had been gathered which showed that Russia, China and North Korea were the leading threats in this regard and that Russia had even set up a cyber command to carry out these attacks.
Whilst a cyber attack might not be targeted directly at you, there is a strong chance that a cyber attack on the global financial system would have far-reaching implications for many of us and could easily create a sense of widespread panic that could lead to civil unrest and a sharp rise in property crime and attacks.
Be prepared
Having a survivalists emergency supply kit will help to get through a food and resources crisis brought about by the collapse of our cyber network.
Natural disasters
Whether you consider yourself to be a prepper or a survivalist might actually be defined by your view on how to cope with a natural disaster. Many preppers like to network with other like-minded people in order to share tips and learn skills that will be useful if and when a natural disaster strikes in your area.
Learning about canning and how to build a fallout shelter are things that will help you to survive a natural disaster and cope in an emergency situation such as as an earthquake or tornado.
Be prepared
In the event of an earthquake, your primary course of action should be to crawl under a sturdy table and cover your head with your arms. If you subsequently become trapped under some debris, cover your mouth with a cloth or shirt and try to attract attention when you hear someone close by tapping against an object like a pipe. Don’t be tempted to shout out, as this will put you at risk for inhaling dangerous levels of dust which could then get into your lungs and cause breathing problems.
If there is a tornado in your area try to get shelter inside and head for the basement, if you have one. If you are outside when the tornado strikes, lie down flat in a ditch in the ground and cover your head with your hands.
If you hear a flash-flood warning, move to higher ground as soon as possible and keep away from downed power lines as they present a serious danger of electrocution.
Zombie invasion
Zombie apocalypse scenarios are very popular at the moment and the fact that there are countless movies that feature this situation only contributes to the conversation on doomsday scenarios of this nature.
Some preppers who make reference to zombies in forums use the term as a metaphor that covers any number of disaster situations and not actually a zombie invasion.
Having said that, there are a number of plausible scientific explanations that make the prospect of a zombie-like situation realistic.
Apparently half of the human population is infected with toxoplasmosis, a parasite which has the ability to turn its victims into mindless zombie-like slaves, or neurotoxins, which slow your body functions down to the point where you are almost dead.
Whether you believe in the plausibility of this particular doomsday scenario or are genuinely concerned about more tangible threats to the future of America or the world as we know it, such as nuclear war and extreme natural disasters, are you prepared?
John Oliver is an English comedian who first attracted US attention through his work on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. In April 2014, he began taping episodes of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, a weekly half-hour program that satirizes news and current events. Even as a comedy program, it focuses heavily on topics like climate change and other contemporary concerns that lend themselves to critical, in-depth discussions. HBO has given Oliver has full creative freedom and can thus he can target whomever he likes, be they corporations, politicians, or anybody else who considers themselves beyond the reach of the average journalist or comedian.
From the start, Oliver stepped in to boldly expose issues most often misrepresented in mainstream news. In May 2014, he skewered the media’s laughable coverage of the climate change “debate.” Standard news coverage on a topic of any scientific nature generally has a talking head on each side, with Bill Nye the Science Guy (or another familiar face) speaking for the scientists and some nameless “skeptic” speaking for the powers-that-be currently benefiting from the bounty of fossil fuels. Oliver decided to hold his own “statistically accurate” version of one of these conversations, quickly re-confirming that all proof points to the reality of our rapidly warming world.
As Oliver pointed out, 97 percent of the peer-reviewed papers on climate change state that it is real and is caused by human activity. Oliver then showed the audience what a televised debate reflecting that reality would look like. After seating the two or three “skeptics” on one side of a table, Oliver invited the scientists to join them, which led to a horde of people in lab coats swarming in. The scene was hilarious and the video went viral on YouTube. According to energy experts at Dominion Gas, this tactic of marrying humor and education, when it comes to energy usage and climate change, is an easy way to get viewers to tune in and learn without even trying.
A month later, Oliver took on the net neutrality question – despite admitting that many people find the topic “even boring by C-Span standards.” Maintaining net neutrality, however, is vital, for it is the chief principal of the Internet. It holds that all data should be displayed equally and that everybody should be able to access it. That means that sites affiliated with large companies should not have any advantages over other sites. Amongst other things, net neutrality makes it easier for start-ups to compete with larger entities by keeping the playing field level for everybody.
At the time, the FCC was considering changing the rules to produce a two-tiered Internet with high speed service for the bigger sites and slower speeds for everybody else. That, of course, would have drastically changed the Internet – and not for the better. Oliver ended his dissertation with an impassioned and hilarious plea to all the Internet trolls to go forth and send their angry, ranting comments to the FCC opposing the new rules. 45,000 trolls did so – and crashed the FCC’s comment page. The FCC got the hint and scuttled the new rules, at least for the time being. The net neutrality video also went viral. Oliver’s segment on the exploitation of small poultry farmers by large corporations also ended with a call to action, this time directed at members of Congress.
Oliver will also invite guests on to his show who fit and can expand on a given theme. Most famously, he got Edward Snowden to talk about government surveillance. Similarly, he invited Pepe Julian Onziema, a Ugandan LGBT rights activist, to discuss that very topic.
Since his show is on HBO, John-Oliver does have a lot of creative freedom. He doesn’t have to worry about possibly offending any advertisers. If he’d been on network television, he would not have been allowed to skewer General Motors for its mishandling of the recall crisis, since the networks all need GM’s money. HBO is not in that position, so Oliver could lambaste GM. Similarly, his show has fewer commercial breaks than do network programs so he can do things like devote 13 minutes to net neutrality. Not only can he cover a topic in greater depth, he can also issue a call to action.
John-Oliver’s use of humor makes his show both popular and effective. As mentioned earlier, his segment on net neutrality proved to be very popular – despite the fact that most people find the topic not all that interesting. His use of humor helps him make his point. Having several dozen scientists swarm the stage during a “debate” on climate change showed people that the vast majority of scientists accept the reality of climate change. In that same episode, he pointed out the fallacy of taking opinion polls on known scientific facts, for such polls only demonstrate that an embarrassing percentage of Americans don’t understand science.
John-Oliver is also willing to tackle topics like the exploitation of small farmers by large corporations that network journalists cannot or will not touch. Revealing such information can hurt the corporations, for many of their customers would presumably take their business to competitors who treat farmers fairly. To keep that from happening, the corporations try to keep their misdeeds hidden. Since Oliver names names, his fans know which corporations are involved. By using humor to inform and rouse people, Oliver performs a public service.
Russian research on the Vanguard corporation, the secret power controller of the much of the Western corporate power structure.The four companies that are present in all cases below and in all decisions: Vanguard, Fidelity, BlackRock and State Street. All of them “belong together”, but if to check out carefully the balance of shares, it turns out that in reality all these companies controlled by Vanguard. So, all of these partners or “competitors” of Fidelity, BlackRock and State Street belong to Vanguard Group.Please, look at the largest, companies in various industries, controlled by the “Big Four”, and upon closer inspection control by Corporation Vanguard: Alcoa Inc. Altria Group Inc., American International Group Inc., AT & T Inc., Boeing Co., Caterpillar Inc., Coca-Cola Co., DuPont & Co., Exxon Mobil Corp., General Electric Co., General Motors Corporation, Hewlett- Packard Co., Home Depot Inc., Honeywell International Inc., Intel Corp., International Business Machines Corp., Johnson & Johnson, JP Morgan Chase & Co., McDonald’s Corp., Merck & Co. Inc., Microsoft Corp., 3M Co., Pfizer Inc., Procter & Gamble Co., United Technologies Corp., Verizon Communications Inc., Wal-Mart Stores Inc. Time Warner, Walt Disney, the corporation «Halliburton», Viacom, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, CBS Corporation, NBC Universal …To date, tens of trillions of dollars are controlled by these investors, and all of the major global corporations controlled by the group of investors that own asset management group Vanguard: Dick Cheney, the Rothschilds, the Bushes, the Rockefellers, Clintons, Donald Rumsfeld and many other influential people and owners of the Federal Reserve. They virtually monopolized foreign and US defense policy and almost all of the major defense corporations.
Group Vanguard, itself, also controls the major world media. In addition, Corporation Vanguard is working on a number of key figures of the Central Intelligence Agency, including the namesake of a President of Vanguard , the CIA Director John Brennan.
It is important to know who really controls the major banks, and we will start from the United States.
In the first place -JP Morgan Chase with 2.39 trillion dollars of assets. Its large institutional investor is Vanguard Group, Inc. Between the top ten investors the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund, Vanguard Institutional Index Fund and the Vanguard 500 Index Fund.
In second place – Bank of America with assets 2.17 trillion. Its large institutional investor is Vanguard Group, Inc. The top ten investors – investment funds – Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund, Vanguard Institutional Index Fund, Vanguard 500 Index Fund and Vanguard / Windsor II.
The third place — Citigroup with assets 1,88 trillion. The biggest investor —Vanguard Group, Inc. First ten: Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund, Vanguard Institutional Index Fund, Vanguard 500 Index Fund, Vanguard/Windsor II, Vanguard/Wellington Fund, Inc. и Fidelity Contra Fund, Inc. We should consider that some of them, for example, «Fidelity» – this is also Vanguard, and some others, for example, «JPMorgan», is fully controlled by Vanguard, as well. «Fidelity» and its structures belong to Vanguard…
And finally, Warren Buffett’s favorite–Wells Fargo. Assets: 1.44 trillion, deposits: 1.01 trillion. The list of the largest institutional investors: Vanguard Group, Inc. is only in second place, but this is offset by the top ten investors – investment funds: Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund, Fidelity Contra Fund, Inc., Vanguard Institutional Index Fund, Vanguard 500 Index Fund and Vanguard / Wellington Fund, Inc. (All of them are Vanguard’s “daughters”)
That’s what the picture of the investigation loomed today. The largest companies in the world- are banks Bank of America, JP Morgan, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley. Let’s see who their major shareholders. Bank of America, State Street Corporation, Vanguard Group, BlackRock, FMR (Fidelity), Paulson, JP Morgan, T. Rowe, Capital World Investors, AXA, Bank of NY, Mellon.
JP Morgan: State Street Corp., Vanguard Group, FMR (it is Fidelity), BlackRock, T. Rowe, AXA, Capital World Investor, Capital Research Global Investor, Northern Trust Corp. and Bank of Mellon.
Citigroup: State Street Corporation, Vanguard Group, BlackRock, Paulson, FMR, Capital World Investor, JP Morgan, Northern Trust Corporation, Fairhome Capital Mgmt and Bank of NY Mellon.
Wells Fargo: Berkshire Hathaway, FMR, State Street, Vanguard Group, Capital World Investors, BlackRock, Wellington Mgmt, AXA, T. Rowe and Davis Selected Advisers
Check yourself again: As I mentioned above, the leading financial company is fully controlled by ten institutional and/or stock shareholders of which are the nucleus of the four companies that are present in all cases and in all decisions: Vanguard, Fidelity, BlackRock and State Street.
All of them “belong together”, but if to check out carefully the balance of shares, it turns out that in reality all these companies controlled by Vanguard. So, all of these partners or “competitors” Fidelity, BlackRock and State Street belong to Vanguard Group..
Monsanto
The corporation «Monsanto» hated by millions of people around the world, and especially in the US, but its owners did not care about it for a simple reason: no one thought about its real hosts. August 26, 2014. As the owners of «Monsanto» public perceives individuals: William U. Parfet, owning, 284,642 shares of the company, Hugh Grant – 253715, Robert T. Fraley- 95212, Brett D. Begemann – 103523 and David F. Snively to 62072 shares. Impressively, all of them – are very rich and influential people. Total all individuals – the owners of the corporation «Monsanto» have 799,164 shares.
However, the first in the list of institutional shareholders is (who would you think ?) Vanguard Group, Inc. from 31201773 shares, that is 39 or more times greater than the leading “owners” of the company in total.
Let’s see another list of shareholders «Monsanto» – mutual funds: Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund – 8118741 action, Vanguard / Primecap Fund – 6663460, Vanguard Institutional Index Fund – 5226511 and Vanguard 500 Index Fund – 517 086.
At this point, there are not any of the new players, but one new company involved: Fidelity Grows Company Fund with 4072871 shares. The trick is that the mutual fund Fidelity Investment Services working closely with Vanguard Group.
Go down to the list: Vanguard Specialized-Dividend Appreciation Index Fund – More shares 3641513. Do your eyes dazzle by Vanguard? But there is no questions for regulatory agencies: the shares are distributed among the different funds, and all of them are different legal entities!
As a leading figure of «Monsanto» known by the public is Mr. Hugh Grant with the aforementioned 253,715 shares of the corporation. He served as a President, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. Mr. Grant does not explain to any nobody, in whose hands are the reins of Monsanto’s power in reality!
GoogleGoogle!?! You search, and you guess that Google owns by a Russian Jew, Mr. Sergey Brin.
First, find a list of the owners. There are Eric E. Schmidt -1240463 shares, John L. Doerr -2767 shares, Sergey Brin -75000 shares, David C. Drummond -21332 stocks and shares Paul S. Otellini -643. Tough Guys.Go down below to the most important institutional investors, and in the first place is State Street Corporation with 22757690 shares, constituting 6.73% of the company as much as Google. So who is the real owner ?!In second place with a certain abbreviation is FMRLLC with its 20368861 shares and 6.02%. Nothing mysterious. This is Fidelity Management and Research.
The third –Vanguard Group, Inc. with 14624137 shares and 4.32%. At this stage of counting the total share of Vanguard and Fidelity is already 10.34%. Big Boys.
Important!However, we go further: among the most important investment funds of the investors of Google: first is Fidelity Contra fund Inc. with 6925967 shares or 2.05%, on the fourth –Fidelity Growth Company Fund (1,809,678, 0.54%) and on the sixth -Vanguard / Primecap Fund (1,417,843, 0.42%).Total aggregate Vanguard and Fidelity Corporations shares of Google on August 28, 2014 is 45,146,486 (forty-five million one hundred forty-six thousand four hundred eighty-six shares), while the whole world “knows” that Mr. Sergey Brin owns the Google. Mr. Brin has seventy five thousand shares. I informed you already that Vanguard owns the FidelityIn contrast to the Vanguard and Fidelity, holding voting shares, Brin interests in income rather than in control, so all of his shares belong to the category B that filed under section 14 (A) of the Act of 1934 “On Securities Exchanges ” declaration signed by Eric Schmidt. The number of category A shares that owned by Sergey Brin is 0.
However, Brin as a Director, who voting by proxy uses not his shares, but information about the owners of these shares I did not find, and it is possible that among owners of these shares would be the same Vanguard.
MicrosoftPlease, see who controls Microsoft. To do this again we will use “boring” German data, this time on https://de.finance.yahoo.com/q/mh?s=MSFT.List of Direct owners—individuals as of on August 28, 2014: Steven A. Ballmerc 333,254,734 shares, William H. Gates III -c 297992934, Mason G. Morfit -827 shares, Brian Kevin Turner -1295454, and Steven J. Sinofsky to 1176195 shares.List of major institutional investors opens Vanguard Group, Inc. to 386749214 shares, and in fourth place here FMR (Fidelity!), LLC to 272942627. In the first place on the list of the most important foundations Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund with 115,585,047 shares, and below there are Vanguard Institutional Index Fund-Institutional Index Fund -75214603 and Vanguard 500 Indexm Fund -74414992.
AT&T
Now, we will take a quick look at the AT&T. The top ten institutional investors it looks like: The Vanguard Group, Inc., State Street Corporation, Evercore Trust Company, NA, BlackRock Institutional Trust Company, NA, Bank of New York Mellon Corporation, BlackRock Fund Advisors, Northern Trust Corporation, Dimensional Fund Advisors LP, Capital Research Global Investors and BlackRock Group Limited. Only the owners of Evercore Trust Company are not recognized, but the other nine are Vanguard.The Top Ten institutional investors – investment funds
The top ten institutional investors – investment funds: Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund, Vanguard 500 Index Fund, SPDR S & P 500 ETF Trust, Vanguard Institutional Index Fund-Institutional Index Fund, Capital Income Builder, Inc., Franklin Custodian Funds-Income Fund, Spartan 500 Index Fund, Shares Core S & P 500 ETF, DFA US Large Cap Value Series and Vanguard Index-Value Index Fund. From this list it is not clear to me who owns the Shares Core S & P 500 ETF and the DFA US Large Cap Value Series. Other eight out of ten are Vanguard.https://de.finance.yahoo.com/q/mh?s=T%2C+&ql=1Comcast
Please ask me about Comcast and its purchase of 100% shares of Time Warner Cable, of a “daughter” of its alleged largest competitor, media conglomerate AT&T Cable. This “daughter”, Time Warner Cable controls 60% of both the Internet and cable television in the United States.96.69% stake in Comcast is in the hands of institutional investors. Here are the first five: STRS Ohio – 150,105,674, Capital World Investors – 134,729,551, Vanguard Group, Inc. – 125 644 169, State Street Corp. – 104 763 362, and FMR LLC -73 866 510.http://www.nasdaq.com/de/symbol/cmcsa/ownership-summaryI show to you above, but not many of other Americans know that State Street and Fidelity (FMR) are Vanguard, too.
Facts on Ebola
Gilead Sciences,
I do not remember if the FBI agents requested me to investigate transmitted contactless Virus Ebola, which was developed in CIA’s secret laboratory in Guinea by specialists of the American biotechnology company «Gilead Sciences», after which the epidemic was spread covering several countries.The Headquarter of «Gilead Sciences» is located in Foster City, California. If the FBI agents requested me to investigate Ebola, I inform you below about the real owners of the «Gilead Sciences»! If the FBI did not request me to investigate Ebola, please, delete the information below.The nominal owners—individuals: Dr. John C. Martin (President, Chief Executive Officer), Norbert W. Bischofberger, John F. Milligan, Etienne Davignon and James M. Denny.The real control of major institutional shareholders of «Gilead Sciences» belongs to Vanguard Group, Inc. Other major shareholders of mutual investments: Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund; Vanguard Institutional Index Fund, and Vanguard 500 Index Fund.
The Alpha Male, the real man, a man’s man, a warrior, a stand-up guy. It doesn’t matter what you call him, he’s a leader, the guy others look to for motivation, inspiration, and often with a hint of jealousy. He’s the man women want, without the intention of being, the center of attention.
He’s the guy, the man.
Here’s 25 characteristics that make a man, The Alpha Male
1. The alpha male is persistent. There’s no quit in this man. He’s the tortose not the hare. He’s the last man standing.
2. The alpha male can defend himself and his family. He can handle himself with his fists, to put it another way.
3. The alpha male is in peak physical shape. He’s strong and athletic as well as aesthetically pleasing to the opposite sex.
4. The alpha male is courageous. He doesn’t lack fear, rather, he accepts that it exists and faces it at every opportunity.
5. The alpha male can entertain. He has a sense of humor and can have a group of people hanging on his every word – he’s a good story teller.
6. The alpha male has stories to tell. He’s lived – and is living– a unique life. He’s made mistakes, but he’s able to find humor in them. He’s had adventures that everyone wants to hear about.
7. The alpha male can laugh at himself. This is an over-looked characteristic of an alpha male, but a necessary one. You can’t make fun of the alpha male because he’ll join in, no one can make fun of him better than he can.
8. The alpha male is humble. Some of this comes from his ability to laugh at himself. No matter what he accomplishes, his head will never balloon, and if it does, he has the ware-with-all to come back down to earth before it gets out of hand.
9. The alpha male is learned, educated. A degree isn’t a prerequisite, but a thirst for knowledge is. He wants to learn, and he does. This helps him relate to people from every social and economic standing. He can converse intelligently with the business man and the preacher. The history buff and the sports nut.
10. The alpha male is a man’s man. He’s a hard guy not to like or want to have a beer with. He’s tough, often quiet, composed, but can joke and shoot the shit with anyone.
11. The alpha male knows the value of every word, he doesn’t talk simply to hear the sound of his own voice. His words are chosen carefully. He respects their power. Whether he’s writing or speaking, he doesn’t speak to be hear, he speaks when he has something of value to say. He’s never the loudest one in the room.
12. The alpha male has a purpose. This may be his most defining trait. Where many wander through life trying to find their Self, the alpha male is too busy creating his Self. Every day he does something to bring himself closer to his goal. He isn’t a wanderer, he’s going places; it’s so obvious that everyone around him can see it.
13. The alpha male is a hard worker. He knows that nothing great is accomplished without hard work and a definite purpose.
14. The alpha male is a warrior not a worrier. He understands that certain things aren’t under his control. He does everything he can to control what he can, but doesn’t worry about what he can’t. He’s not worried about tomorrow, he’s too busy working for today.
15. The alpha male doesn’t pick a fight,but he ends it if he’s in one. He isn’t a bully. He isn’t an emotional wreck that looks for a fight at every corner. But, if the logical thing to do is to fight because the situation calls for it, he will. He’ll also never hit a man when he’s down. He isn’t fighting to destroy, but to defend.
16. The alpha male has style. He takes pride in how he looks and people respect him for that. He also knows how to dress like a man. You’d never call the alpha male a metrosexual.
17. The alpha male knows who he is, his values govern his life. He doesn’t stray from these values, in fact he stands up for them. Even when he stands alone in what he believes is right, he digs his heels in and fights.
18. The alpha male knows how to treat a lady. He respects women, often because he’s had some great one’s in his life. He’s chivalrous. He helps his lady at every chance. He helps her reach her dreams, all-the-while moving closer to attaining his own.
19. The alpha male isn’t a sucker. He isn’t a clinger. He doesn’t go out of his way to please everyone because that’s a futile endeavor. He won’t let a woman run his life. He’s his own man. Though he worships the ground his lady walks on, he knows how to pick ’em. He won’t be with a control-freak or a jealous woman. He has the social intelligence to see that storm before it peeks it’s nasty little head.
20. The alpha male is a man of value. “Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.” Einstein knew that success is reached if you’re valuable to others. The alpha male is a man of value and values. He makes the lives of others better by being a part of them.
21. The alpha male helps others, he’s generous. He has his purpose, but he knows that life isn’t merely about accomplishments, but about leaving a legacy. That legacy is how he made others feel, and how he helps others accomplish their dreams.
22. The alpha male is a leader who leads by example. He doesn’t tell people how to live, but lives in the manner he sees as best to live.
23. Alpha males throughout history, [Achilles, William Wallace, and Napoleon], saw opportunity where others saw failure. The alpha male will fail, but he won’t see failure as the end. He’s sees it as a necessary part of the experience, a stepping-stone. Knowing this allows him to try things others won’t, and to work harder when others usually quit.
24. The alpha male is stubborn. When he starts something he’s passionate about, no one can stop him or pull back on the reigns. He’s in it until the end. He’s also open-minded and willing to listen to other points of view. He knows he’s flawed and stubborn, so he gives way and learns from people who are better than him.
25. The alpha male doesn’t try to be an alpha male. That’s where so many fail. He is interested in life, in living. He’s fascinated by the world around him, in becoming the best man he can possibly become. He genuinely cares about people. He passionately works hard. He’s excited by life, by the opportunity that each day presents. He’s genuine in every facet of who he is. Each of the characteristics are possessed by him naturally, or will be as he grows as a man. Bred from curiosity, a genuine kindness, and a warrior’s heart, he is who he is, and all others follow him wherever he will lead them.
For Men
Playlist on YouTube
The Way of The Superior Man Perhaps now more than at any time, men of all ages still “tussle with the challenges of women, work, and sexual desire.” In this unabridged audiobook of the classic guide to masculine spirituality, David Deida encourages men and women to lean into the conversation and offer their most valuable assets to the world – their authentic heart and depth of presence.
More relevant than ever,The Way of the Superior Manoffers a view of a more conscious and embodied masculinity. “It is time to evolve beyond the macho jerk ideal, all spine and no heart”, writes Deida. “It is also time to evolve beyond the sensitive and caring wimp ideal, all heart and no spine.”
Including a new preface written in celebration of the book’s 20th anniversary,The Way of the Superior Manpresents the next generation of with the opportunity to grapple with fear, cultivate trust in the moment, and put forth the best versions of themselves in an ever-changing world.
So I’m certain you’ve seen the news non stop, Chapo escaped, again. Happened on a Saturday night, he disappeared from the view of a surveillance camera in his cell and went underground into a tunnel under the Altiplano maximum security prison and wasn’t seen again. That’s the summary of the official story, and the video does appear to show that he went out through the tunnel dug where his shower was located. The story being spun is that since they couldn’t see him escape because Chapo was in a blind spot for the cameras. The authorities stated that out of respect for “human rights” they didn’t want to invade a prisoner’s privacy by placing a surveillance camera that could look into the shower area. That’s their trick up their sleeve, and the one that brings the story down.
An ex prisoner of the very same jail Chapo was doing time in said there is no respect for human rights let alone privacy rights in that prison. The authorities made it seem like they thought Chapo might have just been getting ready to shower. The ex prisoner explained that showers at night are not allowed. You can only shower once, at six in the morning. So there goes that part. He also states that there are indeed cameras that can see into the shower, even the toilet. That you’re only allowed ten minutes in the shower but really about 8 since the guards rush the prisoners to finish. He says the only blind spot in a jail cell at Altiplano is under your bed. You have to take into account that the authorities have stressed that the reason for these so called blind spots, is their concern for human rights. Okay.
If you’ve read enough about the Mexican government and their many hands, then you know that the last thing on their mind is a concern for human rights for its citizens. You can look at a photo of what police did to a young student that will verify that, Google that if you would like to but a face ripped off isn’t something I recommend you look at. The Mexican authorities aren’t concerned with human rights for its citizens let alone prisoners. The conditions at that jail and many others throughout Mexico are nightmarish. Put aside that we all know they don’t care about privacy, because don’t forget about this right here.
Secretary of the Interior Osorio Chong had repeatedly stated that the reason for the blind spots was out of respect for human rights, that turned into backlash as people began to say they looked the other way. He had to state that respecting human rights for a prisoner is not the same as helping them escape. That is true, it isn’t the same thing, but he wasn’t respecting human rights, so let’s get that straight.
It was obvious from the beginning of the story that Chapo must have had help from the inside, and you could ask any Mexican if they thought he had bought his way out and they’ll laugh and explain to you how reasoning works. It was confirmed that several prison workers including the director of Altiplano were detained for their alleged roles in Chapo’s escape. The former prisoner however stated that Chapo needed to have four departments under his control in that prison because of its maximum security status. He needed to control the federal, the prison guards, the prison officials and the special guards. So obviously he was able to do that, since he’s out of prison. Outside the prison is another link of the story of how Chapo was released.
The house at the end of the tunnel had no permit to be built. How could a maximum security prison not notice a building being built not far from its walls? You can say that Mexican authorities are very relaxed with their regulations, but a maximum security prison that houses the most wanted criminals is something else. Not only did it house Chapo, it had the leader of The Zetas Cartel, leader of the Knights Templar Cartel, “La Barbie” of the Beltran-Leyva Cartel, it is the prison of the most high profile cartel leaders. Surely they would notice a house being built about a mile from their walls, right? People familiar with the area have stated how secure that entire area is, you can’t even pick up radio signals there. With regards to how Chapo could’ve pulled this off, again, it isn’t how but why. Chapo didn’t escape if the authorities allowed all the pieces to be put into place for him to leave. He didn’t escape, he just left. He left behind a nice gift at least. That little bracelet used to monitor his location.
The bracelet that kept track of him doesn’t work outside the prison walls, pretty neat feature there for a maximum security prison. That’s another story in itself, the bracelet isn’t of importance because he removed it before going down the tunnel. How did he remove it so easily? What kind of bracelet for prisoner monitoring be so easily removable? Well, it was left behind and even if he couldn’t remove it, it would have stopped working once he was out. To be honest, he could have a huge lighthouse blaring out his location on top of his head and the authorities will still not find him, because they’re not looking for him. They released him. Well, for certain the local authorities did.
Shit rolls downhill, and so does money. This is an embarrassment for the upper echelons of power. President Enrique Peña Nieto is looking like quite the fool for being en route to France as the most prolific drug trafficker in the world just slipped out of prison on a motorcycle through a tunnel. Secretary of the Interior Osorio Chong looked like he was about to suffer an anxiety attack as he held a press conference over Chapo’s escape. They might not be happy about it, but certainly the lower level officials have quite a nice family retirement plan because of this. Sorry, us Mexicans usually think about, “I hope my family is taken care of” not, “I hope the president and the top brass is happy.” I can assure you, anyone involved in letting Chapo go aren’t worrying about the future of their family. They might go to jail, but just like those who sacrifice their being to work endlessly in the US to send money back home to ensure their families are taken care of, that’s all that matters. Speaking of money, that might be the key to the whole story.
Not going to get into specifics here, but the biggest buzz from the Left in Mexico on this story is, the bigger picture. Yeah Chapo is the head of arguably the biggest and most powerful cartel in the world. It was that way when he was in jail, and when he wasn’t in jail. So why all the effort to find him, arrest him, jail him? Well, the biggest bit on that has to do with a general goal with the EPN administration. Privatization and more oversight from the US government over Mexico. There has been talks about the need to privatize Mexican prisons, among other neoliberal proposals such as in the education sector which has met with fierce resistance from education workers. There’s lots of quotes in US media from law enforcement agents saying this is an embarrassment for the corrupt and weak Mexican judicial system, that it needs more US assistance, and you get the idea. This of course is the US lead war on drugs, and they have the final say and if need be, final action. Loretta Lynch went as far to say that the US is ready to “help” Mexico find and capture Chapo. Anytime the US says they’re ready to help another country find “justice” well you know how that story ends. Sovereignty or any resemblance to it not only flies out the window, it leaves a bloody mess. Wow, sorry but I’m looking at this post and it is rather long and tedious to write and I’m certain it’s getting tedious to read as well so I’ll break this down to the core, just a moment.
The rumors, Chapo was allowed to walk right out the front door of the prison. Let’s say that was the truth, that the tunnel was just a prop to assist this novela like story streaming from the TV networks. Even if it wasn’t, his release, yes release, serves a powerful purpose. Either the Mexican state is weak and corrupt, it is. Or, it’s another excuse for a “soft” intervention from the US. It can be both, it most certainly feels that way. We forget the War on Drugs is an actual war, and propaganda is a tool of war. You can point to the bad guy and say that’s enough reason to go to war, but at least recognize that this is part of a war. So treat it like one. Bin Laden was sought after in the War on Terror and many innocent people died going after the bad guy. Remember that lives are a factor here, it’s war after all.
In this video actor Matt Damon speaks publicly on the New World Order and the Illuminati in a powerful speech.
He mentions the “topsy turvy world”we’re living in where the wrong people are in jail and the wrong people are out of jail.
He also says that the wrong people are in power, whilst the wrong people are out of power. Matt Damon has been a voice in the public eye for many years. He speaks out for human rights and freedom of information. He is a proponent of helping people and a respected actor and director. His speech is great and I am sure you guys will enjoy your time listening to it.
One of the most widely used tools for Schools monitoring kids and restricting pupils’ internet use in UK schools has a serious security flaw which could leave hundreds of thousands of children’s personal information exposed to hackers, a researcher has warned.
Impero Education Pro, a product that restricts and monitors’ students’ website use and searches, is used in 27% of UK secondary schools, according to the company. In a controversial pilot programme, a version of the software looks for extremism-related searches such as “jihadi bride”.
But last month the security researcher Zammis Clark posted extensive details of a flaw in the company’s encryption protocols which could allow almost anyone to gain full access to computers running the Impero software, run software such as spyware on the systems, or access files and records stored on them.
The company said it had released a temporary security patch and was working on a permanent upgrade.
Clark said the flaw he found would leave affected schools’ networks “completely pwned”, online slang meaning in this context that the networks’ security would be fully compromised and information on it would be rendered vulnerable.
He said he had posted it publicly, rather than privately disclosing it to the company, for several reasons. “One was that I was against the ‘anti-extremism’ stuff, the other was because not being a customer, I didn’t know where to send it.”
Schools using Impero’s software said the company had notified them of the security flaw in the middle of last month but they were offered few details of its potential scale.
One school IT manager said the response from Impero was vague and required managers to contact the firm for more information. “Impero are crap at communication,” he said.
Three schools and chains using the software that were approached by the Guardian said the company had been slow to deliver promised software patches. Impero also offered fixes to schools that were using the software without contractual support, but left it up to those schools to make contact.
One school said the most recent update on the situation from Impero arrived by email on Monday.
The company is known on school tech forums for its pushy sales techniques, but the software remains popular because of the lack of quality alternatives.
Impero stressed that no data had been compromised, it had already issued a temporary fix for the vulnerability and it would install a full solution before the start of the next academic year.
“On 13 June 2015, we were made aware that someone had maliciously and illegally hacked our product, subsequently making this hack public rather than bringing it to our attention privately and in confidence. No customers have been affected by this and no data has been leaked or compromised,” it said.
“We immediately released a hot fix, as a short-term measure, to address the issue and since then we have been working closely with our customers and penetration testers to develop a solid long-term solution. All schools will have the new version, including the long-term fix, installed in time for the new school term.”
The company said “the methods used to identify and communicate this particular issue were not legal” and they would take a “firm stance”.
“Impero Education Pro is designed to protect and safeguard children in schools and any attempt to jeopardise this by illegally obtaining and publicising sensitive information will be dealt with appropriately,”it said.
On Monday, a month after Clark first disclosed the software vulnerability, lawyers acting for Impero demanded in a letter that he should remove all of his online postings about the company, under the threat of civil proceedings for breach of confidence and copyright infringement and criminal proceedings under the computer misuse act. The letter admits the potential seriousness of the vulnerability Clark disclosed in schools’ systems.
“By publicising the encryption key on the internet and on social media and other confidential information, you have enabled anyone to breach the security of our client’s software program and write destructive files to disrupt numerous software systems throughout the UK,” it said.
Impero said the hack “could only be exploited if basic network security does not exist” and would require the hacker to be physically present in a school.
Publicly disclosing details of security vulnerabilities is a controversial practice in the online security world. Some believe private disclosure is better initially, as it gives companies time to fix flaws before they are made public, but it rarely results in legal action.
Mustafa al-Bassam, a security engineer and former member of the hacking collective Lulzsec, said the legal threat against Clark was bizarre, especially when such exploits can be used or sold for profit, rather than posted online to be fixed.
“Responding with a legal threat to a security researcher that highlighted a serious security flaw in your software is bizarre and shows utter disregard for customers,” he said.
“Unfortunately it shows a theme that is too common in the software industry: companies view security as an external PR issue because it often affects their customers more than it affects them. And they should be grateful that this security flaw was disclosed publicly instead of being sold to malware developers like Hacking Team.”
Impero’s Education Pro software serves a variety of roles in schools’ systems, including blocking inappropriate web surfing – such as adult sites – and monitoring students’ activity, as well as rationing printing and making IT administration simpler.
However, last month – just days before Clark discovered the flaw – the Guardian reported Impero was offering a new feature to monitor keywords potentially tied to terrorism or extremism before the implementation of new counter-terrorism legislation introducing a requirement on schools to monitor pupils for such signs.
The pilot, introduced in 16 UK schools and five in the US, monitors for phrases such as “YODO” – You Only Die Once – “War on Islam”, and “Storm Front”, a neo-Nazi group.
The Department for Education said: “We have been clear that schools are expected to ensure that sensitive pupil information is held securely. The Data Protection Act of 1998 is clear what standards schools are expected to adhere to and we provide guidance on this.”
A mere cursory glimpse into the future foretells of a world in which the Internet has been integrated into almost every facet of our lives. However, the flood of smartphones, laptops, and “Internet of Things”-enabled devices in recent years has led it to expand at a rate far beyond the expectations of its original creators. With today’s generation of technology pushing the limits of current fiber optic capacity, in the next decade, radical new solutions to the “capacity crunch” are crucial to the sustained success of the web.
The domain of all things digital is evolving quickly, and tomorrow’s Internet promises to be in places it never was before: inside our appliances, in far-flung villages, even in space. While some of these needs are practical (“smart” healthcare devices, learning thermostats, rural WiFi) others are purely for amusement (Netflix, the introduction of Oculus Rift). All in all, coming changes to the constantly-expanding role of the net stand to make our world a much different place than it was just several years ago.
As much of the world races to improve Internet connection speeds, researchers are concerned that the fiber optic cables which form the physical backbone of the global Internet are reaching their peak capacity and may run out of bandwidth in as soon as five to eight years. According to UK scientists, the cables and fiber optics that deliver data to users will have reached their limit by 2023. No longer able to transmit information, this may trigger an Internet collapse of epic proportions. This is a massive problem, of course, especially taking into account the fact that much of the developing world still needs to be brought online, even as Western superpowers continue to demand greater bandwidth and faster Internet speeds.
This issue has made it to the mainstream, as doomsday predictions from scientists, physicists and engineers warning of a “full” Internet summoned the attention of all who depend on the web (for cat videos, or other perhaps more worthwhile pursuits). Until now, Internet providers have kept up with increased demand simply by sending more and more data down a single line of optic fiber. But now, the optical fibers have reached maximum capacity, and cannot transfer any additional information. Some of the world’s largest providers of fiber optic connections, such as VerizonFiOS, Google, and Microsoft, have recently worked to improve their networking infrastructure to keep up with our insatiable desire for faster, stronger Internet. However, this does not change the fact that computer-to-computer interactions are growing at an exponentially faster rate than anyone had predicted.
As reported by the media, there are several Internet initiatives afoot which may serve to mitigate this issue completely. Some of the biggest names in technology today have a stake in the race to develop better and faster forms of Internet delivery, implementing some wild schemes in an attempt to move beyond broadband. From Google’s Loons to Elon Musk’s lofty plan for individual Internet satellites, some plans are perhaps less “grounded” in reality than others. However, the key to fighting capacity crunch might already be beneath our feet.
“Dark fiber” is a term used to refer to networks of unlit optical cable infrastructure, laid down and left unused during the dotcom era. In the city of San Francisco alone, over 110 miles of fiber optic cable run underground. Only a fraction of that fiber network is currently being put to use. Right now, networks of dark-fiber primarily serve corporate entities, in high-density urban centers. But experts say that putting them to use residential communities wouldn’t be tough.
Robert Steele, former intelligence officer with the CIA, has proposed another idea to solve this problem: open source everything. As the growth of online media consumption – through streaming sites such as Netflix and Youtube – promises to further skyrocket in years ahead, his solution may make the most sense.
Steele spoke on the matter, saying:
“Sharing, not secrecy, is the means by which we realise such a lofty destiny as well as create infinite wealth. The wealth of networks, the wealth of knowledge, revolutionary wealth – all can create a nonzero win-win Earth that works for one hundred percent of humanity. This is the ‘utopia’ that Buckminster Fuller foresaw, now within our reach.”
Does reaching the end of the current optical fiber limit mean an Internet apocalypse will occur within our lifetimes? Personally, I’m optimistic that engineers will soon ameliorate the problem and clean up the mess – hopefully before I have to cancel my Netflix subscription.
If you were murdered today, there’s only a 60% chance of police catching the person who did it. That number drops to 3% if you’re raped. 50 years ago, that number was much higher. What happened?
Despite overwhelming disapproval from the public, the war on drugs wages on and we are witnessing the inevitable materialization of a fascist police state before us.
The irony here is that no matter how much money the state steals from us to fund themselves, and no matter how many tanks or AR-15s they acquire, they are solving far fewer crimes than before.
Police aren’t getting any closer to “winning” this ridiculous and immoral war on drugs either.
So, why aren’t police solving crimes?
The answer to that question can be found by looking at where police allocate much of their time and resources.
Civil asset forfeiture pays. Busting low-level drug dealers by the dozen and confiscating their drugs, guns, cars, houses, and money pays. Writing tickets for victimless crime pays. Pulling you over for window tint, seat belts, arbitrary traveling speeds, and expired license plates; these are the things that pay, not solving crimes.
In criminal justice, clearance rates are used as a measure of crimes solved by the police. The clearance rate is calculated by dividing the number of crimes that are “cleared” (a charge being laid) by the total number of crimes recorded.
In the United States, the murder clearance rate in 1965 was more than 90 percent. Since the inception of the war on drugs, the murder clearance rate has plummetted to an average of less than 65 percent per year.
Despite the near complete erosion of the constitutional protections against unlawful search and seizure, the clearance rate for murder continued its free fall. This highlights the fact that no matter how many rights are given up or freedoms diminished, police cannot guarantee your safety.
It’s not just murders that police fail to investigate, it’s rapes too.
According to the Department of Justice, there are currently over 400,000 untested rape kits collecting dust in police evidence rooms nationwide, and many other estimates suggest that this number could be as high as one million.
As a result of this horrific negligence, roughly 3% of rape cases in America are actually solved. This is in spite of the fact that many rape kits have a high chance of leading to an arrest since most rapists are career criminals who have their DNA on file.
In some cases, the victims even know who their attackers were, but they can not prosecute these criminals because the evidence has yet to be processed by police.
Arresting rapists and murderers simply falls short in the two areas police are worried about; revenue collection and keeping their inflated drug war budgets flowing.
It’s not that police are incapable of solving these crimes either; they’re just not interested in doing so.
“Take for example, homicides of police officers in the course of their duty,” University of Maryland criminologist Charles Wellfordpoints out. On paper, they’re the kind of homicide that’s hardest to solve — “they’re frequently done in communities that generally have low clearance rates … they’re stranger-to-stranger homicides, they [have] high potential of retaliation [for] witnesses.” And yet, Wellford says, they’re almost always cleared.
This is why people don’t like the police.
This lack of solving crimes coupled with the increase in shakedowns of non-violent citizens has created a rift between the rest of society and police.
“One of the consequences of the war on drugs is people have stopped looking at police as their protectors and more see them as their potential persecutors,” explains Sean Dunagan, Former DEA Senior Intelligence Specialist.
The war on drugs has driven a wedge between citizens and police. If you keep locking up millions of people for victimless crimes, eventually you’ll effect enough lives to vastly tarnish your reputation.
“The police department basically becomes the “other” to the community. Once you have that breakdown, then information stops flowing, so you don’t learn about crimes. And the only crime you become interested in is the one you can solve, which is locking up people up for using drugs,” says Ed Burns, Former Baltimore Narcotics and Homicide Detective.
Locking up drug users has proven to be quite the profitable venture.
It is much easier to walk out on the street corner and shakedown a teenager who may have an illegal plant in his pocket than it is to examine the evidence in a rape or murder case. The so-called “Private” Prisons know this and have subsequently found their niche in this immoral war on drugs.
The term Private Prison is a farce from the get-go.
A truly Private prison would not be solely funded by taxpayer dollars. These Private prisons are nothing more than a fascist mixture of state and corporate, completely dependent upon the extortion factor of the state, i.e., taxation, as a means of their corporate sustenance.
A truly Private prison would have a negative incentive to boost its population for the simple fact that it is particularly expensive to house inmates. On the contrary, these fascist, or more aptly, corporatist prisons contractually require occupancy rates of 95%-100%.
The requirement for a 95% occupancy rate creates a de facto demand for criminals. Think about that for a second; a need or demand for people to commit crimes is created by this corporatist arrangement. The implications associated with demanding people commit crimes are horrifying.
Creating a completely immoral demand for “criminals” leads to the situation in which we find ourselves today. People, who are otherwise entirely innocent, are labeled as criminals for their personal choices and thrown in cages. We are now witnessing a vicious cycle between law enforcement, who must create and arrest criminals, and the corporatist prison system which constantly demands more prisoners.
The police and prison corporations know that without the war on drugs, this windfall of money, cars, and houses — ceases to exist.
If you want to know who profits from ruining lives and throwing marijuana users in cages, we need only look at who bribes (also known as lobbies) the politicians to keep the war on drugs alive.
Below is a list of the top five industries who need you locked in a cage for possessing a plant in order to ensure their job security.
Police Unions: Coming in as the number one contributor to politicians for their votes to lock you in a cage for a plant are the police themselves. They risk taking massive pay cuts and losing all their expensive militarized toys without the war on drugs.
Private Prison Corporations: No surprise here. The corporatist prison lobby is constantly pushing for stricter laws to keep their stream of tax dollars flowing.
Pharmaceutical Corporations: The hypocrisy of marijuana remaining a Schedule 1 drug, “No Medical Use Whatsoever,” seems criminal when considering that pharmaceutical companies reproduce a chemical version of THC and are able to market and sell it as such. Ever hear of Marinol? Big pharma simply uses the force of the state to legislate out their competition; which happens to be nature.
Prison Guard Unions: The prison guard unions are another group, so scared of losing their jobs, that they would rather see thousands of non-violent and morally innocent people thrown into cages, than look for another job.
What does it say about a society who’s resolute in enacting violence against their fellow human so they can have a job to go to in the morning?
The person who wants to ingest a substance for medical or recreational reasons is not the criminal. However, the person that would kidnap, cage, or kill someone because they have a different lifestyle is a villain on many fronts.
When does this vicious cycle end?
The good news is, that the drug war’s days are numbered. Evidence of this is everywhere. States are defying the federal government and refusing to lock people in cages for marijuana. Colorado and Washington state served as a catalyst in a seemingly exponential awakening to the government’s immoral war.
Following suit were Oregon, D.C., and Alaska. Medical marijuana initiatives are becoming a constant part of legislative debates nationwide. We’ve even seen bills that would not only completely legalize marijuana, but unregulate it entirely, like corn.
As more and more states refuse to kidnap and cage marijuana users, the drug war will continue to implode. We must be resilient in this fight.
If doing drugs bothers you, don’t do drugs. When you transition from holding an opinion to using government violence to enforce your personal preference, you become the bad guy.
When we shop for food in a supermarket or eat a fast food hamburger and fries, most of us don’t give much thought to the way the food was produced, or to the amount of suffering and environmental cost that went into each bite. But research is beginning to show definitively that industrialized factory farming, particularly animal agriculture, is having a catastrophic effect on the environment and poses a significant threat to human health and well-being. The following five documentaries look at these problems head on.
Indigestible: The Film (2014): This 90-minute documentary by Geri Atos examines factory farming and its effects not only on the animals being raised for food, but also on human health and on the environment as a whole. The film seeks to uncover the truth about conditions for animals in these Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, and uses interviews with experts in the public health and environmental fields to identify the far-reaching societal consequences of factory farming. You can stream Indigestible on Facebook.
Fat, Sick, & Nearly Dead (2010): Joe Cross, an affable Australian, decides he’s had enough of ill health and obesity and endeavors to transform his life. This documentary (which is streaming on Netflix) chronicles his journey as he undertakes a 60-day fruit and vegetable juice fast and travels across the United States, interviewing ordinary people along the way. Two of the people he meets are inspired by his efforts to change their own lives. At the end of his fast, Cross has lost 100 pounds and has no signs of the autoimmune disease that had plagued him. He presents his story as a cautionary tale for Americans plagued by obesity and poor diets.
Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret (2014): A close look at how industrialized farming is wrecking environment, this film features experts like Michael Pollan and Howard Lyman who argue that factory farming of animals is contributing to climate change, loss of forests, huge amounts of water pollution, and other environmental problems. Directors/producers Kip Andersen and Keegan Kuhn show that many organizations that supposedly want to help protect the climate, like Greenpeace, NRDC and Surfrider, seem to be ignoring the huge role that animal agriculture plays in messing up the environment. There’s a lot of food for thought in this one, and it’s online in full at Disclose.tv.
Cock Fight (2015): Produced by Fusion, a media company launched as a joint venture between Univision Communications and Disney/ABC, this six-part documentary tells the story of Craig Watts, a chicken farmer turned whistleblower. The picture it paints of the chicken industry is disturbing. Four companies control 54 percent of the chicken production in the United States, and they own and control almost every aspect of the production process. That leaves the farmers themselves little better than sharecroppers; most are “contractors” who don’t even own the chickens they raise and who spend much of their time killing undersized or deformed birds. Poverty, debt, and the fear of retaliation for speaking up against an unjust system are the lot of most chicken farmers today. Check this out on one of Fusion’s local channels.
Food, Inc. (2008): This PBS documentary by Robert Kenner presents a comprehensive and scathing picture of the highly mechanized global food industry which values efficiency and profit over health and well-being. The result, Kenner argues, is sick animals, environmental degradation, unhealthy food, obesity, diabetes, and other health issues, and a system in which a few giant producers hold all the power. With footage of production sites and meat packing operations, interviews with farmers, food workers, consumer advocates, and experts like Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser, Kenner marshals a vast array of evidence to make his case against the industrialization of food. Food Inc. is streaming and on DVD from Netflix.
Each of these films offers a different take on issues related to factory farming and the global mechanized food industry, but all provide important information and insights into the dangers of the current system for human health and for the health of the planet. The first step in changing any of this is becoming aware of it, so do yourself a favor and lift the veil hiding the realities of the food industry!
Anonymous radio host know as Lorax aka Adam Bennett Anon was arrested (full article).
Everybody who has known Adam ‘Lorax’ Bennett aka Adam Bennett Anon knows he’s an awesome anon. Furthermore, the article now let us know he was also involved in his local community as an experienced life saver and a fundraising manager for Cancer Support. This kind of person doesn’t belong in jail! He belong to it’s people. The people he give each day of is life to protect.
If you’ve know Lorax, or Adam John Bennett, now is the time to get involved and help!
The lifesaving Lorax’s tale took an interesting turn the last few nights, as the internets and ircs were ablaze with controversy, flame wars, and a little good-ole-fashioned ‘he-said she-said.’ What was already looking like a classic tale of governmental overreach and the suppression of Adam John Bennett’s Civil-Rights is turning into a dark tale of deception, duplicity, and police-led treachery. While there was much argument among the anons present, one thing was very clear, the Australian government had tricked and deceived a minor in an unsuccessful attempt to lure the Lorax into a hacking scheme. Having failed in that they have continued to attempt to argue that the research work that he did at his job for a Cancer fighting charity that showed a clear problem with the same security protocol that the Australian Government was proposing using with it’s upcoming, Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Amendment (Data Retention) Bill 2014, plan for telecoms to keep their customer’s e-mail and phone metadata for two years.
Soon after Bennett began criticizing the plan there was an alleged hack into AATP (third-largest telecom in Australia) and the Indonesian government, Anonymous was blamed. The Government initially charged the Lorax and two hackers with the breach. After nearly a year of delays and continuations, the court announced that all of the charges for hacking by Bennett would be dropped, but replaced with obscure sounding charges like, “aiding and harassment.” It has become ever more clear that there wasn’t ever much of a case and the government is using Bennett’s bail restrictions to keep his LoraxLive show off of the air.
This dark tale really begins in 2011, even before the government started suggesting an ill-conceived data retention scheme, before anyone hacked AATP and the Indonesian government. Back in the heyday of lulzsec a 15 year-old hacker who we’ll call Hacker-Z (not his real hacker handle) was caught up in the glamour and prestige of the lulzsec-style direct-action hacking. Hacker-Z was like almost nearly ever teenage boy he wanted to listen to loud music and raise a little hell. That sounds anti-social perhaps, but when you see that the things that young hacktivists want to break are things like evil autocratic governments like Libya or Tunisia, or on-line bullying groups, that anti-social streak can begin to turn an odd shade of heroic on a young person. Apparently, according to general consent, it wasn’t hard for the same sort of Five Eyes investigators–who were at that same time acting as the nefarious Sabu’s puppet masters, in a separate scheme to entrap Anons–to get a hold of this inspired, if naive teenager.
Having entrapped the would-be activist with an illegal hacking scheme, they first terrified the lad and his mother with the prospect of nearly life in prison for his unsuccessful attempt, while being directed by undercover government agents, to hack government and military websites; according to some in the chatroom. Having scared his mother as best they could it was easy for the police to convince her to give consent for them to use their son as a mole to keep an eye on on-line hacktivists. Any mother if, confronted with the prospect of sending her only child to prison, for probably, the rest of his life would almost surely make the same decision. Having Hacker-Z as a mole worked well for the police apparently, he was generally reported to be a friendly, helpful, and affable young man. No one on this side of things is sure how much information he really got in his few years, probably, working for the police, but needless to say when he was arrested with the Lorax, many a hard drive was wiped, just in case.
It seems the feds kept Hacker-Z on ice until the day they needed him. That day came, apparently, during the summer of 2012, when the Australian Government first proposed the current anti-privacy legislation that they are quietly pushing through the legislature right now. When The Lorax caught wind of the Government’s plan he immediately saw the obvious problems with warehousing the entire Australian population’s personal web data. Even if the government could show an actual need for all of this personal, which they can’t, Bennett honed in on the first and most obvious problem, security. Eventually Bennett showed, at his workplace, while testing their server, that recent flaws found in OpenSSL, the so called “Heartbleed Bug” could eventually lead to losses of citizen’s personal data to criminals or terrorists, if the government continued with their data retention plan.
Seeing the problem the Lorax did what the Lorax does when the community is in danger; he warned people through his popular show, Lorax Live, whose archives, that haven’t been seized by the government, can be heard here and here. Obviously, the leaders and politicians backed by corporatism and fully vested in the telecom industry, couldn’t afford to have a lot people aware of or critical of their massive transfer of both citizen’s data and the nation’s wealth, in the form of fees paid by taxes, to the nation’s telecoms. No, classically, power becomes annoyed when confronted by truth, this story is no different.
By the Winter of 2012, as far as the Australian government and the Australian Federal Police were concerned; the Lorax had to be silenced. Later when they learned that, while at his job testing his employer’s server’s security, Bennett had discovered a way that the “Heartbleed Bug” might be used to access encrypted files on a server, the very sort of thing that privacy advocates had been screaming about ever since the government first suggested the data retention program, government agents hatched a plan to silence the Lorax.
The police knew that they would never convince a reputable, white-hat security researcher like Adam John Bennett to participate in a criminal attack on the internet’s infrastructure. It is rumored that the police devised a plan to implicate the Lorax without needing him to take part in any illegal activity. To do this, they gathered up their friendly young, unfortunate mole, Hacker-Z and sent him into an irc chat with the Lorax and had him plead with Bennett to give him, Hacker-Z, Bennett’s note’s from his research work on OpenSSL. The authorities, it seems, hoped that by obtaining information on how one might be able to attack encryption from the researcher they could implicate him in a crime and, at least, keep his radio show off the Internet until they got their data retention plans passed into law.
Perhaps more despicable than the government’s attempt frame and implicate a man are its motives, of depriving a citizen of his civil-rights, and its methods of abusing the criminal justice system through the attempted entrapment of an innocent man, and misuse of a citizen’s right to bail in order to silence a benign, but vocal critic of governmental corruption and malfeasance. This is not Syria or Zimbabwe where a critic can simply be tossed in a hole or executed by despots, in “free” societies, like Australia, you must design administrative and judicial straps with which to bind their tongues and hands to things like restrictive bail requirements or plea agreements, to trumped up or false charges. The critic is silenced, the powers-that-be have no blood on their hands, the media calls the former hero-of-the-people a villain, and whatever danger the critic was fighting against is forgotten. It’s all very civilized.
If the police were unaware of who they were dealing with or simply unfamiliar with the world of white-hats is unclear. Bennett did not give their mole any help or information, and not because he believed he was a mole. (As a white-hat researcher Bennett was well aware of cyber-crime and the need for enforcement in the field, it can assuredly be assumed then that he supports law-enforcement and legitimate undercover operations, but any thinking adult would have to wonder about the wisdom of using children as moles to bait and entrap adult criminals.) No, it is rumored that Bennett refused to help the boy, not because he believed he was working with police, rather he believed that the youth might be an impassioned young hacktivist who could possibly do something unwise or damaging with the information, something that might hurt others as well as get the lad in trouble with the law. Most likely, in Bennett’s mind, the young Hacker-Z would be better off waiting until the bugs in OpenSSL were fixed to get a look at the Lorax’s research notes.
Blown off course, but not sunk by the Adam John Bennett’s integrity, the Australian Government tried a new, indirect tack to get their entrapment scheme back on course. They would have Hacker-Z engage an intermediary, another White Hat researcher, someone the Lorax would trust. They found him in a passionate young researcher we’ll call Hacker-X. Hacker-X was known as a knowledgeable and helpful security expert. He had long been very helpful getting newbloods on the right track on-line and helping others secure their computer systems. Like a lot of hacker culture Hacker-X believes in education and the open-sharing of information, not to cause damage but to protect from damage.
Imagine you bought a lock for your front door, it’s a common lock, and there are many like it in your neighborhood. If there was a flaw in that lock that could allow criminals to enter your home then you would like to know about it, wouldn’t you? Of course you would, and it would be good for you to know so you could find a way to fix it or replace it, so the burglars can’t come in. Certainly, you wouldn’t want burglars to know about the flaw, but luckily the vast majority of humans aren’t burglars, likewise very few people interested in computer security are criminals. So, for a researcher such as Hacker-X to want to share something that could easily be used to help secure a network, is understandable and legal. It’s not clear if he already had possession of the notes from Lorax’s research into OpenSSL, or if he actually obtained them on behalf of Hacker-Z, regardless, sharing information about a weakness in an encryption protocol is not illegal, as the Australian Government’s delays and recent charge droppings indicate.
Whether the police were directly involved in or only supervising the alleged hacks on AATP and the Indonesian government isn’t clear, but it has become very clear that they never had any evidence against Adam John Bennett, the Lorax. In an extraordinary judicial move they have dropped all of the charges against Bennett, but have come up with ten new charges that, they claim they will commit to at his next hearing in June. While on one hand it is great to think that the Lorax may end up getting the justice he deserves in a dismissal of all charges at his next hearing, what is maddening is the obvious and bald faced way in which the Australian Government is misusing the criminal justice system to keep him Bennett on the restrictive bail terms that prevent him from broadcasting his show, LoraxLive and his protest about the government’s data retention plan.
The case of Matt DeHart, a former U.S. drone pilot turned hacktivist, is as strange as it is disturbing. The 29-year-old was recently denied asylum in Canada, having fled there with his family after — he claims — he was drugged and tortured by agents of the FBI, who accused him of espionage and child pornography.
Prosecutors have shown they’re willing to say anything to convict a hacktivist, even if it means lying
Last week the Canadian Border Services Agency said he will be deported to the U.S. to stand trial “in very short order,” after a Canadian Immigration and Refugee Board ruling earlier this month denying his request for refugee status. He is being denied access to two thumb drives that he says contain evidence of illegal acts perpetrated by a U.S. government agency. Now after three unsuccessful attempts to gain political asylum, he fears that he and the files will be delivered to the very government he sought to escape.
“I cannot imagine any life in a country which has already tortured me,” Matt DeHart told reporter Adrian Humphreys, whose astonishing five-part series in Canada’s National Postdocuments the bizarre case. “Am I now to be given into the hands of my torturers?”
It’s tempting to dismiss DeHart’s claims based on their sheer outlandishness and his equally outlandish attempts to defect to Russia and Venezuela, which he now says he regrets. But given President Barack Obama’s administration’s penchant for punishing hacktivists and whistleblowers, a disturbing decades-long trend of prosecutorial misconduct and the now established fact that the U.S. has, as Obama put it, “tortured some folks,” it’s clear that the U.S. government’s claims in this case warrant even more skepticism.
Matt DeHart
According to government documents, Matt DeHart admitted during an interrogation to becoming involved with a spy ring during his time as a drone pilot, agreeing to broker the sale of military secrets for up to $100,000 per month through a Russian agent in Canada. But he claims he was being drugged and tortured and simply made the story up.
“I would have told them anything,” he told The National Post of his encounter with the FBI agents, during which he was denied a lawyer. “Information that is derived from torture — to use it against somebody is ridiculous. It’s garbage. I already said it’s not true.”
He testified that the agents admitted the child porn charges were fabricated — a ruse to enable investigation into his involvement with the nebulous hacktivist collective Anonymous. He says the investigation stems from a file he uploaded twice to a hidden website, hosted on the anonymous Tor network from a server in his parents’ house. DeHart claims it contained evidence of government wrongdoing, “an FBI investigation into the [CIA’s] practices.” Screen shots of the WikiLeaks website found on his computer suggest he intended to send the file to the whistleblowing organization.
After the asylum ruling earlier this month, three courts — two in the U.S. and one in Canada — have expressed strong doubts about the child pornography charges that triggered a search warrant onMatt DeHart’s parents’ home in the U.S. Those accusations date to 2008 and stemmed from his association with two teenagers while playing the online game “World of Warcraft,” one of whom was also involved with Anonymous; the charges were ultimately not proved.
After DeHart was arrested while crossing from Canada to the U.S. in 2010, a judge in Bangor, Maine, found it odd that prosecutors were suddenly citing the two-year-old porn accusations and that police hadn’t analyzed Matt DeHart computers for illicit files seven months after they were seized. A judge in Tennessee, where Matt DeHart ‘s family lived before moving to Canada, admitted that “the weight of the evidence is not as firm as I thought it was.” And most recently, the Canadian Immigration and Refugee Board concluded there was “no credible or trustworthy evidence” that DeHart had solicited child porn.
Prosecutorial misconduct helps the government railroad journalists, whistleblowers, hacktivists and any who dare to speak truth to power.
To be sure, Matt DeHart strange behavior throughout this ordeal doesn’t place him in a particularly flattering light. But it’s worth noting that these kinds of serious accusations are often made in cases against hacktivists and whistleblowers, helping place them in the government’s crosshairs and paint them as nefarious even when the accusations are easily disproved.
Barrett Brown, a journalist who investigated links between the U.S. government and private intelligence contractors, had all manner of ridiculous false accusations thrown at him before being sentenced last month to five and a half years in prison. He was initially charged for the innocuous act of copying and pasting a hyperlink to a public file stolen by Anonymous from one chat room into another. The charge was dropped, but the linking was still used to increase the length of his sentence, despite the fact that prosecutors had no evidence Brown had looked at the file or even known what was in it.
At one point, prosecutors claimed that Brown conspired with members of Anonymous to overthrow the U.S. government. They also accused him of participating in “SWATting,” the practice of making fake 911 calls to harass people in their homes, and even of plotting with another journalist to hack the Bahraini government. Not one of these claims was supported by the voluminous collection of chat logs that the government provided as evidence. Nor did additional logs obtained by The Daily Dot, which the prosecution had withheld under seal.
Brown was not entirely without fault in the case, having obstructed a search warrant and posted a YouTube video threatening an FBI agent in response to the seizure of his laptops. But in retrospect, it seems clear the impetus for the case was that the government saw Brown’s investigations as a threat and would say anything to guarantee his conviction, even if that meant knowingly making false statements. As Brown put it during his allocution, “This is not the rule of law … It is the rule of law enforcement.”
Close scrutiny
What can we expect from the Matt DeHart case if this is the prosecutorial legacy it follows?
As The New York Times editorial board recently noted, defendants have no recourse when police and prosecutors lie, cheat and conceal evidence in the courtroom, leading to what one federal judge has described (PDF) as a national epidemic of prosecutorial misconduct. Sometimes it leads to wrongful convictions. Other times, as in Brown’s case, it helps the government railroad journalists, whistleblowers, hacktivists and any who dare to speak truth to power.
Remember Aaron Swartz, an information activist who prosecutors pursued vigorously for the act of downloading too many academic articles from an MIT library? Much like in Brown’s case, prosecutors were accused of withholding evidence and coercing Swartz into taking a guilty plea. Swartz committed suicide in 2013 amid mounting legal costs and the possibility of up to 35 years in prison, triggering the DeHarts’ decision to flee the country.
“Aaron Swartz had very similar psychological makeup, similar age, same circumstances as Matt DeHart,” DeHart’s father, Paul DeHart, a retired U.S. Air Force major, told The National Post. “I do not want to wake up one day and find my son hanging from a rope in the garage of our house. And I have noplace to go to bring this to anyone’s attention.”
With Matt DeHart’s attempted defections and other erratic behavior, it’s admittedly difficult to determine where his true intentions lie. But the government’s actions against him have been just as sketchy, if not more so. His claims must be taken seriously, and his case should be closely scrutinized, lest another potential whistleblower fall prey to the state’s merciless war on leaks.
by Joshua Kopstein, a cyberculture journalist and researcher from New York City. His work focuses on Internet law and disorder, surveillance and government secrecy.
Aaron Swartz was a computer programmer and Internet activist who is often referred to as the third founder of Reddit.
Early Years
Aaron Swartz was born on November 8, 1986, in Chicago. Precocious from the start, Swartz taught himself to read when he was only three, and when he was 12, Swartz created Info Network, a user-generated encyclopedia, which Swartz later likened to an early version of Wikipedia.
Info Network landed Swartz in the finals for the ArsDigita Prize, and he also was invited to join the RDF Core Working Group of W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), a group assembled to help the Web evolve.
RSS & Creative Commons
Swartz’s next steps were co-authoring news aggregator RSS 1.0 (which went on to become the industry standard) and moving to San Francisco to write code for Creative Commons, a public domain watchdog group. He then headed to California to study sociology at Stanford University. At Stanford, he downloaded law review articles from the Westlaw database and used the data to write an important paper about the connection between research funders and biased results. However, he left academia after only a year, taking a leave of absence to join Y Combinator, an incubator for up-and-coming Internet talent.
Also around this time, Swartz’s new project, Infogami, merged with Reddit.com, making Swartz a co-founder of the resulting company. Reddit had millions of visitors per month when Condé Nast bought it a year later (2006).
In 2008 Swartz wrote “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto,” which was an argument against information being hoarded and controlled by any particular group. The document ended with a demand that information be freely available and grabbed forcibly, if need be: “We need to take information, wherever it is stored, [and] make our copies and share them with the world.”
Felony Charges
That fall, Swartz decided to take on PACER, a system that charged users to download court documents. Through an algorithm he wrote, Swartz downloaded 19,865,160 pages of text from the database. By the spring of 2009, FBI agents were at Swartz’s door, questioning him about the downloads. The investigation was dropped, but a year later Swartz began downloading academic articles from the JSTOR archive at MIT, ending up with around 5 million documents. Swartz’s motivation for downloading the articles was never fully determined, however, friends and colleagues believe his intention was either to upload them to the Internet to share them with the public or analyze them to uncover corruption in the funding of climate change research.
After launching activist group Progressive Change Campaign Committee and later Demand Progress, in January 2011, Swartz was detained in Cambridge, Mass. by police and Secret Service agents. Since his activities in PACER, the government had been watching, and by July 2011, Swartz was facing multiple counts of computer and wire fraud, charges that could have resulted in 35 years in federal prison.
Suspicious Death – Murdered?
When Aaron Swartz refused to deal with the devil, did the government “suicide” him?
“You could eat a sandwich in the time it takes to suffocate from hanging. If he really was as depressed as media says, he could have easily gotten a prescription for Xanex, put on some nice music, light some candles and gone to sleep and never wake up. Why hanging? “
Aaron Swartz was found hung in his Brooklyn apartment. The coroner and Media say he killed himself.
Swartz was no Occupy Wall Street hippie. At 27, he’d already reached the top of his field. He was a software genius and Internet champion. He co-authored the “RSS 1.0” a widely-used syndication format. he also co-founded Reddit which was sold to Conde Naste. He founded Open Library, an internet database dedicated to obtaining public domain documents that had been appropriated by private interests. He ‘hacked’ the Library of Congress database and uploaded it to Open Library making it available for free.
The “social media” industry has virtually taken over every aspect of human communication. This industry increasingly is synonymous with erosion of privacy and commercialism. The movie, ‘The Social Network’ glorified Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg, as a ‘genius’ at betrayal of friends and classmates in order to get sex, money, and power.
Aaron Swartz wasn’t as famous as Mark Zuckerberg – but he was an effective advocate for freedom of information. He wasn’t billionaire, or even a millionaire, though he could have been. Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig said, “He never did anything for the money”.
LEGAL PROBLEMS
In 2010, Swartz downloaded the entire JSTOR archives because the organization pays the publishers of scholarly articles, not the authors.
On July 19th, 2011, the Attorney General of Massachusetts threw the book at him. He was charged under the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, otherwise known as “hacking”. But this broad, fuzzy law wasn’t a good fit for downloading uncopyrighted articles with intent to redistribute.
At the moment, that’s not a crime yet. Making such a thing a crime is what the PIPA / SOPA bills meant to do. Undaunted by the warning from Federal muscle to “chill”, last year Swartz was a significant organizer against the SOPA bill that threatened freedom of information access on the internet.
Lawrence Lessig, said, “The government was not gonna stop until he admitted he was a felon. In a world where the architects of the financial crisis regularly dine at the White House, it’s ridiculous to think Aaron Swartz was a felon.”
Lessig knew Aaron for twelve years. He was Swartz’ advisor on intellectual property law for Creative Commons and Open Library.
WAS HE MURDERED?
The mainstream media has been doing a snow job to make us believe that Aaron Swartz committed suicide by tying a rope around his neck and hanging himself.
Personally, I think he would have been creative enough to think of a less horrible way to die. You could eat a sandwich in the time it takes to suffocate from hanging. If he really was as depressed as media says, he could have easily gotten a prescription for Xanex, put on some nice music, light some candles and gone to sleep and never wake up. Why hanging?
Hanging is a horrible way to die. The sentence of hanging was intended to send a message to other offenders “this could happen to you”. I think that’s why Aaron Swartz died by hanging. It’s a message to other activists — probably those he knew who worked with him.
Swartz’s father is an intellectual property consultant to MIT’s computer lab. At Aaron’s funeral, he said his son was killed by the government.
Media has since spun Swartz’ father’s remark as if it he was speaking figuratively. Don’t you believe it. I don’t like the way mainstream media writers frame Swartz’s hanging as a reaction to ‘bullying’. It implies Swartz was afraid of the government, that he was a coward, or mentally ill.
That’s not it. Swartz’s career shows the familiar pattern of attempts to assimilate him into the system – scholarship to Stanford, lucrative job under auspices of WIRED, a fellowship from Harvard’s institution on ethics. All these perks failed to control him, so they switched to Federal muscle tactics.
Each attempt to control him drove him further beyond the pale. But I think his death warrant wasn’t issued till last year when he became an effective leader of a million people and stopped the PIPA and SOPA bills. Effective leaders aren’t allowed.
Bertrand Russell wrote frankly that geniuses would be carefully offered a place with the elite, but those that persisted in bucking the system would be exterminated. From “The Scientific Outlook”, 1931, Russell wrote;
“On those rare occasions, when a boy or girl who has passed the age at which it is usual to determine social status shows such marked ability as to seem the intellectual equal of the rulers, a difficult situation will arise, requiring serious consideration. If the youth is content to abandon his previous associates and to throw in his lot whole-heartedly with the rulers, he may, after suitable tests, be promoted, but if he shows any regrettable solidarity with his previous associates, the rulers will reluctantly conclude that there is nothing to be done with him except to send him to the lethal chamber before his ill-disciplined intelligence has had time to spread revolt. This will be a painful duty to the rulers, but I think they will not shrink from performing it.”
Lessig said “Aaron Swartz is now an icon, an ideal. He is what we will be fighting for, all of us, for the rest of our lives.”
An unnamed scientific researcher walks out to her mailbox, shuffles through some bills and advertisements, and pulls out an envelope containing a CD of pictures from a recent scientific conference the researcher had attended in Houston. Excited – though maybe a bit nervous – to see the candid photos of herself and her colleagues snapped by an excitable event photographer, the researcher walks inside, casually drops the unopened bills on the kitchen table, opens up her laptop, and slides in the CD. Windows asks if she’d like to open the pictures to view them. She accepts, and the pictures pop up in the photo viewer. One by one she clicks through them, viewing the photos from the event. She reminisces fondly, wincing only at that one photo where she looks either drunk or high, making mental note of the pictures to print out for her lab desk.
What the researcher doesn’t see, however, is a malicious payload – a virus, one of the most sophisticated known to man – secretly installing itself in the background of her computer. This virus would give a certain secret group of individuals complete access to her system, a group which had hijacked the package mid-transit in the mail, replaced the original CD with a copy that included the virus, taped everything back up without evidence of tampering, and sent the package on its way to her. The virus was practically untraceable and completely irremovable; it could map out networks, jump to computers not connected via the Internet, and even selectively target and destroy specific computers much like a bioengineered nano-virus – all at the direction of a secret shadow organization that was covertly infiltrating the world’s most secure computer systems.
The Equation Group
What may sound like the start to a Tom Clancy novel, or an episode of 24, is, in fact, completely real, the likes of which actually happened to one or more researchers back in 2009. In fact, surreptitious, interdiction-based cyberattacks like this one have apparently been happening since at least the early 2000s and may date back to 1996.
Last Monday, Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab released a cybersecurity report uncovering details about the most sophisticated, covert, and pervasive hacker groups known to man and possibly ever imagined. The organization, dubbed the Equation Group due to the group’s affinity towards sophisticated encryption methods, had operated practically undetected for over a decade, silently infecting computers across the globe and delivering attack payloads still unknown.
“There is nowhere I can’t go. There is nowhere I won’t find you.” – Bane, The Matrix Revolutions
Kaspersky Lab, a cybersecurity firm known primarily for its antivirus software, is no stranger to hackers. The company tracks and documents security breaches of all shapes and sizes.
For years, most high-profile computer hacks had been primarily the work of individuals or small groups motivated by curiosity or, more recently, financial interest – gray-collar criminals who would infiltrate computer systems for credit card numbers to sell on the black market. Usually these attacks are relatively unsophisticated, relying on bad operational cybersecurity practices (dubbed “opsec”) from corporations to create exploitable security holes like those seen in the recent Target and Home Depot security breaches. Only upon the discovery of the Stuxnet virus in June 2010 that sabotaged Iran’s Natanz uranium enrichment facilities have cybersecurity researchers and the public at large turned an eye towards advanced persistent threats (APTs) which use advanced hacking techniques capable of bypassing strong opsec protocols.
What make Equation Group so impressive are their “almost superhuman” technical feats, which include never-before-seen levels of ingenuity in hacking, engineering, and encryption. Those feats include:
using virtual file systems like those found in the Regin (a.k.a. WarriorPride) malware attack used by the NSA to infect overseas computers;
the ability to infect and surveil sensitive air-gapped (i.e. non-Internet connected) networks by piggybacking on USB flash drives, much like the Stuxnet virus;
encrypting malicious files and storing them in multiple branches of the Windows registry, making it immune to detect with antivirus software;
using over 300 Internet domains and 100 servers to command and control malware infrastructure; and
hijacking URL requests on iPhones to spoofed Mac servers, which indicates that Equation Group has compromised the iOS and OSX operating systems.
Hollywood good
Perhaps most impressive is an Equation Group malware platform that rewrites the firmware of infected hard drives, allowing the virus to survive even low-level reformatting that is used to securely wipe a hard drive. All major hard drive manufacturers have drive models that have been compromised, including Western Digital, Seagate, Maxtor, Samsung, IBM, Toshiba, and Micron. Once the drive has been infected, the malware is completely impossible to detect or remove; the drive is compromised forever.
Forensics software displays, in Matrix-like fashion, some of the hard drives Equation Group was able to successfully hijack. (Credit: Kaspersky)
The difference in sophistication between your average Internet hacker and Equation Group cannot be understated. Your run-of-the-mill hacker is more or less equivalent to your run-of-the-mill burglar, who might break into a place with all of the sophistication of opening an unlocked door or busting out a window with a crowbar. APTs are more like museum thieves who might dress up like a guard or clone a keycard to snatch a valuable diamond or painting. Equation Group is an APT well beyond its peers, using super-spy tactics with analogical laser grids, vent shafts, and harnesses to swap a diamond with a perfect replica, remaining entirely undetected. It’s the stuff of Hollywood’s Mission: Impossible, only without the gratuitous explosions and Tom Cruise (…at least as far as anyone knows). And like Mission: Impossible, Equation Group is more than likely a clandestine operation of the U.S. government. via RedOrbit
“Discoveries and inventions are not terminals; they are fresh starting points from which we can climb to new knowledge.” – Dr. Willis R. Whitney, founder of General Electric Laboratories
After so many years of watching airplanes produce the lines in the sky, largely without knowing of what this Project consists or why, we have recently gained an understanding. Evidence suggests that today’s chemtrail spraying operations consist of airplanes saturating our atmosphere with nano-sized particles influenced by electromagnetic energy for the purpose of weather modification.
U.S. patent #4,686,605 “Method and Apparatus for Altering a Region in the Earth’s Atmosphere, Ionosphere and/or Magnetosphere” shows how stratospheric and tropospheric aerosols can be manipulated using electromagnetic energy in order to modify the weather. The ground-based antennas (known as ionospheric heaters) needed to produce the appropriate electromagnetic energy exist. For a detailed discussion, please see the author’s previous article “Smoking Gun: The HAARP and Chemtrails Connection.”
The 1996 U.S. military document “Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025” outlines a program using aerosols sprayed from airplanes which are then manipulated with electromagnetic energy in order to modify the weather. This document will be discussed shortly.
The common thread here is weather modification; or as the Library of Congress calls it, “weather control.” Lots of other evidence supporting this assertion exists as well, but these two documents are the most salient.
Motives are plenty. Most notably, significant direct benefits can be gained by playing financial markets which rise and fall with the weather such as the weather derivatives and catastrophe reinsurance markets; not to mention agricultural and energy commodities. Enron pioneered the markets. With foreknowledge of the weather, so many scams could be concocted that it boggles the mind. Weather routinely changes the course of Human history. It determines what we do every day. It determines the outcomes of wars and influences elections. Control of the weather is God-like power. Money and power junkies want it.
Controlling Earth’s weather would necessarily require a gigantic scientific effort. Oddly enough, when one looks for a National effort in weather modification, one finds a lot. Specifically, if one looks, one can find a history of weather control programs involving electromagnetic energy and atmospheric particles; all in a coherent chronological order.
This paper is the result of thousands of dollars and countless hours spent researching many thousands of pages of source, organizational and Government documents related to weather modification and the atmospheric sciences. This article serves as the foundation for a series of shortly forthcoming articles detailing the history and current state of this Project. May this work help end the spraying. For the fact that these environmental modifications have been done without our informed consent, may this work contribute to the largest class-action lawsuit in history.
This paper examines the origins and development of this; the first planetary level scientific endeavor. Now is our opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of the New Manhattan Project.
The Origins of Weather Modification
People have been attempting to modify the weather for ever. Most commonly, man has gone about making it rain; especially in times of drought. The earliest recorded efforts were those of mystics. Local shaman would be called upon to ingest a certain concoction in order to communicate with the weather gods and ask for help. In some cases, the sacrifice of certain animals in certain fashions may have been the thing to do. Sometimes a good old rain dance may have done the trick.
Some early Western efforts to stop destructive weather are outlined in professor James Fleming’s book Fixing the Sky. On page 78 he writes, “In ancient Greece, the official ‘hail wardens’ of Cleonae were appointed at public expense to watch for hail and then signal the farmers to offer blood sacrifices to protect their fields: a lamb, a chicken, or even a poor man drawing blood from his finger was deemed sufficient.”
A little later professor Fleming writes, “In Austria, it was traditional to ring ‘thunder bells’ or blow on huge ‘weather horns’ while herdsmen set up a terrific howl and women rattled chains and beat milk pails to scare away the destructive spirit of the storm.”
Much of the early Western attempts at weather modification involved the detonation of explosive charges in the lower atmosphere. It was hypothesized that atmospheric explosions cause precipitation.
Early American Involvement
Although there has been much international participation, this article focuses on America’s participation in the New Manhattan Project. Throughout the development of the New Manhattan Project, America was the world’s technological leader; especially in the area of military technology. America led the way and developed most of this Project. America continues to lead the Project today. Therefore the early history of weather modification in America is relevant.
James Pollard Espy (1785-1860) also known as “The Storm King” was the first meteorologist in U.S. government service. Although he never received Federal funding for it, he suggested that forest fires can produce rainfall and that experiments in this area should be carried out. His magnum opus was a book called The Philosophy of Storms. This book contains a long section entitled “Artificial Rains.”
The first Federally funded weather modification field effort took place in Texas in 1891, with funds appropriated by the Congress in the amount of nine thousand dollars through the Department of Agriculture. The experiment involved weather modifier Robert St. George Dyrenforth (1844-1910) attacking the atmosphere with balloons, kites, dynamite, mortars, smoke bombs and fireworks. The results were inconclusive, but you can bet that the atmosphere was absolutely terrified!
From these early efforts until the beginning of the scientific era in 1946, the realm of weather modification was inhabited largely by a motley collection of pseudo-scientists and con artists similar to Dyrenforth. These people, who referred to themselves as “rainmakers,” traveled around the Country (mostly the West), going where local governments were willing to pay for their services. If a certain region was experiencing a severe drought, people were often desperate for solutions. These rainmakers’ activities often involved the mixing and open air release of dangerous chemicals. Some of these efforts were Federally funded. Since the days of Robert Dyrenforth, the Federal money has not stopped flowing.
Nikola Tesla
In the late 1800s, inventor Nikola Tesla (1856-1943) popularized the use of electromagnetic energy. In his 1905 United States patent number 787,412 “Art of Transmitting Electrical Energy Through the Natural Mediums” Tesla describes how electromagnetic energy may be sent and received through the atmosphere. The Supreme Court found that U.S. patent #645,576 “System of Transmission of Electrical Energy” proves he invented radio; not Marconi. He pioneered radar. He invented wireless signal and power transmission. Yes, power can be transmitted wirelessly; we’ll have more about that later.
Tesla’s musings and scientific discoveries pioneered what are today’s ionospheric heaters which use electromagnetic energy to cause atmospheric perturbations from great distances and play a defining role in the New Manhattan Project. Specifically, he pioneered the use of a certain type of electromagnetic energy called extremely-low frequency (ELF). This is a specific type of energy known to be used in the New Manhattan Project; the other being very-low frequency (VLF) electromagnetic energy.
In her book Tesla: Man Out of Time, Margaret Cheney writes that he did a good deal of theorizing about weather control. She also writes that he theorized that the entire earth might be illuminated by shooting electromagnetic energy 35,000 feet up into the atmosphere. 35,000 feet is about the altitude of today’s offending airplanes.
The Beginning of the Scientific Era
The scientific era of weather modification began famously in 1946 with a trio of scientists from General Electric Laboratories: Irving Langmuir, Vincent Schaefer and Bernard Vonnegut. Leading the group was the world famous Nobel Peace Prize winning scientist Irving Langmuir (1881-1957). This trio popularized the fact that, under certain circumstances, dumping substances from airplanes into clouds causes precipitation. Early experiments used dry ice while later experiments pioneered the use of silver iodide. Also invented were silver iodide generation equipment and many other weather related scientific instruments. Much of this trio’s work here was done in cooperation with the Office of Naval Research and the Air Force. Although others had previously dumped stuff out of airplanes in attempts to modify the weather, the G.E. scientists practiced a sound scientific method previously unseen in the field.
Schaefer, Langmuir & Vonnegut
image source: General Electric Laboratories
Following the famous scientific weather modification efforts of the G.E. Labs trio, the public’s imagination was sparked and a government regulated weather modification industry flourished. To this day, the government-regulated weather modification industry (or “conventional” weather modification industry as we will call it) expels dry ice, lead iodide or silver iodide (usually silver iodide) from airplanes.
However, the conventional weather modification industry is distinct from the New Manhattan Project and therefore is not the focus of this article. The New Manhattan Project employs electromagnetic energy to manipulate dispersed particles while conventional weather modifiers do not. Also, conventional weather modification efforts are conducted on a regional basis while the New Manhattan Project is global.
Not long after the scientific breakthroughs of the G.E. Labs trio, fueled by high level political rhetoric and popular interest, the United States federal government began pouring hundreds of millions of dollars annually into basic atmospheric research. Since then, the United States government is admitted to have spent many tens of billions of dollars on weather modification and the atmospheric sciences. Much of that was expended in 1950s, ’60s and ’70s dollars. If one is to control the weather, one must know how the atmosphere works. Or as geoengineer Dr. Clement J. Todd wrote in 1970, “Our ability to manage precipitation depends upon four factors: (1) understanding the physical processes of the atmosphere, (2) real-time knowledge of the weather we wish to manipulate, (3) devising the optimum treatment material and technique, and (4) delivery of that treatment to the cloud where and when we wish.”
The majority of the vast expanses of literature pertaining to weather modification and the atmospheric sciences is geared towards conventional weather modification. However, both the New Manhattan Project and conventional weather modification are supported by basic atmospheric research. So, buried in this body of literature, one may find glimpses of the New Manhattan Project. The rest of this paper recounts these glimpses.
Bernard Vonnegut
One member of the G.E. Labs trio, Bernard Vonnegut (1914-1997) went on to pioneer weather modification research involving the use of artificial electric charges and atmospheric aerosols. His work in this area was performed under Government contracts outsourced to a research and development firm called Arthur D. Little Inc.
Bernard Vonnegut
image source: Life Magazine
The earliest recorded instances of electricity being intentionally used to modify particles in the atmosphere can be found in the 1884 experiments of Sir Oliver Lodge (1851-1940). The 1918 U.S. patent #1,279,823 “Process and Apparatus for Causing Precipitation by Coalescence of Aqueous Particles Contained in the Atmosphere” by J.G. Balsillie built upon Lodge’s work. Using this knowledge as a basis, Mr. Vonnegut resumed Lodge’s work; this time with massive funding and modernized scientific equipment.
Beginning in 1953, Bernard Vonnegut, Arthur D. Little et al., conducted experiments involving stainless steel wires miles long strung from the tops of telephone poles, connected to a power supply and discharging corona. The coronal discharge’s effect upon ambient aerosols and the clouds above was monitored and analyzed. Through 1961, these experiments were carried out in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Texas, Illinois and New Mexico. These types of experiments are referred to as “space charge” experiments. The U.S. Signal Corps and the U. S. Coast Guard provided support. Others performed similar experiments.
Space charge experiment
image source: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The 1958 “Final Report of the Advisory Committee on Weather Control” contained an article by Bernard Vonnegut, Vincent Schaefer, J. S. Barrows and Paul MacCready titled “The Future.” In it they outline an atmosphere saturated with “chemicals” and “altering” atmospheric electrical variables. It reads:
When the nature of thunderstorm electrification is understood it may prove possible to control this process by the introduction of chemicals into the atmosphere or by altering electrical variables. Such variables might be atmospheric conductivity, field, and space charge, or perhaps the corona giving properties of the earth’s surface.
When we become sufficiently sophisticated concerning the dynamics of the atmosphere it is possible that weather may be controlled by the large scale release of chemical or more probably thermonuclear heat energy.
In 1961, Bernard Vonnegut, Arnold W. Doyle and D. Read Moffett wrote a paper for Arthur D. Little titled “Research in Electrical Phenomena Associated with Aerosols.” This was a report about their experiments of the previous 3 months involving the effects of electromagnetic energy upon a grounded sphere in a small chamber surrounded by gas. Please consider the implications of that. We will revisit this paper much later.
If you are wondering… yes, Bernard Vonnegut was related to the novelist Kurt Vonnegut. They were brothers.
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In 1958 the chief White House advisor on weather modification, Captain Howard T. Orville, said the U.S. defense department was studying “ways to manipulate the charges of the earth and sky and so affect the weather” by using an electronic beam to ionize or de-ionize the atmosphere over a given area.
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The Department of Commerce Weather Bureau reported in 1960 that they were conducting a weather modification study in which, “Chemicals are introduced into the cloud which noticeably changes the surface tension of the droplets. Electrification effects are being observed by artificially electrifying the droplets and subjecting them to impressed electric fields.”
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For better or for worse, this super secret program had a prophet. His name was United States Navy Admiral William Francis Raborn (1905-1990).
William Francis Raborn
image source: United States Navy
In the January 1963 edition of the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, Admiral Raborn outlined a program using electromagnetic energy to modify the weather. His article was entitled “New Horizons of Naval Research and Development.” In this paper, underneath the heading of ‘Environmental Warfare’ he wrote:
The possibilities for the military employment of the “weather weapon” may be as diverse as they are numerous. An ability to control the weather could introduce greater changes in warfare than those which occurred in 1945 with the explosion of the first nuclear weapons.
A severe storm or hurricane striking a naval force may well inflict greater damage than could an enemy. The capability to change the direction of destructive storms and guide them toward enemy concentrations may exist in the future arsenal of the naval tactical commander.
Ground, sea, air and amphibious operations might be supported by the dissipation of fog or clouds, or by the production of rain or drought. Conversely, the creation of solid, low overcasts might be used to conceal troop concentrations, movements, and task force deployments. Large-scale weather control techniques might be used to cause extensive flooding in strategic areas or even to bring a new “ice age” upon the enemy. By influencing the ionosphere and atmosphere simultaneously, magnetic, acoustic, and pressure effects might be generated in such a way that ocean-wide sweeping of mines would occur.
Creating or dissipating atmospheric temperature/humidity ducts might modify the refractive index of the atmosphere enough to influence radar or radio transmission. Artificially-induced ionospheric storms might produce a blackout of communications.
Certain electromagnetic waves are unable to pass through an area of precipitation. A cloud seeding generator could be employed under appropriate meteorological conditions to produce precipitation that would interfere with the operation of radio-guided or remotely-controlled devices or vehicles. We already have taken our first steps toward developing an environmental warfare capability. We are using satellite weather data from Tiros II for current, tactical operations and more accurate, long-range weather predictions. Some experiments in fog dissipation have shown promise, and some exploratory research has been conducted on ways to change the heading of major storms.
For these reasons – and because our advances in science make it reasonable – we are now engaged in planning a ten-year, comprehensive study of the atmosphere, a study which we will designate ATMOS. This plan will be co-ordinated with our TENOC oceanographic studies.
About the ATMOS program, the author has failed to find any other significant information. The author has looked over a 1961 report pertaining to the Navy TENOC (Ten Year Program in Oceanography) program. Although it did not contain any specific information pertinent to the New Manhattan Project, it did make mention of another, classified TENOC report.
It is notable that the title of Raborn’s article includes the word “horizon” because the type of electromagnetic energy to which he refers is akin to “over the horizon radar.” This type of radar is called “over the horizon” because it is bounced off the ionosphere and therefore is effective far beyond the range of the forty miles or so (depending on terrain) afforded by previous radar systems. Forty miles is approximately the distance one can see over flat land or sea before the curvature of the Earth obscures points beyond. Over the horizon radar, on the other hand, is effective to thousands of miles. Today’s ionospheric heaters evolved as over the horizon radar.
Also of note is the fact that the United States Navy, of which Mr. Raborn was an admiral, is today one of the managers of the HAARP facility in Alaska. The HAARP facility contains the world’s most powerful ionospheric heater which is documented to be able to modify the weather.
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In the 1967 National Science Foundation’s ninth annual weather modification report, it reads, “ESSA [Environmental Science Services Administration] is also investigating the effect of cirrus clouds on the radiation budget of the atmosphere by studying aircraft-produced contrails which often spread into cirrus layers covering considerable fractions of the sky. One technique proposed for modifying lower cloud development has been the generation of a high level cirrus deck with jet aircraft. By intercepting solar radiation at high altitude it may be possible to influence larger scale cloud development elsewhere by reducing solar input and reducing convective cloud generation in areas where they are not needed.” This is essentially today’s geoengineering thesis.
A little later in that same report, it reads that their computer atmospheric simulations, or ‘models’ as they call them, might simulate, “…producing high-level cirrus cloud cover over an area by means of jet aircraft, inserting particulate matter into the upper atmosphere to alter the solar radiation balance and the like.”
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In 1966, the Interdepartmental Committee on Atmospheric Sciences Select Panel on Weather Modification produced a document titled “Present and Future Plans of Federal Agencies in Weather-Climate Modification.” On page 17 of this report, it reads, “It is anticipated that there will be a few large-scale facilities funded for the testing of modification schemes. Typical schemes might be the suspension of a spray nozzle over a valley between two mountain peaks to produce cloud-sized droplets into which electrical charges can be introduced in either polarity, contaminants can be introduced, and the drop size spectrum can be adjusted to any reasonable distribution.” The Interdepartmental Committee on Atmospheric Sciences subsequently agreed to proceed with the development of a National Weather Modification Program along the lines of this report.
The now defunct Interdepartmental Committee for Atmospheric Sciences (ICAS) was created by the Federal Council for Science and Technology in 1959 in order to oversee and coordinate a wide range of basic atmospheric research originating from many previously disparate government offices. Their focus was weather modification. Members of the ICAS included the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Interior, Transportation and State as well as the Environmental Protection Agency, the Energy Research and Development Administration, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the National Science Foundation. These are the government agencies which have been involved in weather modification all along.
The ICAS produced a series of semi-annual reports between 1960 and 1978. In these reports, ICAS member organizations’ weather related scientific activities and expenditures were recounted. The ICAS reports’ areas of study included: Earth’s natural geomagnetic energy, different ways clouds form and different ways they precipitate, lightning, hurricanes and other extreme weather, inadvertent weather modification, intentional weather modification and extra-planetary atmospheres. The ICAS is duly noted here because so much of the history of the New Manhattan Project is accounted for in the pages of their reports.
In the 1969 ICAS report, under the heading of “Cloud Electricity Modification,” it is written that the National Science Foundation is developing, “Means for injecting significant quantities of charge artificially into clouds…”
Again in this 1969 report, on page 37 it describes the Army’s intentions in the area of weather modification. It reads, “Studies will continue on upper atmospheric structure and dynamics, lasers and other electromagnetic propagation, and acoustic propagation. New approaches to atmospheric modification will be studied.”
On page 42 of the 1971 ICAS special report “A National Program for Accelerating Progress in Weather Modification,” the authors write of fog being cleared by airplanes releasing chemicals and ‘electrical methods’ of fog dissipation.
On page 79 of the 1973 ICAS report, it is written, “There is a great deal to be learned before we can with confidence say what effect can be produced by the injection of chemically active trace gasses and particulates into the lower stratosphere. New emphasis has been given to both dynamical and physical meteorological research relevant to this question.”
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United States patent #5,003,186 “Stratospheric Welsbach Seeding for Reduction of Global Warming” was filed by the Hughes Aircraft Corporation in 1991. The patent describes a method for dispersing particulates into the upper atmosphere in order to save us from global warming. The author David B. Chang suggests that aluminum oxide be used for this purpose. Lab tests from around the world have shown aluminum to be the number one chemtrail ingredient.
“One proposed solution to the problem of global warming,” it reads, “involves the seeding of the atmosphere with metallic particles. One technique proposed to seed the metallic particles was to add the tiny particles to the fuel of jet airliners, so that the particles would be emitted from the jet engine exhaust while the airliner was at its cruising altitude.”
The first mention of aluminum occurs in this passage, “The method comprises the step of seeding the greenhouse gas layer with a quantity of tiny particles of materials characterized by wavelength-dependent emissivity or reflectivity, in that said materials have high emissivities in the visible and far infrared wavelength region. Such materials can include the class of materials known as Welsbach materials. The oxides of metal, e.g., aluminum oxide, are also suitable for the purpose.”
The second mention of aluminum occurs a little later. It reads, “Another class of materials having the desired property includes the oxides of metals. For example, aluminum oxide (Al2O3) is one metal oxide suitable for the purpose and which is relatively inexpensive.”
The Hughes Aircraft Corporation was acquired by and is now integrated into Raytheon.
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A 1994 document produced by Stanford Research International called “Multiple Instrument Studies of Chemical Releases and Heating at Arecibo” details three barium releases of 48 kilograms each over Puerto Rico. The barium clouds produced by these rocket-borne explosions were subsequently hit with man-made electromagnetic energy from an ionospheric heater and thus turned into a plasma. Barium has been found to be the number two chemtrail ingredient.
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In 1996 the Air Force produced a previously mentioned document called “Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025.” The document was produced by the Department of Defense and written as ordered by the chief of staff of the Air Force, Ronald R. Fogleman. “Owning the Weather” was but one in a series of 39 documents speaking to a great overhaul of Air Force operations to be achieved by the year 2025. The larger set of documents is called “Air Force 2025.” “Owning the Weather” describes a system of weather modification combining atmospheric aerosols with electromagnetic energy.
On page 2 the document reads, “Prior to the attack, which is coordinated with forecasted weather conditions, the UAVs begin cloud generation and seeding operations. UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] disperse a cirrus shield to deny enemy visual and infrared (IR) surveillance. Simultaneously, microwave heaters create localized scintillation to disrupt active sensing via synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems such as the commercially available Canadian search and rescue satellite-aided tracking (SARSAT) that will be widely available in 2025. Other cloud seeding operations cause a developing thunderstorm to intensify over the target, severely limiting the enemy’s capability to defend. The WFSE monitors the entire operation in real-time and notes the successful completion of another very important but routine weather-modification mission.”
The document mostly speaks to military combat applications, but there are some very interesting quotes. Here’s one, “In the United States, weather-modification will likely become a part of national security policy with both domestic and international applications.” Let’s hear more about those “domestic applications”
On page 34 the document reads, “The ability to modify the weather may be desirable both for economic and defense reasons.”
Also in 1996, as part of the same series containing “Owning the Weather,” the Air Force produced a document entitled “An Operational Analysis for Air Force 2025” which briefly outlines something they call a “weather analysis and modification system.” This system is described as employing both particulate seeding and microwave energy for the purpose of weather modification.
Under the heading of “Weather Analysis and Modification System,” the document reads, “A global network of sensors provides ‘weather warriors’ with the means to monitor and accurately predict weather activities and their effects on military operations. A diverse set of weather modification tools allows manipulation of small-to-medium scale weather phenomena to enhance friendly force capabilities and degrade those of the adversary.”
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In the mid-nineties, Lawrence Livermore Laboratories scientists Edward Teller, Lowell Wood and Roderick Hyde wrote a series of papers calling for the spraying of megatons of aluminum to save us from global warming. The mid-nineties was when reports of chemtrail spraying in American skies began pouring in. If you will recall, aluminum has been found to be the number one chemtrail ingredient.
In their 1997 paper “Global Warming and Ice Ages,” the Livermore Labs trio wrote, “It has been suggested that alumina injected into the stratosphere by the exhaust of solid-rocket motors might scatter non-negligible amounts of sunlight. We expect that introduction of scattering-optimized alumina particles into the stratosphere may well be overall competitive with use of sulfur oxides; alumina particles offer a distinctly different environmental impact profile.”
They continue to espouse the virtues of stratospheric alumina in the footnotes writing, “Alumina, like sulfate, is ubiquitous in the terrestrial biosphere, and its stratospheric injection seemingly poses no significant environment issues.”
In conclusion
So there you have an evolutionary history of a project employing sprayed particles and the electrification of clouds for the purpose of weather modification. Is this a coincidence? Are all these examples simply isolated, one-off events not a part of a larger overall plan? What are the odds of these data points evolving in a chronological order such as they have without being part of a coordinated effort? One may be looking at something like a quadrillion to one; and that is conservative.
For five days only, from Thursday, February 19 through Monday, February 23, my ebook Chemtrails Exposed will be available for free from Amazon.
Stay tuned. God willing, this article is only the first of many coming in this year; 2015. The heavy lifting (studying the history of weather modification) is complete. The next papers will come much easier because they involve smaller topics and half or more of the work on each is already done. Although the topic will remain secret until publication, you can expect the next article in a couple of months, possibly sooner. Until then, keep firing in the information war. Thank you.
U.S. patent #4,686,605 “Method and Apparatus for Altering a Region in the Earth’s Atmosphere, Ionosphere and/or Magnetosphere,” 1987
“Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025” by Col. Tamzy J. House, Lt. Col. James B. Near, Jr., LTC William B. Shields (USA), Maj. Ronald J. Celentano, Maj. David M. Husband, Maj. Ann E. Mercer and Maj. James E. Pugh, published by the United States Air Force, 1996
Early History of Cloud Seeding by Barrington S. Havens, published by the Langmuir Laboratory at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, the Atmospheric Sciences Research Center at the State University of New York at Albany and the Research and Development Center of the General Electric Company, 1978
Interdepartmental Committee for Atmospheric Sciences reports 1960-1978, published by the Federal Council for Science and Technology
“Department of the Interior Program in Precipitation Management for 1970” by Dr. Clement J. Todd as it appeared in the “Proceedings of the Twelfth Interagency Conference on Weather Modification” 1970
U.S. patent #1,279,823 “Process and Apparatus for Causing Precipitation by Coalescence of Aqueous Particles Contained in the Atmosphere”
“Technique for Introducing Low-Density Space Charge into the Atmosphere” by B. Vonnegut, K. Maynard, W.G. Sykes and C.B. Moore, published by Arthur D. Little and the Journal of Geophysical Research, volume 66, number 3, March, 1961
“The Future” by Bernard Vonnegut, Vincent Schaefer, J. S. Barrows and Paul MacCready, published in the Final Report of the Advisory Committee on Weather Control, p201, 1958
1st National Science Foundation annual weather modification report, p14, 1960
“New Horizons of Naval Research and Development” by William Francis Raborn, published in U.S.Naval Institute Proceedings, January, 1963
“Ten Year Program in Oceanography: TENOC” by the U.S. Navy, March 13, 1961
9th National Science Foundation annual weather modification report, 1967
“Present and Future Plans of Federal Agencies in Weather-Climate Modification” by the Interdepartmental Committee on Atmospheric Sciences Select Panel on Weather Modification, 1966
Interdepartmental Committee on Atmospheric Sciences memorandum to Homer E. Newell dated June 21, 1966, as it appeared in the appendix to “Present and Future Plans of Federal Agencies in Weather-Climate Modification” by the Interdepartmental Committee on Atmospheric Sciences Select Panel on Weather Modification, 1966
“The Interdepartmental Committee on Atmospheric Sciences: A Case History” by Robert E. Morrison
U.S. patent #5,003,186 “Stratospheric Welsbach Seeding for Reduction of Global Warming,” 1991
“Multiple Instrument Studies of Chemical Releases and Heating at Arecibo” by Stanford Research International, published by Stanford Research International, 1994
“Air Force 2025” by the U.S. Air Force, published by the U.S. Air Force, 1996
“An Operational Analysis for Air Force 2025” by the U.S. Air Force, published by the U.S. Air Force as part of “Air Force 2025” by the U.S. Air Force, published by the U.S. Air Force, 1996
Global Warming and Ice Ages by Edward Teller, Lowell Wood and Roderick Hyde, published by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, 1997
Palm Beach County, Florida – Journalists at the DC Post were looking through message boards that are frequented by law enforcement officers, when they found a post where one officer was causally talking about planting evidence on “mouthy drivers” and “street lawyers.”
The Post then contacted the officer and conducted an anonymous interview with him where he revealed his disturbing perspective.
The officer revealed the illegal and unethical actions that he is proud of taking on the job. The DC Post has also said that they have verified the officer’s position with the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office, and they have verified many of the claims that he has made.
The original post was titled “Tricks of the trade – let’s exchange!” and featured the following message:
“I have a method for getting people off the street that should not be there. Mouthy drivers, street lawyers, assholes and just anyone else trying to make my job difficult. Under my floor mat, I keep a small plastic dime baggie with Cocaine in residue. Since it’s just residue, if it is ever found during a search of my car like during an inspection, it’s easy enough to explain. It must have stuck to my foot while walking through San Castle. Anyways, no one’s going to question an empty baggie. The residue is the key because you can fully charge some asshole with possession of cocaine, heroin, or whatever just with the residue. How to get it done? “I asked Mr. DOE for his identification. And he pulled out his wallet, I observed a small plastic baggie fall out of his pocket…” You get the idea. easy, right? Best part is, those baggies can be found lots of places so you can always be ready. Don’t forget to wipe the baggie on the person’s skin after you arrest them because you want their DNA on the bag if they say you planted it or fight it in court.”
Other officers on the board responded by sharing similar stories about how they falsely arrest people who don’t adequately bow to their authority.
Later in the interview, when the officer was asked if planting evidence happened regularly within his department, he responded by saying,
“Um, yes it does, on a regular basis. Probably every day in my shift. I work nights on the Road Patrol in a rough, um, mostly black neighborhood. Planting evidence and lying in your reports are just part of the game.
Then straight from the horses mouth, the officer said that this crooked behavior was actually encouraged by the drug war. Continuing his discussion about planting evidence, the officer said,
“Yes, all the time. It is something I see a lot of, whether it was from deputies, supervisors or undercovers and even investigators. It’s almost like you have no emotion with it, that they attach the bodies to it, they’re going to be out of jail tomorrow anyway; nothing is going to happen to them anyway. One of the consequences of the war on drugs is that police officers are pressured to make large numbers of arrests, and it’s easy for some of the less honest cops to plant evidence on innocent people. The drug war inevitably leads to crooked policing — and quotas further incentivize such practices. It doesn’t help that your higherups all did the same thing when they were on the road. It’s like a neverending cycle. Like how molested children accept that as okay behavior and begin molesting children themselves.”
When asked if he would get in trouble with the police department for framing people, the officer laughed and said that this type of behavior was actually encouraged.
“Our top boss, Sheriff Ric Bradshaw, supports this behavior and has for his entire career. As with anything, it depends on who you know in our agency. Last year, we had three deputies on the TAC unit, Kevin Drummond and Jarrod Foster, get caught falsifying information for a warrant. They got a pat on the back for a job well done. Just recently, we had a deputy, I think his name was Booth. He was caught completely lying on a car crash. Back a few more years, our Sheriff was involved a massive coverup of the death of two black deputies. He hid the report for years. This is only the beginning. The Sheriff has been involved in falsification of documents and his underling, Chief Deputy Michael Gauger, has been personally involved in an overtime scandal to steal money from the Sheriff’s Office. Does our Sheriff know about this behavior? Of course he does. We have even had a judge outright accuse my agency of committing fraud upon the court in a public hearing. She was one of the ones who saw through all the lying and covering up our department does to get away with the internal crime committed by deputies on a regular basis,” he said.
Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office is no special police department, and this officer is not just a bad apple. The problems that are discussed in this interview are systematic, and they occur in every town across the country.
Just this week, we exposed a police department in Missouri whose officers were forced to make arrests or faced losing their job. This leads to otherwise innocent people being charged on a regular basis.
Also this week, the Free Thought Project conducted a report to show what happens to cops who try to expose this corruption. Several officers within the Chicago police department were threatened with “going home in a casket” for exposing this same vile practice within their ranks. via FreeThoughtProject
AMERICAN AND BRITISH Leaked: NSA Spies hacked into the internal computer network of the largest manufacturer of SIM cards in the world, stealing encryption keys used to protect the privacy of cellphone communications across the globe, according to top-secret documents provided to The Intercept by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden.
The hack was perpetrated by a joint unit consisting of operatives from the NSA and its British counterpart Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ. The breach, detailed in a secret 2010 GCHQ document, gave the surveillance agencies the potential to secretly monitor a large portion of the world’s cellular communications, including both voice and data.
The company targeted by the intelligence agencies, Gemalto, is a multinational firm incorporated in the Netherlands that makes the chips used in mobile phones and next-generation credit cards. Among its clients are AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, Sprint and some 450 wireless network providers around the world. The company operates in 85 countries and has more than 40 manufacturing facilities. One of its three global headquarters is in Austin, Texas and it has a large factory in Pennsylvania.
In all, Gemalto produces some 2 billion SIM cards a year. Its motto is “Security to be Free.”
With these stolen encryption keys, intelligence agencies can monitor mobile communications without seeking or receiving approval from telecom companies and foreign governments. Possessing the keys also sidesteps the need to get a warrant or a wiretap, while leaving no trace on the wireless provider’s network that the communications were intercepted. Bulk key theft additionally enables the intelligence agencies to unlock any previously encrypted communications they had already intercepted, but did not yet have the ability to decrypt.
As part of the covert operations against Gemalto, spies from GCHQ — with support from the NSA — mined the private communications of unwitting engineers and other company employees in multiple countries.
Gemalto was totally oblivious to the penetration of its systems — and the spying on its employees. “I’m disturbed, quite concerned that this has happened,” Paul Beverly, a Gemalto executive vice president, told The Intercept. “The most important thing for me is to understand exactly how this was done, so we can take every measure to ensure that it doesn’t happen again, and also to make sure that there’s no impact on the telecom operators that we have served in a very trusted manner for many years. What I want to understand is what sort of ramifications it has, or could have, on any of our customers.” He added that “the most important thing for us now is to understand the degree” of the breach.
Leading privacy advocates and security experts say that the theft of encryption keys from major wireless network providers is tantamount to a thief obtaining the master ring of a building superintendent who holds the keys to every apartment. “Once you have the keys, decrypting traffic is trivial,” says Christopher Soghoian, the principal technologist for the American Civil Liberties Union. “The news of this key theft will send a shock wave through the security community.”
THE MASSIVE KEY THEFT IS “BAD NEWS FOR PHONE SECURITY. REALLY BAD NEWS.”
Beverly said that after being contacted by The Intercept, Gemalto’s internal security team began on Wednesday to investigate how their system was penetrated and could find no trace of the hacks. When asked if the NSA or GCHQ had ever requested access to Gemalto-manufactured encryption keys, Beverly said, “I am totally unaware. To the best of my knowledge, no.”
According to one secret GCHQ slide, the British intelligence agency penetrated Gemalto’s internal networks, planting malware on several computers, giving GCHQ secret access. We “believe we have their entire network,” the slide’s author boasted about the operation against Gemalto.
Additionally, the spy agency targeted unnamed cellular companies’ core networks, giving it access to “sales staff machines for customer information and network engineers machines for network maps.” GCHQ also claimed the ability to manipulate the billing servers of cell companies to “suppress” charges in an effort to conceal the spy agency’s secret actions against an individual’s phone. Most significantly, GCHQ also penetrated “authentication servers,” allowing it to decrypt data and voice communications between a targeted individual’s phone and his or her telecom provider’s network. A note accompanying the slide asserted that the spy agency was “very happy with the data so far and [was] working through the vast quantity of product.”
The Mobile Handset Exploitation Team (MHET), whose existence has never before been disclosed, was formed in April 2010 to target vulnerabilities in cellphones. One of its main missions was to covertly penetrate computer networks of corporations that manufacture SIM cards, as well as those of wireless network providers. The team included operatives from both GCHQ and the NSA.
While the FBI and other U.S. agencies can obtain court orders compelling U.S.-based telecom companies to allow them to wiretap or intercept the communications of their customers, on the international front this type of data collection is much more challenging. Unless a foreign telecom or foreign government grants access to their citizens’ data to a U.S. intelligence agency, the NSA or CIA would have to hack into the network or specifically target the user’s device for a more risky “active” form of surveillance that could be detected by sophisticated targets. Moreover, foreign intelligence agencies would not allow U.S. or U.K. spy agencies access to the mobile communications of their heads of state or other government officials.
“It’s unbelievable. Unbelievable,” said Gerard Schouw, a member of the Dutch Parliament, when told of the spy agencies’ actions. Schouw, the intelligence spokesperson for D66, the largest opposition party in the Netherlands, told The Intercept, “We don’t want to have the secret services from other countries doing things like this.” Schouw added that he and other lawmakers will ask the Dutch government to provide an official explanation and to clarify whether the country’s intelligence services were aware of the targeting of Gemalto, whose official headquarters is in Amsterdam.
Last November, the Dutch government proposed an amendment to its constitution to include explicit protection for the privacy of digital communications, including those made on mobile devices. “We have, in the Netherlands, a law on the [activities] of secret services. And hacking is not allowed,” Schouw said. Under Dutch law, the interior minister would have to sign off on such operations by foreign governments’ intelligence agencies. “I don’t believe that he has given his permission for these kind of actions.”
The U.S. and British intelligence agencies pulled off the encryption key heist in great stealth, giving them the ability to intercept and decrypt communications without alerting the wireless network provider, the foreign government or the individual user that they have been targeted. “Gaining access to a database of keys is pretty much game over for cellular encryption,” says Matthew Green, a cryptography specialist at the Johns Hopkins Information Security Institute. The massive key theft is “bad news for phone security. Really bad news.”
The Chicago police department operates an off-the-books interrogation compound, rendering Americans unable to be found by family or attorneys while locked inside what lawyers say is the domestic equivalent of a CIA black site.
The facility, a nondescript warehouse on Chicago’s west side known as Homan Square, has long been the scene of secretive work by special police units. Interviews with local attorneys and one protester who spent the better part of a day shackled in Homan Square describe operations that deny access to basic constitutional rights.
Alleged police practices at Homan Square, according to those familiar with the facility who spoke out to the Guardian after its investigation into Chicago police abuse, include:
Keeping arrestees out of official booking databases.
Beating by police, resulting in head wounds.
Shackling for prolonged periods.
Denying attorneys access to the “secure” facility.
Holding people without legal counsel for between 12 and 24 hours, including people as young as 15.
At least one man was found unresponsive in a Homan Square “interview room” and later pronounced dead.
Brian Jacob Church, a protester known as one of the “Nato Three”, was held and questioned at Homan Square in 2012 following a police raid. Officers restrained Church for the better part of a day, denying him access to an attorney, before sending him to a nearby police station to be booked and charged.
“Homan Square is definitely an unusual place,” Church told the Guardian on Friday. “It brings to mind the interrogation facilities they use in the Middle East. The CIA calls them black sites. It’s a domestic black site. When you go in, no one knows what’s happened to you.”
The secretive warehouse is the latest example of Chicago police practices that echo the much-criticized detention abuses of the US war on terrorism. While those abuses impacted people overseas, Homan Square – said to house military-style vehicles, interrogation cells and even a cage – trains its focus on Americans, most often poor, black and brown.
Unlike a precinct, no one taken to Homan Square is said to be booked. Witnesses, suspects or other Chicagoans who end up inside do not appear to have a public, searchable record entered into a database indicating where they are, as happens when someone is booked at a precinct. Lawyers and relatives insist there is no way of finding their whereabouts. Those lawyers who have attempted to gain access to Homan Square are most often turned away, even as their clients remain in custody inside.
“It’s sort of an open secret among attorneys that regularly make police station visits, this place – if you can’t find a client in the system, odds are they’re there,” said Chicago lawyer Julia Bartmes.
Chicago civil-rights attorney Flint Taylor said Homan Square represented a routinization of a notorious practice in local police work that violates the fifth and sixth amendments of the constitution.
“This Homan Square revelation seems to me to be an institutionalization of the practice that dates back more than 40 years,” Taylor said, “of violating a suspect or witness’ rights to a lawyer and not to be physically or otherwise coerced into giving a statement.”
Much remains hidden about Homan Square. The Chicago police department did not respond to the Guardian’s questions about the facility. But after the Guardian published this story, the department provided a statement insisting, without specifics, that there is nothing untoward taking place at what it called the “sensitive” location, home to undercover units.
“CPD [Chicago police department] abides by all laws, rules and guidelines pertaining to any interviews of suspects or witnesses, at Homan Square or any other CPD facility. If lawyers have a client detained at Homan Square, just like any other facility, they are allowed to speak to and visit them. It also houses CPD’s Evidence Recovered Property Section, where the public is able to claim inventoried property,” the statement said, something numerous attorneys and one Homan Square arrestee have denied.
“There are always records of anyone who is arrested by CPD, and this is not any different at Homan Square,” it continued.
The Chicago police statement did not address how long into an arrest or detention those records are generated or their availability to the public. A department spokesperson did not respond to a detailed request for clarification.
When a Guardian reporter arrived at the warehouse on Friday, a man at the gatehouse outside refused any entrance and would not answer questions. “This is a secure facility. You’re not even supposed to be standing here,” said the man, who refused to give his name.
A former Chicago police superintendent and a more recently retired detective, both of whom have been inside Homan Square in the last few years in a post-police capacity, said the police department did not operate out of the warehouse until the late 1990s.
But in detailing episodes involving their clients over the past several years, lawyers described mad scrambles that led to the closed doors of Homan Square, a place most had never heard of previously. The facility was even unknown to Rob Warden, the founder of Northwestern University Law School’s Center on Wrongful Convictions, until the Guardian informed him of the allegations of clients who vanish into inherently coercive police custody.
“They just disappear,” said Anthony Hill, a criminal defense attorney, “until they show up at a district for charging or are just released back out on the street.”
‘They were held incommunicado for much longer than I think should be permitted in this country – anywhere – but particularly given the strong constitutional rights afforded to people who are being charged with crimes,” said Sarah Gelsomino, the lawyer for Brian Jacob Church. Photograph: Phil Batta/Guardian
Jacob Church learned about Homan Square the hard way. On May 16 2012, he and 11 others were taken there after police infiltrated their protest against the Nato summit. Church says officers cuffed him to a bench for an estimated 17 hours, intermittently interrogating him without reading his Miranda rights to remain silent. It would take another three hours – and an unusual lawyer visit through a wire cage – before he was finally charged with terrorism-related offenses at the nearby 11th district station, where he was made to sign papers, fingerprinted and photographed.
In preparation for the Nato protest, Church, who is from Florida, had written a phone number for the National Lawyers Guild on his arm as a precautionary measure. Once taken to Homan Square, Church asked explicitly to call his lawyers, and said he was denied.
“Essentially, I wasn’t allowed to make any contact with anybody,” Church told the Guardian, in contradiction of a police guidance on permitting phone calls and legal counsel to arrestees.
Church’s left wrist was cuffed to a bar behind a bench in windowless cinderblock cell, with his ankles cuffed together. He remained in those restraints for about 17 hours.
“I had essentially figured, ‘All right, well, they disappeared us and so we’re probably never going to see the light of day again,’” Church said.
The Disappeared
Brian Church, Jared Chase and Brent Vincent Betterly, known as the ‘Nato Three’
Though the raid attracted major media attention, a team of attorneys could not find Church through 12 hours of “active searching”, Sarah Gelsomino, Church’s lawyer, recalled. No booking record existed. Only after she and others made a “major stink” with contacts in the offices of the corporation counsel and Mayor Rahm Emanuel did they even learn about Homan Square.
They sent another attorney to the facility, where he ultimately gained entry, and talked to Church through a floor-to-ceiling chain-link metal cage. Finally, hours later, police took Church and his two co-defendants to a nearby police station for booking.
After serving two and a half years in prison, Church is currently on parole after he and his co-defendants were found not guilty in 2014 of terrorism-related offenses but guilty of lesser charges of possessing an incendiary device and the misdemeanor of “mob action”.
It’s almost like they throw a black bag over your head and make you disappear for a day or two
-Brian Jacob Church
The access that Nato Three attorneys received to Homan Square was an exception to the rule, even if Jacob Church’s experience there was not.
Three attorneys interviewed by the Guardian report being personally turned away from Homan Square between 2009 and 2013 without being allowed access to their clients. Two more lawyers who hadn’t been physically denied described it as a place where police withheld information about their clients’ whereabouts. Church was the only person who had been detained at the facility who agreed to talk with the Guardian: their lawyers say others fear police retaliation.
One man in January 2013 had his name changed in the Chicago central bookings database and then taken to Homan Square without a record of his transfer being kept, according to Eliza Solowiej of Chicago’s First Defense Legal Aid. (The man, the Guardian understands, wishes to be anonymous; his current attorney declined to confirm Solowiej’s account.) She found out where he was after he was taken to the hospital with a head injury.
“He said that the officers caused his head injuries in an interrogation room at Homan Square. I had been looking for him for six to eight hours, and every department member I talked to said they had never heard of him,” Solowiej said. “He sent me a phone pic of his head injuries because I had seen him in a police station right before he was transferred to Homan Square without any.”
Bartmes, another Chicago attorney, said that in September 2013 she got a call from a mother worried that her 15-year-old son had been picked up by police before dawn. A sympathetic sergeant followed up with the mother to say her son was being questioned at Homan Square in connection to a shooting and would be released soon. When hours passed, Bartmes traveled to Homan Square, only to be refused entry for nearly an hour.
An officer told her, “Well, you can’t just stand here taking notes, this is a secure facility, there are undercover officers, and you’re making people very nervous,” Bartmes recalled. Told to leave, she said she would return in an hour if the boy was not released. He was home, and not charged, after “12, maybe 13” hours in custody.
On February 2, 2013, John Hubbard was taken to Homan Square. Hubbard never walked out. The Chicago Tribune reported that the 44-year old was found “unresponsive inside an interview room”, and pronounced dead. After publication, the Cook County medical examiner told the Guardian that the cause of death was determined to be heroin intoxication.
Homan Square is hardly concerned exclusively with terrorism. Several special units operate outside of it, including the anti-gang and anti-drug forces. If police “want money, guns, drugs”, or information on the flow of any of them onto Chicago’s streets, “they bring them there and use it as a place of interrogation off the books,” Hill said.
‘The real danger in allowing practices like Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib is the fact that they always creep into other aspects,’ criminologist Tracy Siska told the Guardian. Photograph: Chandler West/Guardian
A former Chicago detective and current private investigator, Bill Dorsch, said he had not heard of the police abuses described by Church and lawyers for other suspects who had been taken to Homan Square. He has been permitted access to the facility to visit one of its main features, an evidence locker for the police department. (“I just showed my retirement star and passed through,” Dorsch said.)
Transferring detainees through police custody to deny them access to legal counsel, would be “a career-ender,” Dorsch said. “To move just for the purpose of hiding them, I can’t see that happening,” he told the Guardian.
Richard Brzeczek, Chicago’s police superintendent from 1980 to 1983, who also said he had no first-hand knowledge of abuses at Homan Square, said it was “never justified” to deny access to attorneys.
“Homan Square should be on the same list as every other facility where you can call central booking and say: ‘Can you tell me if this person is in custody and where,’” Brzeczek said.
“If you’re going to be doing this, then you have to include Homan Square on the list of facilities that prisoners are taken into and a record made. It can’t be an exempt facility.”
Indeed, Chicago police guidelines appear to ban the sorts of practices Church and the lawyers said occur at Homan Square.
A directive titled “Processing Persons Under Department Control” instructs that “investigation or interrogation of an arrestee will not delay the booking process,” and arrestees must be allowed “a reasonable number of telephone calls” to attorneys swiftly “after their arrival at the first place of custody.” Another directive, “Arrestee and In-Custody Communications,” says police supervisors must “allow visitation by attorneys.”
Attorney Scott Finger said that the Chicago police tightened the latter directive in 2012 after quiet complaints from lawyers about their lack of access to Homan Square. Without those changes, Church’s attorneys might not have gained entry at all. But that tightening – about a week before Church’s arrest – did not prevent Church’s prolonged detention without a lawyer, nor the later cases where lawyers were unable to enter.
The combination of holding clients for long periods, while concealing their whereabouts and denying access to a lawyer, struck legal experts as a throwback to the worst excesses of Chicago police abuse, with a post-9/11 feel to it.
On a smaller scale, Homan Square is “analogous to the CIA’s black sites,” said Andrea Lyon, a former Chicago public defender and current dean of Valparaiso University Law School. When she practiced law in Chicago in the 1980s and 1990s, she said, “police used the term ‘shadow site’” to refer to the quasi-disappearances now in place at Homan Square.
I’ve never known any kind of organized, secret place where they go and hold somebody before booking for hours and hours
James Trainum, former detective, Washington DC
“Back when I first started working on torture cases and started representing criminal defendants in the early 1970s, my clients often told me they’d been taken from one police station to another before ending up at Area 2 where they were tortured,” said Taylor, the civil-rights lawyer most associated with pursuing the notoriously abusive Area 2 police commander Jon Burge. “And in that way the police prevent their family and lawyers from seeing them until they could coerce, through torture or other means, confessions from them.”
Police often have off-site facilities to have private conversations with their informants. But a retired Washington DC homicide detective, James Trainum, could not think of another circumstance nationwide where police held people incommunicado for extended periods.
“I’ve never known any kind of organized, secret place where they go and just hold somebody before booking for hours and hours and hours. That scares the hell out of me that that even exists or might exist,” said Trainum, who now studies national policing issues, to include interrogations, for the Innocence Project and the Constitution Project.
Regardless of departmental regulations, police frequently deny or elide access to lawyers even at regular police precincts, said Solowiej of First Defense Legal Aid. But she said the outright denial was exacerbated at Chicago’s secretive interrogation and holding facility: “It’s very, very rare for anyone to experience their constitutional rights in Chicago police custody, and even more so at Homan Square,” Solowiej said.
Church said that one of his more striking memories of Homan Square was the “big, big vehicles” police had inside the complex that “look like very large MRAPs that they use in the Middle East.”
Cook County, home of Chicago, has received some 1,700 pieces of military equipment from a much-criticized Pentagon program transferring military gear to local police. It includes a Humvee, according to a local ABC News report.
Tracy Siska, a criminologist and civil-rights activist with the Chicago Justice Project, said that Homan Square, as well as the unrelated case of ex-Guantánamo interrogator and retired Chicago detective Richard Zuley, showed the lines blurring between domestic law enforcement and overseas military operations.
“The real danger in allowing practices like Guantánamo or Abu Ghraib is the fact that they always creep into other aspects,” Siska said.
“They creep into domestic law enforcement, either with weaponry like with the militarization of police, or interrogation practices. That’s how we ended up with a black site in Chicago.”
Author and lecturer Stuart Wilde is one of the real characters of the self-help, human potential movement. His style is humorous, controversial, poignant and transformational. He has written over a dozen books, including those that make up the very successful Taos Quintet, which are considered classics in their genre. They are: Affirmations, The Force, Miracles, The Quickening and The Trick to Money Is Having Some. Stuart’s books have been translated into 12 languages.
In Stuart’s Own Words – from “Affirmations”
“I was born when I was very young, in Farnham, England. Conditions at birth were very crowded. My twin sister appeared in the physical plane about twenty minutes ahead of me. I like to think that I allowed her pole position, being the proper little gent that I was, but if truth be known I was asleep in the wings and missed the curtain call.”
“My father was an officer in the British navy. At the time of my birth in 1946, he was seconded to the Foreign Office and served as a diplomat. My mother was Sicilian. They met during the Allied invasion of Sicily and were married in three weeks. She was very bright, a professor of languages and the only person that I have ever known who could speak Latin fluently.”
“At age ten, disaster struck. I was shipped from a carefree existence on the beaches of Africa to a British boarding school, a mausoleum of a place that was founded in the year dot. Its philosophies were archaic and bizarre to say the least. Much of it could be traced back to some obscure little man who sat on a sand dune in pre-history, developing ways to manipulate and harass people.”
“I remember my father standing on the tarmac of Accra airport prior to my departure for England, and ceremoniously presenting me with a five pound note ($7.50 at today’s exchange rate.) At the tender age of ten that seemed to me an untold fortune. However, once at school I discovered the sweet shop and through that, along with the ravages of inflation, I experienced my first cash flow crunch about a week-and-a-half into my scholastic career.”
“Cigarettes, it seemed, were a prized form of contraband. As ten-year-old boys were not allowed off the grounds, shortages existed. Demand having been established, I now set about the problem of supply. One morning the gods smiled on me and I met an older student whose function it was to go to the village on his bike each day to collect my master’s newspapers. I pinned him to the wall, and in my best Sicilian accent asked him if he would like to go into business. He said, ‘No.’ Whereupon I punched him in the nose and we became lifelong friends and partners.”
“I remember the tennis coach coming up to me on the last day at that school and asking me why I looked so miserable. From within my tears I mumbled, ‘the business, the business.’ Graduating from school was my first taste of unemployment.”
“I mucked around for a few years and wound up as a stage hand with the prestigious English Stage Company at Sloan Square in London. I had the idea of going into theater management. My twin sister was by now forging ahead with a showbiz career and was appearing weekly on British TV. However, once I found out that the stage manager earned just forty pounds for a seventy hour work week, the roar of the grease paint and the smell of the crowd lost its allure.”
“The swinging sixties were hotting up and the British rock bands were all the rage. On one of my travels I discovered a textile mill in Lancashire that made a kind of a T-shirt vest that miners wore. To my amazement the first boutique I offered them to snapped them up. The problem was one of logistics. I could tye-dye hundreds of T-shirts each day, but drying them was a problem. Luckily, they were greatly in demand and in my customer’s search for sartorial splendor, they failed to notice that the T-shirt hung limply off the hangers still wet.”
“By the age of twenty, I was earning a little over the equivalent of $20,000 per week…. I then signed up for a seven year course at the University of Burn-out, cruising London with a group of exotic characters whose names seemed culled from the cockney hall of fame. My chauffeurs were called Billy the Kid and Slick Vic, and I employed a fellow named Richard the Minder to get me home at night.”
“At the ripe old age of twenty eight I was exhausted. There were hardly any human experiences left to me. Literally, I had been there, done that, and gotten the T-shirt.”
“One morning, nursing a terrible hangover, I decided to discover the meaning of life. I signed up to train as a spirit medium at the College of Psychic Studies. I seemed to have a fair talent for it and not long after I was regularly contacting the spirits of the departed in hopes that they might answer my questions as to life’s wondrous mysteries.”
“During those years of searching, I struggled both spiritually and in the worldly sense. If I had known then what I know now, I could have saved myself much pain and anguish…. I continued to travel and study endlessly… Bit my bit I was able to sift the chaff from the wheat as I worked on myself, my own perceptions began to open up. I developed the ability to enter into deep states of mind and not fall asleep. After five years of training I found that I could hold concentration at the theta brain level (which is 4 – 6 cycles of brain rhythm second) almost indefinitely.
That was the turning point in my quest.”
Stuart rarely appears in public anymore, choosing instead to teach advanced metaphysics to small groups via his Transcendental Tours ™. Stuart is often described as a mystical man with a mysterious, powerful persona. Those who train with Stuart however quickly realize that at heart, Stuart is an enormously loving, generous and caring teacher, whose primary mission is to help seekers recognize their own truth. With that in mind, Stuart is destined to leave a lasting legacy for all those commited to discovering their higher purpose.
The groundbreaking new book “The Sixth Sense” is an amazing inner discovery of your SIXTH SENSE which he defines as sacred energy that taps you into the state of all-knowing. The subtle body (the etheric), Stuart reveals, is a key component in understanding the sixth sense, and he helps you to unlock its mysteries here. Once you open to the power and omniscience of the sixth sense, you can perceive life in all its subtlety and vastness.
When revolutionary rap duo Dead Prez released their classic 2000 opening salvo, Let’s Get Free, the outspoken hip-hop tandem of stic.man and M-1 were lauded and criticized for their two-fisted rebuke of systematic racism in all its forms. Nearly two decades later, Dead Prez is still fighting the good fight: stic is set to release the book The Art of War: Hip-Hop and Social Activism later this year, and M just dropped the track “Sacrifice” in celebration of the prison release of Black Liberation Army member Sekou Odinga. In the polarizing aftermath of the Ferguson, Missouri, grand jury’s decision to not indict a police officer for killing unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown, OZY reached out to the pair to hear their views on a community and city on fire.
“What I think is even more constructive … is an economic strike aimed at some of the pressure points of the system.”
— stic.man
We here at the decryptedmatrix love these guys and their candor and message. We can only hope for more artists of all kinds to embrace the chance to speak truth to those who will listen to them. Model artists like this are what we need more of to inspire the next generation and to create content that we all enjoy. Without more guys like Dead Prez we fear that music industry will continue to be corrupted by the same corporate influences that have so far shaped what is on the radio and the top of the billboard charts.
For-profit prisons have created a “neo-slavery” in the US, according to award-winning journalist Chris Hedges. Inmates work eight hours per day for major corporations such as Chevron, Motorola, Nordstrom’s and Target, yet only have the possibility of making up $1.25 an hour. In addition, companies that provide services like phone calls overcharge prisoners on even the most basic services, making hundreds of millions in profits annually. RT’s Ben Swann speaks to Hedges, who explains how this shadowy system came into existence. This system is now even expanding around the world. First by crossing the boarder down south to make more Neo-Slavery prisons in Mexico and soon expanding this same Neo-Slavery prison system into Canada, Europe and the rest of the world if we are not vigilant and careful of what kind of Neo-Slavery these Slave masters will try to force onto all of us.
Expert Consultant, Museum Curator, Investigator, UFOlogist
Richard C. Hoagland is a former museum space science Curator; a former NASA Consultant; and, during the historic Apollo Missions to the Moon, was science advisor to Walter Cronkite and CBS News. In the mid-1960’s, at the age of 19 (possibly “the youngest museum curator in the country at the time”), Hoagland created his first elaborate commemorative event — around NASA’s first historic unmanned fly-by of the planet Mars, Mariner 4. A simultaneous all-night, transcontinental radio program the evening of the Encounter (linking the museum in Springfield, Mass., and NASA’s JPL control center, in Pasadena, Ca.), co-produced by Hoagland and WTIC-Radio, in Hartford, Ct., was subsequently nominated for a Peabody Award, one of journalism’s most prestigious.
In the early 1970’s, Hoagland proposed to Carl Sagan (along with Eric Burgess) the placement of a “message to Mankind” aboard Pioneer 10 — humanity’s “first unmanned probe of Jupiter“; subsequent to its 1973 Jovian Encounter, celestial mechanics resulted in Pioneer 10 becoming the first artifact to successfully escape the solar system into the vast Galaxy beyond — carrying “the Plaque” — whose origins were officially acknowledged by Sagan in the prestigious journal, SCIENCE (175 [1972], 881).
In the early 1980’s, based on NASA data from the more sophisticated unmanned Voyager fly-bys of the outer planets, Hoagland became the first to propose (in a widely-quoted series of UPI and AP stories on his startling paper, published in 1980 in Star & Sky magazine) the possible existence of “deep ocean life” under the global ice shield perpetually surrounding the enigmatic moon of Jupiter, Europa. At the time, most (though not all) NASA scientists instantly derided this idea; two outstanding dissenters from the unfortunately then-common NASA view were Director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Dr. Robert Jastrow, and well-known science writer and visionary, Arthur C. Clarke. In the sequel to his outstanding epic “2001” (“2010: Odyssey Two”), built entirely around this extraordinary concept of “eon-old life in the ice-covered oceans of Europa,” Clarke wrote:
“The fascinating idea that there might be life on Europa . . . was first proposed by Richard C. Hoagland [in a 30-page article] in the magazine Star & Sky… This quite brilliant concept has been taken seriously by a number of astronomers (notably NASA’s Institute for Space Studies, Dr. Robert Jastrow), and may provide one of the best motives for the projected GALILEO Mission.”
Remarkably, before recent NASA press conferences and television documentaries, celebrating the successfully GALILEO probe of Jupiter’s atmosphere, December 7, 1995, NASA scientists’ “belated” acceptance of the startling possibility of “life in Europa’s oceans” has been widely presented and discussed. As is GALILEO’s potential acquisition of new data from its upcoming Europa fly-bys which could lead to actual confirmation (!) of the “Hoagland model.” Curiously, despite clearly prior publication and detailed elaboration of the concept, Hoagland’s name is not being mentioned anywhere by NASA, or by current GALILEO scientists, in connection with “Europa”…
In the early 1990’s Mr. Hoagland led a team of volunteers and consultants in the creation of a pioneering “space-age” inner-city educational effort at Dunbar Senior High, just off Capitol Hill, in Washington D.C. The experiment was built around the concept of “student involvement in real time’ mission planning and data acquisition” during various NASA planetary exploration missions, such as “Hubble” and the ill-fated “Mars Observer.” Starting as an after school extracurricular activity, and using donated state-of-the-art computer imaging equipment and enhancement algorithms, “The Enterprise Mission” and “becoming a crew member of the ‘U.S.S. Dunbar'” eventually became an accredited course in the Dunbar school curriculum. Over the years, scores of senior NASA Headquarters and Goddard Space Flight Center personnel have enthusiastically participated in the project, including installation of a student satellite data link direct to NASA and on-site briefing of students on many current NASA projects. Education advocate, then First Lady Barbara Bush, personally came to Dunbar early in the project, for a personal briefing by the students; this — the original “ENTERPRISE Mission” — was ultimately nominated for a White House “Point of Light” award.
For the last 13 years, since 1983, Hoagland has been leading an outside scientific Team in a critically acclaimed independent analysis of possible intelligently-designed artifacts on NASA (and other) data sets — beginning with the unmanned NASA VIKING mission to Mars in 1976, and its provocative images of a region called “Cydonia.” Hoagland and his Team have been invited at least four times to various NASA Centers since 1988, to brief thousands of NASA scientists and engineers on the results of their on-going “Cydonia investigation.” In 1989, Hoagland and his colleagues briefed then-Chairman of the House Committee on Space Science and Applications, Representative Robert Roe, on the status of their “Mars Investigation.” Chairman Roe, before his sudden and unexplained resignation from the Congress, directed NASA to acquire better images from Mars during its then-upcoming “Mars Observer mission”; Mars Observer’s equally sudden and tragic disappearance in 1993 precluded any new data relating to “Cydonia.” In 1993, Hoagland was awarded the International Angstrom Medal for Excellence in Science by the Angstrom Foundation, in Stockholm, Sweden, for that continuing research. In the last 4 years, he and his Team’s investigations have been quietly extended to include over 30 years of previously hidden data from NASA, Soviet, and Pentagon missions to the Moon — with startling results.
As reported by the media, there are several Internet initiatives afoot which may serve to mitigate this issue completely. Some of the biggest names in technology today have a stake in the race to develop better and faster forms of Internet delivery, implementing some wild schemes in an attempt to move beyond broadband. From 
