Thread: Obama’s Insider Threat Program Resembles Nazi Gestapo

Obama’s Insider Threat Program Resembles Nazi Gestapo

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
July 10, 2012

SS propaganda poster of the Day of the German police (1941). Wikimedia Commons

The techniques employed by Obama’s Insider Threat Program are reminiscent of those used by the Gestapo in Nazi Germany. Unlike the Nazis, however, Obama’s effort – the result of an unconstitutional executive order issued in October, 2011 – is limited, for now, to federal government employees.
From McClatchy:

The techniques are a key pillar of the Insider Threat Program, an unprecedented government-wide crackdown under which millions of federal bureaucrats and contractors must watch out for “high-risk persons or behaviors” among co-workers. Those who fail to report them could face penalties, including criminal charges.
(…)
Under the program, which is being implemented with little public attention, security investigations can be launched when government employees showing “indicators of insider threat behavior” are reported by co-workers, according to previously undisclosed administration documents obtained by McClatchy. Investigations also can be triggered when “suspicious user behavior” is detected by computer network monitoring and reported to “insider threat personnel.”
Federal employees and contractors are asked to pay particular attention to the lifestyles, attitudes and behaviors – like financial troubles, odd working hours or unexplained travel – of co-workers as a way to predict whether they might do “harm to the United States.” Managers of special insider threat offices will have “regular, timely, and, if possible, electronic, access” to employees’ personnel, payroll, disciplinary and “personal contact” files, as well as records of their use of classified and unclassified computer networks, polygraph results, travel reports and financial disclosure forms.

The effort is not limited to preventing whistleblowers like Edward Snowden. “The initiative goes beyond classified information leaks,” McClatchy explains. “It includes as insider threats ‘damage to the United States through espionage, terrorism, unauthorized disclosure of national security information or through the loss or degradation of departmental resources or capabilities,’ according to a document setting ‘Minimum Standards for Executive Branch Insider Threat Programs.’”
In his book, The Third Reich in Power, Richard J. Evans describes a similar pattern in Nazi Germany. The Gestapo, the official secret police of Germany in the 1930s and all of occupied Europe during the Second World War, relied on a large network of informers comprised largely of average citizens. The end result of the Gestapo’s panopticism – as described by Canadian historian Robert Gellately – was the creation of widespread fear and the belief that the state was all-seeing, an attribute fictionalized by George Orwell in his seminal novel, Nineteen Eighty Four.
Critics will argue that Obama’s effort is limited to the federal workforce and it does not threaten society at large. Developments since September 11, 2001, however, reveal that a Gestapo-like panopticism – a social theory originally developed by French philosopher Michel Foucault in his book, Discipline and Punish – is already at work in American society.
Because of the Department of Homeland Security’s “see something, say something” program and the TSA’s intrusive and humiliating search techniques and revelations of the NSA’s overarching electronic surveillance grid – a high-tech electronic panopticon — it can be categorically stated that America is now a Stasi police state.
Mission creep under the rubric of the so-called war on terror is now commonplace. The Department of Homeland security was established in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks to address the supposed threat Americans face from foreign terrorists.
“Over the last decade, the feds have established a number of efforts to nationalize law enforcement and create a number of organizations designed to supposedly ‘protect the homeland’ from not only terrorists – most handled by the FBI and the CIA – but all sorts of domestic criminals, including those who engage in victimless crimes such as drug use and prostitution,” we reported last March.

There are now dozens of organizations feeding off tax dollars dispensed by the feds – from FEMA’s Citizen Corps to Volunteers in Police Service and Infragard and beyond. In many ways, these federally-funded and organized groups rival the police state apparatus active in Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union.
For example, the DHS now “protects victims” from “domestic violence and other violent crimes” that have nothing to do with the late CIA asset Osama bin Laden or the would-be nineteen hijackers who trained on U.S. military bases. The mega-bureaucracy now doles out money to everything from “Juvenile Accountability” to anti-counterfeiting, border security, and computer incident response.
But it really shines when it comes to acting as a political surveillance tool for the establishment. It has successfully exploited the global jihad terror myth to spy on antiwar and patriot groups and recently the Occupy movement. So-called fusion centers – centralized high-tech Orwellian snoop hubs – now dot the landscape and feed data into the DHS leviathan.

Obama’s Insider Threat Program sets a precedent for similar action outside government. In fact, Infragard – a public-private partnership between business and government (the very essence of fascism) – serves as an apparatus that shares data with the government’s intelligence network.
The ACLU put it mildly when it said there “is evidence that InfraGard may be closer to a corporate TIPS program, turning private-sector corporations — some of which may be in a position to observe the activities of millions of individual customers — into surrogate eyes and ears for the FBI.”
http://www.infowars.com/obamas-insid...-nazi-gestapo/

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This article was posted: Wednesday, July 10, 2013 at 4:02 pm
Tags: big brother, constitution, domestic news, domestic spying, police state, technology

News Link • Activism

Police investigate 'United Stasi of America' artist


07-13-2013 • .



Published on Jul 7, 2013

Reported by Powell Gammil

(Reuters) - A German artist who beamed the words "United Stasi of America" onto the wall of the U.S. embassy in Berlin says Washington's spy methods make the former East German secret police look like boy scouts.

A video of Oliver Bienkowski's artwork is fast becoming a hit on the Internet in Germany, tapping into widespread outrage over U.S. surveillance programs revealed by fugitive ex-National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden.

Government eavesdropping is a highly sensitive topic in Germany, evoking memories of the Nazi Gestapo and the Stasi security police, which used a vast network of informants to crush dissidents in communist East Germany.

Chancellor Angela Merkel has sought explanations from the United States. With an election looming in September, her opponents have tried to turn the matter into a campaign issue, with some demanding a halt to EU-U.S. trade talks unless Washington allays German concerns.

"The Stasi would have dreamt of being able to do what the Americans are doing," said Bienkowski, 31. "The Stasi look like a bunch of boy scouts compared to what the NSA is doing. It's the real deal in terms of a secret service with modern technology at their disposal. It's far more dangerous."

A spokesman for the U.S. embassy, in the heart of Berlin near the Brandenburg Gate, said the artist's stunt was "funny, but anyone who makes this comparison knows neither the Stasi nor the United States".

Respected German news magazine Der Spiegel reported late last month, citing an internal NSA document, that the United States taps half a billion phone calls, emails and text messages in Germany in a typical month and has classed its biggest European ally as a target similar to China.

German government spokesman Steffen Seibert said on Monday that talks between European Union and U.S. experts to clarify the NSA's activities were starting this week in parallel to the transatlantic free trade talks.

Bienkowski's slogan, beamed onto the south wall of the U.S. embassy with a powerful projector late on Sunday night, was briefly visible throughout the neighborhood. He said police stopped him after a few minutes, telling him he needed a permit for the artwork.

A video of the incident has gathered more than 42,000 hits on YouTube, and the artist made the front page of Bild, Germany's best-selling daily with more than 12 million readers.

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  Berlin police are investigating whether an artist who projected “United Stasi of America" onto the US embassy in the German capital earlier this week could be charged with a criminal offence. Read Full Story

  Reported by Powell Gammil

http://www.freedomsphoenix.com/News/....htm?From=News

News Link • Media: Internet Jailed Journalist Barrett Brown Faces 105 Years For Reporting on Hacked Private Intelligence Firms 07-13-2013 • . Journalist Barrett Brown spent his 300th day behind bars this week on a range of charges filed after he used information obtained by the hacker group Anonymous to report on the operations of private intelligence firms. Brown faces 17 charges ranging from threatening an FBI agent to credit card fraud for posting a link online to a document that contained stolen credit card data. But according to his supporters, Brown is being unfairly targeted for daring to investigate the highly secretive world of private intelligence and military contractors. Read Full Story

Reported by Powell Gammill

http://www.freedomsphoenix.com/News/....htm?From=News

News Link • Intelligence: Use and Abuse Shocking study on how much the government pays to spy on you 07-11-2013 • Kevin Camps, Death & Taxes With Edward Snowden’s revelation of the NSA’s PRISM program, domestic surveillance has become one of the most talked-about subjects of the day. But forget the moral implications for a second and think about the practicalities: Ever wonder how much the government spends to spy on you? Turns out, it’s a lot. USA Today published in in-depth piece on the matter and it brought about more questions than answers. Let us first get down to brass tax— it costs the United States Government on average $50,000 per wiretap when everything is said in done. Take a second to breathe before screaming at the computer. That is your money they are spending to spy on you. This piece, however, will not be dissecting whether or not snooping on citizens is the moral thing to do (there are far too many articles on that online already) rather it will outline the actual cost of gaining these wiretaps from cell companies and will look at the economics surrounding it. Here is the breakdown for most of the nation’s leading carriers: AT&T imposes a $325 “activation fee” per wiretap and $10’s a day to monitor it, Cricket and U.S. Cellular charge only about $250 per wiretap, and Verizon charges the government $775 for the first month and $500 each month after that. All this is according to industry disclosures made last year to Congressman Edward Markey. Email records (such as with Edward Snowden) are much easier to come by at around $25 per account. Read Full Story

Reported by Leon Felkins

http://www.freedomsphoenix.com/News/....htm?From=News

pread Use Across USA, Targeting Americans, Secret Documents Now Reveal

Saturday, July 13, 2013 2:32


(Before It's News)
As regular readers of Natural News are well aware, we track the state of freedom in America – food freedom, the freedom to buy and sell our goods, the right to live free of government interference and, most importantly, the right to be left alone.

By J.D Heyes
Natural News
July 13, 2013


Nowhere in the world is privacy as under assault as it is in America, the one country with a written governing document – the U.S. Constitution – that specifically prohibits our government from denying us our right to privacy. If we had leaders of integrity this wouldn’t be an issue, but the government in Washington is behaving precisely the way our leaders have fashioned it, so serial violations of our rights is the norm these days rather than the exception.
‘Look – up in the sky! Smile! You’re on camera…’
Take the issue of drone usage to spy on us. The use of drones by government has exploded in recent years, and for reasons that have nothing to do with “security” or “law enforcement” or under the guise of “protecting us.” No, these drones are being used by both state and federal governments to spy on Americans, as if tracking our snail mail and all electronic communications isn’t enough.
Per the Electronic Freedom Frontier, an advocacy group that tracks abuses of privacy in the Digital Age:
Recently released daily flight logs from Customs & Border Protection (CPB) show the agency has sharply increased the number of missions its 10 Predator drones have flown on behalf of state, local and non-CPB federal agencies. Yet, despite this increase – eight-fold between 2010 and 2012 – CBP has failed to explain how it’s protecting our privacy from unwarranted drone surveillance.
Now granted, the Border Patrol has a tough job patrolling the nearly 2,000-mile long U.S. border with Mexico, which is where the bulk of illegal aliens and drugs enter our country. But the 10 Predators the agency acquired over the past few years are no longer being used solely for border enforcement.
“As far as I know, CBP’s drone program was intended and authorized by Congress for the purpose of patrolling the nation’s borders,” writes Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst for the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project. “It was not intended to be a general law enforcement drone “lending library,” in which Predator drones (which are quite unlike the small UAVs that police departments around the country are beginning to acquire and deploy) are used for all manner of purposes across the country.”
Bad and getting worse
According to documents obtained by EFF, the CBP’s drones have been utilized to conduct surveillance for a range of federal agencies including the FBI, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the U.S. Marshal Service and the Coast Guard. In addition, the Predators have been used to support surveillance operations for the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Investigation, the North Dakota Bureau of Criminal Investigation, the North Dakota Army National Guard, and the Texas Department of Public Safety, EFF said, adding:
CBP also flew its drones for non-law enforcement agencies and missions. The logs show that CBP conducted extensive “electro-optical, thermal infrared imagery and Synthetic Aperture Radar” surveillance of levees along the Mississippi River and river valleys across several states, along with surveillance of the massive Deep Water Horizon oil spill and other natural resources for the US Geological Survey, FEMA, the Bureau of Land Management, the US Forest Service, the Department of Natural Resources, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Look, even innocuous-sounding missions should raise red flags. Americans cannot go anywhere anymore to simply function in society – to buy groceries, go to the movies or visit friends, for instance – without being under some kind of surveillance every step of the way.
Cities, states and now the federal government are telling us they are watching us 24/7/365 to simply try to keep us safe, but the Constitution does not permit such broad, continuous surveillance. It is a blatant violation of our right to privacy, which is not allowable. There is no “except in cases of ensuring public safety” provision in the Fourth Amendment.
That said, expect the violations to get worse – that is, unless the whole of Washington and elected leaders in cities and states around the country suddenly grow a conscience, and you know what the chances are of that happening.
Sources:
http://www.eff.org
http://www.infowars.com
http://www.nytimes.com
http://www.aclu.org

The post Spy Drones in Widespread Use Across USA, Targeting Americans, Secret Documents Now Reveal appeared first on Intellihub.com.

Source: http://intellihub.com/2013/07/13/spy-drones-in-widespread-use-across-usa-targeting-americans-secret-documents-now-reveal/

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