Zelandakh, on 2017-May-24, 07:52, said:
So you still believe that almost all security services across the Western world are involved in an enormous conspiracy theory to implicate the Russians in the elections of the USA and, to a lesser extent, France? No doubt that makes perfect sense in your fantasies; in the real world noone with half a brain considers Russian involvement in doubt. The unknown part is how large of an impact it had. Where there is little doubt is that the combination of the Russians together with the Comey effect were enough to swing the election.
All that is basically old news though. We have a result and it is not going to change because a foreign power got involved. On the other hand, if it were shown that there was collusion between one of the candidates and such a foreign power, well that is a different story. Another possible scenario is that the POTUS was impossibly compromised and therefore unable to discharge his responsibilities. That would be a different situation entirely. I assume you would not support the POTUS's position if either of these scenarios comes up?
I think we have to take a step back here.
It is very important that we have a healthy level of professional skepticism of any source from whom we receive information. And yes, that even includes members of the Western Intelligence services and law enforcement community.
COINTELPRO was under the Federal Bureau of Investigation but it gathered intelligence illegally, violated Constitutional rights, and was known for disseminating propaganda. See link:
https://en.wikipedia...iki/COINTELPRO.
The huge intelligence failure regarding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was committed by 16 different members of the Western intelligence community and led to an extended, costly war campaign.
Edward Snowden revealed a mass surveillance program that again undermined the Constitutional rights of all American citizens, millions of whom have not committed crimes, and yet were the subject of mass electronic illegal searches and seizures. See
https://en.wikipedia...Edward_Snowden.
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The ongoing publication of leaked documents has revealed previously unknown details of a global surveillance apparatus run by the United States' NSA in close cooperation with three of its Five Eyes partners: Australia's ASD, the UK's GCHQ, and Canada's CSEC.
PRISM: a clandestine surveillance program under which the NSA collects user data from companies like Microsoft, Google, Apple, Yahoo, Facebook and YouTube.
On June 5, 2013, media reports documenting the existence and functions of classified surveillance programs and their scope began and continued throughout the entire year. The first program to be revealed was PRISM, which allows for court-approved direct access to Americans' Google and Yahoo accounts, reported from both The Washington Post and The Guardian published one hour apart. Barton Gellman of The Washington Post was the first journalist to report on Snowden's documents. He said the U.S. government urged him not to specify by name which companies were involved, but Gellman decided that to name them "would make it real to Americans." Reports also revealed details of Tempora, a British black-ops surveillance program run by the NSA's British partner, GCHQ. The initial reports included details about NSA call database, Boundless Informant, and of a secret court order requiring Verizon to hand the NSA millions of Americans' phone records daily, the surveillance of French citizens' phone and Internet records, and those of "high-profile individuals from the world of business or politics. XKeyscore, an analytical tool that allows for collection of "almost anything done on the internet," was described by The Guardian as a program that "shed light" on one of Snowden's most controversial statements: "I, sitting at my desk [could] wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the president, if I had a personal email."
It was revealed that the NSA was harvesting millions of email and instant messaging contact lists, searching email content, tracking and mapping the location of cell phones, undermining attempts at encryption via Bullrun and that the agency was using cookies to "piggyback" on the same tools used by Internet advertisers "to pinpoint targets for government hacking and to bolster surveillance."The NSA was shown to be "secretly" tapping into Yahoo and Google data centers to collect information from "hundreds of millions" of account holders worldwide by tapping undersea cables using the MUSCULAR surveillance program.
The NSA, the CIA and GCHQ spied on users of Second Life, Xbox Live and World of Warcraft, and attempted to recruit would-be informants from the sites, according to documents revealed in December 2013. Leaked documents showed NSA agents also spied on their own "love interests," a practice NSA employees termed LOVEINT. The NSA was shown to be tracking the online sexual activity of people they termed "radicalizers" in order to discredit them. Following the revelation of "Black Pearl", a program targeting private networks, the NSA was accused of extending beyond its primary mission of national security. The agency's intelligence-gathering operations had targeted, among others, oil giant Petrobras, Brazil's largest company. The NSA and the GCHQ were also shown to be surveilling charities including UNICEF and Médecins du Monde, as well as allies such as European Commissioner Joaquín Almunia and the Israeli Prime Minister.
By October 2013, Snowden's disclosures had created tensions between the U.S. and some of its close allies after they revealed that the U.S. had spied on Brazil, France, Mexico, Britain, China, Germany, and Spain, as well as 35 world leaders, most notably German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who said "spying among friends" was "unacceptable" and compared the NSA with the Stasi. Leaked documents published by Der Spiegel in 2014 appeared to show that the NSA had targeted 122 "high ranking" leaders.
The NSA's top-secret "black budget," obtained from Snowden by The Washington Post, exposed the "successes and failures" of the 16 spy agencies comprising the U.S. intelligence community, and revealed that the NSA was paying U.S. private tech companies for "clandestine access" to their communications networks.The agencies were allotted $52 billion for the 2013 fiscal year.
An NSA mission statement titled "SIGINT Strategy 2012-2016" affirmed that the NSA had plans for continued expansion of surveillance activities. Their stated goal was to "dramatically increase mastery of the global network" and "acquire the capabilities to gather intelligence on anyone, anytime, anywhere." Leaked slides revealed in Greenwald's book No Place to Hide, released in May 2014, showed that the NSA's stated objective was to "Collect it All," "Process it All," "Exploit it All," "Partner it All," "Sniff it All" and "Know it All."
Snowden stated in a January 2014 interview with German television that the NSA does not limit its data collection to national security issues, accusing the agency of conducting industrial espionage. Using the example of German company Siemens, he stated, "If there's information at Siemens that's beneficial to US national interests—even if it doesn't have anything to do with national security—then they'll take that information nevertheless." In the wake of Snowden's revelations and in response to an inquiry from the Left Party, Germany's domestic security agency Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV) investigated and found no "concrete evidence" that the U.S. conducted economic or industrial espionage in Germany.
In February 2014, during testimony to the European Union, Snowden said of the remaining "undisclosed programs": "I will leave the public interest determinations as to which of these may be safely disclosed to responsible journalists in coordination with government stakeholders."
In March 2014, documents disclosed by Glenn Greenwald writing for The Intercept showed the NSA, in cooperation with the GCHQ, has plans to infect millions of computers with malware using a program called "Turbine." Revelations included information about "QUANTUMHAND," a program through which the NSA set up a fake Facebook server to intercept connections.
According to a report in The Washington Post in July 2014, relying on information furnished by Snowden, 90% of those placed under surveillance in the U.S. are ordinary Americans, and are not the intended targets. The newspaper said it had examined documents including emails, message texts, and online accounts, that support the claim.
In an August 2014 interview, Snowden for the first time disclosed a cyberwarfare program in the works, codenamed MonsterMind. The program would "automate the process of hunting for the beginnings of a foreign cyberattack". The software would constantly look for traffic patterns indicating known or suspected attacks. What sets MonsterMind apart was that it would add a "unique new capability: instead of simply detecting and killing the malware at the point of entry, MonsterMind would automatically fire back, with no human involvement". Snowden expressed concern that often initial attacks are routed through computers in innocent third countries. "These attacks can be spoofed. You could have someone sitting in China, for example, making it appear that one of these attacks is originating in Russia. And then we end up shooting back at a Russian hospital. What happens next?" [bold and ital mine]
So, the ransomware attack in China, was it really executed by North Korea, or could it be Operation "Turbine" perpetrated by any partners of the Five Eyes global surveillance program as a false pretext to war or military action? Or could it have been a preemptive move to get bad actors like China to (1) curtail its ubiquitous software piracy (2) encourage its citizens and businesses to destroy bootleg copies of Microsoft Windows and (3) recommend that all users purchase legal software licenses with appropriate security patches to avoid future malware attacks. This would protect Western intellectual property rights and promote the U.S. economy. Snowden already said the NSA had attacks like these in the pipeline.
As citizens of a constitutional Republic, we must determine how much of our Constitutional freedoms we are willing to sacrifice to help our government provide more security. I am surprised that our nation doesn't appear to be extremely disturbed by the revelations of Edward Snowden's actions. It appears we have officially entered the era of "thought police".
Note: I am not suggesting Edward Snowden is a hero or a traitor. He just pulled back the curtain to reveal how Western intelligence services can abuse their powers and violate the Constitution if their powers remain hidden, unchecked and unquestioned. That is not what I call a conspiracy. It is just an inconvenient truth of our journey towards a surveillance state.
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