Jeff Bezos Protests the Invasion of His Privacy, as Amazon Builds a Sprawling Surveillance State for Everyone Else
February 12th, 2019Via: The Intercept:
If Bezos were the political victim of surveillance state abuses, it would be scandalous and dangerous. It would also be deeply ironic.
That’s because Amazon, the company that has made Bezos the planet’s richest human being, is a critical partner for the U.S. Government in building an ever-more invasive, militarized and sprawling surveillance state. Indeed, one of the largest components of Amazon’s business, and thus one of the most important sources of Bezos’ vast wealth and power, is working with the Pentagon and the NSA to empower the U.S. Government with more potent and more sophisticated weapons, including surveillance weapons.
In December, 2017, Amazon boasted that it had perfected new face-recognition software for crowds, which it called Rekognition. It explained that the product is intended, in large part, for use by governments and police forces around the world. The ACLU quickly warned that the product is “dangerous” and that Amazon “is actively helping governments deploy it.”
“Powered by artificial intelligence,” wrote the ACLU, “Rekognition can identify, track, and analyze people in real time and recognize up to 100 people in a single image. It can quickly scan information it collects against databases featuring tens of millions of faces.” The group warned: “Amazon’s Rekognition raises profound civil liberties and civil rights concerns.” In a separate advisory, the ACLU said of this face-recognition software that Amazon’s “marketing materials read like a user manual for the type of authoritarian surveillance you can currently see in China.”
Russia to Disconnect from Internet to Test Cyber Defenses
February 11th, 2019Via: BBC:
Russia is considering whether to disconnect from the global internet briefly, as part of a test of its cyber-defences.
The test will mean data passing between Russian citizens and organisations stays inside the nation rather than being routed internationally.
A draft law mandating technical changes needed to operate independently was introduced to its parliament last year.
The test is expected to happen before 1 April but no exact date has been set.
Major disruption
The draft law, called the Digital Economy National Program, requires Russia’s ISPs to ensure that it can operate in the event of foreign powers acting to isolate the country online.
Nato and its allies have threatened to sanction Russia over the cyber-attacks and other online interference which it is regularly accused of instigating.
The measures outlined in the law include Russia building its own version of the net’s address system, known as DNS, so it can operate if links to these internationally-located servers are cut.
Currently, 12 organisations oversee the root servers for DNS and none of them are in Russia. However many copies of the net’s core address book do already exist inside Russia suggesting its net systems could keep working even if punitive action was taken to cut it off.
The test is also expected to involve ISPs demonstrating that they can direct data to government-controlled routing points. These will filter traffic so that data sent between Russians reaches its destination, but any destined for foreign computers is discarded.
Eventually the Russian government wants all domestic traffic to pass through these routing points. This is believed to be part of an effort to set up a mass censorship system akin to that seen in China, which tries to scrub out prohibited traffic.
The Real Reason 4 Cops Got Shot in Houston Last Week
February 7th, 2019Via: The Daily Bell:
All the headlines would have you believe these cops were ambushed, attacked just for being cops while minding their own business.
But when you look deeper at the case, you realize these cops didn’t get shot because of anti-police rhetoric.
They got shot because they invaded an innocent couple’s home without announcing themselves.
That means that instead of knocking on the door and announcing themselves, police barge into a home with a battering ram.
These SWAT-style raids have increased exponentially over the years. And they are used for less and less serious accusations.
In this case, a couple in their late 50s, with no criminal history, was accused of selling heroin out of the home they lived in for 20 years.
The cops got a warrant to search the home after they claim someone sold a confidential informant heroin at the couple’s home.
Apparently, the word of one druggie informant is all the justification cops need.
Police busted down the door and shot the couple’s dog. The man responded by firing his handgun at the officers.
According to the police chief, narcotics officers “don’t show up in uniform,” when executing search warrants.
So did this guy even know it was police who just invaded his home and shot his dog?
We’ll never know, because dead men tell no tales. The couple was murdered by the police officers.
More: ‘They Did Not Deal Drugs’: Neighbors of Slain Couple Who Shot 4 Cops Refute Official Story
Research Credit: Pookie
U.S. Special Operations Manual: IMF, World Bank Part of “Unconventional” Weapons Arsenal
February 7th, 2019Via: Mint Press:
WASHINGTON – In a leaked military manual on “unconventional warfare” recently highlighted by WikiLeaks, the U.S. Army states that major global financial institutions — such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) — are used as unconventional, financial “weapons in times of conflict up to and including large-scale general war,” as well as in leveraging “the policies and cooperation of state governments.”
The document, officially titled “Field Manual (FM) 3-05.130, Army Special Operations Forces Unconventional Warfare” and originally written in September 2008, was recently highlighted by WikiLeaks on Twitter in light of recent events in Venezuela as well as the years-long, U.S.-led economic siege of that country through sanctions and other means of economic warfare. Though the document has generated new interest in recent days, it had originally been released by WikiLeaks in December 2008 and has been described as the military’s “regime change handbook.”
Big Telecom Sold Highly Sensitive Customer GPS Data Typically Used for 911 Calls
February 7th, 2019Via: Vice:
Around 250 bounty hunters and related businesses had access to AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint customer location data, according to documents obtained by Motherboard. The documents also show that telecom companies sold data intended to be used by 911 operators and first responders to data aggregators, who sold it to bounty hunters. The data was in some cases so accurate that a user could be tracked to specific spots inside a building.
The news shows not only how widely Americans’ sensitive location data has been sold through the overlooked and questionable data broker market, but also how the ease-of-access dramatically increased the risk of abuse. Motherboard found that an individual company made more than 18,000 data location requests through a data broker; other companies made thousands of requests.
VW: Bet Everything On Electric
February 6th, 2019Via: Reuters:
If Volkswagen realizes its ambition of becoming the global leader in electric cars, it will be thanks to a radical and risky bet born out of the biggest calamity in its history.
The German giant has staked its future, to the tune of 80 billion euros ($91 billion), on being able to profitably mass-produce electric vehicles – a feat no carmaker has come close to achieving.
So far mainstream automakers’ electric plans have had one main goal: to protect profits gleaned from high-margin conventional cars by adding enough zero-emission vehicles to their fleet to meet clean-air rules.
Customers have meanwhile largely shunned electric vehicles because they are too expensive, can be inconvenient to charge and lack range.
U.S. Special Forces Exercise in Downtown Los Angeles
February 6th, 2019Alex Strezev captured video of several helicopters landing:
Via: ABC:
Military helicopters were seen flying in formation around downtown Los Angeles and explosions were reported in the area that were all part of an exercise.
The choppers and explosions caused many people to head to social media, scared about what they were seeing outside.
Many people also tweeted that they saw the exercise in Silver Lake.
One helicopter even landed in the middle of Wilshire Boulevard and soldiers were seen rappelling out of the aircrafts onto rooftops.
Authorities urge there was no cause for alarm and that the Special Forces exercises will continue for the next several nights.
Journalist Interrogated, Fired for Story Linking CIA and Syria Weapons Flights
February 6th, 2019Via: ZeroHedge:
A months-long investigation which tracked and exposed a massive covert weapons shipment network to terror groups in Syria via diplomatic flights originating in the Caucuses and Eastern Europe under the watch of the CIA and other intelligence agencies has resulted in the interrogation and firing of the Bulgarian journalist who first broke the story. This comes as the original report is finally breaking into mainstream international coverage.
Investigative reporter Dilyana Gaytandzhieva authored a bombshell report for Trud Newspaper, based in Sofia, Bulgaria, which found that an Azerbaijan state airline company was regularly transporting tons of weaponry to Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Turkey under diplomatic cover as part of the CIA covert program to supply anti-Assad fighters in Syria. Those weapons, Gaytandzhieva found, ended up in the hands of ISIS and al-Qaeda terrorists in Iraq and Syria.
While it’s long been understood that the US-Gulf-NATO coalition arming rebels inside Syria facilitated the rapid rise of the Islamic State as the group had steady access to a “jihadi Wal-Mart” of weapons (in the words of one former spy and British diplomat), the Trud Newspaper report is the first to provide exhaustive documentation detailing the precise logistical chain of the weapons as they flowed from their country of origin to the battlefield in Syria and Iraq. Gaytandzhieva even traveled to Aleppo where she filmed and examined labeled weapons shipping containers held in underground jihadist storehouses.
The Bulgaria-based journalist obtained and published dozens of secret internal memos which were leaked to her by an anonymous source as part of the report. The leaked documents appear to be internal communications between the Bulgarian government and Azerbaijan’s Embassy in Sofia detailing flight plans for Silk Way Airlines, which was essentially operating an “off the books” weapons transport service (not subject to inspections or tax under diplomatic cover) for the US Special Operations Command (USSOCOM), Saudi Arabia, Israel, Germany, Denmark, and Sweden. Silk Way Airlines has been the subject of other recent investigations involving weapons supplies for the Saudi war on Yemen. In addition, the military monitoring site Balkan Insight has exposed similar weapons cargo flights in and out of neighboring Serbia.
Volkswagen Will Use Tesla Batteries at U.S. Car-Charging Stations
February 5th, 2019Via: Bloomberg:
Tesla Inc.’s battery systems will be installed at more than 100 electric-vehicle U.S. charging stations this year.
Electrify America, created by Volkswagen AG as part of a settlement from the automaker’s emissions-cheating scandal, said in an emailed statement Monday that it plans to add the Tesla Powerpack systems at charging stations across the U.S. through 2019. The 210-kilowatt battery systems will each have about about 350 kilowatt-hours of capacity. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed and a Tesla spokesman declined to comment.
Man Shot, Killed After Breaching Nevada Nuclear Site
February 5th, 2019Via: Las Vegas Sun:
A man who was shot and killed Monday by law enforcement after he breached the main security gate at the Nevada National Security Site has been identified as an Iowa resident, according to the Nye County Sheriff’s Office.
Nekiylo Dawayne Graves, 27, died at the scene, about 8 miles into the testing site — which is 70 miles north of Las Vegas — said Sheriff Sharon Wehrly in a briefing broadcast online Wednesday night.
The incident unfolded about 5:20 p.m. when Graves “had run the main gate,” Wehrly said.
Security at the site — formerly known as the Nevada Test Site — summoned Nye County Deputy John Kakavulias, who was assigned to the property, and a chase ensued.
Kakavulias caught up, and Graves stopped his vehicle less than 10 minutes later, Wehrly said.
Wehrly said Graves exited and began approaching Kakavulias and another officer, refusing to comply with orders to stop, so the officers opened fire, fatally wounding him, Wehrly said.
The National Nuclear Security Administration said Monday that the suspect had an unspecified cylindrical object in his hand when he was shot. Wehrly didn’t mention the object Wednesday.
