Tuesday, April 8, 2014

How To Expose Corruption On The Local Level

This is a good example of the people of Eufaula, Alabama exposing the corruption by town officials mis-using federal funds.  Corruption such as this goes on all over the country and little is done about it...more people should take an active role such as the people in the following video.  Good job people!  Need more like this. ~ Norm
 
Eufaula Misspends Federal Funds in Dudley Quarters

Monday, April 7, 2014

If You're a 'swinger', 'single', or married, the NSA knows...an 'Angry Bird' told them!


The following from: ProPublica
 
Spy Agencies Probe Angry Birds and Other Apps for Personal Data
by Jeff Larson, ProPublica, and James Glanz and Andrew W. Lehren, The New York Times

When a smartphone user opens Angry Birds, the popular game application, and starts slinging birds at chortling green pigs, spy agencies have plotted how to lurk in the background to snatch data revealing the player’s location, age, sex and other personal information, according to secret British intelligence documents.

A portion of the computer code in Burstly’s Software Development
Kit — used by Angry Birds.  This software was studied by GCHQ for
intelligence value.
In their globe-spanning surveillance for terrorism suspects and other targets, the National Security Agency and its British counterpart have been trying to exploit a basic byproduct of modern telecommunications: With each new generation of mobile phone technology, ever greater amounts of personal data pour onto networks where spies can pick it up.
According to dozens of previously undisclosed classified documents, among the most valuable of those unintended intelligence tools are so-called leaky apps that spew everything from users’ smartphone identification codes to where they have been that day.
The N.S.A. and Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters were working together on how to collect and store data from dozens of smartphone apps by 2007, according to the documents, provided by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor. Since then, the agencies have traded recipes for grabbing location and planning data when a target uses Google Maps, and for vacuuming up address books, buddy lists, phone logs and the geographic data embedded in photos when someone sends a post to the mobile versions of Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn, Twitter and other services.
The eavesdroppers’ pursuit of mobile networks has been outlined in earlier reports, but the secret documents, shared by The New York Times, The Guardian and ProPublica, offer far more details of their ambitions for smartphones and the apps that run on them. The efforts were part of an initiative called “the mobile surge,” according to a 2011 British document, an analogy to the troop surges in Iraq and Afghanistan. One N.S.A. analyst’s enthusiasm was evident in the breathless title — “Golden Nugget!” — given to one slide for a top-secret 2010 talk describing iPhones and Android phones as rich resources, one document notes.
The scale and the specifics of the data haul are not clear. The documents show that the N.S.A. and the British agency routinely obtain information from certain apps, particularly some of those introduced earliest to cellphones. With some newer apps, including Angry Birds, the agencies have a similar capability, the documents show, but they do not make explicit whether the spies have put that into practice. Some personal data, developed in profiles by advertising companies, could be particularly sensitive: A secret 2012 British intelligence document says that spies can scrub smartphone apps that contain details like a user’s “political alignment” and sexual orientation.
President Obama announced new restrictions this month to better protect the privacy of ordinary Americans and foreigners from government surveillance, including limits on how the N.S.A. can view “metadata” of Americans’ phone calls — the routing information, time stamps and other data associated with calls. But he did not address the avalanche of information that the intelligence agencies get from leaky apps and other smartphone functions.
And while he expressed concern about advertising companies that collect information on people to send tailored ads to their mobile phones, he offered no hint that American spies routinely seize that data. Nothing in the secret reports indicates that the companies cooperate with the spy agencies to share the information; the topic is not addressed.
The agencies have long been intercepting earlier generations of cellphone traffic like text messages and metadata from nearly every segment of the mobile network — and, more recently, mobile traffic running on Internet pipelines. Because those same networks carry the rush of data from leaky apps, the agencies have a ready-made way to collect and store this new resource. The documents do not address how many users might be affected, whether they include Americans, or how often, with so much information collected automatically, analysts would see personal data.
“N.S.A. does not profile everyday Americans as it carries out its foreign intelligence mission,” the agency said in a written response to questions about the program. “Because some data of U.S. persons may at times be incidentally collected in N.S.A.'s lawful foreign intelligence mission, privacy protections for U.S. persons exist across the entire process.” Similar protections, the agency said, are in place for “innocent foreign citizens.”
The British spy agency declined to comment on any specific program, but said all its activities complied with British law.
Two top-secret flow charts produced by the British agency in 2012 show incoming streams of information skimmed from smartphone traffic by the Americans and the British. The streams are divided into “traditional telephony” — metadata — and others marked “social apps,” “geo apps,” “http linking,” webmail, MMS and traffic associated with mobile ads, among others. (MMS refers to the mobile system for sending pictures and other multimedia, and http is the protocol for linking to websites.)
In charts showing how information flows from smartphones into the agency’s computers, analysts included questions to be answered by the data, including “Where was my target when they did this?” and “Where is my target going?”
As the program accelerated, the N.S.A. nearly quadrupled its budget in a single year, to $767 million in 2007 from $204 million, according to a top-secret Canadian analysis written around the same time.
Even sophisticated users are often unaware of how smartphones offer a unique opportunity for one-stop shopping for information about them. “By having these devices in our pockets and using them more and more,” said Philippe Langlois, who has studied the vulnerabilities of mobile phone networks and is the founder of the Paris-based company Priority One Security, “you’re somehow becoming a sensor for the world intelligence community.”
Detailed Profiles
Smartphones almost seem to make things too easy. Functioning as phones — making calls and sending texts — and as computers — surfing the web and sending emails — they generate and also rely on data. One secret report shows that just by updating Android software, a user sent more than 500 printed lines of data about the phone’s history and use onto the network.
Such information helps mobile ad companies, for example, create detailed profiles of people based on how they use their mobile device, where they travel, what apps and websites they open, and other factors. Advertising firms might triangulate web shopping data and browsing history to guess whether someone is wealthy or has children, for example.
The N.S.A. and the British agency busily scoop up this data, mining it for new information and comparing it with their lists of intelligence targets.
One secret 2010 British document suggests that the agencies collect such a huge volume of “cookies” — the digital traces left on a mobile device or a computer when a target visits a website — that classified computers were having trouble storing it all.
“They are gathered in bulk, and are currently our single largest type of events,” the document says.
The two agencies displayed a particular interest in Google Maps, which is accurate to within a few yards or better in some locations. Intelligence agencies collect so much data from the app that “you’ll be able to clone Google’s database” of global searches for directions, according to a top-secret N.S.A. report from 2007.
“It effectively means that anyone using Google Maps on a smartphone is working in support of a G.C.H.Q. system,” a secret 2008 report by the British agency says.
(In December, The Washington Post, citing the Snowden documents, reported that the N.S.A. was using metadata to track cellphone locations outside the United States and was using ad cookies to connect Internet addresses with physical locations.)
In another example, a secret 20-page British report dated 2012 includes the computer code needed for plucking the profiles generated when Android users play Angry Birds. The app was created by Rovio Entertainment, of Finland, and has been downloaded more than a billion times, the company has said.
Rovio drew public criticism in 2012 when researchers claimed that the app was tracking users’ locations and gathering other data and passing it to mobile ad companies. In a statement on its website, Rovio says that it may collect its users’ personal data, but that it abides by some restrictions. For example, the statement says, “Rovio does not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13 years of age.”
The secret report noted that the profiles vary depending on which of the ad companies — which include Burstly and Google’s ad services, two of the largest online advertising businesses — compiles them. Most profiles contain a string of characters that identifies the phone, along with basic data on the user like age, sex and location. One profile notes whether the user is currently listening to music or making a call, and another has an entry for household income.
Google declined to comment for this article, and Burstly did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Saara Bergstrom, a Rovio spokeswoman, said that the company had no knowledge of the intelligence programs. “Nor do we have any involvement with the organizations you mentioned,” Ms. Bergstrom said, referring to the N.S.A. and the British spy agency.
Another ad company creates far more intrusive profiles that the agencies can retrieve, the report says. The apps that generate those profiles are not identified, but the company is named as Millennial Media, which has its headquarters in Baltimore.
In securities filings, Millennial documented how it began working with Rovio in 2011 to embed ad services in Angry Birds apps running on iPhones, Android phones and other devices.
According to the report, the Millennial profiles contain much of the same information as the others, but several categories listed as “optional,” including ethnicity, marital status and sexual orientation, suggest that much wider sweeps of personal data may take place.
Possible categories for marital status, the report says, include single, married, divorced, engaged and “swinger”; those for sexual orientation are straight, gay, bisexual and “not sure.” It is unclear whether the “not sure” category exists because so many phone apps are used by children, or because insufficient data may be available.
There is no explanation of precisely how the ad company defined the categories or how accurate the information is. Nor is there any discussion of why all that information would be useful for marketing — or intelligence.

Unwieldy Heaps

The agencies have had occasional success — at least by their own reckoning — when they start with something closer to a traditional investigative tip or lead. The spies say that tracking smartphone traffic helped break up a bomb plot by Al Qaeda in Germany in 2007, and the N.S.A. bragged that to crack the plot, it wove together mobile data with emails, log-ins and web traffic. Similarly, mining smartphone data helped lead to arrests of members of a drug cartel hit squad for the 2010 murder of an employee of an American Consulate in Mexico.
But the data, whose volume is soaring as mobile devices have begun to dominate the technological landscape, is a crushing amount of information for the spies to sift through. As smartphone data builds up in N.S.A. and British databases, the agencies sometimes seem a bit at a loss on what to do with it all, the documents show. A few isolated experiments provide hints as to how unwieldy it can be.
In 2009, the American and British spy agencies each undertook a brute-force analysis of a tiny sliver of their cellphone databases. Crunching just one month of N.S.A. cellphone data, a secret report said, required 120 computers and turned up 8,615,650 “actors” — apparently callers of interest. A similar run using three months of British data came up with 24,760,289 actors.
“Not necessarily straightforward,” the report said of the analysis. The agencies’ extensive computer operations had trouble sorting through the slice of data. Analysts were “dealing with immaturity,” the report said, encountering computer memory and processing problems. The report made no mention of anything suspicious in the enormous lumps of data.
Ginger Thompson contributed reporting

Sunday, April 6, 2014

Decadence and Dupes...there's a bit of both in most of us

Be sure to listen to the Leonard Patterson sound track at the bottom of this page.
 
The following post may appear at the outset to be in sharp contrast to a previous post
(Vladimir Putin Vows to Defend Christianity Worldwide dated April 5, 2014) but its not.  We have known for a long time that Russian Communist plans for world domination are seated deep within their philosophy and anything that furthers their goals over the long run is welcomed.  Perhaps one should refresh their memories regarding the long term by re-reading Dr. Cuddy's Chronological History of the new world order, paying particular attention to:
1931 -- Students at the Lenin School of Political Warfare in Moscow are taught:"One day we shall start to spread the most theatrical peace movement the world has ever seen. The capitalist countries, stupid and decadent ... will fall into the trap offered by the possibility of making new friends. Our day will come in 30 years or so... The bourgeoisie must be lulled into a false sense of security." 1931 -- In a speech to the Institute for the Study of International Affairs at Copenhagen) historian Arnold Toyee said: "We are at present working discreetly with all our might to wrest this mysterious force called sovereignty out of the clutches of the local nation states of the world. All the time we are denying with our lips what we are doing with our hands...."
Whether we have proven ourselves to be stupid will be determined by the outcome of the final conflict but we cannot deny that decadence has gained a strong foothold. ~ Norman E. Hooben

Source: NEW ZEAL  shining the torch for liberty
Modern-Day Russian “Dupes”
By: Cliff Kincaid Accuracy in Media
Pat Buchanan’s column, “Is God Now on Russia’s Side?,” is difficult to read and almost laugh-out-loud funny, as Buchanan was once a staunch anti-communist who served President Reagan as his communications director during the Cold War. Buchanan’s opposition to the Evil Empire, as Reagan correctly called it, has given way to an unseemly embrace of former Soviet KGB colonel Vladimir Putin, the virtual dictator of Russia who served the “Evil Empire” for decades.  Once a sharp thinker, Buchanan argues that Putin is a Christian and Russia is now a Christian nation. We are apparently supposed to ignore, or forgive, Putin’s violations of human rights, including murders of journalists, and the invasion of Ukraine.
There is absolutely no evidence, aside from rhetoric, to suggest that Russia in general and Putin in particular have been converted to Christianity. Instead, what we are witnessing is a massive Russian “active measures” campaign that has ensnared many American conservatives, convincing them that Putin is somehow a legitimate alternative to President Obama’s decadent worldview. It is troubling to see some of these conservatives endorse Russia’s invasion and occupation of Ukraine.
The term “active measures” refers to influence operations that use agents of influence, disinformation and propaganda.
The main flaw in Buchanan’s argument is the lack of any real evidence that Russia has come to grips with—and disavowed—its Soviet past. To the contrary, Putin laments the passing of the USSR and has put the former KGB, now the FSB, in charge of the power centers in Russia. He celebrates Russian spying on America.
Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest-ranking Soviet bloc defector, says that Russia is “the first intelligence dictatorship in history.” Two brave Russian investigative journalists, Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, have captured the nature of the problem in their book, The New Nobility: The Restoration of Russia’s Security State and the Enduring Legacy of the KGB.
Buchanan cites pro-family statements by Putin, and anti-gay and pro-life laws passed in Russia. But like the Soviet propaganda and disinformation that Buchanan fought to expose when he worked for Reagan, the Russian rhetoric and legislative maneuvers cannot be considered legitimate. It is a show, designed to mask the dangerous path Russia is on, both domestically and internationally.
Rather than embrace Christianity, the evidence shows Russia has embraced the Russian Orthodox Church, always a tool of Soviet intelligence. As we noted in an AIM Report back in 1984, John Barron’s authoritative book, KGB, said that the KGB’s Directorate 5 is assigned to “clandestinely control religion in the Soviet Union” and to “insure that the Russian Orthodox Church and all other churches serve as instruments of Soviet policy.” Barron added, “The directorate placed KGB officers within the Russian Orthodox Church hierarchy and recruits bonafide clergymen as agents. Much of its work is accomplished through the Council on Religious Affairs, which is heavily staffed with retired and disabled KGB officers.”
Nothing has really changed. In fact, the Russian Orthodox Church is even closer to the regime these days, and is still so morally bankrupt that it published a 2014 calendar in honor of Soviet mass murderer Joseph Stalin. Former KGB officer Konstantin Preobrazhensky has called it “Putin’s Espionage Church,” and devotes a major portion of his book, KGB/FSB’s New Trojan Horse, to its use by the Russian intelligence service.
The scholarly paper, “The Occult Revival in Russia Today and Its Impact on Literature,” demonstrates the existence of something as sinister as the regime’s domination of the church for its own political purposes. It describes how “post-Soviet Russia” has embraced New Age and occult ideas, even what the author, German academic Birgit Menzel, calls “dark” or “evil forces.”
“The occult has always been used for different ends, for purposes that range from benignly spiritual to totalitarian or fascist,” she writes.
Menzel’s detailed article notes the impact of Theosophy on Russia and Russian Marxists. Founded by a Russian mystic named Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831–1891), who wrote The Secret Doctrine, Theosophy teaches that man can become God through mystical experiences, and can even perform miracles.
Traditional Christians have a different view. Theosophy, writes Dr. Peter Jones, one of the world’s foremost experts on paganism and the occult, is part of a movement which “plans to eat the Christian church alive in the days ahead.” He says Theosophy is at “the spiritual heart” of the United Nations and notes that the Lucis Trust (originally the Lucifer Trust) is an occult Theosophist group in charge of the United Nations’ Meditation Room.
In Russia, Menzel cites evidence that the Soviet secret police had “special agents for occult matters” who monitored the theosophical society in Russia, several esoteric orders, and even a “secret society” of some kind.
One of many fascinating revelations from Menzel’s well-researched 2007 article is that Aleksandr Dugin, now an adviser to Putin, has incorporated some of these ideas into his theory of “geopolitical Eurasianism,” a revival of the Russian empire that includes Islamic Iran. She writes, “Since 2000, Dugin has moved to the center of political power close to the Putin administration by a deliberate strategy of veiling his mystic-esoteric ideology…”
This is the same Dugin who was photographed meeting with former American Ku Klux Klan leader and neo-Nazi David Duke in Russia. Duke argues, like many Russian nationalists, that communism was imposed on Russia by a Jewish banker conspiracy.
Robert Zubrin, the author of several articles about Dugin, points out the similarities between the National Socialism of Hitler and Dugin’s original National Bolshevism. He says Dugin gave up on the idea of his own political party so he could become an adviser to Putin’s United Russia Party. For a time, he worked with the Russian Communist Party, the second largest political party in the country next to Putin’s United Russia.
As part of this transformation, Zubrin says, Putin himself became a spokesman for tradition and morality, even though the Russian government “runs the biggest organized human trafficking operation in the world,” kidnapping Russian girls and selling them around the world as prostitutes. “Nobody should be fooled by Putin’s claim of being a defender of conservative morality,” Zubrin says.
“There’s far more depravity in Russia, including homosexual depravity, than there is here,” he says. “In the Russian army, boyish recruits are subject to homosexual rape by officers as a form of hazing, and the regime protects this.”
Equally troubling, there are reports that Dugin’s vision of a resurgent Russia is built in part on the ideas of Aleister Crowley (1875-1947), a Satanist who described himself as the “Beast 666,” or Antichrist, of the Book of Revelation. “It [is] worth mentioning that in early 90s the National Bolsheviks and their main ideologist Aleksandr Dugin tried to bring Aleister Crowley’s ideas to wide popular masses in Russia with enviable persistence,” one observer of the Russian political scene noted.
Some analysts say Crowley, who visited Russia twice (in 1898 and in 1913), was a mastermind of an international conspiracy rooted in Satanism, and that he helped the Communists in Russia and his philosophy played a role in the subsequent rise of the Nazis in Germany.
His associates included Walter Duranty, the correspondent for The New York Times who achieved notoriety—and a Pulitzer Prize—for helping cover up the crimes of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, such as his murder of millions of Ukrainians.
As incredible as it seems, S.J. Taylor writes in her book about Duranty, Stalin’s Apologist, that Duranty and Crowley participated in drug-taking Satanic orgies. In a series of rituals conducted in Paris in 1913, Crowley received a “sacrament” from “a certain priest, A.B.,” who Taylor says was Duranty. The sacrament was semen. Taylor said that, during these orgies, verses were chanted, including one consisting of “Blood and semen! Blood and semen!”
In his column on Putin’s alleged Christ-like qualities, Buchanan writes that he was “startled to read” that the newsletter from the social conservative World Council [sic] of Families had hailed Russia as a “pro-family leader” and that the group’s conference this fall was being held in Moscow.
Buchanan asked, “Will Vladimir Putin give the keynote?”
Buchanan failed to notice that the conference has been “suspended,” in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The World Congress of Families says, “The situation in the Ukraine and Crimea (and the resulting U.S. and European sanctions) has raised questions about the travel, logistics, and other matters necessary to plan” the Moscow event.
In other words, the Americans planning to go to Moscow and attend services at Christ the Savior Cathedral of the Russian Orthodox Church would not be able to spend the Russian rubles that were coming their way.
Those rubles were supposed to be provided by Putin crony Vladimir Yakunin, a former KGB officer like Putin who reportedly stole millions, if not billions, from public expenditures on construction projects related to the Sochi Olympic Games. Some of the stolen funds were used to build a fancy estate for Yakunin that includes a guest house, a servants quarters, a garage for 15 cars, sauna, swimming pool and prayer room.
The World Congress of Families (WCF) has been collaborating with the Russians since at least 2008, when it participated in the World Public Forum, another group founded by Yakunin. Larry Jacobs of the WCF said at the time, “Much credit should be given to Vladimir Yakunin, who has invested his time and resources for the betterment of world civilizations.”
Tell that to the people of Ukraine.

Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism and can be contacted at cliff.kincaid@aim.org. View the complete archives from Cliff Kincaid.
________________________________
 
The following is presented because the very same organizations that trained Mr. Patterson were highly influential in the community organizing efforts that still exist to this very day...the same community organizing bragged about by Barack Husein Obama. 
 
I Trained In Moscow For Black Revolution – Leonard Patterson (Video)
A former communist who trained in Moscow discusses his experience in the Communist party and how the Communist Party infiltrated the Civil Rights Movement. Mr. Patterson was on the Speaker’s Bureau of The John Birch Society.

Leonard Patterson

Charged with conspiring to murder. ...but will he confess (LOL)

Source: NY Daily News
Pakistan charges 9 month old with conspiring to murder (VIDEO below)
Muhammad Mosa Khan allegedly threw stones at cops during a raid in Lahore. He was arrested and fingerprinted.
BY David Harding  NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Saturday, April 5, 2014, 10:37 AM
Is this a genuine baby-faced killer?

A nine-month old boy has appeared in court in Pakistan — charged with conspiring to murder.
Muhammad Mosa Khan is alleged to have thrown stones at officers during a police raid, according to The Nation website.

He was subsequently arrested along with other — older — members of his family.

The tot has even been fingerprinted and appeared in court drinking milk as he sat on the lap of his grandfather.
He has been charged along with other family members who claim they were protesting against lack of electricity in Lahore, Pakistan's second largest city.
The child's appearance in court has prompted the intervention of politicians who are demanding an inquiry. A police officer has been suspended.