Saturday, May 9, 2015

Why don't the voters know this stuff? They have a NEED TO KNOW!

Originally posted in conjunction with: The Dictator Hath Cometh
Have you ever wondered what an Alinskyism is?
by Norman E. Hooben
Saul Alinsky was is probably the most influential character in American politics during the last half a century. Without getting into his life story suffice it to say that he has injected more hatred for the American way of life into the Democratic Party than any one person. Even Hillary Clinton admired this man so much that she wrote her college thesis about him. Saul Alinsky is famous in the world of liberal academia because his methods fall in line for the ultimate destruction of this Republic. For it was the Communists who took on his tactics to get control of the American educational system...just look at who controls Harvard (John Harvard would be appalled), Yale, Georgetown, UCLA, et.al. ...and the politicians they develop.
Alinsky wrote a little red book titled, "Rules For Radicals" and we can list some of them here. But before we do, I can summarize most of the book with one sentence, "Tell them one thing but do the opposite." Most Alinskyites (Alinsky followers) have been doing this since FDR (and before), Johnson did, as did Carter, Clinton, and now Obama. Take FDR for example...during his campaign he was against everything his opponent was for and yet almost all of FDR's policies were that of the guy that lost.
All of the politicians I've mentioned have the ability to preach a good sermon while expressing their patriotism and yet not one of them has ever done one good thing for the Republic for which we (the people) stand. Everything gets progressively worse over the long run (huh, is that why they like to call themselves progressives), especially the national debt and the dwindling loss of freedoms (i.e. by instituting numerous rules and regulations either by fiat, dictates by unelected government agencies, Executive Orders, and occasionally by an actual law passed by both Houses and signed by the president. I might add in this parenthetical space that it would not be illegal to disobey an EO for the president does not have the authority to make laws. You as a citizen have the responsibilty to obey laws and EO's are not laws.)
Now before Obama came onto the national scene the most influential Alinskyite was Bill Clinton who's major agenda was is one world government. He spoke of his new world order on many occasions and most of his legislative wishes were to enhance that outcome; the new world order! While the Clintons were raised in an America that they knew was founded on Judeo/Christian principles and understood that fact while at the same time despising anything to do with organized religions, their Alinsky-like influence on the American voter was accepted because they preached a good sermon. Obama however, was not raised in the traditional American household or neighborhood. His entire life has been infuenced by Communists (of which he was a member of the New American Party), Marxists, and Islamists. Obviously he was groomed for the position he now holds and he got their by making use of Alinskyisms...say one thing but do the opposite. The Judeo/Christian definition of that would be a lie. The Clintons understood that. The Islamic or Muslim defintion of that would be....aah lets see, anything you want it to mean as long as the desired outcome fits your agenda. And that's exactly what Obama is doing here: ↓ see video ↓


Obama is preaching a good sermon but does not believe a word of it. Remember, Obama does not have a conscience so lying with every other breath does not bother him in the least...he's after one thing; his agenda! Although his agenda includes a one world government absent of all organized religions except Islam. He's even friends with the guy that wants to place the flag of Islam over the White House, but that's another story. Meanwhile I promised I'd list some of Alinsky's Rules For Radicals...here they are:

Saul Alinsky’s 12 Rules for Radicals

Here is the complete list from Alinsky.
* RULE 1: “Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.” Power is derived from 2 main sources – money and people. “Have-Nots” must build power from flesh and blood. (These are two things of which there is a plentiful supply. Government and corporations always have a difficult time appealing to people, and usually do so almost exclusively with economic arguments.)
* RULE 2: “Never go outside the expertise of your people.” It results in confusion, fear and retreat. Feeling secure adds to the backbone of anyone. (Organizations under attack wonder why radicals don’t address the “real” issues. This is why. They avoid things with which they have no knowledge.)
* RULE 3: “Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of the enemy.” Look for ways to increase insecurity, anxiety and uncertainty. (This happens all the time. Watch how many organizations under attack are blind-sided by seemingly irrelevant arguments that they are then forced to address.)
* RULE 4: “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” If the rule is that every letter gets a reply, send 30,000 letters. You can kill them with this because no one can possibly obey all of their own rules. (This is a serious rule. The besieged entity’s very credibility and reputation is at stake, because if activists catch it lying or not living up to its commitments, they can continue to chip away at the damage.)
* RULE 5: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.” There is no defense. It’s irrational. It’s infuriating. It also works as a key pressure point to force the enemy into concessions. (Pretty crude, rude and mean, huh? They want to create anger and fear.)
* RULE 6: “A good tactic is one your people enjoy.” They’ll keep doing it without urging and come back to do more. They’re doing their thing, and will even suggest better ones. (Radical activists, in this sense, are no different that any other human being. We all avoid “un-fun” activities, and but we revel at and enjoy the ones that work and bring results.)
* RULE 7: “A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.” Don’t become old news. (Even radical activists get bored. So to keep them excited and involved, organizers are constantly coming up with new tactics.)
* RULE 8: “Keep the pressure on. Never let up.” Keep trying new things to keep the opposition off balance. As the opposition masters one approach, hit them from the flank with something new. (Attack, attack, attack from all sides, never giving the reeling organization a chance to rest, regroup, recover and re-strategize.)
* RULE 9: “The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.” Imagination and ego can dream up many more consequences than any activist. (Perception is reality. Large organizations always prepare a worst-case scenario, something that may be furthest from the activists’ minds. The upshot is that the organization will expend enormous time and energy, creating in its own collective mind the direst of conclusions. The possibilities can easily poison the mind and result in demoralization.)
* RULE 10: “If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive.” Violence from the other side can win the public to your side because the public sympathizes with the underdog. (Unions used this tactic. Peaceful [albeit loud] demonstrations during the heyday of unions in the early to mid-20th Century incurred management’s wrath, often in the form of violence that eventually brought public sympathy to their side.)
* RULE 11: “The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.” Never let the enemy score points because you’re caught without a solution to the problem. (Old saw: If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. Activist organizations have an agenda, and their strategy is to hold a place at the table, to be given a forum to wield their power. So, they have to have a compromise solution.)
* RULE 12: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions. (This is cruel, but very effective. Direct, personalized criticism and ridicule works.)

By the way, even reporters have trouble getting the point across to a complacent society of voters as evidenced by the following:
Reporting for World Net Daily, author/researcher Jerome Corsi recently reported, “President Obama is continuing President George W. Bush’s effort to advance North American integration with a public-relations makeover calculated to place the program under the radar of public opinion and to deflect concerns about border security and national sovereignty. ~ See Obama Continues Bush's Sellout Policy
If Corsi would emphasize the point by outright telling his readers that Obama lied instead of using such words as, "a public-relations makeover calculated to place the program under the radar of public opinion and to deflect concerns about border security and national sovereignty"... "Placing the program under the radar of public opinion." Does the average reader voter really comprehend the enormity of such words as "a public relations makeover" or " deflect concerns" ? Why doesn't he come right out and say, "Obama is lying."? And that, my friends, sums up an Alinskyism, say a bunch of words that sound good and nobody will ever know what they really mean once you've said them...confusing huh!
_________________________________________
If you're not worried about how your country will look like after you're gone, then you don't need to watch the following...but maybe you should let your children watch for they will be the most affected.



If you are worried, what are you going to do about it?

Still not worried? Watch this ↓

____________________________________________________

Has there been a coup? Please America, put this one together.




And why are these cops still employed?

 
______________________________________________

And then there's this...

Friday, May 8, 2015

You...rather YOU, need to be reminded of this from time to time


VIDEO: OBAMA THE MUSLIM, HIS OWN WORDS (Third party video)
Posted by Britain First on Sunday, February 1, 2015

Real Racists...You can include Barack Obama and Al Sharpton in this group...because we only deal with facts!

The following cross-posted from FaceBook (Video from YouTube)

Daniel Beninati
BRUTAL HONESTY: THIS IS THE VIDEO ABOUT RACISM THEY DON’T WANT YOU TO SEE REAL RACISM IS SUPPORTED BY LIES
Racism, it seems, is not only alive and well, but worse than it has ever been.
...
Though Americans were under the impression that race would improve after the election of a half-black man as President of the United States, the last eight years have witnessed a firestorm of assumptions, accusations, lies, division and violence.
● Racism, it seems, is not only alive and well, but worse than it has ever been.
Or is it? Could it be that most Americans, regardless of the color of their skin, are perfectly fine having people of other races as their friends, neighbors and colleagues, and that certain people in positions of power are using their influence to manipulate the masses?
This short micro-documentary from Future Money Trends explores a hot button issue and one that is all too often voluntarily ignored by the broader media because it is simply too controversial to admit.http://futuremoneytrends.com/stopthehate
● Excerpt From ‘Real Racism Is Supported By Lies':
Police brutality is real… and racism is real. But they are probably not tied together as closely as much as the media wants you to believe.
Instead of people rallying that ‘all lives matter’ we have organizations like the National Association for Colored People, Congressional Black Caucus, Black Entertainment, and the National Al Sharpton Action Network leading the charge on just who the racists are…carrying signs that say ‘black lives matter.’
Interesting that people who identify their organizations and voting bias off the color of their skin would be given so much credibility as to where the real racism in America is.
I wonder where these groups are when an unarmed white man is shot by a police officer…
Visit this site to learn more about the liars who promote false racism: http://futuremoneytrends.com/stopthehate
And here is the youtube channel for 'VisionVictory' that is a must see, please subscribe: https://m.facebook.com/l.php…
And: https://m.youtube.com/channel/UC3_-GgP_2OpXohosehe0dkg
Future Money Trends Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/FutureMoneyTrends?_rdr
In addition, most excellent and outstanding sites where you can find true journalism and trustworthy information: www.infowars.com  & PrisonPlanet.com
And Paul Joseph Watson of Infowars.com on Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/paul.j.watson.71
And also check out: http://www.shtfplan.com/ 

The Business of Business...its great in Texas! (Hey New York,"How does it feel down there at next to bottom?)

How your state ranks with business in 2015 according to CEOs across America
Source: Examiner.com

Texas, Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Georgia have been rated the top ranking states for business in 2015 according to CEOs across America. California, New York, Illinois, New Jersey, and Massachusetts were ranked lowest.
Thursday Chief Executive magazine released the results of their annual survey of 511 Chief Executive Officers in U.S. business. They measure each state according to three criteria:

1. Taxes and regulations
2. Quality of the workforce
3. Living environment,

Living environment considers cost of living, quality of education, crime rates, social amenities and affordable housing.
“Chief executives have shown that they favor pro-growth, low-tax states, by ranking Texas the best state for business in Chief Executive magazine's 2015 "Best and Worst States for Business" survey,” a release from the publication announced. “This is Texas' 11th year on top.”
Since the beginning of the recession, established as December 2007, Texas has created 1.2 million net jobs. This compares to 700,000 net jobs created in the other 49 states combined.
"California and Oregon are essentially anti-business, whereas Texas and Tennessee do everything possible to make business comfortable and more successful," one CEO commented.
Another CEO said, "Texas is pro-business in terms of taxes, licensing, and incentives, as well as quality of workforce."
"Texas 'gets it' with incentives, workforce development and low taxation, but everyone cannot move there," observed a third CEO.
According to the magazine, state governments use the data from their survey to “improve their regulatory environment to attract more businesses, while corporations use the data to decide where to build facilities and attract vibrant workforces.”
Comments regarding Florida include the Sunshine State “is making all the right moves with a great place to work and live" and "Florida has several advantages from a government standpoint; however, very limited resources to support growing technology businesses."

Rank State Last Year’s Rank Change

1 Texas 1 0
2 Florida 2 0
3 North Carolina 4 1
4 Tennessee 3 -1
5 Georgia 10 5
6 Indiana 6 0
7 Louisiana 9 2
8 Nevada 8 0
9 Arizona 7 -2
10 South Carolina 5 -5
11 Colorado 16 5
12 Wisconsin 14 2
13 Iowa 19 6
14 Virginia 11 -3
15 Utah 13 -2
16 Oklahoma 20 4
17 Wyoming 18 1
18 Idaho 28 10
19 North Dakota 12 -7
20 Delaware 23 3
21 New Hampshire 24 3
22 Ohio 27 5
23 South Dakota 15 -8
24 Alabama 17 -7
25 Nebraska 21 -4
26 Missouri 22 -4
27 Kansas 26 -1
28 Kentucky 25 -3
29 Montana 31 2
30 Maine 36 6
31 Minnesota 34 3
32 Washington 33 1
33 Arkansas 29 -4
34 Alaska 32 -2
35 Pennsylvania 42 7
36 New Mexico 30 -6
37 Rhode Island 40 3
38 West Virginia 35 -3
39 Mississippi 37 -2
40 Maryland 41 1
41 Vermont 39 -2
42 Oregon 38 -4
43 Michigan 45 2
44 Hawaii 43 -1
45 Connecticut 44 -1
46 Massachusetts 46 0
47 New Jersey 47 0
48 Illinois 48 0
49 New York 49 0
50 California 50 0
 
And then there's this from the New York Times...
Ad Effort Selling State as a Business Haven Is Criticized
by Danny Hakim
ALBANY — The Cuomo administration has set aside nearly $140 million for an advertising campaign called “New York State Open for Business,” with the money drawn largely from a state authority created to lower electricity bills and from federal disaster aid, records show.
Much of the money spent has been used to buy television ads, half of which are being broadcast outside New York, celebrating the state’s economic success stories as part of an effort to lure and keep business here.
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s administration, which began the campaign, says the ads are a valuable tool for recruiting businesses, but critics say they are a backdoor way of elevating the governor’s stature, even though they do not mention his name and he is prohibited from appearing in them.
“We are doing everything we can to level the playing field to bring businesses and jobs to the state of New York, and will continue to double down on those efforts as long as this governor is in office,” Melissa DeRosa, a spokeswoman for Mr. Cuomo, said.  ....continued here

America Has Turned Away From God...What we have warned you never to do, we have done!



Powerful, timely, prophetic message -- Wake up America Members of Congress hear a hard-hitting speech by Rabbi Jonathan...
Posted by Nigeriacamera on Monday, May 4, 2015

Also from YouTube

Thursday, May 7, 2015

Al Gore's Solution To Global Warming... it may sound preposterous, but so was his warning!




Another Reason To Not Like Lindsey Graham et. al.



Barack Obama Uses The Coleman Young Playbook...and he's winning with it! (Its Your Move America)

If you disregard the headline, "Coleman Young: the Communist Who Destroyed Detroit", the next headline will read,"Barack Obama: the Communist Who Destroyed America"...
Its Your Move America!

Source
Coleman Young: the Communist Who Destroyed Detroit
Trevor Loudon
colemanyoung
New Zeal
If one man could be blamed most for the destruction of Detroit, it would be Coleman Young.
Mayor from 1974 to 1993, Young set a city already in decline on the pathway to the disaster area it is today.

Coleman Young had a well-deserved reputation for corruption, but few today understand his communism.
It is important to know that it was a combination of crony capitalism and communism that destroyed Detroit, because that is exactly the formula being employed by Young’s spiritual heir, Barack Obama, from the White House today.
Born in 1918, Young found communism as a young man. In the 1930s, he found an apprentice electrician program sponsored by Ford Motor Company. There, he became an underground union organizer and “civil rights” activist until he was drafted into the Army in 1942.
Young served as a bombardier and navigator with the famous Tuskegee Airmen. Toward the end of the war, Young and about 100 other African-American men were arrested for demanding service at a segregated officers’ club in Indiana. Young managed to get word to the Black press. Within days, he was released and the Army began the process of integrating the club.
Another black Communist Party supporter also served in the unit, Percy Sutton, a future Manhattan borough president. He would later go on to mentor and employ a young radical named Eric Holder, and write a letter of recommendation to get a young Barack Obama into Harvard.
After the war, Young returned to Detroit, where he became a union organizer. But he lost his job when the head of the United Auto Workers Union “took a dislike to the commotion created by Young and other Black dissidents.” There may have been more to this, as during that period the UAW was being run by socialists, who were trying to oust their rival communists from the union.
Young took his first political job working for Progressive Party 1948 presidential candidate, Henry A. Wallace. The Progressive party was controlled, lock, stock and barrel, by the Communist Party.
In 1949, Young worked with fellow Progressive Party leader, Stanley Nowak, in supporting Ford factory strikers, as this clipping from the Communist Party’s Peoples world proves.
Untitledyoung

In 1966, Novak turned up as a sponsor of the Herbert Aptheker Testimonial Dinner. The dinner was held on the occasion of Communist Party theoretician Herbert Aptheker‘s 50th birthday.
The National Negro Labor Council (1950-56), was a Communist Party front for black workers and labor officials.
Key leaders of the Council included Coleman Young (national executive secretary), Charles Hayes (Chicago leader, identified communist and later a Democratic Congressman), Cleveland Robinson, George Crockett and Erma Henderson from Detroit.
Cleveland Robinson would later become a member of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee and a founder, with Charles Hayes, of the Communist Party created Coalition of Black Trade Unionists – an organization greatly loved by many modern Black leaders including Mississippi’s communist connected Congressman Bennie Thompson and Barack Obama.
Crockett was a close sympathizer and almost certainly a secret Communist Party member, who went on to become a Democratic Congressman from Michigan.
Erma Henderson would later serve on the Detroit City Council under Coleman Young.
In 1946, Erma Henderson was a Michigan representative to the National Council of American Youth for Democracy – the youth wing of the Communist Party USA. Serving alongside Henderson was a young Chicago journalist named Vernon Jarrett. He in turn, was a close colleague of a Chicago Communist party writer named Frank Marshall Davis – later the Hawaii mentor of a teenage Barack Obama.
Vernon Jarrett’s son would later marry the daughter of a Chicago radical educationalist named Barbara Bowman. The brief marriage turned Valerie Bowman into Valerie Jarrett – now Obama’s closest friend and most trusted White House adviser.
By 1952, Young’s work brought him to the attention of the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was investigating the Communist Party in Michigan. Coleman Young completely refused to answer the committee’s questions.
Coleman Young, HUAC hearings. Lawyer George Crockett, right
Coleman Young, HUAC hearings. Lawyer George Crockett, right

There is no doubt however that Young was a secret Party member.
In 1988, Howard Johnson — who had been one of the leading communists in Harlem during the Great Depression — told interviewer Kay Takora about his return home from World War II: “I came back into activity in the Communist Party… I at first became county educational director. New York county was the biggest county organization. From ’46 to ’49. And during that same period, I was assigned to help build a national Negro veterans organization which was called the United Negro and Allied Veterans of America. And that had the backing of the party and I was assigned by the party to work in that along with my duties as educational director of the county organization.”
Howard Johnson continued, eventually bringing the conversation to Detroit and to Detroit’s mayor, Coleman Young: “When UNAVA was formed, I was elected national vice-commander in charge of education, which fit my training, and the other national vice-commander was Coleman Young, who was national vice-commander in charge of labor.
“Because at that time he was a steward in the auto workers union and [a] very prominent trade unionist in Detroit. Coleman and I were very good friends…. I never anticipated he would be a bourgeois mayor of Detroit. But Coleman’s a great guy, nevertheless. But I think that it was his party training that (helped) him to move forward as he did”.
In the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, the Communist Party’s liaison man with Moscow was a secret FBI informant, Morris Childs. On one trip to Moscow, Morris Childs’ fellow-delegate, the black communist James Jackson, asked that Coleman Young, a future mayor of Detroit and a secret Party member, be invited to Moscow to study Marxism-Leninism; the Soviets vetoed him as too old.
Democratic Socialists of America member and socialist historian Paul Buhle, wrote in a 1992 article for the Encyclopedia of the American Left:
Communists also gained from long-standing political contacts in the black community. Victories of black mayoral and congressional candidates with decades — old ties to the CP — a short list would include Coleman Young and George Crocket in Detroit, Gus Newport in Berkeley, and somewhat more ambiguously, Harold Washington in Chicago.”
It was the 1983 victory of long time Communist Party affiliate Harold Washington that inspired a young Barack Obama to move to the Windy City two years later.
Washington stacked Chicago City Hall full of communists and socialists. Coleman Young did the same in Detroit. He even appointed Communist Party supporter Dave Moore, Director of the city’s Senior Citizens Department.
So, it’s no surprise to see Barack Obama doing the same thing at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
Like Obama though, Coleman Young didn’t destroy Detroit alone. He had a whole raft of communist and socialist affiliated Councillors on his team, including Erma Henderson, Ken Cockrel, Sr., Clyde Cleveland and Maryann Mahaffey.
Erma Henderson center, Maryann Mahaffey, fourth from right, Clyde Cleveland, third from right, with a delegation from the Soviet front World Peace Council, 1975
Erma Henderson center, Maryann Mahaffey, fourth from right, Clyde Cleveland, third from right, with a delegation from the Soviet front World Peace Council, 1975

Coleman Young, crony capitalism and communism destroyed Detroit.
Barack Obama is using the same formula to destroy America.
Will you let him?
Will you let him?

Wednesday, May 6, 2015

Careful What You Say...Your government has ears!

"...most people don’t realize that the words they speak are not so private anymore..."
 
The following from: The // Intercept
The Computers are Listening
How the NSA Converts Spoken Words Into Searchable Text

Most people realize that emails and other digital communications they once considered private can now become part of their permanent record.
But even as they increasingly use apps that understand what they say, most people don’t realize that the words they speak are not so private anymore, either.
Top-secret documents from the archive of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden show the National Security Agency can now automatically recognize the content within phone calls by creating rough transcripts and phonetic representations that can be easily searched and stored.
The documents show NSA analysts celebrating the development of what they called “Google for Voice” nearly a decade ago.
Though perfect transcription of natural conversation apparently remains the Intelligence Community’s “holy grail,” the Snowden documents describe extensive use of keyword searching as well as computer programs designed to analyze and “extract” the content of voice conversations, and even use sophisticated algorithms to flag conversations of interest.
The documents include vivid examples of the use of speech recognition in war zones like Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as in Latin America. But they leave unclear exactly how widely the spy agency uses this ability, particularly in programs that pick up considerable amounts of conversations that include people who live in or are citizens of the United States.
Spying on international telephone calls has always been a staple of NSA surveillance, but the requirement that an actual person do the listening meant it was effectively limited to a tiny percentage of the total traffic. By leveraging advances in automated speech recognition, the NSA has entered the era of bulk listening.
And this has happened with no apparent public oversight, hearings or legislative action. Congress hasn’t shown signs of even knowing that it’s going on.
The USA Freedom Act — the surveillance reform bill that Congress is currently debating — doesn’t address the topic at all. The bill would end an NSA program that does not collect voice content: the government’s bulk collection of domestic calling data, showing who called who and for how long.
Even if becomes law, the bill would leave in place a multitude of mechanisms exposed by Snowden that scoop up vast amounts of innocent people’s text and voice communications in the U.S. and across the globe.
Civil liberty experts contacted by The Intercept said the NSA’s speech-to-text capabilities are a disturbing example of the privacy invasions that are becoming possible as our analog world transitions to a digital one.
“I think people don’t understand that the economics of surveillance have totally changed,” Jennifer Granick, civil liberties director at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, told The Intercept.
“Once you have this capability, then the question is: How will it be deployed? Can you temporarily cache all American phone calls, transcribe all the phone calls, and do text searching of the content of the calls?” she said. “It may not be what they are doing right now, but they’ll be able to do it.”
And, she asked: “How would we ever know if they change the policy?”
Indeed, NSA officials have been secretive about their ability to convert speech to text, and how widely they use it, leaving open any number of possibilities.
That secrecy is the key, Granick said. “We don’t have any idea how many innocent people are being affected, or how many of those innocent people are also Americans.”

I Can Search Against It

NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake, who was trained as a voice processing crypto-linguist and worked at the agency until 2008, told The Intercept that he saw a huge push after the September 11, 2001 terror attacks to turn the massive amounts of voice communications being collected into something more useful.
Human listening was clearly not going to be the solution. “There weren’t enough ears,” he said.
The transcripts that emerged from the new systems weren’t perfect, he said. “But even if it’s not 100 percent, I can still get a lot more information. It’s far more accessible. I can search against it.”
Converting speech to text makes it easier for the NSA to see what it has collected and stored, according to Drake. “The breakthrough was being able to do it on a vast scale,” he said.


More Data, More Power, Better Performance
The Defense Department, through its Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), started funding academic and commercial research into speech recognition in the early 1970s.
What emerged were several systems to turn speech into text, all of which slowly but gradually improved as they were able to work with more data and at faster speeds.
In a brief interview, Dan Kaufman, director of DARPA’s Information Innovation Office, indicated that the government’s ability to automate transcription is still limited.
Kaufman says that automated transcription of phone conversation is “super hard,” because “there’s a lot of noise on the signal” and “it’s informal as hell.”
“I would tell you we are not very good at that,” he said.
In an ideal environment like a news broadcast, he said, “we’re getting pretty good at being able to do these types of translations.”

A 2008 document from the Snowden archive shows that transcribing news broadcasts was already working well seven years ago, using a program called Enhanced Video Text and Audio Processing:

(U//FOUO) EViTAP is a fully-automated news monitoring tool. The key feature of this Intelink-SBU-hosted tool is that it analyzes news in six languages, including Arabic, Mandarin Chinese, Russian, Spanish, English, and Farsi/Persian. “How does it work?” you may ask. It integrates Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) which provides transcripts of the spoken audio. Next, machine translation of the ASR transcript translates the native language transcript to English. Voila! Technology is amazing.

A version of the system the NSA uses is now even available commercially.

Experts in speech recognition say that in the last decade or so, the pace of technological improvement has been explosive. As information storage became cheaper and more efficient, technology companies were able to store massive amounts of voice data on their servers, allowing them to continually update and improve the models. Enormous processors, tuned as “deep neural networks” that detect patterns like human brains do, produce much cleaner transcripts.

And the Snowden documents show that the same kinds of leaps forward seen in commercial speech-to-text products have also been happening in secret at the NSA, fueled by the agency’s singular access to astronomical processing power and its own vast data archives.

In fact, the NSA has been repeatedly releasing new and improved speech recognition systems for more than a decade.

The first-generation tool, which made keyword-searching of vast amounts of voice content possible, was rolled out in 2004 and code-named RHINEHART.

“Voice word search technology allows analysts to find and prioritize intercept based on its intelligence content,” says an internal 2006 NSA memo entitled “For Media Mining, the Future Is Now!

The memo says that intelligence analysts involved in counterterrorism were able to identify terms related to bomb-making materials, like “detonator” and “hydrogen peroxide,” as well as place names like “Baghdad” or people like “Musharaf.”

RHINEHART was “designed to support both real-time searches, in which incoming data is automatically searched by a designated set of dictionaries, and retrospective searches, in which analysts can repeatedly search over months of past traffic,” the memo explains (emphasis in original).

As of 2006, RHINEHART was operating “across a wide variety of missions and languages” and was “used throughout the NSA/CSS [Central Security Service] Enterprise.”

But even then, a newer, more sophisticated product was already being rolled out by the NSA’s Human Language Technology (HLT) program office. The new system, called VoiceRT, was first introduced in Baghdad, and “designed to index and tag 1 million cuts per day.”

The goal, according to another 2006 memo, was to use voice processing technology to be able “index, tag and graph,” all intercepted communications. “Using HLT services, a single analyst will be able to sort through millions of cuts per day and focus on only the small percentage that is relevant,” the memo states.

A 2009 memo from the NSA’s British partner, GCHQ, describes how “NSA have had the BBN speech-to-text system Byblos running at Fort Meade for at least 10 years. (Initially they also had Dragon.) During this period they have invested heavily in producing their own corpora of transcribed Sigint in both American English and an increasing range of other languages.” (GCHQ also noted that it had its own small corpora of transcribed voice communications, most of which happened to be “Northern Irish accented speech.”)

VoiceRT, in turn, was surpassed a few years after its launch. According to the intelligence community’s “Black Budget” for fiscal year 2013, VoiceRT was decommissioned and replaced in 2011 and 2012, so that by 2013, NSA could operationalize a new system. This system, apparently called SPIRITFIRE, could handle more data, faster. SPIRITFIRE would be “a more robust voice processing capability based on speech-to-text keyword search and paired dialogue transcription.”

Extensive Use Abroad

Voice communications can be collected by the NSA whether they are being sent by regular phone lines, over cellular networks, or through voice-over-internet services. Previously released documents from the Snowden archive describe enormous efforts by the NSA during the last decade to get access to voice-over-internet content like Skype calls, for instance. And other documents in the archive chronicle the agency’s adjustment to the fact that an increasingly large percentage of conversations, even those that start as landline or mobile calls, end up as digitized packets flying through the same fiber-optic cables that the NSA taps so effectively for other data and voice communications.

The Snowden archive, as searched and analyzed by The Intercept, documents extensive use of speech-to-text by the NSA to search through international voice intercepts — particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as Mexico and Latin America.

For example, speech-to-text was a key but previously unheralded element of the sophisticated analytical program known as the Real Time Regional Gateway (RTRG), which started in 2005 when newly appointed NSA chief Keith B. Alexander, according to the Washington Post, “wanted everything: Every Iraqi text message, phone call and e-mail that could be vacuumed up by the agency’s powerful computers.”

The Real Time Regional Gateway was credited with playing a role in “breaking up Iraqi insurgent networks and significantly reducing the monthly death toll from improvised explosive devices.” The indexing and searching of “voice cuts” was deployed to Iraq in 2006. By 2008, RTRG was operational in Afghanistan as well.

A slide from a June 2006 NSA powerpoint presentation described the role of VoiceRT:



Keyword spotting extended to Iranian intercepts as well. A 2006 memo reported that RHINEHART had been used successfully by Persian-speaking analysts who “searched for the words ‘negotiations’ or ‘America’ in their traffic, and RHINEHART located a very important call that was transcribed verbatim providing information on an important Iranian target’s discussion of the formation of a the new Iraqi government.”
According to a 2011 memo, “How is Human Language Technology (HLT) Progressing?“, NSA that year deployed “HLT Labs” to Afghanistan, NSA facilities in Texas and Georgia, and listening posts in Latin America run by the Special Collection Service, a joint NSA/CIA unit that operates out of embassies and other locations.
“Spanish is the most mature of our speech-to-text analytics,” the memo says, noting that the NSA and its Special Collections Service sites in Latin America, have had “great success searching for Spanish keywords.”
The memo offers an example from NSA Texas, where an analyst newly trained on the system used a keyword search to find previously unreported information on a target involved in drug-trafficking. In another case, an official at a Special Collection Service site in Latin America “was able to find foreign intelligence regarding a Cuban official in a fraction of the usual time.”
In a 2011 article, “Finding Nuggets — Quickly — in a Heap of Voice Collection, From Mexico to Afghanistan,” an intelligence analysis technical director from NSA Texas described the “rare life-changing instance” when he learned about human language technology, and its ability to “find the exact traffic of interest within a mass of collection.”
Analysts in Texas found the new technology a boon for spying. “From finding tunnels in Tijuana, identifying bomb threats in the streets of Mexico City, or shedding light on the shooting of US Customs officials in Potosi, Mexico, the technology did what it advertised: It accelerated the process of finding relevant intelligence when time was of the essence,” he wrote. (Emphasis in original.)
The author of the memo was also part of a team that introduced the technology to military leaders in Afghanistan. “From Kandahar to Kabul, we have traveled the country explaining NSA leaders’ vision and introducing SIGINT teams to what HLT analytics can do today and to what is still needed to make this technology a game-changing success,” the memo reads.

Extent of Domestic Use Remains Unknown
What’s less clear from the archive is how extensively this capability is used to transcribe or otherwise index and search voice conversations that primarily involve what the NSA terms “U.S. persons.”
The NSA did not answer a series of detailed questions about automated speech recognition, even though an NSA “classification guide” that is part of the Snowden archive explicitly states that “The fact that NSA/CSS has created HLT models” for speech-to-text processing as well as gender, language and voice recognition, is “UNCLASSIFIED.”

Also unclassified: The fact that the processing can sort and prioritize audio files for human linguists, and that the statistical models are regularly being improved and updated based on actual intercepts. By contrast, because they’ve been tuned using actual intercepts, the specific parameters of the systems are highly classified.
“The National Security Agency employs a variety of technologies in the course of its authorized foreign-intelligence mission,” spokesperson Vanee’ Vines wrote in an email to The Intercept. “These capabilities, operated by NSA’s dedicated professionals and overseen by multiple internal and external authorities, help to deter threats from international terrorists, human traffickers, cyber criminals, and others who seek to harm our citizens and allies.”
Vines did not respond to the specific questions about privacy protections in place related to the processing of domestic or domestic-to-international voice communications. But she wrote that “NSA always applies rigorous protections designed to safeguard the privacy not only of U.S. persons, but also of foreigners abroad, as directed by the President in January 2014.”
The presidentially appointed but independent Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) didn’t mention speech-to-text technology in its public reports.
“I’m not going to get into whether any program does or does not have that capability,” PCLOB chairman David Medine told The Intercept.
His board’s reports, he said, contained only information that the intelligence community agreed could be declassified.
“We went to the intelligence community and asked them to declassify a significant amount of material,” he said. The “vast majority” of that material was declassified, he said. But not all — including “facts that we thought could be declassified without compromising national security.”
Hypothetically, Medine said, the ability to turn voice into text would raise significant privacy concerns. And it would also raise questions about how the intelligence agencies “minimize” the retention and dissemination of material— particularly involving U.S. persons — that doesn’t include information they’re explicitly allowed to keep.
“Obviously it increases the ability of the government to process information from more calls,” Medine said. “It would also allow the government to listen in on more calls, which would raise more of the kind of privacy issues that the board has raised in the past.”
“I’m not saying the government does or doesn’t do it,” he said, “just that these would be the consequences.”
A New Learning Curve
Speech recognition expert Bhiksha Raj likens the current era to the early days of the Internet, when people didn’t fully realize how the things they typed would last forever.
“When I started using the Internet in the 90s, I was just posting stuff,” said Raj, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Language Technologies Institute. “It never struck me that 20 years later I could go Google myself and pull all this up. Imagine if I posted something on alt.binaries.pictures.erotica or something like that, and now that post is going to embarrass me forever.”
The same is increasingly becoming the case with voice communication, he said. And the stakes are even higher, given that the majority of the world’s communication has historically been conducted by voice, and it has traditionally been considered a private mode of communication.
“People still aren’t realizing quite the magnitude that the problem could get to,” Raj said. “And it’s not just surveillance,” he said. “People are using voice services all the time. And where does the voice go? It’s sitting somewhere. It’s going somewhere. You’re living on trust.” He added: “Right now I don’t think you can trust anybody.”

The Need for New Rules
Kim Taipale, executive director of the Stilwell Center for Advanced Studies in Science and Technology Policy, is one of several people who tried a decade ago to get policymakers to recognize that existing surveillance law doesn’t adequately deal with new global communication networks and advanced technologies including speech recognition.
“Things aren’t ephemeral anymore,” Taipale told The Intercept. “We’re living in a world where many things that were fleeting in the analog world are now on the permanent record. The question then becomes: what are the consequences of that and what are the rules going to be to deal with those consequences?”
Realistically, Taipale said, “the ability of the government to search voice communication in bulk is one of the things we may have to live with under some circumstances going forward.” But there at least need to be “clear public rules and effective oversight to make sure that the information is only used for appropriate law-enforcement or national security purposes consistent with Constitutional principles.”
Ultimately, Taipale said, a system where computers flag suspicious voice communications could be less invasive than one where people do the listening, given the potential for human abuse and misuse to lead to privacy violations. “Automated analysis has different privacy implications,” he said.
But to Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, the distinction between a human listening and a computer listening is irrelevant in terms of privacy, possible consequences, and a chilling effect on speech.
“What people care about in the end, and what creates chilling effects in the end, are consequences,” he said. “I think that over time, people would learn to fear computerized eavesdropping just as much as they fear eavesdropping by humans, because of the consequences that it could bring.”
Indeed, computer listening could raise new concerns. One of the internal NSA memos from 2006 says an “important enhancement under development is the ability for this HLT capability to predict what intercepted data might be of interest to analysts based on the analysts’ past behavior.”
Citing Amazon’s ability to not just track but predict buyer preferences, the memo says that an NSA system designed to flag interesting intercepts “offers the promise of presenting analysts with highly enriched sorting of their traffic.”
To Phillip Rogaway, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Davis, keyword-search is probably the “least of our problems.” In an email to The Intercept, Rogaway warned that “When the NSA identifies someone as ‘interesting’ based on contemporary NLP [Natural Language Processing] methods, it might be that there is no human-understandable explanation as to why beyond: ‘his corpus of discourse resembles those of others whom we thought interesting'; or the conceptual opposite: ‘his discourse looks or sounds different from most people’s.'”
If the algorithms NSA computers use to identify threats are too complex for humans to understand, Rogaway wrote, “it will be impossible to understand the contours of the surveillance apparatus by which one is judged. All that people will be able to do is to try your best to behave just like everyone else.”

Next: The NSA’s best kept open secret.
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Documents published with this article:
Research on the Snowden archive was conducted by Intercept researcher Andrew Fishman.
Illustrations by Richard Mia for The Intercept.
Email the author: dan.froomkin@theintercept.com

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