Spy versus
SPY

Updated @5:19pm

from Alternet: Be Careful What You Google

August 1, 2013  |

 

   Music writer Michele Catalano  wrote Thursday about a personal experience that may show, to bizarre but chilling effect, the government’s online surveillance in action. Catalano writes that her home was visited and searched by members of the Joint Terrorist Task Force —  a fact she attributes to having searched online for pressure cookers, while her husband searched for backpack.

Yeah General Hayden, I believe you, nobody is watching us..........................end UPDATE

 

 

Richard Nixon must be looking up from his extremely warm location in Hell and feeling a sense of frustration as he watches folks he would have considered amateurs get away with crap he wouldn't have dreamed of even attempting in his day of trying to establish executive control over Amerika and the world. He was highly cheesed at Daniel Ellsberg, who had the temerity to expose the lies behind the Vietnam Scam from his position as an employee of the Rand Corporation, a position similar to Edward Snowden today, with access to documents that put the lie to the "official" government position. Of course back in those days the so-called system of checks and balances still functioned to a degree and the court was appalled at the lengths that Nixon and his band of sleazebags would go to discredit and persecute Mr. Ellsberg, which led to complete exoneration for Daniel and his eventual recognition as a GOOD CITIZEN by most people with functioning brains. 


Today though, Bradley Manning finds himself looking at over 130 years in Leavenworth, or comparable digs for exposing not just lies from our government but actual war crimes by so-called men who are apparently immune to any accountability. Sometimes I wonder if the Nuremberg Trials actually happened or are a fairy tale ala the Brothers Grimm. As one wag on Twitter pointed out the other day, someone who exposes war crimes gets over a hundred years in jail, while war criminals get a library. I guess being a "good German" is the way to go now, unless you like free room and board in unpleasant accommodations or worse (execution for TREASON).


I caught a discussion with Charlie Rose and some of the usual suspect regarding Snowden and Manning yesterday and was not surprised to see that only one person included in the discussion didn't think both young "whistleblowers" were actually criminals with Messiah complexes or worse.  General Michael Hayden former head of sequentially the NSA and the CIA got 15 or 20 minutes to explain how troubled and dangerous both Snowden and Manning were and spent a fair bit of time explaining that the public, and even the Congress Critters who almost defunded the NSA programs the other day had it all wrong. He said that all the skeptics and critics mistakenly believed that the gubmint was listening to our phone calls and reading our e-mails, but that indeed no information that wasn't in the phone book was being disclosed or used. Of course anyone who has spent thirty or forty years as a big player in the Security Industrial Complex should be expected to laud the value of spooks prying into our private business.


General Hayden pretty well made everything he said irrelevant before he was done though, or just proved he was as hypocritical as it is possible to be, before he signed off. After all his denials of any kind of actual listening or reading (claiming only "meta-data" was being collected) he expressed his deep concern for his (probably) buddy General David Petraeus. Yep, General Hayden was/is concerned about the fact that the FBI could read Petraeus' emails without a warrant, which of course led to him having to resign as head of the CIA because he was committing adultery with his young biographer. In other words, General Hayden, who spent years in charge of all this bullshit spying on Americans, Europeans, anyone on earth really, couldn't care less whose privacy is violated, unless the violated person is a friend, or person of equal status/position.


Well fuck you General Hayden, and I hope someday people look at Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning the way we look at Daniel Ellsberg.

USA Number One! 

#1 The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world and the largest total prison population on the entire globe.

#2 According to NationMaster.com, the United States has the highest percentage of obese people in the world.

#3 The United States has the highest divorce rate on the globe by a wide margin.

#4 The United States is tied with the U.K. for the most hours of television watched per person each week.

#5 The United States has the highest rate of illegal drug use on the entire planet.

#6 There are more car thefts in the United States each year than anywhere else in the world by far.

#7 There are more reported rapes in the United States each year than anywhere else in the world.

#8 There are more reported murders in the United States each year than anywhere else in the world.

#9 There are more total crimes in the United States each year than anywhere else in the world.

#10 The United States also has more police officers than anywhere else in the world.

#11 The United States spends much more on health care as a percentage of GDP than any other nation on the face of the earth.

#12 The United States has more people on pharmaceutical drugs than any other country on the planet.

#13 The percentage of women taking antidepressants in America is higher than in any other country in the world.

#14 Americans have more student loan debt than anyone else in the world.

#15 More pornography is created in the United States than anywhere else on the entire globe.  89 percent is made in the U.S.A. and only 11 percent is made in the rest of the world.

#16 The United States has the largest trade deficit in the world every single year.  Between December 2000 and December 2010, the United States ran a total trade deficit of 6.1 trillion dollars with the rest of the world, and the U.S. has had a negative trade balance every single year since 1976.

#17 The United States spends 7 times more on the military than any other nation on the planet does.  In fact, U.S. military spending is greater than the military spending of China, Russia, Japan, India, and the rest of NATO combined.

#18 The United States has far more foreign military bases than any other country does.

#19 The United States has the most complicated tax system in the entire world.

#20 The U.S. has accumulated the biggest national debt that the world has ever seen and it is rapidly getting worse.  Right now, U.S. government debt is expanding at a rate of $40,000 per second.

Data from The Economic Collapse 

(I went to this site for the list, which has been bandied about all over. I'm not too clear on where/what this site is about as the comment thread is a weird collection of anti-socialist and pro-Jesus (it's all because America forgot God) tripe)