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Ukraine - NoEnzLefttoSplit - Mar 28, 2024 - 1:30am
 
The Obituary Page - ScottFromWyoming - Mar 27, 2024 - 10:58pm
 
Breaking News - Lazy8 - Mar 27, 2024 - 10:55pm
 
March 2024 Photo Theme - Many - KurtfromLaQuinta - Mar 27, 2024 - 8:52pm
 
USA! USA! USA! - R_P - Mar 27, 2024 - 7:40pm
 
Trump - kurtster - Mar 27, 2024 - 7:38pm
 
Little known information...maybe even facts - haresfur - Mar 27, 2024 - 6:21pm
 
Live Music - oldviolin - Mar 27, 2024 - 5:08pm
 
RightWingNutZ - R_P - Mar 27, 2024 - 3:48pm
 
Wordle - daily game - JrzyTmata - Mar 27, 2024 - 3:04pm
 
Lyrics that strike a chord today... - miamizsun - Mar 27, 2024 - 2:44pm
 
NY Times Strands - rgio - Mar 27, 2024 - 2:14pm
 
Please Don't Post Here - Red_Dragon - Mar 27, 2024 - 11:02am
 
NYTimes Connections - geoff_morphini - Mar 27, 2024 - 8:23am
 
Radio Paradise Comments - GeneP59 - Mar 27, 2024 - 7:51am
 
Today in History - DaveInSaoMiguel - Mar 27, 2024 - 3:17am
 
Motivational Office Cliches... - NoEnzLefttoSplit - Mar 26, 2024 - 10:20pm
 
(Big) Media Watch - Red_Dragon - Mar 26, 2024 - 6:18pm
 
YouTube: Music-Videos - miamizsun - Mar 26, 2024 - 4:10pm
 
Israel - R_P - Mar 26, 2024 - 12:24pm
 
Photos you have taken of your walks or hikes. - Steely_D - Mar 26, 2024 - 12:04pm
 
Business as Usual - black321 - Mar 26, 2024 - 12:02pm
 
Solar / Wind / Geothermal / Efficiency Energy - islander - Mar 26, 2024 - 8:00am
 
Is there any DOG news out there? - Beez - Mar 26, 2024 - 7:24am
 
Food - Steely_D - Mar 26, 2024 - 1:41am
 
• • • The Once-a-Day • • •  - Red_Dragon - Mar 25, 2024 - 7:30pm
 
Vinyl Only Spin List - kurtster - Mar 25, 2024 - 6:56pm
 
Derplahoma! - Red_Dragon - Mar 25, 2024 - 3:48pm
 
Frequent drop outs (The Netherlands) - kingen - Mar 25, 2024 - 2:43pm
 
China - R_P - Mar 25, 2024 - 11:59am
 
Musky Mythology - R_P - Mar 25, 2024 - 11:20am
 
Play history seems to indicate that I"m streaming 24/7, b... - jarro - Mar 25, 2024 - 10:44am
 
April 8th Partial Solar Eclipse - Coaxial - Mar 24, 2024 - 6:22pm
 
New Music - KurtfromLaQuinta - Mar 24, 2024 - 5:07pm
 
Dental Floss Tycoons, and other Montana Myths, Facts, and... - Red_Dragon - Mar 24, 2024 - 12:32pm
 
Orbiting Earth - oldviolin - Mar 24, 2024 - 9:42am
 
Basketball - oldviolin - Mar 23, 2024 - 2:50pm
 
What Makes You Laugh? - ScottFromWyoming - Mar 23, 2024 - 1:54pm
 
Joe Biden - kurtster - Mar 23, 2024 - 11:17am
 
Technical Streaming Note for Nerdy RP DIYers - sjagminas1 - Mar 23, 2024 - 10:16am
 
Museum Of Bad Album Covers - Proclivities - Mar 23, 2024 - 8:56am
 
Other Medical Stuff - Antigone - Mar 22, 2024 - 3:06pm
 
Country Up The Bumpkin - oldviolin - Mar 22, 2024 - 11:06am
 
Pernicious Pious Proclivities Particularized Prodigiously - Red_Dragon - Mar 22, 2024 - 9:17am
 
Memorials - Remembering Our Loved Ones - Bill_J - Mar 21, 2024 - 8:54pm
 
Talk Behind Their Backs Forum - VV - Mar 21, 2024 - 2:29pm
 
Can you afford to retire? - DaveInSaoMiguel - Mar 21, 2024 - 2:15pm
 
Bug Reports & Feature Requests - blt - Mar 21, 2024 - 12:49pm
 
Mixtape Culture Club - KurtfromLaQuinta - Mar 21, 2024 - 11:10am
 
Baseball, anyone? - ScottFromWyoming - Mar 21, 2024 - 7:11am
 
What Did You See Today? - KurtfromLaQuinta - Mar 20, 2024 - 5:13pm
 
Annoying stuff. not things that piss you off, just annoyi... - ScottFromWyoming - Mar 20, 2024 - 4:31pm
 
Upcoming concerts or shows you can't wait to see - Antigone - Mar 20, 2024 - 3:10pm
 
Russia - NoEnzLefttoSplit - Mar 20, 2024 - 11:44am
 
Photography Forum - Your Own Photos - Proclivities - Mar 20, 2024 - 9:33am
 
2024 Elections! - Lazy8 - Mar 20, 2024 - 7:26am
 
Economix - R_P - Mar 19, 2024 - 4:36pm
 
Name My Band - DaveInSaoMiguel - Mar 19, 2024 - 10:53am
 
RP automation with iOS Shortcuts App - jarro - Mar 19, 2024 - 10:15am
 
Delicacies: a..k.a.. the Gross Food forum - DaveInSaoMiguel - Mar 19, 2024 - 10:12am
 
Irony 101 - Proclivities - Mar 19, 2024 - 6:02am
 
New Forum Member on "What Makes RP Great" - miamizsun - Mar 19, 2024 - 4:38am
 
Cache stopped working on old Android Phone - Eisenwindel - Mar 19, 2024 - 1:50am
 
Cryptic Posts - Leave Them Guessing - Bill_J - Mar 18, 2024 - 8:23pm
 
Damn Dinosaurs! - oldviolin - Mar 18, 2024 - 8:16pm
 
One Partying State - Wyoming News - geoff_morphini - Mar 18, 2024 - 3:58pm
 
Great guitar faces - skyguy - Mar 18, 2024 - 3:33pm
 
Despots, dictators and war criminals - R_P - Mar 18, 2024 - 12:41pm
 
Uploading Music - dischuckin - Mar 18, 2024 - 11:55am
 
Media Matters - thisbody - Mar 18, 2024 - 10:03am
 
NASA & other news from space - miamizsun - Mar 18, 2024 - 4:13am
 
MEALTICKET - drinpt - Mar 17, 2024 - 4:13am
 
What makes you smile? - Steely_D - Mar 16, 2024 - 7:31pm
 
Apple Computer - GeneP59 - Mar 16, 2024 - 12:02pm
 
Environment - R_P - Mar 16, 2024 - 11:18am
 
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Posted: Apr 24, 2022 - 7:43pm

Former Intelligence Officials, Citing Russia, Say Big Tech Monopoly Power is Vital to National Security
A group of former intelligence and national security officials on Monday issued a jointly signed letter warning that pending legislative attempts to restrict or break up the power of Big Tech monopolies — Facebook, Google, and Amazon — would jeopardize national security because, they argue, their centralized censorship power is crucial to advancing U.S. foreign policy. The majority of this letter is devoted to repeatedly invoking the grave threat allegedly posed to the U.S. by Russia as illustrated by the invasion of Ukraine, and it repeatedly points to the dangers of Putin and the Kremlin to justify the need to preserve Big Tech's power in its maximalist form. Any attempts to restrict Big Tech's monopolistic power would therefore undermine the U.S. fight against Moscow. (...)

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Posted: Apr 16, 2021 - 2:59pm

Why Spy Agencies Say the Future Is Bleak
Climate change, technology, disease and financial crises will pose big challenges for the world, an intelligence report concludes.
Every four years, at the start of a new administration, American intelligence agencies put out “Global Trends,” a weighty assessment of where the world seems headed over the next two decades. In 2008, for example, the report warned about the potential emergence of a pandemic originating in East Asia and spreading rapidly around the world.

The latest report, Global Trends 2040, released last week by the National Intelligence Council, finds that the pandemic has proved to be “the most significant, singular global disruption since World War II,” with medical, political and security implications that will reverberate for years. That’s not schadenfreude. It’s the prologue to a far darker picture of what lies ahead. (...)

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Posted: Jan 1, 2021 - 2:00pm

The Man Who Refused to Spy
The F.B.I. tried to recruit an Iranian scientist as an informant. When he balked, the payback was brutal.
Iranians visiting or residing in the U.S. routinely hear from the Bureau. Half a dozen Iranian nationals and Iranian-Americans have described such approaches to me, and they have typically done so with trepidation, because the Iranian government sees any returning national who has had dealings with a U.S. intelligence agency as a potential spy. Some Iranians told me of polite conversations with federal agents, cards exchanged, refusals accepted. Others described repeated demands, veiled threats, and legal trouble lasting years. The Bureau recruits counterintelligence assets in much the same way it turns witnesses in domestic racketeering cases: agents look for vulnerabilities to use as leverage in pressuring people to become informants. They find discrepancies in immigration paperwork or identify petty sanctions violations, sometimes threatening an indictment to bolster their demands.

(...)

If there was ever a force equal to Asgari’s will, it was the bureaucratic inertia of ICE. The immigration attorneys he consulted were largely stymied by the agency’s impenetrable structure. One said, “I’m just throwing shit at a wall, and every once in a while the wall throws something back.” Another fruitlessly chased Asgari’s paperwork from one office to another: ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations, the F.B.I., Customs and Border Protection, the ICE regional headquarters in Detroit, the local headquarters in Cleveland. At one point, Asgari urged me to call ICE officials in Detroit and Cleveland who had signed documents addressed to him. None of them ever answered their phones.

ICE occasionally sent representatives to meet with detainees and discuss their cases. They were just following procedures, they told Asgari, and had no authority to evaluate the logic or the justice of the measures they enforced. Asgari answered the representatives by telling them an Iranian joke. A man sees two groups of workers, one digging a trench along the road and the other following behind to fill it up and cover it. The bystander, confounded, asks the workers what they are doing. They say that the government hired three contractors: one to dig, one to install a pipeline, and the third to cover it. The second contractor never showed up, a worker says, adding, “So we are doing our job.” Such, Asgari concluded, was ICE.

(...)

Asgari still viewed America with affection. He marvelled that, in every prison, he could pick up a phone and talk to journalists, and that journalists could publish what they wanted without fear of being censored. But what he appreciated most was the independence of the American judiciary.

“I appeared as an Iranian in front of an American judge,” he reflected. “This American judge ruled against an F.B.I. agent in my favor. I was privileged to witness the way he handled the trial, from jury selection to the end, the way he advocated impartiality and fairness. I believe these are global values that should be respected by all governments, including my own.” He added, “My attorneys, who put their heart into this thing—they were employees of the same government that was on the other side of this case.”

(...)

Prison was a crucible of human relations, and for the most part Asgari’s faith in them had emerged stronger from the experience. In a pod, you couldn’t hide behind an avatar, a bank account, or an accomplishment—not even behind the self-importance of a busy schedule. Governments might seek to dominate or obliterate one another, but human beings, forced into intimacy and the roughest equality, tended to be coöperative, Asgari had found. He had always been a scholar of microstructures, and now he understood that the atoms of a society—from which all its properties emanated—were people in their elemental state. The bonds among them were the structure’s deepest source of strength.

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Posted: Jul 16, 2020 - 2:05pm

Homeland Security Worries Covid-19 Masks Are Breaking Facial Recognition, Leaked Document Shows
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Posted: Jul 15, 2020 - 12:07pm

Secret Trump order gives CIA more powers to launch cyberattacks
The secret authorization, known as a presidential finding, gives the spy agency more freedom in both the kinds of operations it conducts and who it targets, undoing many restrictions that had been in place under prior administrations. The finding allows the CIA to more easily authorize its own covert cyber operations, rather than requiring the agency to get approval from the White House.

Unlike previous presidential findings that have focused on a specific foreign policy objective or outcome — such as preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear power — this directive, driven by the National Security Council and crafted by the CIA, focuses more broadly on a capability: covert action in cyberspace.

The “very aggressive” finding “gave the agency very specific authorities to really take the fight offensively to a handful of adversarial countries,” said a former U.S. government official. These countries include Russia, China, Iran and North Korea — which are mentioned directly in the document — but the finding potentially applies to others as well, according to another former official. “The White House wanted a vehicle to strike back,” said the second former official. “And this was the way to do it.”

The finding has made it easier for the CIA to damage adversaries’ critical infrastructure, such as petrochemical plants, and to engage in the kind of hack-and-dump operations that Russian hackers and WikiLeaks popularized, in which tranches of stolen documents or data are leaked to journalists or posted on the internet. It has also freed the agency to conduct disruptive operations against organizations that were largely off limits previously, such as banks and other financial institutions.

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Posted: Jun 14, 2020 - 11:38am

Barr also directed the JTTF to “identify criminal organizers and instigators,” even though antifa has no organizational structure and the FBI’s own internal assessments don’t support the claim that antifa is somehow weaponizing protests

(...)

Eli Anderson, a 19-year-old college student on summer break back home in Cookeville, decided to organize an impromptu Black Lives Matter rally in the Cookeville public square on Tuesday, June 2. A little after 3 p.m., Anderson and his friends announced on their Instagram stories that there would be a peaceful protest in the city square at 5 p.m. A friend picked Anderson up at 4:30 p.m. to head to the rally when he got a call from his mother saying, “The FBI is here and I don’t know what is happening.”Anderson rushed home. By the time he got there, the two agents were gone and his mother was in a state of panic. She told Eli they had flashed FBI credentials.

“The agents told her they had been monitoring my social media and believed that I might have information about antifa coming to town,” Anderson said. “I’m like, ‘What the fuck is antifa?’ I had never even heard of it before.”

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Posted: May 27, 2020 - 5:19pm

System Update with Glenn Greenwald - The Murderous History and Deceitful Function of the CIA

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Posted: May 14, 2020 - 12:16pm

McConnell’s PATRIOT Act Expansion Would Hand Barr Unprecedented Spy Powers
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Posted: Feb 11, 2020 - 5:43pm

The CIA's ‘Minerva’ Secret
The U.S. intelligence community actively monitored for decades the diplomatic and military communications of numerous Latin American nations through encryption machines supplied by a Swiss company that was secretly owned by the CIA and the German intelligence agency, BND, according to reports today by the German public television channel, ZDF and the Washington Post.
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Posted: Apr 12, 2019 - 11:11am


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Posted: Jan 22, 2019 - 6:42pm

Cooking with FOIA: The Soviet Army’s 1948 borscht recipe
The CIA kept this translation of the “Manual for the cook instructor of the ground troops in peacetime” classified for over 50 years

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Posted: Jan 6, 2019 - 1:10pm

A Tough Time to Be a Spy, NPR Reports
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Posted: Nov 13, 2018 - 2:29pm

Secret CIA Document Shows Plan to Test Drugs on Prisoners
Perhaps the most striking element of the document is the CIA doctors’ willful blindness to the truth of what they were doing. CIA doctors decided that waterboarding actually “provided periodic relief” to a  prisoner because it was a break from days of standing sleep deprivation. Similarly, CIA doctors decided that when a different prisoner was stuffed into a coffin-sized box, this provided a “relatively benign sanctuary” from other torture methods. CIA doctors described yet another prisoner — who cried, begged, pleaded, vomited, and required medical resuscitation after being waterboarded — as “amazingly resistant to the waterboard.” Incredibly, CIA doctors concluded that the torture program  was “reassuringly free of enduring physical or psychological effects.”

The truth is that CIA torture left a legacy of broken bodies and traumatized minds. Today, with a president who has vocally supported torture and a new CIA director who was deeply complicit in torturing prisoners, it’s more important than ever to expose the crimes of the past. Recognizing the roles played by the lawyers, doctors, and psychologists who enabled torture is critical to making sure it never happens again.

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Posted: Nov 9, 2018 - 9:54am

CIA’s secret online network unravelled with a Google search
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Posted: May 25, 2018 - 9:10pm

 R_P wrote:


 
Well, you can tell by the way I use my walk
I'm a Hoover man, no time to talk
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Posted: May 25, 2018 - 6:17pm


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Posted: May 17, 2018 - 8:47pm

Bipartisan scumbaggery
Gina Haspel confirmed as CIA director after key Democrats vote in favor
(...) Haspel received robust backing from former intelligence, diplomatic, military and national security officials. Among those who supported her nomination were six former CIA directors and three former national intelligence directors.

On the opposing side are groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union, which says she should have stood up against the interrogation practices then. More than 100 former US ambassadors who served both Republican and Democratic presidents sent the Senate a letter opposing Haspel, saying that despite her credentials, confirming her would give authoritarian leaders around the world the license to say US behavior is “no different from ours”.

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Posted: May 9, 2018 - 10:19am

Gina Haspel, Trump’s pick to lead CIA, pledges she won’t restart interrogation program

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Posted: Mar 20, 2018 - 11:56am

The NSA Worked to “Track Down” Bitcoin Users, Snowden Documents Reveal

Internet paranoiacs drawn to Bitcoin have long indulged fantasies of American spies subverting the booming, controversial digital currency. Increasingly popular among get-rich-quick speculators, Bitcoin started out as a high-minded project to make financial transactions public and mathematically verifiable — while also offering discretion. Governments, with a vested interest in controlling how money moves, would, some of Bitcoin’s fierce advocates believed, naturally try and thwart the coming techno-libertarian financial order.

It turns out the conspiracy theorists were onto something. Classified documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden show that the National Security Agency indeed worked urgently to target Bitcoin users around the world — and wielded at least one mysterious source of information to “help track down senders and receivers of Bitcoins,” according to a top-secret passage in an internal NSA report dating to March 2013. The data source appears to have leveraged the NSA’s ability to harvest and analyze raw, global internet traffic while also exploiting an unnamed software program that purported to offer anonymity to users, according to other documents.

Although the agency was interested in surveilling some competing cryptocurrencies, “Bitcoin is #1 priority,” a March 15, 2013 internal NSA report stated. (...)

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Posted: Mar 16, 2018 - 10:27pm

Caveat Emptor: MSNBC and CNN Use ClA Apologists for False Commentary
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