Thomas Gaist

Former CIA employee Edward Joseph Snowden announced on Sunday that he is the source of recent leaks to the Guardian and Washington Post exposing systematic police-state surveillance conducted under the Obama administration by the National Security Agency.

Snowden, who is 29 years old and has served as an undercover intelligence employee, referred to the massive surveillance program as an “architecture of oppression” with virtually limitless aims: “They are intent on making every conversation and every form of behaviour in the world known to them.”

The leaks have uncovered a government spying program that includes the accumulation of detailed phone records on nearly every individual in the United States, as well as a program of Internet spying involving the close collaboration of major tech companies, including Microsoft and Google.

In an interview with the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald (available online here), Snowden detailed the vast spying capabilities assembled by US government agencies: “The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything. With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested without targeting.”

“The NSA specifically targets the communications of everyone… I sitting at my desk certainly had the authority to wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the president if I had a personal email.”

“I don’t want to live a society that does these sort of things,” Snowden said. “I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to support or live under.”

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Paul Craig Roberts

June 7, 2013. The payroll jobs report for May released today continues the fantasy. Goods producing jobs declined, with manufacturing losing another 4,000 jobs, but the New Economy produced 179,000 service jobs. Are these jobs the high-powered, high-wage “innovation jobs” that economists promised would be our reward from Globalism. I’m afraid not. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the jobs created are the usual lowly paid non-exportable domestic service jobs–the jobs of a third world country.

■ Retail trade accounts for 27,700 of the jobs.
■ Wholesale trade accounts for 7,900 jobs.
■ Ambulatory health care services accounts for 15,300 of the jobs.
■ Waitresses and bartenders account for 38,100 of the jobs.
■ Local government accounts for 13,000 of the jobs.
■ Amusements, gambling, and recreation account for 12,500 of the jobs.
■ Temporary help services provided 25,600 jobs.
■ Business support services provided 4,300 jobs.
■ Services to buildings and dwellings provided 6,400 jobs.
■ Accounting and bookkeeping services provided 3,100 jobs.
■ Architectural and engineering services provided 4,900 jobs.
■ Computer systems design and related provided 6,000 jobs (most likely filled by H-1B work visas).
■ Management and technical consulting services provided 3,200 jobs.

For a decade this has been the jobs profile of “the world’s most powerful economy.” It is the profile of third world India 40 years ago. The jobs that made the US the dominant economy have been moved off shore by corporations threatened by Wall Street with takeovers if they did not increase their profits.

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Stephen Lendman

Avraham Shalom, Ami Ayalon, Yaakov Peri, Yuval Diskin,
Avi Dichter and Carmi Gillon (Sony/Allstar Picture Library)

It doesn't surprise. On June 8, Haaretz headlined "What was the Israeli involvement in collecting US communications intel for NSA?" More on that below.

On April 3, 2012, James Bamford headlined "Shady Companies with Ties to Israel Wiretap for US for the NSA." He said NSA chief General Keith Alexander's "having a busy year." He's "cutting ribbons at secret bases and bringing to life the agency’s greatly expanded eavesdropping network." "In January he dedicated the new $358 million CAPT Joseph J. Rochefort Building at NSA Hawaii, and in March he unveiled the 604,000-square-foot John Whitelaw Building at NSA Georgia." It's for around "4,000 earphone-clad intercept operators, analysts and other specialists, many of them employed by private contractors." Spies "R" Us defines US policy. NSA's "mammoth 1-million-square-foot, $2 billion Utah Data Center is far more sweeping."

It's located at Camp Williams. It's a Utah National Guard training facility. Once fully operational, says Bamford, it'll "become, in effect, the NSA Cloud." It'll receive data from NSA satellites, overseas listening posts, and nationwide multiple telecom facility monitoring rooms. What's planned is an unprecedented global spy network. NSA operatives and hackers will harvest around 2.1 million gigabytes of data per hour. It'll do so on the world's most powerful computer. It's called the Titan Supercomputer. It can handle over 20,000 trillion calculations per second or 20 petaflops. One petaflop = one quadrillion instructions per second. Supercomputer power will be used to collect and analyze foreign and domestic communications from all possible sources.

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