US President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping met today in southern California for the first of two days of informal talks . This is the first meeting between the two leaders since Xi was appointed head of the Chinese state in March. - There is clear concern within sections of the US foreign policy establishment that the drive towards conflict with Beijing is nearing a possible point of no return. The Obama administration’s “pivot to Asia”—the calculated tightening of a noose around China through US basing deals, military exercises, shows of force, and diplomatic machinations—has turned the Asia-Pacific into a simmering cauldron of regional conflicts. Far from preparing to ease tensions with China, on the eve of the summit, Obama made clear he will maintain US economic and strategic pressure. He publicly declared that Beijing would have to comply with an “economic order where nations are playing by the same rules”—coded language for the Chinese leadership accepting US currency manipulation and further opening up its economy to US corporations.

A former Air Force drone operator who says he participated in missions that killed more than 1,600 people remembers watching one of the first victims bleed to death.

Brandon Bryant says he was sitting in a chair at a Nevada Air Force base operating the camera when his team fired two missiles from their drone at three men walking down a road halfway around the world in Afghanistan. The missiles hit all three targets, and Bryant says he could see the aftermath on his computer screen – including thermal images of a growing puddle of hot blood. “The guy that was running forward, he’s missing his right leg,” he recalled. “And I watch this guy bleed out and, I mean, the blood is hot.” As the man died his body grew cold, said Bryant, and his thermal image changed until he became the same color as the ground.

This soldiers's obviously unbelievably sick and not at all very sincere. He says after hitting a man and watching him "bleed out" that he felt like a sociopath: "I can almost see the agony on this guy's face...and eventually this guy becomes the same color as the ground that he bled upon. And..." - "So he looses his heat - you watch him die!" the interviewer says, interrupting him. - "Yeah!" the soldier says emphatically and smiles with apparent glee.

Sam Sacks: We know of the NSA’s domestic telecom and internet surveillance programs today not because of the efforts of Congress and esteemed Senators like Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Mark Udall (D-CO), but instead thanks to brave whistleblowers. This fact speaks not only to the critical role whistleblowers are playing and will continue to play in the struggle against an emerging, monstrous surveillance state, but it also speaks to the dereliction of duty of the legislative branch, entrusted with holding the power of the Executive in check, and utterly failing in this primary task over the last decade. So, it’s pretty clear: all this outrageous domestic surveillance coming out of the Executive that’s long been speculated and only recently confirmed, was made possible thanks to Congress. That explains why Congress has largely been unsurprised by these revelations.

Mocks Critics Who 'Complain About Big Brother' - With the PRISM program, which allows the NSA to directly, warrantlessly spy on virtually all communications on the Internet, and other NSA schemes surveilling literally every phone call made in the United States, America has struck the “right balance” between privacy and government power, according to President Barack Obama, adding that spying on the myriad details of Americans’ lives actually protects civil liberties. As the one in charge of the surveillance, Obama is naturally quick comfortable with this situation, and mocked the people who “complain about Big Brother,” a reference to the (somewhat less ambitious) surveillance system in George Orwell’s novel 1984.

Glenn Greenwald: U.S. wants to destroy privacy worldwide - “There is a massive apparatus within the United States government that with complete secrecy has been building this enormous structure that has only one goal, and that is to destroy privacy and anonymity, not just in the United States but around the world,” charged Glenn Greenwald, a reporter for the British newspaper “The Guardian,” speaking on CNN. “That is not hyperbole. That is their objective.”

Stephen Lendman: Unconstitutional US Data-Mining - It's lawless. Congress has no authority to subvert constitutional provisions. Institutionalized spying is official policy. Big Brother no longer is fiction. Obama officials claim no court or judge can challenge them. What they say goes. Governing this way is called tyranny. Fascism wasn’t vanquished. It was transplanted to America. It’s visible in plain sight.

James Hurley: Web inventor Berners-Lee warns forces are 'trying to take control' - The inventor of the World Wide Web said the internet is facing a “major” threat from “people who want to control it on the sly” through “worrying laws” such as SOPA, the US anti-piracy act, and through the actions of internet giants. “If you can control [the internet], if you can start tweaking what people say, or intercepting communications, it's very, very powerful...it's the sort of power that if you give it to a corrupt government, you give them the ability to stay in power forever.”

■ The Government “Quite Literally Can Watch Your Ideas Form As You Type”
■ NSA Surveillance: Brits, Canadians [Israelis] Have Access to Your Data Too
■ Two Secretive Israeli Companies May Have Bugged The US Telecommunications Grid For The NSA
■ Top-secret court order reveals NSA's daily data collection on millions of Americans
■ What is the NSA's PRISM program? (FAQ)

Obviously, the Verizon/NSA situation was merely a small view into just how much spying the NSA is doing on everyone. And it seems to be spurring further leaks and disclosures. The latest, from the Washington Post, is that the NSA has direct data mining capabilities into the data held by nine of the biggest internet/tech companies:

■ The technology companies, which participate knowingly in PRISM operations, include most of the dominant global players of Silicon Valley. They are listed on a roster that bears their logos in order of entry into the program: “Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.” PalTalk, although much smaller, has hosted significant traffic during the Arab Spring and in the ongoing Syrian civil war.
■ Dropbox, the cloud storage and synchronization service, is described as “coming soon.”

This program, like the constant surveillance of phone records, began in 2007, though other programs predated it. They claim that they're not collecting all data, but it's not clear that makes a real difference:

■ The PRISM program is not a dragnet, exactly. From inside a company’s data stream the NSA is capable of pulling out anything it likes, but under current rules the agency does not try to collect it all.
■ Analysts who use the system from a Web portal at Fort Meade key in “selectors,” or search terms, that are designed to produce at least 51 percent confidence in a target’s “foreignness.” That is not a very stringent test. Training materials obtained by the Post instruct new analysts to submit accidentally collected U.S. content for a quarterly report, “but it’s nothing to worry about.”
■ Even when the system works just as advertised, with no American singled out for targeting, the NSA routinely collects a great deal of American content.

CLG: Verizon Top Secret FISC Order

[September 4, 1999] - Microsoft operating systems have a backdoor entrance for the National Security Agency, a cryptography expert said Friday, but the software giant denied the report and other experts differed on it. The chief scientist at an Internet security company said Microsoft built in a "key" for the nation's most powerful intelligence agency to the cryptographic standard used in Microsoft Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT4 and Windows2000. To use cryptographic applications in Windows, users must load its cryptography architecture in a standard called CryptoAPI. A year ago, researchers discovered there were two keys, or digital signatures, that allowed the loading of CryptoAPI -- Microsoft had one but the identity of the other keyholder was a mystery. Andrew Fernandes of Ontario-based Cryptonym Corp. and his colleagues now say the NSA holds the second key because they found that a recent service pack for Windows NT failed to cloak the second key, revealing it as "_NSAKEY." "In the data security profession, those three initials only mean one thing: National Security Agency," Fernandes said.

The US Labor Department said Friday that the economy added 175,000 jobs in May, barely enough to keep up with the increase in population, in another month of tepid jobs growth. - The release of the May jobs figures followed a week of negative economic data in the US. On Monday, the Institute for Supply Management said its purchasing managers index (PMI) fell to 49 in May, down from 50.7 in April. The May jobs report points to the fact that there has been no economic recovery for working people in the United States: millions remain unemployed, and millions more have left the labor force because no jobs are available. Wages, which have plunged in real terms since 2008, remain stagnant, while government assistance for the poor and unemployed is being slashed.

German data commissioner calls monitoring "monstrous". - Europeans reacted angrily on Friday to revelations that U.S. authorities had tapped the servers of Internet companies for personal data, saying such activity confirmed their worst fears about American Web giants' reach and showed tighter regulations were needed. The Washington Post and the Guardian newspapers aroused broad outrage with reports that the National Security Agency (NSA) and the FBI had accessed central servers of Google , Facebook and other big Internet companies and gathered millions of phone users' data. Europe has long yearned to contain the power of the U.S. titans that dominate the Internet, and privacy-focused Germany was quick to condemn the companies' co-operation with the U.S. security services.

Baghdad has warned Israel that it would respond to any attempts by Tel Aviv to use Iraqi airspace for a strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities, a top Iraqi minister told. The remarks from Hussein al-Shahristani, deputy prime minister responsible for energy affairs, mark the first time a senior Iraqi official has publicly warned Israel against entering its airspace -- the most direct route -- to hit targets in Iran. Asked how Iraq would react to any such Israeli attempt to target Iran’s nuclear program, Shahristani said, “Obviously, Iraq wouldn’t be disclosing its reaction, to allow Israel to take that into account.”

Last month marked the 65th anniversary of the Nakba — the Palestinian catastrophe of 1948, during which Israeli forces expelled some 800,000 Palestinians from their homeland and seized their properties. In total, 536 cities, towns and villages — 78 percent of the land of historic Palestine — were taken during the 1948 war. The Nakba is not just a historical event, however. It remains an ongoing trauma. Palestinian human rights are assaulted daily; Palestinians still live under occupation or are barred from their homeland. Meanwhile, Israeli land and water confiscation continue — particularly in the West Bank and the Naqab (Negev) desert. Palestinians worldwide remain excluded and uncompensated, despite Israel’s admission to the United Nations in 1949 being preceded by its expressed willingness to abide by Resolution 194, calling for the Palestinian refugees’ repatriation and compensation. - Little known, however, is that four communities in Palestine have received carefully evaluated and internationally arranged compensation for their losses. The four villages — Sarona, Wilhelma, Betlehem (not the famed Bethlehem) and Waldheim — belonged to a Christian German group called the Templers.

It is a clever trick by left wing Zionists to take over the anti-Zionist movement by creating the demand that Israel return to its pre-1967 borders as part of the Boycott, Disinvestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, anti-Zionist activist and self-proclaimed “ex-Jew” Gilad Atzmon has pointed out.

In an interview with PressTV, Gilad, one of the bravest dissenters yet to emerge from Israel, pointed out that the BDS campaign was based on a demand to “end occupation and colonization of all Arab lands occupied since 1967.” He went on to point out that this “dismisses the fact that the Nachba” (Arabic for the “disaster”, or the driving out of Palestinians from their homeland to create Israel) took place in 1948. “Tel Aviv is also an occupied Palestinian land. And so is Haifa. I know about my grandfather who was in the Irgun (one of the Jewish terrorist groups who ethnically cleansed Israel of Palestinians) who actually invaded Jaffa,” Gilad continued. “In a way, when I see that I can that there is somehow a kind of a liberal Zionist ideology filtering in.”