Category Archives: NSA Spying

MTV Indoctrinates Viewers at Behest of CAIR

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In 1979, the United State severed ties with Iran. An interesting twist however, Iran did not sever ties with factions inside the United States and pro-Khomeini Shiite activities. Even back in 1979 and moving forward, Iranian influence and Islamic influence were making end roads into the culture and driving down Main Street USA. No one noticed except the FBI. But the investigations of the FBI remained classified until 2008 and then the reports were meant to remain obscure and out of sight from America.

Moving into the United States went unnoticed such that Islam is now a common and accepted condition in America but this is the time to fight back as Islam is political and packaged as a religion. Sharia law cannot compete with the U.S. Constitution however, so far it has.

So, here we are witnessing Islamic indoctrination on our televisions right in our homes but who notices that? CAIR is a co-conspirator of the Holyland Foundation trial and was deemed such by the Department of Justice. Why then would MTV partner with CAIR?

No one at MTV is talking which likely is to understand that no one at MTV did their homework or bothered with vetting. So, the homework has been done for them and perhaps you will collectively contact MTV and hold class with their leadership. Then have a talk with your family and then have a talk with your cable provider until MTV admits the error and fixes the matter.

 

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MTV Partners With CAIR Despite Islamist Agenda

MTV has seriously erred by choosing CAIR, an organization with an extremist history that tars every opponent as an anti-Muslim bigot.
By Ryan Mauro

MTV is including the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a U.S. Muslim Brotherhood entity with a history of radicalism, in its “world-class coalition of expert partners” for a campaign to combat discrimination and inequality. CAIR has a history of tarring its opponents by calling them “anti-Muslim” or “Islamophobes.”

 

The multi-year “Look Different” campaign will use celebrity activism, television shows and social media to influence the over 500 million households that MTV is available in. While well-intentioned, MTV unfortunately chose to include CAIR, an organization with an extremist history that tars every opponent as an anti-Muslim bigot.

The Justice Department designated CAIR an unindicted co-conspirator in the largest terrorism-financing trial in U.S. history. The government listed CAIR as an entity of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood, specifically its secret Palestine Committee; a body set up to covertly support the Hamas terrorist group.

The designation was upheld by a federal judge in 2009 because of “ample” evidence to show that CAIR is part of the Muslim Brotherhood’s pro-Hamas network in America. After the designation, the FBI formally ended its use of CAIR as an outreach partner “until we can resolve whether there continues to be a relationship between CAIR or its executives with Hamas.”

In 2004, CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad said in an interview with Al-Jazeera that CAIR does not consider Hamas and Hezbollah to be terrorist organizations. He said, “We do not and will not condemn any liberation movement inside Palestine or Lebanon.”

In 2007, federal prosecutors said in a court filing: “From its founding by Muslim Brotherhood leaders, CAIR conspired with other affiliates of the Muslim Brotherhood to support terrorists … the conspirators agreed to use deception to conceal from the American public their connections to terrorists.”

You can read the Clarion Project’s fully-documented profile of CAIR here.

The Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas have a history of extremism and anti-Semitism; the exact type of sentiment that MTV’s project seeks to counter. Yet, MTV is embracing an organization with confirmed links to these groups. CAIR’s fundraising banquets regularly feature radical speakers that promote violence and anti-American and anti-Semitic propaganda and conspiracy theories.

“In our work, we see biases carried out in hurtful actions almost every day. The fact that so many of the young people MTV polled want to work to change or eliminate harmful biases fills us with hope that campaigns like Look Different can effect long-lasting, positive changes in our society,” CAIR spokesman Amina Rubin said.

CAIR and associated Islamists play the “Islamophobia

IslamophobiaGlossary Item

Unwarranted fear of Muslims; term frequently used by Islamist groups and their allies to label critics of Islamic extremism as bigots in order to stifle criticism.

According to Abdur-Rahman Muhammad, a former member of a U.S. Muslim Brotherhood front group (IIIT), “This loathsome term is nothing more than a thought-terminating cliche conceived in the bowels of Muslim think tanks for the purpose of beating down critics.”

” card on anyone who stands in their way, drawing the ire of anti-Islamist Muslim activists. It is part of a calculated political strategy and CAIR will utilize MTV towards this end if given the opportunity. 

“Name-calling with the term Islamophobia is an aggressive tactic popularized by apologists for Radical Islam to silence individuals who attempt to tell the truth about Jihadist Islam,” writes Muslim activist Tawfik Hamid, a former member of Ayman al-Zawahiri’s group in Egypt.

Raheel Raza, President of the Council for Muslims Facing Tomorrow, describes the “Islamophobia” tactic as “a form of emotional extortion intended to extract special concessions from well-meaning but gullible people the West.”

A former member of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood network, Abdur-Rahman Muhammad, has talked about a private meeting he held in the 1990s with the International Institute of Islamic Thought, CAIR’s fellow U.S. Muslim Brotherhood entity. The discussion focused on delegitimizing any opposition by accusing it of “Islamophobia.”

“This loathsome term is nothing more than a thought-terminating cliché conceived in the bowels of Muslim think tanks for the purpose of beating down critics,” he explains.

This tactic is even used on devout Muslims. Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, a practicing Muslim, has been accused of belonging to an “Islamophobia Network” countless times by CAIR. The group also went after the American Islamic Congress without provocation, accusing it of promoting “Islamophobia” just because it hasn’t adopted CAIR’s political causes.

This stands in sharp contrast to CAIR’s treatment of Islamist radicals, most recently defending Jamaat ul-Fuqra, a virulently anti-Semitic group with a terrorist history.

The American Islamists have been using this strategy since long before 9/11. For example, Imam

ImamGlossary Item

Religious authority figure; usually the leader of a mosque.

Siraj Wahhaj, a radical cleric that helps CAIR fundraise, can be seen preaching this theme in this video from around the time of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. 

Wahhaj tells the audience that there’s an anti-Muslim conspiracy involving the U.S. government and Israel and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, he claims, is part of it. The overall message is the same one that we hear today: The Islamists’ opponents are part of an anti-Muslim network that is hijacking the institutions of power.

CAIR’s efforts to use MTV’s campaign for political advantage will be endorsed by the Southern Poverty Law Center, another organization included in MTV’s coalition. The think-tank equates any recognition of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood with anti-Muslim bigotry.

“The sole evidence for this conspiracy theory is a 20-year old document outlining a plan for such a [Muslim Brotherhood] takeover, which has since been debunked as the fantasy of a single Muslim Brotherhood member,” the Center incorrectly claims.

The Muslim Brotherhood document the Center refers to introduced as evidence in the Holy Land Foundation trial. Contrary to what the Center says, the file’s authenticity has not been debunked or even seriously challenged.

And even if it was, it wouldn’t make any difference. Supporting proof comes in the form of declassified FBI documents, court filings, U.S. government determinations, other internal Brotherhood documents and the Islamists’ own actions and statements.

On May 19, the Clarion Project contacted MTV to inform the network of CAIR’s history and its false labeling of any and all critics as anti-Muslim “Islamophobes” with bigoted agendas. We requested a statement in response. MTV did not respond.

MTV has seriously erred by choosing CAIR as an “expert partner” in combating intolerance and discrimination. The well-meaning campaign runs the risk of becoming a platform for CAIR to assault the integrity of its opponents.

There was Snowden but NOW there is Greenwald

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Actually we should all be grateful to Edward Snowden for what he revealed about the NSA and the sweeping indiscriminate spying on U.S. citizens without a warrant or approval. This caused a real debate and formal discussion where the checks and balances should be a mission of all citizens.

Snowden has the proof for the sake of validation but should there be limits to what is published globally?

Glen Greenwald along with some partnerships that included the founder of eBay has exposed worldwide documents that exposed sources and methods that likely has crossed the Rubicon. The debate has caused alarm and decisions are underway to address the intrusion into the privacy of common citizens. What is surfacing is social modeling and behavior control, something that has little attention, yet should.

Greenwald is publishing more yet to what end? The other question should be what is the solution to protect privacy, maintain limits of Constitutional protections and use of information for the sake of national security

The United States works with a few other countries that include the UK, Canada and Australia under an agreement and organization called GCHQ. While we are familiar with the NSA we are not so familiar with the UK’s eavesdropping operation called Menwith Hall.

Use of the social networking not only profiles all users regardless of their methods of communications, it does the same with terrorists, and it should. A deeper look is required however.

 

NSA GCHQ

How The NSA Uses Social Network Analysis To Map Terrorist Networks

Ever since The Guardian reported that the National Security Agency (NSA) has been collecting the phone record metadata of millions of Americans, the cable talk circuit has been ablaze with pundits demanding answers to what should be obvious questions.

Who knew about the program to collect data? (Apparently, all three branches of government). Who else has been supplying data?  (Just about everybody, according to the Washington Post). What is metadata?  (It’s data about data).

The question that nobody seems to be asking is probably the most important one:  What is the NSA doing with the data and why do they need so much of it?  The answer is a relatively new field called social network analysis and, while it may make people uneasy, the benefits far outweigh the risks, so it is probably something we will just have to accept.

The New Science of Networks

The story of networks starts in 1736, long before the United States became a country, when Leonhard Euler set out to conquer a famous math problem concerning the Seven Bridges of Königsberg. To solve it, he created a new form of mathematics called graph theory, which concerned itself with links and nodes in a network.

In the 1950’s, interest renewed in Euler’s networks.  First, Anatol Rapoport introduced the concept of triadic closure, which asserted that networks grow when people meet through a central friend that they both know.  Later, Erdős and Rényi showed that as networks got bigger, communication among the people in the network got much more efficient.

In the 1970’s a sociologist named Mark Granovetter argued that we get most of our information not through close friends, but through weak ties and in the 1990’s Watts and Strogatz built on Granovetter’s work by showing that small clusters of people naturally organize themselves into far flung networks.

So by the late 1990’s, the small field of network analysis had built into a full fledged science and it was about to be applied to an increasingly important problem:  Terrorist networks.

Mapping Terrorist Networks

Valdis Krebs of Orgnet is a network scientist who in 2002 published a widely praised paper on mapping terrorist networks and has since consulted with the Defense Department on methods and approaches of evaluating and dismantling terrorist organizations.

It used to be that law enforcement officers would simply watch the two men closely, but in the era of global jihad, that’s much too slow to save lives.  The two might be peripheral to the conspiracy and it could take years before you could connect them to the leadership of the network, if ever.

Here’s where the data from Verizon and other companies comes in.  If you can analyze communication records, you can move much more quickly.  However, you don’t want to look at everyone the suspects talk to because you’ll end up with mostly incidental contacts, like friendly neighbors and delivery men.

But if you kept Rapoport’s concept of triadic closure in mind and had full access to communication records, you could look for contacts the two suspects have in common and start to build out a map of the conspiracy.  Read more here and see the graphic illustrations.

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Now is the time to question boundaries, collateral damage and protection results with regard to offensive measures against terrorists.

 

Chilling, the Government’s Destruction of Privacy

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We have all witnessed the matter of Edward Snowden’s war on the NSA and the destruction of our now feeble expectation of privacy. Before Snowden there was Julian Assange and Wikileaks sending a message to spying and governments violations of law.

There are other victims in the casualty of Snowden that jobs, livelihoods and threats of death. There are many moving parts and they most certainly include other world leaders and the very common citizen’s basic forms of communications that include phone calls, internet searches, locations, and emails. There is no where to hide much less no full-proof layers of protections. We are all Taliban or part of a fractured terror cell regardless of where we are or who we think we are safely communicating with much less who we think we can trust. Pathetic condition and no one in our own U.S government is giving us any form of hope or protection.

The NSA along with a handful of other countries are in collusion with each other to facilitate the complete communications dragnet not only for the sake of imposed national security, but also in the cases of narcotics trafficking, weapons smuggling and human-trafficking. The NSA and the FBI spy on U.S. citizens without our knowledge or approval, our credit/debit card purchases are monitored, our bank accounts are under scrutiny, actually nothing is exempt.

Only recently has it been revealed that the NSA is using the dragnet system beyond Germany, it reaches to Mexico, Bahamas and the Philippines. To be sure there are others.

I am partial to the encrypted services, when needed of Silent Circle, but there are others out there like Lavabit. In the wake of destruction left behind on the initial matter of Edward Snowden, both encryption services have been legally assaulted by the U.S. government and have had to alter their respective business models under the full weight and power of the Federal government.  A chilling account of Lavabit is just now being revealed due in part that some parts of the gag orders have been lifted on its founder Ladar Levison.

NSA

Levison contributed his account of ‘hell’ to the Guardian.

Secrets, lies and Snowden’s email: why I was forced to shut down Lavabit

My legal saga started last summer with a knock at the door, behind which stood two federal agents ready to to serve me with a court order requiring the installation of surveillance equipment on my company’s network.

My company, Lavabit, provided email services to 410,000 people – including Edward Snowden, according to news reports – and thrived by offering features specifically designed to protect the privacy and security of its customers. I had no choice but to consent to the installation of their device, which would hand the US government access to all of the messages – to and from all of my customers – as they travelled between their email accounts other providers on the Internet.

But that wasn’t enough. The federal agents then claimed that their court order required me to surrender my company’s private encryption keys, and I balked. What they said they needed were customer passwords – which were sent securely – so that they could access the plain-text versions of messages from customers using my company’s encrypted storage feature. (The government would later claim they only made this demand because of my “noncompliance”.)

Bothered by what the agents were saying, I informed them that I would first need to read the order they had just delivered – and then consult with an attorney. The feds seemed surprised by my hesitation.

What ensued was a flurry of legal proceedings that would last 38 days, ending not only my startup but also destroying, bit by bit, the very principle upon which I founded it – that we all have a right to personal privacy.

In the first two weeks, I was served legal papers a total of seven times and was in contact with the FBI every other day. (This was the period a prosecutor would later characterize as my “period of silence”.) It took a week for me to identify an attorney who could adequately represent me, given the complex technological and legal issues involved – and we were in contact for less than a day when agents served me with a summons ordering me to appear in a Virginia courtroom, over 1,000 miles from my home. Two days later, I was served the first subpoena for the encryption keys.

With such short notice, my first attorney was unable to appear alongside me in court. Because the whole case was under seal, I couldn’t even admit to anyone who wasn’t an attorney that I needed a lawyer, let alone why. In the days before my appearance, I would spend hours repeating the facts of the case to a dozen attorneys, as I sought someone else that was qualified to represent me. I also discovered that as a third party in a federal criminal indictment, I had no right to counsel. After all, only my property was in jeopardy – not my liberty. Finally, I was forced to choose between appearing alone or facing a bench warrant for my arrest.

In Virginia, the government replaced its encryption key subpoena with a search warrant and a new court date. I retained a small, local law firm before I went back to my home state, which was then forced to assemble a legal strategy and file briefs in just a few short days. The court barred them from consulting outside experts about either the statutes or the technology involved in the case. The court didn’t even deliver transcripts of my first appearance to my own lawyers for two months, and forced them to proceed without access to the information they needed.

Then, a federal judge entered an order of contempt against me – without even so much as a hearing.

But the judge created a loophole: without a hearing, I was never given the opportunity to object, let alone make any any substantive defense, to the contempt change. Without any objection (because I wasn’t allowed a hearing), the appellate court waived consideration of the substantive questions my case raised – and upheld the contempt charge, on the grounds that I hadn’t disputed it in court. Since the US supreme court traditionally declines to review decided on wholly procedural grounds, I will be permanently denied justice.

In the meantime, I had a hard decision to make. I had not devoted 10 years of my life to building Lavabit, only to become complicit in a plan which I felt would have involved the wholesale violation of my customers’ right to privacy. Thus with no alternative, the decision was obvious: I had to shut down my company.

The largest technological question we raised in our appeal (which the courts refused to consider) was what constitutes a “search”, i.e., whether law enforcement can demand the encryption keys of a business and use those keys to inspect the private communications of every customer, even when the court has only authorized them to access information belonging to specific targets.

The problem here is technological: until any communication has been decrypted and the contents parsed, it is currently impossible for a surveillance device to determine which network connections belong to any given suspect. The government argued that, since the “inspection” of the data was to be carried out by a machine, they were exempt from the normal search-and-seizure protections of the Fourth Amendment.

More importantly for my case, the prosecution also argued that my users had no expectation of privacy, even though the service I provided – encryption – is designed for users’ privacy.

If my experience serves any purpose, it is to illustrate what most already know: courts must not be allowed to consider matters of great importance under the shroud of secrecy, lest we find ourselves summarily deprived of meaningful due process. If we allow our government to continue operating in secret, it is only a matter of time before you or a loved one find yourself in a position like I did – standing in a secret courtroom, alone, and without any of the meaningful protections that were always supposed to be the people’s defense against an abuse of the state’s power.

There are reasons to spy for sure. There are systems that can be used to protect our 1st and 4th Amendment protections. The U.S. government wants it all and our protections just be dammed.

For a very revealing legal account between the U.S Government and Levison, this is a ‘wow’ read and you are encouraged to review it as likely customers of encryption companies like Lavabit may be the next victim.

The warrant and the last Judge’s decision can be read here.