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To: illyia who wrote (6867)12/2/2010 2:53:41 PM
From: illyia   of 7567
 
Fed Held Back as Evidence Mounted on Subprime Loan Abuses

By Binyamin Appelbaum
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, September 27, 2009; A01



The visits had a ritual quality. Three times a year, a coalition of Chicago community groups met with the Federal Reserve and other banking regulators to warn about the growing prevalence of abusive mortgage lending.

They began to present research in 1999 showing that large banking companies including Wells Fargo and Citigroup had created subprime businesses wholly focused on making loans at high interest rates, largely in the black and Hispanic neighborhoods to the south and west of downtown Chicago.

The groups pleaded for regulators to act.

The evidence eventually led Illinois to file suit against Wells Fargo in July for discrimination and other abuses.

But during the years of the housing boom, the pleas failed to move the Fed, the sole federal regulator with authority over the businesses. Under a policy quietly formalized in 1998, the Fed refused to police lenders' compliance with federal laws protecting borrowers, despite repeated urging by consumer advocates across the country and even by other government agencies.

The hands-off policy, which the Fed reversed earlier this month, created a double standard. Banks and their subprime affiliates made loans under the same laws, but only the banks faced regular federal scrutiny. Under the policy, the Fed did not even investigate consumer complaints against the affiliates.

"In the prime market, where we need supervision less, we have lots of it. In the subprime market, where we badly need supervision, a majority of loans are made with very little supervision," former Fed Governor Edward M. Gramlich, a critic of the hands-off policy, wrote in 2007. "It is like a city with a murder law, but no cops on the beat."

Between 2004 and 2007, bank affiliates made more than 1.1 million subprime loans, around 13 percent of the national total, federal data show. Thousands ended in foreclosure, helping to spark the crisis and leaving borrowers and investors to deal with the consequences.

Congress now is weighing whether the Fed should be fired. The Obama administration has proposed shifting consumer protection duties away from the Fed and other banking regulators and into a new watchdog agency. That proposal, a central plank in the administration's plan to overhaul financial regulation, is opposed by the industry and faces a battle on Capitol Hill.

The Federal Reserve is best known as an economic shepherd, responsible for adjusting interest rates to keep prices steady and unemployment low. But since its creation, the Fed has held a second job as a banking regulator, one of four federal agencies responsible for keeping banks healthy and protecting their customers. Congress also authorized the Fed to write consumer protection rules enforced by all the agencies.

During the boom, however, the Fed left those powers largely unused. It imposed few new constraints on mortgage lending and pulled back from enforcing rules that did exist.

The Fed's performance was undercut by several factors, according to documents and more than two dozen interviews with current and former Fed governors and employees, government officials, industry executives and consumer advocates. It was crippled by the doubts of senior officials about the value of regulation, by a tendency to discount anecdotal evidence of problems and by its affinity for the financial industry.

Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke testified before Congress this summer that the Fed has protected consumers with renewed vigor in recent years, writing new rules and responding to problems more quickly. The Fed has avoided a public position on the new agency, but Bernanke has testified that Congress instead could choose to strengthen the Fed's responsibilities.

An Industry Rises

Subprime mortgage lending sneaked up on the Federal Reserve.

Most subprime affiliates began life as independent consumer finance companies, beyond the watch of banking regulators. These firms made loans to people whose credit was not good enough to borrow from banks, generally at high interest rates, often just a few thousand dollars for new furniture or medical bills. But by the 1990s, thanks to big changes in laws, markets and lending technology, the companies increasingly were focused on the much more lucrative business of mortgage lending.

As profits soared, hundreds of banking companies took notice, buying or creating finance businesses for themselves. Consumer advocates demanded that regulators take notice, too.

The advocates amassed evidence of abusive practices by lenders, such as Fleet Finance, an affiliate of a New England bank that eventually paid the state of Georgia $115 million to settle allegations that it charged thousands of lower-income black families usurious interest rates and punitive fees on home-equity loans. The National Community Reinvestment Coalition pressed the Fed to investigate allegations against other affiliates.

On Jan. 12, 1998, the Fed demurred. Acting on a recommendation from four Fed staffers including representatives of the Philadelphia, St. Louis and Kansas City regional reserve banks, the Fed's Board of Governors unanimously decided to formalize a long-standing practice, "to not conduct consumer compliance examinations of, nor to investigate consumer complaints regarding, nonbank subsidiaries of bank holding companies."

The Fed could balk because Congress had allowed the laws governing the financial industry to become outdated.

Banks and the companies that own them, known as holding companies, have long operated under federal oversight. But a growing share of loans were made by companies that competed with banks, such as consumer finance firms. The money they gave to borrowers came from Wall Street rather than depositors. As a result, those firms operated beyond the authority of banking regulators, and Congress did not task anyone else with oversight.

The Fed Board decided that even when a nonbank was purchased by a bank holding company, the Fed still lacked authority to police its operations.

Fed staff recommended that it continue to investigate complaints from Congress, which oversees the central bank's performance as an industry regulator. Everything else was passed to the Federal Trade Commission, which has law-enforcement powers but neither the authority nor the resources to oversee the fast-growing industry.

The Fed's hands-off policy was quickly criticized by other parts of the federal government.

A 1999 report by the General Accounting Office warned that the Fed's decision created "a lack of regulatory oversight," because the Fed alone was in a position to supervise the affiliates.

"If the Fed really wants to take action against predatory lending, here is a clear opportunity," John Taylor, president of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, told Congress after the report was issued.

A 2000 joint report on predatory lending by the Treasury Department and the Department of Housing and Urban Development made a similar recommendation. The report said the Fed clearly had the authority to investigate evidence of abusive lending practices, and urged a policy of targeted examinations.

Even inside the Fed, there was dissent. Gramlich was starting to express concern about predatory lending in his public speeches. He had voted for the hands-off policy in 1998, but by 2000 concluded that the Fed could demonstrate leadership by subjecting the lending affiliates to examinations. "A good defense against predatory lending, perhaps the best defense society has devised, is a careful compliance examination for banks," Gramlich later told a 2004 meeting of bankers in Chicago.

Alan Greenspan, then chairman of the Fed, recalled that Gramlich broached the subject at a private meeting in 2000. Greenspan said that he disagreed with Gramlich, telling him that such inspections would require a vast effort with no certainty of results, and that the Fed's involvement might give borrowers a false sense of security.

Gramlich did not press the issue. Years later, in 2007, after an account of the meeting appeared in newspapers, he sent Greenspan a note that read in part, "What happened was a small incident, and as I think you know, if I had felt that strongly at the time, I would have made a bigger stink."

Unchecked Growth

After the Fed's decision, several of the largest bank holding companies added finance arms, expanding into the regulatory vacuum.

In March 1998, First Union bought the Money Store, a California lender with a ziggurat for a headquarters, ads featuring baseball Hall of Famers Jim Palmer and Phil Rizutto, and a catchy phone number: 1-800-LOAN-YES.

"Thank goodness you can buy all of the things you need with a fixed-rate second mortgage loan," Rizutto told audiences.

In April 1998, Citibank announced a merger with Travelers and its finance arm, which was renamed CitiFinancial. Two years later, Citigroup added the nation's largest consumer finance company, paying $31 billion for Associates First Capital. Both the Justice Department and the FTC were investigating Associates for abusive lending practices, but Citi executives promised reforms. In 2002, the company agreed to pay the FTC a record fine of $215 million to settle allegations that Associates had "engaged in systematic and widespread deceptive and abusive lending practices."

The last of the large finance companies was also snapped up in 2002, as HSBC agreed to pay $14 billion for Household International. The Chicago firm described itself as the nation's oldest finance company and boasted in its corporate history that it pioneered direct-mail loan solicitations in 1896. More recently, it had become the subject of a massive investigation by state attorneys general who charged that it routinely misled borrowers about the true cost of refinance loans. Immediately before announcing its deal with HSBC, Household agreed to pay $484 million to settle those charges.

By 2004, the consumer finance industry had largely been folded into the banking industry, and the finance arms of bank holding companies were making at least 12 percent of all mortgage loans with high interest rates, according to data reported by lenders under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act.

The rapid growth of subprime lending by affiliates renewed the interest of the GAO, which repeated its call for the Fed to examine affiliates in a 2004 report on shortcomings in federal efforts to combat predatory lending. The report noted the FTC investigations of Fleet Finance and Associates as reasons for concern.

"The significant amount of subprime lending among holding company subsidiaries, combined with recent large settlements in cases involving allegations against such subsidiaries, suggests a need for additional scrutiny and monitoring of these entities," the GAO said.

This time, the GAO suggested that Congress clarify the question of legal authority to address the Fed's concerns.

A response letter signed by Gramlich, who died in 2007, said the Fed had all the authority it needed if it wanted to act. "The existing structure has not been a barrier to Federal Reserve oversight," he wrote.

Five months later, the Fed took its first public enforcement action against an affiliate, fining Citigroup $70 million. In settling the FTC's earlier charges, Citigroup had agreed to a number of reforms. The Fed found that some practices had continued in violation of that commitment, and that employees had misled regulators.

Fed officials cite the fine as evidence that the agency was able to protect consumers without conducting regular examinations. Consumer advocates took the opposite lesson: Despite finding that a major affiliate was violating consumer protection laws, the Fed still was refusing to create a reliable system for identifying other abuses.

The Citigroup case remains the Fed's only public enforcement action against a lending affiliate.

Retreat From Oversight

The Fed's reluctance was part of a broad governmental retreat from oversight of the financial industry. Greenspan and many politicians in both parties saw regulation as a blunt instrument that often deprived more people than it protected.

"There was a long period when things were going very well and regulation was viewed as something that got in the way," said Alice Rivlin, the Fed's vice chairman from 1996 to 1999 and now a fellow at the Brookings Institution.

The Fed also minimized repeated warnings about mortgage lending abuses in part because it was an institution dominated by big-picture economists focused on the health of the broader economy rather than the problems faced by individual borrowers.

Greenspan said in an interview that he did not think the Fed was suited to policing lending abuses because of its focus on broader issues, but he added, "I'm not sure anyone could have done it better." He said the administration's plan to create a consumer protection agency was "probably the right decision."

Throughout the lending boom, consumer advocates trooped regularly to the Fed's monumental marble headquarters on Constitution Avenue to offer specific accounts of abuses in financial transactions. But what seemed powerful to advocates often was dismissed as anecdotal by regulators.

"The response we were getting from most of the governors and the staff was, 'All you're able to do is point to the stories of individual consumers, you're not able to show the macroeconomic effect,' " said Patricia McCoy, a law professor at the University of Connecticut who served on the Fed's consumer advisory council from 2002 to 2004. "That is a classic Fed mindset. If you cannot prove that it is a broad-based problem that threatens systemic consequences, then you will be dismissed."

As the anecdotes piled up, so did the frustration of advocates. By refusing to conduct examinations of lending affiliates -- by refusing to look systematically -- the Fed was basically preventing itself from finding systemic problems.

"I stood up at a Fed meeting in 2005 and said, 'How may anecdotes makes it real?' " said Margot Saunders of the National Consumer Law Center's Washington office. "How many tens or thousands of anecdotes will it take to convince you that this is a trend?' "

The Boom, the Burden

As the great housing boom soared toward its cataclysm, lending abuses became increasingly hard to ignore.

The Fed's Board of Governors had voted in 2002 to require more detailed annual reports from mortgage lenders. When the first data were released in the fall of 2005, they confirmed that the largest banking companies had developed split personalities. The banks, subject to regular scrutiny, mostly made loans at market rates and concentrated their lending in white, suburban neighborhoods. The unwatched subprime affiliates mostly made loans at high rates and concentrated their lending in minority neighborhoods.

Wells Fargo Bank, for example, charged high interest rates on only 9 percent of its loans between 2004 and 2007. Wells Fargo Financial, which used the same stagecoach logo and the same red-and-yellow color scheme, charged high rates on 80 percent of its loans during the same period. The disparities were similar at Citigroup and HSBC.

Nationwide, the data showed that black borrowers making more than $100,000 were charged high rates more often than white borrowers making less than $40,000.

The three companies have all said they complied with lending laws and that race was not a factor in their decisions.

Wells Fargo said that it complied with all relevant laws, and it is contesting the Illinois lawsuit. The company merged its subprime affiliate into its bank last year.

"We served customers across the United States regardless of their race. Our pricing and underwriting simply doesn't factor race into the equation at all," David Kvamme, president of Wells Fargo Financial, said in an interview. "We were regulated on a consistent basis by the states, and the states looked deeply into our compliance with all laws including consumer protection laws."

Consumer advocates used the data to press their case for increased regulation.

At the end of the March 2007 meeting of the Fed's consumer advisory council, during a slot reserved for presentations, two longtime advocates confronted the Fed's governors and staff with a study showing lending disparities in six cities including New York and Chicago.

"We thought it was pretty convincing evidence of discrimination," recalled one of the presenters, Sarah Ludwig of the Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project, based in New York. "And afterward I remember nobody asking a question. I remember nobody making eye contact. Nobody called me from the Fed afterward saying, 'Let's talk about it.'"

"We thought it was incredibly important and we weren't seeing much of a response," she said.

Finally, as the housing market, then the financial system, then economy came crashing down, the reluctance to regulate started to fade away.

Bernanke asked the Fed's lawyers to revisit their concerns and, in July 2007, the Fed announced a pilot program to examine a few subprime affiliates.

This summer, pronouncing itself satisfied with the results, the Fed announced it would launch regular consumer compliance examinations.

"In looking at our responsibility to enforce these consumer laws we believe a somewhat more proactive stance is justified," Bernanke told Congress.

The Fed also said it will begin to investigate consumer complaints.

This is the first in an occasional series of articles about the record of the Federal Reserve.

washingtonpost.com 

Printable:
washingtonpost.com 

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From: illyia12/2/2010 7:34:42 PM
   of 7567
 
SEC Kills Whistleblower Initiative Claiming Its Billion Dollar Budget Is Insufficient
By Tyler Durden
Published on zero hedge (http://www.zerohedge.com)

Created 12/02/2010 - 15:52


Just when you thought the parasitism at the SEC could no longer surprise, we find ourselves stunned yet again: "The Securities and Exchange Commission, facing the probability that resurgent congressional Republicans will cut its budget, has put on hold part of the work it has been tasked with by the Dodd-Frank financial law. The SEC will delay setting up five new offices mandated by the law, including a new office to field tips from informants about wrongdoing that was a signature accomplishment of SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro. The so-called whistleblower office won't be staffed; its functions will temporarily be carried out instead by existing enforcement staff, the SEC said on its website. A new credit rating office, an office for municipal securities and two separate offices focused on investors and women and minorities are also on hold." In other words, let's all just sing Kumbaya and pretend our markets are supervised even as Wall Street continues to funnel trillions of NPV dollars in its pockets today, while sticking future generations with what is now nearly $14 trillion in debt.

More from Dow Jones:

The SEC said the work is "being deferred due to budget uncertainty."

The Dodd-Frank law authorized a series of budget increases for the SEC that would nearly double the agency's funding over the next few years. But the money must be appropriated by Congress. With Republicans back in control of the House of Representatives next year, it looks increasingly unlikely the SEC will see the increases that have been authorized.

Federal agencies are currently operating under last year's spending levels as Republicans and Democrats remain locked in an impasse over the budget. Some Republicans have vowed to cut spending to
2008 levels.

The SEC's workload swelled with the passage of Dodd-Frank. It was tasked with writing more rules and regulations than any other federal agency to implement the law.

As a reminder the world's most corrupt, incompetent and porn-addicted organization has a budget of $1.23 billion [1].

Here's a thought: terminate Mary Schapiro immediately. That act alone will allow the SEC to actually regain about 120% of the credibility it has lost in the last two years. Then proceed with terminating everyone else and actually hiring grossly overpaid bureaucrats who actually know what a bid and an ask are. That way you won't even need a whistleblower office.

h/t London Dude Trader

Mary SchapiroSecurities and Exchange Commission

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Source URL: zerohedge.com 
Links:
[1] businessweek.com 

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From: illyia12/3/2010 12:31:17 PM
   of 7567
 
Sherrie Questioning All
Sherrie's Blog
12-3-10

Is The Govt. trying to Find out, Who has What now? I ask, because - Child Services Interviewed My Child - Wanted to Know if We Had Solar Panels, Exactly Where We Go Camping and Hiking , If have Alternative Energy, If Food Stored, Then Came to my House!

Updated Article on 12/3/10 with Video Clips From Interview


I have been very hesitant about releasing what happened to me regarding Child Protective Services. But after discussing this with Dave Hodges, from the Commonsense Radio Show on Republic Broadcasting, he said I need to get this information out to the public.

This happened about one month ago now.

Here is how it all began.

I got a call from Child Protective Services, the woman said they had gotten a "call" about me and abuse of my child. I was in shock, when she told me this. I was completely confused and it also freaked me out, as I could not comprehend on why someone had called Child Services on me. Anyone that knows me, knows how blessed I feel, in having my "miracle child"!

I asked the woman, if they were going to have to go to her father's house also, she said "OH, I didn't know the father did not live there". I gave her, the father's phone number and name. I also, asked "How can I be sure, you are who you say you are". She gave me the phone number for the office and said I could call it back. After she let me know they would be at my house early the next morning and I was still completely freaked and confused on how someone could even think I have ever abused my child, I hung up. I called her father and let him know what was going on. The phone call was just a few minutes before my child was due home from school.

When my child got home, I got a bigger shock! My child told me, child services had come to her school that day and interviewed her! I told her to wait, to tell me anything, as I wanted to put her on speaker phone with her father so she could tell us at the same time, what questions they asked.


My child said, these are the questions they asked " Does your mother have SOLAR PANELS? Where Exactly does your mother take you camping? Where exactly have you gone hiking? Do you hike and then camp? Does anyone else go with you camping? What do you do when you go camping? Does your mother have alternative energy? Does your mother have stored food? Does your mother have any guns? Does your mother saying anything about "The end of the world"? What kind of remodeling has your mother done to your home? Do you have a "safe room", like a bomb shelter in your home?

My child also said she told child services, her father does not live with me and there was shared custody and that included being at my house for one week and then her father's house for one week. So my child TOLD Child services the father and I did not live together! I was upset, as the woman then lied to me on the phone saying "She did not know the father didn't live here". I hung up with her father to call Child services and confront the woman. Besides Child services asking what I considered were the MOST Bizarre questions I had EVER heard of, for a child abuse case! What the the World do ANY of those questions have to do with "Child abuse"?!!!!!

When the child services woman answered the phone, I started into her right away, saying she was not truthful about not knowing the father didn't live here to me on the phone earlier! She was a little taken back it seems, that I would be confronting her as I was! She said "she did not remember my child telling her that"! I was telling her "Really?, MY Child TOLD you all about her living with her father and about her brother there and Everything, and you DON'T remember that?!" She said "No" she didn't! I then said I had a HUGE problem with that fact then, because "What else, doesn't she remember in her conversation with my child, when she had just interviewed my child?". I also asked her "Why in the world would you ask a child about "the end of the world and even put any ideas like that in a child's head"? She was flustered and said "they have to ask questions in regards to any accusations".

I told her " I will have witnesses here tomorrow, to make sure things stay "straight"! I also told her, she would NOT be allowed anywhere else in my house, EXCEPT for my child's room, since that was required. *Child services has to confirm a child has a bed to sleep in, clothes and food, with any visit to a home*. She asked me Why - they would not be able to see the WHOLE House? I told her, because the ONLY thing required is her bedroom and that would be IT! She somewhat hung up the phone on me, with exasperation from the call.

I was One Upset person now! To me this was the Most Bizarre event happening. I sat back down with my child and asked her.. "was there anyone else in the room besides the child services people?" My child said "No". I then asked my child "Did they ask, if I have ever hit you, did they ask if I drink, did they ask if I do drugs"? She said "No", they did not ask ANY questions such as that! I was NOW completely confused! How in the heck, is it Child services did NOT ask what I would think would be NORMAL Child Abuse questions that would be abusive to a child! NOT ONE NORMAL CHILD ABUSE QUESTION WAS ASKED!

I called my sister, who lives by me and then I called some neighbors and asked them to be witnesses the next morning. Also I asked my sister to bring her video camera, as I wanted to TAPE the whole Child services interview!

The next morning, my neighbors and sister arrived early and my sister set up the camera, we waited.


The child services people as I opened the door saw the video camera rolling - there were 3 of them. The woman had brought her associate and her supervisor with her. They waved at the camera and I told them, for their protection as well as my own, the WHOLE interview was going to be recorded.

I told them, I had a right to know what the Accusations were against me, though they did not have to say WHO made the accusations, as soon as they acknowledged the camera.

The woman said the accusation was "mental abuse and neglect" against me. I asked how child services, decides if there is "mental abuse", since that is very subjective in opinion? They simply agreed it was "subjective". I then said, "Well, I will show you her room, clothes and food now, so that part is over with". I took them to her room (I had all doors shut to all rooms of the house, as I felt it was none of their business in seeing any other rooms of my house). Then we came back and I opened up the fridge and freezer and then showed them the pantry, so they could see food was there. My sister followed us with the camera, everywhere we went, taping the child services workers.

They then asked if they could sit down and discuss the accusations. First they asked me "normal questions, my date of birth, my name, my child's date of birth, my address, and other form questions as that.

They then asked me, if I had ever talked to my child about "the end of the world"? I told them "No, in fact I asked my child if kids ever said anything about it, just a couple of weeks before. My child told me "Yes, kids say stuff about 2012" I told my child NOT to listen to any of the ridiculous stuff kids say". I then told the child services people, I know they asked my child about it the day before and my child TOLD them I had NEVER said anything about "the end of the world" to her! So don't they take my child's word for that?! She said "Yes, they do". So I said "then you know I have not said anything regarding end of the world type stuff".

Then she asked if I had "stored food"? I told her... I follow the guidelines which FEMA has up on their site and I am a Red Cross Volunteer and have gone out on disasters with the Red Cross and I have had all the training with the Red Cross, in knowing that people should be self reliant for a couple of weeks, without needing help from the government or any other source during that time. So "I follow the Guidelines of the government and recommendations from the Red Cross in that respect"!

They then asked if I had an "alternative heat source" for my house! I said "Yes, I have a Yukon Eagle heater, which burns, wood or natural gas for heating my house". I said "I have saved lots of money by heating my house with wood, compared to natural gas". oh, they said "a problem with it could be carbon monoxide", I told them, natural gas heaters had problems with that, besides I have carbon monoxide sensors. . They asked if they could see it (which it is downstairs in my basement), I went and got a brochure and the owners manual on it from my file cabinet and handed it to them, so they could look at it there. I was not going to take them downstairs to my basement, as I felt they did not have a right to "check out my house in all ways". They mentioned wanting seeing it once more, I ignored it and I went on to another subject. The supervisor was familiar with the unit I have, as he said they have lots of them up north, where he came from.

Then they asked me, "what renovations have I done on my home and do I continue to do renovations to it"? I laughed and looked at my neighbors and sister as they too laughed. I told them, I have done lots of renovations, and my sister and I put the wood floors in here, I tiled the entrance and I just redid the hall ways and the outside entrance. I also had taken down walls. The supervisor asked "what walls and where exactly were taken down"? I stood up and said "right here, I took down walls that used to go across here and the wall that separated the kitchen and den".

She then said "We understand you are a "blogger" and what exactly is your blog about, also it is said you have a "conspiracy mind"? I was a little shocked at this question and told them "mainly my blog is about the Foreclosure Fraud that has been happening". They asked how many hours I spend blogging, as that is where the "neglect" part of the accusation came in, in that I spent most of my time "blogging". I told them the weeks I don't have my child "I blog more and spend more time on the computer". But when I have my child, I spend time with my child! My neighbors piped up and said, "we see her outside playing with her child and she is probably one of the best mothers and my child is about the most well balanced child they have ever come across". One neighbor said "we would not have the problems we do, if all kids were raised, as I was raising my child, as she is so balanced".

I told the child services people, "I spend lots of time with my child and I was raising her to "give to others" and that my child and I do fund raisers for the Red Cross and she loves volunteering and doing what she can for others!" I told them, "I have let my child know, doing for others is one of the best things you can do in your life and beauty comes from the inside, not the out".


Then they said "Well, here is the biggest accusation and one of the oddest accusations we have had before. They said I was accused of "Being a member of a Top Secret Agency, that worked against the Government". My sister, neighbors and I began laughing very hard with this! I looked at them and said "Are you Serious?"
I asked them to repeat the accusation, after they did, I just laughed and said "No" as I continued laughing!

The supervisor did say "Well, I would think you would be having "men in black" come see you, if you were".
They then began talking about "militias" and how they raise their children, I just listened to them and the way they were saying it, left it with a question to me on if I was involved in any. I made a comment saying "I would have absolutely no clue, about anything regarding militias, as I had never entered that realm or researched militias".

I asked them directly and asked them to be honest, regarding them seeing any validity to the accusations.
They said, "they didn't see any problems or validity of the accusations to me, before they left".

I was waiting for all the questions about my camping with my daughter and so on.... those questions never were asked and at the time I did not think about asking about it either.

I asked them "do you have any more questions"? They said 'No".
They were at my house for about one hour and after they left, I called my child's father, to let him know they were on their way.

After a few hours, my child's father called me and said "they had been at his house for 2 HOURS and the whole time, they were grilling them about ME"! He said, they asked him all kinds of things about my camping, and if HE knew where we went and what we did while camping! He also said "they said they were concerned, since I did not let them see the downstairs of my house". He said they asked him, if he knew what my blog was about and did he read it? He told them "mainly financial stuff and the diseases from last winter and if they were so worried about it, they could get on the internet and read it themselves".

I was completely flabbergasted! I was "WTF"? They did NOT ask ME about my camping with my child and they had TOLD me, they didn't see any problems, yet they were telling my child's father something different! I called and recorded my message for the child services woman saying "I don't understand where there is a problem with me taking my child camping and Where we go, as you Never asked me a single thing about that"!

I will say, I have left 3 messages for her, since that day, asking for clarification on what the problem is with camping and Why is there a problem with our camping? I have never received a call back! Last week, I called and spoke to the supervisor that was here that day and said I wanted to know what accusation was in my regards to camping with my child? He had to look and would call me back. When he did call back, He said "he could not find one on the paperwork". He also said, the accusations were unsubstantiated in their opinion, but they were going to be talking to my child once more. ***That has still not occurred, as of writing this***

SO....... I still would like to know why there were so many questions about my camping with my daughter and where we go camping, hiking and what we do, when we camp. When they had asked my child she told them "we camp in a tent and make sure not to be next to an RV, due to their generator noise and we go hiking to falls and on trails". So if my child told them the type of stuff we do, they don't ask me, BUT then they grill my child's father on it..... What the Heck is WRONG with Camping?!

The day they were here, I will admit, I was completely Freaked out the whole time, as I had never had anything like this happen before. I did not confront them, with the questions they asked my child and why they asked my child the type questions they did, as I wanted to say as little as possible and not open any doors for them to conversations! I do regret now, not confronting them on the camping, solar panels, alternative energy, etc. when they were here. I also feel, they did not want to get into those questions, due to the camera filming everything too!

I did ask them.... were there any claims of "physical abuse" and they said "No", there was nothing in claims of my abusing my child that way, only the "mental and neglect".

Now here are my questions about this whole ordeal.............. and the accusations of Mental abuse and Neglect.........................


How does if I have Solar panels have anything to do with of those two accusations?


How does Where we go Camping have anything to do with those two accusations?


How does where we go hiking have anything to do with those two accusations?


How does what we do when we go camping have anything to do with those two accusations?


How does Who has ever gone camping with us, have anything to do with those two accusations?


How does if I have any stored food, have anything to do with those two accusations?


How does if I have an alternative heat source have anything to do with those two accusations?


I would like to know How doing Renovations on my house has anything to do with those two accusations?

How does what I write on my blog, have anything to do with those accusations?

I could possibly understand, if a parent talked about the "end of the world" to a child, how that would completely mess up a child's mind, so in that regards, I do not believe that is such a "crazy" question! Though I did want to ask the child services people - "Are you going to go after those children's parents, the ones who are telling MY child, the "end of the world is coming"? But I did not.

I would like to know in fact, in my doing lots of outdoor things with my child and going camping, is that not then a conflict to the accusation of neglect of a child? To me, that means a parent is far from neglecting a child, as they are spending time with the child outdoors, spending time together without T.V.s or other distractions! When did camping become being part of child abuse?

To sum this up, I drove myself crazy for awhile, wondering WHO would have made these accusations against me. I have accused a family member to thinking it was possibly a neighbor, to her father's relatives. BUT, now that time has gone by and I have been able to think more clearly about it, including having a conversation with Dave Hodges from the "Commonsense Radio Show", I am now of the opinion, another branch of the government, possibly sent Child Services to my home.

Dave Hodges, mentioned he has had previous shows about Child services and they are used by other branches to find out what people have or don't have, as it is the easiest way to get information.

A person can not refuse child services into their house as they have a complete right under law to come in and they have to see a child's room, clothes, and food, no matter what the accusation is.

One point I found out, after my child was interviewed, is.... they interviewed her, without anyone else in the room, I found out, a child has a RIGHT to have their own advocate and witness in the room with them when being interviewed by any government agency! I have let my child Know the rights now and have said "if they ever come back, you can Insist on having someone else in the room with you, Including your parents"!

Where does that leave this all?

I was fearful of revealing this information, in case child services could come back on me for it. But Dave Hodges explained "People NEED To know what is Happening" and "the more exposure to it, the less they can get you"!

I don't know if all of that is true, but the hours I have spent dwelling on this whole ordeal, I have come more convinced, None of it makes ANY SENSE! The accusations do NOT match the questions! The questions had Nothing to do with Child Abuse! The questions were All about What I may or may NOT have!

So, is it actually from my having this blog and the comments I have made in regards to my thoughts and opinions on various subjects?

I will also clarify, I understand from seeing and living first hand, what disasters are like and what you need. I have experienced seeing them through the Red Cross, when I have gone out on disasters as a volunteer and I have lived through a major disaster, when I lived in St. Croix Virgin Islands when Hurricane Hugo hit. I lost everything I owned and it basically wiped out the whole island. I lived without electricity for 8 months after, besides having to live in an incomplete Hurricane damaged house and living with doing for yourself and others for a few weeks immediately afterward. We did not have the grocery stores or anything immediately after for a few weeks, in fact, I learned very fast, why having a little extra food is a good thing. There is nothing wrong with understanding "disasters do happen" and having some things in ready. Ask those, who went through Katrina, ask those who have been flooded out in Iowa, Nashville and other places. Ask those who due to ice storms have lived without electricity last winter in Kentucky or in the North East. Ask me and all the others who were isolated on St. Croix for a time after Hugo, before any help could arrive. Ask those in Haiti after the large earthquake.

But, what does being prepared as per the FEMA government website and other organizations recommend, have anything to do with child abuse? So, IF someone does Follow the guidelines of FEMA, then they are possibly on a list for the government to check out or being accused of child abuse?

So...... now the question is, are others who have been public about their opinions on varied subjects, have had the government check on them? Has child services been used in other cases where they asked bizarre questions, compared to abuse questions?

Dave Hodges from the Commonsense Radio show and I may join forces to find out, if there are other cases and people out there who have had this similar type incident happen to them? Is the government going around and trying to find out, what people may have or not have? Is the government going around, trying to find out if there is a "place in the woods" people plan on going to (hence the camping questions)?

***Note*** I have talked to Dave Hodges yet again today, he feels after talking to someone else who is an expert in regards to child services, is that I was being profiled and assessed in what kind of "threat" I may be for homeland security.

If that is the case, does that mean having a voice and using our voices to speak up in what we feel are wrongs happening in a peaceful manner and exercising our "rights" as citizens, we are then considered possible "threats"? So does that mean everyone in the United States who may not have a blog, yet they still will voice their thoughts and opinions on what is happening in the United States and around the world to friends and co-workers are possibly "threats"?

Yes, I have a blog, it is a place where I can voice my peaceful but frustrated opinions at times and provide information some may not be aware of at times. Does that make me someone "to watch"?
I would like to say "I have more faith in our government, than them feeling people exercising their First Amendment rights to Free Speech are "threats" to the government, when they are done in a peaceful manner". But can I say that with full confidence? Right now, I am not sure. If this whole ordeal was to find out what I may or may not have and to do an assessment on me by the government, then I would like to know...... have I moved to another country and just not know it? Have I moved to a country that feels everyone is a threat who may not agree with their policies, they are profiled and are threatened with their children being taken away?

What country have I woken up in and when exactly did I move from the country I thought I was living in?

I have always raised my voice, when I use to think it mattered to the politicians. I have called our elected government officials many times and voiced my opinions on bills (TARP, Stimulus, FISA) and have emailed all I could voicing my opinion in Washington, D.C. I have always felt we should stand up and have our voices heard. When I gave up, in realizing Washington D.C., was deaf to the people's voices, is when I gave up trying to have my voice heard with them. I then began this blog, through the frustration of talking to the elected politicians as much as possible and knowing I was drowned out through the "yelling" of the lobbyist and big money of corporations and banks.

So, I have had my little blog, to give a spot for my voice, I do not break the law in any manner by voicing my opinion, but due to my voicing my thoughts and opinions, on my small blog ...... it seems, I may be considered a possible "threat"?

Someone.......... please wake me up, when I am back in the country I thought I was living in!

***Also, this is why, some may have noticed I have been slack on my "foreclosure fraud" information over the last month and not on it as much as I was previously, but I am getting back to myself now****

btw: Yes, I do see that Quantico comes into my blog quite often.



OH, one other comment - my child went from being a Straight A student with a couple of B's all her school years, to getting F's on tests and began failing classes, the week after this happened! My child was very Traumatized by the Child services ordeal, as she was/is aware of child services and what they do from T.V. etc. and she was Freaked out that she may be "taken away"! So...... she has now just begun "not worrying" about it at this time.

sherriequestioningall.blogspot.com 

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To: illyia who wrote (6864)12/3/2010 2:02:45 PM
From: Sidney Reilly   of 7567
 
Thanks. It's chilling what the government is doing that is largely unreported on the major networks. That should have been the top story on the evening news. That news should be bigger than Watergate but its hushed up. All the news is censored.

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From: illyia12/3/2010 8:11:57 PM
   of 7567
 
The Guardian gave State Dept. cables to the NY Times
By Michael Calderone
Yahoo
Sun Nov 28, 9:26 pm ET



New York Times editors said Sunday that although the paper's reporters had been digging through WikiLeaks trove of 250,000 State Department cables for "several weeks," the online whistleblower wasn't the source of the documents.

But if WikiLeaks—which allegedly obtained the cables from a 22-year-old army private—wasn't the Times source, than who was? Apparently, The Guardian—one of the five newspapers that had an advanced look at the cables—supplied a copy of the cables to The Times.

David Leigh, The Guardian's investigations executive editor, told The Cutline in an email that "we got the cables from WL"—meaning WikiLeaks—and "we gave a copy to the NYT."

It's not everyday that a newspaper gives valuable source material to a competitor. But Leigh explained in a second email that British law "might have stopped us through injunctions [gag orders] if we were on our own."

The Times, in an editor's note, said that the cables "were made available to The Times by a source who insisted on anonymity." A Times article on the cables said they were provided to the paper by an "intermediary." So presumably, the Guardian acted as intermediary and the Times agreed to the same embargo as the other publications involved.

On Sunday, Leigh wrote on The Guardian's site that his paper's staff spent months going through the cables. In an email, Leigh specified that The Guardian received the cables in August.

Leigh said that all the publications involved Sunday—including Spain's El Pais, France's Le Monde and Germany's Der Spiegel—"talked to each other in order to coordinate timing, and the papers talked to each other in an effort [not completely successful!] to avoid scooping each other."

Both The Times and the Guardian were among the newspapers that WikiLeaks provided the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs to prior to publishing online. But the WikiLeaks-Times relationship has been a bit rocky of late.

WikiLeaks founder and editor-in-chief Julian Assange harshly criticized The Times in October for a front-page profile of him that ran alongside the Iraq logs coverage.

Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times, would not confirm on Sunday night that the Guardian was the paper's source.

That's not surprising, since journalists are never quick to reveal sources. Even though Leigh confirmed it publicly, Keller still needed clearance from The Guardian. On Monday morning, Keller confirmed in a follow-up email that The Guardian provided the material to The Times.

(Note: This post was updated within the text after following up with Leigh and Keller).

news.yahoo.com 

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From: illyia12/4/2010 4:45:57 PM
1 Recommendation   of 7567
 
WikiLeaks Exposes Israeli Mafia’s Growing Influence
Posted By Justin Raimondo
- Antiwar.com Original - original.antiwar.com  -
On December 2, 2010 @ 11:00 pm


I love how the pundits are yawning over the latest WikiLeaks revelations: oh, there’s nothing to see here, it’s all so boring, no "smoking gun," so let’s just move right along. These people are just plain lazy: they want "scoops" delivered to their front doors, all neatly packaged and labeled as such. In short, they don’t want to have to do any work, beyond the usual cut-and-paste. Which is why a lot of the really juicy stuff coming out of WikiLeaks continues to elude them.


Take, for example, this excerpt from a cable dated May 15, 2009 — entitled "Israel, A Promised Land for Organized Crime?" – sent by our embassy in Tel Aviv, which deals with the rising influence of Israeli organized crime:


"As recently as March 2009, Zvika Ben Shabat, Yaacov Avitan, and Tzuri Roka requested visas to attend a ‘security-related convention’ in Las Vegas. According to local media reports, all three had involvement with OC. Post asked the applicants to provide police reports for any criminal records in Israel, but without such evidence there is no immediate ineligibility for links to OC. Luckily, all three have so far failed to return for continued adjudication of their applications. Nevertheless, it is fair to assume that many known OC figures hold valid tourist visas to the United States and travel freely."


What are organized crime figures doing showing up at a "security-related convention" in Las Vegas? Well, it seems Mr. Zvika Ben Shabat is the President of "H.A.Sh Security Group," an Israeli company that offers security services worldwide. Indeed, they just signed an agreement to start a joint venture with India’s giant Micro-Technologies, a company which is described as follows:


"Micro Technologies was established by Dr. [P.] Shekhar, who served as the person in charge on behalf of the Indian Government for advancement and development of the technology and software field in India (First Director Software Technology Park in India), and his company deals with the development of technologies and is already active in many markets around the world, amongst which are: Denmark, Brussels, Italy, New York, Japan, Singapore, South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, Sri Lanka and more. The company has security technologies for identification and monitoring of cell phones, vehicles, structures, computers, infrastructures and WIFI technologies."


In other words, they specialize in snooping, otherwise known as spying. The first Micro Technologies/H.A. Sh Security Group project is a "command and control center" to be built in Mumbai, India. As for what theH.A.Sh Security Group specializes in, well, take a look at these Youtube videos: here, here, and here, for starters. And get a load of who is the Chairman of H.A.Sh Security: none other than retired Major General Dan Ronen, whose resume appears here:


"2001-2003 – Israel Police: Head of the Operations Division, with the rank of Major General; Coordination of activities of all police units in the operational field; Coordination with the General Security Service and IDF units in the battle against terrorism; 2004-2007 – Israel Police: Commander of Northern Region (the largest of the police regions); Responsible for liaison and coordination vis-à-vis heads of local authorities; Responsible for leading and commanding the overall forces and systems during the second Lebanon War, in missions involving defense of the residents in the northern home front; Areas of Expertise: Combat against terrorism and suicide bombers coordination and operation of emergency and rescue organizations Combat against crime and crime organizations."


Gen. Ronen is listed as the Chairman of H.A.Sh Security Group, with Mr. Ben Shabat, variously described [pdf] as the President, Vice-President, and Director. So why is one of Israel’s former top cops in a business relationship with a known member of the Israeli Mafia?


Enquiring minds want to know!


Ominously, the cable goes on to bemoan the fact that Israeli organized crime figures are no longer automatically prevented from entering the US due to a change in the rules. As the author, someone named Cunningham, notes in an appended comment entitled "OC [Organized Crime] Slipping Through the Consular Cracks":


"Given the growing reach and lethal methods of Israeli OC, blocking the travel of known OC figures to the United States is a matter of great concern to Post. Through collaboration with Israeli and U.S. law enforcement authorities, Post has developed an extensive database and placed lookouts for OC figures and their foot soldiers. Nevertheless, the above visa cases demonstrate the challenges that have arisen since the termination of the Visas Shark in September 2008. Unlike OC groups from the former Soviet Union, Italy, China, and Central America, application of INA 212(a)(3)(A)(ii) against Israeli OC is not specifically authorized per Foreign Affairs Manual 40.31 N5.3. As such, Israelis who are known to work for or belong to OC families are not automatically ineligible for travel to the United States."


"Visas Shark" was apparently a program that effectively excluded organized crime figures from the US, and its termination is noted here: instead, the embassy must go through a complex bureaucratic procedure in order to exclude a suspected organized crime member. First, the consular official must determine that a "reasonable suspicion" exists to identify a visa applicant as a member of an organized crime syndicate, and then the matter goes back to the State Department’s "Office of Legislation, Regulations, and Advisory Assistance," which will then determine if a "reason to believe" the derogatory information on the applicant exists. A whole laundry list of possible "reasons to believe" are listed, including


"Acknowledgement of membership by the individual, …actively working to further the organization’s aims in a way to suggest close affiliation; Receiving financial support or recognition from the organization; Determination of membership by a competent court; Statement from local or U.S. law enforcement authorities that the individual is a member; Frequent association with other members; Voluntarily displaying symbols of the organization; and participating in the organization’s activities, even if lawful."


Yet it was due to media reports that the author of the cable determined the connection of Messrs Ben Shabat, Avitan, and Roka to organized crime. Is this good enough to have a "reason to believe"? Ask the Office of Legislation, Regulation, and Advisory Assistance – which is what our embassy in Tel Aviv (and, indeed, our embassies all around the world) must do before they can refuse a visa to an applicant on that basis.


Not that the Israeli Mafia has had any problem entering the United States in the past – and making its presence felt. As Fox News’ Carl Cameron reported on December 17, 2001:


"Los Angeles, 1997, a major local, state and federal drug investigating sours. The suspects: Israeli organized crime with operations in New York, Miami, Las Vegas, Canada, Israel and Egypt. The allegations: cocaine and ecstasy trafficking, and sophisticated white-collar credit card and computer fraud.

"The problem: according to classified law enforcement documents obtained by Fox News, the bad guys had the cops’ beepers, cell phones, even home phones under surveillance. Some who did get caught admitted to having hundreds of numbers and using them to avoid arrest.

"This compromised law enforcement communications between LAPD detectives and other assigned law enforcement officers working various aspects of the case. The organization discovered communications between organized crime intelligence division detectives, the FBI and the Secret Service.

"Shock spread from the DEA to the FBI in Washington, and then the CIA. An investigation of the problem, according to law enforcement documents, concluded, ‘The organization has apparent extensive access to database systems to identify pertinent personal and biographical information.’"


Israel’s hi-tech military sector is booming in the midst of a world economic downturn, and the "homeland security" industry is something they’ve jumped into head first, as Governor Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania knows all too well. It was Rendell who hired them to oversee Pennsylvania’s security – until it was revealed they were spying on legal citizens groups who were protesting the construction of a local power plant. Israeli "security" firms are operating all over the US, as well as abroad, in airports, and government facilities, and if Israeli organized crime is now a factor in that booming industry, then surely that’s a major security concern – or ought to be.


Cameron’s four-part Fox News investigation into Israeli spying in the US seemed to posit a connection between the Israeli government and the Israeli Mafia, and, thanks to WikiLeaks, we can now see the link made visible. The Gen. Ronen-Ben Shabat connection, through the H.A.Sh Security Group, shows Cameron’s reporting was based on more than a mere suspicion. Given the additional information provided by this cable, it is reasonable to believe a corrupted segment of the Israeli military-law enforcement establishment has literally gone into business with Israeli organized crime.

If that isn’t scary — and newsworthy — I don’t know what is. Yet our laid-back pundits, and "journalists" — who want a story delivered on a silver platter — complain that there’s nothing really new to be found in the WikiLeaks cables.


That’s because they aren’t looking.

Read more by Justin Raimondo [click site for links]
•WikiLeaks vs. the Political Class – November 30th, 2010
•The Big Dump – November 28th, 2010
•Libertarians Against the Regime – November 25th, 2010
•Korean Conundrum: Is There a Way Out? – November 23rd, 2010
•The War Party vs. Rand Paul – November 21st, 2010

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Article printed from Antiwar.com Original: original.antiwar.com 

URL to article: original.antiwar.com 

Copyright © 2009 Antiwar.com Original. All rights reserved.

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From: illyia12/7/2010 2:33:44 PM
2 Recommendations   of 7567
 
Assange: Aftonbladet's 'Inside Story'
A timeline including excerpts of case testimony.
12-7-10

STOCKHOLM (Radsoft) — Aftonbladet claim to have a copy of the Assange case files. They've published a special supplement to their hardcopy edition with details of the Assange case they've not revealed online.

Aftonbladet is a tabloid - meaning they arbitrarily mix truth with fiction and hyperbole. Their articles are at best 'hearsay of hearsay' - the testimony of the girls is not corroborated and Aftonbladet's version isn't corroborated either.

That being said, one can construct a timeline based on the Aftonbladet supplement.

v 2010-08-11 (Wednesday). Julian Assange arrives in Stockholm. He is invited by Anna Ardin of the Brotherhood Movement, an adjunct of the Social Democrat Party. Ardin is to be out of town for a few days and lets Assange stay at her flat on Tjurbergsgatan on Södermalm in Stockholm. Assange uses much of his time to meet with journalists and organisations. He has dinner with friends and a US journalist who wants to talk about his new book on the Bush clan.



Sofia Wilén contacts the Brotherhood Movement on or shortly after 11 August to get a ticket to the Assange event. Admission is 'prio press' as Ardin posts on Twitter. Wilén is professedly a photographer and gets a ticket. She lives outside Stockholm (in Enköping) but claims to be a national government employee.

v 2010-08-13 (Friday). Ardin was to return to Stockholm first on Saturday 14 August but gets back early, already on Friday afternoon.

'He was there when I came home', Ardin tells the police. 'We talked a bit and agreed he could continue to stay there.'

Ardin and Assange go to a local eatery for dinner, then return to the flat and have sex. They use a condom but the condom is found to be broken afterwards.

v 2010-08-14 (Saturday). Wilén attends the event arranged by Ardin, sits in the front row with her camera and takes pictures of Assange, hangs about afterwards, introduces herself to Assange, gets an invite to a lunch with the entourage at a 'bistro' a few blocks away, she and Assange see a short movie in a local cinema afterwards, then part.

Assange attends a crayfish party in Ardin's courtyard where two members of Sweden's Pirate Party (likely Falkvinge and Troberg) and are also present.

v 2010-08-15 (Sunday). Assange, Falkvinge, and Troberg meet in the old town for a photo shoot concerning Sweden's Pirate Party offering server support to WikiLeaks.



Wilén rings Assange but his telephone is turned off. She starts telling her work colleagues about her meet with Assange.

'They told me he must feel like I dumped him, so the ball's in my court if I want see him again', Wilén tells the police.

v 2010-08-16 (Monday). Wilén rings Assange again and this time he picks up. He tells her he's going to a meeting in the evening but should be able to connect with her about 20:30. Wilén wanders about in the city, eats some sushi, rings Assange back at 21:00 when he hasn't yet turned up. Assange picks up.

'He said he was in Hornsgatan and the meeting had just ended. He asked me to come and meet him, which I did.'

Wilén and Assange walk to the old town, sit down at Munkbron, talk a while, then take the train to her home in Enköping. Wilén pays for Assange's ticket (SEK107/$10).



Wilén and Assange have sex that evening with a condom. They have sex again in the following morning but without a condom. After sex in the morning, Wilén goes out and buys, then cooks breakfast - oatmeal and juice. They joke about her possibly being pregnant.

'I was being sarcastic to defuse the situation.'

Wilén and Assange ride together on her bike to the train station. Assange returns to Stockholm alone. Wilén asks Assange if he'll ring her. He says he will.



Assange is to meet Agneta Lindblom Hulthén of the Swedish journalists association at 12:00 noon but doesn't turn up until 16:00. One of his colleagues who'd been at the meeting the previous evening and who'd seen Wilén arrive at Hornsgatan starts looking for him. He tries to reach Wilén as he suspected they'd spent the night together. He rings Assange but Assange doesn't answer.

v 2010-08-18 (Wednesday). Wilén calls Ardin and tells her she's had unprotected sex with Assange. She says she's upset he didn't use a condom and is afraid she might have contracted an STD or become pregnant. Ardin admits she too had had sex with Assange. Ardin rings an acquaintance of Assange's after the conversation with Wilén to convey the message to Assange that she wants him to move his things out of her flat.

v 2010-08-19 (Thursday). Ardin sends an SMS message to the same acquaintance of Assange's, saying he still hadn't moved his things out.

v 2010-08-20 (Friday). Assange moves his things out of Ardin's flat. He claims it's first on Friday he hears of her request.

Wilén and Ardin arrive at the Klara police station at 14:00. Wilén wants to file charges of rape; Ardin tags along to be of help.



They talk to a female police officer who concludes they're both victims of sex crimes and decides to interrogate them separately. Of Wilén the female police officer writes the following in the report.

'She said she'd been raped in her home on the morning of Tuesday 17 August by a man who had sex with her against her wishes.'

The female police officer ends her report with the following.

'Everyone I spoke to was in earnest agreement that this was a case of rape.'

Ardin, who only came along to help Wilén, tells the policewoman she also had sex with Ardin. She tells the policewoman the condom broke during sex and now accuses Assange of deliberately breaking it. The police conduct their interrogation of Ardin the following day on the phone.

The police send out a posse to Stureplan to visit upscale nightclubs in search of Assange. He is not to be found.

(Assange later tells friends about the broken condom but dismisses the idea it broke deliberately. He also insists he in no way raped the other woman either - it was consensual unprotected sex.)



(Niklas Svensson of Expressen gets wind of the story, races back to Stockkholm from Harpsund, he or someone else in his office rings up prosecutor on duty Maria Kjellstrand who corroborates the details, the charges, and the identities involved.)

v 2010-08-21 (Saturday). Svensson's story hits Expressen online 05:00. A few hours later the other Swedish news sites have the story and soon it's all over the globe.

The police are tipped off that Assange is staying at a hotel in Stockholm but he's already checked out by the time they arrive.

Chief prosecutor Eva Finné decides to take over the case and has the files sent to her summer cottage by messenger. She reviews the documents and immediately rescinds the arrest warrant. She adds the following to her decision.

'If the suspect turns up then tell him he's suspected of molestation X 2.'

v 2010-08-22 (Sunday). Karin Rosander is interviewed by Al Jazeera and somehow makes a mockery of herself and the country to a stupefied reporter and studio crew; Eva Finné is rumoured to be highly critical of the initial arrest warrant.



Wilén and Ardin contact Claes Borgström in the evening and he agrees to take the case.

v 2010-08-23 (Monday). Assange retains Leif Silbersky as counsel and Silbersky immediately poses a rather obvious question.

'Why did the prosecutor corroborate all that confidential information for the media?'

The question is considered obvious because such behaviour is neither normal, acceptable, nor prudent - particularly when the arrest is 'in absentia'. Announcing such an arrest only gives the suspect a chance to flee.

The prosecutor's office refuse to this day to reply to Silbersky.

v 2010-08-25 (Wednesday). A Google search for 'Assange rape' yields 1.2 million hits.

Finné clarifies that she doesn't mean she doesn't believe the women's stories, only that there is nothing criminal in them. Borgström, based on the same evidence, insists there is something criminal and that it was outright rape in both cases, and demands the case be reviewed by a prosecutor of yet higher rank.

Borgström is given an advance copy of the Aftonbladet article and replies with the following.

'I want to stress that there are significant details missing in this report, details I base my accusations of rape on, but I am prevented from revealing what these details are.'



Aftonbladet's reporters suggest to Borgström that it's in his clients' best interests to reveal the 'significant details'. Borgström replies with the following.

'It would hurt the investigation to make the information public at this stage. It's my opinion [Finné] was in error. I believe Assange will be accused of sex crimes.'

Aftonbladet's reporters tell Borgström they wonder how this can be if Ardin insists she's not been raped. Borgström replies with the following.

'[Ardin]'s not a jurist.'

v 2010-08-30 (Monday). Assange meets with the police at 17:45. His solicitor Leif Silbersky is simultaneously involved in the 'helicopter robbery' case and can't make it earlier. Assange is told he is suspected of deliberately breaking a condom and denies this is so. He adds that he'll be staying in Sweden to fight the accusations and has no intention of fleeing the country.

Assange also demands guarantees details of the case will not again be leaked to the media - particularly Expressen.

v 2010-08-31 (Tuesday). Details of the interview the police guaranteed would not be leaked turn up in Expressen anyway.

Note: a Google search for 'Assange+rape' yields 4.38 million hits at time of writing.

See Also
Rixstep: Assange/WikiLeaks RSS Feed
Radsoft: Assange/WikiLeaks RSS Feed

rixstep.com 

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From: illyia12/7/2010 10:39:03 PM
   of 7567
 
The Case of Wikileaks, Part I—The Hacker’s Treehouse
Gonzalo Lira's Blog
12-7-2010

This is the first of a two-part examination of Wikileaks. Part II, “The New McCarthyism” will be posted on Thursday morning.

It’s only when you poke the beast that you get a sense of its true nature...
-GL

*** *** ***

The American government, media, and corporate establishment are all in a tizzy over the latest poke from Wikileaks:

The “whistleblowing” site (it really isn’t, but I’ll get to that in a minute) is releasing excerpts from a cache of some 250,000 diplomatic cables and other documents. These cables were sent from various American embassies back to the State Department between 1966 and 2010. The leaks have been dripping out since November 28, revealing a whole host of tawdry but so far trivial tidbits of American diplomatic behavior.

None of the “secrets” revealed by Wikileaks are really secrets: They’re mostly confidential appraisals of the U.S.’s allies and rivals; much of it is gossip, or merely pedestrian—demonstrably so:

Of the 251,287 documents Wikileaks has obtained, 134,000 are outright unclassified; 102,000 are classified “confidential”; and 15,652 are classified as “secret”. Source is linked here, confirmation is linked here.

None of these documents are classified “top secret” or higher—anyone claiming that they are “top secret” or that they “put lives in danger” is at best exaggerating, and at worst lying.

The reason none of the data Wikileaks acquired was “top secret” or higher in its classification is because the data in question was accessed through the SIPRNet system (Secret Internet Protocol Router Network) that the U.S. government has set up. This is a sort of parallel internet for the Department of Defense and the State Department. Three million people have access to SIPRNet, which by design handles at most “secret” documents. Material rated “top secret” or higher in the classification scale use a completely different system, accessed by far fewer individuals.

So the latest Wikileaks “revelations” are actually not particularly important, in and of themselves.

More than anything, they have been embarrassing—such as the acknowledgment that American officials cast a blind eye on rampant Afghani government corruption; that Saudi Arabia has been clamoring for the U.S. to attack Iran just as loudly as the Israelis; that Hillary Clinton directed American diplomats to spy on United Nations delegates, up to and including gathering their credit card, e-mail, and “biometric” information.

But none have been important, or have offered some startling surprise. The three most important “revelations” were already well-known facts: That al-Qaeda and other Islamic radicals are funded by Saudi Arabia; that Yemeni government missile strikes on al-Qaeda training facilities in that country were actually carried out by the American military; and that China’s government had indeed executed the “hacking attack” on Google between June 2009 and January 2010, which eventually drove the company out of the country.

In diplomatic, military and cyber-security circles—and not particularly elevated circles at that—these “revelations” were as well known as the truth about Santa and the Easter Bunny.

What is important about the latest Wikileaks release is the reaction these revelations have caused in the realms of government, media and corporate power in America—a collective reaction that I for one found startling, not to say frightening.

To me, it revealed a New McCarthyism that transcends mere party affiliation and ordinary political divisions, and glides off into a realm of hatred for the individual—an enforced moral acquiescence, whereby a truth spoken is a truth that must be shut up, regardless of the cost.

So I figured I’d find out all I could about Wikileaks, so as to understand what the hubbub was all about—and understand my own reaction.

The Origins and Rise to Prominence of Wikileaks

As soon as you start looking into Wikileaks, you come across the name Julian Assange, the 39 year-old “official spokesperson” of the organization. If you look more closely, you start to realize that Julian Assange is Wikileaks, and Wikileaks is very much him: In outlook, priorities and modus operandi.

Julian Assange

Australian by birth, the child of divorce and a gypsy upbringing, Julian Assange has that pasty-faced expressionless Nordic look of a cruel and steely-eyed English barrister who got buggered senseless in his upper-crust public school—or maybe an inscrutable Euro-trash arms dealer who obsessively plays baccarat up and down the Côte d’Azur. In other words, he is an adventurer, but a cypher as well.

He first gained prominence as a teenager in Australia in 1991, when he was arrested for computer hacking, managing to carry out some fairly sophisticated hacking of Canada’s Nortel. But according to The New Yorker (in a long and detailed profile of him that I highly recommend), the Australian judge concluded there was no aim of lucre or vandalism on Assange’s part: “There is just no evidence that there was anything other than [a] sort of intelligent inquisitiveness and the pleasure of being able to—what’s the expression—surf through these various computers.”

This was indeed the case: Before his arrest, as a 16 year-old, Assange had joined up with two other hackers in Australia to form a group they called “The International Subversives”. (Before we laugh, let’s remember all the stupid clubs we invented for ourselves when we were sixteen.) The stated goal of this little cyber-treehouse club was to break into corporate and government computers and see what was in them, without stealing or hurting anyone.

(What I personally find very interesting—and reminiscent of my own teenaged misery—is that Assange wrote detailed and formal rules for this band of cyber-pranksters. This urge to impose structure and order on the self—while at the same time trying to subvert structure and order in the world outside the self—is very much a divorce-baby’s metier.)

The other aspect of Assange’s biography that bears mentioning is a terrifically long and bruising custody battle over his child, which turned from a legal fight with his child’s mother, into a legal fight with the Australian state, which for various bureaucratic reasons was unresponsive to Assange’s custody appeal, excepting a pitched legal battle.

Out of this traumatic experience, Assange seemed to develop the idea that Left vs. Right, Rich vs. Poor, and other such old-fashioned political dichotomies were missing the point: It was the bureacracy/corporation versus the individual.

From these two strains—computer hacking, and fighting a large bureaucratic power—one could not predict, but could certainly explain, how Assange got the idea to create Wikileaks around 2006.

It was without question his idea, and he was the prime mover behind the site. Though he was helped along the way, Assange was the architect of Wikileaks, wrote the basic code, and developed the security system. At various times, various people have helped Wikileaks; some have even been on staff, some of them even being paid—

—but at the end of the day, Wikileaks is a one-man band: Julian Assange is the band leader.

Wikileaks was up and running by late 2006—but like all sites, it lacked the crucial ingredient:

Content.

With no content, he could not show that his Wikileaks site was worth submitting anonymous material to. Without content, his site was like a bright and shiny new used-car dealership—but with no cars.

He got his content the old fashioned way—by stealing it from thieves. To be more precise, Assange/Wikileaks noticed that a server they had access to was being used as a node for the transmission of various governments’ data—and this node was being hacked by some Chinese hackers, for reasons unknown. Therefore, Assange/Wikileaks leached on to the Chinese, and hacked what they were hacking.

This was how Assange landed the first batch of Wikileaks content: In December of 2006, they could claim that they had “over 1,000,000 government documents”, which was technically true—and some of it was almost interesting.

But it’s import didn’t matter: With this first batch, Wikileaks was off and running, accreting more data by the very fact that it had accumulated a lot of confidential government data.

This is what apparently drew Spc. Bradley Manning, a homosexual Army intelligence analyst, to pass along a trove of some 90,000 Army documents to Assange/Wikileaks, including battlefield video. (As of this writing, though people seem to suggest Manning is the source of both the 90,000 Army documents and the additional 250,000 State Department cables, it is unclear if that is truly the case, or if there were two or more separate leaks. For purposes of this discussion, it’s irrelevant.)

[Screen captures from “Collateral Murder”]

Certainly one of the videos Spc. Manning provided—“Collateral Murder”—was the most chilling, and created instant controversy around the world: Released in April 2010, the video shows a 2007 incident where an Apache helicopter gunship killed a group of Iraqis, who turned out to be Reuters reporters. Two children were also severely injured in the attack by American soldiers.

This video put Wikileaks on the map.

I won’t give a Greatest Hits recitation of Wikileaks’ various coups between the time it started and the “Collateral Murder” release. I’ll limit myself to pointing interested readers to this list in the UK Telegraph, recounting the most memorable Wikileaks exploits.

However, for all their exploits—some of them quite amusing, such as their leaking the confidential British military manual outlining how to prevent Wikileaks from publishing confidential material—Wikileaks is not really a whistleblowing site.

It claims it is a whistleblowing site—a claim which is the basis for its entire effort at self-promotion. But it soon becomes apparent that Wikileaks doesn’t want to call attention to malfeasance per se: Rather, Wikileaks just wants to reveal secrets—the bigger the better, the more embarrassing the better.

I say this because Wikileaks has consistently published confidential material that in and of itself did not serve the purpose of opening governments to greater accountability, yet which hurt individuals egregiously.

For instance, there was the case of Wikileaks revealing the e-mail data and personal photos of Sarah Palin—but that was merely juvenile.

Far more serious was the release of the confidential Belgian police report which named a potential suspect in an ongoing criminal investigation, as was the release of the names of local Afghans assisting American forces in their occupation of that country: These revelations exposed these individuals to harm, but certainly did not advance the cause of government openness, or highlight any particular injustice.

In the above cases where individuals were harmed by Wikileaks’ revelations, criticism by Wikileaks’ allies led it to begin conscientiously redacting the names of individuals from future document dumps.

This reaction to its allies’ urgings, rather than Wikileaks itself moving to strike the names of blameless individuals who would come to harm because of these revelations, goes to show a moral blankness of Assange/Wikileaks:

He/it did not recognize what was bad about releasing information about a private individual, even someone as deplorable as Palin. The information was simply released with an eye to maximum media impact, but without a corresponding eye towards the morality and goodness of making the information known.

This goes to show what Wikileaks’ is really interested in: It doesn’t want to blow any whistle—it wants a world without secrets. And it wants to make sure the world knows that Wikileaks is the reason the world has no secrets.

This reflects a hacker’s worldview—which should surprise no one, of course, because that’s what Assange is: A former teenaged hacker.

Who Assange is, and what his organization, Wikileaks, really is—a hacker’s site, not a whistleblowing site—inevitably creates tensions with people who genuinely are appalled by the behavior of the Western democracies over the last ten or fifteen years.

In a case like “Collateral Murder”, Assange/Wikileaks’ hacker’s mantra of No Secrets coincides perfectly with the political goal (such as my own) of open democracies that are truthful and reliable, no matter how bitter the truth or the political cost of discovery.

I want to know of incidents like those shown by “Collateral Murder”—because I want to know what crimes my government has been committing in my name, and how my government has been deceiving me. I want to know these bitter truths so that I can (through democratic proxies) prosecute the guilty, assuage the suffering of the innocent victims, and ultimately make a better state for both myself, my family and my children.

But from a morally blank hacker’s point of view, the titillation and horror of the footage of “Collateral Murder” is not a means to achieving some political goal—the sensory rush of the footage is an end in itself. From the hacker’s point of view, the whole idea behind releasing something like “Collateral Murder” is to bask in the glow of people’s reaction to the footage—but nothing more.

These two conflicting points of view fit together perfectly in the case of something like “Collateral Murder”: Where the hacker’s interest ends, the democratic moralist’s interest begins.

A true whistleblower—a moralist trying to improve a democratic society’s systems of government by way of public release of confidential information which highlights failures of that government—is what Spc. Bradley Manning is: He gained access to information that conclusively proved crimes and misdemeanors carried out by government agents and covered up by that government, and sought to release that information to the wider public.

Bradley Manning is the true hero of this entire situation—and he will likely spend the rest of his life in prison: A fate which should haunt every American’s conscience.

Why? Because Manning had no other motive than goodness and justice. He released this information at great risk to himself, with no desire for publicity (obviously), and no possibility of recompense. His only motive, clearly, was so that people’s sense of injustice would be so outraged by the footage and documents that they would demand of their government some accountability—some semblance of justice.

Julian Assange and Wikileaks—because of their hacker’s mentality—were interested in maximum impact.

They’re very good at it, too: Maximum impact.

Assange very shrewdly got himself to the big time by way of his rather brilliant strategy of releasing new information that he has developed: A strategy of media exclusivity—ironically the exact opposite of the openness Wikileaks claims to seek.

It all has to do with information—and how it is presented.

The internet is much like the sea: If I were to take a diamond the size of a fist, and place it on the surface of the ocean, it would sink without a sign, and no one would ever know it had been there.

But if I take a banana, put it on a neon-orange dinghy in the middle of the busy Sydney harbor, then fire flares into the night sky hour after hour, while blaring fog horns nonstop, what will happen? Why, in no time at all, I’ll get a huge crowd, all of them jostling one another to catch a sight of this marvelous banana, amazed by it as if they’d never seen one before.

Same with information on the internet.

Rather than simply dumping tons of documents into the internet ether, and have its impact dissipate like smoke, Wikileaks has selectively released documents and material to a few high-profile, indisputably serious mainstream news sources in different countries. In the case of the State Department cables, Wikileaks gave simultaneous exclusives to the New York Times, Germany’s Der Spiegel, France’s Le Monde, Spain’s El País, and the UK’s The Guardian.

This plays to the media outlet’s vanity, giving them an “exclusive” in their home country (which is the market they care about), while insuring that the material will be released, and released prominently: If, say, the Times had failed to publish the material, the other four would likely have published it, garnering the media glory. The editors at the Times would know that—so they’d have no choice but to publish the material, and publish it prominently.

This is, of course, what Wikileaks wants: There’s no point in outing a secret if nobody hears that it’s been outed.

But like the banana released to hoopla in the middle of Sydney harbor, in the case of the State Department cables, this very clever media strategy has had the effect of making trivial and unimportant “revelations” have a heft and weight that they do not objectively have—which makes the reactions to the latest Wikileaks document dump far more interesting:

The collective hissy-fit the American establishment is having is over things which do not matter.

Remember that, as we survey the reactions to the State Department cable dump: As of this writing, none of the Wikileaks revelations from their cache are either unknown, or surprising, or revealing, or secret.

And so far, Wikileaks has not been charged with breaking any law.

“Part II—The New McCarthyism” will appear on Thursday morning. In that post, I will discuss the specifics of the government, media and corporate reactions to this latest release from Wikileaks; the sex crime allegations against Assange; and the legal fate of Assange and Wikileaks.
GL

gonzalolira.blogspot.com 

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From: illyia12/7/2010 11:05:45 PM
   of 7567
 
Big Brother a Click Away
written by Tom Burghardt
Pacific Free Press
10-10-10

When the 'Future' Invades Our Lives:
The CIA Funds 'Predictive Behavior' Start-Ups

[For complete article features, please see source at Antifascist Calling... here.]

What do Google, the CIA and a host of so-called "predictive behavior" start-ups have in common? They're interested in you, or more specifically, whether your online interests--from Facebook to Twitter posts, and from Flickr photos to YouTube and blog entries--can be exploited by powerful computer algorithms and subsequently transformed into "actionable intelligence."

As they walked along the busy, yellow-lit tiers of offices, Anderton said: "You're acquainted with the theory of precrime, of course. I presume we can take that for granted." - Philip K. Dick, The Minority Report

And whether the knowledge gleaned from an IP address is geared towards selling useless junk or entering a name into a law enforcement database matters not a whit. It's all "just data" and "buzz" goes the mantra, along what little is left of our privacy and our rights.

Increasingly, secret state agencies ranging from the CIA to the National Security Agency are pouring millions of dollars into data-mining firms which claim they have a handle on who you are or what you might do in the future. And to top it off, the latest trend in weeding-out dissenters and nonconformists from the social landscape will soon be invading a workplace near you; in fact, it already has.

Welcome to the sinister world of "Precrime" where capitalist grifters, drug- and torture-tainted spy shops are all laboring mightily to stamp out every last vestige of free thought here in the heimat.

The CIA Enters the Frame

In July, security journalist Noah Shachtman revealed in Wired that "the investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time--and says it uses that information to predict the future."

Shachtman reported that the CIA's semi-private investment company, In-Q-Tel, and Google Ventures, the search giant's business division had partnered-up with a dodgy outfit called Recorded Future pouring, according to some estimates, $20 million dollars into the fledgling firm.

A blurb on In-Q-Tel's web site informs us that "Recorded Future extracts time and event information from the web. The company offers users new ways to analyze the past, present, and the predicted future."

Who those ubiquitous though nameless "users" are or what they might do with that information once they "extract" it from the web is left unsaid. However, judging from the interest that a CIA-connected entity has expressed in funding the company, privacy will not figure prominently in the "new ways" such tools will be used.

Wired reported that the company, founded by former Swedish Army Ranger Christopher Ahlberg, "scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents--both present and still-to-come."

"The cool thing is" Ahlberg said, "you can actually predict the curve, in many cases."

And as for the search giant's interest in "predicting the future" for the secret state, it wouldn't be the first time that Google Ventures sold equipment and expertise to America's shadow warriors.

While the firm may pride itself on the corporate slogan, "don't be evil," data is a valuable commodity. And where's there value, there's money to be made. Whether it comes in the form of "increasing share value" through the sale of private information to marketeers or state intelligence agencies eager to increase "situational awareness" of the "battlespace" is a matter of complete indifference to corporate bean counters.

After all, as Google CEO Eric Schmidt told CNBC last year, "if you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."

But that standard, "only bad people have something to hide," is infinitely mutable and can be stretched--or manipulated as has so often been the case in the United States--to encompass everything from "Papist" conspiracies, "illegal" migrants, homosexuality, communism, drug use, or America's latest bête noire: the "Muslim threat."

Schmidt went on to say that "the reality is that search engines, including Google, do retain this information for some time. And we're all subject, in the U.S., to the Patriot Act, and it is possible that that information could be made available to the authorities."

In February, The Washington Post reported that "the world's largest Internet search company and the world's most powerful electronic surveillance organization are teaming up in the name of cybersecurity."

"The alliance" between Google and NSA "is being designed to allow the two organizations to share critical information without violating Google's policies or laws that protect the privacy of Americans' online communications," the Post alleged.

An anonymous source told the Post that "the deal does not mean the NSA will be viewing users' searches or e-mail accounts or that Google will be sharing proprietary data."

Really?

Last spring it was revealed that Google's Street View cars had been secretly vacuuming up terabytes of private wi-fi data for more than three years across Europe and the United States.

The Sunday Times reported that the firm had "been scooping up snippets of people's online activities broadcast over unprotected home and business wi-fi networks."

In July, The Washington Post's "Top Secret America" investigation disclosed that Google supplies mapping and search products to the U.S. secret state and that their employees, outsourced intelligence contractors for the Defense Department, may have filched their customers' wi-fi data as part of an NSA surveillance project.

And what about email and web searches? Last year, The New York Times revealed that NSA intercepts of "private telephone calls and e-mail messages of Americans are broader than previously acknowledged." In fact, a former NSA analyst described how he was trained-up fierce in 2005 "for a program in which the agency routinely examined large volumes of Americans' e-mail messages without court warrants."

That program, code-named PINWALE, and the NSA's meta-data-mining spy op STELLAR WIND, continue under Obama. Indeed, The Atlantic told us at the time that PINWALE "is actually an unclassified proprietary term used to refer to advanced data-mining software that the government uses."

But the seamless relationships amongst communications' giants such as Google and the secret state doesn't stop there.

Even before Google sought an assist from the National Security Agency to secure its networks after an alleged breech by China last year, in 2004 the firm had acquired Keyhole, Inc., an In-Q-Tel funded start-up that developed 3-D-spy-in-the-sky images; Keyhole became the backbone for what later evolved into Google Earth.

At the time of their initial investment, In-Q-Tel said that Keyhole's "strategic relationship ... means that the Intelligence Community can now benefit from the massive scalability and high performance of the Keyhole enterprise solution."

In-Q-Tel's then-CEO, Gilman Louie, said that spy shop venture capitalists invested in the firm "because it offers government and commercial users a new capability to radically enhance critical decision making. Through its ability to stream very large geospatial datasets over the Internet and private networks, Keyhole has created an entirely new way to interact with earth imagery and feature data."

Or, as seen on a daily basis in the AfPak "theatre" deliver exciting new ways to kill people. Now that's innovation!

That was then, now the search giant and the CIA's investment arm are banking on products that will take privacy intrusions to a whole new level.

A promotional offering by the up-and-comers in the predictive behavior marketplace, Recorded Future--A White Paper on Temporal Analytics asserts that "unlike traditional search engines which focus on text retrieval and leaves the analysis to the user, we strive to provide tools which assist in identifying and understanding historical developments, and which can also help formulate hypotheses about and give clues to likely future events. We have decided on the term 'temporal analytics' to describe the time oriented analysis tasks supported by our systems."

Big in the hyperbole department, Recorded Future claims to have developed an "analytics engine, which goes beyond search, explicit link analysis and adds implicit link analysis, by looking at the 'invisible links' between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events. We do this by separating the documents and their content from what they talk about."

According to the would-be Big Brother enablers, "Recorded Future also analyzes the 'time and space dimension' of documents--references to when and where an event has taken place, or even when and where it will take place--since many documents actually refer to events expected to take place in the future."

Adding to the unadulterated creep factor, the technocratic grifters aver they're "adding more components, e.g. sentiment analyses, which determine what attitude an author has towards his/her topic, and how strong that attitude is--the affective state of the author."

Strongly oppose America's imperial project to steal other people's resources in Afghanistan and Iraq, or, crime of crimes, have the temerity to write or organize against it? Step right this way, Recorded Future has their eye on you and will sell that information to the highest bidder!

After all, as Mike Van Winkle, a California Anti-Terrorism Information Center shill infamously told the Oakland Tribune back in 2003 after Oakland cops wounded scores of peacenik longshoremen at an antiwar rally at the port: "You can make an easy kind of a link that, if you have a protest group protesting a war where the cause that's being fought against is international terrorism, you might have terrorism at that (protest). You can almost argue that a protest against that is a terrorist act."

And with Recorded Future's "sentiment analyses" such "links" will be even easier to fabricate.

Never mind that the prestigious National Academy of Science's National Research Council issued a scathing 2008 report, Protecting Individual Privacy in the Struggle Against Terrorists: A Framework for Assessment, that debunked the utility of data-ming and link analysis as effective counterterrorism tools.

"Far more problematic," the NRC informs us, "are automated data-mining techniques that search databases for unusual patterns of activity not already known to be associated with terrorists." Since "so little is known about what patterns indicate terrorist activity" the report avers, dodgy techniques such as link analysis "are likely to generate huge numbers of false leads."

As for Recorded Future's over-hyped "sentiment analyses," the NRC debunked, one might even say preemptively, the dodgy claims of our would-be precrime mavens. "The committee also examined behavioral surveillance techniques, which try to identify terrorists by observing behavior or measuring physiological states."

Their conclusion? "There is no scientific consensus on whether these techniques are ready for use at all in counterterrorism." Damningly, the NRC asserted that such techniques "have enormous potential for privacy violations because they will inevitably force targeted individuals to explain and justify their mental and emotional states."

Not that such inconvenient facts matter to Recorded Future or their paymasters in the so-called intelligence community who after all, are in the driver's seat when the firm's knowledge products "make predictions about the future."

After all, as Ahlberg and his merry band of privacy invaders inform us: "Our mission is not to help our customers find documents, but to enable them to understand what is happening in the world."

The better to get a leg up on the competition or know who to target.

The "Real You"

Not to be outdone by black world spy agencies, their outsourced corporate partners or the futurist gurus who do their bidding, the high-tech publication Datamation, told us last month that the precrime concept "is coming very soon to the world of Human Resources (HR) and employee management."

Reporter Mike Elgan revealed that a "Santa Barbara, Calif., startup called Social Intelligence data-mines the social networks to help companies decide if they really want to hire you."

Elgan averred that while background checks have historically searched for evidence of criminal behavior on the part of prospective employees, "Social Intelligence is the first company that I'm aware of that systematically trolls social networks for evidence of bad character."

Similar to Recorded Future and dozens of other "predictive behavior" companies such as Attensity and Visible Technologies, Social Intelligence deploys "automation software that slogs through Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, LinkedIn, blogs, and 'thousands of other sources,' the company develops a report on the 'real you'--not the carefully crafted you in your resume."

According to Datamation, "the company also offers a separate Social Intelligence Monitoring service to watch the personal activity of existing employees on an ongoing basis." Such intrusive monitoring transforms the "workplace" into a 24/7 Orwellian panopticon from which there is no hope of escape.

The service is sold as an exemplary means to "enforce company social media policies." However, since "criteria are company-defined, it's not clear whether it's possible to monitor personal activity." Fear not, it is.

Social Intelligence, according to Elgan, "provides reporting that deemphasizes specific actions and emphasizes character. It's less about 'what did the employee do' and more about 'what kind of person is this employee?'"

In other words, it's all about the future; specifically, the grim world order that fear-mongering corporations are rapidly bringing to fruition.

Datamation reports that "following the current trend lines," rooted in the flawed logic of information derived from data-mining and link analysis, "social networking spiders and predictive analytics engines will be working night and day scanning the Internet and using that data to predict what every employee is likely to do in the future. This capability will simply be baked right in to HR software suites."

As with other aspects of daily life in post-constitutional America, executive decisions, ranging from whether or not to hire or fire someone, cast them into a lawless gulag without trial, or even kill them solely on the say-so of our War-Criminal-in-Chief, are the new house rules.

Like our faux progressive president, some HR bureaucrat will act as judge, jury and executioner, making decisions that can--and have--wrecked lives.

Elgan tells us that unlike a criminal proceeding where you stand before the law accused of wrongdoing and get to face your accuser, "you can't legally be thrown in jail for bad character, poor judgment, or expectations of what you might do in the future. You have to actually break the law, and they have to prove it."

"Personnel actions aren't anything like this." You aren't afforded the means to "face your accuser." In fact, based on whether or not you sucked-up to the boss, pissed-off some corporate toady, or moved into the "suspect" category based on an algorithm, you don't have to actually violate comapny rules in order to be fired "and they don't have to prove it."

Datamation tells us, "if the social network scanning, predictive analytics software of the future decides that you are going to do something in future that's inconsistent with the company's interests, you're fired."

And, Elgan avers, now that "the tools are becoming monstrously sophisticated, efficient, powerful, far-reaching and invasive," the precrime "concept is coming to HR."


Big Brother is only a "ping" or mouse click away...



Tom Burghardt is a researcher and activist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In addition to publishing in Covert Action Quarterly and Global Research, an independent research and media group of writers, scholars, journalists and activists based in Montreal, his articles can be read onDissident Voice, The Intelligence Daily, Pacific Free Press, Uncommon Thought Journal, and the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks. He is the editor of Police State America: U.S. Military "Civil Disturbance" Planning, distributed by AK Press and has contributed to the new book from Global Research, The Global Economic Crisis: The Great Depression of the XXI Century.

pacificfreepress.com 

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To: illyia who wrote (6876)12/7/2010 11:26:52 PM
From: Karen Lawrence   of 7567
 
U.S. Teens Lag as China Soars on International Test
By John Hechinger - Dec 7, 2010 9:04 AM PT

Fifteen-year-olds in the U.S. ranked 25th among peers from 34 countries on a math test and scored in the middle in science and reading, while China’s Shanghai topped the charts, raising concern that the U.S. isn’t prepared to succeed in the global economy.

The Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development, which represents 34 countries, today released the 2009 Program for International Student Assessment. For the first time, the test broke out the performance of China’s Shanghai region, which topped every country in all academic categories. The U.S. government considers the test one of the most comprehensive measures of international achievement.

The results show that U.S. students must improve to compete in a global economy, Education Secretary Arne Duncan said yesterday in a telephone interview. President Barack Obama’s administration is promoting national curriculum standards and a revamping of teacher pay that stresses performance rather than credentials and seniority.

“The brutal fact here is there are many countries that are far ahead of us and improving more rapidly than we are,” Duncan said. “This should be a massive wake-up call to the entire country.”

‘Key Schools’

China’s success in Shanghai results from the government’s abandonment of a system of “key schools” for elites and the institution of “a more inclusive system in which all students are expected to perform at high levels,” the OECD said in the report.

China also raised teacher pay and standards and reduced rote learning, while giving students and local authorities more choice in curriculum.

Shanghai was the first city in China to achieve universal primary and junior-secondary education, and more than 80 percent of students of college age are admitted into higher-education institutions, compared with the national figure of 24 percent, according to the report. China’s Hong Kong is also a top performer.

The OECD test, first administered in 2000 and given every three years, aims to measure skills achieved near the end of compulsory schooling. In the U.S., 165 public and private schools and 5,233 students participated in the two-hour paper- and-pencil assessment, given in September and November 2009. It consisted of multiple-choice and open-response questions.

Beating the U.S.

In all, 470,000 students worldwide took the exam. The test also measured countries and regions outside the OECD, or a total of 65 countries and economies. Asian countries and regions, including South Korea, Japan, Singapore and Hong Kong, all outpaced the U.S., as did Finland.

U.S. 15-year-olds had an average score of 487 in math on a 1,000-point scale. Shanghai students scored 600, Singapore, 562; South Korea, Hong Kong, 555; Finland, 541.

The U.S. is traditionally ranked against other OECD countries. On an absolute basis, students from 24 of 34 OECD countries had higher scores than U.S. students, and the Education Department said 17 were better on a statistically significant basis.

U.S. math scores rose from 474 in 2006, when they ranked 25th of 30 OECD countries.

The average U.S. reading score of 500 ranked 14th among OECD countries, which were led by South Korea, Finland and Canada. Only six had scores that were better statistically, the Education Department said. Shanghai students scored 556. Because of an error in printing test booklets, no U.S. reading results were reported in 2006.

Science Score

The average U.S. science score of 502 ranks 17th in the OECD nations, which were led by Finland, Japan and South Korea. Twelve scores were statistically better, the Education Department said. Shanghai students scored 575. The U.S., which scored 489 in 2006, ranked 21st among 30 OECD countries that year.

The U.S. faces educational challenges from its immigrant and heterogeneous population, an OECD report said. In contrast with the U.S., Finland benefited from relative homogeneity, according to the report.

While the U.S. is wealthier than most of its OECD peers and its parents are better educated, the country fails to put the most-talented teachers in the most-challenging classrooms, Andreas Schleicher, who oversees the test for OECD, said in a telephone interview.

Policy Lessons

The success of top-scoring education systems holds lessons for U.S. policy, according to the report. Successful countries provide comparable opportunities to all students regardless of wealth, offer autonomy to individual schools in terms of curriculum and prioritize teacher pay over smaller classes, according to the report.

Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates urged top U.S. public- school officials to overhaul teacher pay, saying on Nov. 19 that instructors should be rewarded for results rather than seniority or advanced degrees. Gates, whose Seattle-based Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation funds education programs, said the U.S. may also find money for merit pay by increasing class size. Duncan has also endorsed that approach.

“Great teachers and great principals elevate the entire profession,” Duncan said yesterday. “There are huge lessons we can learn from countries that are both doing better than we are and improving more rapidly.”

bloomberg.com 

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