Showing posts with label Spies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Spies. Show all posts

Saturday, April 5, 2014

The Complete Interactive Guide To How The NSA Spies On Everything You Do

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The Complete Interactive Guide To How The NSA Spies On Everything You Do

Raytheon"s Riot Program Mines Social Network Data Like a Google for Spies

At The Daily News Source, the privacy of our visitors is of extreme importance to us (See this article to learn more about Privacy Policies.). This privacy policy document outlines the types of personal information is received and collected by The Daily News Source and how it is used.


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Raytheon"s Riot Program Mines Social Network Data Like a Google for Spies

Wednesday, March 19, 2014

Those times the CIA used American spies to spy on Americans





Last week, the Senate Intelligence Committee’s chair essentially accused the Central Intelligence Agency of spying on the committee’s staffers — an incident NPR called a “verbal bazooka.”


Sen. Dianne Feinstein suggested last Tuesday that the CIA’s search of computers used by the committee during its investigation into the CIA’s own activities in the post-9/11 era may have “violated the separation of powers principles embodied in the Constitution.”


“Besides the constitutional implications, the CIA’s search may also have violated the Fourth Amendment, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, as well as Executive Order 12333, which prohibits the CIA from conducting domestic searches or surveillance,” she said.


The CIA’s Director John Brennan denied the allegations. But if the facts prove otherwise, it wouldn’t be the first recorded instance of American spies spying on Americans.


GlobalPost took a look at some famous examples:


Operation Chaos



(AFP)


Between 1967 and 1973, the CIA, by its own admission, amassed files on Americans suspected of being domestic dissidents. The White House under President Lyndon B. Johnson and, later under President Richard Nixon, wanted the CIA to look into any foreign influence on the civil rights and anti-war movements. 


At its height, Operation Chaos had access to the CIA’s mail intercept program and the National Security Agency’s monitoring of international communications. It also received material collected by the FBI.


The agency found little evidence of foreign influence on leftist movements in the United States besides encouragement at international conferences and through political statements.


Project Merrimac


Closely related to Chaos, Merrimac used CIA agents to infiltrate peace groups and black activist groups with the aim of anticipating attacks on the agency itself. However, the agents also gathered details about individuals inside the groups, their funding and activities.


Project Resistance


Another Chaos cousin, Resistance’s aim was to compile information on radical groups that might target CIA activities or assets. The program compiled information from around the country, but specifically targeted college campuses in its search for radical elements. The CIA obtained additional information from local police, and campus officials.


Sept. 11, 2001



(AFP)


A CIA inspector general’s report published in 2013 found that for a decade after the Twin Towers fell, four CIA officers were embedded in the New York Police Department. The NYPD itself was in trouble at the time, facing allegations of unconstitutional surveillance of Muslim communities in New York and New Jersey.


The report found that one CIA officer operated as if he were exempt from limitations — such as those prohibiting CIA officers from domestic spying — because he was on an unpaid leave of absence. Another CIA analyst had access to “unfiltered” police reports, according to The New York Times


Project MK-ULTRA



(AFP)


While not an instance of domestic spying, this case of the CIA’s domestic meddling was much worse. The CIA dosed hundreds of unwitting Americans with psychoactive drugs in the 1950s and 1960′s as part of a program run by the Office of Scientific Intelligence. The agency’s experiments with LSD targeted patients in mental hospitals, prisoners, prostitutes and addicts, according to The New York Times.


All this to study the human consciousness. The Times noted that some agency employees and military officers were also involved in experiments, though they might not have known the full details. CIA Director Richard Helms ordered all files connected to the MK-ULTRA program destroyed in 1973.


Western Union



(AFP)


The Patriot Act, which the NSA cited as its legal basis for collecting the phone records of millions of Americans, is also cited by the CIA to collect information on international money transfers, according to a Wall Street Journal report from January.


The report cited anonymous officials familiar with a CIA program that tracked the financial transfers of millions, including American citizens. The CIA cannot collect intelligence on Americans, but reportedly gained authorization from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to track international transactions to detect terror operations.


Enemies of my enemies



(AFP)


In the aftermath of the Second World War, and in the first frost of the Cold War, the CIA and FBI were authorized by the National Security Council to exploit the knowledge of the flood of Eastern European immigrants coming to America, according to The Daily Beast.


In those days, there were no cellphone meta data or internet records to access, so intelligence agents asked refugee organizations in the US and Europe for information on the Eastern Europeans coming through their offices.


Government documents revealing how intelligence agencies used information from refugee organizations to recruit “informants, spies, assassins, saboteurs” were only declassified in the 1990s.


Project Mockingbird



(AFP)


The current media battle between the NSA and news sites publishing information gleaned from leaked documents isn’t the first face-off between the media and intelligence agencies — not by a long shot.


The CIA had a program to monitor journalists, using wiretaps and observation posts to keep tabs on writers who published material the Kennedy administration deemed sensitive.


Project Mockingbird, which wiretapped two reporters in 1963, was authorized by Director of Central Intelligence John McCone at the behest of President John F. Kennedy, according to The New York Times.


A declassified CIA document outlined the project: “During the period from 12 March 1963 to 15 June 1963, this Office installed telephone taps on two Washington-based newsmen who were suspected of disclosing classified information obtained from a variety of governmental and congressional sources.”


“The intercept activity was particularly productive in identifying contacts of the newsmen, their method of operation and many of their sources of information. For example, it was determined that during the period they received data from 13 newsmen, 12 of whom were identified; 12 senators and 6 members of Congress, all identified; 21 Congressional staff members, of whom 11 were identified; 16 government employees, including a staff member of the White House, members of the Vice President’s office, an Assistant Attorney General, and other well-placed individuals.”



“The newsmen actually received more classified and official data than they could use,” the report said.


The Mockingbird task force kept tabs on five reporters for three years. The Times noted that Kennedy set a precedent that would later be followed by Presidents Johnson, Nixon and George W. Bush.


http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/americas/united-states/140311/cia-american-spies-spy-americans-list-cia-spying-usa




GlobalPost – Home



Those times the CIA used American spies to spy on Americans

Friday, February 28, 2014

Special Report: Street Surveillance Is Here, LED Light Spies


Infowars.com
February 28, 2014


A New Jersey airport sets up “Energy Efficient” Lights that also spy on travelers before they even get to the ticket counter.


These “energy-efficient” upgrades are popping up all over the country, helping the mass surveillance apparatus save money while stealing liberties.


This article was posted: Friday, February 28, 2014 at 12:46 pm










Infowars



Special Report: Street Surveillance Is Here, LED Light Spies

Thursday, February 27, 2014

You Read It Here First: Government Spies On Innocent People Via Webcams, Laptops, Xbox


Latest Snowden Leak confirms story Infowars first broke EIGHT YEARS AGO


Steve Watson
Infowars.com
February 27, 2014


The latest revelation concerning mass government spying confirms an issue that Infowars has been covering for close to a decade. British and American governments are spying on people in their own homes via web cams, laptop microphones and devices such as the X-box.


The London Guardian has the details in a report based on information leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.


The British surveillance agency GCHQ, with help from the NSA, actively spied on nearly 2 million Yahoo users via webcams built into their computers. The documents show that the agency intercepted millions of images as part of a secret program codenamed OPTIC NERVE.


The report also states that Americans were almost certainly targeted as part of the bulk collection of data, and that there is no law to prevent such activity in Britain.


NSA ragout 4


The documents show that images were collected from webcams at regular intervals, one image every five minutes, and were used by the spy agency to trial automated facial recognition programs.


The Guardian describes the process as “eerily reminiscent of the telescreens evoked in George Orwell’s 1984.”


NSA ragout 3


The documents dub the practice as “bulk access to Yahoo webcam images/events”, and spies working at GCHQ compared it to a police database of mugshots. “Face detection has the potential to aid selection of useful images for ‘mugshots’ or even for face recognition by assessing the angle of the face,” the papers read. “The best images are ones where the person is facing the camera with their face upright.”


Essentially, the spy agency appear to have been building a huge digital database containing the faces of Yahoo users.


The documents advise employees at GCHQ on how to use the system, noting “[I]f you search for similar IDs to your target, you will be able to request automatic comparison of the face in the similar IDs to those in your target’s ID”.


In one presentation contained within the documents, more technologically advanced systems, such as iris recognition cameras, are discussed as potential surveillance tools. The paper even chillingly states “think Tom Cruise in Minority Report”.


The documents state that Yahoo users were specifically singled out because “Yahoo webcam is known to be used by GCHQ targets”.


The papers also note that a large quantity of the data collected contained nudity or sexually explicit imagery. The spy agency seemingly made no effort to prevent the collection of such images.


Yahoo described the practice as “a whole new level of violation of our users’ privacy,” and strenuously denied having any knowledge of the program.


Infowars first reported in 2006, EIGHT YEARS AGO, that innocent people were being spied on through their computers. We specifically described the practice as Minority Report style technology, as the GCHQ had done.


We have since covered the issue consistently, warning that “Hundreds of millions of Internet-active Americans will all be potential targets for secret surveillance.”


Of course, some quarters dismissed our reports as “conspiracy theories”, while worried internet users questioned whether the reports were accurate.


The GCHQ program was seemingly not limited to Yahoo user web cams either. Another presentation within the leaked internal papers discusses the capabilities of the Xbox 360′s Kinect camera, saying it generated “fairly normal webcam traffic” and that it was being evaluated as a potential surveillance tool.


We have also documented the potential use of Xbox for surveillance purposes, noting that Skype calls made on the devices can be intercepted. We have also warned that the ‘always on’ camera of the new Xbox One, which is so powerful it can see through clothing, is wide open to abuse by hackers and government agencies.


According to the leaked documents, the OPTIC NERVE program began as a prototype in 2008 and was still active in 2012. There is no indication that the program has been deactivated.


Security expert Bruce Schneier writes that this latest revelation highlights how there is no distinction between actively spying on a person and what he called “Eavesdropping by algorithm”, in other words, automated computer surveillance. The NSA and the Obama administration have attempted to argue that what they are doing cannot be called “spying” or even “collecting” data, because when the data is gathered, a person is not looking at it. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper still uses this explanation to claim he never lied to Congress when he answered ‘no’ to the question “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?”


The fallout from the OPTIC NERVE program, the creation of facial recognition databases, and the fact that spooks provably looked at images of people, even NAKED images of people, highlights the fact, Schneier argues, that the “NSA’s definition of ‘collect’ makes no sense whatsoever”, and that our governments are indeed actively spying on us.


—————————————————————-


Steve Watson is the London based writer and editor for Alex Jones’ Infowars.com, and Prisonplanet.com. He has a Masters Degree in International Relations from the School of Politics at The University of Nottingham, and a Bachelor Of Arts Degree in Literature and Creative Writing from Nottingham Trent University.


This article was posted: Thursday, February 27, 2014 at 11:18 am


Tags: big brother, domestic spying










Infowars



You Read It Here First: Government Spies On Innocent People Via Webcams, Laptops, Xbox

Friday, January 17, 2014

Spies Want Edward Snowden Dead...

At Not Just The News, the privacy of our visitors is of extreme importance to us (See this article to learn more about Privacy Policies.). This privacy policy document outlines the types of personal information is received and collected by Not Just The News and how it is used.


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Spies Want Edward Snowden Dead...

Thursday, January 16, 2014

NSA Quantum Program Leaked: Edward Snowden Reveals How US Government Spies On Offline Computers


posted on Jan, 16 2014 @ 10:17 AM


reply to post by zeroBelief

I wouldn’t be so sure about that. Cottonmouth is only one of the methods they use to monitor data in an isolated (no network) environment. If you think about the sheer number of wireless networks out there, and the fact that they already said Nightstand can inject packets of data from 8 miles away, I’d bet money that they can pretty easily intercept data from pretty much any standard wireless network if they really wanted to. They also mentioned micro-circuitry that’s used in a similar fashion to the Cottonmouth method.


Jesus, as I was writing this I just remembered the whole RSA scandal that was uncovered a few weeks back (Source). Talk about a perfect way to distribute Cottonmouth!? Who’s to say that every one of the RSA key’s sold and used with this flawed algorithm designed by the NSA, also doesn’t double as a radio-transmitter like Cottonmouth? It’d be the perfect double whammy:


Step 1: If the user is online, they can use the backdoor built-in to the algorithm to gain real-time access, like a trojan virus. This would then allow further installation/distribution of software to keep the door “held open” too.
Step 2: In the event that the PC was offline yet still accessing a secure date source via the RSA key, they would simply need a little briefcase (Nightstand) located somewhere within their acceptable 8-mile radius to accomplish the exact same thing.


This is probably worthy of another thread, but directly related to the OP. S&F for the find, should be interesting come Friday.


edit on 16-1-2014 by parad0x122 because: typo





AboveTopSecret.com New Topics In Breaking Alternative News



NSA Quantum Program Leaked: Edward Snowden Reveals How US Government Spies On Offline Computers

Friday, December 27, 2013

I love spies

At Alternate Viewpoint, the privacy of our visitors is of extreme importance to us (See this article to learn more about Privacy Policies.). This privacy policy document outlines the types of personal information is received and collected by Alternate Viewpoint and how it is used.


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I love spies

Sunday, September 15, 2013

"Follow the Money": NSA Spies on International Payments


The National Security Agency (NSA) widely monitors international payments, banking and credit card transactions, according to documents seen by SPIEGEL.


The information from the American foreign intelligence agency, acquired by former NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden, show that the spying is conducted by a branch called “Follow the Money” (FTM). The collected information then flows into the NSA’s own financial databank, called “Tracfin,” which in 2011 contained 180 million records. Some 84 percent of the data is from credit card transactions.


Further NSA documents from 2010 show that the NSA also targets the transactions of customers of large credit card companies like VISA for surveillance. NSA analysts at an internal conference that year described in detail how they had apparently successfully searched through the US company’s complex transaction network for tapping possibilities.


Their aim was to gain access to transactions by VISA customers in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, according to one presentation. The goal was to “collect, parse and ingest transactional data for priority credit card associations, focusing on priority geographic regions.” In response to a SPIEGEL inquiry, however, a VISA spokeswoman ruled out the possibility that data could be taken from company-run networks.


The NSA’s Tracfin data bank also contained data from the Brussels-based Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), a network used by thousands of banks to send transaction information securely. SWIFT was named as a “target,” according to the documents, which also show that the NSA spied on the organization on several levels, involving, among others, the agency’s “tailored access operations” division. One of the ways the agency accessed the data included reading “SWIFT printer traffic from numerous banks,” the documents show.


But even intelligence agency employees are somewhat concerned about spying on the world finance system, according to one document from the UK’s intelligence agency GCHQ concerning the legal perspectives on “financial data” and the agency’s own cooperations with the NSA in this area. The collection, storage and sharing of politically sensitive data is a deep invasion of privacy, and involved “bulk data” full of “rich personal information,” much of which “is not about our targets,” the document says.




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SPIEGEL ONLINE – International – NSA Spying Scandal



"Follow the Money": NSA Spies on International Payments

Friday, August 16, 2013

No more spies


If you’re an instructor in cover — how to pass as someone you aren’t — at the CIA training facility near Williamsburg, VA, what the hell do you tell your students about life in the field?


Edward Snowden’s exploitation of NSA’s surprisingly penetratable firewalls, Bradley Manning’s large-scale collection of State Department cables, and the inability of the U.S. government to contain secrets is of course a feature of the open source revolution that is changing how citizens interact with their government. We can hold our government more accountable. And that’s good.


A caveat in honor of Evgeny Morozov goes here: that interaction may not be for the better, or course; the flip side is the ease with which political dissidents can be tracked, imprisoned and killed. In other countries, the “open” society is nothing of the sort.


Since I’m an intelligence community junkie, I want to mention two examples of how the same principle, the same technological reality, can become a powerful weapon of governments and be a significant detriment to the core mission of their intelligence services.


Cover is a term of art, but spies for the U.S. — the case officers at the National Clandestine Service, the intelligence analysts and officers of the Special Collection Service, the newly minted collection officers at the Defense Clandestine Service, and select members of the U.S. special operations forces — operate in the world under an identity that is not the one they were born with. Foreign governments have forever tried to out U.S. personnel working under cover and often with success.


This next generation of spies, the men and women who are in high school now, are going to find that it will be virtually impossible to live a life under cover. The CIA knows this, and it is gradually changing the way it integrates intelligence officers into their assignments. Malevolent and friendly entities are gobbling up data from U.S social networks to try and identify current and future spies; a big source of intelligence is the Facebook and LinkedIn profiles that former CIA officers establish once they’ve retired. Just like the NSA, foreign intelligence services can use Google, Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook to track the activities of current and former American intelligence operatives. And who, at the age of 12, thinks about the record he or she is leaving online at that age as a barrier to future employment as a spy?


CIA officers used to acquire legends and cover identities that could, if investigated, actually check out. But now, it’s impossible to do that; augmented reality can automatically scan faces entering a country through intelligence databases as well as through open source repositories of images, like Google’s image search. (The NSA is not the only country that conducts dragnet surveillance using fiber and cable taps.)


It will be very hard for a CIA officer to pretend to be a scientist or a researcher or anyone else in the future. The solution may be, ironically, that they need to accept from the get-go that their identity is known to the enemy, and they’ve got to go back to other elements of tradecraft to elude surveillance, or find ways of spying in plain sight.


The flip side of this happens to be a specialty of the Mossad and Israel’s special forces. They can manipulate online identities to make it appear as if someone is a spy, a double agent, is cooperating with people he or she shouldn’t be cooperating with, having sex with dead girls or live boys — pretty much anything you might envision someone doing.


The U.S. government does this on occasion — it’s an “Integrated Joint Special Technical Operation” — and the NSA works with the CIA to try and keep case officers identities and legends sacrosanct online, hacking into overseas networks where a spy may or may not have been identified. Reputation management in the tool of intelligence agencies can be highly destructive too. It’s the electronic equivalent of planting a gun on someone to see them arrested, or of a police officer disclosing to a member of a gang that a compadre is cooperating with police, and it’s happening quite frequently.




The Week: Most Recent U.S. Posts



No more spies

Sunday, July 28, 2013

Who Spies More, The United States Or Europe?





Protesters demonstrate against alleged NSA surveillance in Germany during a rally in Hannover, Germany on Saturday.



Peter Steffen/AP

Protesters demonstrate against alleged NSA surveillance in Germany during a rally in Hannover, Germany on Saturday.



Protesters demonstrate against alleged NSA surveillance in Germany during a rally in Hannover, Germany on Saturday.


Peter Steffen/AP



The House of Representatives last week rejected legislation that would have limited the data the NSA can collect from Americans. But the margin was narrow, and House leaders predict more efforts to bring the NSA under tighter control.


U.S. intelligence officials were put on the defensive by the vote, arguing that regulation of government surveillance programs is tighter in the United States than in many other countries.


The disclosure of of previously secret NSA surveillance programs was met by outrage in Europe. The European Parliament actually threatened to delay trade talks with the United States.


U.S. officials dismissed much of the complaining as hypocrisy. Stewart Baker, formerly the NSA’s general counsel, told the House Judiciary Committee this month that Europeans are more likely to be spied on by their governments than Americans are by theirs. And he had data to back that up.


“According to the Max Planck Institute, you’re 100 times more likely to be surveilled by your own government if you live in the Netherlands or you live in Italy,” Baker said. “You’re 30 to 50 times more likely to be surveilled if you’re a French or a German national than in the United States.”


Joris van Hoboken of the Institute for Information Law at the University of Amsterdam says those numbers are generally accurate. But he points out that many of the surveillance orders are issued by police departments, not by intelligence agencies like the NSA. He cites his own country.


“It’s quite known that law enforcement in the Netherlands uses wiretapping to a great extent, and that has to do with a certain tradition in the Netherlands of using that instrument,” as opposed to using, for example, undercover agents, he says.


But U.S. officials also argue that the legal restrictions on surveillance are tighter here. Christopher Wolf, a lawyer specializing in privacy, recently co-wrote a study comparing the extent to which spy investigations have to get outside approval, in the United States and in Europe.


His conclusion: For all the uproar here over intelligence agencies having a free hand, it’s worse in Europe.


“We can have a debate over whether or not the judicial and legislative approval process is working here in America, but the fact is, it exists, and in many places in Europe you don’t have that kind of due process,” Wolf says. “You don’t have legislative oversight. In fact, the national security investigations are done completely in the dark or mostly in the dark.”


He cites Germany’s Office of Criminal Investigation.


“For example, it’s permitted to use a computer virus to search IT systems and to monitor communications and collect data, without the knowledge of users or service providers,” Wolf says. “And while a court order is needed to use it, the service providers often aren’t even aware of its deployment.”


Joris van Hoboken, the Dutch information researcher, does not disagree that oversight is weaker in Europe.


“It’s actually true that in general the laws here that allow national security agencies and intelligence community to do wiretapping, there are less details and sometimes even less procedural safeguards,” he says.


On the other hand, van Hoboken says, it’s a mistake to focus too heavily on comparisons between what the NSA can do and what European intelligence agencies can do. Intelligence activities in Europe are done by individual governments and on a far, far smaller scale than what the NSA does.


And one other point: The laws that limit the NSA only apply to what the agency does with U.S. citizens, on U.S. territory.


“And so that oversight is basically quite meaningless from a perspective of a foreign country or people in a foreign country,” where the NSA can basically do what it wants, van Hoboken says.


So U.S. officials may bristle over some European complaints about NSA surveillance, but those European concerns are not entirely unfounded.




News



Who Spies More, The United States Or Europe?

Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Video: Obama’s IRS Spies


Floyd Brown, in his prescient exposé Obama’s Enemies List, shouted from the highest mountain, warning of a rogue Obama administration and its mammoth enemies list; but the Establishment refused to listen. Now that the IRS scandal and attack on the Press has proven him right, the mainstream media is playing catch up.


As long as it was just those so-called “extremist” Tea Party, pro-life, and Christian groups that were being attacked, no one seemed to care. But now that we know the Obama administration is an “equal opportunity” attacker, going after the Associated Press, Fox News, local reporters, Romney donors, Benghazi whistleblowers, etc., etc. (with more Obama enemies sure to surface), the country now seems to be taking notice.


But this is only the surface of how the Obama enemies list works. Everything, and I mean everything, is geared towards an enemies list, which is predicated on having an extensive surveillance state.


The communist Saul Alinsky, Barack Hussein Obama’s favorite community organizer, famously said, “The issue is never the issue.” Put a little more plainly: “Deception is our Modus Operandi.”


Case in point: ObamaCare.


Presumably, ObamaCare is about access to healthcare. But doctors are dropping out of the healthcare system in droves, healthcare is already being rationed, and healthcare costs are skyrocketing as much as four hundred percent.


The issue is never the issue. ObamaCare is not about access to healthcare; it’s about an elaborate system to support an enemies list.


Enter the IRS, now in charge of ObamaCare.


In order for the IRS to supposedly determine whether Americans are eligible for government subsidies to pay for mandated health insurance, they must collect a horrendous amount of information on every single American. The IRS is creating a database so vast that it makes George Orwell’s dystopian society in the book 1984 look like amateur hour. Called the Federal Data Services Hub, it will combine the IRS’s income and employment database with the Social Security, Homeland Security, Department of Justice, and Health and Human Services databases. Combined with the proposed Immigration Bill creating a national ID system, this will be the mother of all databases—the mother of a complete and total surveillance state.


Does America really believe that the same woman behind the targeting of conservatives at the IRS, former commissioner of tax exempt and government entities Sarah Hall Ingram, now promoted to the head of the IRS’ Affordable Care Act office, was a coincidence? That the person in charge of sending hundreds of questionnaires to Tea Party, pro-life, and Christian groups asking for personal information was promoted to the ObamaCare office by some objective bureaucratic points system?


The issue is never the issue. ObamaCare is not about healthcare; it’s about surveillance. It’s about control. But most importantly, it’s about having access to the information of your enemies. And Obama specifically chose Sarah Hall Ingram to be in charge of this mammoth enemies list.


Conservative groups were prevented from obtaining tax-exempt status by the IRS, forcing them to divulge donor lists, intern lists, and political and family connections, Facebook posts, tweets, event records, transcripts of speeches, even the content of their prayers, all as part of an effort to collect data on their enemies.


Imagine you are a Tea Party member who needs hip replacement surgery. Sarah Hall Ingram, Obama’s chief ObamaCare enforcer, sees the request but also sees through her extensive database that you are part of a local Tea Party group that had opposed ObamaCare, the plan you are now locked into. Think you’ll get a hip replacement? Think again. First will come the endless questions. First will come the long wait. Only when you come around to Obama’s “common sense” approached to healthcare (that is, socialized medicine) and drop the whole perceived Tea Party nonsense will you get the healthcare you need.


The issue is never the issue. ObamaCare is not about healthcare; it’s about a surveillance state. It’s about Obama having access to information on his enemies.


If ObamaCare is allowed to continue—if the Obama administration is allowed to continue, we will no longer have a United States of America. It will be something else. A truly Orwellian nightmare with Barack Hussein Obama as Big Brother and the enemies of the state being conservatives.


Please share this post with your friends and comment below. If you haven’t already, take a moment to sign up for our free newsletter above and friend us on Twitter and Facebook to get real time updates.



Western Journalism



Video: Obama’s IRS Spies

Video: Obama’s IRS Spies


Floyd Brown, in his prescient exposé Obama’s Enemies List, shouted from the highest mountain, warning of a rogue Obama administration and its mammoth enemies list; but the Establishment refused to listen. Now that the IRS scandal and attack on the Press has proven him right, the mainstream media is playing catch up.


As long as it was just those so-called “extremist” Tea Party, pro-life, and Christian groups that were being attacked, no one seemed to care. But now that we know the Obama administration is an “equal opportunity” attacker, going after the Associated Press, Fox News, local reporters, Romney donors, Benghazi whistleblowers, etc., etc. (with more Obama enemies sure to surface), the country now seems to be taking notice.


But this is only the surface of how the Obama enemies list works. Everything, and I mean everything, is geared towards an enemies list, which is predicated on having an extensive surveillance state.


The communist Saul Alinsky, Barack Hussein Obama’s favorite community organizer, famously said, “The issue is never the issue.” Put a little more plainly: “Deception is our Modus Operandi.”


Case in point: ObamaCare.


Presumably, ObamaCare is about access to healthcare. But doctors are dropping out of the healthcare system in droves, healthcare is already being rationed, and healthcare costs are skyrocketing as much as four hundred percent.


The issue is never the issue. ObamaCare is not about access to healthcare; it’s about an elaborate system to support an enemies list.


Enter the IRS, now in charge of ObamaCare.


In order for the IRS to supposedly determine whether Americans are eligible for government subsidies to pay for mandated health insurance, they must collect a horrendous amount of information on every single American. The IRS is creating a database so vast that it makes George Orwell’s dystopian society in the book 1984 look like amateur hour. Called the Federal Data Services Hub, it will combine the IRS’s income and employment database with the Social Security, Homeland Security, Department of Justice, and Health and Human Services databases. Combined with the proposed Immigration Bill creating a national ID system, this will be the mother of all databases—the mother of a complete and total surveillance state.


Does America really believe that the same woman behind the targeting of conservatives at the IRS, former commissioner of tax exempt and government entities Sarah Hall Ingram, now promoted to the head of the IRS’ Affordable Care Act office, was a coincidence? That the person in charge of sending hundreds of questionnaires to Tea Party, pro-life, and Christian groups asking for personal information was promoted to the ObamaCare office by some objective bureaucratic points system?


The issue is never the issue. ObamaCare is not about healthcare; it’s about surveillance. It’s about control. But most importantly, it’s about having access to the information of your enemies. And Obama specifically chose Sarah Hall Ingram to be in charge of this mammoth enemies list.


Conservative groups were prevented from obtaining tax-exempt status by the IRS, forcing them to divulge donor lists, intern lists, and political and family connections, Facebook posts, tweets, event records, transcripts of speeches, even the content of their prayers, all as part of an effort to collect data on their enemies.


Imagine you are a Tea Party member who needs hip replacement surgery. Sarah Hall Ingram, Obama’s chief ObamaCare enforcer, sees the request but also sees through her extensive database that you are part of a local Tea Party group that had opposed ObamaCare, the plan you are now locked into. Think you’ll get a hip replacement? Think again. First will come the endless questions. First will come the long wait. Only when you come around to Obama’s “common sense” approached to healthcare (that is, socialized medicine) and drop the whole perceived Tea Party nonsense will you get the healthcare you need.


The issue is never the issue. ObamaCare is not about healthcare; it’s about a surveillance state. It’s about Obama having access to information on his enemies.


If ObamaCare is allowed to continue—if the Obama administration is allowed to continue, we will no longer have a United States of America. It will be something else. A truly Orwellian nightmare with Barack Hussein Obama as Big Brother and the enemies of the state being conservatives.


Please share this post with your friends and comment below. If you haven’t already, take a moment to sign up for our free newsletter above and friend us on Twitter and Facebook to get real time updates.



Western Journalism



Video: Obama’s IRS Spies