Only One Percent Of Snowden’s Leaks Published.

*Source: Ben Swann

The Guardian claims to have published only one percent of the material leaked by National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Snowden’s leaks revealed government spying by the United States and British governments.
Alan Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian, said that although Snowden leaked about 58,000 files, his paper only published “about one percent” of the total material. “I would not expect us to be publishing a huge amount more,” Rusbridger said as he was questioned by Parliament’s home affairs committee.

The editor also insisted that The Guardian did not put national security at risk or assist terrorists, as some government officials have accused. Rather, Rusbridger argued that the leaks helped the public as a whole by igniting a world-wide conversation about government surveillance.

He said, “There is no doubt in my mind … that newspapers have done something that oversight has failed to do.”

Still, the British government was so convinced that the leaks aided terrorism that a criminal investigation was launched and David Miranda, the partner of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, was detained. The British government will not disclose much information about the case, including the specific offenses The Guardian allegedly committed.

Rusbridger went on to say that his newspaper has been under immense pressure from government officials: “I feel that some of this activity has been designed to intimidate the Guardian.” He argued that this would be “inconceivable” in America, where journalists are protected by the First Amendment.

Britain has no constitutional right to free speech. The Guardian is a relatively small publication, with circulation just under 200,000 (although its online presence is fairly sizable). The government treatment of the paper exposes the way the British government views free speech — the freedom of expression is tolerated, so long as it does not “threaten” the public good.

Ben Swann
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Students Show NO MERCY, Pin NSA Recruiters Against Wall .

When NSA recruiters went to the University of Wisconsin earlier this week to pitch language students on working for the agency, they got more than they bargained for.

The informed students turned the question-and-answer session into a hearing. On trial were the NSA's lies, their legality, and how they define -adversary-.

The students recorded audio of the exchange on an iPhone proving that the language-analyst NSA recruiters were left tongue-tied.

-I'm surprised that for language analysts you're incredibly imprecise with your language,- grad student Madiha Tahir charged when they failed to define what constitutes an adversary.

-What you're selling us is untrue- she added. -We also know that the NSA took down brochures and fact sheets after the Snowden revelations because those fact sheets had severe inaccuracies and untruths in them -- so how are we supposed to believe what you're saying?-

Another student directly challenged the NSA's morality for using the -globe as their playground- and then partying at the office with co-workers. She then challenges them to become whistleblowers because the truth will ultimately prevail.

CIA admits Full Monitoring of Facebook and other Social Networks

*Source: WorldTruth.TV

Most people use social media like Facebook and Twitter to share photos of friends and family, chat with friends and strangers about random and amusing diversions, or follow their favorite websites, bands and television shows.

But what does the US military use those same networks for? Well, we can't tell you: That's "classified," a CENTCOM spokesman recently informed Raw Story.

One use that's confirmed, however, is the manipulation of social media through the use of fake online "personas" managed by the military. Recently the US Air Force had solicited private sector vendors for something called "persona management software." Such a technology would allow single individuals to command virtual armies of fake, digital "people" across numerous social media portals.

These "personas" were to have detailed, fictionalized backgrounds, to make them believable to outside observers, and a sophisticated identity protection service was to back them up, preventing suspicious readers from uncovering the real person behind the account. They even worked out ways to game geolocating services, so these "personas" could be virtually inserted anywhere in the world, providing ostensibly live commentary on real events, even while the operator was not really present.

When Raw Story first reported on the contract for this software, it was unclear what the Air Force wanted with it or even if it had been acquired. The potential for misuse, however, was abundantly clear.

A fake virtual army of people could be used to help create the impression of consensus opinion in online comment threads, or manipulate social media to the point where valuable stories are suppressed.

Ultimately, this can have the effect of causing a net change to the public's opinions and understanding of key world events.

Wired.com published an article how US spies are making investments in the Company In-Q-Tel in order to monitor your blogs and read your tweets.

In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA and the wider intelligence community, is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. It's part of a larger movement within the spy services to get better at using "open source intelligence" - information that's publicly available, but often hidden in the flood of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports generated every day.

Visible crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. (It doesn't touch closed social networks, like Facebook, at the moment.) Customers get customized, real-time feeds of what's being said on these sites, based on a series of keywords.

"That's kind of the basic step - get in and monitor," says company senior vice president Blake Cahill.

Then Visible "scores" each post, labeling it as positive or negative, mixed or neutral. It examines how influential a conversation or an author is. ("Trying to determine who really matters," as Cahill puts it.) Finally, Visible gives users a chance to tag posts, forward them to colleagues and allow them to response through a web interface.

In-Q-Tel says it wants Visible to keep track of foreign social media, and give spooks "early-warning detection on how issues are playing internationally," spokesperson Donald Tighe tells Danger Room.

Of course, such a tool can also be pointed inward, at domestic bloggers or tweeters. Visible already keeps tabs on web 2.0 sites for Dell, AT&T and Verizon. For Microsoft, the company is monitoring the buzz on its Windows 7 rollout. For Spam-maker Hormel, Visible is tracking animal-right activists' online campaigns against the company.

"Anything that is out in the open is fair game for collection," says Steven Aftergood, who tracks intelligence issues at the Federation of American Scientists. But "even if information is openly gathered by intelligence agencies it would still be problematic if it were used for unauthorized domestic investigations or operations. Intelligence agencies or employees might be tempted to use the tools at their disposal to compile information on political figures, critics, journalists or others, and to exploit such information for political advantage. That is not permissible even if all of the information in question is technically 'open source.'"

Visible chief executive officer Dan Vetras says the CIA is now an "end customer," thanks to the In-Q-Tel investment. And more government clients are now on the horizon. "We just got awarded another one in the last few days," Vetras adds.

Tighe disputes this - sort of. "This contract, this deal, this investment has nothing to do with any agency of government and this company," he says. But Tighe quickly notes that In-Q-Tel does have "an interested  end customer" in the intelligence community for Visibile. And if all goes well, the company's software will be used in pilot programs at that agency. "In pilots, we use real data. And during the adoption phase, we use it real missions."

Neither party would disclose the size of In-Q-Tel's investment in Visible, a 90-person company with expected revenues of about $20 million in 2010. But a source familiar with the deal says the In-Q-Tel cash will be used to boost Visible's foreign languages capabilities, which already include Arabic, French, Spanish and nine other languages.

Visible has been trying for nearly a year to break into the government field. In late 2008, the company teamed up with the Washington, DC, consulting firm Concepts & Strategies, which has handled media monitoring and translation services for U.S. Strategic Command and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, among others.

On its website, Concepts & Strategies is recruiting "social media engagement specialists" with Defense Department experience and a high proficiency in Arabic, Farsi, French, Urdu or Russian. The company is also looking for an "information system security engineer" who already has a "Top Secret SCI [Sensitive Compartmentalized Information] with NSA Full Scope Polygraph" security clearance.

The intelligence community has been interested in social media for years. In-Q-Tel has sunk money into companies like Attensity, which recently announced its own web 2.0-monitoring service. The agencies have their own, password-protected blogs and wikis - even a MySpace for spooks. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence maintains an Open Source Center, which combs publicly available information, including web 2.0 sites. Doug Naquin, the Center's Director, told an audience of intelligence professionals in October 

 2007 that "we're looking now at YouTube, which carries some unique and honest-to-goodness intelligence.... We have groups looking at what they call 'citizens media': people taking pictures with their cell phones and posting them on the internet. Then there's social media, phenomena like MySpace and blogs."

But, "the CIA specifically needs the help of innovative tech firms to keep up with the pace of innovation in social media. Experienced IC [intelligence community] analysts may not be the best at detecting the incessant shift in popularity of social-networking sites. They need help in following young international internet user-herds as they move their allegiance from one site to another," Lewis Shepherd, the former senior technology officer at the Defense Intelligence Agency, says in an e-mail. "Facebook says that more than 70 percent of its users are outside the U.S., in more than 180 countries. There are more than 200 non-U.S., non-English-language microblogging Twitter-clone sites today. If the intelligence community ignored that tsunami of real-time information, we'd call them incompetent."

New Book Says Hillary Clinton Was Force Behind Mission To kill Osama bin Laden.

*Source: NY Daily News

President Obama canceled previous plans to attack terror kingpin, author Richard Miniter alleges.

It was Hillary Clinton who persuaded a jittery President Obama to carry out the mission to kill terror mastermind Osama bin Laden, a new book claims.

Obama canceled three missions targeting bin Laden before Clinton finally convinced him to pull the trigger, according to the book by former Wall Street Journal reporter Richard Miniter.

“Obama feared taking responsibility for a risky raid that might go tragically wrong,” Miniter writes in “Leading From Behind: The Reluctant President and the Advisors Who Decide For Him.”

Excerpts of the book, which is being published Tuesday, were viewed by the London Daily Mail and posted on its website Monday.

Miniter — who has also worked for the Washington Times and the Sunday Times of London — cites an unnamed source within Joint Special Operations Command as claiming previous missions to kill bin Laden were canceled by the President in January, February and March 2011.

Miniter’s explosive allegation threatens to undermine the White House’s narrative of a decisive Obama ordering the risky May 2011 raid by U.S. Navy Seals to kill bin Laden at his compound in Pakistan.

The book portrays Clinton as the primary force pushing Obama to kill bin Laden and contends that Obama was influenced by a number of strong women — including top adviser Valerie Jarrett and his wife, Michelle.

According to Miniter, Obama came into office undecided about whether to kill bin Laden and was often “disengaged” as the operation was planned.

“Throughout 2009 Obama demanded more and more certainty about U.S. intelligence concerning bin Laden,” the book says.

“As CIA covert teams successfully parried concerns about intelligence by extraordinary efforts that proved bin Laden was indeed in the Abbottabad compound, a new set of delaying tactics emerged, embedded in the debate over what should actually be done,” Miniter added.

Clinton, according to the source, used her weekly meetings with the President to lobby for a strike against bin Laden.

“She knew her husband had paid a political price for failing to stop bin Laden before the September 11 attacks,” Miniter wrote. “She knew Obama’s presidency could be mortally wounded if he had bin Laden in his gun sights and didn’t fire.”

Clinton, despite her 2008 campaign against Obama for the Democratic nomination, won Obama over and was eventually able to convince him to move against the terror kingpin.

“He knew Clinton was right,” Miniter wrote. “So he agreed to keep making minor decisions, but remained uneasy about the big one at the end — deciding to kill bin Laden, and to risk losing American and Pakistani lives in the process.”

Steve Quayle with Hawk 4-26-2012 Flashpoint

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"We're @ The Flashpoint"
Explosive Current Events and Intel Update Thursday 4.26.2012
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