With CIA help, NYPD moves covertly in Muslim areas

Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the New York Police Department has become one of the nation's most aggressive domestic intelligence agencies, targeting ethnic communities in ways that would run afoul of civil liberties rules if practiced by the federal government, an Associated Press investigation has found.

These operations have benefited from unprecedented help from the CIA, a partnership that has blurred the line between foreign and domestic spying.

The department has dispatched undercover officers, known as "rakers," into minority neighborhoods as part of a human mapping program, according to officials directly involved in the program. They've monitored daily life in bookstores, bars, cafes and nightclubs. Police have also used informants, known as "mosque crawlers," to monitor sermons, even when there's no evidence of wrongdoing.  - Yahoo! News

Watch video:

• Ethnic Maping

America's serious crime rate is plunging, but why?

Editors note: Maybe "street" crime has fallen because the "framers" of society, Corporations; Big Pharma, Mainstream Media, etc, have succeeded in their plan through media, meds, mis-education & mass incarceration to socially control the masses. These same mass DON'T protest the blatant corporate crimes and government corruption.
So, it is not only that violent crime has fallen, activism has also fallen, while Corporate and Government crimes have risen. White-collar crime is up, pays more and affects more people. Maybe new laws of punishment should be minted for corporate & government crime, but that will never happen since the criminals are controlling the farm.
Then again, maybe it is the lull before the storm?

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"If you look at the homicide statistics from major cities in 1990 they're absolutely appalling. I think the reaction of the legislatures at the time was to say three strikes and you're out, mandatory minimums, you have to actually serve the time. They were responding to what was in front of them which was an epidemic of violence and I think to some extent they were right," he said.
"You can make the case that mass incarceration hastened the end of the crime wave. You would have a much more difficult time making the case that a continuation of that mass incarceration is necessary. The benefit from preventing crime, since crime rates are so much lower, is a lot smaller than it used to be and the costs continue to go up. We're investing more and more in prison and getting a smaller and smaller return."
But the public may not share that view. A recent poll showed most Americans feel crime is still getting worse.  | The Guardian

US to build shadow web

When a wave of revolution crashed over the Middle East this Spring, many said what ended in the streets began with 140 characters or less—on social media like Twitter, Youtube and Facebook. Hoping to harness the people power of online communication, the US State Department is providing $2 million in grants for the "internet in a suitcase" to help dissidents circumvent repressive regimes' internet censorship with mobile web technology. But critics like John Young of Cryptome and Barrett Brown of Project PM say these "liberation technologies" could also allow governments and corporations to spy on and influence online revolutions.

US to build shadow web

England takes a page from apartheid Israel: Evicting rioters' families from their homes

On one level, it exemplifies that failure of the most basic social understanding that at least helped trigger these riots. The idea seems to be that those in social housing could just find somewhere else, they could just walk into private housing. Like the similar proposals for taking away housing benefit from miscreants, it is based on an inability to imagine what poverty is like, to think for a second what might happen to a family when it loses its income or its home. Given that the riots were largely concentrated in areas where extreme wealth and poverty rub up against each other – from Clapham to the Thames Valley, from Manchester to Bristol – it shows the total mutual incomprehension that we have for our literal neighbours. On another level it is of dubious legality – for a council tenancy to be rescinded, the tenant has to have been convicted of an offence on or near the premises, not always the case in these highly mobile riots; and given that so many of the rioters were minors, their parents will be those being evicted. There's a term for this – collective punishment. It is illegal under international law.  | guardian.co.uk

Raw Wars: FDA's War on Organic Farmers & Raw Milk Suppliers

For the past several years organic foods have received an increase of attention due to the lack of pesticides and not being genetically altered. Many people are demanding that their food be untouched. Recently a SWAT team arrested farmers for selling raw milk to customers. Is it a crime to drink raw milk or does the government feel left out? Mike Adams, health ranger, first broke the story any tells us why the FDA doesn't approve of this.

Health Ranger: 'FDA fights organic farmers'

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Media Mogul Rupert Murdoch Shuts Down Flagship U.K. Newspaper Amidst Scandal Over Illegal Surveillance

Rupert Murdoch’s media empire is engulfed in a growing scandal after new evidence emerged that his reporters in Britain paid corrupt police officers for story tips and hacked the voicemails of thousands of people, from child murder victims to the families of Britain’s war dead. On Thursday, Murdoch shocked the country by shutting down the newspaper at the center of the scandal — the News of the World — Britain’s biggest-selling Sunday newspaper. Founded in 1843, the tabloid’s final edition will be this weekend. Earlier today, one former reporter for the paper, Andy Coulson, was arrested on corruption and phone hacking charges. Until January, Coulson served as British Prime Minister David Cameron’s director of communications. Meanwhile, Murdoch is attempting to pull off a $12 billion takeover of the television network, British Sky Broadcasting. But today, Britain’s culture secretary announced its decision on the Sky deal will be delayed because of the ongoing scandal. We speak to Ryan Chittum, who has been writing about the scandal for the Columbia Journalism Review. Read more...

Click HERE to view Rupert Murdoch's Media empire.

Phone-hacking, Easesdropping, & the Death of the 4th Estate

Hypothetical question: If a major news media outlet hacked people's cell phones to get dirt on them and in the process caused family members of serial killer's victims to think their loved one was alive, would that be a major news story? If that story expanded to include possibly thousands of people -- celebrity, politician, and private citizen alike -- would that be news?  | Crooks and Liars

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Judge: Google Can Be Sued for Wiretapping in Street View Debacle

A federal judge has found that Google can be held liable for damages for secretly intercepting data on open Wi-Fi routers. The ruling is a serious legal setback for the search giant over activity it has engaged in across the United States for years.  | Wired.com

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Big Brother comes to Dayton, Ohio, speeders beware - underground sensors, roaming vans & monitoring cameras

Dayton approves use of speed cameras
A speeding offense will be detected by sensors that are buried in the pavement that will activate the cameras. The camera will snap a series of three photos of the offending vehicle...

Dayton will use cameras to fine speeders
The city also will debut a “speed van” with a mounted camera that can issue citations, with Biehl saying the unit will be sent to areas where residents complain about persistent speeding. 

Airplanes to Catch Speeders
In addition to red-light and speed cameras, Dayton police will be getting air support to help catch speeders this weekend. Air planes will be monitoring locations, known for excessive numbers of accidents and speeding violations. 


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Martial Law Provision Secretly Passed In Congress

A noted human rights group spokesperson has stated that the mandatory military detention provision that the Senate Armed Services Committee secretly discussed and passed this week, is what martial-law states, not democracies do.

The Senate Armed Services Committee’s vote this week redefined rules for detaining terrorism suspects, including giving power to military judges to review cases of prisoners in Afghanistan and mandating military detention for important Qaeda suspects even captured on United States soil according to The New York Times.  Read more...

The Patriot Act: When Truth Becomes Treason

Most Americans believe they understand the dangers of the Patriot Act, which Congress has vowed to extend 4 more years in a vote later this week. Trust me when I say, Americans are not nearly frightened enough.

Ever wonder why the truth about 9/11 never got exposed? Why Americans don't have a clue about leadership fraud surrounding the War on Terror? Why Americans don't know if the 9/11 investigation was really successful? Why the Iraqi Peace Option draws a blank? Somebody has known the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden--- or his grave—for the past 10 years. But nobody's talking to the people.  | Scoop News

Now we know why Osama's dead body was thawed out, the Senate confirmed former CIA director Leon Panetta 100-0 as Pentagon Chief (Defense Secretary)

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          He was director of the Office of Civil Rights in the Nixon administration

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Scientists Successfully Implant Chip That Controls The Brain

In a scene right out of a George Orwell novel, a team of scientists working in the fields of “neural engineering” and “Biomimetic MicroElectronic Systems” have successfully created a chip that controls the brain and can be used as a storage device for long-term memories. In studies the scientists have been able to record, download and transfer memories into other hosts with the same chip implanted.  Infowars via Activist Post

Private Prisons and the American Police State

In the last few decades, the population of our national prisons has nearly tripled. This phenomenon can be attributed to many factors ranging from the increasing economic insecurity to the War on Drugs. Statistics tell us that 1 in 18 American men are now incarcerated or being monitored.

Although this number could be reasonably justified as a reflection of our social morality breakdown; America still leads the world in per capita imprisonment, and the privatization of the our corrections system calls into question the motives behind tougher sentencing and the ever-increasing American police state.

Since 1980, the increase of population in prisons or under surveillance by the judicial system has increased to over 7 million persons. This increase is said to be attributable to the following factors:   Read more @ Activist Post

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'Shadow Internet' and US hypocrisy

The US government is financing the deployment of shadow Internet and mobile phone systems in countries including Iran, Syria and Libya, which would allow members of the opposition in these countries to communicate outside of government control, the New York Times reported on Sunday.  Read more...

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'US becoming a police state'

"The most damning thing that shows that the United States is in the process of [a] police state is the recent passage of the USA Patriot Act which basically makes the Constitution of the United States null and void," said Sheehan.  PressTV

F.B.I. Giving Agents New Powers in Revised Manual

The F.B.I. soon plans to issue a new edition of its manual, called the Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide, according to an official who has worked on the draft document and several others who have been briefed on its contents. The new rules add to several measures taken over the past decade to give agents more latitude as they search for signs of criminal or terrorist activity.  - NYTimes

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Facebook quietly rolls out facial-recognition tool

For this and other reasons, many consider it important to have control over who sees their photos. Facebook may be further pushing users' sense of privacy limits with its latest privacy setting change: it has quietly rolled out a facial-recognition tool that will automate photo tagging and suggest friends to tag in your photos based on what they look like.  - CNET News

• Making Photo Tagging Easier

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America's Creeping Police State

The late Chalmers Johnson often reminded us that “A nation can be one or the other, a democracy or an imperialist, but it can’t be both. If it sticks to imperialism, it will, like the old Roman Republic, on which so much of our system was modeled, lose its democracy to a domestic dictatorship.” His warning rings more true by the day, as Americans watch the erosion of their civil liberties accelerate in conjunction with the expansion of the US Empire.  | AlterNet

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Bill Would Keep Big Brother’s Mitts Off Your GPS Data

The courts aren’t sure whether so-called “geolocation” data taken from GPS devices or cellphones is covered by the Fourth Amendment, as Wired.com’s blog Threat Level has extensively reported. That ambiguity has largely enabled law enforcement to snatch it up without getting a warrant or showing probable cause. | Wired.com

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