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We’re Being Watched

We’re Being Watched
How Corporations and Law Enforcement Are Spying on Environmentalists By Adam Federman photo illustrations Nadia Khastagir / Design Action In February 2010 Tom Jiunta and a small group of residents in northeastern Pennsylvania formed the Gas Drilling Awareness Coalition (GDAC), an environmental organization opposed to hydraulic fracturing in the region. The group of about 10 professionals – engineers, nurses, and teachers – began meeting in the basement of a member’s home. Since the group had never engaged in any kind of illegal activity or particularly radical forms of protest, it came as a shock when GDAC members learned that their organization had been featured in intelligence bulletins compiled by a private security firm, The Institute of Terrorism Research and Response (ITRR). The tri-weekly bulletins featured a wide range of supposed threats to the state’s infrastructure. The surveillance of even moderate groups like GDAC comes at a pivotal time for the environmental movement. Related:  The Company and Friends

News - No More Lies - The Honest Intelligence Gathering of World News 89 bears killed in Alaska predator control program FAIRBANKS - State wildlife biologists from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game recently killed almost 90 bears and delivered nearly 4 tons of bear meat to residents in eight villages in western Interior Alaska as part of a predator control program designed to increase the number of moose in the area. Fish and Game staff shot 89 bears — 84 black bears and five grizzlies — in game management unit 19A along the Kuskokwim River during a two-week program that began on May 13 and ended Monday. The area is about 300 miles southwest of Fairbanks. Biologists shot the bears from a helicopter in a 530-square mile area of state land that is a small part of unit 19A, which encompasses nearly 10,000 square miles east of Aniak. The goal of the program was to reduce the number of bears in the area as low as possible, Fish and Game spokeswoman Cathie Harms said. The bears ranged in age from yearlings to mature adults. “Early estimates were we could take anywhere from 50 to 120 bears,” she said.

Man Suggests Nature Walk To Observe NSA Spies Threatened Habitat; Has Law Enforcement Visit His Habitat Facebook continues to be an intelligence operative's best friend. Many of its users subvert any sort of expectation of privacy simply by leaving their accounts on the default settings. (This also works out well for Mark Zuckerberg.) Anything set to the public default can and, apparently, will be seen. If you want to make a joke about the NSA, feel free. Normally, Daniel Bangert's Facebook posts tend to be of the serious variety. Few of Bangert's friends took him up on his offer. Bangert's doorbell rang at almost the exact same time. So, how did the local police hear of Bangert's "event?" Not long later, Bangert got another call asking him to report to Central Commissariat 10 of the German federal police. The federal police were less amused by Bangert's post (he was called *gasp* a "smart aleck"), but unable to find anything damning, they resorted to more bureaucratic forms of dissuasion -- suggesting Bangert secure a permit for his "demonstration." So is he planning a repeat?

Graphic Video Shows True Nature of Hounders **UPDATE** May 28, 2013. The video has been pulled from YouTube. Apparently once these cowards take some heat over their sadism they remove their videos. I was able to obtain screenshots from the video, and have them on file. **WARNING** The following video is EXTREMELY graphic and depraved. This video was forwarded to me today and I am sickened beyond belief. This was apparently done in Idaho but it is no different than what Wisconsin promotes and expands each and every year. Please share this so everyone knows what these hounders and their ilk are really all about. Update May 28, 2013: The original video was removed by the coward that posted it but just a quick view to the “recommended videos” on the page point to many, many other depraved act or dog being used to kill wild animals. Apparently these wildlife snuff films are perfectly legal and are all over YouTube. Real classy. Like this: Like Loading...

New studies: ‘Conspiracy theorists’ sane; government dupes crazy, hostile Recent studies by psychologists and social scientists in the US and UK suggest that contrary to mainstream media stereotypes, those labeled “conspiracy theorists” appear to be saner than those who accept the official versions of contested events. The most recent study was published on July 8th by psychologists Michael J. Wood and Karen M. Douglas of the University of Kent (UK). Entitled “What about Building 7? The authors were surprised to discover that it is now more conventional to leave so-called conspiracist comments than conventionalist ones: “Of the 2174 comments collected, 1459 were coded as conspiracist and 715 as conventionalist.” Perhaps because their supposedly mainstream views no longer represent the majority, the anti-conspiracy commenters often displayed anger and hostility: “The research… showed that people who favoured the official account of 9/11 were generally more hostile when trying to persuade their rivals.”

SUIT TO UNCOVER POLITICAL DEALS BEHIND GRAY WOLF DE-LISTING Washington, DC — The federal government’s plan to remove the gray wolf from the protections of the Endangered Species Act, as detailed by a draft Federal Register notice posted today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), is temporarily on hold. The reasons for the indefinite delay announced this week were not revealed and neither were the records of meetings beginning in 2010 to hammer out this plan. Today PEER filed a federal lawsuit to obtain the records from those meetings. The draft Federal Register notice would strike the gray wolf from the federal list of threatened or endangered species but would keep endangered status for the Mexican wolf. On April 30, 2012, PEER submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the U.S. The SDM meetings included most states involved with gray wolf conservation. Other documents earlier uncovered by PEER show eligible habitat for Mexican wolves was severely limited by a related series of political federal-state deals.

Why "Nothing to Hide" misrepresents online privacy A legal research professor explains to Michael P. Kassner why we should think long and hard before subscribing to the "Nothing to Hide" defense of surveillance and data-gathering. A colleague stopped me in the hallway at work last week, "Hey, I read your article; and I'm not worried. Towards the end of the week, I received a call from my friend, a security analyst who I emailed earlier in the week about the responses I was getting. After the usual guy-geek gossip, my friend told me about Daniel J. The essay turned out to be exactly what I needed: The nothing-to-hide argument pervades discussions about privacy. That alone reassured me that my concerns were not mine alone. Government PoV Next in the essay, the professor sheds light on how governments view "Nothing to Hide": In Britain, for example, the government has installed millions of public-surveillance cameras in cities and towns, which are watched by officials via closed-circuit television. Privacy pundits PoV So do you have curtains?

Save the Wolves: Support the Rights of All Animals Make no mistake, I love wolves as much as just about anyone; yet some people practically worship them, putting them above any other species except perhaps whales and dolphins. To be sure, wolves are sacred, but there are folks who think of them as hyper-sentient—the great Northern furred land-dolphin, if you will. I’m not for a minute denying wolves’ intelligence or adherence to an almost human-like social caste system, but I can’t get behind campaign slogans such as “Real hunters don’t hunt wolves.” I call bullshit on that. Real hunters hunt wolves, coyotes, elk, deer, prairie dogs, pigeons, pronghorn, bears, cougars, raccoons— anything and everything that moves or has ever moved. Granted, some hunters are more sadistic than others, just as some serial killers revel in their victims’ suffering, while others dispatch their prey as quickly as possible—they’re only interest: harvesting a trophy corpse to have around, for whatever morbid reason. Like this: Like Loading...

The JFK Case: The Twelve Who Built the Oswald Legend (Part 10: Nightmare in Mexico City) When it comes to working the Oswald legend, there's no one quite like Ann Goodpasture, the station case officer at the CIA's Mexico City station in 1963. Although she received the highest rating as outstanding in her fitness report, she made several supposed mistakes that would humiliate a rookie. Let me offer a brief hypothesis of how Goodpasture used the Oswald file in a clever maneuver designed to see who had impersonated Oswald in a telephone call in Mexico City two months before the JFK assassination. Goodpasture had good reason to believe that there might have been enemy spy in her immediate circles. I will stick my neck out and say that I believe that someone impersonated Oswald in a phone call precisely to convince the Mexico City and CIA HQ to conduct a molehunt to find the impersonator. To me, the best way to analyze the JFK assassination is to focus on the cover-up. A little background on Goodpasture, Oswald, and Sylvia Duran Oswald was identified, and quickly.

Rock guitarist May leads London march against badger cull Date: 03-Jun-13 Country: UK Author: Dylan Martinez and Estelle Shirbon Brian May, guitarist of rock band Queen, leads a protest against the cull of badgers, in central London June 1, 2013. Photo: Dylan Martinez Protesters dressed as badgers and led by Queen guitarist Brian May marched through central London on Saturday demanding that the government scrap a plan to cull badgers, aimed at slowing the spread of a cattle disease. About 5,000 of the nocturnal black-and-white animals are due to be shot by marksmen in the six-week pilot cull, authorized to begin on Saturday in two areas in southwestern England. The cull has divided rural England, pitting farmers determined to protect their livestock and livelihoods against animal lovers who say the plan will not work and will cause suffering to badgers. "Thousands of badgers are going to be killed in a scheme which will not make life any easier for farmers," May told the BBC. "This cull is unscientific and cruel.

The Pentagon was behind Egypt’s Military Coup Press TV has conducted an interview with Michel Chossudovsky, Centre for Research on Globalization, Montreal about the coup d’état by the Egyptian military that has deposed the elected Morsi government after large anti-government protests arose. “We must understand that from 1991 to the present – over a 20-year period, the Egyptian economy has been destabilized, the Nile Value bread basket has been destroyed. 3,000 years of self-sufficient agriculture; food prices have risen; unemployment has gone sky high; the industrial fabric of a relatively self-reliant economy has been destroyed; and this is the basis of the protest movement. People are protesting because their living standards have collapsed and they saw in this new government an avenue of change. But bear in mind: the United States is supporting both sides and their objective and their strategy is to destabilize this country as a nation-state.” Complete transcript of interview below Morsi was not a people’s government.

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