NSA

The following article by Paul Craig Roberts, reprinted with the author's kind permission, has been previously published (23/7/18) on Russia Insider with the same title and on both The Unz Review (4/7/18) and the author's own web-site PaulCraigRoberts.org (4/7/18) as "Washington Moves Against Rafael Correa".

As President of Ecuador, Rafael Correa (pictured above) was a Godsend for the Ecuadorian people, for Latin American independence and for WikiLeaks' Julian Assange. By serving justice and truth instead of Washington, Correa earned Washington's hatred and determination to destroy him.

Correa was succeeded as president by Lenin Moreno, who Correa mistakenly believed to be an ally, but who has every appearance of being a Washington asset. The first thing that Moreno did was to make a deal with Washington, block Correa from being able to again stand for the presidency and turn on Julian Assange. Moreno wants to revoke the asylum granted to Assange and has prevented Assange from continuing his journalistic activity from the Ecuadorian embassy in London. In other words, Moreno has conspired with Washington and the UK to effectively imprison Assange in the embassy.

Now Moreno has taken another step that highlights his character as a blackguard. Correa, realizing that he and his family were in danger, moved to Belgium. An Ecuadorian court has now ordered the Belgians to detain Correa and extradite him to Ecuador on a fabricated kidnapping charge.

Correa thinks that Belgium will not comply with an absurd charge for which no evidence is presented and that the charge is intended to smear his name. If I were Correa, I would not be so sure. Look at the ease with which Washington was able to use its vassals—Sweden and the UK—to effectively nullify the political asylum that Ecuador gave Assange. Belgium is also Washington's vassal and will experience threats and bribes—whatever it takes—to deliver Correa into Moreno's hands, which is to say into Washington's hands. If I were Correa, I would get myself over to the Russian embassy and request asylum from Putin.

Here is a news report from RT: https://www.rt.com/news/431653-correa-ecuador-arrest-order/

This article gives a 'good cop bad cop' analysis of Australia's two party history since the fall of the Whitlam Government. It looks at the evolution of economic theory and foreign involvement in wars over this period.

As United States whistleblower Christopher Boyce (aka 'the Falcon') revealed on SBS Dateline on 18 February 2014, after the CIA helped to destroy the Whitlam Labor government in 1975 it attempted to consolidate its victory by buying influence amongst newer leaders of the Labor Party.

Consequently, when Labor finally won office again on 5 March 1983, the reforms of the Whitlam government were abandoned. Instead the Labor government of former ACTU President Bob Hawke helped pioneer in Australia the adoption of neo-liberal 'free market' economic policies that would later be adopted around much of the rest of the world. Australian finance and industry was exposed to globalised international competition, including the removal of government control over the Australian dollar's exchange rate (i.e. the “floating of the dollar”) by then Treasurer Paul Keating in December 1983. Government services and the public servant numbers were reduced. Also publicly owned assets were privatised with no electoral mandate – QANTAS, TAA (the domestic air service), the Australian National Line shipping company and the Commonwealth Bank.

Since 1983, Labor governments have generally played the role of 'good cop' whilst Liberal/National Coalition governments have generally played the role of 'bad cop'. Prior to his defeat in March 1983, 'bad cop' Malcolm Fraser imposed a 12 month wages freeze during which the value of real wages fell 9.1% as a result of cost of living increases not being matched by wage rises. Subsequently the 'good cop' Hawke Labor government with the help of ACTU President Cliff Dolan imposed the Prices and Incomes Accord on the Trade union movement. The accord allowed restricted wage rises and promised increases in social spending.

Labor has also backtracked away from Gough Whitlam's opposition to war. In 1991 the Hawke government sent troops to fight in Operation Desert Storm after Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had been tricked into believing that the United States would not retaliate should Iraq take action against neighbouring Kuwait for slant-drilling into Iraq's oil fields. Sanctions imposed against Iraq after its 1990 invasion continued until until after Saddam Hussein was overthrown after the 2003 invasion. This continued even after bleeding heart' Paul Keating became PM in December 1991. Many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died as a result. One estimate puts the death toll at more than 1.5 million including 750,000 children under the age of 5. Other wars, which gained bipartisan support from the Labor Party include the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and the invasion of Libya in 2011.

Both sides of Australian politics, with a only a few honourable exceptions, are shamefully complicit in the United States' proxy terrorist war against Syria which started in March 2011. In that war, 210,000 Syrians have so far died at the hands of jihadist invaders from nearly every corner of the Muslim world and a number of other countries . Australia expelled the Syrian ambassador under the pretext that the Syrian government had allegedly massacred 108 of its citizens, including 34 women and 49 children at Houla on 25 May. This allegation that the Syrian government had massacred Syrians in a region particularly renowned for its strong support for the Syrian government is contrary to common sense and all credible eyewitness and forensic evidence.

Both sides of parliament have also sided with the neo-Nazi government of Ukraine which came to power in February 2014 as a result of a CIA-orchestrated coup. Both sides have also unquestioningly accepted the lying mainstream newsmedia narrative that the 298 passengers, including 27 Australians, aboard Malaysian Airways Flight MH17 were murdered by East Ukrainian self-defence forces with a BUK surface to air missile on 17 March 2014. This is contrary to all eyewitness and forensic evidence, including the photos of the pilot cockpits apparently riddled with cannon shells on both sides indicate that MH17 was shot down by 2 Ukrainian Sukhoi 17 fighters.

Both Labor and the Coalition have voted in Parliament to support dragnet collection of all our Intenet and telephone communication meta-data by our spy agencies. This is in spite of whistleblower Edward Snowden's warning that this has never prevented even one act of terrorism.

The above are only some examples of how corrupt Australian and global politics has become since 1975. However while there is still a free and open Internet, and a trade union movement with capable leaders we still stand a chance of reversing the damage and re-establish a quality of democracy comparable to what we once enjoyed.

You can help by using the Internet to help tell the truth, and by contributing an to http://candobetter.net and other alternative newsmedia sites and by spreading the word. This article is published at http://candobetter.net/node/4321 .

See also: Le Pen: France should leave NATO because of United States CIA torture (12/12/14)

Speaking via videolink at a Paris conference organised by pressure group Amnesty International, Edward Snowden, who famously exposed the United States' National Security Agency's (NSA) dragnet PRISM surveillance program in June 2013, said he was "deeply saddened and to a great extent angered' by what he read.

In a one hour interview, Edward Snowden, who as a private contractor, worked for the United States' National Security Agency (NSA), reveals all about the NSA's dragnet surveillance program. This program has captured and stored everything we have ever communicated through the Internet or telephone in recent years. He reveals that this program has not stopped one act of terrorism. Near the end, Edward also provides practical suggestions about how you can protect your on-line privacy.

Intel is the inventor of the x86 series of microprocessors, the processors found in most personal computers. Because of suspicions that Intel chips facilitate US spy-ware, like many other countries, Russia is seeking a way around this.

22 June, 2014 (Tony Cartalucci - LocalOrg) - Russia's ITAR-TASS News Agency reported in an article titled, "Russia wants to replace US computer chips with local processors" that: Russia's Industry and Trade Ministry plans to replace US microchips Intel and AMD, used in government's computers, with domestically-produced micro processor Baikal in a project worth dozens of millions of dollars, business daily Kommersant reported Thursday.

Breaking the back of multinational monopolies is a matter of national security. 

Image: The NSA is not an indep­endent agency nor does it merely answer to those in Wash­ington. It is a manifest­ation of an over­reaching corporat­ocracy that will stop at nothing to expand its various monopolies. The key to defeating the NSA is not attacking it directly but by under­mining and replacing the corporate interests that created it and direct it in the first place.

It also stated:

The Baikal chips will be installed on computers of government bodies and in state-run firms, which purchase some 700,000 personal computers annually worth $500 million and 300,000 servers worth $800 million. The total volume of the market amounts to about 5 million devices worth $3.5 billion.

In addition to the obvious financial benefits for Russia of locally manufacturing processors, there are several other dimensions within which the move will be beneficial, including in terms of national security.

Long has it been reported that US-manufactured processors may have vulnerabilities engineered into them, at the request of US intelligence agencies including the National Security Agency (NSA). Australia's Financial Review revealed in 2013 in an article titled, "Intel chips could let US spies inside: expert, that:

One of Silicon Valley's most respected technology experts, Steve Blank, says he would be "surprised" if the US National Security Agency was not embedding "back doors" inside chips produced by Intel and AMD, two of the world's largest semiconductor firms, giving them the possibility to access and control machines.

The claims come after The Australian Financial Review revealed that computers made by Chinese firm Lenovo are banned from the "secret" and "top secret" networks of the intelligence and defence services of Australia, the US, Britain, Canada and New Zealand because of concerns they are vulnerable to being hacked.

Internationally renowned security research engineer Jonathan Brossard, who unveiled what Forbes described as an "undetectable and incurable" permanent back door at last year's prestigious Black Hat conference, told the Financial Review that he had independently concluded that CPU back doors are "attractive attack vectors".

If correct, the allegations would raise the stakes in a growing cyber cold war, and fuel claims that US snooping leaves the Chinese in the shade.

The move by Russia would help protect government assets from foreign spying and cyber attacks enabled by the potential vulnerabilities described in the Financial Review. And because of the large scale of production that will be needed to supply the Russian government's annual demand, the possibility of Russian-made processors being used outside of state agencies and firms could help secure Russia's wider national IT infrastructure as well.

Dependence on foreign technology has created a potential threat to Russia's IT infrastructure. Technological self-sufficiency, then, can clearly be seen as a priority for national security. Developing independent technology requires an emphasis on education, research, and development, but the price of neglecting these areas renders a nation at the mercy of those that haven't.

Image: Just as manu­facturing your own processors affords you added security for IT infra­structure, locally produced, organic agri­culture affords you food security.

The West's geopolitical primacy has been enabled by the various corporate-financier monopolies that exist upon Wall Street and in the City of London. Breaking the back of these monopolies requires nations to develop alternatives that undermine and ultimately displace these monopolies from within their borders. Russia's decision to produce processors domestically is one example of this. Nation's focusing on domestic food security by encouraging local, organic farming undermines and displaces the West's big-agri monopolies and in particular their attempts to monopolize the very code of life itself through the proliferation of patented GMOs.

And while governments should be focused on national-level solutions to undermine and displace foreign monopolies threatening national security, on the local level there are steps regular people can take to protect their communities and themselves - including boycotting and replacing Fortune 500 monopolies with local solutions, and the creation of local institutions and organizations that are composed and serve the interests of the people that created them.

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The American people aren’t falling for NSA's propaganda. They want the rogue agency reined in. But Obama refuses to rein in the NSA, Dianne Feinstein says that Congress "doesn't have the votes" to do anything about mass surveillance, and at least some judges are supporting the NSA's spying (and it's not clear what the Supreme Court will do).

But states are trying to fight back ...

Legislation has been introduced in 10 states (and counting) proposing one or both of the following:

1. Cutting off water, electricity or other resources to NSA facilities within the state
2. Prohibiting the state's cooperation with the NSA; for example, sharing data about its citizens, or university research support for NSA

For information about the state legislation:

• Arizona
• California
• Indiana
• Kansas
• Mississippi
• Missouri
• New Hampshire
• Oklahoma
• Tennessee
• Washington

And see this.

While this may sound to some like a Republican approach, Democrats who support the NSA will be vulnerable next election, and progressives need to re-claim freedom from mass surveillance as a core issue.