By Tana Ganeva

Earlier this summer Facebook rolled out facial recognition software that identifies users even when they appear in untagged photos. Like every other time the social networking site has introduced a creepy, invasive new feature, they made it the default setting without telling anyone.

Once people realized that Facebook was basically harvesting biometric data, the usual uproar over the site’s relentless corrosion of privacy ensued. Germany even threatened to sue Facebook for violating German and EU data protection laws and a few other countries are investigating. But facial recognition technology is hardly confined to Facebook — and unlike the social networking site, there’s no “opt-out” of leaving your house.

Post-9/11, many airports and a few cities rushed to install cameras hooked to facial recognition technology, a futuristic apparatus that promised to pick out terrorists and criminals from milling crowds by matching their faces to biometric data in large databases.

Many programs were abandoned a few years later, when it became clear they accomplished little beyond creeping people out. Boston’s Logan Airport scrapped face recognition surveillance after two separate tests showed only a 61.4 percent success rate. When the city of Tampa tried to keep tabs on revelers in the city’s night-club district, the sophisticated technology was bested by people wearing masks and flicking off the cameras.

Human ingenuity aside, most facial recognition software could also be foiled by eyewear, a bad angle or somebody making a weird face. But nothing drives innovation like the promise of government contracts! In the past few years, face recognition technology has advanced substantially, moving from 2-d to 3-d scanning that can capture identifying information about faces even in profile. Another great leap forward, courtesy of Identex (now L-1 Identity Solutions, Inc.), combines geometric face scanning and “skinprint” technology that maps pores, skin texture, scars and other identifying facial marks captured in high-resolution photos.

As face recognition and other biometrics advance, the technology has begun to proliferate in two predictable realms: law enforcement and commerce. Here are 5 places besides Facebook you might encounter face recognition and other biometric technology — not that, for the most part, you would know it if you did.

1. The streets of America

In the fall, police officers from 40 departments will hit the streets armed with the Mobile Offender Recognition and Information System (MORIS) device. The gadget, which attaches to an iPhone, can take an iris scan from 6 inches away, a measure of a person’s face from 5 feet away, or electronic fingerprints, according to Computer vision central. This biometric information can be matched to any database of pictures, including, potentially, one of the largest collections of tagged photos in existence: Facebook. The process is almost instant, so no time for a suspect to opt out of supplying law enforcement with a record of their biometric data.

Lee Tien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation told AlterNet that while it’s unclear how individual departments will use the technology, there are two obvious ways it tempts abuse. Since officers don’t have to haul in an unidentified suspect to get their fingerprints, they have more incentive to pull people over, increasing the likelihood of racial profiling. The second danger lurks in the creation and growth of personal information databases. Biometric information is basically worthless to law enforcement unless, for example, the pattern of someone’s iris can be run against a big database full of many people’s irises.

In an extensive report on the MORIS device, Al-Jazeera’s D. Parvaz asked the president of a company that develops facial recognition software how he feels about equipping the government and law enforcement with the technology. He replied (chillingly) ”I’m counting on our government being honest, whether it’s law enforcement or the military, trying to find people who threaten our lives.”

But the article highlights an inherent legal problem in the MORIS device, regardless of the no doubt uniformally angelic intentions of law enforcement officials. The 4th Amendment guards against unreasonable searches, including fingerprints. Like a fingerprint, an iris scan reveals identifying information that can’t be gleaned from mere observation. Parvaz’ interview with a member of the Plymouth County Sheriff’s office seems to show that addressing the civil liberties hazards of MORIS are not at the top of law enforcement’s priorities:

John Birtwell, the director of public information and technology at the Plymouth County Sheriff’s Department told Al Jazeera that the county will get “more than a handful … at least three” of the devices.

But that’s just about all the certainty Birtwell had to offer on the topic, as he seemed unclear as to whether officers would inform suspects of their Fourth Amendment rights to refuse to undergo impromptu fingerprinting and iris scanning.

He also seemed unsure as to what the protocol would be in the even that a suspect declined to be processed in such a manner.

“I’m dancing on the head of a pin here because I’m not a constitutional scholar,” said Birtwell.

Other law enforcement officials have more clearly articulated ambitions for the technology — like hunting down undocumented immigrants.

In a June “Fox and Friends” segment on the MORIS device, Sheriff Paul Babeu of Pinal County, Arizona explained his enthusiasm for the new technology. “In Arizona, the illegal immigration issue — we have people from foreign countries, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of them that deliberately have very good documents that are fake, fraudulent, and we need to find out who they are, not only for the safety of my deputies but for the protection of our citizens all across America.”

(“We’ve all heard of racial profiling. Now get ready for what some are calling ‘facial profiling,’” deadpanned “Fox and Friends” host Steve Doocey at the start of the show, completely inadvertently making a very good point.)

It’s important to note that the military has used similar technology in Afghanistan and Iraq for years. One of 20 people in Afghanistan is registered in biometric databases (one of six men of fighting age), according to recent reporting by the New York Times. It’s one in 14 in Iraq (and one in four men of fighting age).

The technology is also being put to use in the aftermath of the London riots, both by law enforcement and an online group assembled to hunt down people involved in the riots by using social networking sites. (London is one of the most heavily surveilled cities in the world.)

2. The DMV

Slightly fewer than half of the DMVs in the US have the capacity to run your picture through biometric databases. Ostensibly, these searches are intended to catch people trying to collect multiple IDs from different states. Fair enough. But as EFF’s Lee Tien told AlterNet, the DMV can also log into and run a person’s face against any government database, including ones that hold criminal records. Last August, former New York Gov. David Paterson and DMV commissioner David Swartz held a triumphant news conference where they announced that more than 100 felony arrests were made through the DMV’s facial recognition program.

In the past, the FBI has applied facial recognition technology to the DMV’s vast database of photo images in pursuit of suspects, according to the AP.

When the California DMV tried to acquire facial recognition technology in 2009, privacy and consumer advocates fought the agency on the grounds that such a massive shift in private data handling required public debate (the DMV had been trying to stealthily strike a deal with the vendor). As SecurityInfoWatch reported at the time, privacy advocates argued that there was no way to ensure the technology would not also be used to track and monitor anyone:

“…. the five-year contract, which is being fast-tracked and could be approved as early as next month, is drawing objections from privacy advocates who fear state and local authorities could use the biometric technology to monitor the movements of ‘innocent people’ — for instance, spectators at a sporting event or an anti-war rally.

‘We see this as sort of creeping Big Brother government, an invasion of people’s privacy,’ said Richard Holober, executive director of the San Mateo-based Consumer Federation of California.”

If facial recognition technology in the hands of the DMV sounds like the makings of someone’s mistaken-identity, Kaftaesque nightmare, it is. The unlucky John H. Gass of Massachusetts had to spend 10 days proving to the Massachusetts DMV that he had not committed ID fraud after facial recognition technology mistakenly flagged his photo because he resembled another man.

3. Las Vegas casinos, and Kraft and Adidas stores

For years Las Vegas casinos have used various forms of facial recognition to identify card-counters. Now, Vegas is at the forefront of efforts to adapt facial recognition to more efficiently suck money out of visitors.

The LA Times reported last week that the Venetian hotel and casino has installed basic facial recognition software in advertisements. A camera captures an image of a person passing by and an algorithm determines their gender and rough age. The advertisement can then present them with products most likely to appeal to their demographic.

Targeted ads are the holy grail of marketing. If you’re an advertiser, you don’t want to waste the priceless real-estate of a teen boy’s brain with an ad for, say, tampons, so advertisers are constantly trying to figure out new ways to deliver the right ads to the right people. Thanks to tools that let companies track web surfing history and the detailed personal information featured on certain giant social networking sites, the digital world provides the best venue for targeted ads.

LA Times reporters Shan Li and David Sarno also got Kraft and Adidas to go on the record about their future plans to install the technology in ads and store kiosks:

“If a retailer can offer the right products quickly, people are more likely to buy something,” said Chris Aubrey, vice president of global retail marketing for Adidas.

Kraft said it’s in talks with a supermarket chain, which it would not identify, to test face-scanning kiosks.

“If it recognizes that there is a female between 25 to 29 standing there, it may surmise that you are more likely to have minor children at home and give suggestions on how to spice up Kraft Macaroni & Cheese for the kids,” said Donald King, the company’s vice president of retail experience.

While these tools divulge very basic personal information, their potential seems limitless. Really, how tough would it be for more sophisticated technology to match a photo to someone’s public Facebook profile, and determine in the process their marriage status, sexuality, hometown, politics, religious beliefs and any number of personality signifiers compiled online, thrusting their digital lives into physical space?

4. Bars

Inevitably, facial recognition software is also being deployed for the purpose of getting people laid. SceneTap, an app developed by a Chicago company uses information from facial recognition cameras planted in bars to determine the ratio of women to men and the average age of customers. As of June, 200 bars across the country had signed up to take part, according to Forbes.

SceneTap developers assured reporters that the cameras they’re installing in bars do not capture high-enough-quality images to match them up to databases or Facebook profiles.

Meanwhile, the East Bay Express reported that bars throughout the Bay Area were actually streaming video to an app called “BarSpace” that lets people check out the bar in real time – so presumably anyone with an iPhone could easily check where you are and who you’re drunkenly flirting with without you knowing it. The investigation found that most bar patrons are not aware they’re being filmed. Is an app wedding SceneTap’s face recognition technology to BarSpace coming down the pike?

This is not the first time biometric tools have invaded bars. In 2006, a program called BioBouncer let bouncers take pictures of incoming patrons and scan them against a database to pick out troublemakers. Bar owners shared a large database of information. According to the company behind the technology, information about law-abiding bar patrons would get dumped at the end of the night, reported Wired. Of course, there was no way to guarantee that indefinitely. Or guarantee that bar owners wouldn’t share the info with the police, or with private investigators, or with data collection companies, as security expert Bob Schneier pointed out at the time.

5. All of Japan

As far as commercial uses of facial recognition technology, Japan is way ahead of the curve. So here are some things we may be looking forward to:

a) Vending machines: Japanese vending machines suggest soft drinks based on stereotypes based on your gender and age (and the weather).

b) Billboards: Japanese billboards contain technology that figures out a person’s sex and age to within 10 years, and presents them with the appropriate advertising.

c) Truck stops: A truck stop uses facial recognition to gauge the alertness of drivers.

d) Hotels and restaurants: NTDtv reports Omron, a Japanese technology company, equips hotels and restaurants with the technology to let them flag VIP guests.

e) Service work: According to Reuters, Omron also uses a “smile-scan” allowing service companies to ensure their employees evince the appropriate levels of enthusiasm on the job.

While there’s nothing inherently wrong with advances in biometrics, there are also no inherent limits for its use and abuse, as EFF’s Tien points out. So it’s important to always ask who’s controlling the cameras and the databases, and for what purpose.

Tana Ganeva is an AlterNet editor. Follow her on Twitter. You can email her at tanaalternet@gmail.com.

By http://antifascist-calling.blogspot.com/

We live in an age where insider deals, conflicts of interest, revolving doors between “regulators” and the “regulated” (lubricated with oceans of cash) accompanies the generalized looting of social wealth by deviant capitalist elites.

That such behavior by our corporate masters no longer raise an eyebrow, let alone elicit action by authorities charged with stopping criminal miscreants destroying other people’s lives, is an unmistakable sign that the much-vaunted “free market” system, staring into an abyss of its own creation, has entered a terminal phase.

It now appears that insiders at Standard and Poor’s or the Treasury Department, take your pick, may have leaked information to privileged clients on the recent U.S. credit downgrade, with confirmation coming from a surprising source.

Last week, AntiSec cyber-guerrillas (a loose alliance amongst individuals affiliated with LulzSec and Anonymous) released a 1GB cache of emails filched from security contractor Vanguard Defense Industries (VDI).

Previously Anonymous and LulzSec have wrapped their keyboards around defense grifters Booz Allen Hamilton, ManTech International, NATO, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, InfraGard (a “public-private” security alliance amongst corporate heavy-hitters and the Bureau), the CIA, the Arizona Department of Public Safety, the Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center (a so-called “fusion center” staffed by cops, federal agents, private contractors and the U.S. military), the Bay Area Rapid Transit agency (BART), Britain’s Serious Organised Crime Agency, PBS, Fox News, and repressive governments such as Egypt, Tunisia and Zimbabwe.

Their latest campaign targeted VDI, a Texas-based firm, which specializes in the “development and deployment” of Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS, killer drones). VDI “draws on specialized experience of senior aerospace engineers, former military special operations officers, military instructor pilots as well as retired Senior Executive Service Federal Agents,” claiming their “background and operational knowledge has afforded us the unique vision to provide a platform that will extend the security and response capabilities of any organization,” according to a blurb on their web site.

While VDI touts their ability to offer “support” to the “military, local, state and federal law enforcement as well as the private sector,” the firm also offers “a full scope of consulting services independent of our aerial technology.”

That “unique vision” however, didn’t prevent AntiSec from spiriting away thousands of emails from VDI’s Senior Vice President Richard T. Garcia, a former FBI Assistant Director in Los Angeles who recently left a well-paid position as Global Security Manager for the environment-killing Shell Oil Corporation (can you say Niger Delta?) for “greener” pastures.

A press statement from AntiSec announced that the leak “contains internal meeting notes and contracts, schematics, non-disclosure agreements, personal information about other VDI employees, and several dozen ‘counter-terrorism’ documents classified as ‘law enforcement sensitive’ and ‘for official use only’.”

“Vanguard Defense Industries,” AntiSec writes, “manufactures unmanned ‘ShadowHawk’ drones which cost $640,000 and are equipped with grenade launchers and shotguns. ShadowHawks are currently in use by law enforcement, military, and private corporations deploying them in the US, the Horn of Africa, Panama, Columbia [sic], and US-Mexico border patrol operations. These emails contain contracts, schematics, non-disclosure agreements, and more. Additionally we found evidence of a Merrill Lynch wealth management advisor giving private advance notice to Garcia about upcoming S&P US credit rating downgrades.”

Improper Disclosures

In an April 25, 2011 email from Garcia to Gloria Newport, Cindy Cook, a Wealth Management Advisor with Bank of America-owned Merrill Lynch “advised that Standard and Poors, may lower the credit rating of the US Government which could cause a run on US Banks that will affect the Federal Reserve. They give the US Govt. 2 years to correct the current situation, which they believe both the Republican and Democratic solutions do not do enough and both parties may make this a political situation for the 2012 Presidential election and never come up with a answer to correct the situation within the two years set by Standard and Poors. She did not see any real Cyber issue that could change the situation.”

Investigative journalist Steve Ragan, writing at The Tech Herald(the publication that broke the story on Anonymous’s HBGary hack) informs us that “the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission was investigating whether there was any sort of insider trading done by S&P employees before the downgrade was official. The story hinged on comments made to the paper by sources close to the investigation itself.”

“On the day S&P cut the U.S.’s credit rating” Ragan writes, “Wall Street was flooded with downgrade rumors. These rumors started earlier in the day while trading was active. It turned out they were true.”

According to Bloomberg News the SEC “is scrutinizing the method Standard & Poor’s used to cut the U.S.’s credit rating and whether the firm properly protected the confidential decision, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter.”

Reporter Joshua Gallu wrote August 14 that SEC staff are “looking into whether certain market participants learned of the downgrade before its announcement.”

Downplaying speculation that S&P employees may have breached SEC rules by leaking sensitive information to privileged clients, The New York Times, as is their wont, claimed “it is arguable whether S.&P.’s announcement on Aug. 5 of the rating change was all that confidential, given the speculation about it.”

“Assuming information about the downgrade was confidential,” the Times pontificates, “it must also be material, which means a reasonable investor would consider it important. This seems to be an easy element to establish because the wild gyrations in the market on the first trading day after the downgrade shows how investors viewed it.”

But Cook’s email to Garcia didn’t arrive in his in-box “on the first trading day after the downgrade” but nearly four months earlier, long before July’s political shenanigans over raising the federal debt ceiling, the ostensible reason why S&P downgraded America’s credit worthiness.

Maxine Waters (D-CA), wrote to SEC chairwoman, cover-up specialist Mary Schapiro, demanding that the commission “conduct an investigation into whether S.&P. selectively disclosed information related to the U.S. government debt downgrade to any financial institutions, and whether any institutions that had that nonpublic information traded on that information prior to the official announcement.”

It appears that Cook’s email to Garcia would confirm that S&P insiders did just that, providing information to Merrill Lynch and one can assume other financial firms.

Throwing cold water on charges that the rating’s agency acted improperly, the Times argues that “even if if the S.E.C. finds that the information was improperly disclosed, proving insider trading will be difficult.”

Why might that be?

According to the Times, “while S.&P. and other credit rating agencies are required to adopt policies to prevent such disclosure, it is questionable whether just leaking information violates any federal regulations, even if it breaches a corporate confidentiality policy.”

Lest readers believe however, that the SEC will mount a comprehensive investigation of leaks by S&P insiders, they would do well to read Matt Taibbi’s latest piece for Rolling Stone.

According to congressional testimony by an SEC whistleblower, which sparked an investigation by that agency’s Inspector General, the commission’s enforcement division, under orders from higher-ups, who went on to secure well-paid positions with the firms they were charged to regulate, shredded a mountain of incriminating evidence detailing wrongdoing by some of the world’s top financial firms.

How many files, called “Matters Under Investigation” or MUI were destroyed? According to whistleblower Darcy Flynn, the SEC’s enforcement division “disappeared” some 18,000 files, including those of convicted fraudster Bernie Madoff, accused swindler, suspected CIA banker and drug money launderer R. Allen Stanford, as well as accusations that top-tier Wall Street investment banks such as J.P. Morgan Chase had engaged in insider trading.

Taibbi writes that “under a deal the SEC worked out with the National Archives and Records Administration, all of the agency’s records–’including case files relating to preliminary investigations’–are supposed to be maintained for at least 25 years. But the SEC, using history-altering practices that for once actually deserve the overused and usually hysterical term ‘Orwellian,’ devised an elaborate and possibly illegal system under which staffers were directed to dispose of the documents from any preliminary inquiry that did not receive approval from senior staff to become a full-blown, formal investigation.”

It’s a nice deal if you can get it, which of course firms like Goldman Sachs, J. P. Morgan Chase, Deutsche Bank, AIG and Lehman Brothers (before their 2008 collapse) managed to get in spades.

“We’ll never know,” Taibbi avers, “what the impact of those destroyed cases might have been; we’ll never know if those cases were closed for good reasons or bad. We’ll never know exactly who got away with what, because federal regulators have weighted down a huge sack of Wall Street’s dirty laundry and dumped it in a lake, never to be seen again.”

In this light, AntiSec’s hack of VDI is instructive. If for nothing else, it demonstrates that well-connected insiders reap billions from the collapse of the global economy, divvying-up the spoils amongst privileged friends and clients, including those inhabiting the nethermost regions of the secret state.

Cyberwar: Bringing it All Back Home, and Waging War on the Global Economy

As global elites scramble to seize as much advantage as possible over their rivals as the economy craters, intelligence methods deployed as part of imperialism’s endless “War on Terror” have migrated with a vengeance onto Wall Street.

Revelations by Anonymous earlier this year that a passel of Pentagon-linked security contractors had joined forces to run covert ops on whistleblowers and journalists set alarm bells ringing.

February’s release of some 75,000 emails filched from servers controlled by security grifters HBGary Federal and HBGary, uncovered a sordid scheme by the Bank of American and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to target supporters of WikiLeaks and left-wing corporate critics.

That hack, in addition to exposing BofA’s illicit “Team Themis”gambit, a co-production of white shoe law firm Hunton & Williams, HBGary Federal, HBGary, Palantir Technologies (a recipient of CIA slush funds from its venture capital arm In-Q-Tel) and Berico Technologies, also revealed that the Pentagon and giant defense contractors such as General Dynamics had teamed up with HBGary to develop undetectable malware or “rootkits” for America’s emerging Cyberwar-Intelligence Complex, according to a series of documents published by the secrecy-shredding web site Public Intelligence.

Additional files revealed that HBGary and ManTech International had partnered-up with the National Security State for what they described as “Internet Based Reconnaissance Operations” that use “non-attributable internet access” methodologies (approvedhacking by the secret state) for “operating system and network application identification,” “identification of possible perimeter defense” for “intelligence gap fill” and “counterintelligence research.” In other words, broad based internet spying on an array of “adversaries” (e.g., political dissidents, antiwar activists, anticorporate campaigners and other enemies of the state).

Further research by Project PM’s OpMetalGear revealed that defense giant Northrop Grumman and other firms such as HBGary Federal, TASC and ManTech International were engaged in a bidding war to spear the Pentagon’s Romas/COIN program (since renamed Odyssey).

That program, researcher Barrett Brown writes, is “a secretive and immensely sophisticated campaign of mass surveillance and data mining against the Arab world, allowing the intelligence community to monitor the habits, conversations, and activity of millions of individuals at once.” (For additional background see: “Security Grifters Partner-Up on Sinister Cyber-Surveillance Project,” Antifascist Calling, July 3, 2011)

We can assume that once intelligence sources and methods intended to target external enemies are turned inward and attack the American people, financial insiders too, would find such tools an exemplary means to crush their competitors and adversaries, the global working class.

Bankrupting and Criminalizing the State

“Economic warfare,” economist and researcher Michel Chossudovsky, writing in The Global Economic Crisis: The Great Depression of the XXI Century, “consists in destabilizing countries and impoverishing their respective populations.”

Chossudovsky argues that “the manipulation of market forces through the imposition of strong ‘economic medicine’ under the helm of the IMF supports U.S.-NATO strategic and geopolitical objectives.”

Similarly,” Chossudovsky observes, “the speculative attacks waged by powerful banking conglomerates in the currency, commodity and stock markets are acts of financial warfare,” one in which the “financing of an oversized U.S. war economy triggers imbalances in the U.S. monetary system, destabilizes the U.S. fiscal structure and creates imbalances in the allocation of human and material resources.”

This tragedy is playing out today. The on-going market meltdown in the wake of the U.S. credit downgrade and the crisis in the Eurozone has affected tens of millions of workers who saw their retirement funds gobbled up by speculators. Additionally, states and municipalities “carrying debt tied to federal creditworthiness,” The Tech Herald avers, “each took a hit.”

Hard hit cities and states struggling under an enormous debt burden due to falling revenues, are held hostage by the credit rating agencies. As economist Michael Hudson points out inGlobal Research credit rating agencies such as Standard and Poor’s, Moody’s and Fitch “are playing the political role of ‘enforcer’ as the gatekeepers to credit, to put pressure on Iceland, Greece and even the United States to pursue creditor-oriented policies that lead inevitably to financial crises.”

Hudson writes that these “crises in turn force debtor governments to sell off their assets under distress conditions. In pursuing this guard-dog service to the world’s bankers, the ratings agencies are escalating a political strategy they have long been refined over a generation in the corrupt arena of local U.S. politics.”

As the World Socialist Web Site observes, “the crisis of the world’s stock exchanges and financial markets is increasingly spiraling out of control. Governments are being driven by developments which they are unable to influence.”

Socialist critic Peter Schwarz notes that “the panic on the stock markets shows that traders are expecting a deep recession, already heralded by stagnating growth and rising unemployment rates,” and that “corporations will respond with new waves of layoffs, governments with further budget cuts.”

In a climate stoked by fear, war and those all-purpose boogeymen, “debt,” “terror” and now, “cyberwar,” the cost of bailing-out a looted capitalist economy are shouldered by the working class. These pressures in turn increase the downward spiral as employment, wages, manufacturing and consumer spending go into a tail-spin, a self-destructive feed-back loop that further exacerbates levels of unemployment, home foreclosures and generalized misery. The tentacles of this manufactured “debt crisis” reach everywhere–from the smallest town to the largest city.

Hudson avers that “localities are pressured when their rising debt levels lead to a financial stringency. Banks pull back their credit lines, and urge cities and states to pay down their debts by selling off their most viable public enterprises.”

And waiting in the wings are a new class of corporate vultures and rentier vampires who swoop down to reap the rewards gleaned by gobbling-up (looting) public assets at fire sale prices.

The rating agencies who profit at both ends of any transaction according to Hudson, “offer opinions” that have become a “big business” for the agencies. “So it is understandable why their business model opposes policies–and political candidates–that support the idea of basing public financing on taxation rather than by borrowing. This self-interest colors their ‘opinions’.”

Accordingly, “to acquiescence in such economically destructive financial behavior is the opposite of fiscal responsibility. Cutting federal taxes and Social Security payments to obtain a more positive S&P ‘opinion,” Hudson writes, “would give banks an ability to ‘pull the plug’ and force privatization and anti-labor austerity plans by refraining from rolling over the U.S. debt–and cutting taxes Tea-Party style rather than funding spending by taxation on a pay-as-you-go-basis.”

In this light, one can certainly understand why a Merrill Lynch “wealth management advisor” would offer her “knowledgeable judgement” (clubby insider info) to a dodgy security outfit such as VDI.

Working classes across Europe have not “gone gently into the night” of impoverishment; the great fear here in the heimatamongst corporatists and militarists alike, is that once working people realize the game is up they just might impose some “shock therapy” of their own!

As Salon columnist Glenn Greenwald (a target of “Team Themis’s” dirty tricks campaign) avers, speaking out about “the sprawling Surveillance State and the attempted criminalization of WikiLeaks and whistleblowing are so vital” to the defense of democracy.

“The free flow of information and communications enabled by new technologies–as protest movements in the Middle East and a wave of serious leaks over the last year have demonstrated–is a uniquely potent weapon in challenging entrenched government power and other powerful factions,” Greenwald writes.

“And that is precisely why those in power–those devoted to preservation of the prevailing social order–are so increasingly fixated on seizing control of it and snuffing out its potential for subverting that order: they are well aware of, and are petrified by, its power, and want to ensure that the ability to dictate how it is used, and toward what ends, remains exclusively in their hands.”

This is why actions by disparate groups such as AntiSec, Anonymous and WikiLeaks are informational beacons in an otherwise homogenized media landscape, one characterized by celebrity gossip, sex scandals and “crimes” carried out by poor and marginalized populations–never the filthy rich or the warmongers who murder millions as they launch resource wars that steal other people’s social property.

While firms such as VDI, Boeing, General Atomics and Lockheed Martin hawk drone technologies that transform human beings into red mist, and do so as their “patriotic” (and highly-profitable) duty as the Pentagon wholeheartedly embraces hypermodern forms of robotized mass murder, the bill for American hubris, long past due, is coming faster than most people think.

p>(The South Journal)

Panama will be the venue of an event to be held April 11-15, whose objective is the setting up of an “elite international task force” to enhance the cyberwar against Cuba. The sponsors of this meeting, under the intellectualized name of “Thinking Cuba”, use military terms like “task force”, while several of their alliances are quite too close to extremism and US military institutions, including the marines, according to the curriculum of Janessa Goldbeck, one of the event´s organizers.

South Journal–An article by Cuban writer Iroel Sanchez published on La Pupila Insomne website reads that Panama has been chosen to hold a meeting aimed at setting up an “elite international task force” to enhance cyberwar against Cuba. The meeting will count on the participation of “anti-Cuba Cyber-extremist” Ernesto Hernández Busto who along with George W. Bush, launched the US subversive strategy against Cuba on the Internet.

The sponsors of this meeting, under the intellectualized name of “Thinking Cuba”, use military terms like “task force”, while several of their alliances are quite too close to extremism and US military institutions, including the marines, according to the curriculum of Janessa Goldbeck, one of the event´s organizers.

The first of the Websites under “ Thinking Cuba” is “Babalu Blog, linked to blogger Yoani Sanchez promoting violent actions against Cuba and support for terrorist Luis Posada Carriles. “Thinking Cuba” is sponsored by “The Albert Einstein Institution, the same entity that was behind the so-called “color revolutions” in Eastern Europe and that sponsored the training of young Yugoslavians with the Otpor organization by a US colonel in the eve of the NATO aggression on Yugoslavia.

Over the past few weeks, numerous materials have exposed the US strategy to provide its agents on the island with modern I.T. technology to keep covert communication avenues with them, thus violating their own regulations established by the US blockade of Cuba.

On 7 April 2010, the main organizer of the Panama event, Stephanie Rudat wrote on her blog about the use of these technologies to promote “change” in Cuba and she explained about their implementation in countries, such as Iran, something acknowledged by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as a work of the Department of State.

In her 2007 writings, Rudat tells about the role played as part of this strategy by organizations such as “Raices de Esperanza,” which maintains links to the so-called Ladies in White, in Cuba.

A point in the Panama agenda may be the updating of the strategy, after the repeated defeats undergone by the United States in trying to boost the use of such technologies in Cuba, in an effort to find inexistent similarities with the ongoing events in the Middle East, with media and entrepreneurial support.

The CubaMoneyProject has collected significant information on the antecedents, relations and financial sources related to Rudat. This information suggests that the Panama event counts on the highest-level support of the US government, including the CIA and the State Department. All this has led journalist Tracey Eaton to say: “Let´s see if Rudat, who has said that technology is a synonym of transparency, gets to voluntarily reveal the source of money.”

The US taxpayers´ money has been largely used with these aims over the past years. CubaMoneyProject recently published a list of recipients of these funds, after explaining that it is not a complete picture of the “Cuba Program” financed by the United States. Out of that list, we bring you some of those directly linked to the supply of technological support to the counterrevolution in Cuba:

2007

“Plantados hasta la Libertad y la Democracia en Cuba” (organization made up of individuals with terrorist backgrounds)
13 September – Contract signed for 200,000 dollars. Description: technical support for a peaceful transition to Democracy, of the Cuba Program.

2008

Creative Associates International. 29 September – 6.5 million-dollar contract signed with USAID´s Office for Transition Initiatives (OTI).

2009

DAI / Nathan Group (The company that sent Alan Gross to Cuba)
29 September –853.976-dollar contract. Description: “Provide extra funds amounting to 853.976 dollars.”

2010

Creative Associates International
03 September – A two-million-dollar contract. Contract expiring date is 30 September 2011.

Freedom House
28 September – One-million-dollar contract. Description: This cooperation agreement supports the Freedom House´s New Media Initiatives for Cuba project (NewMIC).

These sums are joined by projects with entities such as the National Democratic Institute (NDI), the International Republican Institute (IRI) and the CIA direct operations, which also include the supply of technology for subversion as it has been exposed by the TV series Cuba´s Reasons.

[English version of Iroel Sanchez’ article in Spanish posted on the Pupila Insomne]