Public Intelligence Blog

Berto Jongman

EU tax: Barroso urges full automatic exchange of data

The head of the European Commission has told the European Parliament he wants EU-wide exchange of income data as part of the fight against tax evasion.

Jose Manuel Barroso said he would urge Wednesday’s summit of EU leaders to support automatic exchange of people’s earnings data between tax authorities.

Tax evasion costs EU states 1tn euros ($1.3tn; £0.85tn) a year, more than was spent on healthcare in 2008.

MEPs are expected to call for a Europe-wide blacklist of tax havens.

Pressure is likely to be put on Switzerland to relax banking secrecy amid anger over revelations about Greek and French politicians holding secret Swiss bank accounts.

The debate comes a day after UK Prime Minister David Cameron urged British overseas territories which operate low-tax regimes to “get their house in order” and sign up to international treaties on tax.

Mr Barroso said he wanted to see the principle of automatic exchange “become the standard at international level as well”.

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Sterling Seagrave

Responding to 2013 Robert Steele Answers on OSINT to PhD Student in Denmark

You refer several times to what you call “unethical private sector parties whose only focus is on money in, not intelligence out.” This is what corrupted Truman’s initiative. Covens like this go way back in history, but in the US more recently it coalesced around the group that set up the Fed, expanded to include globetrotters like Wild Bill Donovan and the Dulles Brothers. They, in turn, brought in collusion with Meyer Lansky, a merger of Mafia with highest level Masons, and a very powerful group of attorneys (Paul Helliwell, etc), financiers (Averell Harriman, etc), who were vigorously engaged in financing the Bolsheviks, the Nazis, the Fascists, Imperialists, and eventually Neo-Cons.  While financing these groups to put power into dictatorship-of-the-State (everyone else being disposable serfs), they profited from moving heroin and other drugs, and siphoned off all the gold they could to personal offshore caches. In effect, this created a covert government-within-a-government, enabled them to take over mass media, and to use pharmaceuticals to stupefy the general public.  The formal government of the US is now 90% corrupted into what’s been called “a parliament of whores”. Huge sums provided to “rescue” Greece, etc., vanish. The coven has brought together as many fascist foreign governments as possible, so in effect it is attempting to set up its “invisible government” as the new global government. In doing so it has subverted the UN, and virtually all global organizations such as the FAO.  This is why OSINT is having such a difficult time, reversing the poisonous current.  The last thing the coven wants is an honest, moral, and open source of truthful information for the public.

How many and which fascist governments?

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Berto Jongman

Socom’s goal: Pre-empt wars

Tampa is headquarters for the commandos who are gaining a bigger role in military operations around the globe. Military writer Howard Altman travels with them this month in Afghanistan.

By Howard Altman | Tribune Staff

Tampa Tribune,  May 19, 2013

They make small footprints at the edges of the Earth.

Click on Image to Enlarge

Sometimes they hunt and kill. Sometimes they teach rural tribes how to govern and farm.

But after more than 12 years of war, special operations forces are frayed — and in more demand than ever. With the military facing big spending cuts and a new emphasis on places around the globe, U.S. Special Operations Command, headquartered at MacDill Air Force Base, is working to adapt to new realities.

Where will they make footprints next?

“There has been a shift in strategy away from war to defensive tactics,” said Stuart Bradin, an Army colonel helping bring a new global special operations network to life.

Click on Image to Enlarge

“The primary pieces are a pivot to Asia while keeping a very strong eye and focus on the Middle East, as well. We are going to go out in small footprints and work with key partners to ensure that small regional issues don’t become major theater operations. We can’t afford that in blood or treasure.”

The new network has a name, “Global SOF Network,” and a theme, “you can’t surge trust,” and it’s the vision of Socom commander Adm. William McRaven.

Full story and PBI comment below the line.

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Editor’s Note

In today’s issue I want to illustrate several trends, and show how they blend together into a meta-trend. This is our shadow. An amalgam of hysteria, fear, anger, racism, willful ignorance, and a sense of affronted victimization. Each of these stories illustrates an aspect of this meta-trend. By putting them together I wanted to give a sense of how broad this trend is. It is an act of intentioned self-sabotage of historic proportions. For other examples read Jared Diamond’s Collapse, or Barbara Tuchman’s March of Folly. We are coming to a crisis. I want to be clear here. This is not about partisanship, this is about attitudes and priorities. Finally, I close the edition with a different world, the one that could be, if we would only make national wellness a first priority. [Denmark, not the USA, is the gold standard for secular Western democracy.]

– Stephan

Letters at 3AM: An Arbitrary Nation
MICHAEL VENTURA – The Austin Chronicle

Is Democracy in Trouble?
E.J. DIONNE, JR. – Truthdig

Washington Gets Explicit: Its ‘war on Terror’ Is Permanent
Glenn Greenwald – The Guardian (U.K.)

Beltway Scandal Machine Breaks, Knows Nothing About America
JOAN WALSH , Editor-at-Large – Salon

Rand Paul: UN has Secret Plot to ‘CONFISCATE and DESTROY ALL’ of America’s Guns
Eric W. Dolan – The Raw Story

Right-wing Radio Host: I Want to Shoot Clinton Right in the Vagina
ERIC W. DOLAN – The Raw Story

And finally let me close the edition with this… What we could do, what we could be… if socially progressive adults who had national wellness as a first priority made policy.

America Needs Denmark’s
Senator Bernie Sanders, (I-Vt) – Reader Supported News

Stephen E. Arnold

Google Implants By 2030?

From Marketplace Tech comes an interesting article on Google Glass and the projections into the future in regards to similar projects. The article, “Google’s Ray Kurzweil on the Computers that will Live in our Brains,” discusses how everything Google puts its hands on is changing how we search, retrieve and interact with information. As in nearly all articles these days discussing Google Glass Ray Kurzweil, the director of engineering at Google, leads the conversation.

Kurzweil posits that we will eventually move beyond devices that simply allow us to look at the world through a keyhole. Instead, he forecasts that people will be online all the time. He projects that devices post-Glass will ultimately be the size of blood cells able to be sent inside the brain and connect to the cloud around the mid-2030’s.

The article tells us more:

“In Kurzweil’s vision, these advances don’t simply bring computers closer to our biological systems. Machines become more like us. ‘Your personality, your skills are contained in information in your neocortex, and it is information,’ Kurzweil says. ‘These technologies will be a million times more powerful in 20 years and we will be able to manipulate the information inside your brain.’ As that data locked up inside our brain becomes searchable, inimitable human qualities suddenly become easier to emulate. Kurzweil denies that the searching and backup up of the brain itself is a bloodless pursuit, depleted of human emotion.”

Artificial intelligence and the melding of biology and machine is increasingly discussed in the media in reference to Google Glass. Will Glass evolve to Google impants? The bigger question is touched upon in this particular article: is it altruistic intentions or advertising that is driving this kind of technology?

Megan Feil, May 20, 2013

Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search

David Swanson

CIA: An Idea Whose Time Has Gone

By David Swanson

There’s a contradiction built into every campaign promise about transparent government beyond the failure to keep the promises.  Our government is, in significant portion, made up of secret operations, operations that include warmaking, kidnapping, torture, assassination, and infiltrating and overthrowing governments.  A growing movement is ready to see that end.

The Central Intelligence Agency is central to our foreign policy, but there is nothing intelligent about it, and there is no good news to be found regarding it.  Its drone wars are humanitarian and strategic disasters.  The piles of cash it keeps delivering to Hamid Karzai fuel corruption, not democracy.  Whose idea was it that secret piles of cash could create democracy? (Nobody’s, of course, democracy being the furthest thing from U.S. goals.)  Lavishing money on potential Russian spies and getting caught helps no one, and not getting caught would have helped no one.  Even scandals that avoid mentioning the CIA, like Benghazigate, are CIA blowback and worse than we’re being told.

We’ve moved from the war on Iraq, about which the CIA lied, and its accompanying atrocities serving as the primary recruiting tool for anti-U.S. terrorists, to the drone wars filling that role.  We’ve moved from kidnapping and torture to kidnapping and torture under a president who, we like to fantasize, doesn’t really mean it.  But the slave-owners who founded this country knew very well what virtually anyone would do if you gave them power, and framed the Constitution so as not to give presidents powers like these.

There are shelves full in your local bookstore of books pointing out the CIA’s outrageous incompetence.  The brilliant idea to give Iran plans for a nuclear bomb in order to prevent Iran from ever developing a nuclear bomb is one of my favorites.

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The attack on science by the Theocratic Right and the corporate interests destroying the earth have done great damage, but finally science is pushing back. We’ll see.

Corporations Are Manufacturing Uncertainty About Scientific Findings. Now Scientists Are Fighting Back.
BILL MOYERS & COMPANY – The Raw Story

300 Million Talons…

Degrowth, Anti-Consumerism and Peak Consumption

Degrowth embraces the ongoing devolution of paid work and wealth that cannot be reversed.The anti-consumerism Degrowth movement is gaining visibility and adherents in Europe. Degrowth (French: décroissance, Spanish: decrecimiento, Italian: decrescita) recognizes that the mindless expansion of mindless consumption fueled by credit and financialization is qualitatively and quantitatively different from positive growth.

Degrowth is based on a number of principles:

1. Consumerism is psychological/spiritual junk food (French: malbouffe) that actively reduces well-being (bien-etre) rather than increases it.

2. Better rather than more: well-being is increased by everything that cannot be commoditized by a market economy or financialized by a cartel-state financial machine– friendship, family, community, self-cultivation–rather than by acquiring more. The goal of economic and social growth should be better, not more. On a national scale, the cancerous-growth measured by gross domestic product (GDP) should be replaced with gross domestic happiness/ gross nation happiness (GNH).

3. A recognition that resources are not infinite, despite claims to the contrary. Even if fossil fuels were infinite and low-cost (cheerleaders never mention costs of extraction and refining or the external costs), fisheries, soil and fresh water are not. For one example of many: China Is Plundering the Planet’s Seas (The Atlantic). Indeed, all the evidence suggests that access to cheap energy only speeds up the depletion and despoliation of every other resource.

4. The unsustainability of consumerist consumption dependent on resource depletion and financialization (i.e. the endless expansion of credit and phantom collateral).

Read full article with video.

Stephen E. Arnold

Google: An Island or a Digital Monaco?

May 19, 2013

After several days of rehash about search, I am running out of energy for topics related to information retrieval. Hello, hello, search today is not much better than it was five years ago. In fact, when it comes to locating high value information, I think we are now regressing.  I took a moment to read “Welcome to Google Island.” It’s a Condé Nate thing. I am okay with trendy writing, but at age 69 I think a trend is a Silent 700 terminal with a fresh roll of thermal paper. There you go, young folks.  The main point of the write up is that Wired found the Google conference in mid May 2013 sort of disconnected from the mainland. I ignored the utopia stuff and I shudder when me too companies do the innovation thing.

Here’s a passage which I marked with my trust yellow highlighter:

“Governments are too focused on democracy and rule of law. On Google Island, we’ve found those things to be distractions. If democracy worked so well, if a majority public opinion made something right, we would still have Jim Crow laws and Google Reader. We believe we can fix the world’s problems with better math. We can tear down the old and rebuild it with the new. Imagine Minecraft. Now imagine it photorealistic, and now imagine yourself living there, or at least, your Google Being living there. We already have the information. All we need is an invitation. This is the inevitable and logical end point of Google Island: a new Google Earth.”  And I realized I believed him. I believed in him, even. Sure, he’s a weird guy living in his own world. But what vision! And I wanted Google to make my world look like its own. And I wanted to give it all my information, about everything in my life, even my most private shameful thoughts. I put the glasses back on, and took off my pants. We stood, naked, before each other with no secrets, no rules, and no shame. And I knew I never wanted to leave Google Island. Even if I could.

I assume that the write up is Swiftian, but with Condé Nast one never really knows.

Several thoughts:

First, we are returning to the walled garden view of technology. Sure, there’s lots of talk about open, but big companies are gunning for lock in.

Second, when outfits operate with sweeping visions, some of the faithful may not follow along. Even cults experience some attrition.

Third, Google is embroiled in a dispute with England over taxes. The fix may be to set up a summit between England’s prime minister and Google’s chairman.

Net net: Google is not an island. Google may be operating more in the Luxembourg or Monaco mode. The prince, I believe, is a strong advocate of the blue fin tuna. And Luxembourg is really into money.

I am not sure the island metaphor is the right one.

Stephen E Arnold, May 19, 2013

Who, Me?

Force protection?  Not at Camp Lejuene.

Victims: Marines failed to safeguard water supply

May 18, 8:24 PM (ET)

By ALLEN G. BREED, MICHAEL BIESECKER and MARTHA WAGGONER

CAMP LEJEUNE, N.C. (AP) – A simple test could have alerted officials that the drinking water at Camp Lejeune was contaminated, long before authorities determined that as many as a million Marines and their families were exposed to a witch’s brew of cancer-causing chemicals.

But no one responsible for the lab at the base can recall that the procedure – mandated by the Navy – was ever conducted.

The U.S. Marine Corps maintains that the carbon chloroform extract (CCE) test would not have uncovered the carcinogens that fouled the southeastern North Carolina base’s water system from at least the mid-1950s until wells were capped in the mid-1980s. But experts say even this “relatively primitive” test – required by Navy health directives as early as 1963 – would have told officials that something was terribly wrong beneath Lejeune’s sandy soil.

A just-released study from the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry cited a February 1985 level for trichloroethylene of 18,900 parts per billion in one Lejeune drinking water well – nearly 4,000 times today’s maximum allowed limit of 5 ppb. Given those kinds of numbers, environmental engineer Marco Kaltofen said even a testing method as inadequate as CCE should have raised some red flags with a “careful analyst.”

“That’s knock-your-socks-off level – even back then,” said Kaltofen, who worked on the infamous Love Canal case in upstate New York, where drums of buried chemical waste leaked toxins into a local water system. “You could have smelled it.”

Biochemist Michael Hargett agrees that CCE, while imperfect, would have been enough to prompt more specific testing in what is now recognized as the worst documented case of drinking-water contamination in the nation’s history

Read full article with photos.