State-Sponsored Commercial Espionage: The Global Theft of Ideas — Larry Romanoff

After digesting its massive theft of ideas, things and people from Operation Paperclip following the end of World War Two, the US wasted no time in designing and implementing the world’s largest network of commercial espionage that has ever existed, and one which still exists in vastly expanded form today – as we saw from the revelations by Edward Snowden....

Today, Echelon attempts to intercept and monitor every communications transaction transmitted by satellite, undersea cables, fiber optic, telephone lines, microwave and more, spying on every nation and, if possible, on every person, on earth. Moreover, it sorts and stores all this information in perpetuity, in the world’s largest database located in the American desert, in Bluffdale, Utah. This is state-sponsored commercial espionage on a global scale, intended primarily to benefit US multinational corporations in their quest for global dominance....

But look over there — China, Huawei. (snark)

Actually, "everyone" (that can) does it."

The US is not the only nation engaging in this activity. According to Robert Gates, a former CIA Director, there are about 20 countries that engage in state-sponsored economic espionage in the US. The worst offender is Israel, followed by France, Russia, and Britain. China is not high on this list....

Bill Totten's Weblog
State-Sponsored Commercial Espionage: The Global Theft of Ideas

Larry Romanoff

Antony C Black — Operation Gladio: The Unholy Alliance … Between the Vatican, the CIA, and the Mafia [Book Review]

What your "deep state" has been up to. No good.

Can Paul L. Williams be believed? On one hand, he has academic credentials. On the other hand, he has been criticized as a conspiracy theorist for alarmist writings on the threat of Islamic terrorism in the US. His book is available for download at Internet Archive here. He provides documentation for his claims, but I have not checked out the sources.

Off Guardian
Operation Gladio: The Unholy Alliance …… Between the Vatican, the CIA, and the Mafia (2015)Overview of Paul L Williams” book
Antony C Black

Related

Peter Radford reviews Walter Scheidel’s “The Great Leveler”, "which gives us a very long period perspective on inequality."

This is a good article on the limitations that academic economics imposes on itself that limit its scope to idealizations about the operation of markets based on stylized facts rather than investigating the actual facts, which extend beyond this scope and are determinative of outcomes that cannot be understood without investigation of the influence of politics and power. Perhaps I am influence by confirmation bias, since I have saying this for a long time here at MNE and it bears me out.

The Radford Free Press
Power: Take Two
Peter Radford

Tom Winter — Historic meeting of Intel Chiefs from Pakistan, Iran, Russia, and China – But why?

Top security and intelligence officials from Pakistan, Iran, Russia, and China held a meeting in Islamabad, where they stressed the need for more active involvement of regional forces in efforts to resolve the conflict in Afghanistan.This is reported by TASS.

On Tuesday, a meeting of leaders of the intelligence services of Russia, Iran, China and Pakistan was held in Islamabad, at which measures were discussed to combat the threat of the reunification of ISIS fighters in Afghanistan....

Not stated in any of the news accounts of this meeting is the likely spur that led to it. Last month the Chief of Iranian General Staff Major General Mohammad Hossein Baqeri accused the US of transferring Daesh terrorists, defeated in Syria and Iraq, into Afghanistan.

Sputnik alike has reported “The US has been accused numerous times of providing various forms of support to Daesh and other terrorist groups, operating in the region....

For Russ

Historic meeting of Intel Chiefs from Pakistan, Iran, Russia, and China – But why?

Tom Winter

See also

Geopolitics Alert
5 Times the US Actively Supported ISIS or Similar Groups (Yes, Actively)

Brandon Stout, former member of the petty-bourgeoisie and is now a class traitor living happily in Detroit, Michigan

Update

Fort Russ
German RT — Historic Islamabad Meeting Of Intel Chiefs, Omitting The US, In The German PressIntelligence services of Russia, Iran, China & Pakistan decide to cooperate in Afghanistan - without the USA
Tom Winter

Peter Van Buren — Christopher Steele: The Real Foreign Influence in the 2016 Election?

His dossier was more than opposition research, it was part of a full-spectrum information operation.

The American Conservative
Christopher Steele: The Real Foreign Influence in the 2016 Election?

Peter Van Buren, 24-year US State Department veteran

Intel Today — British Intelligence Agencies

Backgrounder

Intel Today
British Intelligence Agencies

David V. Gioe — The History of Fake News

Yep, fake news is a staple, manufactured by intel services.

The post is also a valuable lesson in critical thinking and the need for it in a liberal democracy — like American philosopher and educator John Dewey said.

Strategic Culture Foundation
The History of Fake News
David V. Gioe | Assistant Professor of History at the United States Military Academy at West Point, where he also serves as the History Fellow for the Army Cyber Institute. He is a former CIA analyst and operations officer, and he holds a commission as a Foreign Area Officer in the Navy Reserve

Luke Graham — NATO says a 'state actor' was behind the massive ransomware attack and could trigger military response

• NATO says a "state actor" was behind the recent cyberattack.
• The cyberattack could be interpreted as an act of war, triggering Article 5.
• The attack was designed to cause disruption, not to make financial gains, according to experts.

Again, inference without evidence. Belief with a narrative rationale. No trail even. These people are being paid for what exactly?

CNBC
NATO says a 'state actor' was behind the massive ransomware attack and could trigger military response
Luke Graham

Patrick Armstrong — When Intelligence Isn't

What passes for intelligence these days.

Sic Semper Tyrannis
When Intelligence Isn't
Patrick Armstrong

See also

"Anatoly, you will not believe what the idiots proposed to me!" (Dramatization)
Col. W. Patrick Lang, US Army (ret.), former military intelligence officer at the US Defense Intelligence Agency

The Duran
Another story from the Deep State soft coup plotters: Kushner, Flynn and the ‘back channel’ to Russia
Alexander Mercouris

Also

On Thursday, the leaders of NATO member countries met for the first time with President Trump at the NATO summit in Brussels. On the same day, ahead of her trip to Brussels, Angela Merkel met with former US president Barack Obama in Berlin. Polish political analyst Jan Hartman commented to Sputnik on the occasion.…

Sputnik International
No Coincidence: Why Obama Visited Merkel Hours Before Trump Joining NATO Summit

After failing to thwart two terror attacks that have occurred in the U.K. so far this year – both of which were carried out by suspected jihadis who were known to U.K. authorities – intelligence agencies have identified 23,000 potential jihadis living in Britain, according to a report published in the Times of London on Saturday.
The report emerged after U.K. Prime Minster Theresa May downgraded the terror threat to “severe,” after raising it “critical” on Tuesday in the aftermath of the attacks.
Of this 'pool' of potential terrorists, 3,000 are suspected of posing an “imminent threat” and are being investigated accordingly, the Times reports. Meanwhile, the other 20,000 have been involved with past investigation....

Zero Hedge
Intelligence Agencies Admit 23,000 Jihadis Live In Britain; 3,000 Pose "Imminent Threat"

Tyler Durden

Moon of Alabama — Syria - Killing Journos Enabled "Media Activist" Domination - Intended Effect?

As pointed out yesterday, a recent tweet series by Club des Cordeliers made some interesting observation about the #StandWithAleppo propaganda campaign:

The "Stand with Aleppo" campaign in the U.S. was started and is propelled by a Democratic party operative who is also CEO of a public relations company and "strategic affairs consultant" in Chicago, Becky Carroll.

The Cordeliere made some additional remarks on anti-Syria propaganda. These about the U.S. directed Information Warfare campaign from inside Syria. This leads me to the thoughts below about the U.S. waged Unconventional Warfare in Syria and how it may be responsible for the elimination of "neutral" journalists on the ground....

We have to see the killing and kidnapping of journalists as a (secret) part of the arsenal of the Unconventional Warfare and the U.S. created propaganda storm out of Syria.

The same applies to humanitarian Non-Government Organizations. Neither the United Nations, nor the Red Cross or any other neutral NGO had staff in east-Aleppo. Only the MI-6 propaganda outlet SOHR in Coventry provides numbers allegedly sourced from Syria. Only (U.S. trained) "media activists" on the Takfiri site report or tweet from inside east-Aleppo. Only these get interviewed. Only the U.S./UK created and directed "White Helmets" and the French government sponsored Takfiri "Aleppo Media Channel" produce pictures and videos from inside east-Aleppo. As this was the only available information source and sole available audio-visual material it was heavily used by news outlets around the world. It reflected solely the armed oppositions and its sponsors' views and warfare needs.

If one intends to give a maximum effect to the propaganda output of ones proxies in an Information Warfare operation, it makes great sense to eliminate all other potential sources of information from the wider warzone. Thus - the abduction and killing of neutral professional journalists is a conscious process that enables their replacement with ones own Information Warfare assets. I believe we have seen such a process in Syria....

Moon of Alabama

Syria - Killing Journos Enabled "Media Activist" Domination - Intended Effect?

b

See also

The sources for these reports are so-called ‘activists’. Who are they? As far as I know, there was not one single staff reporter for any Western news organisation in eastern Aleppo last week. Not one.

THIS is for the very good reason that they would have been kidnapped and probably murdered. The zone was ruled without mercy by heavily armed Osama Bin Laden sympathisers, who were bombarding the west of the city with powerful artillery (they frequently killed innocent civilians and struck hospitals, since you ask). That is why you never see pictures of armed males in eastern Aleppo, just beautifully composed photographs of handsome young unarmed men lifting wounded children from the rubble, with the light just right....

The Daily Mail
PETER HITCHENS: Amid the bombs of Aleppo, all you can hear are the lies

Geoffrey Smith — Snoopers Gonna Snoop

It’s hard for non-Americans to understand how a country that persistently spies on, and infiltrates the power structures of, even its closest allies can get so extraordinarily bent out of shape when someone tries the same trick back on it.....

Spying and subversion is what powers do to their neighbors and rivals, and woe to those who fail to protect themselves against it. Wasn’t that what the U.S. was telling France and Germany in the wake of Edward’s Snowden’s revelations [about spying on its leaders]? By the same token, if you were Vladimir Putin, and your intelligence services weren’ttrying to manipulate every possible process to Russia’s advantage, you’d wonder what you were paying them for….

The people that rule the country and create the narrative that shapes "reality" there.. In the case of the US,  The rationale runs that because America is "exceptional" and "the indispensable nation" it can do anything it deems necessary to "lead the world." Others have to do what the US says or experience the consequences of stepping out of line, which is tantamount to subverting "freedom and democracy."

Fortune
Snoopers Gonna Snoop
Geoffrey Smith

Carey Wedler — 50 Defense Dept. Whistleblowers Slam “Stalinist” Pentagon Officials For Lying About ISIS

The Pentagon has erupted in “revolt” amid claims from 50 intelligence analysts that senior defense officials manipulated intelligence reports to downplay the severity of the Islamic State’s increasing upper-hand in the Middle East. According to allegations made in an official complaint with the Department of Defense Inspector General, the officers in question doctored reports — among other things — in order to maintain the Pentagon and president’s narrative that the war against the Islamic State, as well as Al Qaeda in Syria, is succeeding. To the contrary, the dissenting analysts — now effectively whistleblowers — have repeatedly attempted to warn that the situation is far more dismal than what authorities are revealing to the public.

“The cancer was within the senior level of the intelligence command,” one defense official told the Daily Beast, which broke the story late Wednesday. Two senior analysts at CENTCOM — the U.S. military’s central command Middle East and Central Asia — filed the formal complaint with the Defense Department’s Inspector General in July (the analysts are formally employed by the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon’s dedicated spy wing).

Other analysts are willing to back up allegations with “concrete examples.” 11 of 50 intelligence analysts spoke anonymously with the Daily Beast, detailing various methods senior defense officials have used to downplay the terrorist groups’ influence and power. This is particularly concerning considering the story told to the public is already pitiful, portraying grave threats to the United States.

In some cases, analysts allege reports that portrayed the war in too negative a light were simply prevented from moving higher up the chain of command. In other cases, they were sent back down to analysts, prompting many to self-censor their reports out of fear of rejection or punitive action.

Most sordid, perhaps, are claims that senior officials blatantly altered reports ”…to be more in line with the Obama administration’s public contention that the fight against ISIS and al Qaeda is making progress.” Additionally, protesting officials told the Daily Beast that “…in some cases key elements of intelligence reports were removed, resulting in a document that didn’t accurately capture the analysts’ conclusions.” They allege “…the reports, some of which were briefed to President Obama, portrayed the terror groups as weaker than the analysts believe they are. The reports were changed by CENTCOM higher-ups to adhere to the administration’s public line that the U.S. is winning the battle against ISIS and al Nusra, al Qaeda’s branch in Syria, the analysts claim.”

Many analysts said that because of these practices, they felt they could not provide an honest, unbiased analysis of the situation in Iraq and Syria — a task they were hired to perform. Others expressed this was because of the career ambitions of high-ranking officials who did not want negative reports about the conflict to compromise their chances of further advancement.…

More fixing intelligence around policy.

AntiMedia
50 Defense Dept. Whistleblowers Slam “Stalinist” Pentagon Officials For Lying About ISIS
Carey Wedler

Phil Butler — The Impossible Truth About MH17

The plot thickens. Is there no information forthcoming from the US and Russian intelligence services since that would reveal capabilities and weaknesses to adversaries?

New Eastern Outlook
The Impossible Truth About MH17

Phil Butler

Alexander Chuikov — Russian Foreign Intelligence chief: Russia is a target because it's a cradle of a new world paradigm

Interview with a Russian intelligence chief.

Fort Russ
Russian Foreign Intelligence chief: Russia is a target because it's a cradle of a new world paradigm

Alexander Chuikov
Original in Russian at Argumenti.RU
Translated by Kristina Rus

Jordan Michael Smith — Vote all you want. The secret government won’t change.

The people we elect aren’t the ones calling the shots, says Tufts University’s Michael Glennon.

More on the deep state.

Glennon’s critique sounds like an outsider’s take, even a radical one. In fact, he is the quintessential insider: He was legal counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a consultant to various congressional committees, as well as to the State Department. “National Security and Double Government” comes favorably blurbed by former members of the Defense Department, State Department, White House, and even the CIA. And he’s not a conspiracy theorist: Rather, he sees the problem as one of “smart, hard-working, public-spirited people acting in good faith who are responding to systemic incentives”—without any meaningful oversight to rein them in. 

How exactly has double government taken hold? And what can be done about it? Glennon spoke with Ideas from his office at Tufts’ Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. This interview has been condensed and edited.

The conclusion.

IDEAS: Do we have any hope of fixing the problem? 

GLENNON: The ultimate problem is the pervasive political ignorance on the part of the American people. And indifference to the threat that is emerging from these concealed institutions. That is where the energy for reform has to come from: the American people. Not from government. Government is very much the problem here. The people have to take the bull by the horns. And that’s a very difficult thing to do, because the ignorance is in many ways rational. There is very little profit to be had in learning about, and being active about, problems that you can’t affect, policies that you can’t change.

The Boston Globe
Vote all you want. The secret government won’t change.
Jordan Michael Smith

Elena Holodny — Former Bank CEO Says He Led A Double Life As A CIA Agent And Hunted Osama Bin Laden

Most bankers spend their days building models on their Excel spreadsheets.

But some of the projects Ed Hale worked on required more gusto. 

Hale, the former chairman and CEO of the First Mariner Bank, revealed that he led a double life as a CIA agent from 1991 to 2001 in an interview on WJZ, a CBS affiliate.
“I was the perfect cover because I was all over the world with my vessels and trucking here in America, so I was the perfect person to take somebody and send them out to Afghanistan, Uzbekistan,” he told WJZ. 

He even "found himself in the early hunt" for Osama Bin Laden toward the end of his involvement with the CIA, according to WJZ. 

“Getting people into places where they could figure out the traces and the pathways of Osama Bin Laden back in the '90s,” Hale said. “I heard his name early on, Osama Bin Laden. I didn’t know who he was. It wasn’t the household name that it became.” 

However, Hale's undercover days are long past. He retired from CIA work over 13 years ago, shortly after 9/11. 

Aside from banking and CIA work, Hale "is credited with developing the Canton Waterfront" in downtown Baltimore. He owns the Baltimore Blast, a professional indoor soccer team.

Makes one wonder who isn't working for the CIA or some intelligence service.

Business Insider
Former Bank CEO Says He Led A Double Life As A CIA Agent And Hunted Osama Bin Laden

Elena Holodny

Tom Engelhardt — The Fourth Branch — The Rise to Power of the National Security State

As every schoolchild knows, there are three check-and-balance branches of the U.S. government: the executive, Congress, and the judiciary. That’s bedrock Americanism and the most basic high school civics material. Only one problem: it’s just not so.

During the Cold War years and far more strikingly in the twenty-first century, the U.S. government has evolved. It sprouted a fourth branch: the national security state, whose main characteristic may be an unquenchable urge to expand its power and reach. Admittedly, it still lacks certain formal prerogatives of governmental power.

Nonetheless, at a time when Congress and the presidency are in a check-and-balance ballet of inactivity that would have been unimaginable to Americans of earlier eras, the Fourth Branch is an ever more unchecked and unbalanced power center in Washington. Curtained off from accountability by a penumbra of secrecy, its leaders increasingly are making nitty-gritty policy decisions and largely doing what they want, a situation illuminated by a recent controversy over the possible release of a Senate report on CIA rendition and torture practices.…

Keep in mind again that we’re still only talking about the overwhelming sense of power of one of the 17 agencies that make up the Intelligence Community, which itself is but part of the far vaster national security state. Just one.…

The Totalitarian State is here as the contemporary Leviathan, the guarantor of "law and order" through extra-constitutional means. This could not happen without the consent of the president and President Obama has just expressed full confidence in CIA chief John Brennan.

TomDispatch
The Fourth Branch — The Rise to Power of the National Security State
Tom Engelhardt
Widely crossposted

See also Conor Friedersdorf, Does John Brennan Know Too Much for Obama to Fire Him?

Washington's Blog — Exclusive: High-Level NSA Whistleblower Says Blackmail Is a Huge – Unreported – Part of Mass Surveillance

Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse. Oh, and turns out it has been going on for a long time. J. Edgar Hoover was a master at it, and Harry Truman denounced it specifically. Yukky.

Exclusive: High-Level NSA Whistleblower Says Blackmail Is a Huge – Unreported – Part of Mass Surveillance
Washington's Blog

Mike Masnick — Nancy Pelosi Admits That Congress Is Scared Of The CIA

Pelosi: "You don’t fight it without a price because they come after you and they don’t always tell the truth."

Nothing new. All politicians including presidents were intimidated by FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover.

techdirt
Nancy Pelosi Admits That Congress Is Scared Of The CIA
Mike Masnick

Jon Perr — For Obama, Chickens Come Home to Roost on Bush Torture Program

George W. Bush and Dick Cheney must be laughing their asses off. President Obama has a budding constitutional crisis on his hands, with a leading Senate Democrat accusing Obama's CIA director of spying on Intelligence Committee staff. But at the heart of the issue is a still-classified, 6,000 page report said to catalog abuses and deceptions perpetrated by the Central Intelligence Agency as part of President Bush's program of so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques." Which means that five years after he put an end to Bush's regime of detainee torture, Barack Obama is facing the blowback from his decision to leave its architects unpunished.

PERRspectives

For Obama, Chickens Come Home to Roost on Bush Torture Program
Jon Perr

It's impossible that President Obama actually put an end to Bush's regime of detainee torture other than in PR if he has seen to it that no one is punished. That just means that the reign of torture goes back underground where it had been for decades. Now it not politically correct to publicize it anymore. Have the CIA and related sub rosa services running black ops been reined in? No way. And it is President Obama's responsibility.

Thom Hartmann — Is It Time for a New Church Committee?

Between 1975 and 1976, the Church Committee published fourteen reports on intelligence gathering abuses by U.S. intelligence agencies.

In August of 1975, the Church Committee released its findings.

Senator Church went on NBC's Meet the Press after the findings were released, and said that, "In the need to develop a capacity to know what potential enemies are doing, the United States government has perfected a technological capability that enables us to monitor the messages that go through the air. Now, that is necessary and important to the United States as we look abroad at enemies or potential enemies. We must know, at the same time, that capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left such is the capability to monitor everything—telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter. There would be no place to hide."

Church added that, "I don't want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return."

Truthout | Op-Ed
Is It Time for a New Church Committee?
Thom Hartmann, The Daily Take, The Thom Hartmann Program