To be sure, when liberals hear about Snowden’s revelation, they’ll be quick to call him a liar, or claim he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, and to that my response is simple: Let’s take a look at:
Let’s see how his credibility holds up, and then revisit whether we can trust him to tell the truth or not afterward…
MAGE: BARTON GELLMAN/GETTY IMAGES
Back in 2013, the Guardian published its first bombshell story
based on leaked top-secret documents showing that the National Security
Agency was spying on American citizens. At the time, journalist Glenn
Greenwald and the Guardian never mentioned that they had a
treasure trove of other NSA documents, nor that they came from one
person. Then three days later, the source surprisingly unmasked himself: His name was Edward Snowden.
Journalist Glenn Greenwald and the Guardian won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting based on Snowden’s information.
Image: John Minchillo/Associated Press
When asked if
more revelations were in the pipeline, Greenwald always used to respond
that yes, many more were coming — and he wasn’t kidding. Over the next
year, explosive stories began to trickle out of those documents. Here
are the top 10 revelations of the year.
1. Secret court orders allow NSA to sweep up Americans’ phone records
The very first story revealed
that Verizon had been providing the NSA with virtually all of its
customers’ phone records. It soon was revealed that it wasn’t just
Verizon, but virtually every other telephone company in America.
This revelation
is still one of the most controversial ones. Privacy advocates have
challenged the legality of the program in court, and one Judge deemed the program unconstitutional and “almost Orwellian,” while another one ruled it legal.
The uproar caused by this first story has led President Barack Obama to endorse a reform to the program, and the House of Representatives to pass the first law that tries to change it.
2. PRISM
The existence of PRISM
was the second NSA bombshell, coming less than 24 hours after the first
one. Initially, reports described PRISM as the NSA’s program to
directly access the servers of U.S tech giants like Google, Facebook,
Microsoft and Apple, among others.
Its reality was slightly different.
PRISM, we soon learned, was less less evil than first thought. In reality, the NSA doesn’t have direct access to the servers, but can request user data from the companies, which are compelled by law to comply.
PRISM was perhaps as controversial as the first NSA scoop, prompting technology companies to first deny any knowledge of it, then later fight
for the right to be more transparent about government data requests.
The companies ended up partially winning that fight, getting the
government to ease some restrictions and allow for more transparency.
3. Britain’s version of the NSA taps fiber optic cables around the world
The British spy
agency, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), taps fiber
optic cables all over the world to intercept data flowing through the
global Internet, we learned. The GCHQ works closely with the NSA,
sharing data and intelligence in a program that’s codenamed Tempora.
Tempora is one of the key NSA/GCHQ programs, allowing the spy agencies to collect vasts troves of data,
but for some reason, it has sometimes been overlooked. After a couple
of months from the Tempora revelation, a German newspaper revealed
the names of the companies that collaborate with the GCHQ in the
Tempora program: Verizon Business, British Telecommunications, Vodafone
Cable, Global Crossing, Level 3, Viatel and Interoute.
4. NSA spies on foreign countries and world leaders
U.S. President
Barack Obama, right, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel are seated
together at a G7 dinner in Brussels, on June 4. Their relationship has
been tense since reports revealed that the NSA tapped Merkel’s phone.
Image: Charles Dharapak/Associated Press
Over the
months, countless stories based on Snowden documents have revealed that
the NSA has spied on numerous world leaders and foreign governments.
The German newsweekly Der Spiegel revealed that the NSA targets at least 122 world leaders.
Other stories over the past years have named specific targets like German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Brazil’s President Dilma Roussef, and Mexico’s former President Felipe Calderon, the French Foreign Ministry, as well as leaders at the 2010 G8 and G20 summits in Toronto.
5. XKeyscore, the program that sees everything
XKeyscore
is a tool the NSA uses to search “nearly everything a user does on the
Internet” through data it intercepts across the world. In leaked documents, the NSA describes it as the “widest-reaching” system to search through Internet data.
6. NSA efforts to crack encryption and undermine Internet security
Encryption
makes data flowing through the Internet unreadable to hackers and spies,
making the NSA’s surveillance programs less useful. What’s the point of
tapping fiber optic cables if the data flowing through them is
unreadable? That’s why the NSA has a developed a series of techniques and tricks to circumvent widely used web encryption technologies.
The NSA,
however, isn’t able to compromise the encryption algorithms underlying
these technologies. Instead, it circumvents or undermines them, forcing
companies to install backdoors, hacking into servers and computers, or
promoting the use weaker algorithms.
In any case, technologists were alarmed.
“Even as the
NSA demands more powers to invade our privacy in the name of
cybersecurity, it is making the Internet less secure and exposing us to
criminal hacking, foreign espionage, and unlawful surveillance. The
NSA’s efforts to secretly defeat encryption are recklessly shortsighted
and will further erode not only the United States’ reputation as a
global champion of civil liberties and privacy but the economic
competitiveness of its largest companies,” Christopher Soghoian,
principal technologist at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said
at the time.
7. NSA elite hacking team techniques revealed
The NSA has at
its disposal an elite hacker team codenamed “Tailored Access Operations”
(TAO) that hacks into computers worldwide, infects them with malware and does the dirty job when other surveillance tactics fail.
Der Spiegel, which detailed
TAO’s secrets, labelled it as “a squad of plumbers that can be called
in when normal access to a target is blocked.” But they can probably be
best described as the NSA’s black bag operations team.
TAO comes in
for specific, targeted operations when the NSA can’t find intelligence
or needs more detailed information on a target through its bulk
surveillance programs. Before Snowden, most of their operations and
techniques were shrouded in secrecy, and their secrets make for one of
the most fascinating revelations.
8. NSA cracks Google and Yahoo data center links
When bulk collection or PRISM fails, the NSA had other tricks up its sleeve: It could infiltrate links connecting Yahoo and Google data centers, behind the companies’ backs.
This revelation was made famous mostly by a Power Point slide that included a celebratory smiley face.
This story truly enraged the tech companies, which reacted with much more fury than before. Google and Yahoo announced
plans to strengthen and encrypt those links to avoid this kind of
surveillance, and a Google security employee even said on his Google+ account what many others must have thought privately: “Fu** these guys.”
9. NSA collects text messages
It’s not just about Internet data though. The NSA, following its unofficial motto of “collecting it all,” intercepts 200 million text messages every day worldwide through a program called Dishfire.
In leaked documents, the agency described the collected messages as a “gold mine to exploit” for all kinds of personal data.
Here is what the NSA automatically extract from text messages *every day*: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/16/nsa-collects-millions-text-messages-daily-untargeted-global-sweep …
— James Ball (@jamesrbuk) 2:18 PM – 16 Jan 2014
Other documents
also revealed that the NSA can “easily” crack cell phone encryption,
allowing the agency to more easily decode and access the content of
intercepted calls and text messages.
10. NSA intercepts all phone calls in two countries
The NSA intercepts and stores all phone calls made in the Bahamas and Afghanistan through a program called MYSTIC, which has its own snazzy logo.
The Bahamas was revealed by The Intercept, Greenwald’s new website, while the second was revealed by WikiLeaks, which protested The Intercept‘s decision to withhold the second country’s name.
The NSA also collects all phone calls’ metadata in Mexico, Kenya and the Philippines.
(H/T to the site Free Snowden, which has an extensive and detailed list of all the NSA revelations.)
Liberals and global warming theorists would love to have all of us believing the earth is warming
at a rapid rate and we are the cause of it. They want to blame our
“carbon footprints” for the melting of the polar caps and have tried
relentlessly for decades to push this agenda as a reason to ration
energy production and consumption and generally control every act of our
lives.
Recent data compiled by Real Climate Science may finally put some of those outlandish ideas to rest. The group recently analyzed data released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, claiming that 2015 was the “hottest year ever.”
They included a
graph explaining a 58-year-long radiosonde temperature record. However,
their graph only showed the last 37 years — and the reason why
explained just what a hoax global warming is.
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Simply put, the
full NOAA data set showed as much pre-1979 cooling as is did post-1979
warming. In addition, NOAA’s recently released data showed about 0.5C
warming from 1979 to 2010. However, the original data showed almost one
full degree of warming from 1979 to 2010.
Absurd liberal issues like
this one never seem to go away because liberals leave out pertinent
information and fudge numbers until they are able to craft a scenario
that fits their agenda — and then and only then do they publish their
data.
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However, it’s difficult to argue with facts, and most thinking people understand just what a hoax global warming is.
Watch Nobel laureate Ivar Giaever debunk global warming at the Nobel Laureates meeting in July 2015:
We don’t expect
this evidence to change how liberals approach this topic. After all,
scientists and other experts have hidden clear evidence against global warming
for years. They have too much money, too much career and too much of
their anti-capitalism agenda invested in the scheme to give up now.
The truth is
that without this “issue,” liberals wouldn’t have nearly as much
justification to control our lives and fight against the use of fossil
fuel, all in the name of saving the planet.
H/T teaparty.org
BUT… WHY STOP THERE? WE CAN KEEP GOING…
DID YOU KNOW THE FOUNDER OF GREENPEACE SAYS ITS A HOAX TOO?
GREENPEACE FOUNDER, PATRICK MOORE PhD SUGGESTS YOU FOLLOW THE MONEY….
The Brewster writes:
Who has better,
longer, more grounded, credentials than Patrick Moore? One of the
original founders of Greenpeace who left that organization when they
started lurching (no referrence to John Kerry there) to the left. The
group became highly politicized, and funded by the giga-dollars of the
uber-left. The video below is Mr. Moore PhD discussing the flawed,
non-science this highly politicized theory is. How it is more like a
cult, and is based on assumptions, grant money, opinion, coercion, the
stigmatizing (gaslighting) of “deniers”…and while all the previous does
represent many words, there resides how many actual facts in any of them
when acted out by the left? Zero.
The rabid
red-faced global-warming cultist alarmists, like Al Gumshoe Gore, would
like you to believe that it’s Great Big Oil, That Megalithic, Monolithic
Colossal Money Machine who Control the Universe and they, the tiny
green, care about you and nothing else, tree-hugging, lovers of all life
except humans, flower sniffing, non-selfish, ever-gregarious mice, are
the underdogs. Are they? No.
It is they who
are seriously, ridiculously funded, institutionally funded, government
funded, billionaire funded, multi-national funded. Their funds and
influence dwarf anything big oil could even consider coming up with. The
US Government is also in on the act, along with governments of many
other countries.
It is they who
are the giants, we who are the duped populace, and the solutions to this
imaginary problem, will make these insatiable giants, even stronger and
more controlling than they already are.
As usual, follow the money. It’s an oft learned, repetitious thing, which is demonstrated every day in many ways.
Below the video
is what The Examiner reveals about the funding of the cult called
Global-warming/Climate Change. But first, here’s Patrick Moore PhD.
The “Kill
Keystone XL” crowd isn’t little David up against a Big Oil Goliath. As
usual, conventional wisdom isn’t wisdom when the mainstream media ask
all the wrong questions with commensurate answers.
Behemoth Big Green outstrips Big Oil in expendable revenue by orders of magnitude — if you know how to follow the money.
They would
never discover that the American Petroleum Institute’s IRS Form 990 for
the most recent year showed $237.9 million in assets while the Natural
Resources Defense Council reported $241.8 million.
Nor would they
discover who started the anti-Keystone campaign in the first place. It
was the $789 million Rockefeller Brothers Fund (established in 1940).
The fund’s program is elaborated in a 2008 PowerPoint presentation
called “The Tar Sands Campaign” by program officer Michael Northrop, who
set up coordination and funding for a dozen environmental and
anti-corporate attack groups to use the strategy, “raise the negatives,
raise the costs, slow down and stop infrastructure, and stop pipelines.”
Tom Steyer’s $100 million solo act is naive underclass nouveau cheap by
comparison.
Read More
Here is another
very interesting article about a group of scientists who say that all
of this Global-warming/Climate change alarmism is:
“based on a string of inferences that begins with the assumptions”
A very
interesting read. Of course they’re a bunch of flat earthers too, just
like Patrick Moore, and every other person who realizes what a
totalitarian wannabe bunch of freaks the global warming crowd and their
government cohorts are. As usual, they desire you check with them, check
your brain at the door, and check out from reality, but not necessarily
in that order.
FINALLY,
IF YOU REALLY WANT TO GET OBNOXIOUS, THE FOLLOWING FOUR PART SERIES
DONE BY GLENN BECK WHEN HE WAS ON FOX IS ABSOLUTELY BRILLIANT.
Apparently Media Matters does
their best in some Youtube video to debunk Beck, but seriously? Media
Matters? The same group that stormed Trump’s rally with financing from
Communist billionaire George Soros? Give me a break. Snowden and
everyone above is batting 1000. Stick with the winners.
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