NSA

Since the NSO / Pegasus investigation broke there are now 18 high end global media outlets that are working in consortium to track the story and the fallout. They have the data, and we rely on them. This is a very different set of circumstances than the Snowden revelations eight years ago. With that story, only two outlets had real access. Those outlets were firmly dealt with by the Anglo American intelligence community.

Hoping to bury the scandal of outright election fraud the Iowa Democratic Party waited until the country was settling in for Trump's yearly state of his campaign address to Congress and the mandatory publicity stunts that accompany such theater to announce some of the results of their failed caucus. 40% of precincts had reported by 5pm eastern time yesterday, February 5th. Two hours later it was 60%. As of the time of this writing 20 hours later the Guardian UK is showing a barely interactive map with 70.82% of precincts reporting.

Children born 18 years ago this week have lived their whole lives with their country at war. They are old enough to enlist without parental consent and according to CDC birth records there are enough of them, 362,000, to completely replace the active duty component of the Marine Corps, 181,000 twice That number does not account for the United State's leadership of the developed world in infant mortality, which would place the number at 344,000, or not quite enough to double the size of the Marine Corps but still larger than the Air Force.

Yesterday, October 15th, Google announced a new partnership with privately run and partially state owned French telecom giant Orange to build a new transatlantic cable. Far from being a snub to the Brexit befuddled United Kingdom, the partnership creates a host of new surveillance opportunities in Eastern Europe, Africa, Spain and France itself. This will greatly expand Google's usefulness to global surveillance by the five eyes nations (US, UK, Australia Canada and New Zealand) through their already developing infrastructure level projects.

Bloomberg Businessweek broke a major story today, which they split up into three articles so far, about a long term Chinese military intelligence operation that compromised the security of 30 American companies including Apple and Amazon, DoD data centers, and some CIA drone operations. The People's liberation army had somehow managed to sneak a chip with security back doors into the manufacture of servers for large data farms.

The Center-Right wing of the Democratic party has maintained that Russian intelligence hacked the something or everything that was responsible for the 2016 election loss of the presidency. They began this tirade of misrepresentation before the actual Democratic National Convention. When Hillary Clinton proved unpalatable to the actual Democratic base as opposed to moderated Republicans and this translated into her narrow defeat last November the unverified claims became so-called “Russian Election Hacking.”

On June 5th of this year the Intercept published a report that included leaked documents from the NSA, as the Intercept has done with Edward Snowden's leaks and others. The report detailed an alleged attempt by Russian intelligence to gain access to computers used for email purposes by an American manufacturer of election equipment. Later that same day, an NSA contract employee, former Senior Airwoman Reality Winner, was arrested for leaking to the media. She is being held without bail.

A Roomba is one of the cutest things the internet put a cat on. This article was delayed by an endless parade of cat playing with roomba videos, dog barking a roomba videos, and plain old cat videos because the author likes cats. Beneath the feline powered viral marketing campaign there is a hidden agenda and that agenda is as bad for you and your privacy as feeding a gremlin after dark or making bed from living tribbles.

“Subject to paragraph (3), the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation or a designee of the Director (whose rank shall be no lower than Assistant Special Agent in Charge) may make an application for an order requiring the production of any tangible things (including books, records, papers, documents, and other items) for an investigation to obtain foreign intelligence information not concerning a United States person or to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities, provided that such investigation of a United States person is not conducted solely

The shortest answer is very few new things at first glance. Second answer, there is at least one gem – which is there is still a domestic spying effort. Third answer, all of Uncle Sam's children share their toys with one another, work together, operate domestically and invited their British friends. The mainstream press, lead by the government owned NPR, was quick to say “The NSA collected American data; no evidence the CIA is doing so.” when discussing how the leak wast less revealing then being “Snowden 2.0.”