The 2013 Obama Scandal omnibus thread- Benghazi, IRS, AP, EPA, Congressional cloak room

I'm surprised no one is also focusing on what the Wired article mentioned as well, which is not just the storage capabilities of this facility, but the fact that they have possibly created a supercomputer that is able to break the encryption standards currently in use. In the article, it is said that they made a big breakthrough. From an engineering standpoint, I find this fascinating as I love the subject of computer architecture.

 

I also think that if the technology exists to build such a machine, our government should have it, because otherwise the Chinese and/or Russians will eventually get something like it. BUT, such a machine with such massive storage and code-cracking capabilities (especially if it can read all sorts of stuff thought to be unbreakable) requires immense responsibility on the part of the users.

 

Like a real-life version of Batman's machine from The Dark Knight.

 

Too late.

 

 

The Tianhe-2

A Chinese university has built the world's fastest supercomputer, almost doubling the speed of the U.S. machine that previously claimed the top spot and underlining China's rise as a science and technology powerhouse.

 

 

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-205_162-575897...worlds-fastest/

Too late.

 

 

 

 

 

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-205_162-575897...worlds-fastest/

 

Perhaps fasted "known" US computer.

Perhaps fasted "known" US computer.

 

Touche

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/jun/21/g...munications-nsa

 

 

GCHQ taps fibre-optic cables for secret access to world's communications

 

Exclusive: British spy agency collects and stores vast quantities of global email messages, Facebook posts, internet histories and calls, and shares them with NSA, latest documents from Edward Snowden reveal

 

Britain's spy agency GCHQ has secretly gained access to the network of cables which carry the world's phone calls and internet traffic and has started to process vast streams of sensitive personal information which it is sharing with its American partner, the National Security Agency (NSA).

 

The sheer scale of the agency's ambition is reflected in the titles of its two principal components: Mastering the Internet and Global Telecoms Exploitation, aimed at scooping up as much online and telephone traffic as possible. This is all being carried out without any form of public acknowledgement or debate.

 

One key innovation has been GCHQ's ability to tap into and store huge volumes of data drawn from fibre-optic cables for up to 30 days so that it can be sifted and analysed. That operation, codenamed Tempora, has been running for some 18 months.

 

GCHQ and the NSA are consequently able to access and process vast quantities of communications between entirely innocent people, as well as targeted suspects.

 

This includes recordings of phone calls, the content of email messages, entries on Facebook and the history of any internet user's access to websites – all of which is deemed legal, even though the warrant system was supposed to limit interception to a specified range of targets.

 

The existence of the programme has been disclosed in documents shown to the Guardian by the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden as part of his attempt to expose what he has called "the largest programme of suspicionless surveillance in human history".

 

"It's not just a US problem. The UK has a huge dog in this fight," Snowden told the Guardian. "They [GCHQ] are worse than the US."

 

However, on Friday a source with knowledge of intelligence argued that the data was collected legally under a system of safeguards, and had provided material that had led to significant breakthroughs in detecting and preventing serious crime.

 

Britain's technical capacity to tap into the cables that carry the world's communications – referred to in the documents as special source exploitation – has made GCHQ an intelligence superpower.

 

By 2010, two years after the project was first trialled, it was able to boast it had the "biggest internet access" of any member of the Five Eyes electronic eavesdropping alliance, comprising the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

 

UK officials could also claim GCHQ "produces larger amounts of metadata than NSA". (Metadata describes basic information on who has been contacting whom, without detailing the content.)

 

By May last year 300 analysts from GCHQ, and 250 from the NSA, had been assigned to sift through the flood of data.

 

The Americans were given guidelines for its use, but were told in legal briefings by GCHQ lawyers: "We have a light oversight regime compared with the US".

 

When it came to judging the necessity and proportionality of what they were allowed to look for, would-be American users were told it was "your call".

 

The Guardian understands that a total of 850,000 NSA employees and US private contractors with top secret clearance had access to GCHQ databases.

 

The documents reveal that by last year GCHQ was handling 600m "telephone events" each day, had tapped more than 200 fibre-optic cables and was able to process data from at least 46 of them at a time.

Each of the cables carries data at a rate of 10 gigabits per second, so the tapped cables had the capacity, in theory, to deliver more than 21 petabytes a day – equivalent to sending all the information in all the books in the British Library 192 times every 24 hours.

 

And the scale of the programme is constantly increasing as more cables are tapped and GCHQ data storage facilities in the UK and abroad are expanded with the aim of processing terabits (thousands of gigabits) of data at a time.

 

For the 2 billion users of the world wide web, Tempora represents a window on to their everyday lives, sucking up every form of communication from the fibre-optic cables that ring the world.

 

The NSA has meanwhile opened a second window, in the form of the Prism operation, revealed earlier this month by the Guardian, from which it secured access to the internal systems of global companies that service the internet.

 

The GCHQ mass tapping operation has been built up over five years by attaching intercept probes to transatlantic fibre-optic cables where they land on British shores carrying data to western Europe from telephone exchanges and internet servers in north America.

 

This was done under secret agreements with commercial companies, described in one document as "intercept partners".

 

The papers seen by the Guardian suggest some companies have been paid for the cost of their co-operation and GCHQ went to great lengths to keep their names secret. They were assigned "sensitive relationship teams" and staff were urged in one internal guidance paper to disguise the origin of "special source" material in their reports for fear that the role of the companies as intercept partners would cause "high-level political fallout".

 

The source with knowledge of intelligence said on Friday the companies were obliged to co-operate in this operation. They are forbidden from revealing the existence of warrants compelling them to allow GCHQ access to the cables.

 

"There's an overarching condition of the licensing of the companies that they have to co-operate in this. Should they decline, we can compel them to do so. They have no choice."

 

The source said that although GCHQ was collecting a "vast haystack of data" what they were looking for was "needles".

 

"Essentially, we have a process that allows us to select a small number of needles in a haystack. We are not looking at every piece of straw. There are certain triggers that allow you to discard or not examine a lot of data so you are just looking at needles. If you had the impression we are reading millions of emails, we are not. There is no intention in this whole programme to use it for looking at UK domestic traffic – British people talking to each other," the source said.

 

He explained that when such "needles" were found a log was made and the interception commissioner could see that log.

 

"The criteria are security, terror, organised crime. And economic well-being. There's an auditing process to go back through the logs and see if it was justified or not. The vast majority of the data is discarded without being looked at … we simply don't have the resources."

 

However, the legitimacy of the operation is in doubt. According to GCHQ's legal advice, it was given the go-ahead by applying old law to new technology. The 2000 Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa) requires the tapping of defined targets to be authorised by a warrant signed by the home secretary or foreign secretary.

 

However, an obscure clause allows the foreign secretary to sign a certificate for the interception of broad categories of material, as long as one end of the monitored communications is abroad. But the nature of modern fibre-optic communications means that a proportion of internal UK traffic is relayed abroad and then returns through the cables.

 

Parliament passed the Ripa law to allow GCHQ to trawl for information, but it did so 13 years ago with no inkling of the scale on which GCHQ would attempt to exploit the certificates, enabling it to gather and process data regardless of whether it belongs to identified targets.

 

The categories of material have included fraud, drug trafficking and terrorism, but the criteria at any one time are secret and are not subject to any public debate. GCHQ's compliance with the certificates is audited by the agency itself, but the results of those audits are also secret.

 

An indication of how broad the dragnet can be was laid bare in advice from GCHQ's lawyers, who said it would be impossible to list the total number of people targeted because "this would be an infinite list which we couldn't manage".

 

There is an investigatory powers tribunal to look into complaints that the data gathered by GCHQ has been improperly used, but the agency reassured NSA analysts in the early days of the programme, in 2009: "So far they have always found in our favour".

 

Historically, the spy agencies have intercepted international communications by focusing on microwave towers and satellites. The NSA's intercept station at Menwith Hill in North Yorkshire played a leading role in this. One internal document quotes the head of the NSA, Lieutenant General Keith Alexander, on a visit to Menwith Hill in June 2008, asking: "Why can't we collect all the signals all the time? Sounds like a good summer project for Menwith."

 

By then, however, satellite interception accounted for only a small part of the network traffic. Most of it now travels on fibre-optic cables, and the UK's position on the western edge of Europe gave it natural access to cables emerging from the Atlantic.

 

The data collected provides a powerful tool in the hands of the security agencies, enabling them to sift for evidence of serious crime. According to the source, it has allowed them to discover new techniques used by terrorists to avoid security checks and to identify terrorists planning atrocities. It has also been used against child exploitation networks and in the field of cyberdefence.

 

It was claimed on Friday that it directly led to the arrest and imprisonment of a cell in the Midlands who were planning co-ordinated attacks; to the arrest of five Luton-based individuals preparing acts of terror, and to the arrest of three London-based people planning attacks prior to the Olympics.

 

As the probes began to generate data, GCHQ set up a three-year trial at the GCHQ station in Bude, Cornwall. By the summer of 2011, GCHQ had probes attached to more than 200 internet links, each carrying data at 10 gigabits a second. "This is a massive amount of data!" as one internal slideshow put it. That summer, it brought NSA analysts into the Bude trials. In the autumn of 2011, it launched Tempora as a mainstream programme, shared with the Americans.

 

The intercept probes on the transatlantic cables gave GCHQ access to its special source exploitation. Tempora allowed the agency to set up internet buffers so it could not simply watch the data live but also store it – for three days in the case of content and 30 days for metadata.

 

"Internet buffers represent an exciting opportunity to get direct access to enormous amounts of GCHQ's special source data," one document explained.

 

The processing centres apply a series of sophisticated computer programmes in order to filter the material through what is known as MVR – massive volume reduction. The first filter immediately rejects high-volume, low-value traffic, such as peer-to-peer downloads, which reduces the volume by about 30%. Others pull out packets of information relating to "selectors" – search terms including subjects, phone numbers and email addresses of interest. Some 40,000 of these were chosen by GCHQ and 31,000 by the NSA. Most of the information extracted is "content", such as recordings of phone calls or the substance of email messages. The rest is metadata.

 

The GCHQ documents that the Guardian has seen illustrate a constant effort to build up storage capacity at the stations at Cheltenham, Bude and at one overseas location, as well a search for ways to maintain the agency's comparative advantage as the world's leading communications companies increasingly route their cables through Asia to cut costs. Meanwhile, technical work is ongoing to expand GCHQ's capacity to ingest data from new super cables carrying data at 100 gigabits a second. As one training slide told new users: "You are in an enviable position – have fun and make the most of it."

 

 

 

Damn I think we have to start communicating in "code"

 

 

http://m.washingtonpost.com/world/national...94cc_story.html

"Charged with spying for revealing spying?"

 

"The dude reveals spying information without authorization, public is informed of his charge of spying by anonymous officials speaking without authorization."

https://mobile.twitter.com/ggreenwald/statu...202448437002240

And it's in a sealed complaint. All apart of Obamas transparent government.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/jun/21/g...munications-nsa

 

I knew when I saw the letters "GCHQ" that it had to be some British intelligence agency. Way too fancy sounding for an American agency.

Too late.

 

 

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-205_162-575897...worlds-fastest/

 

Yeah, the NSA one is classified though. No one knows its true capabilities. The U.S. and China are continually competing in the "civilian" supercomputer arena.

"We are the ones Orwell was waiting for."

Damn I think we have to start communicating in "code"

 

It's the best way to talk.

 

 

http://m.cnsnews.com/news/article/irs-sent...atlanta-address

 

Poor oversight by the Internal Revenue Service allowed workers to use agency credit cards to buy wine for an expensive luncheon, dorky swag for managers' meetings and, for one employee, romance novels and diet pills, an agency watchdog said Tuesday.

 

Two IRS credit cards were used to buy online pornography, though the employees said the cards were stolen. One of the workers reported five agency credit cards lost or stolen.

 

IRS employees used agency credit cards to make more than 273,000 purchases totaling nearly $108 million in 2010 and 2011, according to the report by the Treasury inspector general for tax administration.

 

The vast majority of those purchases were legitimate, the report said. However, the report said the IRS has inadequate controls to prevent inappropriate purchases.

 

For example, investigators found that one IRS employee spent $2,655 on diet pills, romance novels, steaks, a smartphone and baby-related items, including bottles, games and clothes. The case was referred to the IG's office that investigates employee misconduct, the report said.

 

Among other "improper" purchases identified by the inspector general:

 

_ $3,152 to rent a popcorn machine and to buy prizes for an employee event, including bandanas, stuffed animals, sunglasses and stovepipe hats.

 

_ $418 for novelty decorations and swag at managers' meetings, including kazoos, bathtub toys and "Thomas the Tank Engine" wristbands.

 

_ $119 for Nerf footballs that were never used and were found stored in a filing cabinet.

 

"Inadequate procedures to identify, report and address inappropriate use leaves the IRS purchase card program vulnerable to repeated violations of applicable laws and regulations," said J. Russell George, the Treasury inspector general for tax administration.

 

The report comes as the IRS faces intense scrutiny over agents targeting conservative groups for additional scrutiny when they applied for tax-exempt status. Documents released Monday show that liberal and progressive groups were singled out, too.

 

Also, the inspector general released a report earlier this month that detailed lavish spending at employee conferences. In all, the agency spent nearly $50 million on employee conferences from 2010 through 2012.

 

"Clearly, any inappropriate card use impacts our bottom line and is cause for concern," said acting IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel, who took over the agency last month. "Wasteful spending cannot be tolerated, and any employees found to be abusing the system will be held accountable. In fact, we are following up on several inappropriate incidents mentioned in the report, ranging from internal actions to criminal charges."

 

"That said, more than 99.75 percent of IRS purchases adhered to the rules," Werfel added. "The IRS has made important progress over the past two years in strengthening the controls in our purchase card program. We are committed to protecting taxpayer resources, and we will take quick action to implement all of TIGTA's recommendations."

 

The new report highlighted a 2010 conference in Washington for tax officials from other countries. At a luncheon, the IRS bought 28 bottles of wine _ for 41 guests, the report said. A dinner at the conference cost the agency $140 a person, four times the allowable government rate at the time.

 

In all, the agency spent more than $50,000 on meals, receptions and meetings at the five-day conference, the report said. Agency credit cards were used for about $12,500 of the purchases.

 

"It is important to note that the luncheon described in the report took place in 2010 for an international business meeting of tax officials from several of the world's largest countries. This meeting is an important forum for international leaders on major tax issues," Werfel said. "However, given the excessive purchases for the luncheon, I am directing the IRS business units to more closely review spending in advance for any similar events to ensure all spending is appropriate."

 

The IRS participates in the General Services Administration's SmartPay purchase card program. Under the program, agency employees can use purchase cards, which act like credit cards, to buy work-related items. The maximum amount for an individual purchase is $3,000.

 

More expensive items are subject to competitive pricing policies.

 

In 2010 and 2011, internal controls at the IRS found 327 cases in which employees divided their purchases to skirt the $3,000 limit. The inspector general's office found an additional 34 cases. In all, the purchases totaled $493,000, the report said.

 

The report said 94 employees were responsible for the purchases, including 22 workers who had done it more than once in a six-month period. However, the report said, none of the employees were disciplined.

 

As for the two IRS employees whose cards were used to buy pornography, the inspector general's report didn't determine who bought the material or whether their cards were actually stolen. One of the employees is no longer at the agency. The IG is continuing to investigate the other employee, the report said.

 

http://www.breitbart.com/system/wire/DA7512Q00

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/01/g..._n_3528249.html

 

 

 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/01/g..._n_3528249.html

 

 

 

 

Love the last 60 seconds of the video, wonder how he likes his crow...

 

 

http://hotair.com/archives/2013/07/17/sen-...l-transactions/

Obama administration says NSA spying cannot be challenged in court.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/07/s...oping-standing/

Ive been watching HBO'S newsroom and this clip was from the episode I watched last night..

This episode aired over a year ago.

pretty ironic now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeztenbI4T8

Ive been watching HBO'S newsroom and this clip was from the episode I watched last night..

This episode aired over a year ago.

pretty ironic now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeztenbI4T8

I love the newsroom!

Ive been watching HBO'S newsroom and this clip was from the episode I watched last night..

This episode aired over a year ago.

pretty ironic now.

 

 

Love that show. And that was great episode and complete relevant to all this crap.

 

Have you started the new season yet?

Love that show. And that was great episode and complete relevant to all this crap.

 

Have you started the new season yet?

I've got HBOGO on my phone and a camping trip this weekend,so I'm going to watch thr first couple episodes!

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/20...searches/67864/

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/20...searches/67864/

 

Saw that. Disgusting and shameless to say the least. Not to mention they are doing it 100 times a WEEK! That's 5,200 'visits' a year. Obscene.