The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) wants to track the vast networks of journalists, bloggers and other “media influencers” through a massive, searchable database that will allow them to monitor “any and all” trends in real time, according to a publicly posted job listing.
Apparently the NSA doesn’t share their toys with DHS…
The DHS “Media Monitoring” initiative is currently seeking a contractor who can provide DHS with the ability to track over 290,000 global news sources in more than 100 languages – including online, print, bradcast, cable, radio, trade and industry publications, traditional news sources and social media platforms.
After a watchdog blog repeatedly linked him and other local officials to corruption and fraud, the Sheriff of Terrebone Parish in Louisiana on Tuesday sent six deputies to raid a police officer’s home to seize computers and other electronic devices.
Sheriff Jerry Larpenter’s deputies submitted affidavits alleging criminal defamation against the anonymous author of the ExposeDAT blog, and obtained search warrants to seize evidence in the officer’s house and from Facebook.
If you’re one of those people that gets a bit vocal about politics, you’ll be interested to know that your Facebook, Twitter and personal blog are about to begin being monitored for references to the Government.
Ministers announced yesterday that the Government had awarded a contract to five companies who will monitor what people tweet, post to Facebook or blog about the Government and provide updates to Whitehall in real time.
Officials and ministers will provide a list of keywords and topics to the companies so that they know what to monitor.
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan’s first term. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon Chair, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University.
Washington’s problem is that whereas Washington controls the print and TV media in the US and its vassal states in Europe, Canada, Australia, Ukraine, and Japan, Washington does not control Internet sites, such as this one, or media, such as RT, of non-vassal states. Consequently, Washington’s lies are subject to challenge, and as people lose confidence in Western print and TV media because of the propaganda content, Washington’s agendas, which depend on lies, are experiencing rougher sledding.
People who challenge establishment narratives online likened with terrorist organization
Bloggers, conspiracy theorists and people who challenge establishment narratives on the Internet were all likened to ISIS terrorists during a chilling Congressional hearing which took place yesterday.
The hearing, hosted by the House Foreign Relations Committee, was titled “Confronting Russia’s Weaponization of Information,” and accused Russian state broadcaster RT of weaponizing “conspiracy theories” to spread propaganda.
The control freaks that run our government always seem to want to “regulate” things that they do not like. And so it should be no surprise that there is a renewed push to regulate independent news websites. Sites like the Drudge Report, The Economic Collapse Blog , and Zero Hedge have been a thorn in the side of the establishment for years. You see, the truth is that approximately 90 percent of all news and entertainment in this country is controlled by just six giant media corporations. That is why the news seems to be so similar no matter where you turn. But in recent years the alternative media has exploded in popularity.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is taking names. Potentially thousands.
The former KGB colonel, concerned with how social media can be used to undermine his authority, this month expanded his regulation of media to the blogosphere, requiring those with at least 3,000 daily readers to register their real names and contact information. So far, about 580 bloggers in Russia have applied to register with the country’s communications regulator Roskomnadzor.
The government says this is needed so it can remove inaccurate or defamatory information on the Internet. But some bloggers fear it will limit free speech, allow Putin to close down blogs he doesn’t like and give him an excuse to block sites such as Twitter in the future.
The total number of bloggers who are required to register may be several thousand. Roskomnadzor may shut down the accounts of those who don’t follow the new rule. Roskomnadzor sent Eduard Limonov and Boris Akunin, who are known for their opposition to the government, requests to register their blogs, according to the daily newspaper Izvestia.
As of August 1 all blogs having 3,000 daily readers or more will have to follow many of the rules that exist in conventional mass media, such as tougher control on published information or the ban on use of explicit language.
The set of amendments to the Administrative Code, the Law on Information and the Law on Communications , dubbed by reporters as the ‘Bill on Bloggers’, was signed into force by President Putin in early May this year.
The draft introduced the definition of a popular blogger as someone whose internet page attracts at least 3,000 readers every day (earlier this week the authorities announced that these should be unique visitors, not just page hits). Such authors will now have to register with the state watchdog Roskomnadzor, disclose their real identity and follow the same rules as journalists working in conventional state-registered mass media.
Ukraine continues to concoct evidence of Russia’s air defense system’s involvement in the Boeing tragedy. This time Ukraine’s secret service has published as ‘proof’ month–old photos of Kiev’s own Buk-M missile system, claiming it is Russian.
Although even American officials have privately admitted that there is no evidence that Russia is involved in the Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777 disaster on July 17, Kiev has its own idea.
A few years ago, we wrote about the bizarre and quixotic effort by Florida businessman Christopher Comins to find any possible way to sue University of Florida student and blogger Matthew Frederick VanVoorhis for his blog post concerning a widely publicized event in which Comins shot two dogs in a field (video link). The story made lots of news at the time, but Comins didn’t go after any of the major media — instead targeting VanVoorhis for a defamation suit. The original blog post is “novelistic” but it’s difficult to see how it’s defamatory. Either way, Comins’ case was shot down on fairly specific procedural grounds: namely that Florida defamation law requires specific notice be given to media properties at least 5 days before a lawsuit is launched. Specifically, the law says:
“Now that the government has reopened and this threat to our economy is removed, all of us need to stop focusing on the lobbyists, and the bloggers, and the talking heads on radio and the professional activists who profit from conflict, and focus on what the majority of Americans sent us here to do, and that’s grow this economy, create good jobs, strengthen the middle class, educate our kids, lay the foundation for broad-based prosperity and get our fiscal house in order for the long haul.”
We will ignore the irony of a president talking about “profiting from conflict” when less than two months ago the world was on the verge of World War III over a fabricated, false flag-driven invasion “confirmed” by YouTube clips, and designed entirely by this administration to further (and profit) its Saudi and Qatari interests, and which was halted in the last minute thanks to none other than the Russian president, and ask: instead of stopping to “focus on bloggers” who merely do the math in a world in which math is long forgotten, let’s for one month, week or day, simply halt the Federal Reserve’s circular monetary authority which now purchases virtually all issued US Treasurys that carry any duration risk.
The search for more clues about Edward Snowden’s life and motivations inevitably led the mainstream media to his longtime girlfriend Lindsay Mills, 28, who until recently described herself as “world-traveling, pole-dancing super hero.” Why past tense? Because as of today, her blog, L’s Journey, no longer exists. Of course, this being the NSA-controlled internet, there is always a cached (we use the term loosely) version of everything somewhere, and the full blog can be found at the following link.
Internet free speech is under assault in America, and a dangerous new trend has surfaced that threatens to throw nutritional bloggers in jail for advocating healthy diets on their blogs or websites. As you read this, a blogger who wrote about using the Paleo diet to overcome diabetes is being threatened with jail time in North Carolina, where the state Board of Dietetics / Nutrition claims his nutritional advocacy is equivalent to the crime of “practicing nutrition without a license.”
He’s being targeted by state “dieticians” (which is another word for “nutritional moron” as you’ll see below) who say that Chapter 90, Article 25 of the North Carolina General Statutes makes it a misdemeanor to “practice dietetics or nutrition.” His website’s advocating of the Paleo diet for individuals who have health challenges is, they claim, a violation of law.
So they’ve threatened him with arrest if he does not take down his website… or at the very least stop advocating the Paleo diet to readers.
However, with that said, we are manipulating the silver futures market and playing a smaller (but still massively manipulative) role in manipulating the gold futures market. We have a little over a 25% (give or take a percentage) position in the short market for silver futures and by your definition this denotes a larger position than for speculative purposes or for hedging and is beyond the line of manipulation.
On a side note, I do not work directly with accounts that would have been directly impacted by the MF Global fiasco but I have heard through other colleagues that we have involvement in the hiding of client assets from MF Global. This is another fraudulent effort on our part and constitutes theft. I urge you to forward that part of the investigation on to the respective authorities.
In an article that is about three years overdue, “JPMorgan’s practices bring scrutiny” the FT finally takes aim at that other “vampire squid”, JP Morgan, which technically is incorrect: because if Goldman is a nimble and aggressive creature, with infinite tentacles in every governmental office, and unencumbered by massive liabilities, JPMorgan is just as connected, but unlike Goldman, it is a behemoth in every other possible capacity, and with its trillion in deposits, matched by tens of billions in bad loans, is a true Bank Holding Company. As such ‘Jabba the Hutt‘ would be a far more appropriate allegory to describe the the firm, whose reach, scope and scale lead the FT to classify it as “Three times a pallbearer, never a corpse.”
As some may recall, back in October 2009, Zero Hedge did an exhaustive expose on the relationship between JPMorgan and the then version of MF Global, Lehman Brothers, whose perfectly functioning division, its North American Brokerage, ended up being scooped up by Barclays for pennies on the dollar. In the meantime, however, JPMorgan, with the backing of the Fed, proceeded to demand as much extra collateral for Lehman repo positions on hold with JP Morgan and the Tri-Party repo system, of which JPM is one of only two custodians, simply because it could, and because this is the easiest way for the bank that is even closer to the Fed than Goldman Sachs, to procure liquidity during times of broad distress. Such as when the money market is about to freeze to death. Since then, the topic of just how much JPMorgan may have ripped off the Lehman estate has escalated, and is set to be an epic showdown in the form of a lawsuit which “accuses JPMorgan of using its “life and death power as the brokerage firm’s primary clearing bank” to put a “financial gun” to its head and demand excess collateral.” And here is the kicker: “It claims JPMorgan abused its access to US government officials and then “accelerated Lehman’s free fall into bankruptcy”, hoovering up collateral to protect itself to the detriment of the firm and other eventual creditors.”
And therein lies the rub: because of all TBTF banks, JPMorgan is literally at the nexus of the entire $16 trillion shadow banking system, the very system that the Fed, much more than traditional liabilities, knows and uses constantly to hypothecate and rehypothecate assets, in essence creating money out of nothing, and which in conjunction with the other Tri-Party repo dealer, Bank of New York, as well as State Street, provides the US financial system with over $30 trillion in shadow credit money in the form of custodial assets – liquidity the bulk of which is not accounted for in any conventional monetary textbook or in any modern theory of money as it is such a novel development, yet which is still 100% fungible, and is by far the biggest secret of the American monetary system. It can be seen as summarized in the following graphic, first created by Citi’s Matt King back in the week before Lehman failed (full report can be read here, and should be by anyone who wishes to understand just what is truly going on behind the scenes in modern finance).
Keep in mind, these are the same custody assets which, as explained previously in the case of MF Global, can be rehypothecated in serial fashion, creating a virtually infinite amount of “money” as long as everyone who is in on the fraud agrees to maintain the ponzi. Of course, if and when someone demands delivery of an underlying assets, the whole thing falls apart, which is what happened with AIG, with Lehman, and to a smaller degree, MF Global.
So what does all of this have to do with Blythe Masters?
Simple.
At the end of the day, and as the Lehman lawsuit alleges, JPMorgan has intimate access to US government officials, and particularly the Federal Reserve, who will in turn take advantage of all JPM facilities, including its trading desk, to preserve the sanctity and foundations of the $30+ trillion in custodial assets and rehypothecation system, which further means that any potential implication that fiat money is impaired has to be wiped out. As it so happens, soaring prices of gold and silver are the primary if not only means left to express rising doubts in the future viability of the dollar, but in the viability of the fiat system in the first place. Which means that the Fed is, without a doubt, one of the biggest “clients” of the Fed in a symbiotic crosshold, where what the Fed wants, JPM has to execute and vice versa.
This brings us to the transcript of Blythe’s interview on CNBC, in which a primary topic, ironically, was whether or not Jamie Dimon’s firm manipulates the prices of precious metals, and particularly silver. What followed was the usual avalanche of platitudes that only a muppet can love:
“JPM’s commodities business is not about betting on commodity prices but about assisting clients”… “it’s about assisting clients in executing, managing, their risks and ensuring access to capital so they can make the kind of large long-term investments that are needed in the long run to expand the supply of commodities”…
“There’s been a tremendous amount of speculation particularly in the blogosphere on this topic. I think the challenge is it represents a misunderstanding as the nature of our business. As i mentioned earlier, our business is a client-driven business where we execute on behalf of clients to achieve their financial and risk management objectives. The challenge is that commentators don’t see that. So to give you a specific example, we store significant amount of commodities, for example, silver, on behalf of customers we operate vaults in New York City, Singapore and in London. And often when customers have that metal stored in our facilities, they hedge it on a forward basis through JPMorgan who in turn hedges itself in the commodity markets. If you see only the hedges and our activity in the futures market, but you aren’t aware of the underlying client position that we’re hedging, that would suggest inaccurately that we’re running a large directional position. In fact that’s not the case at all.
“We have offsetting positions. We have no stake in whether prices rise or decline. Rather we’re running a flat or relatively flat matched book.
“What is commonly out there is that JPMorgan is manipulating the metals market. It’s not part of our business model. it would be wrong and we don’t do it.”
Ah yes, because JPMorgan never engages in “wrong” activites…
And while we admire JPM’s naive statement that it can triple its commodities revenues to $2.8 billion in 2011, while everyone else was losing money in the space, without taking prop bets, we just don’t buy it. Just as we didn’t buy Goldman’s explanation that its prop desk only accounted for 12% of that firm’s revenue, as Goldman told us directly (coupled with our challenge of prop trading in 2009, a pursuit taken on by Paul Volcker a few weeks later, resulting in the Volcker Rule). Needless to say, once the firm did break out its prop trading, it became quite clear just how huge of a factor prop trading truly was for Goldman. Because taken at face value, it would mean that all else equal, JPMorgan transacted at least 3 times more in flow in 2011 than in 2010. Yet, everyone knows that trading volumes in 2011 slumped relative to 2010. So no, Blythe, we appreciate your explanation, but we would appreciate the truth even more.
And yet there is one simple explanation that would make Blythe’s story 100% correct: would JPMorgan consider the Fed, whose interests in keeping the price of precious metals as low as possible, and are aligned with those of JPM for the reasons listed above, its client?
Because if so, then absolutely everything falls into place, as JPMorgan is merely the overt conduit by which the Fed, and specifically the New York Fed, conducts monetary policy in the commodities space, just as Brian Sack would conduct open market operations in the bond arena, and as the FRBNY uses, on occasion, Citadel, and its HFT expertise, to execute its discretionary stock trades (yes, we know about those too).
We would welcome Blythe’s comments on any and all of the topics listed above.
In the meantime, for those who missed it, here’s Blythe.
In 2011, we have witnessed the incredible power of bloggers and social media users capturing the world’s attention through their activism. At the same time, regimes appear to be quickening the pace of their cat-and-mouse game with netizens, cracking down on speech through the use of surveillance, censorship, and the persecution and detention of bloggers. The increasingly the tech-savvy Syrian regime has been reported to demand login credentials from detainees, for example, while the use of torture in some of the region’s prisons continues.
Official Chinese media say that rumours spread on popular microblogging sites are damaging to society
Online rumours are drugs that damage users and harm society, the Chinese state media have claimed, as officials step up attempts to rein in the country’s hugely popular microblogs.
One commentary, published by the official Xinhua news agency, warns that while heroin and cocaine damage health, internet rumours are worse because they “poison the social environment and affect social order”.
Another, on People’s Daily Online, is titled: “Internet rumours are drugs: please resist and stay away from them.” It calls for zero tolerance, suggests they “damage people and society” as narcotics do, and accuses rumour-mongers of having ulterior motives and “kidnapping public opinion”.
Gang members in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, killed and beheaded the moderator of a social network, the Houston Chronicle reported Wednesday.
“Hi, I’m Rascatripas,” read the note on a blood-stained blanket left with the body. “This happened to me for not understanding that I shouldn’t report on the social networks.”
The victim, known by his nickname “Rascatripas (Belly Scratcher),” was the moderator of a site called Nuevo Laredo en Vivo, which had posted information about the local drug cartel.
The Federal Reserve wants to know what you are saying about it. In fact, the Federal Reserve has announced plans to identify “key bloggers” and to monitor “billions of conversations” about the Fed on Facebook, Twitter, forums and blogs. This is yet another sign that the alternative media is having a dramatic impact. As first reported on Zero Hedge, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York has issued a “Request for Proposal” to suppliers who may be interested in participating in the development of a “Sentiment Analysis And Social Media Monitoring Solution”. In other words, the Federal Reserve wants to develop a highly sophisticated system that will gather everything that you and I say about the Federal Reserve on the Internet and that will analyze what our feelings about the Fed are. Obviously, any “positive” feelings about the Fed would not be a problem. What they really want to do is to gather information on everyone that views the Federal Reserve negatively. It is unclear how they plan to use this information once they have it, but considering how many alternative media sources have been shut down lately, this is obviously a very troubling sign.
You can read this “Request for Proposal” right here. Posted below are some of the key quotes from the document (in bold) with some of my own commentary in between the quotes….
“The intent is to establish a fair and equitable partnership with a market leader who will who gather data from various social media outlets and news sources and provide applicable reporting to FRBNY. This Request for Proposal (“RFP”) was created in an effort to support FRBNY’s Social Media Listening Platforms initiative.”
A system like this is not cheap. Apparently the Federal Reserve Bank of New York believes that gathering all of this information is very important. In recent years, criticism of the Federal Reserve has become very intense, and most of this criticism has been coming from the Internet. It has gotten to the point where the Federal Reserve Bank of New York has decided that it had better listen to what is being said and find out who is saying it.
“Social media listening platforms are solutions that gather data from various social media outlets and news sources. They monitor billions of conversations and generate text analytics based on predefined criteria. They can also determine the sentiment of a speaker or writer with respect to some topic or document.”
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York intends to listen in on “billions of conversations” and to actually determine the “sentiment” of those that are participating in those conversations.
Of course it will be those conversations that are “negative” about the Federal Reserve that will be setting off the alarm bells.
“Identify and reach out to key bloggers and influencers”
Uh oh. So they plan to “identify” key bloggers and influencers?
What exactly do they plan to do once they “identify” them?
“The solution must be able to gather data from the primary social media platforms –Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, Forums and YouTube.”
Two weeks ago, the media’s heart went aflutter when it learned that the president had borrowed a page right out of ole’ Joe McCarthy’s communist witch hunt book with the launch of Attack Watch. The response by everyone, even fans of Obama, was immediate and brutal. Yet where Obama took about 24 hours to crash and burn, someone else has stepped in with a far stealthier method of ferreting out the traitors amongst us: none other than our old friends, the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States, which in a Request for Proposals filed to companies that are Fed vendors, is requesting the creation of a “Social Listening Platform” whose function is to “gather data from various social media outlets and news sources.” It will “monitor billions of conversations and generate text analytics based on predefined criteria.” The Fed’s desired product should be able to “determine the sentiment [ED:LOL] of a speaker or writer with respect to some topic or document”… “The solution must be able to gather data from the primary social media platforms – Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, Forums and YouTube. It should also be able to aggregate data from various media outlets such as: CNN, WSJ, Factiva etc.” Most importantly, the “Listening Platform” should be able to “Handle crisis situations, Continuously monitor conversations, and Identify and reach out to key bloggers and influencers.“ Said otherwise, the Fed has just entered the counterespionage era and will be monitoring everything written about it anywhere in the world. After all, why ask others to snitch for you and anger everyone as Obama found out the hard way, when you can pay others to create the supreme FIATtack WatchTM using money you yourself can print in unlimited amounts. And once the Internet is completely “transparent”, the Fed will next focus on telephone conversations, and finally will simply bug each and every otherwise “private” location in the world. Because very soon saying that “printing money is treason” will be treason, and such terrorist thoughts must be pre-crimed before they even occur.
All we can say is we welcome our new Chairsatan Voldemort overlord. For it is truly he who must not be named henceforth.
From the key section of the RFP, presented in its entirety below:
(Reuters) – BNP Paribas said on Tuesday that it had asked French market regulator AMF to open an enquiry about a Wall Street Journal opinion piece claiming that France’s largest bank could face a dollar funding crunch.
BNP Paribas, whose shares slumped more than 10 percent in early trading but later rebounded to gain 7.2 percent, said it had requested the enquiry earlier in the day after what it called the “false” report.
PARIS (Dow Jones)–BNP Paribas SA (BNP.FR, BNPQY) on Tuesday said it had asked the French stock-market watchdog to open a probe following the publication of an opinion column in The Wall Street Journal that contained “erroneous information.”
The Autorite des Marches Financiers, or AMF, the stock-market watchdog, wasn’t immediately available to comment.
Attacking the TSA for its privacy-invasive screening procedures has become a favorite activity for many journalists, especially Matt Drudge. TSA horror stories are often featured prominently on The Drudge Report and he has taken to calling Janet Napolitano, Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (of which the TSA is a part) “Big Sis.”
Napolitano, who doesn’t think Drudge “means [the nickname] kindly” said at a recent Politico event that Drudge is wrong in describing DHS programs as Orwellian and that “the privacy impact of new airport screening technology and similar programs are thoroughly vetted before they are implemented,” in Josh Gerstein’s words.
“We want to be conscious of civil liberties and civil rights protections—and we are,” Napolitano said, as reported by Politico.
On the same day as this piece came out, TechDirt reports on a passenger who would likely disagree with the Secretary. After a particularly aggressive patdown in March that might be better termed a feel-up, advice blogger Amy Alkon graphically described how she sobbed loudly while a TSA agent put her hands “into” her — four times. She screamed “You raped me” after the LAX patdown and took the agent’s name with plans to file charges of sexual assault. Those plans fell through after consulting an attorney, but she did blog about it and included the agent’s name, thereby inflicting her own assault — on the agent’s Google search results.
The TSA agent then hired a lawyer who contacted Alkon asking her to remove the post, threatening her with a defamation lawsuit, and asking for a settlement of $500,000. “Rape is a very serious charge,” writes lawyer Vicki Roberts on Thedala Magee’s behalf. She also says that Alkon, on a return trip to the airport in May called her client “a bad person” who had “sexually molested” her.
Free speech lawyer Marc Randazza has stepped in to assert Alkon’s right to post about her patdown experience, and to defend both her definition of the patdown as rape and, regardless of that, her right to rhetorical hyperbole. Techdirt has a copy of the letter Randazza drafted in response to the defamation threat.
“After [the agent Thedala] Magee’s assault on Ms. Alkon’s vagina and dignity, Ms. Alkon exercised her First Amendment right to recount this incident to others in person and through her blog,” writes Randazza. “This was not only her right — it was her responsibility.”
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