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Spy Satellites Turned on the U.S.
2007-09-06, ABC News
http://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/story?id=3567635

Traditionally, powerful spy satellites have been used to search for strategic threats overseas. But now the Department of Homeland Security has developed a new office to use the satellites to [monitor the US itself]. [DHS] officials ... faced extensive criticism [in Congress] about the privacy and civil liberty concerns of the new office, called the National Applications Office. [House Homeland Security] Committee members expressed concern about abuse of the satellite imagery, charging that Homeland Security had not informed the oversight committee about the program. "What's most disturbing is learning about it from The Wall Street Journal," said Committee Chairman Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss. The lawmakers also expressed concern about using military capabilities for U.S. law enforcement and Homeland Security operations, potentially a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, which bars the military from serving as a law enforcement body within the United States. Committee members said that in addition to not being informed about the National Applications Office program, they had not yet been provided with documents defining the limits and legal guidance about the program. [They] sent a letter to Homeland Security saying, "We are so concerned that ... we are calling for a moratorium on the program. Today's testimony made clear that there is effectively no legal framework governing the domestic use of satellite imagery for the various purposes envisioned by the department."

Bush administration defends spy law
2007-08-07, Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/news/la-na-intel7aug07,0,1631228.story

The Bush administration rushed to defend new espionage legislation Monday amid growing concern that the changes could lead to increased spying by U.S. intelligence agencies on American citizens. But officials declined to provide details about how the new capabilities might be used by the National Security Agency and other spy services. And in many cases, they could point only to internal monitoring mechanisms to prevent abuse of the new rules that appear to give the government greater authority to tap into the traffic flowing across U.S. telecommunications networks. Officials rejected assertions that the new capabilities would enable the government to cast electronic "drift nets" that might ensnare U.S. citizens [and] that the new legislation would amount to the expansion of a controversial — and critics contend unconstitutional — warrantless wiretapping program that President Bush authorized after the 9/11 attacks. Intelligence experts said there were an array of provisions in the new legislation that appeared to make it possible for the government to engage in intelligence-collection activities that the Bush administration officials were discounting. "They are trying to shift the terms of the debate to their intentions and away from the meaning of the new law," said Steven Aftergood, an intelligence policy analyst at the Federation of American Scientists. "The new law gives them authority to do far more than simply surveil foreign communications abroad," he said. "It expands the surveillance program beyond terrorism to encompass foreign intelligence. It permits the monitoring of communications of a U.S. person as long as he or she is not the primary target. And it effectively removes judicial supervision of the surveillance process."

In Bush we trust - or else
2007-08-05, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper)
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/08/05/EDJFRB8AF1.DTL

President Bush's latest affront to the U.S. Constitution [is] in plain view on the White House Web site: "Executive Order: Blocking Property of Certain Persons Who Threaten Stabilization Efforts in Iraq." This far-reaching order ... is a frontal assault on the Fifth Amendment, which decrees that the government cannot seize an individual's property without due process. [The order asserts] the authority to freeze the American assets of anyone who directly or indirectly assists someone who poses "a significant risk" [to] the "peace and stability" of [Iraq] or the reconstruction effort. "On its face, this is the greatest encroachment on civil liberties since the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II," said Bruce Fein, a constitutional lawyer who was a deputy attorney general in the Reagan administration. Fein said the sanctions against suspected violators would amount to "a financial death penalty. King George III really would have been jealous of this power." The executive order not only calls for the freezing of assets of anyone who directly or indirectly [opposes US policy in Iraq,] it prohibits anyone else from providing "funds, goods or services" to a blacklisted individual. In other words, a friend or relative could have his or her assets seized for trying to help someone whose bank account is suddenly frozen. An attorney who offered legal help could risk losing everything he or she owned. Then again, there's not much need for lawyers in the world of this executive order. The blacklist would be drawn up by the "secretary of treasury, in consultation with the secretary of state and the secretary of defense." The Fifth Amendment was written for good reason: It's dangerous to give the government unchecked authority to seize private property without judicial review.

We are moving ever closer to the era of mind control
2006-02-06, The Guardian (one of the UK's leading newspapers)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0,,1702694,00.html

There is increasing military interest in the development of techniques that can survey and possibly manipulate the mental processes of potential enemies, or enhance the potential of one's own troops. There is nothing new about such an interest. In the US, it stretches back at least half a century. Impressed by claims that the Soviet Union was developing psychological warfare, the CIA and the Defence Advanced Projects Agency (Darpa) began their own programmes. Early experiments included the clandestine feeding of LSD to their own operatives and attempts at 'brain-washing'. By the 1960s, Darpa, along with the US Navy, was funding almost all US research into 'artificial intelligence', in order to develop methods and technologies for the 'automated battlefield' and the 'intelligent soldier'. Contracts were let and patents taken out on techniques aimed at recording signals from the brains of enemy personnel at a distance, in order to 'read their minds'. These efforts have burgeoned in the aftermath of the so-called 'war on terror'. The step beyond reading thoughts is to attempt to control them directly. A new technique - transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) - has begun to generate interest. This focuses an intense magnetic field on specific brain regions, and has been shown to affect thoughts, perceptions and behaviour.

Note: These technologies are far more developed than this article suggests. For reliable, verifiable information on these little-known "non-lethal" weapons: http://www.WantToKnow.info/mindcontrol10pg#nonlethal

Administration Set to Use New Spy Program in U.S.
2008-04-12, Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/11/AR20080411036...

The Bush administration said yesterday that it plans to start using the nation's most advanced spy technology for domestic purposes soon, rebuffing challenges by House Democrats over the idea's legal authority. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said his department will activate his department's new domestic satellite surveillance office in stages, starting as soon as possible. Sophisticated overhead sensor data will be used for law enforcement once privacy and civil rights concerns are resolved, he said. His statements marked a fresh determination to operate the department's new National Applications Office. But Congress delayed launch of the new office last October. Critics cited its potential to expand the role of military assets in domestic law enforcement, to turn new or as-yet-undeveloped technologies against Americans without adequate public debate, and to divert the existing civilian and scientific focus of some satellite work to security uses. Democrats say Chertoff has not spelled out what federal laws govern the NAO, whose funding and size are classified. Congress barred Homeland Security from funding the office until its investigators could review the office's operating procedures and safeguards. The department submitted answers on Thursday, but some lawmakers promptly said the response was inadequate. [Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.), chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee] said, "We still don't know whether the NAO will pass constitutional muster since no legal framework has been provided."

Note: For many more revealing stories on threats to civil liberties, click here.

Spies' Battleground Turns Virtual
2008-02-06, Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/05/AR20080205031...

U.S. intelligence officials are [now claiming] that popular Internet services that enable computer users to adopt cartoon-like personas in three-dimensional online spaces also are creating security vulnerabilities by opening novel ways ... to move money, organize and conduct corporate espionage. Over the last few years, "virtual worlds" such as Second Life and other role-playing games have become home to millions of computer-generated personas known as avatars. By directing their avatars, people can take on alternate personalities, socialize, explore and earn and spend money across uncharted online landscapes. Nascent economies have sprung to life in these 3-D worlds, complete with currency, banks and shopping malls. Corporations and government agencies have opened animated virtual offices, and a growing number of organizations hold meetings where avatars gather and converse in newly minted conference centers. Intelligence officials ... say they're convinced that the qualities that many computer users find so attractive about virtual worlds -- including anonymity, global access and the expanded ability to make financial transfers outside normal channels -- have turned them into seedbeds for transnational threats. The government's growing concern seems likely to make virtual worlds the next battlefield in the struggle over the proper limits on the government's quest to [expand] data collection and analysis and the surveillance of commercial computer systems. Virtual worlds could also become an actual battlefield. The intelligence community has begun contemplating how to use Second Life and other such communities as platforms for cyber weapons.

China Enacting a High-Tech Plan to Track People
2007-08-12, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/12/business/worldbusiness/12security.html?ex=1...

At least 20,000 police surveillance cameras are being installed along streets here [in Shenzhen] in southern China and will soon be guided by sophisticated computer software from an American-financed company to recognize automatically the faces of police suspects and detect unusual activity. Starting this month in a port neighborhood and then spreading across Shenzhen, a city of 12.4 million people, residency cards fitted with powerful computer chips programmed by the same company will be issued to most citizens. Data on the chip will include not just the citizen’s name and address but also work history, educational background, religion, ethnicity, police record, medical insurance status and landlord’s phone number. Even personal reproductive history will be included, for enforcement of China’s controversial “one child” policy. Plans are being studied to add credit histories, subway travel payments and small purchases charged to the card. Security experts describe China’s plans as the world’s largest effort to meld cutting-edge computer technology with police work to track the activities of a population. But they say the technology can be used to violate civil rights. “We have a very good relationship with U.S. companies like I.B.M., Cisco, H.P., Dell,” said Robin Huang, the chief operating officer of China Public Security. “All of these U.S. companies work with us to build our system together.” The role of American companies in helping Chinese security forces has periodically been controversial in the United States. Executives from Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and Cisco Systems testified in February 2006 at a Congressional hearing called to review whether they had deliberately designed their systems to help the Chinese state muzzle dissidents on the Internet; they denied having done so.

FBI Finds It Frequently Overstepped in Collecting Data
2007-06-14, Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/13/AR20070613024...

An internal FBI audit has found that the bureau potentially violated the law or agency rules more than 1,000 times while collecting data about domestic phone calls, e-mails and financial transactions in recent years, far more than was documented in a Justice Department report in March that ignited bipartisan congressional criticism. The new audit covers just 10 percent of the bureau's national security investigations since 2002. The vast majority of the new violations were instances in which telephone companies and Internet providers gave agents phone and e-mail records the agents did not request and were not authorized to collect. The agents retained the information anyway in their files. Two dozen of the newly-discovered violations involved agents' requests for information that U.S. law did not allow them to have. The results confirmed what ... critics feared, namely that many agents did not ... follow the required legal procedures and paperwork requirements when collecting personal information with one of the most sensitive and powerful intelligence-gathering tools of the post-Sept. 11 era -- the National Security Letter, or NSL. Such letters are uniformly secret and amount to nonnegotiable demands for personal information -- demands that are not reviewed in advance by a judge. After the 2001 terrorist attacks, Congress substantially eased the rules for issuing NSLs, [leading] to an explosive growth in the use of the letters. More than 19,000 such letters were issued in 2005 seeking 47,000 pieces of information, mostly from telecommunications companies.

Tech Watch: Forecasting Pain
2006-12-00, Popular Mechanics
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/military_law/4202262.html

No longer a gleam in the Pentagon's eye, ray guns — or radiofrequency (RF) weapons, to be exact — officially have arrived. As troops are increasingly forced to serve as an ad hoc police force, nonlethal weapons have become a priority for the military. The Department of Defense is currently testing the Active Denial System (ADS), which fires pain-inducing beams of 95-GHz radio waves, for deployment on ground vehicles. This surface heating doesn't actually burn the target, but is painful enough to force a retreat. While the military continues to investigate the safety of RF-based weapons, defense contractor Raytheon has released Silent Guardian, a stripped-down version of the ADS, marketed to law enforcement and security providers as well as to the military. Using a joystick and a targeting screen, operators can induce pain from over 250 yards away, as opposed to more than 500 yards with the ADS. Unlike its longer-ranged counterpart, Silent Guardian is available now. As futuristic — and frightening — as the ADS "pain ray" sounds, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research is funding an even more ambitious use of RF energy. Researchers at the University of Nevada are investigating the feasibility of a method that would immobilize targets without causing pain. Rather than heating the subject's skin, this approach would use microwaves at 0.75 to 6 GHz to affect skeletal muscle contractions. This project is still in the beginning stages. The ADS, on the other hand, is already a painful reality.

Note: For lots more concerning information on non-lethal weapons, click here.

Kanata hotel hosts high-level power group
2006-06-09, CBC News (Canada's equivalent of PBS)
http://www.cbc.ca/ottawa/story/ot-bilderberg20060609.html

A serene setting in Ottawa's west-end Kanata suburb has been transformed into a four-day festival of black suits, black limousines, burly security guards and a bevy of conspiracy theories. The security outside the Brookstreet Hotel is much tighter than it is on Parliament Hill. Inside, the CBC was told, all guests were asked to check out at 8:30 a.m. on Thursday. The hotel appears to be hosting the annual meeting of one of the world's most secretive and powerful societies: the Bilderberg group. But, of course, no one will admit it. People who follow the Bilderberg group say it persuaded Europe to adopt a common currency, and, among other things, persuaded Bill Clinton to support the North American Free Trade Agreement. "David Rockefeller is going to be here. Henry Kissinger is going to be here. Wolfowitz, the president of the World Bank, is going to be here" says Daniel Estulin, who has written a book about the Bilderberg group. Jim Tucker, who has followed the Bilderberg group for the last 30 years, told CBC News he is troubled by all the secrecy. "Officials of the United States government [should not] have a private meeting with private citizens about public policy," Tucker says.

In the chaos of Iraq, one project is on target: a giant US embassy
2006-05-03, London Times
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2162249,00.html

The question puzzles and enrages a city: how is it that the Americans cannot keep the electricity running in Baghdad for more than a couple of hours a day, yet still manage to build themselves the biggest embassy on Earth? Irritation grows as residents deprived of air-conditioning and running water three years after the US-led invasion watch the massive US Embassy they call 'George W's palace' rising from the banks of the Tigris. In the pavement cafés, people moan that the structure is bigger than anything Saddam Hussein built. Officially, the design of the compound is supposed to be a secret, but you cannot hide the giant construction cranes and the concrete contours of the 21 buildings that are taking shape. Looming over the skyline, the embassy has the distinction of being the only big US building project in Iraq that is on time and within budget. In a week when Washington revealed a startling list of missed deadlines and overspending on building projects, Congress was told that the bill for the embassy was $592 million (£312 million).

Note: For the deeper reasons behind this war, don't miss http://www.WantToKnow.info/warcoverup

Military Plays Up Role of Zarqawi
2006-04-10, Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/09/AR20060409008...

[April 10, 2006] The U.S. military is conducting a propaganda campaign to magnify the role of the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, according to internal military documents. The effort has raised his profile in a way that some military intelligence officials believe may have...helped the Bush administration tie the war to...Sept. 11. Although Zarqawi and other foreign insurgents in Iraq have conducted deadly bombing attacks, they remain "a very small part of the actual numbers," [said] Col. Derek Harvey, who...was one of the top officers handling Iraq intelligence issues on the staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "Our own focus on Zarqawi has enlarged his caricature...made him more important than he really is." One briefing slide about U.S. "strategic communications" in Iraq, prepared for Army Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top U.S. commander in Iraq, describes the "home audience" as one of six major targets of the American side of the war. There were direct military efforts to use the U.S. media to affect views of the war. One slide in the same briefing, for example, noted that a "selective leak" about Zarqawi was made to Dexter Filkins, a New York Times reporter. Filkins's resulting article...ran on the Times front page. U.S. propaganda efforts in Iraq in 2004 cost $24 million. "Villainize Zarqawi" one U.S. military briefing from 2004 stated. It listed..."PSYOP," the U.S. military term for propaganda work. One internal briefing, produced by the U.S. military headquarters in Iraq, said..."The Zarqawi PSYOP program is the most successful information campaign to date."

Experts blame flooding on faulty levees
2005-09-21, MSNBC News/Washington Post
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/9419053

Louisiana's top hurricane experts have rejected the official explanations for the floodwall collapses that inundated much of New Orleans, concluding that Hurricane Katrina's storm surges were much smaller than authorities have suggested and that the city's flood-protection system should have kept most of the city dry. With the help of complex computer models and stark visual evidence, scientists and engineers at Louisiana State University's Hurricane Center have concluded that Katrina's surges did not come close to overtopping those barriers. That would make faulty design, inadequate construction or some combination of the two the likely cause of the breaching of the floodwalls. Ivor van Heerden, the Hurricane Center's deputy director, said the real scandal of Katrina is the "catastrophic structural failure" of barriers that should have handled the hurricane with relative ease. "We are absolutely convinced that those floodwalls were never overtopped," said van Heerden. On a tour Tuesday, researchers...showed a "debris line" that indicates the top height of Katrina's waves was at least four feet below the crest of Lake Pontchartrain's levees. They contended that the pattern of destruction behind the breaches was consistent with a localized "pressure burst," rather than widespread overtopping. Former representative Bob Livingston, (R-La.)...noted that the earthen levees along Lake Pontchartrain had all held, while concrete floodwalls had failed. He was especially concerned about the 17th Street barrier, saying it "shouldn't have broken." If Katrina did not exceed the design capacity of the New Orleans levees, the federal government may bear ultimate responsibility for this disaster.

Emotional Rather blasts 'new journalism order'
2005-09-19, ABC News
http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory?id=1141521

Former CBS News anchor Dan Rather said Monday that there is a climate of fear running through newsrooms stronger than he has ever seen in his more than four-decade career. Rather famously tangled with President Nixon and his aides during the Watergate years while Rather was a hard-charging White House correspondent. He said that in the intervening years, politicians "of every persuasion" had gotten better at applying pressure on the conglomerates that own the broadcast networks. He called it a "new journalism order." He said this pressure -- along with the "dumbed-down, tarted-up" coverage, the advent of 24-hour cable competition and the chase for ratings and demographics -- has taken its toll on the news business. "All of this creates a bigger atmosphere of fear in newsrooms," Rather said.

UK film: terror fears exaggerated
2005-05-14, CNN/Reuters
http://www.cnn.com/2005/SHOWBIZ/Movies/05/14/film.cannes.terrorfears.reut

CANNES, France (Reuters) -- A British documentary arguing U.S. neo-conservatives have exaggerated the terror threat is set to rock the Cannes Film Festival on Saturday, the way "Fahrenheit 9/11" stirred emotions here a year ago. At a screening late on Friday ahead of its gala on Saturday, "The Power of Nightmares" by filmmaker and senior BBC producer Adam Curtis kept an audience of journalists and film buyers glued to their seats and taking notes for a full 2-1/2 hours. The film, a non-competition entry, argues that the fear of terrorism has come to pervade politics in the United States and Britain even though much of that angst is based on carefully nurtured illusions.

Note: To view this excellent film online free, click here.

Why We Fight
2005-03-23, BBC (Film Review)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/documentaries/storyville/why-we-fight.shtml

This award-winning film provides an inside look at the anatomy of the American war machine. Why We Fight [was originally] the title of a series of propaganda films that Frank Capra began making in 1942, with the aim of encouraging the American war effort against Nazism. Director Eugene Jarecki (The Trials of Henry Kissinger) has used the films as a commentary on the contemporary obsession of the American elite with military power. He also harks back to a speech by President Eisenhower, who, just before he left office, referred to the "military-industrial complex". Eisenhower was worried that too much intelligence, and too much business acumen in America, had become focussed on the production of unnecessary weapons systems. Since Eisenhower's time, everything has become much worse, as Eugene Jarecki describes it. The war in Iraq was made possible by a new range of weapons systems: a bomb called the "bunker buster" was dropped by stealth bombers on the first night of the conflict. Is American foreign policy dominated by the idea of military supremacy? Has the military become too important in American life? Jarecki's shrewd and intelligent polemic would seem to give an affirmative answer to each of these questions.

Note: To watch this great film (which won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival) free online, click here or here. For powerful information on cover-ups around war, click here.

Loosening of F.B.I. Rules Stirs Privacy Concerns
2009-10-29, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/29/us/29manual.html

After a Somali-American teenager from Minneapolis committed a suicide bombing in Africa in October 2008, the Federal Bureau of Investigation began investigating whether a Somali Islamist group had recruited him on United States soil. Instead of collecting information only on people about whom they had a tip or links to the teenager, agents fanned out to scrutinize Somali communities. The operation unfolded as the Bush administration was relaxing some domestic intelligence-gathering rules. The F.B.I.’s interpretation of those rules was recently made public when it released, in response to a Freedom of Information lawsuit, its “Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide.” The disclosure of the manual has opened the widest window yet onto how agents have been given greater power in the post-Sept. 11 era. But the manual’s details have alarmed privacy advocates. “It raises fundamental questions about whether a domestic intelligence agency can protect civil liberties if they feel they have a right to collect broad personal information about people they don’t even suspect of wrongdoing,” said Mike German, a former F.B.I. agent who now works for the American Civil Liberties Union. The manual authorizes agents to open an “assessment” to “proactively” seek information about whether people or organizations are involved in national security threats. Assessments permit agents to use potentially intrusive techniques, like sending confidential informants to infiltrate organizations and following and photographing targets in public. When selecting targets, agents are permitted to consider political speech or religion as one criterion.

Note: To read the FBI's recently-released and redacted new "Domestic Investigations and Operation Guide", described by the New York Times as giving "F.B.I. agents the most power in national security matters that they have had since the post-Watergate era," click here.

Strange New Air Force Facility Energizes Ionosphere, Fans Conspiracy Flames
2009-07-20, Wired magazine
http://www.wired.com/politics/security/magazine/17-08/mf_haarp

The senior senator from Alaska, Ted Stevens, enjoyed a reputation for inserting projects into the federal budget to benefit his home state, most notoriously a $223 million bridge from the town of Ketchikan to, well, not much of anyplace. In 1988, [physics] researchers sat down with Stevens and assured him that an ionospheric heater would be a bona fide scientific marvel and a guaranteed job creator, and it could be built for a mere $30 million. Just like that, the Pentagon had $10 million for ionospheric heater research. In a series of meetings in the winter of 1989-90, the field's leading lights ... pitched the Navy and the Air Force. Haarp, they asserted, could lead to "significant operational capabilities." They'd build a giant phased antenna array that would aim a finely tuned beam of high-frequency radio waves into the sky. The beam would excite electrons in the ionosphere, altering that spot's conductivity and inducing it to emit its own extremely low frequency waves, which could theoretically penetrate the earth's surface to reveal hidden bunkers or be used to contact deeply submerged submarines. Of course, the scientists said, you'd need a brand-new, state-of-the-art ionospheric heater to see if any of this was even feasible. The Pentagon ... began using Stevens' earmarked cash to fund the appropriate studies. For more than a year, planning proceeded largely out of public view. Then, in 1993, an Anchorage teachers' union rep named Nick Begich—son of one of Alaska's most important political families—found a notice about Haarp in the Australian conspiracy magazine Nexus. In 1995, he self-published a book, Angels Don't Play This HAARP. It sold 100,000 copies. He started giving speeches on Haarp's dangers everywhere, from UFO conventions to the European Parliament.

Note: For more excellent information on HAARP, click here. There is much more than meets the eye here.

Review: 'New World Order' on Independent Film Channel
2009-05-26, Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-new-world-order26-2009may26,0...

"New World Order," which premieres today on the Independent Film Channel, is a film about ... volunteers in an "information war" who see ... that 9/11 was an "inside job," that the military-industrial complex killed Kennedy, and that an international "power elite" is plotting to enslave us all, excepting for those it will kill outright. They are hard to pigeonhole politically, these conspiracy adepts, trusting neither the "socialist Democrats" nor the "fascist Republicans" -- Ron Paul seems to be their man, if anyone is -- yet sounding as often like '60s leftist radicals as right-wing militiamen. They take the 1st Amendment as seriously as any card-carrying member of the ACLU, styling themselves muckrakers and speakers of truth to power, often through a bullhorn. The man with the biggest bullhorn is Alex Jones, an Austin, Texas-based syndicated radio host ... and the point through which all the strands connect in this unexpectedly affecting, nonjudgmental documentary by Luke Meyer and Andrew Neel. Much of what Jones and his fellows and followers believe is, in a general way, hardly controversial. But whether 9/11 was a plot to bring on world government, or whether the government you already have has painted a red or blue dot on your mailbox to indicate whether you will be shot immediately or merely be sent to the "FEMA camps" when the American Armageddon arrives, well, that's a pale horse of a different color. (Still, you'll want to check your mailbox now.) "This is more important than how much Britney Spears' hair sold for on EBay, 'Dancing With the Stars' or who's gonna be America's next idol," says one believer. "People think this is a joke. We're not a joke."

Note: The disparaging tone of this review of the documentary is typical of mainstream media treatment of 9/11 truth activity, but it makes clear that the film itself does not share this attitude.

Warning over 'surveillance state'
2009-02-06, BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/7872425.stm

Electronic surveillance and collection of personal data are "pervasive" in British society and threaten to undermine democracy, peers [in the House of Lords] have warned. CCTV cameras and the DNA database were two examples of threats to privacy, the Lords constitution committee said. It called for compensation for people subject to illegal surveillance. Civil liberties campaigners have warned about the risks of a "surveillance society" in which the state acquires ever-greater powers to track people's movements and retain personal data. In its report, the Lords constitution committee said growth in surveillance by both the state and the private sector risked threatening people's right to privacy, which it said was "an essential pre-requisite to the exercise of individual freedom". People were often unaware of the scale of personal information held and exchanged by public bodies, it said. "There can be no justification for this gradual but incessant creep towards every detail about us being recorded and pored over by the state," committee chairman and Tory peer Lord Goodlad said. "The huge rise in surveillance and data collection by the state and other organisations risks undermining the long-standing tradition of privacy and individual freedom which are vital for democracy," Lord Goodlad added. Human rights campaigners Liberty welcomed the report.

Note: For key reports from major media sources on growing threats to privacy from governments and corporations, click here.

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