Senator Rand Paul Questions FBI Director Chris Wray on the Construct of the Domestic Surveillance State


Posted originally on the conservative tree house on November 18, 2022 | Sundance

Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) recently questioned FBI Director Chris Wray about the nature of how the FBI is receiving or retrieving surveillance information on domestic U.S. citizens, through the use of social media and electronic data collection.  {Direct Rumble Link}

At the core of the issue is a system created in the last 14 years where private social media companies and the intelligence apparatus, to include the FBI, have formed partnerships in the larger surveillance network.  The fact that FBI Director Chris Wray cannot and will not answer specific questions about the issues, only exemplifies the nature of the issue as it relates to unconstitutional violations of privacy.

There is ample & overwhelming evidence, much of it open-sourced, highlighting how federal law enforcement and social media companies are working together to assemble, filter and investigate data based on a collaborative agreement.  Legal protections for privacy are being destroyed in this assembly of constructs.  WATCH:

Paul: “Are you purchasing what is said to be anonymous data through the marketplace and then piercing the anonymous nature to attach individual names to that data?

Wray: “I think it’s a more complicated answer than I could give here.”

In the era shortly after 9/11 the DC national security apparatus, instructed by Vice President Dick Cheney, was constructed to preserve continuity of government and simultaneously view all Americans as potential threats. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) were created specifically for this purpose.

After 9/11/01 the electronic surveillance system that was originally created to monitor threats from abroad was retooled to monitor threats inside our country.  That is when all of our electronic ‘metadata’ came under federal surveillance.

That inflection point, and the process that followed, was exactly what Edward Snowden tried to point out.

What Barack Obama and Eric Holder did with that new construct was refine the internal targeting mechanisms so that only their political opposition became the target of this new national security system.

The problems we face now as a country are directly an outcome of two very distinct points that were merged by Barack Obama. (1) The post 9/11 monitoring of electronic communication of American citizens; and (2) Obama’s team creating a fine-tuning knob that it focused on the politics of the targets.

The modern Fourth Branch of Government is only possible because of a Public-Private partnership with the intelligence apparatus. You do not have to take my word for it, the partnership is so brazened they have made public admissions.

The biggest names in Big Tech announced in June their partnership with the Five Eyes intelligence network, ultimately controlled by the NSA, to: (1) monitor all activity in their platforms; (2) identify extremist content; (3) look for expressions of Domestic Violent Extremism (DVE); and then, (4) put the content details into a database where the Five Eyes intelligence agencies (U.K., U.S., Australia, Canada, New Zealand) can access it.

Facebook, Twitter, Google and Microsoft are all partnering with the intelligence apparatus. It might be difficult to fathom how openly they admit this, but they do. Look at this sentence in the press release (emphasis mine):

[…] “The Group will use lists from intelligence-sharing group Five Eyes adding URLs and PDFs from more groups, including the Proud Boys, the Three Percenters and neo-Nazis.”

Think about that sentence structure very carefully. They are “adding to” the preexisting list…. admitting the group (aka Big Tech) already have access to the the intelligence-sharing database… and also admitting there is a preexisting list created by the Five Eyes consortium.

Obviously, who and what is defined as “extremist content” will be determined by the Big Tech insiders themselves. This provides a gateway, another plausible deniability aspect, to cover the Intelligence Branch from any oversight.

When the Intelligence Branch within government wants to conduct surveillance and monitor American citizens, they run up against problems due to the Constitution of the United States. They get around those legal limitations by sub-contracting the intelligence gathering, the actual data mining, and allowing outside parties (contractors) to have access to the central database.

The government cannot conduct electronic searches (4th amendment issue) without a warrant; however, private individuals can search and report back as long as they have access. What is being admitted is exactly that preexisting partnership. The difference is that Big Tech will flag the content from within their platforms, and now a secondary database filled with the extracted information will be provided openly for the Intelligence Branch to exploit.

The volume of metadata captured by the NSA has always been a problem because of the filters needed to make the targeting useful. There is a lot of noise in collecting all data that makes the parts you really want to identify more difficult to capture. This new admission puts a new massive filtration system in the metadata that circumvents any privacy protections for individuals.

Previously, the Intelligence Branch worked around the constitutional and unlawful search issue by using resources that were not in the United States. A domestic U.S. agency, working on behalf of the U.S. government, cannot listen on your calls without a warrant. However, if the U.S. agency sub-contracts to say a Canadian group, or foreign ally, the privacy invasion is no longer legally restricted by U.S. law.

What was announced in June 2021 is an alarming admission of a prior relationship along with open intent to define their domestic political opposition as extremists.

July 26 (Reuters) – A counterterrorism organization formed by some of the biggest U.S. tech companies including Facebook (FB.O) and Microsoft (MSFT.O) is significantly expanding the types of extremist content shared between firms in a key database, aiming to crack down on material from white supremacists and far-right militias, the group told Reuters.

Until now, the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism’s (GIFCT) database has focused on videos and images from terrorist groups on a United Nations list and so has largely consisted of content from Islamist extremist organizations such as Islamic State, al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Over the next few months, the group will add attacker manifestos – often shared by sympathizers after white supremacist violence – and other publications and links flagged by U.N. initiative Tech Against Terrorism. It will use lists from intelligence-sharing group Five Eyes, adding URLs and PDFs from more groups, including the Proud Boys, the Three Percenters and neo-Nazis.

The firms, which include Twitter (TWTR.N) and Alphabet Inc’s (GOOGL.O) YouTube, share “hashes,” unique numerical representations of original pieces of content that have been removed from their services. Other platforms use these to identify the same content on their own sites in order to review or remove it. (read more)

The influence of the Intelligence Branch now reaches into our lives, our personal lives.

In the decades before 9/11/01 the intelligence apparatus intersected with government, influenced government, and undoubtedly controlled many institutions with it. The legislative oversight function was weak and growing weaker, but it still existed and could have been used to keep the IC in check. However, after the events of 9/11/01, the short-sighted legislative reactions opened the door to allow the surveillance state to weaponize against domestic enemies.

After the Patriot Act was triggered, not coincidentally only six weeks after 9/11, a slow and dangerous fuse was lit that ends with the intelligence apparatus being granted a massive amount of power.  Simultaneously the mission of the intelligence community now encompassed monitoring domestic threats as defined by the people who operate the surveillance system.

The problem with assembled power is always what happens when a Machiavellian network takes control over that power and begins the process to weaponize the tools for their own malicious benefit. That is exactly what the network of President Barack Obama did.

The Obama network took pre-assembled intelligence weapons (we should never have allowed to be created) and turned those weapons into political tools for his radical and fundamental change. The target was the essential fabric of our nation.

Ultimately, this corrupt political process gave power to create the Fourth Branch of Government, the Intelligence Branch. From that perspective the fundamental change was successful.

This is the scale of corrupt political compromise on both sides of the DC dynamic that we are up against.  Preserving this system is also what removing Donald Trump is all about….  The targeting of President Trump in order to preserve the system, the system that was weaponized during the Obama administration, is what the actions of the DOJ and FBI were all about.

What would powerful people in DC do to stop the American people from finding this out?

Republicans Take the House


Armstrong Economics Blog/Politics Re-Posted Nov 16, 2022 by Martin Armstrong

The Republican has won the House. It took more than a week for the Associated Press to determine the GOP had won the 218 seats necessary to control the chamber. Never in my entire life have I ever witnessed an election take this long to find out who won. This is all the paper absentee ballots where my own staff could right a national voting program in less than one month and you do not need the paper nonsense. Dead people will not be able to vote and there will be no harvesting of ballots.

While the press wants to portray this as an underwhelming performance for the Republicans when they should have won hands-down considering the national decline in confidence in Biden that normally would have worked to their advantage, the corruption in the election process has been itself unprecedented.

Our computer was correct – there would be no red wave. The report ($14.95) provided our Timing Arrays forecasting politics out for 12 years. The Republicans would take the House but not the Senate for this would be an extremely tight election due to the corruption. The whole point of the press calling for a red tidal wave was to make sure Republicans felt their vote was not needed so why bother? That was a strategy to keep that up in the press. I saw the same tactic was used to get Jimmie Carter elected. I remember that well for even I concluded it was so overwhelming I did not vote – they didn’t need me. Then you woke up with a surprise nobody expected.

This will now contribute to 2023 where we see rising civil unrest and the Republicans will bring impeachment proceedings against Biden and dive into the Hunter Laptop like never before. The Democrats are about to find out what goes around – comes around. All civility in politics has been tossed out the window.

This is the decline and fall of America. The country is now so divided, there is simply no possible way to ever bring it back to the middle. The Democrats still hate Trump and will push to discredit all Republicans using Trump. The hateful way politics has emerged ensures there is absolutely NOBODY on a white horse who will save the day. It will be soon to just turn out the lights.

UN & ICC Now Guarantee World War III is the Only Solution


Armstrong Economics Blog/War Re-Posted Nov 16, 2022 by Martin Armstrong

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I previously reported that my sources inside the ICC would move to charge Putin with war crimes. No head of state has EVER been charged for the actions of those on the battlefield. Russia is not a member of the ICC, and neither is the United States for that matter. This has merely guaranteed that we are heading into World War III. Putin will not attend the G20, for now, he certainly cannot when the West would use the event to stage an arrest of Putin. They have burned all the bridges for negotiation for peace. This leaves the only resolution is all-out war.

Then the United Nations also ensured that we have no choice but to enter World War III. This is the agenda. The United Nations General Assembly has now adopted a resolution calling for Russia to pay war reparations for its invasion of Ukraine. This is to include the billions of dollars in damage and destruction, as well as reparations for the loss of life. This, too, GUARANTEES there will be no resolution, and this entire event was staged to force Putin to move in to protect the Donbas when Ukraine and the West have torn up both the Belgrade and Minsk Agreements because they want to destroy Russia for climate change.

Russia is the largest energy producer. Some 50% of its GDP is all energy. The US blew up the pipeline deliberately to cut off the sale of energy to Europe. What the US did was an act of war. Of course, nobody in the West and certainly not the ICC or the United Nations would EVER rule against the United States. The West is on this climate change mission, and they are desperately trying to destroy Russia using Ukraine as an excuse.

This UN resolution states plainly that the Russian Federation “must bear the legal consequences of all its internationally wrongful acts, including making reparation for injury, including any damage, caused by such acts.” It boldly goes even further, stating that it will establish “an international mechanism for reparation for damage, loss or injury.”

This is the very same action that was taken against Germany following World War I. They imposed draconian reparation payments that impoverished the German people and caused hyperinflation when the government seized 10% of all private wealth to try to make those payments in December 1922 and laid the very foundation for Hitler’s rise.

It was John Maynard Keynes who warned that the reparations against Germany would create disaster. In his “The Economic Consequences of the Peace,” published in December 1919, Keynes predicted that the stiff war reparations and other harsh terms imposed on Germany by the treaty would lead to the financial collapse of the country. That indeed unleashed the hyperinflation in 1923 and led to the German people turning to Hitler, as Keynes warned, because it would have serious economic and political repercussions on Europe as a whole. That set the stage for World War II, and once again, these people are repeating the very mistakes that unleashed World War II all for climate change.

The sheer stupidity of what is taking place among our world leaders is unthinkable. They WANT war to cover up the collapse of Western debt and the entire monetary system, for they can no longer borrow endlessly. That is precisely what Yellen has said by admitting that she wants to buy back long-term debt and swap it with short-term all because there is a growing debt crisis with NO BID on the long-term as we just saw in the British market.

If you cannot negotiate peace — there is ONLY one solution — all-out war. Ukrainian people are fools. The West has been using them as cannon fodder, and they welcome the death of every Ukrainian to justify their war against Russia. They will wage this proxy war against Russia until the last Ukrainian dies. It is a shame that people believe the propaganda all to “Cry Havoc and let slip the dogs of war.”

This is all about climate change. Imposing these types of sanctions is total insanity. It led to the rise of Hitler, and this only confirms my deepest concern that the removal of Putin will lead to the real hardliners seizing power, and the only reparations solution will be to wipe out Ukraine off the face of the map.

There will be no other solution. They have all now confirmed that they do not seek peace. Russia has stated many times it would negotiate and simply demanded what had been agreed upon in the Minsk Agreement. The Donbas has never been part of Ukraine. Their refusal to allow Russians in the Donbas to vote on their own sovereignty and even outlawing their language and religion is not a fight for democracy, as Zelensky claims — this is a proxy war against Russia. Zelensky has committed his country to a hopeless war, and he will flee at the end, given sanctuary and a private jet for being a good boy and betraying his own people.

The West has indeed unleashed the Dogs of War. Cry Havoc, for our pretend elected politicians prefer war to honest economic reform where they would have to admit that borrowing year after year with no intention of ever paying anything back has come to an end. They were willing to sacrifice the lives of so many people all to retain power.

Biden Asks Lame Duck Congress to Quickly Expedite Another $38 Billion for Ukraine Plus $9 Billion for Big Pharma


Posted originally on the conservative tree house on November 15, 2022 | Sundance

The White House is urging Nancy Pelosi to utilize the lame duck congressional session and construct a massive omnibus spending bill that will wrap Ukraine funding, COVID spending and a federal budget extension via continuous resolution.  The request for Ukraine funding is an additional $38 billion.

Federal funds to support FEMA and hurricane recovery efforts will likely be part of the bargaining chips. Essentially, the sausage ingredients are: if congress doesn’t give Zelenskyy more money, then DeSantis will not get federal financial assistance.

If you don’t support Ukraine, you’re a Russian operative.

WASHINGTON DC – The Biden administration sent a letter to Congress on Tuesday outlining nearly a $38 billion request to help Ukraine continue fending off Russian attacks.

The administration is also asking for $10 billion in emergency health funding, with more than $9 billion going toward Covid vaccine access, next-generation Covid vaccines, long Covid research and more. About $750 million would be spent on efforts to control the spread of monkeypox, hepatitis C and HIV.

Congress has so far provided about $66 billion for Ukraine and other war-related needs. The administration argues that about three-quarters of that funding has either been spent or is committed to specific purposes.

An administration official said the White House plans to request additional disaster relief in the coming weeks to help with hurricane and wildfire recovery but didn’t provide any tentative figure.

The administration’s request for emergency money comes as appropriators aim to clinch a year-end government funding deal that would stave off a partial government shutdown on Dec. 16 and increase agency budgets for the current fiscal year. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has already promised to provide more money for Ukraine in a government funding package, while some conservatives are arguing that the U.S. should cut off financial assistance and assess how funding for the country has been spent to date. (read more)

Deja Vu, Senator McConnell Says Midterm Voters Were Scared of Extremist Candidates


Posted originally on the conservative tree house on November 15, 2022 | Sundance 

In an identical rehash of Republican Senator Mitch McConnell’s purge of Tea Party populism in 2012, a decade later Mitch McConnell gives his perspective on the 2022 midterm election by saying the MAGA populists were just too extreme for independent voters.  If only, the professionally political would have listened to his program and made the white wine spritzer crowd comfier, Republicans would have won.

This is the exact same playbook McConnell used in 2012 to align with his Democrat party friends and destroy the Tea Party movement.  Those who wear sweaters on their shoulders and live amid the high-minded tribes, were just “too frightened” of the unwashed Republican candidates in 2022.  Seriously, those are his words, “too frightened.” WATCH:

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Most casual political observers have absolutely no idea how McConnell works.  However, for over a decade CTH has been trying –mostly failing– to awaken the base of commonsense voters.  In 2010, 2011 and 2012 the #1 priority for McConnell was to destroy the threat represented by the Tea Party.  In 2022 we are seeing an exact replay of the same intents and purposes, only this time the target is President Trump’s MAGA movement.

Keep in mind this is the same Mitch McConnell who was challenged by the audience during a 2017 Rotary Club meeting in Kentucky, about why he refused to support the election priorities of President Trump.  McConnell responded, “I’d ask for a show of hands, but I know everybody’s saying, ‘been there, haven’t done anything,’ which I find extremely irritating — and I’m going to tell you why.”

McConnell continued, “a Congress goes on for two years. Part of the reason I think that the storyline is that we haven’t done much is because, in part, the president and others have set these early timelines about things need to be done by a certain point,” he said.  Then came the kicker, “our new president, of course, has not been in this line of work before, and I think had excessive expectations about how quickly things happen in the Democratic process.

Ah, the customs, traditions and parliamentary norms of the Senate were to blame for republican intransigence on the Trump agenda.  President Trump held “excessive expectations” as to what could be done to support the America-First agenda in the senate.

According to Mitch McConnell, it was Trump’s fault for thinking a Republican majority Senate would work to support the American middle-class.

Comments like that reveal for most what the true motive of Senator McConnell is all about.  It is a motive and agenda all wrapped up in the senate power structure.

McConnell does not fear being in the minority; the color of the flag atop the spire of the UniParty Senate does not matter to those underneath it.  McConnell maneuvers with just as much power in the minority as he does in the majority.

In fact, McConnell makes more money selling his DeceptiCon caucus votes to Chuck Schumer (on behalf of Wall Street) than he does in the majority where he is forced to purchase them.

Indeed, the entire scheme is a rigged game, as Christopher Bedford realized last year and wrote in The Federalist [SEE HERE] after Mitch McConnell delivered his post-election impeachment floor speech.  A ploy to destroy the MAGA movement with Trump removed:

THE FEDERALIST – […] “So what’s all behind this? After four years of yelling “MAGA!” while pushing his own classic, corporate Republican policies, McConnell had hoped to rid himself and his conference of the conservative populist nationalism the former president had championed and go back to the way things were.

He wants a return to promising to tackle illegal immigration before winking at corporate America that nothing will change. He wants to raise money on fighting the abortion of our infants while comfortably lifting nary a finger. He wants to shrug and change the subject when asked about men dominating women’s sports and using women’s bathrooms. He wants fewer taxes and more wars. Hell, he wants someone to blame for the Republican losses in the Georgia special election, and with them the loss of his seat at the head of the Senate.

Instead, his push to impeach ended with rebuke from his own conference. Angry and embarrassed, he blamed his own colleagues as well as the former president, performing a 20-minute attack ad for the left to use on Republicans for the next election cycle and beyond.” (read more)

Through his power structure, McConnell directly controls about 8 to 15 Republican senators; we have called them “The Decepticons” for years. [Cornyn, Thune, Porter, Blunt, Portman, Burr, Barasso, Crapo, Murkowski, Gardner, Roberts, Sasse, Tillis, Rubio, Graham, Romney, and now, Tim Scott]

McConnell has a well-used playbook he deploys to retain power at all costs and select candidates that will be indebted to his Senate schemes. The 2022 Senate candidates have been up against the same Mitch McConnell club machine that readers here are very familiar with.

To remind ourselves how Minority and Majority Senator McConnell took down the threat of the Tea Party, revisit these old articles CNN Part I and CNN Part II  both showcase how McConnell works.   Then do some research on how McConnell worked with Haley Barbour in Mississippi [SEE HERE].

For those who follow the deep weeds of politics, McConnell’s schemes are brutally transparent. For the remaining 97% of the voting electorate, they still don’t understand how the UniParty works. Decepticon leader McConnell doesn’t want the American electorate to see purchased Senate Republicans voting NO on border security.

McConnell must preserve the trough.  Yes, Democrats are ‘our’ opponents; they are ideological enemies to freedom and a constitutional republic. However, just as dangerous an enemy is Mitch McConnell; the man who builds and fills the Trojan Horses that are presented to the voters every two years in order to maintain the illusion of choice.