The Hidden Underbelly of Election Engineering - Why We Cannot Entrust Our Sacred Republic to Automated Elections Interesting Facts About Firmware
Four key properties of firmware, commonly in use in America's and overseas elections and recently approved for statewide deployment in New Hampshire. Each property is confirmed as "TRUE" by a number of technical experts.: · Firmware is "flashable." Modem firmware is often stored in updateable 'flash' memory, rather than requiring chip exchange.
· If there's a remote interface, firmware can be updated by remote and such an interface can be a wireless receiver inside a case, and we wouldn't see it. Simply putting a scanner around it would ensure no telltale signals that might arouse suspicion.
· In the case of wireless, one transmitter can hit all receivers in a given area, and one server can send out and download a particular program, such as a vote-changing program, to every device.
· Such microprograms, composed of microinstructions, can control the sequencing of computer circuits directly at the detailed level of the single machine instruction.
---------------------------------
NATIONAL BALLOT INTEGRITY PROJECT NEW HAMPSHIRE BALLOT INTEGRITY TASK FORCE EarthAngelsNtwk@aol.com http://www.ballotintegrity.org
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Q: WHAT'S WRONG WITH COMPUTER VOTING MACHINES? WHY CAN'T WE SAFELY ENTRUST OUR ELECTIONS TO AUTOMATION?
· Five former CIA Directors are identified as directly involved in election engineering, overtly or covertly: John Deutch, R. James Woolsey, Bobby Ray Inman, Robert Gates, and George H.W. Bush.
· Investigative journalist, Lynn Landes, reports that SAIC (Science Applications International Corp., sometimes also referred to as Scientific Applications International Corp.), of San Diego, California, is described as, “the shadow ruling class within the Pentagon,” and as a “behemoth military defense contractor with a shadowy, if not tarnished reputation,” which maintains strong business ties to the military and intelligence communities, such as the NSA and CIA. Many of SAIC’s board members are formerly with the Pentagon and CIA.
· Behemoth military contractor SAIC and ChoicePoint, Inc., of Atlanta, Georgia, have developed a strategic alliance, teaming up as partners in “data mining”.
· SAIC is aligned with a number of major voting machine vendors, including Diebold Election Systems, Hart Intercivic, VoteHere and ES&S (Election Systems & Software).
· SAIC has bid for state voter registration database contracts, such as that of the State of Nevada, under the name of “Votec/SAIC/ES&S”.
· Investigators have uncovered hidden colorful criminal histories of investigation, indictment, prosecution, and imprisonment for corruption among voting machine vendors and their networks. Among the offenses uncovered: serious security lapses, creative accounting, multiple sets of books (including in the vote counting software itself), dummy front companies, and numerous counts of racketeering, conspiracy, obstruction of justice, fraud, theft, bribery of officials, and embezzlement.
· According to T. Hommel, expert computer programmer, attorney, and Editor of wheresthepaper.org, SAIC, ChoicePoint and Diebold Election Systems now control America’s electronic automated elections.
· Jeffrey Dean, Senior Vice President of Diebold, was convicted of 23 counts of felony theft in the first degree, of planting back doors in his software, and of using a “high degree of sophistication” to evade detection over a period of 2 years.” While heading up the development of Diebold’s GEMS controversial central compiler software source code at Global Election Systems (later, purchased by Diebold, and renamed Diebold Election Systems), convicted felon, Jeffrey Dean, worked in association with John Silvestro, Owner and CEO of LHS Associates of Methuen, MA, which maintains, pre-programs and configures the voting machines and memory cards of five New England States, including New Hampshire.*
· Diebold Election Systems is under tremendous scrutiny nationwide for sales of voting systems proven to be highly vulnerable and easily hackable by anyone from a teenager to a terrorist. Diebold CEO, Walden O’Dell, recently resigned, Diebold shareholders and numerous others have filed suit, and contracts for Diebold voting systems sales and services are in question, and being canceled, throughout the country.
· According to Peter Phillips, Director of Project Censored,“Diebold hired Scientific Applications International Corp. (SAIC) of San Diego to develop the software security in their voting machines.”
· Yet, the State of Maryland hired SAIC as an “independent reviewer,” to assess Diebold’s Accuvote-TS (touch-screen) software security, in light of widespread concerns about its Diebold touch-screen voting machines. On September 2, 2003, SAIC released a “Risk Assessment Report,” with significant deletions, and the media reported that the machines “passed muster.”
· ChoicePoint and its associates lobbied aggressively for a Help America Vote Act (HAVA) provision for federally mandated statewide voter registration databases. ChoicePoint has since bagged the lion’s share of state contracts nationwide.
· ChoicePoint was in the news, in 2000, for purging 91,000 African-American males from Florida’s voter registration database, for which ChoicePoint was paid well. Asserting that they were felons, the company claimed those purged were, thus, ineligible to vote. ChoicePoint’s controversial voter purge list was proven erroneous after the Florida 2000 Presidential Election, which George W. Bush was reported to have won by 537 Florida votes.
· ChoicePoint was in the news for “Grand Theft Identity,” as reported by Newsweek Magazine on July 4, 2005, and for massive credit card identity theft, reportedly, in the hundreds of thousands, possibly more, on its watch, just prior to the 2004 Presidential Election.
· ChoicePoint controls the “no-fly” watch list, recently augmented to 88,000.
· On April 22, 2005, Andrew McIntosh of the Sacramento Bee reported that, despite being under investigation by federal and state regulators for improprieties, ChoicePoint was poised to receive an $845,500 contract from California’s State Attorney General to “develop a computer system (to) help probe suspected criminals and terrorists.”
· The now infamous PROMIS software was originally developed by a company called INSLAW (Institute for Law and Social Research), which was awarded a contract for $10 million by the U.S. Department of Justice, “to adapt a computer program to the needs of U.S. attorneys and government agencies in tracking criminals (later termed “terrorists”), inter-agency.”
· Upon being shorted $2 million of $10 million, INSLAW filed suit against the U.S. Justice Department for breach of contract. Discovery revealed that the PROMIS software had been unlawfully altered with a quiet nod of approval from high-level officials at the Justice Department.
· According to INSLAW Owner and CEO, Bill Hamilton, PROMIS software was later sold with companion hardware, “with extra signal-sending hardware chips that broadcast data to satellites owned by the NSA.”
· Robert Gates, a Senior American intelligence and national security official (later, appointed Director of the CIA by President George H.W. Bush), personally peddled the PROMIS software overseas, complete with “back doors by which to spy on client countries.”
· Corroboration regarding the illegal sale of PROMIS came from, among many, former agent of the United States’ Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), Lester Knox Coleman III. According to Coleman, bootleg copies of PROMIS were “made without the knowledge of INSLAW, to which a “backdoor’ software routine had been added. No matter how securely the front door might be barred with entry codes and passwords, American operators, holding the key to the secret back door, could break into the PROMIS systems operated by Cyprus, Egypt, Syria, Pakistan, Turkey, Kuwait, Israel, Jordan, Iran and Iraq whenever they wished, access the data stored there and get out again without arousing the slightest suspicion that the security of those systems had been breached…”
· Numerous PROMIS client countries also included Canada, Libya, and Chile.
· Similar language has been noted in the case of the computer voting industry, as follows:
On July 8, 2003, an article was published, by Bev Harris of Black Box Voting, elections investigator and author of Black Box Voting – Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century, stating that Johns Hopkins and Rice University technologists had discovered secret “back doors” in the Diebold GEMS software source code (which accounts for the tabulation of 50% of America’s votes) by which votes could be changed, in real time, by remote, during America’s elections.
· In January 2005, it was reported at Boston.com, that SAIC was awarded a $170 million contract for a PROMIS-type computer software program for the FBI, intended “to help agents share data about terrorist threats and criminal cases.” Could SAIC be the keeper of the “improved” PROMIS technology?
· Robert Gates now presides over election engineering, in association with SAIC and VoteHere (satellite cryptography technology).
· An electronic voting project is in progress, at MIT and Caltech, funded by Carnegie and others, that is based on satellite cryptography technology, and which entrusts the security and control of whole elections to five individuals, possessing one-fifth, each, of a single encryption key. Encryption is as much about secrecy as it is about security. Exactly what is being encrypted and who is to be entrusted with the secrets?
· Note that, of the five former CIA Directors identified as directly involved in election engineering, John Deutch is with MIT and Bobby Ray Inman is Caltech-connected.
· Career CIA professional, Ray McGovern, wrote unfavorably of Robert Gates, in Chapter 19 of his book, Neo-Conned, as follows: “Why dwell on Gates? Because a careerist in both senses of the word, he bears the lion’s share of responsibility for institutionalizing the corruption of intelligence analysis (at the CIA).”
· If such is the case, why is Gates presiding over election engineering? Could Robert Gates have interest in “institutionalizing the corruption” of America’s elections?
· Similar properties have been noted between the PROMIS technology (with “extra signal-sending hardware chips that broadcast data to satellites owned by the NSA”) and firmware, commonly in use in America’s elections.
--------
· Firmware is "flashable." Modem firmware is often stored in updateable 'flash' memory, rather than requiring chip exchange.
· If there's a remote interface, firmware can be updated by remote and such an interface can be a wireless receiver inside a case, and we wouldn't see it. Simply putting a scanner around it would ensure no telltale signals that might arouse suspicion.
· In the case of wireless, one transmitter can hit all receivers in a given area, and one server can send out and download a particular program, such as a vote-changing program, to every device.
· Such microprograms, composed of microinstructions, can control the sequencing of computer circuits directly at the detailed level of the single machine instruction.
-------
· We understand that LHS Associates, New England’s exclusive “independent” voting machine sales and service vendor for Diebold and ES&S equipment, long advised New Hampshire that we were using software v. 1.92 T (an early “non-GEMS, pre-GEMS”) test version of the Diebold software, and that we have, therefore, not been using firmware (v. 1.94 W and above) in our automated elections. Thus, we in New Hampshire were advised that we have been safe from any concerns over “central tabulation” and the controversial Diebold GEMS software source code (now known to involve flashable firmware). The matter of firmware’s involvement in New Hampshire’s elections, however, has not in fact been clear, and now, firmware is openly proposed for all of New Hampshire.
· LHS Associates, overseen by Owner/CEO, John Silvestro (a long-time associate of Senior Vice President of Diebold Election Systems, Jeffrey Dean, convicted felon and designer of the controversial Diebold GEMS software compiler code and source code)*, has long been entrusted with the pre-programming, configuration and maintenance of the memory cards and voting machines of five New England States, including both Diebold and ES&S optical scanners in New Hampshire. LHS typically pre-programs the voting machine memory cards on site at its location in Methuen, Massachusetts, absent oversight, and delivers them directly to client communities, throughout New England, for a fee of approximately $500 - $700 per client community, per election period.
· Coincidentally, LHS Associates is also in the business of census demographic data collection for sizeable geographic areas of New England.
· Voting machine software and memory cards provided by private vendors, such as Diebold and ES&S, are regarded as “proprietary.” Thus, even election supervisors are not permitted to closely inspect the memory cards and voting machines widely in use throughout America. As such, it is unknown as to what precisely, is being programmed on the memory cards and voting machines in use in New England, which election officials have long dutifully employed in their elections, in accordance with instructions issued by LHS.
· New Hampshire is presently comprised of 45% hand counted paper ballot areas (encompassing 22% of New Hampshire’s votes), with 55% of areas the state conducting its elections on electronic voting systems manufactured by Diebold Election Systems (72 towns) and ES&S (25 towns), encompassing 78% of New Hampshire's votes. New Hampshire’s automated elections have long been conducted on Diebold AccuVote OS (optical scanner) and ES&S Optech-OS (optical scanner) computer voting systems, all overseen by LHS.
· Due to a ballot design change ordered by a New Hampshire court and related legislation, the use of columnar-styled ballots is scheduled to be implemented in this next election (2006). New Hampshire is now poised to fully convert over to Diebold electronic voting systems in all of its automated areas. Or, it can recommend an immediate return to community-based, locally controlled hand counted paper ballot elections.
· We first understood that the columnar ballot design change was to require the conversion to Diebold voting systems of only the 25 towns now running elections on ES&S equipment. We later learned from Diebold/LHS that, to conform to the ballot design change, New Hampshire is also compelled to uniformly “upgrade” the software running its existing Diebold voting machines to a recent version of the controversial Diebold GEMS firmware, a change which would impact all electronic voting machines throughout the State.
· Journalist, Bill Moyers, has referred to elections as, “The reform upon which all else depends.” With each successive U.S. election, America and the world have long looked to the State of New Hampshire to lead. New Hampshire is in an interesting position to set an important example for America. This is, in fact, a Jeffersonian moment in our nation’s timeline, at which what we do or don’t do in New Hampshire will have powerful far-reaching effects into the future.
· We now ask ourselves two pressing questions:
Q: Can we really safely entrust our sacred New Hampshire democratic elections to such proprietary and surreptitious technology?
Q: Are we prepared to courageously lead in staking a righteous claim on our own elections, by recommending an interim or long-term return to a time-honored system of locally controlled, community-based hand counted paper ballot elections?
-----
UPDATE: On Friday, March 10, 2006, the NH Ballot Law Commission, in a vote of 4:1, voted to approve the upgrade and use of the Diebold GEMS v. 1.94 w firmware on all electronic voting systems throughout the state. ES&S machines will be eliminated.
Barring an appeal or decision override, in the 2006 election and thereafter, 78% of New Hampshire citizens (55% of areas) will vote on Diebold Accu-Vote Optical Scanners with v. 1.94 w firmware, and 22% of New Hampshire citizens(45% of areas) will vote on hand counted paper ballots.
“Under the circumstances, I cannot in good conscience vote to approve the upgrade,” said Gregory Martin of Keene, the Commissioner who opposed the action, and the sole member of the panel to have studied the materials presented.
-------
Testimony of: Sharona Merel, Co-founder National Ballot Integrity Project & New Hampshire Ballot Integrity Task Force
New Hampshire Ballot Law Commission Hearing Concord, New Hampshire March 10, 2006
(Note: A portion adapted from a recent press release, “Vote Rescue Acts to Save Vanishing Voting Rights With Hand-Counted Paper Ballot System in Citizens' Parallel Election, Austin, Texas, March 7, 2006,” from Karen Renick of http://www.voterescue.org {TX}and Vickie Karp of Black Box Voting and http://www.coalitionforvisibleballots.com {TX})
Good morning!
With this testimony, today, it should be noted that we are not questioning the actions of election officials, but, rather, the proprietary secrecy that shrouds the electronic voting machines, the mystery pre-programming of the memory cards and the very suspect nature of the firmware that runs them. This firmware is at issue, today, here in New Hampshire.
As we share these comments with you today, we ask you to consider that just a single vote in multiple precincts across the board can swing an election and invite election officials to consider who, in fact, controls your community’s vote count.
Black Box Voting, a citizens’ watchdog group for elections, has recently exposed serious flaws with two of the four major electronic machine vendors, Diebold and Sequoia. The evidence against electronic voting, both touchscreen systems and optical scan counters of paper ballots, is so irrefutable as to make all electronic voting systems suspect of fraud.
Many hundreds of serious problems with electronic vote tallies across the country – including on optical scanners, such as we have here – have been documented, since November 2000, and repeated tests by computer experts have discovered embedded election “flipping” software. The total lack of transparency inherent with electronic voting, coupled with these other revelations, have stripped voters of their fundamental sacred right to vote and have their votes counted correctly.
We have concerns about hidden factors and ask that they be addressed, here in New Hampshire.
For one thing, the Homeland Security Warning, which was issued, as follows:
HOMELAND SECURITY WARNING of September 2004 Regarding Diebold Back Door:
From US-CERT Diebold GEMS Central Tabulator 1.17.7, 1.18 A vulnerability exists due to an undocumented backdoor account, which could a local or remote authenticated malicious user modify votes. No workaround or patch available at time of publishing. We are not aware of any exploits for this vulnerability. GEMS Central Tabulator Vote Database Vote Modification http://www.us-cert.gov/cas/bulletins/SB04-252.html#diebold Medium BlackBoxVoting.org, August 31, 2004
Jeffrey Dean, Senior Vice President of Diebold, was convicted of 23 counts of felony theft in the first degree, of planting back doors in his software, and of using a “high degree of sophistication” to evade detection over a period of 2 years.” While heading up the development of Diebold’s GEMS controversial central compiler software source code at Global Election Systems (later, purchased by Diebold, and renamed Diebold Election Systems), convicted felon, Jeffrey Dean, worked in association with John Silvestro, Owner and CEO of LHS Associates of Methuen, MA, which maintains, pre-programs and configures the voting machines and memory cards of five New England States, including New Hampshire.*
LHS Associates, overseen by Owner/CEO, John Silvestro (a long-time associate of Senior Vice President of Diebold Election Systems, Jeffrey Dean, convicted felon and designer of the controversial Diebold GEMS software compiler code and source code)*, has long been entrusted with the pre-programming, configuration and maintenance of the memory cards and voting machines of five New England States, including both Diebold and ES&S optical scanners in New Hampshire. It is our understanding that LHS typically pre-programs the voting machine memory cards on site at its location in Methuen, Massachusetts, absent oversight, and delivers them directly to client communities, throughout New England, for a fee of approximately $500 - $700 per client community, per election period.
Voting machine software and memory cards provided by private vendors, such as Diebold and ES&S, are regarded as “proprietary.” Thus, even election supervisors are not permitted to closely inspect the memory cards and voting machines widely in use throughout America. As such, it is unknown as to what precisely, is being programmed on the memory cards and voting machines in use in New England, which election officials have long dutifully employed in their elections, in accordance with instructions issued by LHS.
In addition, according to technical experts, voting software certification to 1990 standards is inadequate. Certification must be to at least 2002 standards.
Further, here is what we now know about firmware, confirmed by numerous technical experts, one with high-level NSA security clearance, who has worked on software security for missile systems.
Four (4) key properties of firmware are as follows:
Interesting Facts About Firmware:
Four key properties of firmware, commonly in use in America's and overseas elections (each point confirmed as "TRUE" by a number of technical experts).
· Firmware is "flashable." Modem firmware is often stored in updateable 'flash' memory, rather than requiring chip exchange.
· If there's a remote interface, firmware can be updated by remote and such an interface can be a wireless receiver inside a case, and we wouldn't see it. Simply putting a scanner around it would ensure no telltale signals that might arouse suspicion.
· In the case of wireless, one transmitter can hit all receivers in a given area, and one server can send out and download a particular program, such as a vote-changing program, to every device.
· Such microprograms, composed of microinstructions, can control the sequencing of computer circuits directly at the detailed level of the single machine instruction.
It is clear to see that firmware is, by no means, benign. Can we really entrust our sacred New Hampshire elections to this suspect technology?
If we allow outside interests to flood our state with firmware, essential control of our own New Hampshire elections will slip right through our fingers in a flash. Should we allow outsiders to wrest control of our elections right out from under us?
We submit that the incursion of the proposed firmware in New Hampshire’s elections poses a grave threat to our state and to elections throughout the nation.
I am a long-time resident of the State of New Hampshire and a co-founder of a national project for election integrity, so am in a position to see the havoc and the veritable war over the incursion of this voting technology occurring throughout the country. Hundreds of thousands of concerned citizens, many of them technology experts and other professional people, are meeting in gatherings similar to this, up in arms, to defend America’s elections. Very often, the vendor in question is Diebold, whose representatives we may see here in this room today. Diebold, whose CEO has recently resigned, whose stockholders are suing the company, whose certifications are suspect in whole states, such as California, and whose firmware has been repeatedly revealed as highly hackable by anyone from a teenager to a terrorist – even from a simple P.C.!
So, let’s ask ourselves just whom do we want controlling our elections, here in New Hampshire: outsiders with proprietary interests or our own earnest election officials and communities?
There are also numerous lawsuits against Diebold occurring throughout the country. If we certify and approve known “flawed” firmware in New Hampshire, who is liable for costs and damages? The Secretary of State’s office? The New Hampshire Ballot Law Commission members? This is, no doubt, a path we would all like to see averted.
Further, five or six (5 or 6) attack points are identified in the case of hand counted paper ballots – a simple, traditional, decentralized form of vote counting that is still openly administered by our own New Hampshire local election officials, with assistance from the citizens, in 45% of our state. We have a beautiful exemplar system for hand counting here in NH, as directed by our good Secretary of State Bill Gardner, whose fine legacy of exemplar elections we intend to protect, and we ask you to assist us with this. Many of us have witnessed a model hand counting system that works well, here in Concord, during post 2004 election recounts.
Why “fix” a cost-effective system that is so exemplar with non-transparent technology that is purposely made complex to justify enormous sales, service contracts, and resales of proprietary non-transparent technology?
Conversely, in the case of electronic voting, there are upwards of 50, some say 110, some experts say “infinite” attack points, with which we must constantly contend. And, if we should manage to overcome one or two attack points (as we saw in Georgia in 2002) patches, with 20 more attack points, simply take their place. And, all facilitated, invisibly, behind the scenes, via flash firmware technology of which we have not even been advised.
We have some handouts here today that describe in some detail some of the hidden involvements of shadowy, corporate defense and intelligence interests in this very election technology, including five former CIA Directors directly involved in election engineering, both overtly and covertly. Suffice it to say, there is more going on behind the scenes in this high stakes game than it would seem.
I ask the good members of this Commission to consider carefully: Whom do we want in charge of our elections in New Hampshire? Outside proprietary interests? Or, are we, in fact, in control of our own elections in New Hampshire?
Today, we are presented with an opportunity to set firm limits against the incursion of outside interests and suspect technology in our own New Hampshire elections. Let us seize the day and save our state.
-------
For more information about the perils and underbelly of electronic voting, see the following sites:
*Note: We in New England election integrity circles (3 States, VT, MA and NH) are in possession of clear evidence of the long-time association of LHS CEO/President, John Silvestro, with convicted felon, Jeffrey Dean, designer of the highly controversial Diebold GEMS software compiler code/source code, and have made this information available to New Hampshire Secretary of State Bill Gardner, Assistant Secretary of State Anthony Stevens and others.
While still under oath at the March 10, 2006 Ballot Law Commission Hearing, Mr. Silvestro stated that he does not know Jeffrey Dean, has never met him and has "never even shaken his hand". If Mr. Silvestro wishes, he is, of course, welcome to provide clear evidence to that effect.
[From provocateurs at protests to the hi-tech surveillance of communication, personal movements, purchases and money flows, “The War On You” was declared decades ago, and the stakes are being raised with every passing day.
As one of the founding members of NY911Truth.org (though no longer affiliated with the organization), I am familiar with the various forms of agents that can be placed into an activist circle. Some are there to gather information, some to disrupt, while others are there to make the wrong suggestion at the right time. It can be hard to discern between people of this ilk and those who are just mentally disturbed. There is a magnetism that draws such individuals to activist movements.
But where “The War On You” becomes hazy is in the hi-tech arena. Phone calls, emails, credit card purchases, bank transactions and beyond are all subject to being monitored, intercepted and/or thwarted. It is difficult, if not impossible, to determine where the fingerprints of PROMIS software will be next or already have been. – MK]
THE WAR ON YOU: U.S. GOVERNMENT TARGETING OF AMERCIAN DISSIDENTS - Part II
October 10th 2006, 3:45PM [PST] - In the first part of this series we traced the history of the targeting of American dissidents from eleven years after the Constitution was signed, through the origins of the FBI and its COINTELPRO’s infiltration, neutralization, and even elimination of groups and individuals in the Black Liberation Movement. In this segment we will briefly consider the targeting of other groups during the 1960s and ‘70s and then move swiftly into the twenty-first century where we are now witnessing unprecedented legislation against dissent, in violation of civil liberties.
Simultaneous with the birth of the civil rights movement in the sixties was the Free Speech Movement which essentially began at the University of California at Berkeley in 1963. Out of that movement grew the anti-Vietnam War movement that swept the campuses of America from approximately 1964-1970. During that period it was often difficult to separate the various freedom movements as white college students volunteered their time, and in some cases, their lives, to assist the civil rights movement. As the Black Liberation Movement gained momentum, white students often marched in solidarity with such groups as the Black Panthers and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
Whereas blacks were railing against racial oppression, white students were feeling the victimization of the military draft and marching vehemently against the war at the same time that they were burning draft cards, moving to Canada, and frequently, going to prison for draft evasion. In addition, an unparalleled revolution of counter-culture was mesmerizing American youth who began questioning the values of their parents’ Great Depression/World War II generation. In those days, college students had more time than most working Americans to read books, engage in philosophical and political discussions into the wee hours, and experiment with psychedelic substances. As they did so, they began rejecting on a colossal scale, the authority and values of the mainstream establishment. It is axiomatic that the oppression of movements of color was symptomatic of deplorable, unacknowledged racism infecting the American psyche, but irrefutably, those in power held a special contempt for callous disregard for their authority. To be a “nigger” was perilous, but to be an “uppity nigger” was suicide. Likewise, an entire generation of white elders were aghast at the flag-burning, sandal-wearing, dope-smoking, long-haired, sexually promiscuous, Mao-quoting, bohemian anarchists that their children had become. Many of these parents were government officials, and some worked in the FBI. A May 27, 1968 memo written from the Newark office of the FBI to J. Edgar Hoover echoed the coercive, imperious sentiment of millions of parents of flower children:
It is believed that the non-conformism in dress and speech, neglect of personal cleanliness, use of obscenities (printed and uttered), publicized sexual promiscuity, experimenting with and the use of drugs, filthy clothes, shaggy hair, wearing of sandals, beads, and unusual jewelry tend to negate any attempt to hold these people up to ridicule. The American press has been doing this with no apparent effect or curtailment of “new left” activities. These individuals are apparently getting strength and [becoming] more brazen in their attempts to destroy American society, as noted in the takeover recently at Columbia University, New York City, and other universities in the U.S.1
An FBI memo from earlier that month left no doubt that the New Left was now an unmistakable target of COINTELPRO as its Director, William Sullivan wrote: “The purpose of this program is to expose, disrupt, and otherwise neutralize the activities of this group and persons connected with it.”2
And then came the Chicago Democratic Convention of that same year in which Mayor Daley’s Police force on national television attacked white student protestors in front of convention headquarters, arresting and brutalizing hundreds while onlookers chanted “the whole world is watching”--this just months after the murders of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy, Jr. and in the throes of an escalating Vietnam War.
The following year, as the Vietnam War continued to escalate, over a half-million American youth immersed themselves in the Woodstock Music Festival and for a few days, forgot about things like the draft and what they might do with their college degrees—should they choose to complete them. The fall and winter of 1969-1970 were dark days of Nixon’s “Vietnamization” of the war and the unpublicized invasion of Cambodia with U.S. troops and increased bombings of that nation, even as Nixon assured the American people that the war was “winding down” because he “had a plan.” As the “secret” invasion of Cambodia was revealed, a new wave of rage swept across American academia resulting in nationwide demonstrations, strikes, and the shutting down of some campuses. While young white heads had been cracked at the Chicago Democratic Convention, white students were now slaughtered at Kent State University on May 4, 1970. [The link provided is to the website of Alan Canfora, one of the survivors of the massacre.]
As a student at a major university in the late sixties and early seventies, extremely active in antiwar protest politics, I do recall suspicious individuals who infiltrated the movement from time to time. Generally, they were folks who seemed a bit emotionally unstable and were incessantly encouraging demonstrators to commit increasingly blatant, outrageous acts of violence. For example, if a peaceful demonstration was planned, they were the ones who always called for “trashing” in the form of destroying property by breaking windows or burning buildings. Whatever the strategy, they wanted to escalate. Sometimes they would come running in from the sidelines of a demonstration claiming to have been hit over the head by a police officer brandishing a frightening baton. Eventually, folks in the movement caught on to their games, but rarely did anyone investigate who these people really were. They were no doubt paid provocateurs and informants, but at what level—local, state, or federal, we never really knew.
Kent State was an extremely significant turning point in the student protest movement because essentially, it ended it. Indeed some smaller protests continued on campuses into the early seventies, but the deplorable events that occurred on May 4, 1970 successfully sent a message to America’s white students: We will kill you. On that day, horrified and frightened as I was, I realized that while the murdering of four innocent students was grotesque and reprehensible, people of color had been experiencing it in this nation for a very long time.
Beginning in the late sixties and continuing into the mid-seventies, the American Indian Movement (AIM) demonstrated against U.S. government abuse and neglect of its tribes and the corruption of reservation politics in collusion with federal agencies. Churchill and Vander Hall devote an entire chapter in their book to the activities of COINTELPRO against AIM which culminated in the framing, false conviction, and imprisonment of Leonard Peltier.
During the late seventies, the FBI continued its search for two key members of the Weatherman faction of Students For A Democratic Society (SDS), Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayres, both of whom surrendered to the FBI in 1980 after it was learned that the FBI had so illegally gathered evidence against them that they could not be prosecuted for blowing up government buildings. Related to this is the reality that in the course of the official existence of COINTELPRO, a host of laws were broken with what were at the time, illegal wiretaps, bugs, and mail openings.3
As previously mentioned in this series, the “official” dates for COINTELPRO’s existence are 1956-1971. To what extent it continued throughout the twentieth century, we do not know with certainty. What we do know is that immediately after September 11, 2001, the bones of COINTELPRO resurrected and reincarnated in the form of the Department of Homeland Security, the USA Patriot Act, PROMIS software, and the Total Information Awareness Program, and this series will address the specifics of how those entities have targeted and are targeting U.S. citizens.
In 2004, Mike Ruppert wrote in Crossing The Rubicon:
If you understand nothing else about the map that I have been trying to draw for you, understand that the post 9/11 erosion of civil liberties and the economic devastation that is being felt here at home are opposite sides of the same coin. One begets and demands the other, whether the Empire consciously considers it or not. And the currents of behavior depicted on the map dictate, as surely as gravity pulls things down and not up, that what has already started can only get worse. Until now, in the Empire’s domestic ham and eggs breakfast, the American people were playing the role of the chicken rather than the pig.4
In Chapter 28 of Rubicon, Mike connects the dots between political oppression, the violation of civil liberties, and the economic hollowing out of American society. This article will not explore those connections, but it is essential to understand them because the targeting of American dissidents is not happening in an economic vacuum.
THE USA PATRIOT ACT Over eight pages of Rubicon are devoted to the Patriot Act, passed in the middle of the night on October 26, 2001 and read by only a handful of legislators who voted for it. Rubicon offers in these eight pages, an extraordinary analysis of the act and its impact on civil liberties, which every concerned citizen should read and study. What may be more surprising, however, is that Attorney Jennifer Van Bergen in her article “The USA Patriot Act Was Planned Before 9/11” positively acknowledges Mike Ruppert’s contribution to the discourse on civil liberties and states that the Patriot Act was already written long before 9/11. She traces the origins of the act back to 1950s anti-communist hysteria, through the Reagan administration’s proposed legislation which became some of the most troubling aspects of the Patriot Act, and on to the 1996 Antiterroism Act which, “…although it had nothing to do with terrorism at all, was Republican Senator Orrin Hatch's long-sought provision to limit the right of habeas corpus. Habeas corpus is the procedure whereby a person convicted by a state court can challenge that conviction in a federal court. The thing is, terrorism cases are brought in federal, not state, courts.” According to James X. Dempsey and David Cole in their book, Terrorism & The Constitution: Sacrificing Civil Liberties In the Name of National Security, "Senator Hatch wanted to make it more difficult for federal courts to order retrials of prisoners where state courts had violated the U.S. Constitution.”
This confirms that the inherently unconstitutional concepts which the Patriot Act made the law of the land were incubating in the minds of people in power for decades before the Act was even written. One of our principal Founding Fathers, James Madison, would have not been surprised, and perhaps this kind of tyranny is what he had in mind when he wrote, “All men in power ought to be mistrusted.”
THE DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY According to Van Bergen, the proposal for a Department of Homeland Security developed in 1998 with the Hart-Rudman Commission which was known as the United States Commission on National Security/21st Century, and its report is dated January 31, 2001. The Commission recommended "the creation of a new independent National Homeland Security Agency (NHSA) with responsibility for planning, coordinating, and integrating various U.S. government activities involved in homeland security. NHSA would be built upon the Federal Emergency Management Agency, with the three organizations currently on the front line of border security - the Coast Guard, the Customs Service, and the Border Patrol - transferred to it. NHSA would not only protect American lives, but also assume responsibility for overseeing the protection of the nation's critical infrastructure, including information technology." Clearly, this is the basic blueprint of the Homeland Security Act
Van Bergen also notes that of the twelve Hart-Rudman commissioners, nine were members of the Council On Foreign Relations (CFR). This semi-secret organization of ruling elite is comprised, for the most part, not of conservative Republicans, but rather moderate to liberal Democrats. The bipartisan Hart-Rudman Commission was launched in 1998 by Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich to “make recommendations on how the United States could ensure its security in the 21st century.” 5 Mike Ruppert spells out clearly what DHS must do:
The DHS will collect and share intelligence vital for its primary mission, which is the protection of critical infrastructure. In the process of doing this, it will access the intelligence of state and local agencies and “coordinate” the dissemination of that information.This means that local police agencies, if they want to continue receiving federal subsidies and don’t want to look as though they aren’t concerned about their citizens, will effectively become intelligence-gathering units for the federal government. In addition the DHS Secretary and his employees are also given total access to all information in any federal agency, whether verified or not on a level of priority equal with the President and the Director of Central Intelligence.It will also have complete access to all banking and stock transaction records; once compiled, these records can be shared with any foreign government the government wishes to share them with. It also allows federal agents to serve search warrants issued by foreign governments inside this country.
A PROMIS IS A PROMIS, AND TIA ISN’T SPANISH FOR “AUNT”
In my opinion, some of the most stunning pages in Crossing The Rubicon are pages 152-174 in which Mike Ruppert discusses in detail what PROMIS software is capable of doing and in which he asks this question:
What would you do if you possessed software that could think,understand every major language in the world, that provided peepholes into everyone else’s computer “dressing rooms,” that could insert data into computers without people’s knowledge, that could fill in blanks beyond human reasoning, and also predict what people would do — before they did it? You would probably use it wouldn’t you? But PROMIS is not a virus. It has to be installed as a program on the computer systems that you want to penetrate. Being as uniquely powerful as it is, this is usually not a problem. Once its power and advantages are demonstrated, most corporations, banks, or nations are eager to be a part of the “exclusive” club that has it. And, as is becoming increasingly confirmed by sources connected to this story, especially in the worldwide banking system, not having PROMIS — by whatever name it is offered — can exclude you from participating in the ever more complex world of money transfers and money laundering. As anexample, look at any of the symbols on the back of your ATM card. Picture your bank refusing to accept the software that made it possible to transfer funds from LA to St. Louis, or from St. Louis to Rome.
PROMIS was stolen from its owner, Inslaw, Inc., by the U.S. government in 1982 and sold to over 40 countries. The capabilities of PROMIS are nothing less than mindboggling for the technically unsophisticated, and Elliot Richardson, former U.S. Attorney General and Inslaw counsel described the PROMIS scandal as “far worse than Watergate.” Even as the U.S. government was raking in hefty profits from the sale of PROMIS, it was not selling all of its technical superiority by any stretch of the imagination. Commenting on the capabilities of PROMIS, Mike Ruppert states that “Mated with artificial intelligence it is capable of analyzing not only an individual’s,
but also a community’s entire life, in real time. It is also capable of issuing warnings when irregularities appear and of predicting future movements based upon past behavior.” 6 He asserts that not only is it almost certain that PROMIS was used in the execution of the 9/11 attacks but that its use, along with the Total Information Awareness Program will be instrumental in the conquest of the American people. Conservative Republican William Safire’s chilling remarks on civil liberties post-9/11 were quoted in Rubicon and elsewhere by Mike Ruppert as Safire railed against the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in his New York Times article, “You Are A Suspect.”
According the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) Total Information Awareness (TIA) of DARPA was supposedly nixed by Congress when “In September 2003, Congress eliminated funding for the controversial project and closed the Pentagon's Information Awareness Office, which had developed TIA. This does not, however, necessarily signal the end of other government data-mining initiatives that are similar to TIA.”7 Indeed this does not signal the end of other government data-mining programs.
In May, 2003, in “A Spy Machine Of DARPA’s Dreams”, Wired News reported that:
The Pentagon is about to embark on a stunningly ambitious research project designed to gather every conceivable bit of information about a person's life, index all the information and make it searchable.
What national security experts and civil libertarians want to know is, why would the Defense Department want to do such a thing?
The embryonic LifeLog program would dump everything an individual does into a giant database: every e-mail sent or received, every picture taken, every Web page surfed, every phone call made, every TV show watched, every magazine read.
All of this -- and more -- would combine with information gleaned from a variety of sources: a GPS transmitter to keep tabs on where that person went, audio-visual sensors to capture what he or she sees or says, and biomedical monitors to keep track of the individual's health.
This gigantic amalgamation of personal information could then be used to "trace the 'threads' of an individual's life," to see exactly how a relationship or events developed, according to a briefing from the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency, LifeLog's sponsor.
Someone with access to the database could "retrieve a specific thread of past transactions, or recall an experience from a few seconds ago or from many years earlier ... by using a search-engine interface." 8
TIA is dead? Not according to the observation of John Pike, Director of defense think tank GlobalSecurity.org who opined that this spy machine “looks like an outgrowth of Total Information Awareness and other DARPA homeland security surveillance programs.” According to an L.A. Times article, June, 2006, “… when Congress disbanded the Total Information Awareness program, it did not prohibit further research on such databanks, or even the use of individual databanks. And, according to a recent study by the National Journal, the Bush administration used that loophole to break the program into smaller parts, transferring some parts to the National Security Agency, classifying the work and renaming parts of it as the Research Development and Experimental Collaboration program.” 9
In the next segment of this series, we will explore in depth the measures enacted immediate after 9/11 which began the legally-sanctioned descent of American society into the totalitarian abyss.
Market Data 
Markets 
AI
