The American Bear

› Everything is Rigged, Vol. 9,713: This Time, It's Currencies | Matt Taibbi

[This] story just landed. Given the LIBOR story, the Interest Rate Swap manipulation story, the Euro gas price manipulation story, the U.S. energy price manipulation story, and (by now) countless others of the “Everything is Rigged” variety, this screams out for immediate notice. Via Bloomberg:

Traders at some of the world’s biggest banks manipulated benchmark foreign-exchange rates used to set the value of trillions of dollars of investments, according to five dealers with knowledge of the practice …

Employees have been front-running client orders and rigging WM/Reuters rates by pushing through trades before and during the 60-second windows when the benchmarks are set, said the current and former traders, who requested anonymity because the practice is controversial. Dealers colluded with counterparts to boost chances of moving the rates, said two of the people, who worked in the industry for a total of more than 20 years.

This time the rates allegedly being rigged are in the foreign-exchange or “FX” markets, meaning that if this story is true, it would almost certainly trump LIBOR for scale/horribleness.

As one friend of mine who works on Wall Street put it, “It’s endless! This is the biggest market in the world.” Bloomberg suggested the story is just the tip of the iceberg:

“The FX market is like the Wild West,” said James McGeehan, who spent 12 years at banks before co-founding Framingham, Massachusetts-based FX Transparency LLC, which advises companies on foreign-exchange trading, in 2009. “It’s buyer beware.”

The $4.7-trillion-a-day currency market, the biggest in the financial system, is one of the least regulated. The inherent conflict banks face between executing client orders and profiting from their own trades is exacerbated because most currency trading takes place away from exchanges.

… [T]he key thing here is the, uh … well, the consistent leitmotif of all these stories. One after another, it’s the same thing: Insiders rigging benchmark rates, shaving money from basically everyone on earth, systematically and over periods of many years. It’s the ultimate taxation-without-representation story – crazy stuff.

› GCHQ intercepted foreign politicians' communications at G20 summits

Foreign politicians and officials who took part in two G20 summit meetings in London in 2009 had their computers monitored and their phone calls intercepted on the instructions of their British government hosts, according to documents seen by the Guardian. Some delegates were tricked into using internet cafes which had been set up by British intelligence agencies to read their email traffic.

The revelation comes as Britain prepares to host another summit on Monday – for the G8 nations, all of whom attended the 2009 meetings which were the object of the systematic spying. It is likely to lead to some tension among visiting delegates who will want the prime minister to explain whether they were targets in 2009 and whether the exercise is to be repeated this week.

The disclosure raises new questions about the boundaries of surveillance by GCHQ and its American sister organisation, the National Security Agency, whose access to phone records and internet data has been defended as necessary in the fight against terrorism and serious crime. The G20 spying appears to have been organised for the more mundane purpose of securing an advantage in meetings. Named targets include long-standing allies such as South Africa and Turkey.

There have often been rumours of this kind of espionage at international conferences, but it is highly unusual for hard evidence to confirm it and spell out the detail. The evidence is contained in documents – classified as top secret – which were seen by the Guardian. They reveal that during G20 meetings in April and September 2009 GCHQ used what one document calls “ground-breaking intelligence capabilities” to intercept the communications of visiting delegations.

This included:

• Setting up internet cafes where they used an email interception programme and key-logging software to spy on delegates’ use of computers;

• Penetrating the security on delegates’ BlackBerrys to monitor their email messages and phone calls;

• Supplying 45 analysts with a live round-the-clock summary of who was phoning who at the summit;

• Targeting the Turkish finance minister and possibly 15 others in his party;

• Receiving reports from an NSA attempt to eavesdrop on the Russian leader, Dmitry Medvedev, as his phone calls passed through satellite links to Moscow.

The documents suggest that the operation was sanctioned in principle at a senior level in the government of the then prime minister, Gordon Brown, and that intelligence, including briefings for visiting delegates, was passed to British ministers.

A briefing paper dated 20 January 2009 records advice given by GCHQ officials to their director, Sir Iain Lobban, who was planning to meet the then foreign secretary, David Miliband. The officials summarised Brown’s aims for the meeting of G20 heads of state due to begin on 2 April, which was attempting to deal with the economic aftermath of the 2008 banking crisis. The briefing paper added: “The GCHQ intent is to ensure that intelligence relevant to HMG’s desired outcomes for its presidency of the G20 reaches customers at the right time and in a form which allows them to make full use of it.” Two documents explicitly refer to the intelligence product being passed to “ministers”.

According to the material seen by the Guardian, GCHQ generated this product by attacking both the computers and the telephones of delegates. [continue]

› In the shadows of the NSA scandals: the National Counter Terrorism Center | Kade Crockford

Anybody remember the National Counter Terrorism Center (NCTC)? The one that sucks up vast quantities of private information about every single person in the United States and also helps the president identify possible targets for his ever-expanding ‘kill list’?

Marcy Wheeler over at Emptywheel makes a chilling observation in light of the NSA’s admission that it sucks up the content of our communications without warrants: the NCTC likely has access to all of our emails, text messages, phone calls and information about our communications, in addition to any and all records held about us by any federal agency.

We’ve known for some time that the NCTC holds information about us that could include “law enforcement investigations…employment history, travel and student records,” as well as tax and employment history, federal mortgage information, and possibly even detailed health records through the Medicare or Medicaid programs. That’s bad enough, but combined with the data we now know NSA sucks up about us, it is downright dystopian.

Wheeler points out that the NCTC guidelines require the Center to be provided with “access to everything.”

[The National Security Act] provides that “[u]nless otherwise directed by the President, the Director of National Intelligence shall have access to all national intelligence and intelligence related to the national security which is collected by any federal department, agency, or other entity, except as otherwise provided by law, or as appropriate, under guidelines agreed upon by the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence.”

Again: all of that information is likely readily accessed or even stored by the National Counter Terrorism Center, the same government office that runs data mining programs via its ‘disposition matrix’ — an Orwellian term for deciding who will be (often extrajudicially) targeted by the president’s secretive death squads, or by the CIA.

Most of us likely won’t be targeted by the CIA or by “industrial-scale…killing machine” JSOC for extrajudicial assassination. But many of us will be arrested this year for drug crimes.

As my colleague Chris Calabrese pointed out in March 2012, the vast troves of information NCTC holds about us — which we now know may include the content of all of our communications and records of everywhere we have traveled with our cell phones over a period of years — can be dished out not simply to the FBI for serious criminal investigations, but also to our state and local police departments, even for investigations related to drugs.

Calabrese:

Perhaps most disturbing, once information is gathered (not necessarily connected to terrorism), in many cases it can be shared with “a federal, state, local, tribal, or foreign or international entity, or to an individual or entity not part of a government” – literally anyone. That sharing can happen in relation to national security and safety, drug investigations, if it’s evidence of a crime or to evaluate sources or contacts. This boundless sharing is broad enough to encompass disclosures to an employer or landlord about someone who NCTC may think is potentially a criminal, or at the request of local law enforcement for vetting an informant.

To recap: the NCTC makes suggestions to the president about who to target for death, kidnapping or detention; collects or has access to pretty much every single bit of information about us; and even gives that data to law enforcement to use it to lock us up on drug charges. All of this is done behind an iron wall of secrecy, with hardly any oversight whatsoever.

Tip of the iceberg, indeed.

› 7 graphs that prove America is overrated | GlobalPost

› TransCanada Wants To Keep Us Safe From People Who Don't Like The Pipeline

… Some of TransCanada’s recent moves - such as allegedly filming property owners walking around on their own land, according to Bold Nebraska - seem strange, if not outright spy-ish. But being surveilled and labeled a terrorist against enterprise has become kind of de rigeur in U.S. eco-activism. It’s just “one of those situations where a corporation is being allowed to frame activists in terms that are really untrue and dishonest: as terrorists,” Parkin told me. The Houston, Texas, native also had the pleasure of being profiled in an Exxon dossier about 10 years back. But that doesn’t make it any less “appalling,” he says - and, well, scary. But if these documents aren’t new, what do they actually mean? Does the multinational energy giant actually believe tree-sitting activists are violent terrorists, or is this effort aimed at riling law enforcement into ratcheting up the criminal charges?

… Again, this is what happens when you have government — local, state, and federal — tied in with corporate power and encouraged to build a surveillance state within itself in order, you know, to keep the rest of us safe. This is what happens when “terrorist” is merely rendered into a conjuring word, and not something with a specific meaning. I’m sure Tom Friedman and David Simon feel safer, but I don’t.

(Source: gonzodave)

› Obama moves to escalate Syrian slaughter | Bill Van Auken

The White House claim that this military escalation is a US response to the regime of Bashar al-Assad crossing Obama’s “red line” and violating “international norms” by using chemical weapons against the so-called “rebels” is an insult to the intelligence of the people of the United States and the world.

[…] The fundamental reason for this debacle is not a lack of weapons—which Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey have poured into the country under the CIA’s supervision—or the brutality of the Assad regime, but the fact that the majority of the population, however much they might dislike Assad, hate the Islamist “rebels” even more.

There is a palpable element of desperation in the latest turn by the Obama administration, which the White House left to a junior aide to announce. It is responding not only to the failure of its previous [proxy war] policy, but also to enormous pressure from within the ruling political establishment for war.

This found sharp expression in the remarks Tuesday by former Democratic President Bill Clinton, who warned that Obama would look like a “wuss” and “total fool” if he stopped short of “dropping a few bombs.” Clinton solidarized himself with Republican Senator John McCain, whose own reckless militarism makes him a candidate for either a war crimes tribunal or a mental facility.

This was the culmination of a steadily escalating campaign by politicians of both parties, the media, the Washington think tanks and sections of the military and intelligence apparatus for a more direct military intervention.

Serving as adjuncts in this campaign are pseudo-left groups such as the International Socialist Organization in the US, the New Anti-capitalist Party in France and the Left Party in Germany, which promote the Islamist militias and mercenaries in Syria as “revolutionaries” and fashion twisted political alibis for imperialist intervention. All of them have blood on their hands.

Nonetheless, there are evidently deep divisions within the state over a war that poses the threat of drawing the entire region as well as powers with interests in Syria, particularly Iran and Russia, into the maelstrom.

After the bitter experiences of Afghanistan and Iraq, there is virtually no support among the American people for US intervention in Syria. US imperialism’s pretense to be championing democracy in Syria is further shattered by the revelations of its police state spying operations against the people of the United States and the world, and the vicious witch-hunt it has launched against Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who has exposed these crimes.

Despite two years of media propaganda vilifying the Assad regime and casting the Al Qaeda-linked militias as crusaders for democracy, an NBC- Wall Street Journal poll released this week showed that barely 11 percent of the US public supports even arming the “rebels.”

The entire political setup in the US proceeds with indifference to these popular sentiments. The hackneyed statements of the Democratic and Republican politicians have nothing to do with convincing anyone to support the war, while the corporate media churns out “news” that resembles Orwellian propaganda.

It will be the working class, both in the US and internationally, that pays the price for intervention in Syria. Under conditions where it is universally proclaimed that there is no money for jobs or vital social programs, not a word is raised about what the military options being considered by Obama will cost. More fundamentally, there is an inexorable logic to a US escalation in Syria, which points toward military confrontation with Iran and potentially Russia, threatening the lives of millions.

› House votes to allow indefinite military detention of Americans

The U.S. House of Representatives voted again Thursday to allow the indefinite military detention of Americans, blocking an amendment that would have barred the possibility.

(Source: azspot)

› On the NSA’s Surveillance Program: The Brown, Muslim, South Asian Elephant In the Room–or On the Phone | Falguni Sheth

Ultimately, the political celebration of NSA’s surveillance programs appears to rest on the same old tired flackery parroted by Lindsay Graham: “I don’t care if the NSA collects my data.” Of course, Graham doesn’t care. Of course, DiFi thinks NSA data collection is crucial to catching terrorists. Of course, white suburban soccer moms are more interested in the intrigue of Snowden’s (ex?)girlfriend. Why should they care? They don’t worry that they will awake some morning and find themselves on the wrong side of the state—and certainly not because ‘they’re not doing anything wrong,’ but rather because they’re not the wrong color, the wrong religion, the wrong ethnicity, the wrong family (Remember Former White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs on 16 year old Abdulrahman Al-Awlaki’s death? “He should have been born to a far more responsible father”). But of course.

That’s why Lindsay Graham, DiFI and the white burbie housewives think that NSA surveillance is a great idea. They’re not politically vulnerable (okay, that’s an understatement). They’re officially in favor of the War on Terror. And certain under this Administration and the previous one, their calls to the doctor and to family (or even Graham’s hypothetical call to Waziristan) are not registering as the ‘suspicious’ activity that the NSA is looking for.

As I’ve said before, this all comes down to a familiar form of American privilege:

[T]he privilege of not having to know (or know about) foreign nationals or feel particularly obliged to them, or know about the harms done to them, simply because the wars, jingoism, and aggressive foreign policy of the US empire won’t affect you.

› Senate Staffers Told To Pretend Top Secret Documents Are Not Widely Available On Web

The Senate Security Office sent an email around the Hill Friday afternoon asking Senate employees and contractors to try to ignore the fact that top-secret, highly-classified documents are now floating around the Web freely (and, in the case of a terribly designed NSA Powerpoint, getting facelifts.) The email asks security managers to remind Senate employees and contractors that the documents are still technically classified and should be treated as if millions of people haven’t already read them.

› Waters: Obama Campaign Database Has 'Information About Everything on Every Individual’ | CNS News

“I don’t know, and I think some people are missing something here,” [Rep. Maxine] Waters said.

“The president has put in place an organization that contains a kind of database that no one has ever seen before in life,” she added. “That’s going to be very, very powerful.”

Martin asked if Waters if she was referring to “Organizing for America.”

“That’s right, that’s right,” Waters said. “And that database will have information about everything on every individual in ways that it’s never been done before.”

Waters said the database would also serve future Democratic candidates seeking the presidency.

“He’s been very smart,” Waters said of Obama. “I mean it’s very powerful what he’s leaving in place.”