Wednesday, January 11, 2012

Anonymous declares Day of Action against NDAA (VIDEO)

Published: 11 January, 2012, 00:10

Anonymous wages attack on NDAA

(6.5Mb)embed video
Time magazine called the protester the person of the year for 2011, but if the US government continues with its campaign against American freedom, defying corruption with demonstration as such will be outlawed in only a matter of time.Concerned over how very real the collapse of the US Constitution is because of Congress’ passing of the National Defense Authorization Act, activists with the online collective Anonymous have proposed a national day of actionagainst the controversial legislation to occur next month.

TAGS: Crime, Protest, Terrorism, Law, Internet,USA

The National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012, or NDAA, was recently signed off by US President Barack Obama. Under the legislation, the Department of Defense is guaranteed spending appropriations for a 12-month span. Thanks to certain provisions snuck in, however, the US government is granted the powers to indefinitely detain and torture American citizens without charge, essentially creating Guantanamo Prison-style detention possibilities for anyone deemed a threat by American authorities.

Hacktivists had initially proposed a massive campaign against the act for January, but have now moved the protest to launch on February 3.

US President Barack Obama insists that he will not abide by such provisions, although the laws are still written and approved under his own name. Although he could abide by his word and remove himself from endorsing any of the provisions, the fact that the legislation does still for such enforcement does not negate its existence.

"The statute is particularly dangerous because it has no temporal or geographic limitations, and can be used by this and future presidents to militarily detain people captured far from any battlefield,” says ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero of the dangerous realities promised under NDAA. Even if the president says he will not abide by the powers he has now been bestowed with under the legislation, Romero says that Obama “will forever be known as the president who signed indefinite detention without charge or trial into law.”

Activists against the legislation have rallied in opposition since it first moved through Congress. Following Obama’s New Year’s Eve signing, however, widespread disbelief and concern has only increased and now Anonymous is urging Americans to take it to the streets before Congress begins to act on the damning bill

“While we cannot force the American people to protest, we must tell them that this law will trip away any rights they thought they had including but not limited to free speech, free press, free access to information and the right to protest, assemble and bear arms,” recites a digitzed voice in a recent YouTube clip uploaded by an account alleging to be affiliated with the Anonymous collective. The narrator describes that NDAA allows for the government to detain suspects, “even American citizens, without trial” for any allegedly belligerent acts.

“What is a belligerent act?” asks the speaker. “Is protesting a belligerent act? Is being Anonymous a belligerent act? This is where we draw the line.”

“This is when we revolt.”

In a written message that appears in the video, the operative says that the protests will spawn nationally. “Everyone will flood the street. The street is now your place of protest.”

Since NDAA first entered Congress, protests have occurred across America although they have attracted relatively small numbers of participants and have almost entirely ignored by the mainstream media.

Demonstrations were staged outside the White House for several days in a row with a handful of protesters being arrested for their actions.

"We are trying to get word out to the people that they need to petition laws like this," one Anonymous operative participating in the campaign, Operation Blackout, tells RT. "NDAA was passed with minimum media attention, so 'Anons' and [those with the Occupy Wall Street movement] have been dedicated to raising awareness. So far word has spread pretty fast. Now we have to convince those who "represent" us to actually do what they were elected to do."

Even people who've come to me trying to defend NDAA have quickly backed off when they realized exactly what this law means to US citizens," adds the operative.

Previously, hacktivists aligned with the Anonymous collective attempted to wage cyber attacks on the creators and signers of NDAA, going after lawmakers involved in the bill by posting private information on the Web.

“No longer will you enslave the people. The world will know of your violations against the rights of the citizens you were elected to represent,” read a statement from one Anonymous operative at the time.

In recent weeks, a similar online-organized attack against supporters of the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, forced in part several major corporations from withdrawing support of the legislation.

US laundered millions for drug cartels

Marijuana plants are burned during an anti-drug operation in Guatemala (AFP Photo / Getty Images)

Marijuana plants are burned during an anti-drug operation in Guatemala (AFP Photo / Getty Images)

TAGS: Crime, Drugs, USA,Government Spending, North America


The Mexican Drug War has so far yielded around 50,000 deaths and has become one of the biggest problems poised on North America during the last century.

It might be a tremendous tally of lost lives, but just as impressive though is the amount of money that the US has invested in the war. Since attempting to cooperate in the battle against dangerous cartels in the south, the United States has moved millions of dollars of narcotics and profits around the world in a money laundering scheme meant to infiltrate the seedy underbelly of Mexico’s drug trade.

What America did, instead, was consequentially fund a deadly campaign that has left a bodycount built with the massacre of thousands of journalists, officers, agents and civilians.

Recent reports obtained by the New York Times reveals that American drug enforcement agents posed as money launderers in an elaborate scheme that was meant to install men within the ranks of the cartels and take them down from the inside. The documents suggest that American agents worked hand-in-hand with Mexican law enforcement officials and a Colombian informant working undercover in 2007 to try to get to the inside. Doing so, they participated in massive felonies, moving millions worth of contraband and cash all over the world.

According to the documents made possible through an extradition order by the Mexican Foreign Ministry, US efforts in conjunction with Mexican and Columbia contacts included a plethora of wire transfers of tens of thousands of dollars at a time and the illegal smuggling of millions of dollars in cold, hard cash. The Times reports that there was also at least one in-depth international incident that led to American agents accompanying a massive coke shipment from Ecuador, into Dallas, Texas and then Madrid,

Five years down the road, however, the Mexican drug war has been incredibly disastrous and all too deadly. While the number of drug war-related deaths in 2007 peaked short of 3,000, that statistic only worsened for the next several years, with 2011 showing the only significant decrease in casualties since then.

Even still, an estimated 12,000 people were killed during the war in 2011 alone.

By 2006, the Mexican drug cartels had already infiltrated American soil, operating out of an estimated 100 US cities. In 2007, the DEA-led initiative attempted to curb that distribution, but two years later the US Department of Justice upgraded the scope of the drug cartels’ presence in the US to 200 diverse markets. Between 2006 and 2007, assaults against Border Patrol agents on the US/Mexican boundary rose by 46 percent, with attacks on US authorities leaving at least two dead on US soil in the two years that followed.

While the DEA was conducting their attempted sting, agents were forced to improvise their moves in a deadly game of cat-and-mouse. While one official close to the matter talking on condition of anonymity tells the Times that such stings involve an “enormously complicated undertaking when it involves money laundering, wires, everything,” others add that the massive campaigns that seem to have failed massively required a strategy that left agents scrambling by the seat of their pants.

“The same rules required domestically do not apply when agencies are operating overseas,” Morris Panner of the Center for International Criminal Justice at Harvard tells the Times, “so the agencies can be forced to make up the rules as they go along.”

Panner acknowledges the dangers created by working in such grey territory, adding that “If it’s not careful, the United States could end up helping the bad guys more than hurting them.”

Only less than five years after the operation has ended, America is just seeing by way of the document leak that their attempted investigation might have really been detrimental to their efforts.