News Updates – 09/21/13 – 09/29/13

Forbes
Sept. 29, 2013

In their never-say-die efforts to defeat Obamacare, Tea Party Republicans brought the federal government a giant step closer to shutdown last night. What they seem not to have considered is how America’s foreign creditors will react.

Although China, Japan, and other major creditor nations have no dog in the Obamacare fight, they have a strong interest in preserving America’s basic financial, economic, and social stability. From their point of view, the Tea Party contingent is not following the script and a corrective may prove necessary.

If the creditor nations were to sell just a small proportion of their American assets, they could send Wall Street into a tailspin, with unpleasant implications for many Republicans.

URL to full article: http://www.forbes.com/sites/eamonnfingleton/2013/09/29/if-republicans-want-to-shut-down-washington-theyll-have-to-ask-chinas-permission-first/?partner=yahootix

Rand Paul: It’s Obama Who’s Shutting Down Government
CBS News
September 29, 2013

Wall Street braces for volatility as shutdown seems likely

NEW YORK (Reuters) – As a last-minute deal to resolve spending negotiations in Washington appeared less likely, U.S. stock investors braced for what had previously seemed remote: a shutdown of the U.S. government that could spark a major equity decline.

The House of Representatives early on Sunday voted for an emergency spending bill that includes a delay of President Barack Obama’s signature healthcare reform law despite veto threats from the White House.

While a deal could be reached before the government’s fiscal year ends at midnight on Monday, the unanimous passage of a bill to continue paying U.S. soldiers in the event the government runs out of money was viewed as a sign that there would be no agreement between Republicans, who hold a majority in the House, and the Democrats, who control the White House and Senate.

More fear injection into mass consciousness, there is always a ‘battle to overt government shutdowns” right before they just magically approve another debt ceiling increase.

Too Big To Fail Is Now Bigger Than Ever Before
September 21, 2013 @ 7:20 am

Michael Snyder
Economic Collapse
September 21, 2013

The too big to fail banks are now much, much larger than they were the last time they caused so much trouble. The six largest banks in the United States have gotten 37 percent larger over the past five years. Meanwhile, 1,400 smaller banks have disappeared from the banking industry during that time. What this means is that the health of JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley is more critical to the U.S. economy than ever before. If they were “too big to fail” back in 2008, then now they must be “too colossal to collapse”. Without these banks, we do not have an economy. The six largest banks control 67 percent of all U.S. banking assets, and Bank of America accounted for about a third of all business loans by itself last year. Our entire economy is based on credit, and these giant banks are at the very core of our system of credit. If these banks were to collapse, a brutal economic depression would be guaranteed. Unfortunately, as you will see later in this article, these banks did not learn anything from 2008 and are being exceedingly reckless. They are counting on the rest of us bailing them out if something goes wrong, but that might not happen next time around.

Ever since the financial crisis of 2008, our politicians have been running around proclaiming that they will not rest until they have fixed “the too big to fail problem”, but instead of fixing it those banks have rapidly gotten even larger. Just check out the following figures which come from the Los Angeles Times…

Just before the financial crisis hit, Wells Fargo & Co. had $609 billion in assets. Now it has $1.4 trillion.Bank of America Corp. had $1.7 trillion in assets. That’s up to $2.1 trillion. 

And the assets of JPMorgan Chase & Co., the nation’s biggest bank, have ballooned to $2.4 trillion from $1.8 trillion.

We are witnessing a consolidation of the banking industry that is absolutely stunning. Hundreds of smaller banks have been swallowed up by these behemoths, and millions of Americans are finding that they have to deal with these banking giants whether they like it or not.

Even though all they do is move money around, these banks have become the core of our economic system, and they are growing at an astounding pace. The following numbers come from a recent CNN article…

-The assets of the six largest banks in the United States have grown by 37 percent over the past five years.

-The U.S. banking system has 14.4 trillion dollars in total assets. The six largest banks now account for 67 percent of those assets and the other 6,934 banks account for only 33 percent of those assets.

-Approximately 1,400 smaller banks have disappeared over the past five years.

-JPMorgan Chase is roughly the size of the entire British economy.

-The four largest banks have more than a million employeescombined.

-The five largest banks account for 42 percent of all loans in the United States.

As I discussed above, without these giant banks there is no economy. We should have never, ever allowed this to happen, but now that it has happened it is imperative that the American people understand this. The power of these banks is absolutely overwhelming…

One third of all business loans this year were made by Bank of America. Wells Fargo funds nearly a quarter of all mortgage loans. And held in the vaults of JPMorgan Chase is $1.3 trillion, which is 12% of our collective cash, including the payrolls of many thousands of companies, or enough to buy 47,636,496,885 of these NFL branded toaster ovens. Thanks for your business!

A lot of people tend to focus on many of the other threats to our economy, but the number one potential threat that our economy is facing is the potential failure of the too big to fail banks. As we saw in 2008, when they start to fail things can get really bad really fast.

And as I have written about so many times, the number one threat to the too big to fail banks is the possibility of a derivatives crisis.

Former Goldman Sachs banker and best selling author Nomi Prins recently told Greg Hunter of USAWatchdog.com that the global economy “could implode and have serious ramifications on the financial systems starting with derivatives and working on outward.” You can watch the full video of that interview right here.

And Nomi Prins is exactly right. Just like we witnessed in 2008, a derivatives panic can spiral out of control very quickly. Our big banks should have learned a lesson from 2008 and should have greatly scaled back their reckless betting.

Unfortunately, that has not happened. In fact, according to the OCC’s latest quarterly report on bank trading and derivatives activities, the big banks have become even more reckless since the last time I reported on this. The following figures reflect the new information contained in the latest OCC report…

JPMorgan Chase

Total Assets: $1,948,150,000,000 (just over 1.9 trillion dollars)

Total Exposure To Derivatives: $70,287,894,000,000 (more than 70 trillion dollars)

Citibank

Total Assets: $1,306,258,000,000 (a bit more than 1.3 trillion dollars)

Total Exposure To Derivatives: $58,471,038,000,000 (more than 58 trillion dollars)

Bank Of America

Total Assets: $1,458,091,000,000 (a bit more than 1.4 trillion dollars)

Total Exposure To Derivatives: $44,543,003,000,000 (more than 44 trillion dollars)

Goldman Sachs

Total Assets: $113,743,000,000 (a bit more than 113 billion dollars – yes, you read that correctly)

Total Exposure To Derivatives: $42,251,600,000,000 (more than 42 trillion dollars)

That means that the total exposure that Goldman Sachs has to derivatives contracts is more than 371 times greater than their total assets.

How in the world can anyone say that Goldman Sachs is not being incredibly reckless?

And remember, the overwhelming majority of these derivatives contracts are interest rate derivatives.

Wild swings in interest rates could set off this time bomb and send our entire financial system plunging into chaos.

After climbing rapidly for a couple of months, the yield on 10 year U.S. Treasury bonds has stabilized for the moment.

But if that changes and interest rates start going up dramatically again, that is going to be a huge problem for these too big to fail banks.

And I know that a lot of you don’t have much sympathy for the big banks, but remember, if they go down we go down too.

These banks have been unbelievably reckless, but when they fail, we will all pay the price.

URL to article: http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/too-big-to-fail-is-now-bigger-than-ever-before 

Obama’s “I Am Not a Crook” Moment
Washington’s Blog
September 21, 2013

America’s top liberal communications expert is George Lakoff. Professor Lakoff (who we’ve previously interviewed) points out that when a politician says “Not X”, people usually think of X:

I wrote a book called, Don’t Think of an Elephant! The title made a basic point: Negating a frame activates that frame. If you activate the other side’s frame, you just help the other side, as Nixon found out when he said, “I am not a crook,” which made people think of him as a crook.

President Obama just said:

This is the United States of America — we’re not some banana republic, this is not a deadbeat nation, we don’t run out on our tab.

***

We can’t just not pay our bills.”

BOSS technology consists of two cameras capable of taking stereoscopic images of a face and a back end remote matching system. Stereoscopic images are two images of the same object, taken at slightly different angles that create an illusion of three-dimensional depth from two-dimensional images.

The cameras transfer the pair of images to the remote matching system by way of fiber optic or wireless technology. The system then processes and stores the two images into a 3-D signature, which is the mathematical representation of the stereo-pair images that the system uses for matching.

http://youtu.be/C_Lw_m3wBOg

URL to full article: http://www.biometricupdate.com/201309/u-s-testing-crowd-scanning-facial-recognition-system

N.S.A. Gathers Data on Social Connections of U.S. Citizens

By JAMES RISEN and LAURA POITRAS

WASHINGTON — Since 2010, the National Security Agency has been exploiting its huge collections of data to create sophisticated graphs of some Americans’ social connections that can identify their associates, their locations at certain times, their traveling companions and other personal information, according to newly disclosed documents and interviews with officials.

The spy agency began allowing the analysis of phone call and e-mail logs in November 2010 to examine Americans’ networks of associations for foreign intelligence purposes after N.S.A. officials lifted restrictions on the practice, according to documents provided by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor.

The policy shift was intended to help the agency “discover and track” connections between intelligence targets overseas and people in the United States, according to an N.S.A. memorandum from January 2011. The agency was authorized to conduct “large-scale graph analysis on very large sets of communications metadata without having to check foreignness” of every e-mail address, phone number or other identifier, the document said. Because of concerns about infringing on the privacy of American citizens, the computer analysis of such data had previously been permitted only for foreigners.

The agency can augment the communications data with material from public, commercial and other sources, including bank codes, insurance information, Facebook profiles, passenger manifests, voter registration rolls and GPS location information, as well as property records and unspecified tax data, according to the documents. They do not indicate any restrictions on the use of such “enrichment” data, and several former senior Obama administration officials said the agency drew on it for both Americans and foreigners.

N.S.A. officials declined to say how many Americans have been caught up in the effort, including people involved in no wrongdoing. The documents do not describe what has resulted from the scrutiny, which links phone numbers and e-mails in a “contact chain” tied directly or indirectly to a person or organization overseas that is of foreign intelligence interest.

The new disclosures add to the growing body of knowledge in recent months about the N.S.A.’s access to and use of private information concerning Americans, prompting lawmakers in Washington to call for reining in the agency and President Obama to order an examination of its surveillance policies. Almost everything about the agency’s operations is hidden, and the decision to revise the limits concerning Americans was made in secret, without review by the nation’s intelligence court or any public debate. As far back as 2006, a Justice Department memo warned of the potential for the “misuse” of such information without adequate safeguards.

An agency spokeswoman, asked about the analyses of Americans’ data, said, “All data queries must include a foreign intelligence justification, period.”

“All of N.S.A.’s work has a foreign intelligence purpose,” the spokeswoman added. “Our activities are centered on counterterrorism, counterproliferation and cybersecurity.”

The spy agency, led by Gen. Keith B. Alexander, an unabashed advocate for more weapons in the hunt for information about the nation’s adversaries, clearly views its collections of metadata as one of its most powerful resources. N.S.A. analysts can exploit that information to develop a portrait of an individual, one that is perhaps more complete and predictive of behavior than could be obtained by listening to phone conversations or reading e-mails, experts say.

Phone and e-mail logs, for example, allow analysts to identify people’s friends and associates, detect where they were at a certain time, acquire clues to religious or political affiliations, and pick up sensitive information like regular calls to a psychiatrist’s office, late-night messages to an extramarital partner or exchanges with a fellow plotter.

A 2009 draft of an N.S.A. inspector general’s report suggests that contact chaining and analysis may have been done on Americans’ communications data under the Bush administration’s program of wiretapping without warrants, which began after the Sept. 11 attacks to detect terrorist activities and skirted the existing laws governing electronic surveillance.

In 2006, months after the wiretapping program was disclosed by The New York Times, the N.S.A.’s acting general counsel wrote a letter to a senior Justice Department official, which was also leaked by Mr. Snowden, formally asking for permission to perform the analysis on American phone and e-mail data. A Justice Department memo to the attorney general noted that the “misuse” of such information “could raise serious concerns,” and said the N.S.A. promised to impose safeguards, including regular audits, on the metadata program. In 2008, the Bush administration gave its approval.

A new policy that year, detailed in “Defense Supplemental Procedures Governing Communications Metadata Analysis,” authorized by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey, said that since the Supreme Court had ruled that metadata was not constitutionally protected, N.S.A. analysts could use such information “without regard to the nationality or location of the communicants,” according to an internal N.S.A. description of the policy.

After that decision, which was previously reported by The Guardian, the N.S.A. performed the social network graphing in a pilot project for 1 ½ years “to great benefit,” according to the 2011 memo. It was put in place in November 2010 in “Sigint Management Directive 424” (sigint refers to signals intelligence).

URL to full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/29/us/nsa-examines-social-networks-of-us-citizens.html

Greenwald, Scahill vow to unmask NSA’s ‘US assassination program’

Published time: September 29, 2013 20:31 

Edited time: September 29, 2013 21:17

US journalists Jeremy Scahill (L) and Glenn Greenwald. (Reuters / Pilar Olivares)

American investigative journalists Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald say they have teamed up to prepare a report on the National Security Agency’s role in what one of them described as the “US assassination program.”

“The connections between war and surveillance are clear. I don’t want to give too much away but Glenn and I are working on a project right now that has at its center how the National Security Agency plays a significant, central role in the US assassination program,” Scahill said in Rio de Janeiro, as cited by Associated Press. 

Speaking to moviegoers at the Rio Film Festival, where an award-winning documentary based on his book was shown, Scahill said he will be working on the project with another journalist – Glenn Greenwald, who broke the story on the NSA leaker Edward Snowden in June. 

The journalists – who were both present at the festival’s Q&A panel – were short on details for their new project and gave no evidence of the alleged US program. 

“There are so many stories that are yet to be published that we hope will produce ‘actionable intelligence,’ or information that ordinary citizens across the world can use to try to fight for change, to try to confront those in power,” said Scahill, a contributor to The Nation magazine and the author of the bestseller ‘Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield’.

Brazilian President Dilma Roussef speaks at the 68th United Nations General Assembly on September 24, 2013 in New York City.(AFP Photo / Andrew Burton)

Speaking in Rio, both journalists welcomed Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff scolding speech at the United Nations General Assembly, where she slammed the US surveillance program, calling it a “breach of international law.” Earlier in September, she postponed a state visit to Washington in response to the US spying on her communications with top aides. Her decision followed a TV report to which Greenwald had contributed. 

The journalists noted that American spying could be replaced by espionage by another government if care isn’t taken. 

“The really important thing to realize is the desire for surveillance is not a uniquely American attribute,”said Greenwald. “America has just devoted way more money and way more resources than anyone else to spying on the world.”

URL to article: http://rt.com/usa/nsa-assassination-leaks-greenwald-514/

Met’s Minority Report: They use computer algorithms to predict where crime will happen

By FRANCESCA INFANTE

PUBLISHED: 07:28 EST, 29 September 2013 | UPDATED: 07:32 EST, 29 September 2013

Police officers at one of Britain’s biggest force are to use predictive technology which allows them to react to crime before it happens. 

Much like the storyline of the film Minority Report Metropolitan police are now routinely deployed to ‘future crime’ areas likely to be targeted by burlgars.

In the Speilberg blockbuster which stars Tom Cruise police forces contain a ‘pre-crime’ department which apprehend offenders before the crime is committed. 

Minority Report style policing has seen a 26 per cent drop in street violence in parts of Manchester and all police forces are now being encouraged to adopt it as a strategy

And although the technology at work in London is slightly less sophisticated it does seem to be the first step on the path. 

Computer algorithms provide detailed maps of the areas most likely to be targeted by muggers and burglars. 

They combine local crime patterns with complex mathematics to predict where crime will strike next and allow officers to be deployed in advance to deal with it.

The ‘predictive area which are generated are typically no more than 250 yards, often covering a specific set of streets and so allows police to attend with near enough pin point accuracy. 

The future crime drive is being led by Commander Simon Letchford who told the Sunday Times: ‘Predictive policing places officers in the right place at the right time using the most up-to-date information.

‘We produce daily maps based on the most recent recorded crime information.’

Evaluation of the system so far indicates that the information in the maps give police a seven times better chance of being able to catch criminals and some London boroughs showing significant reductions in burglaries.

The project has already received the backing of Metropolitan Commissioner Bernard Hogan-Howe agrees with the need to target ever shrinking police resources more effectively.

Initially the system, known as PredPol, was received sceptically by some senior police officers who were uncertain of how academic research and data might work in real-life crime fighting.

But similar schemes have also been piloted in Kent, Great Manchester , West Yorkshire and the West Midlands with promising results.

In Medway, Kent, the scheme was credited with causing a six per cent fall in street violence over a four-month trial last winter. 

Future crime: The data generated by the PredPol maps gives police around seven times more chance of catching criminals than relying on traditional methods

Meanwhile in Manchester, burglary fell nine per cent between May 2010 and May 2011 but in Trafford, where predictive policing was used, the drop was nearly three times that at 26 per cent.

And results from Leeds and showed similarly impressive results.

Professor Shane Johnson of UCL’s department for security and crime science said the most important element in the system was the fact the crime hotspots constantly change. 

He said: ‘The risk of crime is higher in some places than others but does not occur in even the riskiest places all the time, and sometimes occurs in low-risk neighbourhoods.

‘The challenge of pinpointing when crimes will occur at particular locations is the aim of predicting policing – it’s no longer possible to throw overtime at problems. 

‘The police have got to work a bit smarter.’

Predictive policing originated in America and is based on the principle of drawing conclusions based on the large scale analysis of criminal behaviour. 

All 43 forces in England and Wales are now being encouraged to adopt this approach to allocating their resources by the College of Policing, the new professional body that sets police standards.

Rachel Tuffing, the college’s head of research, said she expected most forces to be using such schemes within five years. 

She said: ‘The maps alone cannot reduce crime but they can be used to allocate resources to the areas with the greatest risk of future crime.

‘It’s the classic Minority Report, trying to prevent crime before it happens.’

In Minority report Cruise plays a police captain who heads up a ‘pre-crime’ department which stops criminals based on the information provided by three psychics called ‘precogs.’

URL to article: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2437206/Police-tackle-burglars-muggers-using-Minority-Report-style-technology-tackle-future-crime.html#ixzz2gKDp3bdg