by Russell D. Longcore, DumpDC

Those of us who write about the criminal acts of the US Federal Government are likely filling various dossiers in some government offices somewhere. Apparently, the Federal Government is becoming increasingly concerned about what American citizens are thinking, writing and doing.

Did you know that the Department of Homeland Security has an Office of the Undersecretary of Intelligence & Analysis? And, there is a Homeland Infrastructure Threat & Risk Analysis Center as a part of that Undersecretary’s Office? And that this office has an Extremism and Radicalization Branch?

See the DHS organizational chart at: DHS Organizational Chart

You will find this obscure bureaucracy on the EIGHTEENTH PAGE of the chart, bottom left. It kind of creeps me out that the Department of Homeland Security has to take 25 pages to show its organizational structure. And that doesn’t show all of the worker bees…only the white shirt and tie types.

In an even more eye-opening report directly from the DHS Office of Intelligence Analysis and Assessment, Extremism and Radicalization Branch, we find that they are already becoming alarmed by the activities of various US citizens.

Here is the link for this report: Rightwing Extremism Report

The report is dated 7 April 2009. On page 2 of 9, at the bottom of the page, is this note:

“Rightwing extremism in the United States can be broadly divided into those groups, movements, and adherents that are primarily hate-oriented (based on hatred of particular religious, racial or ethnic groups), and those that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely (Author’s emphasis).It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration.”

That highlighted definition is pretty much inclusive of the authors and readers of LewRockwell.com, my blog, www.DumpDC.com, as well as hundreds of other bloggers on the Web.

The report also goes on to state that the Feds are also concerned with military personnel returning from the war. Specifically, they worry that (a) they won’t assimilate back into civilian culture well, and (b) they have combat training that would benefit militias.

The Feds are leery of militias. Why? Because militias resist tyranny.

This report stops short of making recommendations about what to do with their findings. But liberty loving people should read this report from front to back.

Ladies and gentlemen, the lines are being drawn. The more insanity that spills out from the Washington sewer onto Americans, the more that Americans are going to become “anti-government, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely.”

That does not bode well for Washington DC. However, it does bode very well for the cause of state secession and individual liberty.

In conclusion, I’m going to re-use a positive vision for the future I used in another article.

Try to envision yourself and your family in a new nation created by secession. All the people you meet are excited and breathless in their anticipation of the future. The general opinion of the populace is pure unbridled optimism. The new nation’s economy is booming, the money is backed by gold and silver, and there is no inflation. “Now Hiring” signs are in all the shop windows. The newspaper’s “Help Wanted” ads are packed full. Prices for goods and services are low, and the stores are loaded with goods. Manufacturers are streaming into the new nation to take advantage of the rare pro-business atmosphere. Wages are climbing steadily in manufacturing jobs as companies compete for the best and brightest to be their employees. New businesses are being created at a fever pace. Residential and commercial construction is at a high level to meet the demand of the new residents.

All because one state recognized this historic opportunity and chased the dream of liberty through the process of state secession.

Secession is the hope for humanity. Who will be first?

DumpDC. Six Letters That Can Change History.

© Copyright 2009, Russell D. Longcore. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.

by Noah Shachtman, Wired

America’s spy agencies want to read your blog posts, keep track of your Twitter updates — even check out your book reviews on Amazon.

In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA and the wider intelligence community, is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. It’s part of a larger movement within the spy services to get better at using ”open source intelligence” — information that’s publicly available, but often hidden in the flood of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports generated every day.

Visible crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. (It doesn’t touch closed social networks, like Facebook, at the moment.) Customers get customized, real-time feeds of what’s being said on these sites, based on a series of keywords.

“That’s kind of the basic step — get in and monitor,” says company senior vice president Blake Cahill.

Then Visible “scores” each post, labeling it as positive or negative, mixed or neutral. It examines how influential a conversation or an author is. (”Trying to determine who really matters,” as Cahill puts it.) Finally, Visible gives users a chance to tag posts, forward them to colleagues and allow them to response through a web interface.

In-Q-Tel says it wants Visible to keep track of foreign social media, and give spooks “early-warning detection on how issues are playing internationally,” spokesperson Donald Tighe tells Danger Room.

Of course, such a tool can also be pointed inward, at domestic bloggers or tweeters. Visible already keeps tabs on web 2.0 sites for Dell, AT&T and Verizon. For Microsoft, the company is monitoring the buzz on its Windows 7 rollout. For Spam-maker Hormel, Visible is tracking animal-right activists’ online campaigns against the company.

“Anything that is out in the open is fair game for collection,” says Steven Aftergood, who tracks intelligence issues at the Federation of American Scientists. But “even if information is openly gathered by intelligence agencies it would still be problematic if it were used for unauthorized domestic investigations or operations. Intelligence agencies or employees might be tempted to use the tools at their disposal to compile information on political figures, critics, journalists or others, and to exploit such information for political advantage. That is not permissible even if all of the information in question is technically ‘open source.’”

Visible chief executive officer Dan Vetras says the CIA is now an “end customer,” thanks to the In-Q-Tel investment. And more government clients are now on the horizon. “We just got awarded another one in the last few days,” Vetras adds.

Tighe disputes this — sort of. “This contract, this deal, this investment has nothing to do with any agency of government and this company,” he says. But Tighe quickly notes that In-Q-Tel does have “an interested end customer” in the intelligence community for Visibile. And if all goes well, the company’s software will be used in pilot programs at that agency. “In pilots, we use real data. And during the adoption phase, we use it real missions.”

Read the rest at this link.

by Sebastian Smith, AFP

A top US domestic security chief announced Wednesday a strategy to make ordinary citizens the first line of defense against an increasingly multi-faceted terrorist threat.

“For too long, we’ve treated the public as a liability to be protected rather than an asset in our nation’s collective security,” Janet Napolitano, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, said in a speech in New York.

“This approach, unfortunately, has allowed confusion, anxiety and fear to linger.”

Napolitano, who also announced an extra 78 million dollars in anti-terrorism funding for 15 mass transit systems nationwide, said modern communications had increased the sophistication of threats since the September 11, 2001 attacks.

“The tools for creating violence and chaos are as easy to find as the tools to buy music online or restocking inventory,” she said. “If 9/11 happened in a web 1.0 world, terrorists are certainly in a web 2.0 world now.”

Napolitano urged a “much broader society response” in which the public helps curb a growing phenomenon of so-called home-grown terrorism.

Referring to a spate of arrests around the country of US citizens and residents charged with jihad-type militancy, Napolitano said that ordinary people were often the best eyes and ears.

“You are the ones who know when something is not right in your communities,” she said in her speech at the Council on Foreign Relations.

“Indeed if you look at the last couple of weeks, arrests have been made in places like Minneapolis and North Carolina,” she said.

“So I think better education, about the breadth of the threat and how it can be carried out, is important.”

In the latest case, seven people were arrested Monday, including an American-born Muslim convert and his two sons living in a quiet North Carolina suburb.

Napolitano even called on children to join an effort previously shouldered by police and other security services.

“There’s actually an important role we can play in educating even our very young about watching for, and knowing what to do, if you’re in an airport and you see a package left with no one around,” she said.

However, she stressed she was not advocating “a culture of spying on one another.”

She insisted that President Barack Obama’s administration was committed to repairing the erosion of civil liberties that took place under his predecessor, George W. Bush.

“We have to be careful,” she said. “That’s a balance to be struck.”

An example, she said, was the need to respect mosques and other Islamic institutions.

“We have to be very careful about profiling a religious institution just as we have to be careful about profiling individuals,” she said. “We have to be very, very careful about interfering with the free exercise of religion.”

Even as US troops become increasingly focused on fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan, more attention is being paid to violent plots hatched within US borders — often led by US citizens or residents.

The Washington Post on Wednesday described the chief suspect in the North Carolina arrests, Daniel Boyd, as the son of a US marine who had a “typical American childhood” in the suburbs of the US capital, Washington.

This week, a New York court unsealed a confession made in January by a Long Island man, Bryant Vinas, who says he joined Al-Qaeda to attack US forces in Afghanistan and had plotted to attack a New York commuter train.

In May, five Miami men were found guilty of plotting to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago, which just this month was renamed the Willis Tower.

Also in May, four New York men — three of them US citizens — were arrested on charges of trying to blow up synagogues and destroy a US military plane.