Steve Watson | PrisonPlanet.com 

Ukrainian President Victor Yushchenko has all but declared martial law in the country as he announced yesterday that the National Security and Defense Council will become the supreme ruling authority in the wake of a mystery epidemic sweeping the country.

Yushchenko has made high ranking health ministers members of the NSDC, a government body consisting of the president himself, the chairman of parliament, the prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko (pictured), the head of the Security Service of Ukraine and other high ranking ministers.

Yushchenko told reporters Wednesday night that “the non-fulfillment of its decisions will be prosecuted,” adding “We need to change the system. We need to change the whole system of the state power organization in Ukraine. We have no time for remonstrance no time for waiting”.

The President reiterated his statements in an official address to the Ukrainian peopleyesterday, in which he states “Failure to comply with [NSDC] orders will immediately result in application to the law enforcement authorities.”

“I instruct the Government and the Ministry of Health to immediately start preventive and promotional work in areas where there is no epidemic, targeting primarily the special risk groups,“ the address reads.

The address also announced orders for the arrest of public health officials who have allowed public gatherings to continue and failed to ban the movement of people, calling it “a display of criminal irresponsibility”.

“I have addressed the Prosecutor General of Ukraine with the request to institute criminal charges of negligence committed by first of all the Chief Sanitary Inspector, Kyiv City Sanitarian and the officials, who, despite having daily information on the epidemic situation in the country, neglected it in pursuit of political dividends and ambition,“ the statement reads.

A further report from Interfax Ukrainia Agency says the Ukrainian Health Minister Wasilij Kniazevicz has asked the country’s top prosecutor to open criminal proceedings against those who are opposed to the implementation of the mass flu vaccination campaign.

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Thomas Eddlam |NewAmerican.com 

The National Security Agency is building huge new storage facilities to store the unconstitutionally gained data on the American people’s telephone calls and Internet traffic permanently, including new buildings in suburban Salt Lake City, Utah, and San Antonio, Texas.

The NSA has been keeping permanent records of all American’s telephone call habits and Internet traffic since shortly after September 11, 2001, according to major news reports, without the constitutionally required warrants from a court.

No longer able to store all the intercepted phone calls and e-mail in its Ft. Meade, Maryland, headquarters, the NSA is engaging in its own housing boom. How much data will these giant, multibillion dollar new facilities hold? According to James Bamford of the New York Review of Books, the facility in Utah alone could hold data that will be measured in Yottabytes. Never heard of Yottabytes? You’re not alone. Most computers sold at stores still measure their storage at gigabytes, or billions of bits of data. A few store a terrabyte of information, or one trillion bits of information. That’s 1,000,000,000,000 pieces of information. Yottabytes is the highest number that has yet been named in computer information. The number is septillions of billions of bits of data, or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bits of data.

In his review of Matthew M. Aid’s new book on the NSA, The Secret Sentry: The Untold History of the National Security Agency, Bamford noted that the NSA assault on the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment has taken place without public opposition or even public debate. “Unlike the British government, which, to its great credit, allowed public debate on the idea of a central data bank,” Bamford wrote, “the NSA obtained the full cooperation of much of the American telecom industry in utmost secrecy after September 11.” And when the British government held that debate, the people rose up against such a “big brother”-style plan:

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King5.com

The Washington State Nurses Association has filed a federal lawsuit against MultiCare Heath System, which operates several hospitals in Pierce and south King counties.

The suit seeks an injunction against MultiCare and its new policy of mandating that hospital staffers get a flu shot or wear a surgical mask as a condition of employment.

The WSNA says they can be fired for refusing to do one of the other, and some nurses feel an employer should not force them into a personal health care decision.

“MultiCare’s unilateral implementation of this policy blatantly ignores their legal obligation to bargain with the union,” said Barbara Frye, BSN, RN, Assistant Executive Director of Labor Relations for WSNA.

The WSNA represents more than 16,000 registered nurses in the state.

The lawsuit seeks an injunction to prevent the implementation of this vaccination policy for registered nurses at both Tacoma General and Good Samaritan Hospital.

The WSNA believes that wearing a mask will serve as a sort of scarlet letter. Nurses who do get the shot will wear the special color coded badges to let others know they have been vaccinated.

“WSNA fully supports a voluntary vaccination program and we have been tireless in educating our nurses and the public about flu vaccinations and other prevention tips,” said Judy Huntington, MN, RN, Executive Director of WSNA.

This is the latest in a growing controversy over whether employers can and should ask or even require workers to get immunized. Seattle’s Virginia Mason Medical Center was the first hospital in the country to require flu shots for staffers in 2005. Those who refused have to wear face masks during flu season, or possibly be fired.

MutliCare Health system operates several hospitals in the region, including Tacoma General and Mary Bridge.

The State of New York, hit hard by swine earlier this year, is now requiring all health workers to be immunized. The New York City school district has ordered one million doses of vaccine.

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Ken Bohem | NLPC.org

NLPC has uncovered a plan by the White House New Media operation to hire a technology vendor to conduct a massive, secret effort to harvest personal information on millions of Americans from social networking websites.

The information to be captured includes comments, tag lines, emails, audio, and video. The targeted sites include Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr and others – any space where the White House “maintains a presence.”

In the course of investigating procurement by the White House New Media office, NLPC discovered a 51-page solicitation of bids that was filed on Friday, August 21, 2009. Filed as Solicitation # WHO-S-09-0003, it is posted at FedBizzOps.com. Click here to download a 51-page pdf of the solicitation.

While the solicitation specifies a 12-month contract, it allows for seven one-year extensions. It specifies no dollar cap. Other troubling issues include:

extremely broad secrecy terms preventing the vendor from disclosing to the public or the media what information is being captured and archived (page 7, “Restriction Against Disclosure”)

wholesale capturing of comments by non-White House staff on publicly accessible sites

capturing of content of any type (text, graphics, audio, or video)

capturing of comments by both Obama critics and supporters, with no restriction as to how the White House would use the information.

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Ellen Nakashima | WashingtonPost.com 

 The Obama administration will largely preserve Bush-era procedures allowing the government to search — without suspicion of wrongdoing — the contents of a traveler’s laptop computer, cellphone or other electronic device, although officials said new policies would expand oversight of such inspections.

The policy, disclosed Thursday in a pair of Department of Homeland Security directives, describes more fully than did the Bush administration the procedures by which travelers’ laptops, iPods, cameras and other digital devices can be searched and seized when they cross a U.S. border. And it sets time limits for completing searches.

But representatives of civil liberties and travelers groups say they see little substantive difference between the Bush-era policy, which prompted controversy, and this one.

“It’s a disappointing ratification of the suspicionless search policy put in place by the Bush administration,” said Catherine Crump, staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union. “It provides a lot of procedural safeguards, but it doesn’t deal with the fundamental problem, which is that under the policy, government officials are free to search people’s laptops and cellphones for any reason whatsoever.”

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A video on TheAlexJonesChannel on YouTube has been taken down– not due to claims of copyright infringement or etc.– but due to alleged violations of the You Tube “Community Guidelines“:

We encourage free speech and defend everyone’s right to express unpopular points of view. But we don’t permit hate speech (speech which attacks or demeans a group based on race or ethnic origin, religion, disability, gender, age, veteran status, and sexual orientation/gender identity).

Alex Jones defends against attempts to shut down his speech on You Tube through phony claims of racism.

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Robert McMillan | PCWorld.com 

They sometimes call national security the third rail of politics. Touch it and, politically, you’re dead.

The cliché doesn’t seem far off the mark after reading Mark Klein’s new book, “Wiring up the Big Brother Machine … and Fighting It.” It’s an account of his experiences as the whistleblower who exposed a secret room at a Folsom Street facility in San Francisco that was apparently used to monitor the Internet communications of ordinary Americans.

Klein, 64, was a retired AT&T communications technician in December 2005, when he read the New York Times story that blew the lid off the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program. Secretly authorized in 2002, the program lets the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) monitor telephone conversations and e-mail messages of people inside the U.S. in order to identify suspected terrorists. Klein knew right away that he had proof — documents from his time at AT&T — that could provide a snapshot of how the program was siphoning data off of the AT&T network in San Francisco.

Amazingly, however, nobody wanted to hear his story. In his book he talks about meetings with reporters and privacy groups that went nowhere until a fateful January 20, 2006, meeting with Kevin Bankston of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). Bankston was preparing a lawsuit that he hoped would put a stop to the wiretap program, and Klein was just the kind of witness the EFF was looking for.

With the EFF on board, Klein was briefly a media celebrity — the man who had the guts to expose the NSA’s secret wiretapping program. In his book he provides the documents and the stories that illustrate how all of this transpired.

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Demian Bulwa | SFGate.comWelcome to Tiburon.Click.Your presence has been noted.The posh and picturesque town that juts into San Francisco Bay is poised to do something unprecedented: use cameras to record the license plate number of every vehicle that crosses city limits.Some residents describe the plan as a commonsense way to thwart thieves, most of whom come from out of town. Others see an electronic border gate and worry that the project will only reinforce Tiburon’s image of exclusivity and snootiness.”I personally don’t see too much harm in it, because I have nothing to hide,” commodities broker Paul Lambert, 64, said after a trip to Boardwalk Market in downtown Tiburon on a recent afternoon.”Yet,” he said, “it still has the taint of Big Brother.”Tiburon’s camera idea is a marriage of technology, policing and distinct geography.Situated on a peninsula, Tiburon’s hillside homes and waterfront shops are accessible by only two roads, allowing police to point the special cameras known as license plate readers at every lane that leads into and out of the town of 8,800.The readers, which use character recognition software, can compare plates to databases of cars that have been stolen or linked to crimes, then immediately notify police of matches, said Police Chief Michael Cronin.If someone burglarized a Tiburon home at 3 a.m. one morning, he said, detectives could consult the devices and find out who came to town in the hours before - and who rolled out soon after.’Very low-key’”It’s very low-key,” said Town Manager Peggy Curran.”The whole point of license plates is that people can be identified by them.”If the Town Council gives final approval, Curran said, officials hope to install the readers on Tiburon Boulevard and Paradise Drive by late fall. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s all in the name of research on finding a better way to tax motorists, and the pay is $895.

Beth Quimby | PressHerald.MaineToday.com

Wanted: 250 Maine drivers willing to let a stranger put a black box under their dashboard.

The reward: $895 and the opportunity to speak their minds about the highway tax experiment to a researcher.

University of Iowa researchers are seeking 250 motorists in Cumberland, York and Sagadahoc counties willing to have a computer tracking system installed in their cars for 10 months. The system could someday be used to tax drivers according to the number of miles they drive, rather than the amount of gasoline they consume.

Portland is one of six cities picked for the research, which is designed to determine whether a mileage tax would work better than the gas tax to support the country’s highway system.

Advertising for volunteers in Maine will start at the end of the month, said John Kuhl, an electrical and computer engineering professor in charge of the research. The aim of the study is not just to see whether the technology works, but also to find out whether drivers would accept it.

The $16.5 million study for the U.S. Department of Transportation was authorized in 2005 by Congress, which like the Maine Legislature and other state lawmaking bodies, has been grappling with how to fund the nation’s aging highway system.

“All of the federal commissions that have looked at this have come to the conclusion that sometime in the next decade we need an alternative to the gas tax for highway construction funding,” said Kuhl.

The problem is that the gas tax, collected at the federal, state and sometimes county and municipal levels, is not enough to cover the costs of maintaining the highway system.

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A stinging attack by John Hartigan, the CEO of Rupert Murdoch’s News Limited, labels bloggers and alternative media outlets as “political extremists”. Hartigan implies that bloggers should be jailed as they are in oppressive police states like China and Burma.

In a speech to the National Press Club, Hartigan savagely dismissed blogs as, “Something of such little intellectual value as to be barely discernible from massive ignorance.”

“Bloggers don’t go to jail for their work. They simply aren’t held accountable like real reporters….It could be said the blogosphere is all eyeballs and no insights,” barked Hartigan.

“In the blogosphere, of course, the mainstream media is always found wanting. It really is time this myth was blown apart.”

“Blogs, and a large number of comment sites, specialise in political extremism and personal vilification. Radical sweeping statements without evidence are common.”

Hartigan doesn’t seem to grasp the fact that the mainstream media is always found wanting because they habitually lie about news events and spin stories to suit the demands of their corporate owners. This is the very reason why blogs and alternative media outlets have become so popular and have eaten into the mainstream media’s audience share, because people are sick of being treated like idiots, sick of being lied to, and are desperately in search of the truth.

Indeed, Hartigan’s boss Rupert Murdoch confessed to the fact that his media empire tried to shape public opinion to support the war in Iraq In other words, Murdoch’s many prominent news outlets wantonly put out propaganda supporting the manufactured case for invasion. Murdoch admitted to this while lamenting the corporate media’s “loss of power” to alternative media and Internet blogs, seemingly unaware of the fact that the two are directly connected.

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Slashdot.org 

Comics writer Mark Sable was detained by security at Los Angeles International Airport because he was carrying a script for a new issue of his comic miniseries, Unthinkable.  Unthinkable follows members of a government think tank that was tasked with coming up with 9/11-type “unthinkable” terrorist scenarios that now are coming true.

Sable wrote about his experience saying, “…I was flagged at the gate for ‘extra screening.’ I was subjected to not one, but two invasive searches of my person and belongings. TSA agents then ‘discovered’ the script for Unthinkable #3. They sat and read the script while I stood there, without any personal items, identification or ticket, which had all been confiscated.

The minute I saw the faces of the agents, I knew I was in trouble.

The first page of the Unthinkable script mentioned 9/11, terror plots, and the fact that the (fictional) world had become a police state. The TSA agents then proceeded to interrogate me, having a hard time understanding that a comic book could be about anything other than superheroes, let alone that anyone actually wrote scripts for comics.

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Chris Hedges | TruthDig.com

The ability of the corporate state to pacify the country by extending credit and providing cheap manufactured goods to the masses is gone. The pernicious idea that democracy lies in the choice between competing brands and the freedom to accumulate vast sums of personal wealth at the expense of others has collapsed. The conflation of freedom with the free market has been exposed as a sham. The travails of the poor are rapidly becoming the travails of the middle class, especially as unemployment insurance runs out and people get a taste of Bill Clinton’s draconian welfare reform. And class warfare, once buried under the happy illusion that we were all going to enter an age of prosperity with unfettered capitalism, is returning with a vengeance.

Our economic crisis—despite the corporate media circus around the death of Michael Jackson or Gov. Mark Sanford’s marital infidelity or the outfits of Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest incarnation, Brüno—barrels forward. And this crisis will lead to a period of profound political turmoil and change. Those who care about the plight of the working class and the poor must begin to mobilize quickly or we will lose our last opportunity to save our embattled democracy. The most important struggle will be to wrest the organs of communication from corporations that use mass media to demonize movements of social change and empower proto-fascist movements such as the Christian right.

American culture—or cultures, for we once had distinct regional cultures—was systematically destroyed in the 20th century by corporations. These corporations used mass communication, as well as an understanding of the human subconscious, to turn consumption into an inner compulsion. Old values of thrift, regional identity that had its own iconography, aesthetic expression and history, diverse immigrant traditions, self-sufficiency, a press that was decentralized to provide citizens with a voice in their communities were all destroyed to create mass, corporate culture.

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Bozeman, Montana Tells Applicants To Provide Facebook, Google “Usernames And Passwords,” Which Some Find A Bit Too Invasive

Declan McCullagh | CBSNews.com

If you’re planning to apply for a job with the city of Bozeman, Montana, be prepared to hand over much more than your references and résumé.

The Rocky Mountain city instructs all job applicants to divulge their usernames and passwords for “any Internet-based chat rooms, social clubs or forums, to include, but not limited to: Facebook, Google, Yahoo, YouTube.com, MySpace, etc.”

“Before we offer people employment in a public trust position we have a responsibility to do a thorough background check,” Chuck Winn, Bozeman’s assistant city manager, told CBSNews.com in an interview on Thursday. “This is just a component of a thorough background check.”

“Shame on us if there was information out there available about a person who applied for a job who was a child molester or had some sort of information out there on the Internet that kind of showed those propensities and we didn’t look for it, we didn’t ask, and we hired that person,” Winn said. “In many ways we would have let the public down.”

After CBS affiliate KBZK highlighted the requirement on Wednesday, a firestorm of sorts has erupted online: irate e-mail messages have jammed mailboxes in City Hall, snarky Twitter.com comments have poked fun at a place once awarded the sobriquet of “All-America City,” and a poll indicates 98 percent of respondents believe the city’s policy amounts to an “invasion of privacy.”

In addition to the usual requests for a home address and Social Security number, Bozeman’s one-page background check form asks for the account information for “current personal or business Web sites, Web pages or memberships.” It assures applicants that any information received “is confidential.”
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Paul Joseph Watson | PrisonPlanet.com

A New York Times article about the different test studies being conducted as a precursor to the introduction of a CO2 or mileage tax admits that cars will contain tracking devices that will record where motorists have been.

Obama’s transportation secretary Ray LaHood recently caused controversy when he let slip that the administration was considering a “vehicles miles traveled” tax to replace the federal fuel tax. Press secretary Robert Gibbs hastily moved to offset concerns by claiming that such a tax “is not and will not be the policy of the Obama administration.”

However, as the New York Times reported in its Sunday edition, a number of different large scale beta-testing programs are currently underway to trial that exact scheme.

The largest is the $16.5 million federal Road User Study, under which thousands of volunteers in Austin, Tex.; Baltimore; Boise, Idaho; Raleigh and Durham, N.C.; San Diego; and the Quad Cities region of Iowa are driving cars equipped with tracking devices that catalogue their every movement.

For such a program to achieve its objective of taxing people by the mile, one would think that the only information the tracking device would need to measure is how many miles the vehicle has traveled. However, the true purpose of the technology is revealed when we learn that the system will also “record where motorists have been”.

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The Carroll National Guard will conduct Gun Confiscation Drills from April 2-5, 2009 in the 10 mile stretch between Carroll, IA to Arcadia, IA. According to Sgt. Mike Kots, readiness NCO for Alpha Company the drill will culminate in the apprehension of a suspected arms dealer. However, Sgt. Kots then goes on to explain “One of the techniques we use in today’s political environment is cordon and knock. We ask for the head of the household, get permission to search, then have them open doors and cupboards. The homeowner maintains control. We peer over their shoulder, and the soldier uses the homeowner’s body language and position to protect him.” The question must be asked if the purpose of the drill is to apprehend a suspected weapons dealer why are they searching in cupboards? Is the dealer hiding in a pantry or a breadbox? Or is it really about searching for those nasty guns and firearms that will be a bane during times of martial law.

According to Daily Times Herald from Carroll, IA the primary phase of the operation will be completed Saturday, April 4, when convoys will be deployed from Carroll to Arcadia. Pictures of the arms dealer will be shown in Arcadia, and soldiers will go door to door asking if residents have seen the suspect. “Once credible intelligence has been gathered,” said Kots, “portions of the town will be road-blocked and more in-depth searches of homes and vehicles will be conducted in accordance with the residents’ wishes.” The unit will use a Blackhawk helicopter for overhead command and control, and to simulate medevacs. If this isn’t a military psychological operation, I’m not sure what is. “We have a lot of extended drills this coming year,” Kots added. So this isn’t the end but rather just the beginning of martial law indoctrination of the public. Watch the Video Here.
Alex Jones discusses the martial law event in Iowa