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Now what, the Children's Crusade?

 

Waves of immigrant minors present crisis for Obama, Congress

 

 

(Reuters) - Tens of thousands of children unaccompanied by parents or relatives are flooding across the southern U.S. border illegally, forcing the Obama administration and Congress to grapple with both a humanitarian crisis and a budget dilemma.

 

An estimated 60,000 such children will pour into the United States this year, according to the administration, up from about 6,000 in 2011. Now, Washington is trying to figure out how to pay for their food, housing and transportation once they are taken into custody.

 

The flow is expected to grow. The number of unaccompanied, undocumented immigrants who are under 18 will likely double in 2015 to nearly 130,000 and cost U.S. taxpayers $2 billion, up from $868 million this year, according to administration estimates.

 

The shortage of housing for these children, some as young as 3, has already become so acute that an emergency shelter at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, has been opened and can accommodate 1,000 of them, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said in an interview with Reuters.

 

...

 

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/05/28/us-usa-immigration-children-idUSKBN0E814T20140528

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Did Reagan Kill Entrepreneurialism?

 

...

 

Before Reagan came to Washington, small mom and pop shops were the backbone of our economy. You could walk down any main street or strip mall in this country, and it would be rare to find a big box retailer or a large chain store.

 

If you needed groceries, you went to the local grocer. If you needed a new hammer, you went to the local hardware store.

 

But then Reagan came along.

 

He stopped enforcing the Sherman Anti-Trust Act in 1982, and handed out massive and unfair tax breaks to large corporations and their executives and stockholders, all at the expense of the small businesses that had built the American economy.

 

As a result, mom and pop stores began to close, because they simply couldn't afford to compete with the big box stores that were growing out of control.

 

...

 

 

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/23681-did-reagan-kill-entrepreneurialism#14014153611761&action=collapse_widget&id=1462688

 

 

Much the same thing is happening in LOS!

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N.S.A. Collecting Millions of Faces From Web Images

 

 

The National Security Agency is harvesting huge numbers of images of people from communications that it intercepts through its global surveillance operations for use in sophisticated facial recognition programs, according to top-secret documents.

 

The spy agency’s reliance on facial recognition technology has grown significantly over the last four years as the agency has turned to new software to exploit the flood of images included in emails, text messages, social media, videoconferences and other communications, the N.S.A. documents reveal. Agency officials believe that technological advances could revolutionize the way that the N.S.A. finds intelligence targets around the world, the documents show. The agency’s ambitions for this highly sensitive ability and the scale of its effort have not previously been disclosed.

 

The agency intercepts “millions of images per day†— including about 55,000 “facial recognition quality images†— which translate into “tremendous untapped potential,†according to 2011 documents obtained from the former agency contractor Edward J. Snowden. While once focused on written and oral communications, the N.S.A. now considers facial images, fingerprints and other identifiers just as important to its mission of tracking suspected terrorists and other intelligence targets, the documents show.

 

“It’s not just the traditional communications we’re after: It’s taking a full-arsenal approach that digitally exploits the clues a target leaves behind in their regular activities on the net to compile biographic and biometric information†that can help “implement precision targeting,†noted a 2010 document.

 

One N.S.A. PowerPoint presentation from 2011, for example, displays several photographs of an unidentified man — sometimes bearded, other times clean-shaven — in different settings, along with more than two dozen data points about him. These include whether he was on the Transportation Security Administration no-fly list, his passport and visa status, known associates or suspected terrorist ties, and comments made about him by informants to American intelligence agencies.

 

It is not clear how many people around the world, and how many Americans, might have been caught up in the effort. Neither federal privacy laws nor the nation’s surveillance laws provide specific protections for facial images. Given the N.S.A.’s foreign intelligence mission, much of the imagery would involve people overseas whose data was scooped up through cable taps, Internet hubs and satellite transmissions.

 

Because the agency considers images a form of communications content, the N.S.A. would be required to get court approval for imagery of Americans collected through its surveillance programs, just as it must to read their emails or eavesdrop on their phone conversations, according to an N.S.A. spokeswoman. Cross-border communications in which an American might be emailing or texting an image to someone targeted by the agency overseas could be excepted.

 

Civil-liberties advocates and other critics are concerned that the power of the improving technology, used by government and industry, could erode privacy. “Facial recognition can be very invasive,†said Alessandro Acquisti, a researcher on facial recognition technology at Carnegie Mellon University. “There are still technical limitations on it, but the computational power keeps growing, and the databases keep growing, and the algorithms keep improving.â€

 

State and local law enforcement agencies are relying on a wide range of databases of facial imagery, including driver’s licenses and Facebook, to identify suspects. The F.B.I. is developing what it calls its “next generation identification†project to combine its automated fingerprint identification system with facial imagery and other biometric data.

 

The State Department has what several outside experts say could be the largest facial imagery database in the federal government, storing hundreds of millions of photographs of American passport holders and foreign visa applicants. And the Department of Homeland Security is funding pilot projects at police departments around the country to match suspects against faces in a crowd.

 

The N.S.A., though, is unique in its ability to match images with huge troves of private communications.

 

“We would not be doing our job if we didn’t seek ways to continuously improve the precision of signals intelligence activities — aiming to counteract the efforts of valid foreign intelligence targets to disguise themselves or conceal plans to harm the United States and its allies,†said Vanee M. Vines, the agency spokeswoman.

 

She added that the N.S.A. did not have access to photographs in state databases of driver’s licenses or to passport photos of Americans, while declining to say whether the agency had access to the State Department database of photos of foreign visa applicants. She also declined to say whether the N.S.A. collected facial imagery of Americans from Facebook and other social media through means other than communications intercepts.

 

“The government and the private sector are both investing billions of dollars into face recognition†research and development, said Jennifer Lynch, a lawyer and expert on facial recognition and privacy at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco. “The government leads the way in developing huge face recognition databases, while the private sector leads in accurately identifying people under challenging conditions.â€

 

Ms. Lynch said a handful of recent court decisions could lead to new constitutional protections for the privacy of sensitive face recognition data. But she added that the law was still unclear and that Washington was operating largely in a legal vacuum.

 

Laura Donohue, the director of the Center on National Security and the Law at Georgetown Law School, agreed. “There are very few limits on this,†she said.

 

Congress has largely ignored the issue. “Unfortunately, our privacy laws provide no express protections for facial recognition data,†said Senator Al Franken, Democrat of Minnesota, in a letter in December to the head of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, which is now studying possible standards for commercial, but not governmental, use.

 

Facial recognition technology can still be a clumsy tool. It has difficulty matching low-resolution images, and photographs of people’s faces taken from the side or angles can be impossible to match against mug shots or other head-on photographs.

 

Dalila B. Megherbi, an expert on facial recognition technology at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, explained that “when pictures come in different angles, different resolutions, that all affects the facial recognition algorithms in the software.â€

 

That can lead to errors, the documents show. A 2011 PowerPoint showed one example when Tundra Freeze, the N.S.A.’s main in-house facial recognition program, was asked to identify photos matching the image of a bearded young man with dark hair. The document says the program returned 42 results, and displays several that were obviously false hits, including one of a middle-age man.

 

Similarly, another 2011 N.S.A. document reported that a facial recognition system was queried with a photograph of Osama bin Laden. Among the search results were photos of four other bearded men with only slight resemblances to Bin Laden.

 

But the technology is powerful. One 2011 PowerPoint showed how the software matched a bald young man, shown posing with another man in front of a water park, with another photo where he has a full head of hair, wears different clothes and is at a different location.

 

It is not clear how many images the agency has acquired. The N.S.A. does not collect facial imagery through its bulk metadata collection programs, including that involving Americans’ domestic phone records, authorized under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, according to Ms. Vines.

 

The N.S.A. has accelerated its use of facial recognition technology under the Obama administration, the documents show, intensifying its efforts after two intended attacks on Americans that jarred the White House. The first was the case of the so-called underwear bomber, in which Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian, tried to trigger a bomb hidden in his underwear while flying to Detroit on Christmas in 2009. Just a few months later, in May 2010, Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistani-American, attempted a car bombing in Times Square.

 

The agency’s use of facial recognition technology goes far beyond one program previously reported by The Guardian, which disclosed that the N.S.A. and its British counterpart, General Communications Headquarters, have jointly intercepted webcam images, including sexually explicit material, from Yahoo users.

 

The N.S.A. achieved a technical breakthrough in 2010 when analysts first matched images collected separately in two databases — one in a huge N.S.A. database code-named Pinwale, and another in the government’s main terrorist watch list database, known as Tide — according to N.S.A. documents. That ability to cross-reference images has led to an explosion of analytical uses inside the agency. The agency has created teams of “identity intelligence†analysts who work to combine the facial images with other records about individuals to develop comprehensive portraits of intelligence targets.

 

The agency has developed sophisticated ways to integrate facial recognition programs with a wide range of other databases. It intercepts video teleconferences to obtain facial imagery, gathers airline passenger data and collects photographs from national identity card databases created by foreign countries, the documents show. They also note that the N.S.A. was attempting to gain access to such databases in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Iran.

 

The documents suggest that the agency has considered getting access to iris scans through its phone and email surveillance programs. But asked whether the agency is now doing so, officials declined to comment. The documents also indicate that the N.S.A. collects iris scans of foreigners through other means.

 

In addition, the agency was working with the C.I.A. and the State Department on a program called Pisces, collecting biometric data on border crossings from a wide range of countries.

 

One of the N.S.A.’s broadest efforts to obtain facial images is a program called Wellspring, which strips out images from emails and other communications, and displays those that might contain passport images. In addition to in-house programs, the N.S.A. relies in part on commercially available facial recognition technology, including from PittPatt, a small company owned by Google, the documents show.

 

The N.S.A. can now compare spy satellite photographs with intercepted personal photographs taken outdoors to determine the location. One document shows what appear to be vacation photographs of several men standing near a small waterfront dock in 2011. It matches their surroundings to a spy satellite image of the same dock taken about the same time, located at what the document describes as a militant training facility in Pakistan.

 

 

http://www.nytimes.c...mages.html?_r=0

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This is a bit of background into the US Governments debt war on its own people and a system employed worldwide on varying levels

.I personally believe this is the basis and means of maintaining the stranglehold of fiat debt based power that the oligarchy has on the US populace.

 

From Michael Noonan-

 

By: Michael_Noonan

 

 

diamond.gifAnimal Farm and 1984, meet 2014. The Western world no longer makes any sense, and common sense has been sidelined for decades. It is lies, deceit, and debt ruling supreme. The "American Way" [which once was a standard for emulation] is now a source of embarrassment, advanced by the bankrupt federal government doing the bidding of the moneychangers, those who adhere to and hide behind the Rothschild formula. What is that formula? It has been expressed here on several occasions:

 

Give me control of a nation's money, and I care not who makes the laws." ~ Mayer Amschel Rothschild.

 

Whether Rothschild actually said it or not, this is the most profound statement, and its reality has seized the entire wealth of the Western world. Rothschild learned early on how incredibly profitable it was to lend to nations instead of individuals, and at times of war, profits soared even more. Wars were expensive. Troops had to be paid, munitions bought, and over a period of time, the expense of war drained a nation's treasury.

 

Being recognized as the source for available funding, kings and rulers readily turned to the Rothschild family for money. The Rothschilds always demanded gold and silver in repayment, and when that ran out, control over the issuance of a nation's money was then demanded. Long story short, with its unparalleled, and unfathomable by most to the extent of its accumulation, the Rothschild banking clan became almost the only source of money to run a country.

 

While this may seem repetitive and, to some degree accepted as true, the review is presented as context for what follows.

 

What may not be as widely known is that the English Rothschild bank funded the North in America's Civil War, while the French Rothschild bank funded the South. It did not matter who would win, the Rothschild's were going to increase both their wealth and, more importantly for them, their influence in US politics. That had always been their primary objective.

 

Lincoln did not want to pay the bankers up to 36% interest for loans to fund the war. He decided to issue Greenbacks by the US government, interest free so that the country was not burdened with any interest costs, a very big deal. Lincoln was assassinated, [draw your own conclusions], and after his death, Congress immediately repealed the Greenback law. It should be known that when Lincoln announced his use of interest-free money as a source of funding, bankers stormed to Washington D C t o complain bitterly.

 

Message: Never mess with bankers.

 

Prior to the Civil War, the individual states that comprised the United States were the primary source of power. After the Civil War, the Federal government started to take control of power from the states and placed them under its umbrella. The bankers, under the control of the Rothschilds, were gaining the influence for which they had been scheming.

 

A few decades later, the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 was [illegally] passed, and control of this nation's money supply was now in the banker's hands. It took 2 more decades to officially bankrupt the United States and cause the nation to cease printing any of its own U S Treasury Notes, which were backed by silver and gold, at the time. It was then that Roosevelt declared a "banking holiday." The banking system was shut down for a few days, and when banks reopened, there were then under control of the Federal Reserve and a few Wall Street banks. [JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Chase]

 

For clarity: The Federal Reserve is a privately owned corporation. It is not federal, there are no reserves, and what it issues are not Notes. The third sentence of this article states, It is lies, deceit, and debt ruling supreme. Congress is mandated by Article 1 section 8 clause 5 of the original Constitution "To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures;"

 

Nowhere in the original constitution does it allow for a private corporation to control and issue this nation's currency. Here you see the power of the bankers to come in and take control of the policies, laws, and banking functions. The government, as most people believe exists, in fact does not. The government is under total control of the central banking system, the Federal Reserve.

 

The Federal Reserve does not issue money. To be clear, the Federal Reserve does not issue money! It issues debt. Each and every Federal Reserve Note, [FRN] is a debt instrument. The United States does not issue it own currency. When the US needs money, it is borrowed from the Federal Reserve, and interest is paid on each and every dollar and cent issued by that private banking cartel. When a nation no longer issues its own currency, it is no longer sovereign. Guess who has to pay the interest on the nation's debt?

 

Read Article 14, first sentence of section 4 of the now Federal Constitution:

 

Section 4. The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.

 

This will come as a surprise to most Americans, but it was the Rothschild faction, the money controllers, the elites, who had that section written into the federal constitution. No one is allowed to question the validity of the public debt, no matter how invalid it may be! Theft had become legalized with the passage of that Article 14 of the federal constitution.

 

It is your debt, Americans, and to make matters worse, you have to pay interest on every single dollar and cent loaned into circulation. Forget about what happens to how FRNs are treated once in circulation, their very existence is debt. There is no money in circulation. This country, the world, has been deceived into believing that a FRN is a "dollar," just because the word appears on each debt instrument.

 

It was no accident that Roosevelt passed his useless but effective Executive Order that mandated all "persons" turn in their gold in 1933. In law, a "person" is a corporation. Unless one worked for the federal government as an officer or was a corporation, the deceit of the Executive Order was a pure ruse, as is the entire de facto bankrupt federal government.

 

The reason for it was that the elites wanted to eliminate competition for its fiat FRN. We cannot say it is backed by nothing, for it is backed by the birth of every 14th Amendment "US citizen," a status which never existed prior to the elite mandated passage of the 14th, another ruse to enslave American citizens within their own country by a handful of elites who controlled the money which controls the government. If anyone should doubt that, where does the US government turn when it wants money? To the Fed banking cartel, and that same cartel issues debt that earns them interest.

 

[The point of the birth certificate is that it is used as security for loans based on the premise that each birth will live for so many years, earn money and pay taxes back to the elites. The bith certificate is a form of security.]

 

The debt, by the way, can never be repaid. It is a mathematical impossibility because the interest owed is never loaned into existance.

 

This is a brief overview of how the US government has come to be usurped by a banking cartel that controls everything: government, media, corporations, food supply, etc, etc, all because of their control over the money supply in the Western world. We may continue this theme in another article, for it is incredibly complex and rife with plausible deniability by [puppet]governments acting at the behest of the totally in control elites.

 

Gold and silver are the exact opposite of debt. When you own gold and silver, you own it outright. It is substance without any third-party obligation. You know by the unrelenting manipulation of the price for both by the central bankers how desperate they are to keep it from challenging their grand fiat scheme.

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"She added that the N.S.A. did not have access to photographs in state databases of driver’s licenses or to passport photos of Americans, while declining to say whether the agency had access to the State Department database of photos of foreign visa applicants. She also declined to say whether the N.S.A. collected facial imagery of Americans from Facebook and other social media through means other than communications intercepts."

 

Bullshit !

 

Anecdote:

 

In my state there is a law that requires the DMV to destroy/delete any DMV drivers license photos. DMV cannot save any DMV photo. The photo of those obtaining a drivers license.

There is actually a state DMV Phamplet at all DMV offices that clearly states this. This is a state law.

 

About 2 years in - I lost my drivers license. Went to local DMV to get a duplicate. The nice lady at the DMV asked me if I wanted a new photo - or use the old one on the DMV's computer. I used the old one.

 

I asked why the photo was still on the DMV computer. I was told that they are "slow" in deleting the photos.

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