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[Freedombox-discuss] Anti- freedom-box
by Eugen Leitl 23 Jul '12

23 Jul '12

----- Forwarded message from Boruch Baum <boruch.baum(a)gmail.com> -----

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Secrecy News -- 07/23/12
by Eugen Leitl 23 Jul '12

23 Jul '12

----- Forwarded message from Steven Aftergood <saftergood(a)fas.org> -----

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The Terrifying Background of the Man Who Ran a CIA Assassination Unit
by Eugen Leitl 23 Jul '12

23 Jul '12

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/07/the-terrifying-backgrou… The Terrifying Background of the Man Who Ran a CIA Assassination Unit By Conor Friedersdorf Jul 18 2012, 1:39 PM ET 123 A federal investigation alleged Enrique Prado's involvement in seven murders, yet he was in charge when America outsourced covert killing to a private company. cia full cia.png CIA It was one of the biggest secrets of the post-9/11 era: soon after the attacks, President Bush gave the CIA permission to create a top secret assassination unit to find and kill Al Qaeda operatives. The program was kept from Congress for seven years. And when Leon Panetta told legislators about it in 2009, he revealed that the CIA had hired the private security firm Blackwater to help run it. "The move was historic," says Evan Wright, the two-time National Magazine Award-winning journalist who wrote Generation Kill. "It seems to have marked the first time the U.S. government outsourced a covert assassination service to private enterprise." The quote is from his e-book How to Get Away With Murder in America, which goes on to note that "in the past, the CIA was subject to oversight, however tenuous, from the president and Congress," but that "President Bush's 2001 executive order severed this line by transferring to the CIA his unique authority to approve assassinations. By removing himself from the decision-making cycle, the president shielded himself -- and all elected authority -- from responsibility should a mission go wrong or be found illegal. When the CIA transferred the assassination unit to Blackwater, it continued the trend. CIA officers would no longer participate in the agency's most violent operations, or witness them. If it practiced any oversight at all, the CIA would rely on Blackwater's self-reporting about missions it conducted. Running operations through Blackwater gave the CIA the power to have people abducted, or killed, with no one in the government being exactly responsible." None of this is new information, though I imagine that many people reading this item are hearing about it for the first time. Isn't that bizarre? The bulk of Wright's e-book (full disclosure: I help edit the website of Byliner, publisher of the e-book) tells the story of Enrique Prado, a high-ranking CIA-officer-turned-Blackwater-employee who oversaw assassination units for both the CIA and the contractor. To whom was this awesome responsibility entrusted? According to Wright's investigation, a federal organized crime squad run out of the Miami-Dade Police Department produced an investigation allegedly tying Prado to seven murders carried out while he worked as a bodyguard for a narco crime boss. At the time, the CIA declared him unavailable for questioning; the investigation was shut down before he was arrested or tried. There's a lot more to the story -- Wright's e-book is almost 50 pages long -- but this bit is of particular note: The reporting on Prado's activities at Blackwater produced no evidence that the firm's employees had ever killed anyone on behalf of the CIA. But I spoke to Blackwater employees who insisted that they had. Two Blackwater contractors told me that their firm began conducting assassinations in Afghanistan as early as 2008. They claimed to have participated in such operations -- one in a support role, the other as a "trigger puller." The contractors, to whom I spoke in 2009 and 2010, were both ex-Special Forces soldiers who were not particularly bothered by assassination work, although they did question the legality of Blackwater's involvement in it. According to the "trigger puller," he and a partner were selected for one such operation because they were Mexican Americans, whose darker skin enabled them to blend in as Afghan civilians. The first mission he described took place in 2008. He and his partner spent three weeks training outside Kabul, becoming accustomed to walking barefoot like Afghans while toting weapons underneath their jackets. Their mission centered on walking into a market and killing the occupant of a pickup truck, whose identity a CIA case worker had provided to them. They succeeded in their mission, he told me, and moved on to another. This contractor's story didn't completely fit with other accounts about Prado's unit at Blackwater. The e-mail written by Prado and later obtained by the Times seemed to indicate that the unit wouldn't use Americans to carry out actual assassinations. Moreover, two CIA sources insisted that the contractors I spoke to were lying. As one put it, "These guys are security guards who want to look like Rambo." When I asked Ed O'Connell, a former Air Force colonel and RAND analyst with robust intelligence experience in Afghanistan, to evaluate these contractors' claims, he first told me they were almost certainly a "fantastical crock of shit." But a year later, in 2011, after a research trip in Afghanistan for his firm Alternative Strategies Institute, O'Connell had changed his assessment. He told me, "Your sources seem to have been correct. Private contractors are whacking people like crazy over in Afghanistan for the CIA." So there you have it: A former Air Force lieutenant colonel, speaking on the record and using the present tense, said in 2011 that "private contractors are whacking people like crazy over in Afghanistan for the CIA." Says Wright: While Blackwater's covert unit began as a Bush administration story, President Obama now owns it. In 2010, his administration intervened on behalf of the Blackwater executives indicted for weapons trafficking, filing motions to suppress evidence on the grounds that it could compromise national security. The administration then awarded Blackwater (which is now called Academi) a $250 million contract to perform unspecified services for the CIA. At the same time, Obama has publicly taken responsibility for some lethal operations -- the Navy SEALs' sniper attack on Somali pirates, the raid on bin Laden. His aides have also said that he reviews target lists for drone strikes. The president's actions give him the appearance of a man who wants the best of both worlds. He appears as a tough, resolute leader when he announces his role in killings that will likely be popular -- a pirate, a terrorist. But the apparatus for less accountable killings grinds on. Needless to say, this ought to spark an investigation, but more than that, it should cause Americans to step back and reflect on how vulnerable we've made ourselves to bad actors in the post-9/11 era. We're giving C.I.A. agents and even private security contractors the sort of power no individual should wield. And apparently our screening apparatus turns out to be lacking.

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Re: considerable BTC concentration in a single account
by Eugen Leitl 23 Jul '12

23 Jul '12

----- Forwarded message from Bryce Lynch <virtualadept(a)gmail.com> -----

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Re: [ZS] Another face of Corporatism: Private armies and police
by Eugen Leitl 23 Jul '12

23 Jul '12

----- Forwarded message from Bryce Lynch <virtualadept(a)gmail.com> -----

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Картина на свадьбу в подарок ! - 1490руб
by "Картины" 23 Jul '12

23 Jul '12

Лето - время свадеб. Подарок на свадьбу - красивая картина в роскошной раме и в подарочной упаковке. Летняя скидка 50 % !!! - 1490руб вместо 3000 руб! Подарок доставят Вам домой или в офис! Купить картину здесь: www.картина-тут.рф/11.shtml

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Приглашает на работу Менеджеров
by "Инвестиционно-финансовый холдинг" 23 Jul '12

23 Jul '12

Крупный инвестиционно-финансовый холдинг приглашает в новый логистический проект тех, кто хочет и умеет продавать. Менеджер по продажам услуг экспресс-доставки деловых писем Что нужно делать: · привлекать новых клиентов; · выезжать на переговоры с потенциальными клиентами, выявлять потребности, презентовать услуги компании, заключать договоры. Наши ожидания: · муж./жен, 22-37 лет, строго гражданство РФ; · опыт продаж любых товаров или услуг; · приветствуется опыт работы с корпоративными клиентами (юрлицами). Мы предлагаем: · высокую и полностью официальную заработную плату (ТВЁРДЫЙ ОКЛАД, который готовы обсуждать + % от продаж); · возможности быстрого роста до руководителя группы продаж; · оформление в штат с первого дня работы; · полное соблюдение Трудового кодекса; · график работы: понедельник-пятница, 9:30-18:30; · офис – рядом с центром Москвы (м. "Автозаводская", в шаговой доступности от метро, рядом с Третьим транспортным кольцом). Менеджер по телемаркетингу Что нужно делать: · звонить в компании и назначать встречи «выездным» менеджерам по продажам. Наши ожидания: · муж./жен, 22-40 лет, строго гражданство РФ; · приветствуется опыт телефонных продаж/исходящих звонков. Мы предлагаем: · высокую и полностью официальную заработную плату (ТВЁРДЫЙ ОКЛАД, который готовы обсуждать + % от количества назначенных встреч); · оформление в штат с первого дня работы; · полное соблюдение Трудового кодекса; · график работы: понедельник-пятница, 9:30-18:30; · офис – рядом с центром Москвы (м. "Автозаводская", в шаговой доступности от метро, рядом с Третьим транспортным кольцом). НАШИ КОНТАКТЫ: (495)727-09-69 (909)934-05-59. (понедельник - пятница, с 9:30 до 19:00) vok(a)maillog.ru

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Продаются квартиры в Хамовниках
by "элитные квартиры" 23 Jul '12

23 Jul '12

Продаются элитные квартиры в Хамовниках в близи Новодевичьего монастыря www.дом-хамовники.рф

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considerable BTC concentration in a single account
by Eugen Leitl 23 Jul '12

23 Jul '12

Coverage on http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/wzptm/bitcoin_address_1dkybekt5s2g… Bitcoin Address 1DkyBEKt5S2GDtv7aQw6rQepAvnsRyHoYM (blockchain.info) submitted 7 hours ago by bleahbloh 9 comments share save hide report all 9 comments sorted by: best formatting help [b]Nhdb 13 points 6 hours ago http://1dkybekt5s2gdtv7aqw6rqepavnsryhoym.com/ Pretty awesome move permalink report reply [b]MaunaLoona 4 points 5 hours ago http://i.imgur.com/jNFqw.gif permalink parent report reply [b]DerFrycook 1 point 39 minutes ago This is the best thing I've ever seen. permalink parent report reply [b]anfedorov 11 points 7 hours ago At current rates, that's $3.5M, not bad. I'd love to see someone much smarter than me analyze the types of transactions that come in/out of accounts like this. Who is likely to own it? What's up with those incoming transactions of 5-10k BTC from dozens of addresses? permalink report reply [b]power78 0 points 3 hours ago The link below states that is the SilkRoad main account. Can anyone confirm? permalink parent report reply [b]godofpumpkins 3 points 2 hours ago MagicalTux has suggested before that it belongs to MtGox, as far as I know. permalink parent report reply [b]Puupsfred 9 points 7 hours ago https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=94675.0 permalink report reply [b]MaunaLoona 1 point 5 hours ago Arrr, matey! permalink report reply [b]matthew412 1 point 2 hours ago Some analysis on the addresses that have sent bitcoins there permalink report reply

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10 рассылок за 10 000 рублей +хостинг на месяц в ПОДАРОК
by "Реклама по е-почте" 23 Jul '12

23 Jul '12

10 рассылок за 10 000 рублей + хостинг на месяц в ПОДАРОК (для указания вашего сайта в письме) - По вашему графику - Без ограничений по срокам - Возможно менять макеты все 10 раз !!! - Подготовка макетов бесплатно АКЦИИ: Месяц 44(46) рассылок - 2 раза в день - 5 раз в неделю - 20 000 рублей Под акцию попадают базы: Вся Россия - 23 млн адресов - из них 4 млн ЮР. Вся Москва - 8 млн адресов - из них 1,7 млн ЮР. Вся Украина - 4 млн адресов - из них 1 млн ЮР. и др. Тел: (495) 585-79-04 ICQ: 286 926 971

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