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DoJ Trojan Horse
by coderman 13 Jan '16

13 Jan '16

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/eric-holder-wall-street-double-ag… --- Eric Holder, Wall Street Double Agent, Comes in From the Cold Barack Obama's former top cop cashes in after six years of letting banks run wild By Matt Taibbi July 8, 2015 Share Tweet Share Comment Email eric holder Eric Holder is back at Covington & Burling after serving as U.S. attorney general for six years. Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Eric Holder has gone back to work for his old firm, the white-collar defense heavyweight Covington & Burling. The former attorney general decided against going for a judgeship, saying he's not ready for the ivory tower yet. "I want to be a player," he told the National Law Journal, one would have to say ominously. Sidebar Eric Holder Goldman Non-Prosecution: AG Eric Holder Has No Balls » Holder will reassume his lucrative partnership (he made $2.5 million the last year he worked there) and take his seat in an office that reportedly – this is no joke – was kept empty for him in his absence. The office thing might have been improper, but at this point, who cares? More at issue is the extraordinary run Holder just completed as one of history's great double agents. For six years, while brilliantly disguised as the attorney general of the United States, he was actually working deep undercover, DiCaprio in The Departed-style, as the best defense lawyer Wall Street ever had. Holder denied there was anything weird about returning to one of Wall Street's favorite defense firms after six years of letting one banker after another skate on monstrous cases of fraud, tax evasion, market manipulation, money laundering, bribery and other offenses. "Just because I'm at Covington doesn't mean I will abandon the public interest work," he told CNN. He added to the National Law Journal that a big part of the reason he was going back to private practice was because he wanted to give back to the community. "The firm's emphasis on pro bono work and being engaged in the civic life of this country is consistent with my worldview that lawyers need to be socially active," he said. Right. He's going back to Covington & Burling because of the firm's emphasis on pro bono work. Here's a man who just spent six years handing out soft-touch settlements to practically every Too Big to Fail bank in the world. Now he returns to a firm that represents many of those same companies: Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup, to name a few. Collectively, the decisions he made while in office saved those firms a sum that is impossible to calculate with exactitude. But even going by the massive rises in share price observed after he handed out these deals, his service was certainly worth many billions of dollars to Wall Street. Now he will presumably collect assloads of money from those very same bankers. It's one of the biggest quid pro quo deals in the history of government service. Congressman Billy Tauzin once took a $2 million-a-year job lobbying for the pharmaceutical industry just a few weeks after helping to pass the revolting Prescription Drug Benefit Bill, but what Holder just did makes Tauzin look like a guy who once took a couple of Redskins tickets. In this light, telling reporters that you're going back to Covington & Burling to be "engaged in the civic life of this country" seems like a joke for us all to suck on, like announcing that he's going back to get a doctorate at the University of Blow Me. Holder doesn't look it, but he was a revolutionary. He institutionalized a radical dualistic approach to criminal justice, essentially creating a system of indulgences wherein the world's richest companies paid cash for their sins and escaped the sterner punishments the law dictated. Here are five pillars of the Holder revolution: Sidebar Alayne Fleischmann The $9 Billion Witness: JPMorgan Chase's Worst Nightmare » One is that he failed to win a single conviction in court for any crimes related to the financial crisis. The only trial of any consequence brought by his Justice Department for crimes related to the crisis involved a pair of Bear Stearns nimrods named Ralph Cioffi and Matthew Tannin, who confided in each other via email that the subprime markets were "toast" but told their clients something very different to keep them invested. After a jury acquitted both in early 2009, the Holder Justice Department turtled. Sources inside the DOJ told me over the years that both Holder and his deputy, fellow Covington & Burling alum Lanny Breuer, were obsessed with winning and refused to chance any case where they felt a jury might go sideways on them. Thus the Cioffi-Tannin case was the last financial crisis case they dared to bring into to a criminal courtroom – virtually every other case ended in settlements. Two: Holder famously invented a concept called "collateral consequences," under which the state could pursue non-criminal alternatives for companies if they believed prosecuting them might result in too much "collateral" damage. Britain's HSBC bank, which admitted to massive money laundering violations, and the Swiss bank UBS, which was caught manipulating the Libor interest rate benchmark, were examples of firms that escaped vigorous prosecution because Holder and his lackeys were, ostensibly anyway, concerned about market-altering consequences. Significantly, both banks were later caught up in even more serious scandals, leading to criticism that stiffer punishments the first time around might have prevented future damage. Holder's successor Loretta Lynch was even forced to rip up Holder's UBS deal for being insufficiently punitive. It's worth noting that Holder, before he became attorney general, represented UBS at Covington & Burling. Holder's lenient policies were deployed at a time when fellow officials like Tim Geithner and Ben Bernanke were using bailout monies to merge troubled firms together and create even larger mega-companies. Chase and Wells Fargo, which swallowed up Washington Mutual and Wachovia in state-aided takeovers, were prototypes of the modern mega-bank. So when Holder wedded "collateral consequences" to these new Too Big to Fail mega-firms, he created Too Big to Jail. This is a huge part of his legacy, the creation of an unjailable class. Three: Holder also pioneered the extrajudicial settlement, striking huge deals with companies in which judges did not sign off on the agreements. The arrangement prevented pesky judges like the irksome Jed Rakoff (who voided a pair of settlements he felt were inadequate) from protesting lenient justice. This essentially institutionalized the backroom deal. Everything was done in secret, and there was no longer any opportunity for judges or anyone else to check the power of the executive branch to hand out financial indulgences. The watchdog group Better Markets described the $13 billion Chase settlement, one of the biggest extrajudicial deals, as "an unprecedented settlement amount [that] cannot…immunize the DOJ from having to obtain independent judicial review of its otherwise unilateral, secret actions." Four: There is a huge misconception, pushed equally by odd bedfellows in the financial community and Obama supporters, that Eric Holder didn't send anyone from Wall Street to jail because "no one broke any laws." This preposterous meme grew out of something Barack Obama said on 60 Minutes. Here are the president's exact words: "Some of the most damaging behavior on Wall Street — in some cases some of the least ethical behavior on Wall Street — wasn't illegal." Obama, a brilliant lawyer and wordsmith, was not saying that all of the behavior leading to the crash was legal. He merely said that some of the worst behavior wasn't illegal. Which is true. Meaningless, but true. Of course, some of the worst behavior was very illegal. This is confirmed in the fact that Holder extracted billions of dollars in settlement monies and even, in a few cases, obtained guilty pleas for crimes like fraud, manipulation, bribery, money laundering and tax evasion. Anyone who even tries to claim that none of the banks actually did anything illegal should be directed to the HSBC settlement of December 2012. In this deferred prosecution agreement, Europe's largest bank paid $1.92 billion to settle their responsibility for violations of the Bank Secrecy Act and other laws. This is from a description of HSBC's crimes by Holder's Justice Department: "As a result of HSBC Bank USA's AML failures, at least $881 million in drug trafficking proceeds – including proceeds of drug trafficking by the Sinaloa Cartel in Mexico…were laundered through HSBC Bank USA." You might remember the Sinaloa cartel for their ISIS-style, unforgettably upsetting torture videos. HSBC washed their cash. They even created special teller windows to make their deposits easier. This is admitted, not alleged. But Holder went out of his way to let them keep their U.S. charter. He gave their executives a grand total of zero days in jail, zero dollars in individual fines. To reiterate: HSBC laundered money for guys who chop peoples' heads off with chainsaws. So we can dispense with the "but no one broke any laws" thing. When asked about this in testimony before the Senate, Holder told elected officials he was concerned harsher penalties against firms like HSBC would "have a negative impact on the national economy," and that this "has an inhibiting influence…on our ability to bring resolutions that I think would be more appropriate." Compare this to what he just said after returning to Covington & Burling: "I think that what we did in the department was, I always like to say, appropriately aggressive. There may be clients that, for whatever reason, will not decide to work with me..." Oddly enough, Holder used that same phrase – "appropriately aggressive" – in his Senate testimony. In other words, the attorney general said he was "inhibited" from giving "appropriate" punishments just a few moments before claiming his punishments were appropriate. This is classic Clintonian politics, saying two things at the same time, neither of them true. Five: Holder contributed countless subtle inventions to soften punishments. The most revolting in my view was allowing banks like Chase the courtesy of calling their settlements "remedial payments" instead of fines for wrongdoing. This seemingly insignificant semantic tweak allowed the bank to call $7 billion of their settlement a business expense, which meant they could claim it as a tax deduction, which in turn meant that taxpayers like you and me paid a whopping $2.45 billion of Chase's penalty. Some of the write-ups of these decisions emanating from the financial and legal press were hilarious. Law360.com, noting that the settlement language meant that 35 percent of the bank's regulatory burden would be shifted "onto the backs of taxpayers," pointed out, as if surprised, that the tax treatment "sparked debate" and that "some are even angry about it." Shocking! Of course, none of us mortals can deduct so much as a speeding ticket, since we wouldn't want to use the tax code to encourage speeding. So why was it OK for the nation's top cop to make fraud or money laundering a tax-subsidized activity? There were other tricks. Banks that committed multiple violations of the same offense were often allowed to settle or plead to just one count. And in many cases the fines were staggeringly low compared to the volume of crime – BNP-Paribas, for instance, paid $8.9 billion after laundering $30 billion, meaning they paid about 27 cents per dollar of violations. Holder is a cynic of a type that's increasingly common in Washington. To follow his Justice Department was like watching an endless reel of The Good Wife – smart lawyers half-cleverly constructing one unseemly moral compromise after another, always justifying it to themselves in the end somehow in the name of keeping the ball rolling. Holder doubtless seriously believed at first that in a time of financial crisis, he was doing the right thing in constructing new forms of justice for banks, where nobody but the shareholders actually had to pay for crime. You've heard of victimless crimes; Holder created the victimless punishment. But in the end, it was pretty convenient, wasn't it, that "the right thing" also happened to be the strategy that preserved Democratic Party relationships with big-dollar donors, kept the client base at Holder's old firm nice and fat, made the influential rich immeasurably richer and allowed Eric Holder himself to crash-land into a giant pile of money upon resignation. What a coincidence! In any civilized country, it'd be a scandal. In America, though, he's just another guy selling whatever he can to get by. It was just too bad that what Holder had to sell was the criminal justice system.

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Intel's Clear Linux... Open and Reproducible, Or Suspect Honey Trap For LINUX Fanboys...
by grarpamp 13 Jan '16

13 Jan '16

http://linux.slashdot.org/story/16/01/12/1724210/intels-clear-linux-distrib… https://clearlinux.org/ Comes complete with Spyware and Cloud...

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Won't Someone Please Think Of The... Dead People
by grarpamp 13 Jan '16

13 Jan '16

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2682051-Bill.html http://www.kentucky.com/news/politics-government/article54138900.html

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French To Ban Strong Crypto, Lawmakers Showing They Care
by grarpamp 13 Jan '16

13 Jan '16

"Digital Republic" bill criticizes the effects of strong encryption on state security forces. "France must take the initiative and force device manufacturers to take into consideration the imperative of access for law enforcement officers https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/40nmzg/matthew_green_i_used_to_wa…

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FOIPA: Federal Law Enforcement Covertly Surveilling Your Neighborhood
by grarpamp 13 Jan '16

13 Jan '16

https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2016/jan/12/alcohol-tobacco-firearms… http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=8605281&cid=51289269

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Re: [cryptome] Re: Former Spy Chief Reveals bullcrap
by Shelley 12 Jan '16

12 Jan '16

On January 12, 2016 12:55:15 PM Michael Best <themikebest(a)gmail.com> wrote: > FWIW, the description is from the book itself. Oh, I could definitely tell. Sorry, I didn't mean to imply you'd written that trashy blurb it or agreed with it. My crankiness threshold is lower than normal today (I know, is that even possible!? :p ) and when the Faux News goons start posting mindless drivel, it annoys me. > There's definitely stuff to disagree with in his book, pretty much > everything that's supposition. What's interesting are the first hand > accounts of things and admissions. When he over generalizes, it's pretty > obvious. > […] I'd check the book out of the library, but I wouldn't > recommend most people buy it unless the price is slashed at a used book > store. Library? For this? Nah: torrents via VPN, skim, delete. Heh. You're doing a public service by posting excerpts so I don't even waste the time and bandwidth on it. -S

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Re: [cryptome] Re: Former Spy Chief Reveals bullcrap
by Shelley 12 Jan '16

12 Jan '16

On January 12, 2016 8:30:22 AM Lou Novacheck <luigibasco(a)gmail.com> wrote: >How much difference is there between an Obama nation and an abomination? Seriously? Did you cut and paste that directly from "Faux News Talking Points for Idiots"? > On Tue, Jan 12, 2016 at 6:45 AM, Michael Best <themikebest(a)gmail.com> wrote: >The highest-ranking Soviet bloc intelligence official ever to defect to the >West, Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa is at it again. Sounds like somebody lived longer than he anticipated and The Company's maintenance checks have run thin, so he's making shit up in the long tradition of saying anything to make a quick buck. >Why, during the last two generations, has so much of the Western > world turned against its founding faith, Christianity? Whoa, waitaminute. I wasn't aware that there was a "founding faith," especially since the establishment clause specifically prohibits it. In That One Document, what's it called... > [...] Pacepa and Rychlak also document how the U.S. "mainstream media's" > enduring sympathy for all things liberal-left That's definitely some Faux News-level bullshit right there. I'm not an apologist for the democraps, I think all politics in this town country sucks. But, c'mon! Wtf? -S

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Fwd: Classifed info [in FOIA]
by coderman 12 Jan '16

12 Jan '16

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: "James S. Tyre" <jstyre(a)jstyre.com> Date: Tue, 12 Jan 2016 10:48:05 -0800 Subject: Re: Classifed info To: FOI-L(a)listserv.syr.edu Fun (if only in hindsight) and true story. In the mid-eighties, the FBI and Naval Intelligence raided my law office, sans warrant, claiming that I was in possession of classified docs and that I could be prosecuted under the espionage act. I did indeed have certain classified docs, but .... At the time I obtained them, I got them through a valid FOIA request made a day after they were declassified. So it wasn't exactly a secret that I had them, and I had obtained them completely legally. But then the gov't went "whoops, we didn't really mean to declassify them." And then, while copies were in my possession, the docs were reclassified. Eventually, the gov't agreed that I could keep the docs, and that was pretty much that. But it was certainly interesting for a while. (Everything about this was political, but deliberately I'm not giving enough detail from which anyone can infer what the politics were.) -- James S. Tyre [...] jstyre(a)jstyre.com Special Counsel, Electronic Frontier Foundation

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some bold idiot sold El Chapo bunk kit
by coderman 12 Jan '16

12 Jan '16

''' Penn noted in his article his own concerns about being tracked in the plane but said that Chapo's son put him at ease by pointing out a "red scrambler switch below the cockpit controls" that he claimed blocked ground radar and that an inside man provided them with information about when the military's high-altitude surveillance plane has been deployed. "He has great confidence that there are no unwanted eyes on us," Penn wrote. Military technology and weaponry expert, Dr. Robert J. Bunker, was confused. "It doesn't make any sense," Dr. Bunker, Adjunct Faculty for the Division of Politics & Economics at Claremont Graduate University, told VICE News. "If this existed it would be on all our planes." Bunker said he knew of no invisible radar scrambling systems for small planes, and listed several hypothetical ways it could function before discounting them by saying they would be in "the realm of 'Dr. Evil' planning and technology that borders on simple fantasy." Bunker suggested that somebody may had "sold the narcos a 'high technology scrambling system'—but it really doesn't work." Another possibility could be that Penn was told a story to calm his fears. ''' --- https://news.vice.com/article/the-actress-who-linked-up-sean-penn-with-el-c… The Actress Who Linked Up Sean Penn with El Chapo Was Under Surveillance Since 2014 By Nathaniel Janowitz January 12, 2016 | 1:05 am Kate del Castillo — the actress who took Sean Penn to interview El Chapo — had already been under surveillance for her links to the drug lord for 14 months before the meeting took place in a mountain hideout. In the wake of the kingpin's recapture on Friday, Mexican authorities said that the monitoring of contacts with actors and producers aided the manhunt launched in the the wake of his tunnel escape from prison in July. An unnamed official told The Associated Press that the Penn interview in October directly led to an operation that almost caught up with him then. Related: Sean Penn Interviewed El Chapo – And It Helped Lead to the Drug Lord's Capture Now El Universal has published details of the surveillance of Del Castillo it claims was well-established before his escape from the Altiplano maximum-security prison and continued after he was a fugitive. It said their contact included letters exchanged while he was in jail, as well as several meetings between the actress and Guzmán's lawyers prior to their mountain encounter. The article is backed up by photos purported to be taken before and during the meetings, as well as snaps of her and Penn meeting Guzmán's associates upon arrival in Mexico on October 2 on their way to interview El Chapo. The paper said the surveillance of Del Castillo began in August 2014. El Chapo reportedly instructed one of his lawyers, Andrés Granados Flores, to contact her about making a biopic about his life. Through Guzmán's legal team the actress and drug lord wrote to each other regarding the project. Related: How Kate del Castillo Became the Rebel Celebrity Who Took Sean Penn to 'Chapo' The first face-to-face meeting between Del Castillo and Granados reportedly took place on June 16, 2015 — still nearly a month before Chapo's jailbreak — in an upscale restaurant named the San Ángel Inn, located in the south of Mexico City. The paper claimed it has seen photographs from the meeting showing the actress wearing a black blouse and a white skirt, while the lawyer wore a black suit. El Universal said that Del Castillo and Granados met again after Chapo was on the run, on September 25, in the Western City of Guadalajara. A published photograph purports to show her after arriving on the airline Aeroméxico, flight 783, from Los Angeles. Another from the following day claims to show her sitting in a restaurant with Granados and another member of Guzmán's legal team, Óscar Manuel Gómez Núñez. The report said she saw the lawyers twice on that occasion. First for dinner and the following morning when they gave her a phone with some sort of special features that would allow her to communicate directly with Joaquin Guzmán. The timing of this meeting appears to be reinforced by Sean Penn's Rolling Stone article in which he says that on September 28 he got confirmation from his contact with Del Castillo that he would be able to meet Chapo. Penn wrote that he and Del Castillo flew from Los Angeles to an unnamed "city in mid-Mexico" in a chartered plane four days later. According to the article in El Universal, the city was Guadalajara and the plane was a Hawker 900XP private jet. The paper published a photo it said was of the actors meeting the lawyer. From there they reportedly went to the Hotel Villa Ganza where they registered, dropped off their equipment, and left. >From Guadalajara the paper cited the surveillance tracking the two actors in two vans to Tepic, the capital of Nayarit state. Penn also said they travelled to another city that he did not name. Both accounts say the group boarded two private planes — El Universal says one was white and the other yellow — at a tourist resort with a private airstrip that took them into the Golden Triangle mountain region. According to Penn's article, they were accompanied by one of El Chapo's sons, Alfredo Guzmán. Penn noted in his article his own concerns about being tracked in the plane but said that Chapo's son put him at ease by pointing out a "red scrambler switch below the cockpit controls" that he claimed blocked ground radar and that an inside man provided them with information about when the military's high-altitude surveillance plane has been deployed. "He has great confidence that there are no unwanted eyes on us," Penn wrote. Military technology and weaponry expert, Dr. Robert J. Bunker, was confused. "It doesn't make any sense," Dr. Bunker, Adjunct Faculty for the Division of Politics & Economics at Claremont Graduate University, told VICE News. "If this existed it would be on all our planes." Bunker said he knew of no invisible radar scrambling systems for small planes, and listed several hypothetical ways it could function before discounting them by saying they would be in "the realm of 'Dr. Evil' planning and technology that borders on simple fantasy." Bunker suggested that somebody may had "sold the narcos a 'high technology scrambling system'—but it really doesn't work." Another possibility could be that Penn was told a story to calm his fears. After the flight, they arrived in the Golden Triangle. After a long road trip they met El Chapo for seven hours of chatting, tequila, and tacos, before agreeing to meet eight days later for a two-day long interview. This interview never took place because three days after Chapo, Penn and Del Castillo met, the kingpin narrowly slipped a navy operation to capture him. An unnamed source in Mexican federal law enforcement told The Associated Press that it was the Penn interview that triggered that operation. Some, however, are not so sure. Mexican columnist Raymundo Riva Palacio wrote on Monday on the website ejecentral that the authorities had already identified Chapo's precise location in the Sierra before the interview. While he says that surveillance of Del Castillo would have provided useful information in the manhunt for the fugitive after his escape, her presence in the area alongside a major movie star actually postponed the operation to try and capture him. "The US requested that the operation to capture him be postponed 72 hours," Riva Palacio told VICE News, insisting he had two reliable Mexican sources confirming this. "My theory is that they are putting the emphasis on the actors because they are protecting somebody, perhaps undercover people." In the end Chapo escaped that operation and was not tracked down until Friday, January 8, in the northern city of Los Mochis, Sinaloa. A gopro video was released on Monday showing the initial stage of the raid on a safe house where Guzmán was hiding. Gun shots and arrests take place for 15 minutes as they search for El Chapo in the video. The drug lord had slipped out of the house into the city's sewage system through a hole tunnel reportedly built in a closet. He was caught hours after resurfacing, stealing a vehicle, and attempting to flee the city. Penn's article created a major stir when it was published on Saturday night. The star said he had "nothin' to hide" in a brief email exchange with The Associated Press. Del Castillo has yet to make any comment at all, other than to tell a reporter from Univision, "Everything when and how it should be. Don't call me again."

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Re: US Pres. Cand. Marco Rubio Comes Out For Surveillance State, Bashes Snowden
by John Young 12 Jan '16

12 Jan '16

This is how everyone talks after being "read into" secretkeeping conditions, no matter what they said before then. After a few years of abiding these conditions, a few begin to send canary cheeps about needing less secrecy and more openness but do not go back across that one-way in, no way out border -- for life, as a primary condition to being read into. A much smaller number go across the red line of secretkeeping but become hounded -- for life -- as traitors, or worse. That is also a condition of being read into the black-hearted world (with corollary benefits). These conditions are described in secrecy agreements. At some point, all presidential candidates are read into secretkeeping or are advised to speak as though they have. What this diabolism has led to is a large enterprise worldwide of liars and dissimulators, leaks, fake leaks, spy stories, gov-com-org spying and secretkeeping revolving door industry, led by and enforced by the three branches and their like worldwide. This world is georaphically borderless but has a near impenetrable border at the edge of secretkeeping. There is, as customary of secretkeeping, gulags for violators populated with pseudo-violator implants to keep track of miscreants who must be held to a high standard of obedience. repentance and reeducation, indefinitely, to embrace and intenralize pantopticonic self-censorship, to speak and behave dissimulatively, ambivalently, duplicitously. Whistleblower organizations is one type of implanted gulag. Others are legal, financial and political support systems for whistleblowers and those wishing to whistleblow, leak, violate oaths, ignore NDAs. Entrapment of prospective whistleblowers is facilitated by the press which relishes its privivleges not available to the whistleblower. El Chapo got hoodwinked by "journalist" Sean Penn, as Snowden was, as Manning was, as was Sterling, Kiriakou, Brown, Hammond -- the list is getting longer thanks to the perfect entrapment and tracing device, digital technology. It will be interesting to see what the great human flood borderless immigrants will lead to, by that is meant the cellphone seduction operation, the vast array of cell antennas currently visible for easy attack, digitally and physically but hardly as easy pickings as cellphones themselves spying, informing, guiding the Rubios and Snowdens. At 03:12 AM 1/12/2016, you wrote: >http://www.dailydot.com/politics/marco-rubio-freedom-act-surveillance/ >https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqM7IFUasE0 >http://politics.slashdot.org/story/16/01/11/1541256/marco-rubio-we-need-to-… > >"We are now at a moment in this country where we don't just need to >keep the authorities we already have, we need to add to these >programs," > >"I never believed Edward Snowden was a good public servant... that he >had done a public service for America," Rubio said. "Edward Snowden is >a traitor. He took our intelligence information and gave it to the >Chinese and gave it to the Russians. We cannot afford to have a >commander-in-chief who thinks people like Edward Snowden are doing a >good public service."

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