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Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Real Debt is Real Bad News

Real Debt is Real Bad News, or
Preparation does not guarantee success, but the lack of preparation guarantees failure.

 
As a result of the Newtown School shootings, big-government elites have been hammering HARD for their version of gun control- which is really “victim disarmament.”  Indeed, the push has been more aggressive and contentious than anything I’ve ever seen.  The obvious goal of our government (as the NDAA and NDRP amply demonstrate) is complete and total control of the population, and elimination of any possibility of armed resistance to their hidden agenda.  Oh, we know the agenda is power, but we don’t know the details of why, when or where… or do we?

There are plenty of official proclamations as to how much debt the USA has-$16 Trillion.

But the unofficial debt, using Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) now stands at $238 Trillion. 

Against an annual GDP of approximately $16 Trillion, that means that every dollar of value created by goods and services for the next 15 years is already spent.  And that number, by the way, is in today’s dollars.

Current estimates place the current “financial weapons of mass destruction,” the derivatives (or bad debts) outstanding, at $1.5 Quadrillion.  How can one comprehend such a mind-boggling number?  To answer that question, I took the measurements of a $1 bill, and calculated that this amount of money would cover the entire Earth with a layer of paper 1.24 inches thick.  This is the amount of phony debt that is outstanding, waiting for the first domino to fall, where a bankrupt country goes to their bankrupt neighbor to collect, and so on.  American banksters own approximately half of those bad bets- another 38 years of GDP gone.

So while the “official” numbers show we’re in deep trouble, the real data clearly shows the USA isn’t merely financially “broke,” which implies we’re out of spending money…  It shows we’re completely bankrupt, without any hope of getting out of the hole we’re in.

Our main export at this point, isn’t jobs.  That’s already gone, given away to the Chinese.  Now, our main export is financial paper- or electronic dollars, to be more precise.  The problem is that the ongoing collapse of the American economy- the basis of value for the American dollar- has made it obvious that the dollar is about to collapse. 

In the past, the dollar was backed by gold.  This ended in 1971, when President Nixon disconnected the dollar from gold, and let it “float.”  That is to say, the value of the dollar after this time, was a reflection of the value of the U.S. economy.  In other words, it was based on faith that the government could repay its debts.  As I’ve already shown, it is now impossible to repay the debts, and there is nothing left to support the dollar as the reserve currency.  We have no gold, no industry, nothing except nearly 50 million people who are broke, out of work and hungry, and roughly half of the electorate believes the other half “owes” them something (i.e., putting your money in their hands).

The Chinese- no fools are they- have merely taken these worthless electronic digits, and used them to purchase real money- gold.  In fact, they’ve imported literally hundreds of tons of it, in the last few years.  At the NY Fed, where they supposedly store some 7000 tons of gold, much of it belonging to foreign countries.  But that was before the Fed became blatant in their manipulation of gold and silver prices, by short-selling precious metals, to suppress gold and silver prices, while making the dollar appear more stable.  Since the prices of gold and silver have gone up, the NY Fed has had to provide the collateral- gold- to cover the shorts,.  As a result, there have been rumors that the gold is long gone- stolen or substituted with “salted” bars filled with tungsten.  

Germany owns 1536 metric tons of gold at the NY Fed, and they want to withdraw ~300 metric tons.  The NY Fed claims it will take seven years to accomplish this.  Of course, in 1965, France repatriated their gold reserves- in one day, by loading it onto a battleship.  Considering how fast the economy is spiraling down the toilet, seven years might as well be 700.  Now the Swiss are lining up a referendum (which will obtain enough support) to demand that all of their gold comes home, too- all 1040 tons of it.  Nobody knows how much of it sits in New York, but I hope you’re getting the picture.  Basically, it appears that a gold run has begun, where everyone who owns gold at the NY Fed wants it back.

That the NY Fed can’t deliver can mean only one of two things: it’s not there, or what is still there has claims of ownership by more than one country, which is legally (and practically) the same thing. 

Going back to the Chinese, they’ve been acquiring gold for years, at artificially low prices.  As well, they’re buying gold mines and physical assets such as land, all over the world.  In other words, they’re getting out of the dollar, buying whatever they can with it, while it still has some value.  Why?  Well, the IMF announced this week that the Yuan is ready to be the worlds’ reserve currency.   When that happens- and it will- the price of imported goods will go through the roof almost overnight, as every country will attempt to get rid of their dollars while they still can, and use some other currency for international trade. 

The dollar will be dumped as the worlds’ reserve currency, in a cascade as other countries holding dollars run for the exits.  When this happens, the price of products that are imported will go up by 4-5 times, almost overnight (my best guess).   This is the logical result of the Cloward-Piven strategy writ large.

The price of oil- when no longer priced in dollars- will have ripple effects that will cause suffering on a scale never before seen in America.  Consider the trucking industry, in a very real way, feeds the country.  The food you eat, the clothes you wear, the furniture in your house…  even the building materials for the house itself, were all delivered by truck.  As the price of fuel skyrockets, trucking companies will attempt to pass on the costs to their customers (stores like Wal-Mart, for example), who will in turn pass it on to the consumer.  Will the consumers pay so much more?

Consider that while those desperate people who live on the dole may still get their checks (or “deposits” on their EBT cards), it will no longer be able to buy anything, because the prices of everything have gone up 500% overnight.  What will happen in the inner cities, when people realize they can’t put food on the table, much less put gas in their cars?  Gerald Celente summarized it best: “when people lose everything, and they have nothing left to lose, they lose it.”  And they will.   It is my opinion, that the downward spiral will far exceed what we’ve already seen in Greece.  The starvation and violence will eclipse Greece by many orders of magnitude.  The key reason is that we’re the most heavily armed country in the world, and when the wool is pulled from peoples’ eyes, they’re not going to be happy with our government “representatives.”

THIS is the reason why the Obama administration is pushing so hard for “gun control.”  The scam is almost over, and when it is, people are first going to be fighting for their survival.  When they realize that the country has been robbed blind by the corrupt politicians in D.C. (and at all more-local levels of government), they’re going to be out for blood.  The DHS, it has been suggested, is the personal army of the Obama administration.  It’s why the DHS has ordered 1.6 billion rounds of hollow-point ammunition, tanks, drones, body armor and thousands of REAL assault rifles.  They know the American citizens are going to come after them, and they truly believe they can intimidate and disarm the public.  They believe they’re more enlightened than the rest of us, and that we don’t matter.

The government has made their choice abundantly clear.  They intend to retain power over the American people, regardless of the cost.  We are all slaves- taxpayers, tax collectors, police, military, people down on their luck, the middle class…  They’re perfectly happy to use 20 dead slave children- and hundreds of thousands more in the Middle East- to maintain that power, and won’t let any “crisis go to waste,” to gain more power.  Their viewpoint- to be blunt- is that we are ALL expendable.  You need to understand that fact. 

It is my firm belief that the financial collapse- intentionally caused- will create a civil war.  Those who think they can escape to Costa Rica (as a fellow traveler told me on an airplane two days ago), Russia, Argentina or some other lovely Caribbean country, are fooling themselves.  Americans have always been inventors, and our biggest invention wasn’t nuclear power, it wasn’t advanced medicine or the harnessing of electricity.  Our biggest invention was the financial virus which now infects the entire world.  There’s nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.   The pain unleashed from this virus, will unleash an ugly side of humanity, not witnessed for hundreds of years.

I beg you, to get prepared, both emotionally and physically.  There are a lot of forums that go into how to prepare for the collapse, if you do web search.   

There is an old Japanese proverb, “Preparation does not guarantee success, but the lack of preparation guarantees failure.”  Do what you can, prepare as best you can.  There’s not much time.

Wednesday, February 6, 2013

New "Surveillance-Proof" App To Secure Communications Has Governments Nervous

Silent Circle promises to make encryption easy for everyone.

Silent Circle logo.
Silent Circle logo.
Courtesy Silent Circle.
Lately, Mike Janke has been getting what he calls the “hairy eyeball” from international government agencies. The 44-year-old former Navy SEAL commando, together with two of the world’s most renowned cryptographers, was always bound to ruffle some high-level feathers with his new project—a surveillance-resistant communications platform that makes complex encryption so simple your grandma can use it.
This week, after more than two years of preparation, the finished product has hit the market. Named Silent Circle, it is in essence a series of applications that can be used on a mobile device to encrypt communications—text messages, plus voice and video calls. Currently, apps for the iPhone and iPad are available, with versions for Windows, Galaxy, Nexus, and Android in the works. An email service is also soon scheduled to launch.
The encryption is peer to peer, which means that Silent Circle doesn’t centrally hold a key that can be used to decrypt people’s messages or phone calls. Each phone generates a unique key every time a call is made, then deletes it straight after the call finishes. When sending text messages or images, there is even a “burn” function, which allows you to set a time limit on anything you send to another Silent Circle user—a bit like how “this tape will self destruct” goes down in Mission: Impossible, but without the smoke or fire.
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Silent Circle began as an idea Janke had after spending 12 years working for the U.S. military and later as a security contractor. When traveling overseas, he realized that there was no easy-to-use, trustworthy encrypted communications provider available to keep in touch with family back home. Cellphone calls, text messages, and emails sent over the likes of Hotmail and Gmail can just be “pulled right out of the air,” according to Janke, and he didn’t think the few commercial services offering encryption—like Skype and Hushmail—were secure enough. He was also made uneasy by reports about increased government snooping on communications. “It offended what I thought were my God-given rights—to be able to have a free conversation,” Janke says. “And so I began on this quest to find something to solve it.”
Janke assembled what he calls an “all-star team”: Phil Zimmerman, a recent inductee to the Internet’s Hall of Fame, who in 1991 invented PGP encryption, still considered the standard for email security. Jon Callas, the man behind Apple’s whole-disk encryption (which is used to secure hard drives in Macs across the world), became Silent Circle’s chief technology officer. Other employees were top engineers and ex-special-forces communications experts based in England, Latvia, and Germany. Together, they designed their own software, created a new encryption protocol called SCimp, registered their company offshore and outside U.S. jurisdiction, then built up their own network in Canada. (They eventually plan to expand to Switzerland and Hong Kong.)
Though many encryption options already exist, they are often difficult to use, which is a barrier for those without the skills, patience, or time to learn. Silent Circle helps remove these hurdles. As a result, organizations that have a real need for secure communications but have maybe not understood how to implement them are coming forward and expressing interest in Silent Circle.
Janke says he’s already sold the technology worldwide to nine news outlets, presumably keen to help protect their journalists’ and sources’ safety through encryption. (ProPublica, for one, confirmed it’s had “preliminary discussions” with Silent Circle.) A major multinational company has already ordered 18,000 subscriptions for its staff, and a couple of A-list actors, including one Oscar winner, have been testing the beta version. The basic secure phone service plan will cost $20 a month per person, though Janke says a number of human rights groups and NGOs will be provided with the service for free.
The company has also attracted attention from 23 special operations units, intelligence agencies, and law enforcement departments in nine countries that are interested in using Silent Circle to protect the communications of their own employees—particularly on the personal devices that they use at home or bring to work. Some of these same agencies, perhaps unsurprisingly, have contacted Janke and his team with concerns about how the technology might be used by bad guys. Because Silent Circle is available to just about anyone, Janke accepts there is a real risk that a minority of users could abuse it for criminal purposes. But he argues you could say the same thing about baseball bats and says if the company is ever made aware someone is using the application for “bad illegal things”—he cites an example of a terrorist plotting a bomb attack—it reserves the right to shut off that person’s service and will do so “in seven seconds.”
The very features that make Silent Circle so valuable from a civil liberties and privacy standpoint make law enforcement nervous. Telecom firms in the United States, for instance, have been handing over huge troves of data to authorities under a blanket of secrecy and with very little oversight. Silent Circle is attempting to counter this culture by limiting the data it retains in the first place. It will store only the email address, 10-digit Silent Circle phone number, username, and password of each customer. It won’t retain metadata (such as times and dates calls are made using Silent Circle). Its IP server logs showing who is visiting the Silent Circle website are currently held for seven days, which Janke says the company plans to reduce to just 24 hours once the system is running smoothly.
Almost every base seems to have been covered. Biannually, the company will publish requests it gets from law enforcement in transparency reports, detailing the country of origin and the number of people the request encompassed. And any payment a person makes to Silent Circle will be processed through third-party provider Stripe, so even if authorities could get access to payment records, Janke says, “that in no way gives them access to the data, voice, and video the customer is sending-receiving ... nor does it tie the two together.” If authorities wanted to intercept the communications of a person using Silent Circle, it is likely they’d have to resort to deploying Trojan-style tools—infecting targeted devices with spyware to covertly record communications before they become encrypted.
Among security geeks and privacy advocates, however, there’s still far from consensus how secure Silent Circle actually is. Nadim Kobeissi, a Montreal-based security researcher and developer, took to his blog last week to pre-emptively accuse the company of “damaging the state of the cryptography community.” Kobeissi’s criticism was rooted in an assumption that Silent Circle would not be open source, a cornerstone of encrypted communication tools because it allows people to independently audit coding and make their own assessments of its safety (and to check for secret government backdoors). Christopher Soghoian, principal technologist at the ACLU's Speech Privacy and Technology Project, said he was excited to see a company like Silent Circle visibly competing on privacy and security but that he was waiting for it to go open source and be audited by independent security experts before he would feel comfortable using it for sensitive communications.
When I asked Janke about this, he said he recognized the importance of the open-source principle. He says the company, contrary to Kobeissi’s assertion, will be using a noncommercial open-source license, which will allow developers to “do their own builds” of Silent Circle. “We will put it all out there for scrutiny, inspection, and audit by anyone and everyone,” he added.
Another factor is that a number of countries are pushing for new surveillance laws that will force many communications providers to build in backdoors for wiretapping. The Silent Circle team has been following these developments closely, and it seems to have played into the decision to register offshore and locate its multimillion-dollar network outside U.S. jurisdiction. Janke says he has consulted with Canada’s privacy commissioners and understands that the new push to upgrade surveillance capabilities in Canada will not affect the company because its technology is encrypted peer-to-peer (making it technically incapable of facilitating a wiretap request even if it receives one).
But what if, one day down the line, things change and Canada or another country where Silent Circle has servers tries to force them to build in a secret backdoor for spying? Janke has already thought about that—and his answer sums up the maverick ethos of his company.
“We won’t be held hostage,” he says, without a quiver of hesitation. “All of us would rather shut Silent Circle down than ever allow a backdoor or be bullied into an ‘or else’ position.”
In an age of ever-increasing surveillance, it’s a gutsy stance to take. Perhaps Big Brother has finally met its match.
This article arises from Future Tense, a collaboration among Arizona State University, the New America Foundation, and Slate. Future Tense explores the ways emerging technologies affect society, policy, and culture. To read more, visit the Future Tense blog and the Future Tense home page. You can also follow us on Twitter.