FBI

Virtually everything that you do is being watched.  Do you drive a car?  Do you watch television?  Do you use a cell phone?  As you do any of those things, information about you is being recorded and tracked.  We live at a time when personal privacy is dying.  And it is not just governments that are doing this.  In fact, sometimes private companies are the biggest offenders.  It turns out that gathering information about all of us is very, very profitable.  And both government entities and private companies are going to continue to push the envelope when it comes to high tech surveillance until people start objecting to what they are trying to do.  If we continue down the path that we are currently on, it is inevitable that we will end up living in an extremely restrictive “Big Brother” police state where basically everything that we do is very closely watched, monitored, tracked and controlled.  And such a day may be much closer than you think.  The following are 10 examples of how “Big Brother” is steadily creeping into our daily lives…

Now that the situation in Ukraine has officially been upgraded to "war", what really happens on the ground will remain largely wrapped by the fog of war on either side, with just one thing assured: a war it may be but more than anything it is a proxy war - one in which both western and Russian interests are manifest in the fighting, and killing, of mostly innocent civilians in Ukraine - a carbon copy replica of what happened last year in Syria.  The latest reminder of just this comes from AFP which reports, citing Germany's Bild, that "dozens of specialists from the US Central Intelligence Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation are advising the Ukrainian government."

We’ve been hearing a lot about the so-called Deep State lately. What to make of this shadowy monster? Some observers link it to the paranoid fantasy called the New World Order, a staple of political talk radio (and a hobgoblin I don’t believe in). In popular movies such as the Jason Bourne epics and Mission Impossible, the Deep State launches hyper-complex schemes that work flawlessly and never fail. That is exactly why they have such high entertainment appeal. Viewers are thrilled by the precision, by the conceit of seeming infallibility. The Deep State definitely exists; it just doesn’t work the way it is depicted in the movies. We like to say that we're allergic to conspiracy theories because human beings are generally too inept to carry out schemes at the grand scale, as well as being poor secret-keepers. Insider knowledge is almost always swapped around, even in secretive organizations, often recklessly so, because doling it out confers status, tactical advantage, and sometimes money for the doler-outer. But the Deep State isn’t a secret. It operates in plain sight.

Two very important cases related to the 4th Amendment protection of cellphone data went before the Supreme Court yesterday. At issue here is whether or not police can search someone’s cellphone upon arrest. As usual, the Obama administration’s Justice Department is arguing against the citizenry, and in favor of the (police) state. Oh yeah, destroy privacy rights for 320 million people because a phone could potentially trigger a bomb. You can’t get much more stupid and pathetic than that argument.

This is an impressive, comprehensive analysis of the February 2014 Ukraine coup from the perspective of a senior Russian academic. It details the interests and affiliations of the main Ukrainian domestic players - oligarchical clans many of whose leaders have dual nationality - with some shocking and little known detail. It exposes the glaring hypocrisies and double standards of the western sponsors of the coup and their Russian/Ukrainian '5th Column traitors'. It sees the coup and Russia's successful incorporation of Crimea as major game-changing events in the on-going, US-lead post-WWII machinations of the West to subdue Russia to its own agenda and outlines how Russia should now respond. All-in-all a must-read for westerners needing to understand what is really happening in both the Ukraine and the wider Anglo-US-NATO globalisation drive which it brings into sharp focus

UPDATE: Shooter found dead - from self-inflicted gunshot wound

Police are looking for a man (reportedly a baggage handler) suspected of shooting six people at the FedEx facility in Kennesaw. As NBC11 reports, the shooting occurred at 545am as the male suspect arrved at the facility and started shooting:

*POLICE CONFIRM 6 INJURED IN SHOOTING AT GEORGIA FEDEX FACILITY
*POLICE SAY 'ACTIVE AND FLUID' SITUATION AT FEDEX BUILDING

The facility is on lockdown with workers already at work being held in a warehouse and new arrivals turned away.

Carl Icahn's brilliant "activist" plan revealed in all its glory.

NY Republican Congressman, and former FBI agent (ironically), Michael Grimm - who became infamous for threatening an NY1 reporter "I'll throw you off the fucking balcony... I'll break you in half" - has been indicted on campaign finance charges as well as mail, wire, and healthcare fraud. Oh and since he seemed such a trustworthy and honest chap after his apology for the prevous threats, he is also being charged with perjury after lying about all the other shit he did... Welcome to American politics... As AP reports, he has pleaded not guilty to the 20-count federal indictment.

There is a disturbing push by the FBI to create an extensive facial recognition database. The information received by the EFF via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, demonstrates that the feds may have a mugshot database with up to 52 million photos by 2015. The program is called Next Generation Identification (NGI), and the aspect of it that bothers the EFF most is the fact that non-criminal and criminal photos will be combined in the same database. So someone who has no criminal record can suddenly be flagged as a suspect just because an algorithm says so. What’s worst, research shows that the potential for false positive identification increases as the dataset increases.

"We have been warning that 2014 is the beginning of a new cycle that will see a highly unusual convergence between our domestic (civil unrest & revolution) data and our international war model. Both converge for the first time since the 1700s when there were US and French Revolutions and the fall of monarchy." The civil unrest will develop first outside the USA and turn up more aggressively in the USA after Q3 2015. Nonetheless, it still begins in 2014 for the USA as well. We are starting to see this in the West where memories of previous events still linger deep wounds from 1992.

While the law has been something the US government and General Motors have been willing to 'bend' or break in the past (absolute priority 'shifts' in bankruptcy), we suspect this latest move by Mary Barra's new GM will do more PR damage. Simply put, as many suspected given Barra's testimony and comments in the past, Reuters reports that General Motors Co will ask a bankruptcy court to block any litigation of the alleged deaths associated with the ignition switch problem since they are related to the automaker's pre-2009 bankruptcy. Of course, as we noted here, the Feds are probing the company over whether they knowingly committed bankruptcy fraud.

• Three dead in shootings at Kansas Jewish centers; man to face charges (WSJ)
• Sanctions Blowback in Russia Targets Burgers to Movies (BBG)
• Deadly Virus's Spread Raises Alarms in Mideast (WSJ)
• China group buys $6bn Glencore Peru copper mine (BBG)
• Iran lodges complaint against United States over U.N. envoy ban (Reuters)
• Russian assets down sharply on Ukraine conflict fears (Reuters)
• ECB comments knock euro, but not much (Reuters)
• World-Leading $25 Hourly Wage Roils Swiss Businesses (BBG)

Now that both the FBI and the DOJ have woken up from a half-decade slumber realizing there was riggedness, RIGGEDNESS going on in these here stock markets courtesy of Michael Lewis' book, it wasn't long before those most impacted by the frontrunning startegies of HFTs spoke up - anyone who has lost money in the stock market since Reg NMS was conceived. Sure enough, in a lawsuit that was just filed by lead plaintiff William Charles Braman, seeking class-action status, and filed on behalf of all users of real-time futures market data and futures contracts listed on the CBOT and CME from 2007 to now, the CME is allegd to have sold order information to high-frequency traders ahead of other market participants.

Ever since Goldman's anti-HFT Op-Ed less than a month ago, and since the even more recent full-hearted support by Goldman of Michael Lewis' most recent entry into the anti-HFT crusade (one promoting the Goldman-supported IEX exchange), one thing has been clear: the days of market structure in its current format are numbered. This was further confirmed after Goldman exited both its legacy Spear Leeds & Kellogg designated market making post at the NYSE, and is said to be winding down its market-dominating dark pool, Sigma X. Sure enough, Post reports that just three weeks after the Gary Cohn Op-Ed, the SEC is "preparing to remove some high-frequency trading firms."

"Just after the United States entered World War II, two simultaneous initiatives unfolded that would dictate elements of financing after the war, through the joint initiatives of foreign policy measures and private banking whims. Plans were already being formulated to navigate the postwar peace, especially its international power implications for finance and politics, in the background. American political leaders and scholars began considering the concept of “one world” from an economic perspective, void of divisions and imbalances. Or so the theory went. The original plans to create a set of multinational entities that would finance one-world reconstruction and development (and ostensibly balance the world’s various economies) were conceived by two academics: John Maynard Keynes, an adviser for the British Treasury, and Harry Dexter White, an economist in the Division of Monetary Research of the US Treasury under Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau."