SPY

To summarize: the US was arming and training the same Al Qaeda/ISIS groups of Jihadists, that it concurrently gave Iraq weapons to fight. And since the Iraq army has so far proven utterly incapable of any resistance, it is now up to US drones to "fight" the same "rebels" that the US itself was collaborating with until a month or so ago.

As human beings, we are remarkably poor at predicting our future selves.  We know that our personalities, preferences and values have certainly changed in the past, but, as ConvergEx's Nick Colas explains, we tend to dramatically underestimate what changes might be in store on these fronts in the future.  That’s the upshot of a recent bit of research by Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, and it helps explain how we process decisions as varied as whether to get a tattoo or how we invest financial capital.  Stasis is our default setting when it comes to considering our futures, and that lack of imagination seems to inform how much we can predict about how other people and systems will change as well.  The most important takeaway: no matter how much you think your life will remain the same, you are almost certainly wrong.  And the same goes for capital markets.

You’ve got to give young Andrew Demeter a lot of credit. Given the chance to meet a powerful Congresswoman, most people would melt into a sad puddle of unjustified reverence and pathetic groveling. Not this young man. When he was given the opportunity to ask Nancy Pelosi a question, he confronted her on the NSA’s unconstitutional spy practices and why she hasn’t done anything to stop it, considering she claims to be so “liberal.”

Snowden Is a Good Guy ... But There's a LOT that He Doesn't Know

From Ancient Egypt to Modern America …

Until yesterday, a piece of the global spying puzzle was missing: not because it did not exist, but because certain of Snowden's preferred outlets had refused to reveal it. That piece, as Duncan Campbell of The Register (incidentally Campbell has been breaking exclusives for more than three decades: he was the first journalist to reveal the existence of GCHQ in 1976) revealed yesterday, is the GCHQ's (and thus indirectly the NSA's) top secret middle eastern Internet spy base located in Seeb, Oman (officially known as Oman Comms Link Site 1), smack in the middle of the middle east, located southwest of the Straits of Hormuz, and in close proximity to America's closest petroleum-exporting "friends": Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.

Let's go on to assume that nothing is going to change. The stock market is simply going to keep going up. Slowly, yes, but up nonetheless. The central bankers will, whenever required, create whatever programs, easings, or other actions are required to keep supporting equities. And, simply stated, the rich will just keep getting richer. What would this all mean?

While Russia's "Top Gun" drills were underway on the borders of eastern Europe, it appears the Russian air force was practicing "unusually close flying" in another continent. As Bloomberg reports, the U.S. RC-135U Combat Sent electronic intelligence plane was "conducting a routine mission off Russia's east coast near Japan on April 23 when the Russian fighter flew within about 100 feet (30 meters) of its nose. Asked why the Pentagon didn’t disclose the incident until it was reported today by the Washington Free Beacon, spokesman Army Colonel Steve Warren said, “I don’t have a good answer for you.” China and Japan did a similar "Top Gun" move in May.

It’s been obvious for quite some time that the so-called “war on terror” is nothing more than a fear-mongering induced power grab; a convenient excuse to strip the citizenry of its civil liberties and humanity. Many commentators, including myself, have predicted for years that the entire counter-terror juggernaut that has been constructed post-9/11 would be ultimately redirected upon the domestic population. Snowden’s heroic whistleblowing has already proven without a doubt that the government spy apparatus (along with tech company complicity) has been zeroed in on the domestic population for quite some time, but is the situation about to escalate? Are the feds so fearful of their own people, they are about to focus all their counter-terror energy on U.S. citizens? It appears so.

White House Purchases Google Key Words to Slam Putin

From 1235ET to 1255ET today, the SIP (the data feed that the general public relies on for its trade reporting) went dark for a number of symbols (including SPY - the massively liquid S&P 500 ETF). Luckily - for the High Frequency Traders - the Direct Feed kept on getting data and as the detailed charts from Nanex below show, the machines and their keepers continued to trade with asymmetric information... un-rigged?

As Senator Ron Johnson so appropriately blasted, "I'm not sure sanctions had any effect whatsoever other than, you know, the Russians have mocked them," and so it is that the Treasury's (little heard of) "Terrorism and Financial Intelligence" division is preparing to unleash its most deadly weapons yet - an arsenal of financial weaponry aimed at hitting foreign adversaries with limited cost to allies. It appears clear that while the US dropped speech-bombs and sanction-mines, proclaiming the disastrous economic significance of these efforts, Russian stocks soared (vastly outperforming the US) and the Ruble strengthened... and so - as undersecretary David Cohen tells the WSJ, "What we've done over the past 10 years is to create a new method of projecting U.S. power..." e.g. sell non-US stocks (thus buy US stocks).

There was much said in last week's primetime interview between Edward Snowden and NBC's Brian Williams. But perhaps more interesting than what was said in the one hour time-slot, was what was contained in the three extra hours of conversations that were not broadcast, such as Snowden's questioning of the American intelligence community’s inability to stop the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. One such segment, as transcribed by RT, involves the former NSA contractor's response to a question from Williams on how to prevent further attacks from Al Qaeda and other "non-traditional enemies" in which Snowden suggested that United States had the proper intelligence ahead of 9/11 but failed to act.

One of the many civil liberties related themes we have focused on over the past several years has to do with how emerging technologies can pose a threat, first to our basic 4th Amendment rights, and then ultimately to freedom itself. Two of the most high profile technologies in this regard, and which have extremely high potential for abuse, are license plate readers and drones.

Another day, another fumble by the Obama administration (intentional or not). 11 years after former CIA operative Valerie Plame was deliberately exposed by the Bush administration as the US officials tried to apply pressure on her husband, an American diplomat criticizing the US invasion to Iraq; the Obama Administration's press service unwittingly put the real name of the CIA's top spy in Afghanistan on the 'pool report' distributed to over 6,000 journalists. The Washington Post were the first to discover the FUBAR and while the CIA and White House had 'no comment', they warned that the officer and his family could be at risk if the name were published.