Occupy Banksters & Crony Capitalism & GREED

4 Dead In Pemex Oil Platform Explosion, Hundreds Evacuated
ZeroHedge | author | 04/01/15

Mexico's state-owned PEMEX says an oil platform has exploded in Campeche Bay. 300 workers have been evacuated and the company says 8 boats are attempting to bring the blaze under control. ... Read more
4 Dead In Pemex Oil Platform Explosion, Hundreds Evacuated [0:29]

The Orwellian Re-branding Of "Mass Surveillance" As Merely "Bulk Collection"
firstlook.org/theintercept | Glenn Greenwald | 03/13/15

This re-definition game goes as follows: yes, we vacuum up and store literally as much of the internet as we possibly can. Then we analyze all the data about what you're doing, with whom you're speaking, and who your network of associates is. Based on that analysis of all of you and your activities, we then read the communications that we want (with virtually no checks and concealing from you what percentage of it we're reading), and store as much of the rest of it as technology permits for future trolling. But don't worry: we're only reading the Bad People's emails. So run along then: no mass surveillance here. Just bulk collection! It's not mass surveillance, but "enhanced collection techniques."

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BBC | Glenn Greenwald & Former GCHQ Director David Omand on ISC Surveillance Report - Newsnight (03/12/15) [12:20]

NSA Locations
offnow.org | author | date

The NSA spies on the world. To accomplish this, the agency needs a network of facilities across the Unite States. In all likelihood, the NSA has operations close to your own back yard. ... Read more

Fracking Town's Desperate Laid-off Workers: 'They Don't Tell You It's All a Lie'
AlterNet | Evelyn Nieves | 03/28/15

From the looks of it, the nation's boomtown is still booming. Big rigs, cement mixers and oil tankers still clog streets built for lighter loads. The air still smells like diesel fuel and looks like a dust bowl -- all that traffic -- and natural gas flares, wasted byproducts of the oil wells, still glare out at the night sky like bonfires. Not to mention that Walmart, still the main game in town, can't seem to get a handle on its very long lines and half­ empty shelves.

But life at the center of the country's largest hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, boom has definitely changed. The jobs that brought thousands of recession­-weary employment­-seekers to this once peaceful corner of western North Dakota over the last five years have been drying up, even as the unemployed keep coming.

Downtown, clutches of men pass their time at the Salvation Army, watching movies or trolling Craigslist ads on desktop computers. The main branch of the public library is full, all day, every day, with unemployed men in cubbyholes. And when the Command Center, a private temporary jobs agency, opens every morning at 6am, between two and three dozen people are waiting to get in the door. ... Read more

The National Security Agency -- which is primarily responsible for "signals intelligence," the collection and analysis of various forms of communication -- to house trillions of phone calls, e-mail messages, and data trails: Web searches, parking receipts, bookstore visits, and other digital "pocket litter." Lacking adequate space and power at its city-sized Fort Meade, Maryland, headquarters, the NSA is also completing work on another data archive, this one in San Antonio, Texas, which will be nearly the size of the Alamodome.

Just how much information will be stored in these windowless cybertemples? A clue comes from a recent report prepared by the MITRE Corporation, a Pentagon think tank. "As the sensors associated with the various surveillance missions improve," says the report, referring to a variety of technical collection methods, "the data volumes are increasing with a projection that sensor data volume could potentially increase to the level of Yottabytes (1024 Bytes) by 2015."1 Roughly equal to about a septillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text, numbers beyond Yottabytes haven't yet been named. Once vacuumed up and stored in these near-infinite "libraries," the data are then analyzed by powerful infoweapons, supercomputers running complex algorithmic programs, to determine who among us may be -- or may one day become -- a terrorist. In the NSA's world of automated surveillance on steroids, every bit has a history and every keystroke tells a story. DOES this seem ripe for Blackmail???? Wikipedia | Utah Data Center (article)