Free Republic

Ri Erased from Kim Funeral Committee By Lee Sang Yong [2013-06-21 20:26 ] Facebook Twitter Daily NK has learned that Ri Yong Ho [alternate spelling: Lee Young Ho], the former Chosun PeopleÂ’s Army Chief-of-Staff who was purged in July last year, has been erased from the official funeral committee listing of Kim Jong Il. Ri had been behind then-Prime Minister Choi Young Rim in fourth place on the committee list, which, in its original form, serves as a key indicator of the relative power of officials at the time of Kim Jong IlÂ’s death in December 2011. Daily NK gathered...

Watch the video (at link above). It's only a few minutes.Here's the company's website

“1984” Live! US Surveillance Scandal Is The Biggest Story Of Your Lifetime By Julio Severo “The (National Security Agency) NSA surveillance scandal is the biggest story of your lifetime” – that was, according WND, Michael Savage’s message all this week, as details emerged about the US government spying on Americans and people around the world. However, “They obviously weren’t spying on Muslims, or people known to have associated with terrorists,” Savage pointed out. Otherwise, the authorities would have prevented the Boston Marathon bombing. The White House assures that its massive surveillance is to stop terrorists, and yet it won’t...

A Tennessee community college professor ordered her students to wear ribbons in support of gay rights and said those who supported the traditional definition of marriage are just “uneducated bigots” who “attack homosexuals with hate,” according to a legal firm representing several of the students in the class. Students in a general psychology class at Columbia State Community College were directed by their professor to wear “Rainbow Coalition” ribbons for an entire day and express their support for the homosexual community, said Travis Barham, an attorney with the Alliance Defending Freedom. Barham is calling for the college to punish Dr....

Edward Snowden, America's most wanted whistle-blower, participated in a live online chat with the Guardian newspaper on Monday. "All I can say right now is the US Government is not going to be able to cover this up by jailing or murdering me," Snowden wrote. "Truth is coming, and it cannot be stopped."

Foreign politicians and officials who took part in two G20 summit meetings in London in 2009 had their computers monitored and their phone calls intercepted on the instructions of their British government hosts, according to documents seen by the Guardian. Some delegates were tricked into using internet cafes which had been set up by British intelligence agencies to read their email traffic.

George Orwell's famous novel, 1984, was published in 1949, and he predicted that people in the future would have no privacy, as governments would monitor all their activities. The "big brother is watching" phrase became well known. But Orwell could never have predicted the technologies of the future, when he described a fictional system of oppression based on technologies that were available in 1949. In 1949, there were no personal computers, no cell phones, no internet, no satellites, etc. In the communist regimes of 1949, most people did not own telephones, therefore there were no phones to bug. Most people...

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano weighed in on the NSA intelligence leaks on Friday, telling NY1 that fears over government surveillance were overblown. “I think people have gotten the idea that there’s an Orwellian state out there that somehow we’re operating in. That’s far from the case,” she told Errol Louis during an appearance on Road to City Hall. Despite civil liberties advocates’ fears that monitoring efforts have gone too far, “there are lots of protections built into the system,” Ms. Napolitano said, pointing to a privacy office embedded in her own department that is “constantly reviewing our policies and...

The head of the country’s National Security Agency testified Wednesday that surveillance has stopped “dozens” of potential terrorist attacks by looking at the phone records, emails and other Internet searches of people suspected of terrorism-related incidents. Army Gen. Keith Alexander told a Senate panel that securing a “cyber arena” could be done without infringing upon the privacy rights of Americans. “We do not see a tradeoff between security and liberty,” Alexander said, later adding, “We are trying to protect Americans.”

(FULL TITLE: "'I'm neither a traitor nor a hero... I'm an American': NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden finally breaks cover - and vows to expose MORE secrets") Newspaper said he has exposed more details about surveillance targets He said he will remain in Hong Kong and fight any extradition bidSnowden's whereabouts in Hong Kong are still unknown Edward Snowden, the former CIA analyst behind one of the most significant government leaks in U.S. history, has vowed to expose further surveillance secrets as he speaks out again. The 29-year-old whistleblower remained defiant in an interview with the South China Morning Post on...

The LA Times reports that sales of the book, which concerns a discontented propagandist working for the Ministry of Truth in a time of endless war, are up 5,771 percent as of Tuesday morning. From a sales rank of 12,507 in the days before The Guardian published top-secret government documents provided by Snowden, "1984" has risen to crack Amazon's top 200.

Former Justice Department prosecutor Larry Klayman amended an existing lawsuit against Verizon and a slew of Obama administration officials Monday to make it the first class-action lawsuit in response to the publication of a secret court order instructing Verizon to hand over the phone records of millions of American customers on an "ongoing, daily basis." Klayman told U.S. News he will file a second class-action lawsuit Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia targeting government officials and each of the nine companies listed in a leaked National Security Agency slideshow as participants in the government's PRISM...

LINKThe statistics are updated hourly, so this number will change shortly.5. -- 4,556% Sales rank: 164 (was 7,636)

National Security Agency whistleblower William Binney explains how the secretive agency runs its pervasive domestic spying apparatus in a new piece by Laura Poitras in The New York Times. Binney—one of the best mathematicians and code breakers in NSA history—worked for the Defense Department's foreign signals intelligence agency for 32 years before resigning in late 2001 because he "could not stay after the NSA began purposefully violating the Constitution." In a short video called "The Program," Binney explains how the agency took part of one of the programs he built and started using it to spy on virtually every U.S....

Faulk says he and others in his section of the NSA facility at Fort Gordon routinely shared salacious or tantalizing phone calls that had been intercepted, alerting office mates to certain time codes of "cuts" that were available on each operator's computer. "Hey, check this out," Faulk says he would be told, "there's good phone sex or there's some pillow talk, pull up this call, it's really funny, go check it out. It would be some colonel making pillow talk and we would say, 'Wow, this was crazy'," Faulk told ABC News. Faulk said he joined in to listen, and...

Sales of George Orwell’s "1984" are up 69 percent on Amazon, according to a list on the website.

Sales of George Orwell’s ’1984′ are up 69 percent on Amazon, according to a list on the website.The book’s 60th anniversary was on June 6th, amidst a flurry of real-world news stories on secret government surveillance. ... Update: As of 3:22 p.m. EST, sales of Orwell's '1984' are up 91 percent on the Amazon "Movers and Shakers list."

Things got feisty on Morning Joe today, as Glenn Greenwald of the Guardian clashed with Mika Brzezinski over the leak of the NSA phone surveillance program by Greenwald's informant, Edward Snowden. H/t NB reader Jeff M. When Brzezinski alleged that wiretapping or the review by the NSA of emails required an additional judicial review and warrant, Greenwald accused Mika of using "White House talking points" that were "completely misleading and false." Mika denied it. View the video here.

New Zealand Herald can't be posted to FR, but I think a link might be OK: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=10889158