Sure - This Story Was "Fake" In 2003 (NOT!) The Truth About the American Empire & Torture: They Always Know What You're Doing

I cannot let this go yet. The country goes crazy (according to MSM every second since the murder of Bin Ladin and his family) over the reality of murdering in cold blood someone never charged by the FBI with the crime of instigating 9/11 because they had no information (according to their own documents and their never placing Osama on the "Most Wanted" list for this crime) other than innuendo from the Bush/Cheney junta. Or hot blood is more likely.

(Lifted from Stop Me Before I Vote Again!) But then, there's this story that I read back in 2003 that has never been proved erroneous and even provides some light about why Dan Rather had to be flushed from the MSM even before the Bush AWOL embarrassment (emphasis marks and some editing of content were inserted - Ed.):

Where was Osama bin Laden on 9/11? Bush Administration Knew the Whereabouts of Osama by Michel Chossudovsky 17 November 2003 If the CBS report by Dan Rather is accurate and Osama had indeed been admitted to the Pakistani military hospital on September 10, 2001, courtesy of America's ally, he was in all likelihood still in hospital in Rawalpindi on the 11th of September, when the attacks occurred. In all probability, his whereabouts were known to US officials on the morning of September 12, when Secretary of State Colin Powell initiated negotiations with Pakistan, with a view to arresting and extraditing bin Laden.

A recent Reuters report (11/13/03) quoting Labeviere's book Corridors of Terror points to alleged "negotiations" between Osama bin Laden and the CIA, which took place two months prior to the September 11, 2001 attacks at the American Hospital in Dubai, UAE, while bin Laden was recovering from a kidney dialysis treatment.

Enemy Number One in hospital recovering from dialysis treatment "negotiating with CIA"?

The meeting with the CIA head of station at the American Hospital in Dubai, UAE was confirmed by a report in the French daily newspaper Le Figaro, published in October 2001. (See Alexandra Richard, at Global Research. For a virtual tour of the hospital click here.

The "negotiations" between the CIA and Osama (a CIA "intelligence asset") is sheer disinformation. Even though the CIA has refuted the claim, the report serves to highlight Osama as a bona fide "Enemy of America," rather than a creation of the CIA. In the words of former CIA agent Milt Bearden in an interview with Dan Rather on September 12, 2001, “If they didn’t have an Osama bin Laden, they would invent one.”

Intelligence negotiations never take place on a hospital bed. The CIA knew Osama was at the American Hospital in Dubai. Rather than negotiate, they could have arrested him. He was on the FBI most wanted list.

According to the Reuters report: "At the time, bin Laden had a multi-million dollar price on his head for his suspected role in the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa". So why did the hospital staff, who knew that Osama was at the American Hospital in Dubai, not claim the reward?

The Figaro report points to complicity between the CIA and Osama rather than "negotiation". (see excerpt below). Consistent with several other reports, it also points to the antagonism between the FBI and the CIA.<

If the CIA had wanted to arrest Osama bin Laden prior to September 11, they could have done it then in Dubai. But they would not have had a the war on terrorism pretext for waging a major military operation in the Middle East and Central Asia.

According to Le Figaro:

"Dubai... was the backdrop of a secret meeting between Osama bin Laden and the local CIA agent in July [2001]. A partner of the administration of the American Hospital in Dubai claims that "public enemy number one" stayed at this hospital between the 4th and 14th of July. While he was hospitalized, bin Laden received visits from many members of his family as well as prominent Saudis and Emiratis. During the hospital stay, the local CIA agent, known to many in Dubai, was seen taking the main elevator of the hospital to go [up] to bin Laden's hospital room.

A few days later, the CIA man bragged to a few friends about having visited bin Laden. Authorized sources say that on July 15th, the day after bin Laden returned to Quetta [Pakistan], the CIA agent was called back to headquarters. In the pursuit of its investigations, the FBI discovered "financing agreements" that the CIA had been developing with its "Arab friends" for years. The Dubai meeting is, so it would seem, within the logic of 'a certain American policy.'"

The Figaro report is confirmed by several other news reports including the London Times (1 Nov 2001). During his 11-day stay in the American hospital, Osama received specialized medical treatment from a Canadian urologist Dr. Terry Calloway .(See here. )

Osama back in Hospital on September 10, 2001, one day before the 9/11 attacks

According to Dan Rather, CBS, Bin Laden was back in Hospital, one day before the 9/11 attacks, on September 10, this time, courtesy of America's indefectible ally Pakistan. Pakistan's Military Intelligence (ISI) told CBS that bin Laden had received dialysis treatment in Rawalpindi, at Pak Army's headquarters: [For a transcript of the CBS report also here.]

DAN RATHER, CBS ANCHOR: As the United states and its allies in the war on terrorism press the hunt for Osama bin Laden, CBS News has exclusive information tonight about where bin Laden was and what he was doing in the last hours before his followers struck the United States September 11.

This is the result of hard-nosed investigative reporting by a team of CBS news journalists, and by one of the best foreign correspondents in the business, CBS`s Barry Petersen. Here is his report.

BARRY PETERSEN, CBS CORRESPONDENT: Everyone remembers what happened on September 11. Here`s the story of what may have happened the night before. It is a tale as twisted as the hunt for Osama bin Laden. CBS News has been told that the night before the September 11 terrorist attack, Osama bin Laden was in Pakistan. He was getting medical treatment with the support of the very military that days later pledged its backing for the U.S. war on terror in Afghanistan. Pakistan intelligence sources tell CBS News that bin Laden was spirited into this military hospital in Rawalpindi for kidney dialysis treatment. On that night, says this medical worker who wanted her identity protected, they moved out all the regular staff in the urology department and sent in a secret team to replace them. She says it was treatment for a very special person. The special team was obviously up to no good.

"The military had him surrounded," says this hospital employee who also wanted his identity masked, "and I saw the mysterious patient helped out of a car. Since that time," he says, "I have seen many pictures of the man. He is the man we know as Osama bin Laden. I also heard two army officers talking to each other. They were saying that Osama bin Laden had to be watched carefully and looked after." Those who know bin Laden say he suffers from numerous ailments, back and stomach problems. Ahmed Rashid, who has written extensively on the Taliban, says the military was often there to help before 9/11.

AHMED RASHID, TALIBAN EXPERT: There were reports that Pakistani intelligence had helped the Taliban buy dialysis machines. And the rumor was that these were wanted for Osama bin Laden.

PETERSEN (on camera): Doctors at the hospital told CBS News there was nothing special about that night, but they refused our request to see any records. Government officials tonight denied that bin Laden had any medical treatment on that night.

But it was Pakistan`s President Musharraf who said in public what many suspected, that bin Laden suffers from kidney disease, saying he thinks bin Laden may be near death. His evidence, watching this most recent video, showing a pale and haggard bin Laden, his left hand never moving. Bush administration officials admit they don`t know if bin Laden is sick or even dead.

DONALD RUMSFELD, DEFENSE SECRETARY: With respect to the issue of Osama bin Laden`s health, I just am - don`t have any knowledge. . . .

- Barry Petersen, CBS News, Islamabad. It should be noted, that the hospital is directly under the jurisdiction of the Pakistani Armed Forces, which has close links to the Pentagon. U.S. military advisers based in Rawalpindi. work closely with the Pakistani Armed Forces. Again, no attempt was made to arrest America's best known fugitive, but then maybe bin Laden was serving another "better purpose". . . . Needless to say, the CBS report is a crucial piece of information in the 9/11 jigsaw. It refutes the administration's claim that the whereabouts of bin Laden are unknown. It points to a Pakistan connection, it suggests a cover-up at the highest levels of the Bush administration.

Dan Rather and Barry Petersen fail to draw the implications of their January 2002 report. They fail to beg the question: where was Osama on 9/11? If they are to stand by their report, the conclusion is obvious: The administration is lying regarding the whereabouts of Osama.

Inpatient dialysis treatment tends to be longer than 24 hours in most American hospitals, which suggests that Osama would have been discharged from the Hospital on or "after" September 11.

If the CBS report is accurate and Osama had indeed been admitted to the Pakistani military hospital on September 10, courtesy of America's ally, he was in all likelihood still in hospital in Rawalpindi on the 11th of September, when the attacks occurred. In all probability, his whereabouts were known to US officials on the morning of September 12, when Secretary of State Colin Powell initiated negotiations with Pakistan, with a view to arresting and extraditing bin Laden.

These negotiations, led by General Mahmoud Ahmad, head of Pakistan's military intelligence, on behalf of the government of President Pervez Musharraf, took place on the 12th and 13th of September in Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage's office. For further details, see: M. Chossudovsky, Cover-up or Complicity of the Bush Administration? The Role of Pakistan's Military Intelligence (ISI) in the September 11 Attacks, 2 November 2001.

From my buddy at Down With Tyranny we learn how silly this story is about exactly where he was hiding. (Sounds like it was just the easiest place to stage the firefight (or whatever it was).)

I've driven all through that area of Pakistan and I never visited Abbottabad. It's kind of like a garrison town where retired military officers go to live out their lives. Pakistan's West Point is there. Or like Simi Valley in California. What was bin-Laden doing in that town, living in the biggest, fanciest villa in the town? Glad you asked.

The Abbottabad location is important for two reasons. Bin Laden could not have lived in a compound in Abbottabad without official Pakistani government sustenance. Abbottabad is an upscale area and a garrison town, but not so large as to be impersonal. Bin Laden was living in protected luxury. Many people had to know that and probably will come forward in a little time. On 7 December 2001, Bin Laden escaped from the tunnels in Tora Bora, Nangarhar Province, Afghanistan, with the help of a local warlord named Hazrat Ali, who betrayed US forces who had hired him to help capture bin Laden and is now a member of the Afghan Parliament for Nangarhar. Bin Laden and his gang crossed the Tora Bora mountains to Parachinar, Pakistan, where a Pakistan Army brigade was deployed to ensure his capture if he crossed the border. They failed, of course. He headed east to Kohat, another Army garrison town and disappeared. The distance from Kohat to Abbottabad is several hundred kilometers by road, but the two towns are part of the Pakistan Army network of garrison towns in the northwest. Bin laden reportedly moved around in the northwest, but one inference is that bin Laden has been in the safe keeping of the Pakistan Army for a decade. The news reports suggest the compound was specially built for him and his enterprise, which had to have been subsidized by Pakistan and, through Pakistan, by US aid to Pakistan. Secondly, his compound could not have been attacked from Afghanistan, him killed and his body taken by US Navy SEALs flying US helicopters so close to Islamabad without official Pakistani government cooperation. The US insisted Pakistan played no part in the operation and that the team flew from Afghanistan. That clearly is a cover story for Pakistani public consumption to try to avert overwhelming anti-Pakistan and anti-US demonstrations, which are probably inevitable in any event. Abottabad is not some remote village on the border. It is a large town in eastern Pakistan, on the main road to Kargil and the north as well as to Muzaffarabad and Pakistani Kashmir to the east. It is northeast - towards India - of Islamabad and within the Pakistan air defense intercept zone for the national capital which is protected by the Pakistani integrated air defense system. Nothing can fly in that region without detection and without permission from the Pakistan Air Force, even from Afghanistan. The conclusion is inescapable that the Pakistan Army protected bin Laden and recently decided to give him up, rather than sacrifice the Army's relationship with the US. The terms are not known as yet, but there certainly is a trade in which bin Laden was sacrificed. The trade might involve an end to US drone attacks across the border, which humiliate the Pakistan Army, or a new coordination regime for drone attacks into Pakistan. Bin Laden was a hero in Pakistan. He stood up to the United States and lived . . . for ten years. Readers should expect an enormous backlash against Americans. If the Pakistan civilian government survives, it will be because of the cover story that the US acted unilaterally. If the cover story works, on the surface, the US and Pakistani relationship will appear in the international media to take a nose dive. That will not be the truth, though few Pakistanis will know the truth. If the cover story is not believed, the government will not likely survive. There will be investigations by the National Assembly.

One person who foreign aid disbursements have been, at least partially up to is Michigan's senior senator, Carl Levin, who presides over the Senate Armed Service Committee and is in on every decision in this area. Yesterday, like many of us, he came to the conclusion that bin-Laden was probably living under the protect of Pakistan's multi-faced version of the CIA (the ISI). Diplomatically, he says questions have been raised by how and where bin-Laden was caught.

"I think that the Pakistani army and intelligence have a lot of questions to answer, given the location, the length of time, and the apparent fact that this facility was built for bin Laden, and its closeness to the central location to the Pakistani army," said Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI), who chairs the Senate Armed Services committee, in a Capitol briefing with reporters Monday morning. "I think the Pakistani president's statement today was a very reassuring statement - when he very specifically said that he thinks that it's a great victory and a success, and to congratulate us on the success of the operation," Levin added. "So reassured by his statement, not necessarily suspicious that he knew, or the civilian leadership knew. But I must tell you I hope that he will follow through - that the President of Pakistan Hardari will follow through and ask some very tough questions with his own military and his own intelligence. They've got a lot of explaining to do."

And now even the White House is acknowledging "probable" ISI complicity. Deputy National Security Adviser John Brennan, Obama's top counterterrorism adviser said it's "inconceivable" that Pakistan wasn't helping bin-Laden.

Have you heard about the "Denial of Service" attacks which many of the "truth" websites experienced during the MSM-total-PR-all-the-time response to Obama's speech about murdering Osama bin Laden? (And just who's laughing every time someone in the media tries to say a sentence correctly with both names in it?) No? How about this one, which is one of my favorite sites for the real news:

On May 1, 2011, Just moments before President Obama announced that the U.S. had killed Osama bin Laden, the WHAT REALLY HAPPENED website came under massive distributed denial of service attack. This page, which documents that Osama bin Laden actually died in December of 2001, appears to be what the White House didn't want available while the new propaganda was "catapulted forward" . It is possible that this is the opening gambit in a plan to stage a "revenge" attack from "AL QAEDA" on the United States, with which to justify total war on the Middle East.

Health & Medical History of Osama bin Laden. As a result of the recent perhaps non-event/events (or vice versa), I'm extremely sorry I'm late to link the following essay at Antifascist Calling . . . but it seems that contrived media events don't slow down long enough for true necessary documentation to be released in a timely fashion. This is a terrific website and it documents in depth the decline of our democracy and the rise of the plutocratic fascism (corporatism) that is overtaking our society. Please read it. You won't regret the new information they offer (emphasis marks added - Ed.).

Sunday, April 24, 2011 No Place to Hide: Internet Tracking Probe Unveiled as New Smartphone Spy Scandal Unwinds As the United States morphs into a failed state, one unwilling and soon perhaps, unable, to provide for the common good even as it hands over trillions of dollars to a gang of financial brigands engorged like parasitic ticks on the wealth of others, keeping the lid on is more than just an imperial obsession: it's big business. Earlier this month, New Scientist reported that "a new way of working out where you are by looking at your internet connection could pin down your current location to within a few hundred metres." Although similar techniques are already in use, they are not very accurate in terms of closing the surveillance trap. "Every computer connected to the web has an internet protocol (IP) address, but there is no simple way to map this to a physical location," reporter Jacob Aron informs us. "The current best system can be out by as much as 35 kilometres." However, Yong Wang, "a computer scientist at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China in Chengdu, and colleagues at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, have used businesses and universities as landmarks to achieve much higher accuracy." According to New Scientist, "Wang's team used Google Maps to find both the web and physical addresses of such organisations, providing them with around 76,000 landmarks. By comparison, most other geolocation methods only use a few hundred landmarks specifically set up for the purpose." With geolocation tracking devices embedded in smartphones (and, as we'll see below, this data is stored without their users' consent), all of which is happily turned over to authorities by telecoms (for the right price, of course!), as privacy researcher Christopher Soghoian revealed in 2009, it becomes abundantly clear that sooner than most people think there will be no escaping Big Brother's electronic dragnet. "The new method," Aron writes, "zooms in through three stages to locate a target computer." First, the team of public-private financed research snoops measured "the time it takes to send a data packet to the target and converts it into a distance - a common geolocation technique that narrows the target's possible location to a radius of around 200 kilometres." Wang and his cohorts then "send data packets to the known Google Maps landmark servers in this large area to find which routers they pass through." New Scientist reports that when "a landmark machine and the target computer have shared a router, the researchers can compare how long a packet takes to reach each machine from the router; converted into an estimate of distance, this time difference narrows the search down further." "We shrink the size of the area where the target potentially is," Wang cheerfully explained. "Finally," Aron writes, "they repeat the landmark search at this more fine-grained level: comparing delay times once more, they establish which landmark server is closest to the target." "On average," we're told, "their method gets to within 690 metres of the target and can be as close as 100 metres - good enough to identify the target computer's location to within a few streets." While New Scientist focused their attention on how an IP address tracking tool might be a boon to advert pimps, who else might find the method "useful in certain situations"? Tightening the Surveillance Noose Back in December, The Wall Street Journal reported that "few devices know more personal details about people than the smartphones in their pockets: phone numbers, current location, often the owner's real name--even a unique ID number that can never be changed or turned off." As part of the Journal's excellent "What They Know" series, reporters Scott Thurm and Yukari Iwatani Kane revealed that an examination of more than 100 smartphone apps for Apple's iPhone and Google's Android platforms "showed that 56 transmitted the phone's unique device ID to other companies without users' awareness or consent," 47 apps "transmitted the phone's location in some way," and "five sent age, gender and other personal details to outsiders." Like the New Scientist report above, the Journal focused their investigative lens on "intrusive effort[s] by online-tracking companies to gather personal data about people in order to flesh out detailed dossiers on them." Without a doubt, such data is already being collected by various police intelligence agencies at the local, state and federal levels. In all likelihood, smartphone geolocation data has now been added to the dossier creation mix, another component of the secret state's massive national security index called "Main Core" by investigative journalists Christopher Ketchum and Tim Shorrock. As Ketchum reported in his 2008 piece, three unnamed former intelligence officials told him that "8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as potentially suspect" and, in the event of a national emergency, "could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and even detention." We've now learned that Apple's iPhone and iPad and Google's Android smartphone platforms "constantly track users' physical location and store the data in unencrypted files that can be read by anyone with physical access to the device," The Register disclosed. And with technological advances far-outstripping legal remedies to protect Americans' privacy as Soghoian wrote last week, and with Congress and the Obama administration further lowering the boom, the notion that our personal communications are off-limits to advertisers and government officials is as quaint as the concept that financial institutions should be transparent when it comes to investing our hard-earned dollars. According to researchers Pete Warden and Alasdair Allen, who first reported their findings on the iPhone Tracker blog, the geolocation file is stored on both the iOS device and "any computers that store backups of its data," and "can be used to reconstruct a detailed snapshot of the user's comings and goings, down to the second." The researchers aver that despite Apple's refusal to even acknowledged the existence of these files, or frankly what the firm does with the data once its been downloaded to their servers, users of iPhones and iPads are put at risk that their movements are available to any and all comers with the requisite skills to access their information. "The most immediate problem is that this data is stored in an easily-readable form on your machine," Warden and Allen wrote. "Any other program you run or user with access to your machine can look through it. By passively logging your location without your permission, Apple have made it possible for anyone from a jealous spouse to a private investigator to get a detailed picture of your movements." Needless to say, such information would be a boon to police agencies seeking to "terminate with extreme prejudice" the ability of protest organizers to communicate with demonstrators, as happened during the G20 protests in Pittsburgh, as Antifascist Calling reported in 2009. Elliot Madison was arrested after he relayed a police order to disperse message via Twitter to demonstrators during the protests. A week later, his New York City home was raided by the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force (!) which carted off his computers and cell phone as "evidence." Madison and co-defendant Michael Wallschlaeger were criminally charged with using computers, cell phones and a police scanner to track the movements of "Pittsburgh's finest." Federal prosecutors charged the activists with "hindering apprehension or prosecution, criminal use of a communication facility, and possession of instruments of crime." While such repressive acts may have raised eyebrows two years ago, they have now become part of the seamless panopticon spreading across the "shining city on a hill" like an invisible swarm of privacy-killing locusts. Last week, in the wake of the smartphone tracking scandal, CNET News reported that "law enforcement agencies have known since at least last year that an iPhone or iPad surreptitiously records its owner's approximate location, and have used that geolocation data to aid criminal investigations." Security journalist Declan McCullagh revealed that although "Apple has never publicized the undocumented feature buried deep within the software that operates iPhones and iPads," the secretive Mountain View firm acknowledged to Congress last year that "cell tower and Wi-Fi access point information" is "intermittently" collected and "transmitted to Apple" every 12 hours. CNET reported that "phones running Google's Android OS also store location information," according to Swedish programer Magnus Eriksson. Another researcher told McCullagh that "'virtually all Android devices' send some of those coordinates back to Google." "Among computer forensics specialists," CNET avers, "those location logs - which record nearby cell tower coordinates and time stamps and cannot easily be disabled by someone who wants to use location services--are not merely an open secret. They've become a valuable sales pitch when targeting customers in police, military, and intelligence agencies." In other words, enterprising grifters from niche security firms servicing the secret state--or anyone willing to pay for their unique services, say a dodgy employer, a jealous spouse or a sociopathic freak for that matter - can take advantage of a smartphone's embedded location files. CNET reported that the "U.K-based company Forensic Telecommunications Services advertises its iXAM product as able to 'extract GPS location fixes' from an iPhone 3GS including 'latitude, longitude, altitude and time'." "Its literature boasts," McCullagh writes, that "'these are confirmed fixes--they prove that the device was definitely in that location at that time'." "Another mobile forensics company, Cellebrite," CNET avers, even "brags that its products can pluck out geographical locations derived from both 'Wi-Fi and cell tower' signals, and a third lists Android devices as able to yield 'historical location data' too." Just last week, The Tech Herald disclosed that the Michigan State Police have been using a handheld device and "secretly extracting information from cell phones during traffic stops," and have refused to release information on this program to the ACLU. The Tech Herald reports that for "nearly three years, the ACLU has attempted to get the Michigan State Police (MSP) to answer questions over their use of Cellebrite's UFED Physical Pro scanner." "The handheld device allows police to extract data from phones and SIM memory," journalist Steve Ragan writes, and that "in addition to the normal information, such as contact lists, email, and text messages, the UFED is also able to recover hidden and deleted data." Manufactured by security outfit Cellebrite, the company boasts that their "mobile forensics products enable extraction and analysis of invaluable evidentiary data including deleted and hidden data for military, law enforcement, governments, and intelligence agencies across the world," according to a blurb on their web site. The ACLU charges that the device is routinely used during traffic stops and that state troopers were able to access the mobile devices without their users being aware their data was being grabbed. In their letter to the MSP, the ACLU cautioned that "The Fourth Amendment protects citizens from unreasonable searches. With certain exceptions that do not apply here," the civil liberties watchdogs averred, "a search cannot occur without a warrant in which a judicial officer determines that there is probable cause to believe that the search will yield evidence of criminal activity." "A device that allows immediate, surreptitious intrusion into private data creates enormous risks that troopers will ignore these requirements to the detriment of the constitutional rights of persons whose cell phones are searched." Sounds reasonable, right? The MSP responded by demanding the ACLU fork over $544,680 before they'd even consider releasing these public documents! But as Cryptohippie reported in their excellent study, The Electronic Police State, "two crucial facts about the information gathered under an electronic police state are these: 1. It is criminal evidence, ready for use in a trial. 2. It is gathered universally ('preventively') and only later organized for use in prosecutions." "In an Electronic Police State," researchers averred, "every surveillance camera recording, every email sent, every Internet site surfed, every post made, every check written, every credit card swipe, every cell phone ping... are all criminal evidence, and all are held in searchable databases. The individual can be prosecuted whenever the government wishes." Called a "Universal Forensic Extraction Device," Cellebrite claims their "UFED family of products is able to extract and analyze data from more than 3000 phones, including smartphones and GPS devices." According to the firm, such tools will prove invaluable to secret state snoops. "Diving deeper into a mobile phone's memory than ever before provides them with the ability to gather data and establish connections between networks and people that is quicker and easier to arrive at." The secret-spilling web site Cryptome has generously provided us with with Cellebrite's Smartphone PDA Spy Guide. Amongst other things, we're told that the firm's "UFED Forensics system empowers law enforcement, anti-terror and security organizations to capture critical forensic evidence from mobile phones, Smartphones and PDAs." "UFED," we're informed, "extracts vital data such as phonebook, camera pictures, videos, audio, text messages (SMS), call logs, ESN IMEI, ICCID and IMSI information from over 1,600 handset models, including Symbian, Microsoft Mobile, Blackberry and Palm OS devices." Think you've erased those messy call logs or text messages to your girl- or boyfriend? Better think again! With Cellebrite on the job, "the UFED can extract data from a phone, or directly from the SIM card. When extracting from phone, the UFED connects to the phone via cable, Bluetooth or infrared, and the data is read logically from the phone. It also performs a physical extraction from SIM cards, allowing extraction of additional data such as deleted SMS, ICCID, IMSI, location information and more." We're told that the company's UFED "helps intelligence agencies widen their view and form a complete picture with access to content that can be repurposed, analyzed, and linked to information existing in databases," Main Core, or a similar national security index, perhaps? "For us, people look like little particles..." While digital technologies advance by leaps and bounds, the Empire's political-economic requirements are determining how new devices will be used, who has access to the data points and, once our personal details are extracted - by corporations or shadowy intel outfits (public and private) who do their bidding - what happens to it once it's been stored in giant data farms. The Wall Street Journal reported that Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers are conducting a study that "has tracked 60 families living in campus quarters via sensors and software on their smartphones - recording their movements, relationships, moods, health, calling habits and spending." "In this wealth of intimate detail," reporter Robert Lee Hotz writes, MIT researcher Alex Pentland "is finding patterns of human behavior that could reveal how millions of people interact at home, work and play." According to preliminary findings, "the data can predict with uncanny accuracy where people are likely to be at any given time in the future," and the data "can reveal subtle symptoms of mental illness, foretell movements in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, and chart the spread of political ideas as they move through a community much like a contagious virus, research shows." "Advances in statistics, psychology and the science of social networks are giving researchers the tools to find patterns of human dynamics too subtle to detect by other means," the Journal reports. At Northeastern University in Boston for example, "network physicists discovered just how predictable people could be by studying the travel routines of 100,000 European mobile-phone users." "After analyzing more than 16 million records of call date, time and position," Hotz reports, "the researchers determined that, taken together, people's movements appeared to follow a mathematical pattern," and that given enough information about past movements, scientists averred "they could forecast someone's future whereabouts with 93.6% accuracy." Chillingly, Northeastern physicist Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, who conducted the study, told the Journal: "For us, people look like little particles that move in space and that occasionally communicate with each other. We have turned society into a laboratory where behavior can be objectively followed." Ruthless "objectivity" such as this have real world consequences, not that it matters to those whose butter their bread by bludgeoning our privacy and cratering our political rights. "As a reward when the [MIT] experiment was done," the Journal laconically observed, "the students were allowed to keep the smartphones used to monitor them."

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