CIA Open Source Center Follows Foreign Twitter, Facebook Accounts

---
Not to worry.. "They" ONLY look at foreign accounts.. Uh huh.. ok.. Sure I buy that..

Greg
---



McLEAN, Va. — In an anonymous industrial park, CIA analysts who jokingly call themselves the "ninja librarians" are mining the mass of information people publish about themselves overseas, tracking everything from common public opinion to revolutions.

The group's effort gives the White House a daily snapshot of the world built from tweets, newspaper articles and Facebook updates.

The agency's Open Source Center sometimes looks at 5 million tweets a day. The analysts are also checking out TV news channels, local radio stations, Internet chat rooms – anything overseas that people can access and contribute to openly.

The Associated Press got an apparently unprecedented view of the center's operations, including a tour of the main facility. The AP agreed not to reveal its exact location and to withhold the identities of some who work there because much of the center's work is secret.

From Arabic to Mandarin, from an angry tweet to a thoughtful blog, the analysts gather the information, often in a native tongue. They cross-reference it with a local newspaper or a clandestinely intercepted phone conversation. From there, they build a picture sought by the highest levels at the White House. There might be a real-time peek, for example, at the mood of a region after the Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden, or perhaps a prediction of which Mideast nation seems ripe for revolt.

Yes, they saw the uprising in Egypt coming; they just didn't know exactly when revolution might hit, says the center's director, Doug Naquin.

The center already had "predicted that social media in places like Egypt could be a game-changer and a threat to the regime," he said in an interview.

The CIA facility was set up in response to a recommendation by the 9/11 Commission, its first priority to focus on counterterrorism and counterproliferation. Its predecessor organization had its staff heavily cut in the 1990s – something the CIA's management has vowed to keep from happening again, with new budget reductions looming across the national security spectrum.

The center's several hundred analysts – the actual number is classified – track a broad range of subjects, including Chinese Internet access and the mood on the street in Pakistan.


While most analysts are based in Virginia, they also are scattered throughout U.S. embassies worldwide to get a step closer to their subjects.

The center's analysis ends up in President Barack Obama's daily intelligence briefing in one form or another almost every day. The material is often used to answer questions Obama poses to his inner circle of intelligence advisers when they give him the morning rundown of threats and trouble spots.

"The OSC's focus is overseas, collecting against foreign intelligence issues," said CIA spokeswoman Jennifer Youngblood. "Looking at social media outlets overseas is just a small part of what this skilled organization does," she said. "There is no effort to collect on Americans."

The most successful open source analysts, Naquin said, are something like the heroine of the crime novel "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," a quirky, irreverent computer hacker who "knows how to find stuff other people don't know exists."

An analyst with a master's degree in library science and multiple languages, especially one who grew up speaking another language, makes "a powerful open source officer," Naquin said.

The center had started focusing on social media after watching the Twitter-sphere rock the Iranian regime during the Green Revolution of 2009, when thousands protested the results of the elections that kept Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in power. "Farsi was the third largest presence in social media blogs at the time on the Web," Naquin said.

After bin Laden was killed in Pakistan in May, the CIA followed Twitter to give the White House a snapshot of world public opinion.

Since tweets can't necessarily be pegged to a geographic location, the analysts broke down reaction by language. The result: The majority of Urdu tweets, the language of Pakistan, and Chinese tweets, were negative. China is a close ally of Pakistan's. Officials in Pakistan protested the raid as an affront to their nation's sovereignty, a sore point that continues to complicate U.S.-Pakistani relations.

When President Obama gave his speech addressing Mideast issues a few weeks after the raid, the tweet response over the next 24 hours came in negative from Turkey, Egypt, Yemen, Algeria, the Persian Gulf and Israel, too. Tweets from speakers of Arabic and Turkic contended that Obama favored Israel, while Hebrew tweets denounced the speech as pro-Arab.

In the following days, major news media came to the same conclusion, as did analysis by the covert side of U.S. intelligence based on intercepts and human intelligence gathered in the region.

The center is also in the process of comparing its social media results with the track record of polling organizations, trying to see which produces more accurate results, Naquin said.

"We do what we can to caveat that we may be getting an overrepresentation of the urban elite," said Naquin, acknowledging that only a small slice of the population in many areas being monitored has access to computers and Internet. But he points out that access to social media sites via cellphones is growing in such areas as Africa, meaning a "wider portion of the population than you might expect is sounding off and holding forth than it might appear if you count the Internet hookups in a given country."

Sites such as Facebook and Twitter have become a key resource for following a fast-moving crisis such as the riots that raged across Bangkok in April and May of last year, the center's deputy director said. The AP agreed not to identify him because he sometimes still works undercover in foreign countries.

As director, Naquin is identified publicly by the agency although the location of the center is kept secret to deter attacks, whether physical or electronic.

Naquin says the next generation of social media will probably be closed-loop, subscriber-only cellphone networks, like the ones the Taliban uses to send messages among hundreds of followers at a time in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Those networks can be penetrated only by technical eavesdropping by branches of U.S. intelligence, such as the National Security Agency – but Naquin predicts his covert colleagues will find a way to adapt, as the enemy does.

Source on http://www.huffingtonpost.com

The Inside Story of How Our Financial Regulators Let Us All Down - Primary Dealers / #SEC #FED

---

NOVEMBER 4, 2011

BY SHAH GILANI, Capital Waves Strategist, Money Morning <-- source

Did you hear the story about MF Global?

No, not the headlines about its bankruptcy - the real story.

If you haven't heard it yet, it goes something like this.

MF Global became a primary dealer only eight months ago.

"Primary dealer" is an elite status. It means the firm is one of only 22 government bond dealers that trades directly with the Federal Reserve's New York trading desk.

Only, the Federal Reserve doesn't regulate or oversee MF Global, the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) does - or rather is supposed to.

But, even more incongruously, the CFTC isn't the first overseer of MF Global . It ceded that responsibility to the CME Group Inc. (Nasdaq: CME), which owns and operates the largest futures exchanges in the United States. The designated self-regulatory organization for more than 50 futures brokers, CME was supposed to be the cop on the beat.

However, t he not-so-funny thing about the relationship between MF Global and the CME Group is that MF Global recently boasted on its Website that it "was the top broker by volume at CME's metals and energy exchanges in New York and in the top three at its Chicago exchanges."

So, is it any wonder that the CME just last week audited MF Global's segregated customer funds and found them to be in compliance?

These are the same supposedly segregated funds which the CME is now saying may have been tampered with. According to the CME:

"It now appears that [MF Global] made subsequent transfers of customer segregated funds in a manner that may have been designed to avoid detection insofar as MF Global did not disclose or report such transfers to the CFTC or CME until early morning on Monday October 31, 2011."

How much money are we talking about? About $633 million - or 11.6% out of a segregated fund requirement of about $5.4 billion.

Do you see what I'm driving at?

So the real story is, t he Federal Reserve, which doesn't regulate MF Global but regulates all banks in the United States, lets a futures commission merchant with investment bank wannabe desires become an insider in its dealings. Meanwhile, a private for-profit enterprise that runs the self-regulatory apparatus that oversees its own customers steps in for a federal agency that's supposed to be in charge of commodities, futures and derivatives markets.

And that's only the tip of the iceberg.

Let me jump on the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) next, because you aren't going to believe this, either.

Subterfuge at the SEC

It's come to light recently that the SEC has been blatantly violating federal law for decades.

Since at least 1992 through 2010, the SEC has destroyed more than 9,000 documents that by law were supposed to be saved and turned over to the National Archives and Records Administration and kept for 25 years.

The documents were records of enforcement cases where, after preliminary inquires, it was decided not to pursue full-blown investigations.

When the SEC has information - an anonymous tip or insights from a whistleblower, for instance - that could lead to an investigation, the subjects are pursued as "matters under inquiry," or MUIs.

A couple of examples of MUIs that went nowhere include: The several tips the agency received that Bernie Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme; the anonymous tip on Ernst and Young letterhead that said Lehman Bros. Holdings Inc. (PINK: LEHMQ) was cooking its books; or the MUIs on insider trading, fraud, and market manipulation at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (NYSE: GS), Bank of America Corp. (NYSE: BAC), American International Group Inc. (NYSE: AIG), and SAC Capital Advisors, to name a few others.

But since none of these MUIs morphed into full-blown investigations, the SEC decided to destroy all records pertaining to these inquiries rather than hand them over to the National Archives, as federal law requires.

When confronted with the unauthorized disposal of federal records, thanks to a couple of steadfast and honest lawyers in the enforcement branch of the SEC, the agency said it was "not aware of any specific instances of the destruction of records."

What's shocking and sickening is that even while addressing the Archives' inquiry into the missing documents, the SEC somehow forgot to disclose to the keeper of federal records its policy to "destroy all such documents" when no further action is warranted.

Too bad for the SEC an internal investigation by SEC Inspector General H. David Kotz brought to light the agency's directive to destroy certain MUIs, along with the discovery of MUIs on old hard drives that somebody accidentally forgot to erase and destroy.

Why wouldn't the SEC keep records of enforcement activities? Why would they destroy critical data and information that could be used in the future to pursue cases that re-surfaced and could lead to bone-crushing conspiracy or racketeering charges, if not even the simple garden variety securities law violations?

With any luck, we just might find out.

The SEC could and should face criminal charges for breaking federal law.

There's a powerful push by a quiet group of angry journalists to get to the bottom of this, and I'm one of them. So, expect to hear more about this as we press on for the truth.

In the meantime, it's high time we take a good look at regulators and not just regulations to see where the cracks are in the prudential governance of markets, financial institutions, and most importantly, individuals who are responsible for decisions that break the law or grossly impact markets and our economy.

After all, it's not just regulations we need to worry about - it's the regulators too.

Goldman Sachs Threatens Small Community Bank For Banking With OWS Protestors $GS

---

Posted on November 2, 2011 by Gekko



Last week, Democracy Now! and The Guardianran our story about Goldman Sachs yanking financial support from a community credit union for honoring one of its largest customers. The customer: Occupy Wall Street.

Our report so enraged Goldman that, within days, it doubled down on its attack on the little community bank.

Goldman had already demanded the return of its $5,000 payment to the Lower East Side Peoples Federal Credit Union. Now, sources say, the trillion-dollar Wall Street mega-bank sent the following message to the not-for-profit community bank: ”You will never get a dime from any bank ever again.”

About those ”dimes” Goldman is taking away: They come from you and me, the taxpayers who put up billions into the Troubled Asset Recovery Plan (TARP), usually known as the Bank Bail-Out Fund.

For Goldman to suck its $10 billion from the TARP trough, Goldman had to change from investment bank to commercial bank. This change makes Goldman subject to the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) and requires it by law to pay back a notable portion in funds for low-income communities, abandoned by the big banks.

In other words, Goldman is beating up Lower East Side Peoples (which operates in Harlem and the Latino New York neighborhood known as Loisaida).

The Credit Union’s Chairwoman told me that, “We have not drawn a line in the sand with Goldman Sachs.” The community bank does not want to go to war with Goldman.

The bank stated, following the initial posting of this report, “The Lower East Side People’s Federal Credit Union would like to clarify that it does not consider itself ‘at war’ with Goldman Sachs or any other financial institution. The Credit Union has not received any further communication from Goldman since its decision to withdraw its support from the fundraising event to celebrate our 25th Anniversary.”

The Community Bank wants to emphasize its decades of work serving low-income communities. The point in their honoring Occupy Wall Street is not to attack Goldman says Chairwoman Deyarina Del Rio, but to recognize that the Credit Union and the protestors, “share a philosophy” of putting people before profits.

I would note that Goldman’s nasty threat to cut off funding for Peoples, the credit union that is officially chartered as the bank for low income New Yorkers, came with a complaint about this reporter.

Goldman claims that Greg Palast called only one time to get Goldman’s side of the story. (I called many times, as did my associate, and we left the same repeated message: I want your side of the story. Please call me and tell me if you’re punishing the poor peoples’ bank because they are supporting the demands of Occupy Wall Street?)

There are tens of billions of dollars at stake in the Community Reinvestment funds due from the big banks. As other banks are making noises of heeding Goldman’s call to whip the uppity little credit union, an answer from Goldman becomes urgent.

So, Goldman, I’m still waiting for an answer. You’ve got my numbers, so just pick up a tentacle and call.

Source

You too can trade FX like the Primary Dealers

---

MF Global.. leverage 40 to 1

Jefferies.. leverage 13 to 1

Why so much leverage?

Deep pockets, that's why.. When you get all the free fiat and bailouts you want from the Federal Reserve Bank you NEVER have to accept a losing trade!

These guys "bet wrong" all the time but they simply, strategically, add to their losers until they can either achieve a break even trade or make a profit.

You can trade this way too!

But I NEVER use even 13 to 1 leverage.. Due to account size and risk.

Once in a great while I may get to 4 or 5 to 1 but, generally speaking, by then I'm quite terrified! LMAO

If you have a 300,000.00 account you can very comfortably trade 10.00 per pip..

A 30,000.00 account? 1.00 per pip

A 3,000.00 account? 0.10 per pip

A 300.00 account? 0.01 per pip

Using this technique you can pretty much do whatever TF you want in the market without fear of being virtually destroyed by one or two bad trades.

3 lots = no leverage. 6 lots = 2 to 1. 12 lots = 4 to 1. Etc etc..

Leverage is VERY important and often overlooked or not properly understood.

Be careful out there for God's sake!

Greg

Big banks just bad news for everybody -Robert Reich

---

Wall Street is still out of control, and why Obama should call for Glass-Steagall and a breakup of big banks.

By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog
30 October 11 <-- source

Next week President Obama travels to Wall Street where he'll demand - in light of the Street's continuing antics since the bailout, as well as its role in watering-down the Volcker rule - that the Glass-Steagall Act be resurrected and big banks be broken up.

I'm kidding. But it would be a smart move - politically and economically.

Politically smart because Mitt Romney is almost sure to be the Republican nominee, and Romney is the poster child for the pump-and-dump mentality that's infected the financial industry and continues to jeopardize the American economy.

Romney was CEO of Bain & Company - a private-equity fund that bought up companies, fired employees to save money and boost performance, and then resold the firms at a nice markups.

Romney also epitomizes the pump-and-dump culture of America's super rich. To take one example, he recently purchased a $3 million mansion in La Jolla, California (in addition to his other homes) that he's razing in order build a brand new one.

What better way for Obama to distinguish himself from Romney than to condemn Wall Street's antics since the bailout, and call for real reform?

Economically it would be smart for Obama to go after the Street right now because the Street's lobbying muscle has reduced the Dodd-Frank financial reform law to a pale reflection of its former self. Dodd-Frank is rife with so many loopholes and exemptions that the largest Wall Street banks - larger by far than they were before the bailout - are back to many of their old tricks.

It's impossible to know, for example, the exposure of the Street to European banks in danger of going under. To stay afloat, Europe's banks will be forced to sell mountains of assets - among them, derivatives originating on the Street - and may have to reneg on or delay some repayments on loans from Wall Street banks.

The Street says it's not worried because these assets are insured. But remember AIG? The fact Morgan Stanley and other big U.S. banks are taking a beating in the market suggests investors don't believe the Street. This itself proves financial reform hasn't gone far enough.

If you want more evidence, consider the fancy footwork by Bank of America in recent days. Hit by a credit downgrade last month, BofA just moved its riskiest derivatives from its Merrill Lynch unit to a retail subsidiary flush with insured deposits. That unit has a higher credit rating because the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (that is, you and me and other taxpayers) are backing the deposits. Result: BofA improves its bottom line at the expense of American taxpayers.

Wasn't this supposed to be illegal? Keeping risky assets away from insured deposits had been a key principle of US regulation for decades before the repeal of Glass-Steagall.

The so-called "Volcker rule" was supposed to remedy that. But under pressure of Wall Street's lobbyists, the rule - as officially proposed last week - has morphed into almost 300 pages of regulatory mumbo-jumbo, riddled with exemptions and loopholes.

It would have been far simpler simply to ban proprietary trading from the jump. Why should banks ever be permitted to use peoples' bank deposits - insured by the federal government - to place risky bets on the banks' own behalf? Bring back Glass-Steagall.

True, Glass-Steagall wouldn't have prevented the fall of Lehman Brothers or the squeeze on other investment banks in 2007 and 2008. That's why it's also necessary to break up the big banks.

In the wake of the bailout, the biggest banks are bigger than ever. Twenty years ago the ten largest banks on the Street held 10 percent of America's total bank assets. Now they hold over 70 percent. And the biggest four have a larger market share than ever - so large, in fact, they've almost surely been colluding. How else to explain their apparent coordination on charging debit card fees?

The banks aren't even fulfilling their fiduciary duties to investors. Last summer, after Groupon selected Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Credit Suisse to underwrite its initial public offering, the trio valued it at a generous $30 billion. Subsequent accounting and disclosure problems showed this estimate to be absurdly high. Did the banks care? Not a wit. The higher the valuation, the fatter their fees.

Just last week Citigroup settled charges (without admitting or denying guilt) that it defrauded investors by selling them a package of mortgage-backed securities rife with mortgages it knew were likely to default, but didn't disclose the hazard. It then bet against the package for its own benefit - earning fees of $34 million and net profits of at least $126 million. So what's Citi paying to settle this outrage? A mere $285 million. Its CEO at time (Charles Prince) doesn't pay a dime.

I doubt the President will be condemning the Street's antics, or calling for a resurrection of Glass-Steagall and a breakup of the biggest banks. Democrats are still too dependent on the Street's campaign money.

That's too bad. You don't have to be an occupier of Wall Street to conclude the Street is still out of control. And that's dangerous for all of us

It sure SEEMS like #FXCM is #stealing my #fiat at times @JasonForex

---



Here is the same one minute chart on my instaforex demo platform.. Very odd..



Buyer beware..

Greg

Did You Hear the One About the Bankers?

---
I'm sure you have noticed this language the same as I..

"Citigroup, which is under new and better management now, settled the case without admitting or denying any wrongdoing."

(Last Thursday, the U.S. District Court judge overseeing the case demanded that the S.E.C. explain how such serious securities fraud could end with the defendant neither admitting nor denying wrongdoing.)

As Senator Richard Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, bluntly said in a 2009 radio interview, despite having caused this crisis, these same financial firms “are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they, frankly, own the place.”

Our Congress today is a forum for legalized bribery.

NONE of these "issues", and many more "real" issues (ie; predatory lending and usury, fractional reserve banking itself, the kleptocracy), are even being addressed at all, let alone finding a solution for them..

Consumer spending was up last month but ONLY because the Federal Reserve Bank is intentionally creating inflation in the economy to FORCE people to spend more fiat on everything they require including food & gas, which are stripped out of the CPI.

It truly is a rigged corrupt game that the 99% can never hope to win..

Greg

Here's the post source
---

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: October 29, 2011

CITIGROUP is lucky that Muammar el-Qaddafi was killed when he was. The Libyan leader’s death diverted attention from a lethal article involving Citigroup that deserved more attention because it helps to explain why many average Americans have expressed support for the Occupy Wall Street movement. The news was that Citigroup had to pay a $285 million fine to settle a case in which, with one hand, Citibank sold a package of toxic mortgage-backed securities to unsuspecting customers — securities that it knew were likely to go bust — and, with the other hand, shorted the same securities — that is, bet millions of dollars that they would go bust.

Josh Haner/The New York Times
Thomas L. Friedman

It doesn’t get any more immoral than this. As the Securities and Exchange Commission civil complaint noted, in 2007, Citigroup exercised “significant influence” over choosing $500 million of the $1 billion worth of assets in the deal, and the global bank deliberately chose collateralized debt obligations, or C.D.O.’s, built from mortgage loans almost sure to fail. According to The Wall Street Journal, the S.E.C. complaint quoted one unnamed C.D.O. trader outside Citigroup as describing the portfolio as resembling something your dog leaves on your neighbor’s lawn. “The deal became largely worthless within months of its creation,” The Journal added. “As a result, about 15 hedge funds, investment managers and other firms that invested in the deal lost hundreds of millions of dollars, while Citigroup made $160 million in fees and trading profits.”

Citigroup, which is under new and better management now, settled the case without admitting or denying any wrongdoing. James Stewart, a business columnist for The Times, noted that Citigroup’s flimflam made “Goldman Sachs mortgage traders look like Boy Scouts. In settling its fraud charges for $550 million last year, Goldman was accused by the S.E.C. of being the middleman in a similar deal, allowing the hedge fund manager John Paulson to help choose the mortgages and then bet against them without disclosing this to the other parties. Citigroup dispensed with a Paulson figure altogether, grabbing those lucrative roles for itself.” (Last Thursday, the U.S. District Court judge overseeing the case demanded that the S.E.C. explain how such serious securities fraud could end with the defendant neither admitting nor denying wrongdoing.)

This gets to the core of why all the anti-Wall Street groups around the globe are resonating. I was in Tahrir Square in Cairo for the fall of Hosni Mubarak, and one of the most striking things to me about that demonstration was how apolitical it was. When I talked to Egyptians, it was clear that what animated their protest, first and foremost, was not a quest for democracy — although that was surely a huge factor. It was a quest for “justice.” Many Egyptians were convinced that they lived in a deeply unjust society where the game had been rigged by the Mubarak family and its crony capitalists. Egypt shows what happens when a country adopts free-market capitalism without developing real rule of law and institutions.

But, then, what happened to us? Our financial industry has grown so large and rich it has corrupted our real institutions through political donations. As Senator Richard Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, bluntly said in a 2009 radio interview, despite having caused this crisis, these same financial firms “are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they, frankly, own the place.”

Our Congress today is a forum for legalized bribery. One consumer group using information from Opensecrets.org calculates that the financial services industry, including real estate, spent $2.3 billion on federal campaign contributions from 1990 to 2010, which was more than the health care, energy, defense, agriculture and transportation industries combined. Why are there 61 members on the House Committee on Financial Services? So many congressmen want to be in a position to sell votes to Wall Street.

We can’t afford this any longer. We need to focus on four reforms that don’t require new bureaucracies to implement. 1) If a bank is too big to fail, it is too big and needs to be broken up. We can’t risk another trillion-dollar bailout. 2) If your bank’s deposits are federally insured by U.S. taxpayers, you can’t do any proprietary trading with those deposits — period. 3) Derivatives have to be traded on transparent exchanges where we can see if another A.I.G. is building up enormous risk. 4) Finally, an idea from the blogosphere: U.S. congressmen should have to dress like Nascar drivers and wear the logos of all the banks, investment banks, insurance companies and real estate firms that they’re taking money from. The public needs to know.

Capitalism and free markets are the best engines for generating growth and relieving poverty — provided they are balanced with meaningful transparency, regulation and oversight. We lost that balance in the last decade. If we don’t get it back — and there is now a tidal wave of money resisting that — we will have another crisis. And, if that happens, the cry for justice could turn ugly. Free advice to the financial services industry: Stick to being bulls. Stop being pigs.

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on October 30, 2011, on page SR11 of the New York edition with the headline: Did You Hear the One About the Bankers?.

Link back to source