Good morning 99percenters!

“It’s pure authoritarianism”: Glenn Greenwald exposes the link between Baltimore’s uprising and the NSA
Award-winning journalist tells Salon why the erosion of civil liberties at home and abroad is interconnected

It got lost in all the hubbub of the uprising in Baltimore, as well as the addition of a few more candidates to the 2016 presidential election, but according to reports from multiple sources last week, it’s looking more probable than ever that the so-called Patriot Act will not be reauthorized until after it’s undergone some privacy-protecting revisions. The distance between vague promises in a report and an actual change to the bill’s infamously broad language is considerable, of course. But absent the waves of outrage inspired by leaks from former CIA contractor Edward Snowden — whose collaboration with Salon alum and Intercept founding editor Glenn Greenwald recently led to an Academy Award — it’s hard to imagine reformers ever getting even this close.

Recently, Salon spoke over the phone with Greenwald, whose book on his experience with Snowden, “No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State,” was recently released in paperback. We touched on the reception to the book, the events in Baltimore, Hillary Clinton’s sincerity and the importance of the controversy involving this year’s PEN Awards and Charlie Hebdo. Our conversation is below and has been edited for clarity and length.

Why The Powers That Be Are Pushing A Cashless Society
We Can’t Rein In the Banks If We Can’t Pull Our Money Out of Them

Martin Armstrong summarizes the headway being made to ban cash,  and argues that the goal of those pushing a cashless society is to prevent bank runs … and increase their control:

The central banks are … planning drastic restrictions on cash itself. They see moving to electronic money will first eliminate the underground economy, but secondly, they believe it will even prevent a banking crisis. This idea of eliminating cash was first floated as the normal trial balloon to see how the people take it. It was first launched by Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard University and Willem Buiter, the chief economist at Citigroup. Their claims have been widely hailed and their papers are now the foundation for the new age of Economic Totalitarianism that confronts us. Rogoff and Buiter have laid the ground work for the end of much of our freedom and will one day will be considered the new Marx with hindsight. They sit in their lofty offices but do not have real world practical experience beyond theory. Considerations of their arguments have shown how governments can seize all economic power are destroy cash in the process eliminating all rights. Physical paper money provides the check against negative interest rates for if they become too great, people will simply withdraw their funds and hoard cash. Furthermore, paper currency allows for bank runs. Eliminate paper currency and what you end up with is the elimination of the ability to demand to withdraw funds from a bank.

In many nations, specific measures have already been taken demonstrating that the Rogoff-Buiter world of Economic Totalitarianism is indeed upon us. This is the death of Capitalism. Of course the socialists hate Capitalism and see other people’s money should be theirs. What they cannot see is that Capitalism is freedom from government totalitarianism. The freedom to pursue the field you desire without filling the state needs that supersede your own.

There have been test runs of this Rogoff-Buiter Economic Totalitarianism to see if the idea works. I reported on June 21, 2014 that Britain was doing a test run. A shopping street in Manchester banned cash as part of an experiment to see if Brits would accept a cashless society. London buses ended accepting cash payments from July 2014. Meanwhile, Currency Exchange dealers began offering debt cards instead of cash that they market as being safer to travel with. The Chorlton, South Manchester experiment was touted to test customers and business reaction to the idea for physical currency will disappear inside 20 years.

What’s Washington Doin’ in Central Asia Now?
Since the time the CIA financed and trained more than one hundred Mujahideen Islamic Jihadists, including a fanatical Saudi named Osama bin Laden, to wage a decade-long proxy war against forces of the Soviet Army in Afghanistan, Washington has been obsessed with the idea of penetrating deep into Central Asia in order to drive a wedge between China and Russia.

Early attempts in the wake of the post-2001 US forces’ presence in Afghanistan met with mixed success. Now it appears that Washington is frantically trying a repeat, even calling the ageing US Ambassador Richard M. Miles out of retirement to head a new try at a Color Revolution.

There seems to be a sense of urgency to Washington’s new focus on Central Asia. Russia is hardly buckling under from US and EU financial sanctions; rather she is looking more vibrant than ever, making strategic economic and military deals seemingly everywhere. And Russia’s Eurasian neighbor, The Peoples’ Republic of China, is laying plans to build energy pipelines and high speed rail links with Russia across Eurasia.

Washington appears now to be responding.

The problem with the Washington neoconservatives is that they aren’t very creative, in fact, in terms of understanding the larger consequences of their specific actions, they are rather stupid. And their shenanigens have become very well-known, not only in Moscow, but also in Uzbekistan, Kyrgystan and other Central Asian republics formerly part of the Soviet Union.

‘Father of internet’ speaks out against govt demand for back doors in encryption

Internet pioneer Vint Cerf said Monday that creating defects in encryption systems for law enforcement, often known as “back doors,” was “super, super risky” and not the “right answer.”

Cerf, recognized as a “father of the internet,” currently working at Google, told an audience at the National Press Club that he understood law enforcement’s desire to avoid being locked away from evidence that could be used to prevent crimes. He went on to say, however, that providing such access raises constitutional and legal questions.

“The Congress is forced now to struggle with that, and they’re going to have to listen to these various arguments about protection and safety on the one hand and preservation and privacy and confidentiality on the other,” Cerf said, as
reported by The Hill.

The Obama administration has been trying to force companies like Google and Apple to create defects in encryption so the FBI and other government agencies can gain access to people’s information; this despite mounting criticism over the plan – a criticism that’s shared by Cerf.

Open thread, talk the talk!