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PA's Dept. of Homeland Security Shared Oil-Shale Protester Info With Companies
Western Pennsylvania's shale oil deposits have lately attracted interest not only from companies who have been extracting some of that oil, but from locals who object to what they perceive as sharp dealing by the companies involved, favorable treatment by the state government, and environmental degradation as a result of the extraction. Some of the most visible of those protesters, it turns out, have been tracked (including "Web traffic") by Pennsylvania's own Homeland Security department, and that information about them has been shared not only within the department, but with the oil companies themselves. Homeland Security director James Powers defended the information shared with the oil companies as part of a triweekly bulletin, saying "We want to continue providing this support to the Marcellus Shale Formation natural gas stakeholders while not feeding those groups fomenting dissent against those same companies."
Oh wait, it's the democrats doing this. This is OK then.
I hear all the time about how government protects people from corporations, and that's why we have to keep giving government more and more power. Holy shit, you mean they actually don't?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I don't see what the PA department of homeland security has to benefit from giving that info to the companies? Can someone elaborate?
Which keeps me from making a first post. I mean, who wants Cowboy Neal hunting you down?
Who knew...
I bet the trains run on time though.
Deleted
This is terribly interesting, the worst nightmare posible. The entrenched law inforcement and investigatory agency, tax payer funded being used to unabashedly help business over the general welfare. Someone should be going to jail here.
I had to re-read this a few times. Are these guys taking their cues from North Korea newspapers? Whoever this guy is he should be 1) reminded of what the 1st amendment is about 2) fired.
If someone is shooting at my stuff, especially if it's the large, exploding kinda stuff, like a gas storage tank. I'd expect to be told about it. This doesn't sound so sinister.
Yea I know there are more important things to discus, like how the rich and connected hose those with more altruistic motives. Anyway Pedobear doesn't aprove, and he was here first.
Because James Powers will probably receive a FAT consultant job with Marcellus Shale Formation after he "retires" from his "public sector" job. Very popular thing with DoD generals and military contractors/suppliers in the past.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
This isn't new. There are youtube videos of the water coming out of people's kitchen faucet catching on fire.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRZ4LQSonXA
The process to remove natural gas and oil from shale is extremely complicated. Many companies won't even tell you what chemicals they use; they claim it's a "trade secret". They tell you that everything's okay, but you know for a fact that some of that cocktail they're pumping into the ground simply must be a carcinogen. And if they're drilling on your land, and you get your water from a well (and that's a lot of people in western PA), then you better believe that their fracking chemicals (hydraulic fracturing) are leeching into the local water table.
Naturally, there are also plenty of loopholes in the regulations to make sure that Corporate America can continue to rape and plunder low-life commoners like you and me.
For lots more information, go watch Gasland.
http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/613/index.html
:(){
and pronto. Hydraulic fracturing of shale is an absolutely legitimate health and environmental concern. There is no place for his behavior in Penn or any other state. The Justice Dept should get on this and him.
For many years now I've been calling the agency in question 'DFS', for 'Department of Fatherland Security'. I guess it was only a matter of time before they demonstrated their fascism in a public, step-on-your-own-dick manner. Now their pretense of righteousness has fallen away; DFS is obviously all about money and power, and has nothing whatsoever to do with the safety and security of America and her citizens. These clowns are simply organized criminals with a government mandate, and they run the biggest protection and extortion rackets in the whole country. Given a choice, I'd rather deal with the Mafia - they seem more honorable and more competent, and at least they don't pretend to hold the moral high ground.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
"Homeland Security" was sold as a defense of the "Homeland" against external enemies. Now we're seeing Homeland Security being used to investigate political activities of U.S. Citizens.
This is making me think of Flint in 1933. That's not good.
I was getting worried when the hubbub over the school spying on its students through webcams died off. Good to see we're maintaining our position as the fifth worst state in the Union.
Your brain is not a computer.
Cop walking the beat sees series of poorly xeroxed flyers affixed to several utility poles in neighborhood:
Vandalize Joe's Deli for being a capitalist pigdog! Contact Karl for organizing information.
Does the local police department be proactive, investigating Karl and reporting this issue to Joe, a private businessman?
Or does it wait for Joe to find his window busted?
Now what if the sign were just as poorly xeroxed, Karl just as big of a troublemaker, but the sign said "Protest" instead of "Vandalize"?
Where do you draw the line? It's a hard question to answer in a free society that also demands security, and given how much expensive and dangerous toys mining companies have in their possession, and how certain environmental "activists" and "protesters" like to carry tire irons and bold cutters in their arsenal of free speech, where do you draw the line now?
Just something to thing about before accusing your fellow Americans of being fascists and capitalist pigdogs.
This is apropos because the Pennsylvania State Police began in the early 19th century as the private Iron and Coal Police of the mine and mill owners. The owners tired of paying for their muscle all by themselves and recruited the taxpayers of Pennsylvania to chip in by getting the State of Pennsylvania to ... what's the opposite of "privatize"? Publicize? Anyway, the State adopted the bosses' private security apparatus as a whole, changed its name to the State Police, and started to pay their salaries to do what they had been doing anyway: fighting the unions and communities that were struggling to improve wages and working conditions in the coal mines and steel mills of Pennsylvania.
This is all detailed in Kristian Williams's excellent history of the police in America Our Enemies in Blue .
To paraphrase the techno band Pendelum "Ok, F*** it, we do whatever the big corporations want. What you gonna do?"
This is why there's almost never such a thing as an actual conspiracy. Why spend the effort to hide something when you can do it in the open without any consequences?
Ain't that the state with water that lights on fire, ground that's burning hot enough to cook a turkey, and Alabama in the middle?
I say we nuke it from Orbit. It's the only way to be sure. Damn sure. Plus we get rid of Alabama.
Can you tell I went to Auburn?
The institutions of government must be used against the people! I guess Govt. believes that now....
That's why the Bill of Rights was written. That's why the weakening of the Tenth Amendment was treasonous behavior. That's why Franklin D. Roosevelt was a traitor to the American people. Government is not the solution to the problem, it is not part of the problem, it is the problem itself.
Oppose it.
Your analogy is far from what happened here. A lot of these people were simply attending meetings in an attempt to change official policy.
Just because Karl has a history of vandalizing the deli doesn't mean the state has a right to tell Joe which people share Karl's political viewpoints and are trying to lawfully shut down the deli through zoning changes.
In this case, you have state employees who have clearly violated federal free speech laws, does that mean that we should track the peaceful political actions of all federal employees on their private time for being associated with them?
I am so glad PA is taking care of me and my family. Maybe, next time I wash my clothes they can be used as torch fodder. The wells are going in all around us, and I wait the day that our water is full of extra delicious tastes. Maybe we will get to sell our homes like "love canal" when the water gets to dirty. I still remember seeing pictures of a river on fire in Ohio, I think it was in Cleveland. Oh I know, this winter if we get four more feet of snow on our roofs, we can just hook a hose up to the water, light it and burn the snow right off.
...with the idea that government is necessarily evil. That is the libertarian-corporate clusterf--k that has infected our entire political culture.
Tom Ridge was the first Homeland Security chief, installed by Bush/Cheney. He's the guy who helped Bush/Cheney fake terror alerts timed to win elections. Ridge was Pennsylvania's governor until shortly before he headed Homeland Security, after decades at the top of Pennsylvania politics and police.
The PA Homeland Security department is completely compliant with Tom Ridge's way of doing business.
--
make install -not war
Most of the protesters are full of it. They protest every last thing the companies do, and most of them have been pretty open about what they do. They bitch about the environmental effects, but every single chemical (not just fracking) they use is public.
I was a Central Pennsylvanian. There are no jobs, no future, no industrial base to speak of. That's why I left. No point in staying. And here come the gas companies, paying royalties to everybody and their brother, and handing out jobs with paid training hand over fist.
Yes, they have fucked up a bit with the environment. But all the water used for fracking is removed from creeks, and the dirty water is trucked out for processing, not just dumped back. IIRC, they are now paying an environmental tax. The old tards who think its a bad idea for industry in PA can go to hell.
Correct, now continue on through by asking yourself,"how does one catch one who's crossed from one to another"? It's not like people who do the later wear a "I did it!" sign. Remember the job of security much like it should have been around the time of 9/11 is to catch before they can harm others, not after when a broom and mop may be needed.
The unfortunate reality is that there are always protestors in these kind of groups who go too far, and if we're honest, given the combustible nature of the stuff being extracted, anyone playing around with vandalism on these sorts of sites is playing around with explosives and exactly the kind of people who ought to be investigated by homeland security.
That sure sucks for the people who are against shale oil extraction but are not and do not support vandals or terrorists, but unfortunately sometimes life isn't fair.
$SUBJECT is just an example, really. But to expand bit: Old Boy's Networks seem to be quite effective against that. My guess is that there are already hordes of networked executives moving from corp to corp like locusts, just serving themselves.
Not that I pity the corps, though...
That's always the first and only thing I want to know, when confronted with a report like this. Did a Homeland Security agent commit a crime, and if so, what specific law was broken? The other side of that coin is that, if not, then no crime was committed, which moves the discussion into a direction "there should be a law", where I lose interest completely.
I don't see what the problem is.....
DHS provides information to a company about someone who poses a real security risk to them (the company). What's so wrong about that?
It's the same as the police informing you about someone who poses a very real threat to you.
If the police had information about someone who posed a threat to me, I'd sure like to know as much about them as I could so I could take the proper measures.....
Namely, a .40 Sig Sauer, a Browning Auto 5, 4 boxes of ammo, and a cooler full of beer.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
Uh, did you read the summary? It's complaining that the democrats are doing it.
Here, in case you missed it:
Western Pennsylvania's shale oil deposits have lately attracted interest not only from companies who have been extracting some of that oil, but from locals who object to what they perceive as sharp dealing by the companies involved, favorable treatment by the state government, and environmental degradation as a result of the extraction. Some of the most visible of those protesters, it turns out, have been tracked (including "Web traffic") by Pennsylvania's own Homeland Security department, and that information about them has been shared not only within the department, but with the oil companies themselves. Homeland Security director James Powers defended the information shared with the oil companies as part of a triweekly bulletin, saying "We want to continue providing this support to the Marcellus Shale Formation natural gas stakeholders while not feeding those groups fomenting dissent against those same companies."
You see, it's not OK even though it's the democrats doing it.
You just failed big time.
Replace "oil" with "natural gas" in OP.
That's just sloppy.
The department of homeland security is BIG BROTHER. They do not want to protect you they want to watch you. This is a violation of our rights and must be stopped. No one was fired. Rendell says he is to blame so Rendell should go to JAIL!!! People that take the blame must take the punishment.
This is Bull Poo.
Welcome to the United Corporations of America!
If you ask me it's time we brought back the death penalty for unruly corporations.
That's exactly as it used to be. Pennsylvania was notorious for shutting down banks that were misbehaving in the 1810's and 1820's. All corporations of the time were for limited terms and for public benefit.
Come around towards 1870 and John D. Rockefeller finds he can use his "influence" in Congress to get corporations made permanent, and soon in Santa Clara a footnote to an unrelated case finds that corporations have human rights, and all three branches of government heartily embrace this bizzare idea.
Soon after the "Trust Busters" decided to break up Standard Oil and implemented the break-up plan that Rockefeller himself crafted (as he had found Standard Oil by that time to be too unwieldy to compete nimbly). They showed him, right?
Witness the transformation of the Wall Street banks in the 1990's from partnerships (where the owners' money is directly at risk) to corporate ownership and the resulting shenanigans that ensued.
Corporations remove that direct responsibility, and are, in essence, an agreement between the government and the managers to protect the managers from the People when they engage in malfeasance. Typically, those managers see to it that the representatives in Government are well taken care of, and thus the positive-feedback loop is complete.
Partnerships are the natural structure of companies that need to grow to a large size. There is a limit on their size, in contrast to giant multi-national corporations. Some will argue that the big multi-nationals are essential to provide some kind of product at some kind of price, but the evidence against them is far too compelling to support those arguments of a net-utility benefit.
I'll get a bunch of responses here that we need a big government to protect us from corporations (from well-meaning folks educated in government education centers) but I hope I've given enough of a kernel of information to lead you to read up on how government action is the root problem here, and that corporations exist only at its pleasure.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
And speaking as someone who lives near PA, I don't want your refugees when the company fucks up on safety and starts a fire they can't put out and then it burns for the next 250 years. Great that they are fracking the Natural Gas, 'cause it brings in jobs, but I'm sure that's what those folks on the Gulf Coast thought too, just BEFORE Deep Horizon blew a gasket.
Point is: Sooner or later, they *will* screw up, and either start a fire, or poison the area so badly, that the jobs go away, hell, whole towns will go away, and then those people will invade my state looking to resettle and take our jobs.
I believe it's already the case that many people are reporting that the water coming out of the tap smells badly, or is a funny color.. So, I'm going for the poisoning the landscape. And remember, folks from NY and NJ, that a lot of the food you're eating comes from PA, so, whatever's getting into the water is goiing into your food.
Chew on that for a while while you come down with lymphoma.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Thanks for that link you posted; really important stuff:
"Thom Hartmann: Are Corporations People?"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHmGEkzhhfQ
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Of course, ironically, we can just use renewable energy and not have so much controversy... But fossil fuels are heavily subsidized in terms of both government incentives and ignored externalities...
http://www.energyandcapital.com/articles/oil-gas-crude/461
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
See also:
"Report: Famed Civil Rights Photographer Ernest Withers Spied for FBI"
http://newsfeed.time.com/2010/09/14/report-famed-civil-rights-photographer-ernest-withers-spied-for-fbi/
"Ernest C. Withers had been the photographer who chronicled the civil rights movement through the 50s and 60s. His photos of the gruesome racial murder of teenager Emmitt Till still resonate to this day; he was there when nine students integrated Little Rock Central High School; and his camera shutters snapped just moments after Martin Luther King was assassinated. And all the while, according to the Memphis Commercial Appeal, Withers was betraying everything he knew about the civil rights movement to the FBI."
Which connects to my previous post on the open manufacturing list: :-) as well as so Smári and Bryan and others here can be proud of them too. :-) And, given the CIA is hiring machinists, build a movement where, in a good way, you assume everyone in it is working for the CIA, :-) but where you still get important stuff done in moving the world towards a post-scarcity open future. Just like people should assume Google is a division of the NSA and/or CIA. :-) An impossible task? Well, consider it more like a creative challenge. :-) "
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/ae28e8971f8f9669?hl=en
"My advice to people here is to build movements in such a way that the CIA can be proud of them
And:
"The need for FOSS intelligence tools for sensemaking etc."
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/2846ca1b6bee64e1
"As I see it, there is a race going on. The race is between two trends. On the one hand, the internet can be used to profile and round up dissenters to the scarcity-based economic status quo (thus legitimate worries about privacy and something like TIA). On the other hand, the internet can be used to change the status quo in various ways (better designs, better science, stronger social networks advocating for things like a basic income, all supported by better structured arguments like with the Genoa II approach) to the point where there is abundance for all and rounding up dissenters to mainstream economics is a non-issue because material abundance is everywhere. So, as Bucky Fuller said, whether is will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end. While I can't guarantee success at the second option of using the internet for abundance for all, I can guarantee that if we do nothing, the first option of using the internet to round up dissenters (or really, anybody who is different, like was done using IBM computers in WWII Germany) will probably prevail. So, I feel the global public really needs access to these sorts of sensemaking tools in an open source way, and the way to use them is not so much to "fight back" as to "transform and/or transcend the system". As Bucky Fuller said, you never change thing by fighting the old paradigm directly; you change things by inventing a new way that makes the old paradigm obsolete."
By the way, someone (mrbrod) in the com
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
It would be reasonable if the only information they provided was "safety" related. Using your analogy, the police may give you a name, photo, and make/model of the car of an individual who may be a threat to you. But they most certainly wouldn't give you their license plate number, drivers license number/info, home address, work address, internet history, credit card history, check history, etc. It sounds like DHS is providing at least a few of these bits of information if not allowing them full access to their "terror database". If this is true it is much more likely being used as a dirt slinging/extortion tool than a safety tool. "Mr Smith, we would appreciate it if you would stop organizing protests against us. Otherwise you wife might just find out about your visits to [questionable website].com and how often you stop by the strip club over in [town]. Thank you for your cooperation"
I've worked at a lot of different companies, and some are targets...not just for terrorists, but kooks. The company I work for makes eeeeeevil weapons of war. We've had people sneak past security and try to wage a protest in our offices. We've had people try to sneak in weapons. We've had people try to damage our products. We've had people SUCCEED in damaging our products. We know all to well that we are under threat.
I also worked at a chemical company. We knew full well that some people objected to anything man-made and might attempt sabotage or worse. There is a reason why we had on-site security.
If there are groups planning to protest at our work site, YOU'rRE DAMN RIGHT we would like to know about it. Do we need to know about the individuals involved? Maybe. I consider it a judgement call based on their history. If one person had a history of illegal or violent protesting actions. Once again YOU BETTER BELIEVE that I want our security staff on the lookout. 99% of protesters are perfectly peaceful, and I'm not concerned about those...it's the unhinged kooks who tend to kill people.
The environmental movement is full of violent wackjobs. Their media only carry the most extreme. What goes unreported are all the death threats to *children* of company employees. The Left is delusional and violent; they think they are saving the planet so they stalk kids.
So, ram it up your fucking asses, environmentalist terrorists. You burn labs, houses, cars, threaten children, trespass, B&E, all in the name of Earth. Well to hell with you fucks.
THE ONLY HONEST ENVIRONMENTALIST IS A SUICIDE
So get busy.
Challenge the legality of Corporate Tax on the basis of race discrimination. Corporations are people (ridiculous but its a matter of law), they are racially unique due to the absence of any genetic material. They receive special tax benefits that are only available for one racial group (corporations). End the discrimination!
Yeah, the robber baron era was perhaps the pinnacle of corporatist greed and the low point of "we the people's" power. In America at least. Between then and now, things had gotten better (thanks Sherman!), but it appears we're regressing. This here certainly appears to be an example of blatant disregard for the democratic power structure.
I dunno if you've noticed, but liberals have been coming down on Obama for continuing many of Bush's worst policies. Contrast with what you rightists have done regarding many of these same policies. When it became apparent Bush was assassinating people, rightists did not criticize him for it, instead they accused anyone who had a problem with it of being anti-American traitors who were "with the terrorists". Now that Obama is continuing this bad policy, this same exact policy has gone from something the government must do, to something bad.
While a certain amount of this "it's only bad when the other side does it" does indeed happen on both sides, you rightists have proven yourselves to be much, much worse, so don't even think about trying to project onto others your most glaring flaws.