covert ops

There is something creepy and un-American about such clandestine and underhanded behavior. To those of us who have lived under a totalitarian regime, there is an eerie feeling of déjà vu. This case, if any, deserves the comprehensive, mature and diverse consideration that an en banc panel can provide. We are taking a giant leap into the unknown, and the consequences for ourselves and our children may be dire and irreversible. Some day, soon, we may wake up and find we're living in Oceania.
--Kozinski Chief LOLcat of the 9th Circuit

Via Chief Judge of 9th Circuit: “1984 here at last,” especially for poor. | Dailycensored.com -

So frequently these authoritarians schemes get one greenlight after another. This dissent nails down a wide variety of problems, from GPS spying to the distinct pattern of only appointing rich people with rich friends to the judiciary. This is a really nice dissent from Chief Judge Kozinski, who is regarded apparently as a bomb-throwing libertarian.

I'll post it in full, because we gotta pay some respect when one of these cats actually earns his paycheck.

******

VIA Laws, Life, and Legal Matters - Court Cases and Legal Information at Leagle.com - All Federal and State Appeals Court Cases in One Search

See also: Judges Divided Over Growing GPS Surveillance - NYTimes.com

U.S. v. PINEDA-MORENO

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, Plaintiff-Appellee,
v.
JUAN PINEDA-MORENO, Defendant-Appellant.

No. 08-30385.

United States Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit.

Filed August 12, 2010.

Before: Diarmuid F. O'Scannlain and N. Randy Smith, Circuit Judges, and Charles R. Wolle, Senior District Judge.[1 ]

Order; Dissent by Chief Judge Kozinski, Dissent by Judge Reinhardt.

The petition for rehearing en banc is DENIED.

ORDER

Judges O'Scannlain and N.R. Smith have voted to deny the petition for rehearing en banc, and Judge Wolle has so recommended.

The full court was advised of the petition for rehearing en banc. A judge requested a vote on whether to rehear the matter en banc, and the matter failed to receive a majority of the votes of the nonrecused active judges in favor of en banc consideration. Fed. R. App. P. 35.

Chief Judge KOZINSKI, with whom Judges REINHARDT, WARDLAW, PAEZ and BERZON join, dissenting from the denial of rehearing en banc:

Having previously decimated the protections the Fourth Amendment accords to the home itself, United States v.Lemus, 596 F.3d 512 (9th Cir. 2010) (Kozinski, C.J., dissenting from the denial of rehearing en banc); United Statesv. Black, 482 F.3d 1044 (9th Cir. 2007) (Kozinski, J., dissenting from the denial of rehearing en banc), our court now proceeds to dismantle the zone of privacy we enjoy in the home's curtilage and in public. The needs of law enforcement, to which my colleagues seem inclined to refuse nothing, are quickly making personal privacy a distant memory. 1984 may have come a bit later than predicted, but it's here at last.

The facts are disturbingly simple: Police snuck onto Pineda-Moreno's property in the dead of night and attached a GPS tracking device to the underside of his car. The device continuously recorded the car's location, allowing police to monitor all of Pineda-Moreno's movements without the need for visual surveillance. The panel holds that none of this implicates the Fourth Amendment, even though the government concedes that the car was in the curtilage of Pineda-Moreno's home at the time the police attached the tracking device. The panel twice errs in very significant and dangerous ways.

1. The opinion assumes that Pineda-Moreno's driveway was part of his home's curtilage, yet concludes that Pineda-Moreno had no reasonable expectation of privacy there. Curtilage is a quaint word most people are not familiar with; even among judges and lawyers, the word is seldom well understood. Yet, it stands for a very important concept because it rounds out the constitutional protections accorded an individual when he is at home.

Curtilage comes to us by way of Middle English and traces its roots to the Old French courtillage, roughly meaning court or little yard. In modern times it has come to mean those portions of a homeowner's property so closely associated with the home as to be considered part of it. The walkway leading from the street to the house is probably part of the curtilage, and the stairs from the walkway to the porch almost certainly are, as is the porch where grandma sits and rocks most afternoons and watches strangers pass by. The attached garage on the side of the house is part of the curtilage, and so is the detached shed where dad keeps his shop equipment and mom her gardening tools—so long as it's not too far from the house itself. The front lawn is part of the curtilage, and the driveway and the backyard—if it's not too big, and is properly separated from the open fields beyond the house.

Whether some portion of property—the porch, the stairs, the shed, the yard, the chicken coop—is part of the curtilage is sometimes a disputed question. But once it is determined that something is part of the curtilage, it's entitled to precisely the same Fourth Amendment protections as the home itself. How do we know? Because the Supreme Court has said so repeatedly.

In Oliver v. United States, the Court said as follows:

[O]nly the curtilage . . . warrants the Fourth Amendment protections that attach to the home. At common law, the curtilage is the area to which extends the intimate activity associated with the "sanctity of a man's home and the privacies of life," and therefore has been considered part of home itself for Fourth Amendment purposes. Thus, courts have extended Fourth Amendment protection to the curtilage.

466 U.S. 170, 180 (1984) (quoting Boyd v. United States, 116 U.S. 616, 630 (1886)) (emphasis added). Three years later, the Court reiterated the same view in United States v. Dunn, 480 U.S. 294, 300 (1987):

[In Oliver] we recognized that the Fourth Amendment protects the curtilage of a house and that the extent of the curtilage is determined by factors that bear upon whether an individual reasonably may expect that the area in question should be treated as the home itself.

(Emphasis added). See also Dow Chemical Co. v. United States, 476 U.S. 227, 231 (1986) (citing Oliver, 466 U.S. at 170). There's no disputing that the Court considers the curtilage to stand on the same footing as the home itself for purposes of the Fourth Amendment.

While it can be unclear whether a particular portion of the homeowner's property is part of the curtilage, there's no doubt here because the government concedes that Pineda-Moreno's driveway is a part of his curtilage, and the panel expressly assumes that it is. United States v. Pineda-Moreno, 591 F.3d 1212, 1214-15 (9th Cir. 2010). Having made that assumption, Oliver and Dunn require the panel to "treat[ ] [it] as the home itself." Dunn, 480 U.S. at 300. Instead, the panel holds that Pineda-Moreno was required to separately establish a reasonable expectation of privacy in the curtilage. That— according to Oliver and Dunn—is like requiring the homeowner to establish a reasonable expectation of privacy in his bedroom. We are often reminded that we must follow Supreme Court precedent, see, e.g., Winn v. Ariz. Christian Sch. Tuition Org., 586 F.3d 649, 658-59 (9th Cir. 2009) (O'Scannlain, J., dissenting from denial of rehearing en banc), but the panel here forgets this advice.

The panel does cite California v. Ciraolo, 476 U.S. 207 (1986), but that case undermines its position. Ciraolo held that a homeowner has no reasonable expectation of visual privacy in his property as to activities that might be seen from a low-flying airplane. The activity there in question— cultivation of marijuana—took place in the homeowner's yard, so the Court could have limited its discussion to the curtilage. Instead, Ciraolo quoted a passage from Katz v.United States, 389 US. 347, 361 (1967), to the effect that "a man's home is, for most purposes, a place where he expects privacy, but objects, activities, or statements that he exposes to the `plain view' of outsiders are not `protected' because no intention to keep them to himself has been exhibited." Ciraolo, 476 U.S. at 215 (quoting Katz,389 U.S. at 361). This passage applies equally to a person's yard as his porch and his bedroom window: If what you do in your home is visible to the public, you have no reasonable expectation that it will remain private. Ciraolo citesOliver and follows its analysis by treating the curtilage and the home as exactly the same for Fourth Amendment purposes.

The panel's rationale for concluding that Pineda-Moreno had no reasonable expectation of privacy is even more worrisome than its disregard of Supreme Court precedent: According to the panel, Pineda-Moreno's driveway was open to the public in that strangers wishing to reach the door of his trailer "to deliver the newspaper or to visit someone would have to go through the driveway to get to the house." Pineda-Moreno, 591 F.3d at 1215. But there are many parts of a person's property that are accessible to strangers for limited purposes: the mailman is entitled to open the gate and deposit mail in the front door slot; the gas man may come into the yard, go into the basement or look under the house to read the meter; the gardener goes all over the property, climbs trees, opens sheds, turns on the sprinkler and taps into the electrical outlets; the pool man, the cable guy, the telephone repair man, the garbage collector, the newspaper delivery boy (we should be so lucky) come onto the property to deliver their wares, perform maintenance or make repairs. This doesn't mean that we invite neighbors to use the pool, strangers to camp out on the lawn or police to snoop in the garage. See United States v. Hedrick, 922 F.2d 396, 400, 402 (7th Cir. 1991) (Cudahy, J., dissenting).

The panel authorizes police to do not only what invited strangers could, but also uninvited children—in this case crawl under the car to retrieve a ball and tinker with the undercarriage. But there's no limit to what neighborhood kids will do, given half a chance: They'll jump the fence, crawl under the porch, pick fruit from the trees, set fire to the cat and micturate on the azaleas. To say that the police may do on your property what urchins might do spells the end of Fourth Amendment protections for most people's curtilage.

The very rich will still be able to protect their privacy with the aid of electric gates, tall fences, security booths, remote cameras, motion sensors and roving patrols, but the vast majority of the 60 million people living in the Ninth Circuit will see their privacy materially diminished by the panel's ruling. Open driveways, unenclosed porches, basement doors left unlocked, back doors left ajar, yard gates left unlatched, garage doors that don't quite close, ladders propped up under an open window will all be considered invitations for police to sneak in on the theory that a neighborhood child might, in which case, the homeowner "would have no grounds to complain." Id.

There's been much talk about diversity on the bench, but there's one kind of diversity that doesn't exist: No truly poor people are appointed as federal judges, or as state judges for that matter. Judges, regardless of race, ethnicity or sex, are selected from the class of people who don't live in trailers or urban ghettos. The everyday problems of people who live in poverty are not close to our hearts and minds because that's not how we and our friends live. Yet poor people are entitled to privacy, even if they can't afford all the gadgets of the wealthy for ensuring it. Whatever else one may say about Pineda-Moreno, it's perfectly clear that he did not expect— and certainly did not consent—to have strangers prowl his property in the middle of the night and attach electronic tracking devices to the underside of his car. No one does.

When you glide your BMW into your underground garage or behind an electric gate, you don't need to worry that somebody might attach a tracking device to it while you sleep. But the Constitution doesn't prefer the rich over the poor; the man who parks his car next to his trailer is entitled to the same privacy and peace of mind as the man whose urban fortress is guarded by the Bel Air Patrol. The panel's breezy opinion is troubling on a number of grounds, not least among them its unselfconscious cultural elitism.

2. After concluding that entering onto Pineda-Moreno's property and attaching a tracking device to his car required no warrant, probable cause, founded suspicion or by-your-leave from the homeowner, the panel holds that downloading the data from the GPS device, which gave police the precise locus of all of Pineda-Moreno's movements, also was not a search, and so police can do it to anybody, anytime they feel like it. Contra United Statesv. Maynard, No. 08-3030, slip op. at 19 (D.C. Cir. Aug. 6, 2010). Our panel relies on United States v. Knotts, 460 U.S. 276 (1983), a case from the early 1980s, which involved very different technology.

The Knotts Court refers to the device used there as a "beeper" and describes it as "a radio transmitter, usually battery operated, which emits periodic signals that can be picked up by a radio receiver." Id. at 277. The beeper helped police follow a vehicle by emitting a signal that got stronger the closer the police were to it. The Court considered the beeper to be an aid to following a vehicle through traffic: "The governmental surveillance conducted by means of the beeper in this case amounted principally to the following of an automobile on public streets and highways." Id. at 281. Individuals traveling on streets and highways can be seen by the public, so they have no reasonable expectation that they won't be followed. The beeper helped the police follow the suspect more effectively—the way binoculars enhance the ability to see what is otherwise visible. But the beeper could perform no tracking on its own, nor could it record its location. If no one was close enough to pick up the signal, it was lost forever.

The electronic tracking devices used by the police in this case have little in common with the primitive devices inKnotts. One of the devices here used GPS satellites to pinpoint the car's location on a continuing basis—much like the electronic maps that are now popular in cars. The other type of device was, essentially, a cell phone that tracked the car's movements by its proximity to particular cell towers.

Beepers could help police keep vehicles in view when following them, or find them when they lost sight of them, but they still required at least one officer—and usually many more—to follow the suspect. The modern devices used in Pineda-Moreno's case can record the car's movements without human intervention—quietly, invisibly, with uncanny precision. A small law enforcement team can deploy a dozen, a hundred, a thousand such devices and keep track of their various movements by computer, with far less effort than was previously needed to follow a single vehicle. The devices create a permanent electronic record that can be compared, contrasted and coordinated to deduce all manner of private information about individuals. By holding that this kind of surveillance doesn't impair an individual's reasonable expectation of privacy, the panel hands the government the power to track the movements of every one of us, every day of our lives.

The Supreme Court has recognized that advances in "police technology [can] erode the privacy guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment." Kyllo v. United States, 533 U.S. 27, 34 (2001). To guard against this, courts "must take the long view, from the original meaning of the Fourth Amendment forward." Id. at 40. Kyllo followed a line of cases going back to United States v. Karo, 468 U.S. 705 (1984), Katz, 389 U.S. at 353, and Silverman v. United States,365 U.S. 505, 512 (1961), which stemmed the erosion of personal privacy wrought by technological advances.

In Kyllo, the Court held that use of a thermal imager to detect the heat emanating from defendant's home was a search for purposes of the Fourth Amendment because the then-new technology enabled police to detect what was going on inside the home—activities the homeowner was entitled to consider private. Any other conclusion, the Court noted, "would leave the homeowner at the mercy of advancing technology—including imaging technology that could discern all human activity in the home." Kyllo, 533 U.S. at 35-36 (citing Karo, 468 U.S. at 705). "While the technology used in the present case was relatively crude," the Court continued, "the rule we adopt must take account of more sophisticated systems that are already in use or in development." Id. at 36. In determining whether the tracking devices used in PinedaMoreno's case violate the Fourth Amendment's guarantee of personal privacy, we may not shut our eyes to the fact that they are just advance ripples to a tidal wave of technological assaults on our privacy.

If you have a cell phone in your pocket, then the government can watch you. Michael Isikoff, The Snitch in Your Pocket, Newsweek, Mar. 1, 2010, available at http:// www.newsweek.com/id/233916. At the government's request, the phone company will send out a signal to any cell phone connected to its network, and give the police its location. Last year, law enforcement agents pinged users of just one service provider—Sprint—over eight million times. SeeChristopher Soghoian, 8 Million Reasons for Real Surveillance Oversight, Slight Paranoia (Dec. 1, 2009) http://paranoia/dubfire. net/2009/12/8-million-reasons-for-real-surveillance.html. The volume of requests grew so large that the 110-member electronic surveillance team couldn't keep up, so Sprint automated the process by developing a web interface that gives agents direct access to users' location data. Id. Other cell phone service providers are not as forthcoming about this practice, so we can only guess how many millions of their customers get pinged by the police every year. See Justin Scheck, Stalkers Exploit Cellphone GPS, Wall St. J., Aug. 5, 2010, at A1, A14 (identifying AT&T and Verizon as providing "law-enforcement[ ] easy access to such data").

Use LoJack or OnStar? Someone's watching you too. E.g., OnStar Stolen Vehicle Assistance, http://www.onstar.com/ us_english/jsp/plans/sva.jsp (last visited July 17, 2010). And it's not just live tracking anymore. Private companies are starting to save location information to build databases that allow for hyper-targeted advertising. E.g., Andrew Heining, What's So Bad About the Google Street View Data Flap?, Christian Sci. Monitor, May 15, 2010, available at http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2010/0515/What-s-sobad-about-the-Google-Street-View-data-flap. Companies are amassing huge, ready-made databases of where we've all been. If, as the panel holds, we have no privacy interest in where we go, then the government can mine these databases without a warrant, indeed without any suspicion whatsoever.

By tracking and recording the movements of millions of individuals the government can use computers to detect patterns and develop suspicions. It can also learn a great deal about us because where we go says much about who we are. Are Winston and Julia's cell phones together near a hotel a bit too often? Was Syme's OnStar near an STD clinic? Were Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford at that protest outside the White House? The FBI need no longer deploy agents to infiltrate groups it considers subversive; it can figure out where the groups hold meetings and ask the phone company for a list of cell phones near those locations.

The panel holds that the government can obtain this information without implicating the Fourth Amendment because an individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy in his movements through public spaces where he might be observed by an actual or hypothetical observer. But that's quite a leap from what the Supreme Court actually held inKnotts, which is that you have no expectation of privacy as against police who are conducting visual surveillance, albeit "augmenting the sensory faculties bestowed upon them at birth with such enhancements as science and technology afford[s] them." 460 U.S. at 282.

You can preserve your anonymity from prying eyes, even in public, by traveling at night, through heavy traffic, in crowds, by using a circuitous route, disguising your appearance, passing in and out of buildings and being careful not to be followed. But there's no hiding from the all-seeing network of GPS satellites that hover overhead, which never sleep, never blink, never get confused and never lose attention. Nor is there respite from the dense network of cell towers that honeycomb the inhabited United States. Acting together these two technologies alone can provide law enforcement with a swift, efficient, silent, invisible and cheap way of tracking the movements of virtually anyone and everyone they choose. See, e.g., GPS Mini Tracker with Cell Phone Assist Tracker, http://www.spyville.com/passive-gps.html (last visited July 17, 2010). Most targets won't know they need to disguise their movements or turn off their cell phones because they'll have no reason to suspect that Big Brother is watching them.

The Supreme Court in Knotts expressly left open whether "twenty-four hour surveillance of any citizen of this country" by means of "dragnet-type law enforcement practices" violates the Fourth Amendment's guarantee of personal privacy. 460 U.S. at 283-84. When requests for cell phone location information have become so numerous that the telephone company must develop a self-service website so that law enforcement agents can retrieve user data from the comfort of their desks, we can safely say that "such dragnet-type law enforcement practices" are already in use. This is precisely the wrong time for a court covering one-fifth of the country's population to say that the Fourth Amendment has no role to play in mediating the voracious appetites of law enforcement. But see Maynard, slip op. at 19.

* * *

I don't think that most people in the United States would agree with the panel that someone who leaves his car parked in his driveway outside the door of his home invites people to crawl under it and attach a device that will track the vehicle's every movement and transmit that information to total strangers. There is something creepy and un-American about such clandestine and underhanded behavior. To those of us who have lived under a totalitarian regime, there is an eerie feeling of déjà vu. This case, if any, deserves the comprehensive, mature and diverse consideration that an en banc panel can provide. We are taking a giant leap into the unknown, and the consequences for ourselves and our children may be dire and irreversible. Some day, soon, we may wake up and find we're living in Oceania.

REINHARDT, Circuit Judge, dissenting from the denial of rehearing en banc:

I concur in Chief Judge Kozinski's dissent.

I have served on this court for nearly three decades. I regret that over that time the courts have gradually but deliberately reduced the protections of the Fourth Amendment to the point at which it scarcely resembles the robust guarantor of our constitutional rights we knew when I joined the bench. See Fisher v. City of San Jose, 558 F.3d 1069, 1089 (9th Cir. 2009) (en banc) (Reinhardt, J., dissenting); United States v. Ankeny, 502 F.3d 829, 841 (9th Cir. 2007) (Reinhardt, J., dissenting); United States v. Crapser, 472 F.3d 1141, 1149 (9th Cir. 2007) (Reinhardt, J., dissenting); United States v. Gourde, 440 F.3d 1065, 1074 (9th Cir. 2006) (en banc) (Reinhardt, J., dissenting);United States v. Kincade, 379 F.3d 813, 842 (9th Cir. 2004) (en banc) (Reinhardt, J., dissenting); United States v. Hudson, 100 F.3d 1409, 1421 (9th Cir. 1996) (Reinhardt, J., dissenting); Acton v. Vernonia Sch. Dist. 47J, 66 F.3d 217, 218 (9th Cir. 1995) (Reinhardt, J., dissenting); United States v. Barona, 56 F.3d 1087, 1098 (9th Cir. 1995) (Reinhardt, J., dissenting); United States v. Kelley, 953 F.2d 562, 566 (9th Cir. 1992) (Reinhardt, J., dissenting);United States v. Alvarez, 899 F.2d 833, 840 (9th Cir. 1990) (Reinhardt, J., dissenting); United States v. Flores, 679 F.2d 173, 178 (9th Cir. 1982) (Reinhardt, J., dissenting).

These decisions have curtailed the "right of the people to be secure . . . against unreasonable searches and seizures" not only in our homes and surrounding curtilage, but also in our vehicles, computers, telephones, and bodies — all the way down to our bodily fluids and DNA.

Today's decision is but one more step down the gloomy path the current Judiciary has chosen to follow with regard to the liberties protected by the Fourth Amendment. Sadly, I predict that there will be many more such decisions to come.

I dissent.

Alright here's a bizarre story about a strange man from New Jersey, Hal Turner, who rose to fame as a racist, anti-semitic blogger and radio talk show host whose violent rhetoric upset many people. Alex Jones to his credit accurately flagged Turner years ago as an FBI informant/operative. No mainstream writer would touch this one with a ten-foot pole! But there are too many LOLS! Onward!!

However, Turner plugged away at his strange game for years. He posted an op-ed saying that judges 'deserved' to be killed, which an Assistant US Attorney William "OOPS" Hogan seized upon to charge him. Unfortunately for the Establishment, a ton of shady laundry has been getting spilled into the open in court. Last week Turner got his second hung federal jury trial, with only two jurors considering him "guilty" in the elaborate FBI-staged farce. [MORE: NY DAILY NEWS, ALTERNET, WSJ, DESERET DOG]

Yesterday the "Family of Hal Turner Blog" posted a long account of Turner's secret role in spouting violent, racist, Hitler-like garbage on the airwaves under the direction of the Newark FBI JTTF specifically to trick pro-Israeli moles in law enforcement (by proxy the Anti-Defamation League & American Israel Public Affairs Committee) into looking up his police files.

So... the whole violent racist thing was a trick to get pro-Israeli spies to wig out. It seems Turner really is a racist goon (he was buddies with Sean Hannity earlier as well) but it seems he is less racist and violent than the FBI paid him to sound. And even if this bizarre FBI scheme was directed against Israeli covert moles, well, just as the FBI makes Muslim and activist communities in the US much less safe and sane through their violent undercover provocateurs, staging media-friendly fake, traumatic & violent events, the FBI paying Turner to do all this surely encouraged deranged people further towards acts of violence.

Many government units in the U.S. have paid off white supremacists quite well, if anything enhancing the KKK and others as a terroristic wing of the white US establishment. AIPAC, the ADL and the Southern Poverty Law Center are all a lot shadier than they like to appear -- in this case, at least, the line is sold AIPAC and ADL are still running these illegal espionage type operations, surprise surprise.

The Family claims Turner has told them this flushed the Israeli spy network out, in the most successful FBI counterintelligence op in many years. [Which shows you how ineffective these people are...]

The even weirder twist is that apparently the Newark FBI JTTF agents confided in Turner that A) FBI Headquarters was apparently penetrated by Israelis B) which made Newark FBI's many attempted investigations into the 9/11-Israeli connections (starting with the infamous 'dancing Israelis' and the Mossad front Urban Moving Systems of Weehauken, NJ) get shut down immediately. Thus, Newark FBI launched the Hal Turner Racist Troll Scheme as a compartmentalized operation, secretly hidden from FBI Headquarters. Even Turner's main handler was outside this main operation.

While this sounds dubious and almost like a limited hangout (we can imagine the ADL/AIPAC/assorted mockingbirds using a racist cracker like Turner to help coverup just about anything), unfortunately most of what is cited has already been going around for a long time. [Niaz Khan was interrogated for 3 weeks in Newark because he blew the 9/11 plot, and the Israeli security firm ICTC is deeply shady and probably a Mossad false flag front for airplane bombings & airport plots at any opportunity.]

The only major new twisted claim in this 9/11 account is the claim U.S. Intelligence secretly poisoned former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon because he orchestrated 9/11, and U.S. Intelligence is Taking Its Revenge. [This also seems kinda dubious -- if they're 'getting even' rather than 'coming clean' about the 9/11 Lie Industrial Complex, Americans are still prey to the expanding police grid supported by the Military Industrial Complex and more staged traumatic events.]

Also, the whole idea of blaming Israeli covert ops for staging 9/11 A) gives the Israelis too much credit -- the Dubai disaster for example shows ineptitude & arrogance B) Misdirects our attention from the corrupt Establishment security apparatus that has every incentive to set off staged / false flag attacks & other traumatic events. [JTTFs in particular, while appearing the "good guys" in this narrative, seem to do very little except stage more fake attacks.]

I'll crosspost this strange tale simply because it is something new. I don't like racists, JTTFs (which mainly seem to stage shady events and informant setups), or Israeli political operatives. So perhaps we can call this a symphony of goons, G-Men and covert Zionist operatives, all getting trolled by one joker from New Jersey and his FBI handlers, finally evening the score?! I've heard worse... :-/

Quick hits for the fans of stuff & things. Welcome to the Fishbowl says a sad federal judge upon the abandonment of the 4th Amendment. Alex Kozinski in the 9th Circuit has some integrity... via Reason:

This is an extraordinary case: Our court approves, without blinking, a police sweep of a person’s home without a warrant, without probable cause, without reasonable suspicion and without exigency—in other words, with nothing at all to support the entry except the curiosity police always have about what they might find if they go rummaging around a suspect’s home. Once inside, the police managed to turn up a gun “in plain view”—stuck between two cushions of the living room couch—and we reward them by upholding the search.

Did I mention that this was an entry into somebody’s home, the place where the protections of the Fourth Amendment are supposedly at their zenith?…

The opinion misapplies Supreme Court precedent, conflicts with our own case law and is contrary to the great weight of authority in the other circuits. It is also the only case I know of, in any jurisdiction covered by the Fourth Amendment, where invasion of the home has been approved based on no showing whatsoever. Nada. Gar nichts. Rien du tout. Bupkes.

Whatever may have been left of the Fourth Amendment after [United States v. Black] is now gone. The evisceration of this crucial constitutional protector of the sanctity and privacy of what Americans consider their castles is pretty much complete. Welcome to the fish bowl.

Meahwhile.... The dumb ban on short selling should increase fake puffing up of the market nicely.

First off Iran and Pakistan cooperated to grab Abdolmalek Rigi, leader of the shady terrorist/militant ring Jundullah, which seems to have been an American (and possibly Indian &/or Israeli) supported Baluchi militant ring, the cats-paw for Chalabi-like gooning around. Wayne Madsen (waynemadsenreport.com) claimed Rigi was around on shady American bases and got snagged in a clever ISI-Iran op, forcing his plane to land in Dubai. Nice!

REUTERS: ANALYSIS - Rigi arrest may show easing Afghan regional tensions

On the flip side is Ergenekon, which is a humorous Turkish establishment conspiracy of secular ultranationalists perpetually plotting against the Islamists in that unique post-Byzantine way. A ton of people just got arrested and it's all really quite awesome.

NEWBORN DNA SCHEMEZ: I am glad to see the Newborn DNA scheme is getting more attention. AP story. NewScientist. Popsci.

MTV exec says Jersey Shore is civic minded for GenY.

Joe Stack and likely coming attractions. People need to stay peaceful and chill out in these dire times. However as usual with 'lone wolves' like poor Mr Stack, strange links to the military-industrial complex were close at hand. Stack shared a hangar with some guy all up in the L3 shady ops biz. What else is new?

Financial Chaos Beckons (dunnn dunnn dunnnn, sez my roommate) : California edging closer to BondFail. Europe hit by waves of strikes and tumult. A summer of discontent in the works eh? ZeroHedge is just great, read it! Everyday Greece insurrection. Eurostat debt adjustment. Downgrades. Moar downgrades.

FDIC reports NEGATIVE balance. The FDIC is reporting bad things to come and is opening a satellite office in Illinois. Moar on FDIC. Speaking of Illinois they had an interesting secret meeting of their legislators and the National Conference of State Legislatures,  and we can only fear the collapse/martial law style content, or whatever doomladen scenario you care to assume. {they said it was just so people felt comfortable to talk, however it did sound exciting in a way :-P }

GOP wants statutory limit to include GSEs, a risky bizniss. GSE whacks the dollar. Ron Paul and the amusing Watergate/Saddam Hussein/Federal Reserve nexus. SPY bumps from key algo. Record US debt vs Keynesianism from Bloomberg. Gold Market irregularities? Nifty story of Yamashita's epic lost gold. Maestro sez its tha worst evar. Gunning the mkt in afterhours bumps!

RBS is on the hook for all this Greekness and the UK govt is on the hook for RBS! Tobin Tax in EU??

HUD REO sales seems to be some kind of racket via this page including in Minnesota. BestAssets of Sugarland TX.

BOMBSTATE: Garry Wills and the Bomb State, national security coldwar bloat & more. The nukes really launched the secret state.

TERRORSTATE: Glenn Greenwald blew my mind with this bizarre Newsweek editorial roundtable about how the writers & editors define terrorism. w0w!

SAVVY PRESS: An intriguing philosophy of the Kool Kats in the press.

Quick tour of South America narconews stuff. Uribe has messe dup recelection in some unexpected petition mess.

Coca Cola is going into Mezcal in Oaxaca, Mexico and corruption and taking the community water are the usual items on the neo-capitalist entree.

For Haiti travesties see mediahacker.org.

Natural Health crackdown is coming for your vitamins and McCains trying to make it happen. So that we can be all forcefed cornsyrup or something. Aloe Vera FDA Crackdown:: let's learn!

There are over 300 aloe vera species on earth. But the Aloe Barbadensis Miller species has been the favorite for study in scientific literature today. The main focus in ongoing research is a group of polysaccharides that contain the healing agents known as aloe polymannans. They all have different healing potentials.

The polymannan sizes range from small to medium to large and very large. Each one has a level of healing that corresponds in magnitude with its size. It's the very large molecular weight and long chain polymannans that Dr. Danhof extracted for use on cancer patients. Injecting the large molecule extract was necessary because it is very difficult to absorb through the digestive system.

Another aspect of these polymannans, especially the larger ones, is their capacity for organizing the immune system. These polymannans provide a detection capacity for cells to determine exactly what is needed for various pathogenic invaders. Without them, the cells are shooting wildly in the dark, and that can lead to damaging cytotoxic autoimmune responses.

From researcher Dr. Ivan Danhof: "The very large molecules are immune modulating, which have a powerful healing effect on AIDS, cancer and many different immune system disorders. It is also this large molecule that causes the body to produce a natural chemical, tumor necrosis factors, which functions to shut off the blood supply to tumors."

Anywhooo... Chronic health problems in children soar! Start with Bisphenol-A.

Lawyer goons peddling authoritarian concepts of 'intellectual property' come out against Open Source via the RIAA/MPAA Intellectual Property Alliance.

Tech tip for Final Cut Pro captioning, try Caption In Yourself or Jubler. Also the OSX Fluid App makes embeddable apps.

Reviews of Collapse movie with Michael Ruppert. Great review from Roger Ebert (4/4) HipHop Republican, Metro students, WhatWouldtowatch, some jackass, Enviralment, good review @ dangerousintersection, Montreal Gazette. I will have a kewl Ruppert Q&A video up pretty soon here.

An interesting confluence of events as Obama suddenly grants INTERPOL diplomatic immunity of sorts, while an apparent airport false flag operation or at least 'shady biz as usual' unravels pretty quickly. Good times in the shadow state for 2010.

We found some snippets on the case from two noted journalists in the shadowsphere, UK's Christopher Story & DC's Wayne Madsen. All too frequently Mr Madsen and Mr Story do not seem to report believable things, however in this case they are first on the scenes with some concrete bits to consider, and obviously in the Detroit bombing case as well as the INTERPOL thing a lot of stuff cannot be easily accounted for....

There's certainly a dead silence around the allegations from these guys more often than not, striking at times.

DETROIT UNDYBOMB SITUATION LIKELY FAKED -- WITNESS TO SHADY BIZ, INDIA AND CIA ETC ETC

Flight 253 passenger: Sharp-dressed man aided terror suspect Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab onto plane without passport (MLive.com exclusive) | Detroit News - - MLive.com

Hat tip to Sheena Harrison for unraveling another bit of the establishment narrative!

More: Haskell Family Blog: Lori's Liberal Realm: Latest Story--By Kurt Haskell & Infowars: False Flag Event in Detroit a Pretext to Invade Yemen

Commenter says he was aboard NWA Flight 253, saw suspected terrorist board the plane | Detroit News - - MLive.com

   "I was on this flight today and am thankful to be alive. My wife and I were returning from an African safari and had this connecting flight through Amsterdam. I sat in row 27, which was 7 rows behind the terrorist. I got to see the whole thing take place and it was very scary. Thanks to a few quick acting people I am still alive today.

   For those of you talking about airline security in this thread, I was next to the terrorist when he checked in at the Amsterdam airport early on Christmas. My wife and I were playing cards directly in front of the check in counter. This is what I saw (and I relayed this to the FBI when we were held in customs):

   An Indian man in a nicely dressed suit around age 50 approached the check in counter with the terrorist and said "This man needs to get on this flight and he has no passport." The two of them were an odd pair as the terrorist is a short, black man that looked like he was very poor and looks around age 17(Although I think he is 23 he doesn't look it). It did not cross my mind that they were terrorists, only that the two looked weird together. The ticket taker said "you can't board without a passport". The Indian man then replied, "He is from Sudan, we do this all the time". I can only take from this to mean that it is difficult to get passports from Sudan and this was some sort of sympathy ploy. The ticket taker then said "You will have to talk to my manager", and sent the two down a hallway. I never saw the Indian man again as he wasn't on the flight. It was also weird that the terrorist never said a word in this exchange. Anyway, somehow, the terrorist still made it onto the plane. I am not sure if it was a bribe or just sympathy from the security manager.

   FBI also arrested a different Indian man while we were held in customs after a bomb sniffing dog detected a bomb in his carry on bag and he was searched after we landed. This was later confirmed while we were in customs when an FBI agent said to us "You are being moved to another area because this area is not safe. Read between the lines. Some of you saw what just happened."(The arrest of the other Indian man). I am not sure why this hasn't made it into any news story, but I stood about 15-20 feet away from the other Indian man when he was cuffed and arrested after his search.

Flight 253 passenger Kurt Haskell: 'I was visited by the FBI' | Detroit News - - MLive.com

For the last five days I have been reporting my story of the so called "sharp dressed man." For those of you who haven't read my account, it involves a sharp dressed "Indian man" attempting to talk a ticket agent into letting a supposed "Sudanese refugee" (The terrorist) onto flight 253 without a passport. I have never had any idea how it played out except to note that the so called "Sudanese reefugee" later boarded my flight and attempted to blow it up and kill me. At no time did my story involve, or even find important whether the terrorist actually had a passport. The importance of my story was and always will be, the attempt with an accomplice (apparently succesful) of a terrorist with all sorts of prior terrorist warning signs to skirt the normal passport boarding procedures in Amsterdam. By the way, Amsterdam security did come out the other day and admit that the terrorist did not have to "Go through normal passport checking procedures".

   Amsterdam security, please define to the American public "Normal passport boarding procedures".

   You see the FBI would have the American public believe that what was important was whether the terrorist in fact had a passport.

   Seriously think about this people. You have a suicide bomber who had recently been to Yemen to but a bomb, whose father had reported him as a terrorist, who supposedly was on some kind of U.S. terror watchlist, and most likely knew the U.S. was aware of these red flags. Yet, he didn't go through "Normal passport checking procedures." What does that mean? Maybe that he flashed a passport to some sort of sympathetic security manager in a backroom to avoid a closer look at the terrorist's "red flags"? What is important is that the terrorist avoided using normal passport checking procedures (apparently successfully) in order to avoid a closer look into his red flags. Who cares if he had a passport. The important thing is that he didn't want to show it and somehow avoided a closer inspection and "normal passport checking procedures." Each passport comes with a bar code on it that can be scanned to provide a wealth of information about the individual. I would bet that the passport checking procedures for the terrorist did not include a bar code scan of his passport (which could have revealed damning information about the terrorist).

   Please note that there is a very easy way to verify the veracity of my prior "sharp dressed man" account. Dutch police have admitted that they have reviewed the video of the "sharp dressed man" that I referenced. Note that it has not been released anywhere, You see, if my eye witness account is false, it could easily be proven by releasing the video. However, the proof of my eyewitness account would also be verified if I am telling the truth and I am. There is a reason we have only heard of the video and not seen it. dutch authorities, "RELEASE THE VIDEO!" This is the most important video in 8 years and may be all of two minutes long. Show the entire video and "DO NOT EDIT IT"! The American public deserves its own chance to attempt to identify the "sharp dressed man". I have no doubt that if the video indicated that my account was wrong, that the video would have already swept over the entire world wide web.

   Instead of the video, we get a statment that the video has been viewed and that the terrorist had a passport. Each of these statements made by the FBI is a self serving play on semantics and each misses the importance of my prior "sharp dressed man" account. The importance being that the man "Tried to board the plane with an accomplice and without a passort". The other significance is that only the airport security video can verify my eyewitness account and that it is not being released.

   Who has the agenda here and who doesn't? Think about that for a minute.

Below the Interpol part, more about possible false flag setup via CIA/Mossad/India's RAW agency from Wayne Madsen.

EX-SECRET SERVICE OFFICERS CONTROL TSA MANAGEMENT, THE GANG O PREZ DETAIL DUDES

I heard the TSA top managers were basically the Secret Service guys from the last three administrations - specifically the cool cats from the presidential security detail within SS. What a great idea.... The Secret Service keeps a low profile but really it's now a big slice of the Department of Homeland Security power structure.

OBAMA EXECUTIVE ORDER 13524 == INTERPOL COMING FOR THE BANKERS HAHAHA?!?!!!????

   AMENDING EXECUTIVE ORDER 12425 DESIGNATING INTERPOL
AS A PUBLIC INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATION ENTITLED TO
  ENJOY CERTAIN PRIVILEGES, EXEMPTIONS, AND IMMUNITIES

   By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including section 1 of the International Organizations Immunities Act (22 U.S.C. 288), and in order to extend the appropriate privileges, exemptions, and immunities to the International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL), it is hereby ordered that Executive Order 12425 of June 16, 1983, as amended, is further amended by deleting from the first sentence the words "except those provided by Section 2(c), Section 3, Section 4, Section 5, and Section 6 of that Act" and the semicolon that immediately precedes them.

The funny one is angry bloggers who suspect the World Court via INTERPOL is coming after America for Bush-era war crimes of awesomeness: Hot Air » Did Obama exempt Interpol from same legal constraints as American law-enforcement? More: ThreatsWatch.Org: PrincipalAnalysis: Wither Sovereignty. YouTube - Alex Jones Xmas video alert. More: Interpol Under Siege by Uninformed Bloggers | UN Dispatch. Why make Interpol immune from American law? Handy: Analysis Of The Obama Interpol Order « Dprogram.net. Hm? Not News: Obama EO Removes Restrictions on INTERPOL | NewsBusters. LiveLeak.com - Obama issues executive order exempting INTERPOL from the restraints of the Constitution and American law while operating in the U.S.

The interesting version of INTERPOL is @ worldreports.org by UK writer/publisher Christopher Story. Read this one for a good time: News - OFFICIAL: MONEY SABOTEURS = ECONOMIC TERRORISTS.

The worries about Obama appears to be a diversion because INTERPOL is actually joining with the DOJ to crush the criminal banker syndicate, according to Mr Story, who tells of a giant lien upon the US Treasury has been activated by European and Chinese governments -- and mysterious planeloads of foreign agents arrived in December. Story's been talking about this for a while, making Obama's executive order a striking confirmation 'something is happening here.'

Mr Story 2009 finale, take it for what you will:

POLICY CHANGE AT THE U.S. DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE:

ALL U.S. FINANCIAL SUBVERSIVES NOW TREATED AS ECONOMIC TERRORISTS

We can now reveal, on the basis of impeccable authority divulged to us on 26th December 2009 from ‘inside the US structures’, that the US Department of Justice within the Executive Branch has implemented a fundamental POLICY CHANGE and has determined, within the past three weeks or less, and against the background of the calamity surrounding the Lien in the immense sum of $47 trillion activated on about 6th December and imposed by the sovereign Lien Holders – the Chinese parties and the British Monarchical Power – as follows:

• ALL individuals and entities within the United States' jurisdiction that have participated in the stealing, diversion and conversion of funds belonging to others, INCLUDING past and present officials. both elected and appointed, within the US Government and its structures, WILL BE INVESTIGATED AND PROSECUTED FOR ECONOMIC TERRORISM perpetrated against the United States and the American people (and the Rest of the World). Specifically:

• ANYONE, whether officials in, or formerly in Government, whether CEOs of financial institutions or lower-ranking bankers, partners in ‘involved’ US law firms, intermediaries and US intelligence operatives and others who have been engaged in obstructing the Settlements process by ANY MEANS WHATSOEVER AND AT ANY TIME IN THE PAST, and who have, by their actions or by their inactions, contributed to the DELAY, are now being treated as ECONOMIC TERRORISTS.

........ • This POLICY CHANGE is a direct consequence of the situation arising from the implementation of the Lien and the drastic enforcement measures being taken inside the United States by the massed international cadres and ‘men in suits’ referenced in recent reports and below.

• President Obama’s Executive Order Amending Executive Order 12425 dated 16th December and publicised by the Office of the Press Secretary, at the White House, on 17th December, to ‘extend the appropriate privileges, exemptions, and immunities to the International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL)’ is associated with this POLICY CHANGE at the Justice Department.

CONTINUED RECKLESSLY CRIMINAL FINANCE INTENTIONS

Hence, the criminal engineers behind this scandalous state of affairs have been frenetically trying to cobble together various alternative money trading mechanisms, together with their ‘necessary’ associated covers which are intended to provide false legitimacy – in the expectation that at least one of these will ‘come good’ and won’t be aborted and/or ‘shot down’ by nasty observers such as ourselves who are on the lookout for the next wave of financial corruption.

The reality of these successive ongoing attempts to construct clandestine transnational trading operations behind variegated covers is evidence of the continuing criminal intentions of those concerned, and of the fact that US Law Enforcement has hitherto disgracefully and weakly allowed these organised criminal financial scams to proliferate, discrediting itself in the process.

In this connection, the representatives of foreign creditor countries and their specialist staffers, intelligence personnel, bankers, IT specialists and enforcement personnel, assisted by the eighth planeload of heavily armed INTERPOL officers, are concerned explicitly with requiring performance under the terms of the Writ of Enforcement and the Lien held by the Chinese parties and the British Monarchical Power in the sum of $47 trillion, exercised against the US Treasury and de facto the Federal Reserve on or about 6th December 2009.

OTHER RECENT DEVELOPMENTS: BACK IN WASHINGTON, D.C.

Back in Washington, President Obama’s widely cited Executive Order Amending Executive Order 12425 which extended ‘the appropriate privileges, exemptions and immunities to the International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL)’ promulgated on 17th December 2009, revealed the stark reality that the Chinese and British Monarchical Power Lien Holders were continuing to force the pace – in collaboration here with President Obama who has at times appeared to be out of his depth and has shown some evidence of flip-flopping between the international community, and the harsh pressures placed on him by the arrogant appointees who have continued to defy the Lien Holders (and the President), such as Leon Panetta, the Director of Central Intelligence.

• However that phase is now almost certainly at an end, given not least the very open promulgation of this Executive Order by the White House Press Office.

Promulgation of this Executive Order triggered the predictable knee-jerk responses from those who have not understood what is going on, and who have failed to take on board that the Lien Holders and their servants take precedence over the highest office-holders in the United States, including the President, all of whom, with their predecessors, have been, and remain engaged in criminal conduct which the World Court has condemned. The perception that this represents a setback for the United States is nonsense in the prevailing circumstances – which entail the greatest crisis that the Republic has ever faced, despite it being successfully hidden from the people with the assistance of the co-conspiring so-called ‘mainstream’ press.

‘BRUTAL HORIZONTALISATIONS’ REPORTED FROM EUROPE AND THE UNITED STATES

Various anecdotal reports were received after we posted on 17th December, indicating that heavy operations to procure the necessary resolution were continuing. On 21st December 2009, we had established that an unspecified number of people (whether bankers, trustees, intermediaries or operatives, was not stated) had been ‘taken out’ over the weekend of 19th-20th December on both sides of the Atlantic and, in the words of informants, ‘brutally horizontalised’.

‘FOREIGN SUITS’ CONDUCTING AUDITS INSIDE THE FED

On 18th December it was reported to us that a female accountant based in Dallas who had been working as a consultant for the Federal Reserve Board conducting internal audits, was called back from Texas to Washington, DC, where she was bluntly informed that there was no longer any need for her services, and that no funds were available any longer to pay her for consultancy work.

By way of explanation, Federal Reserve officials told her that there were ‘suits in town’ who were ‘doing the books’ (8).

This was a reference to the audit that has been going on since the massive force of international enforcement, audit and related personnel descended on Washington aboard the seven aircraft on 2nd December. The consultant was also openly informed by Federal Reserve officials, to her face, that ‘Geithner is history’ – which is consistent with the fact that Geithner, as we have reported, is under a form of house arrest and has had a monitor attached to him given his resistance to his obligations under the World Court Writ of Enforcement and the requirements of the Lien Holders.

UNREPORTED INTERPOL SHOWDOWN AT REAGAN NATIONAL AIRPORT

On 22nd December, given the snowstorm, Reagan National Airport serving Washington DC, was widely described as ‘a mess’. But in the late afternoon of 21st December, a certain woman walked to catch a flight that had been rescheduled – only to discover that, along with hundreds of others, she was prevented from proceeding through security.

On the contrary, FBI personnel, Homeland Security operatives and ‘top cops in suits who looked foreign’, with dogs, had stopped the lines going through security for several hours. This situation continued from about 4:30 pm to 7:00pm.

The lady reporting this situation noticed that it was the ‘top cops in suits who were operationally in charge’, and that they were looking for someone. The person concerned eventually made her long delayed flight back home for Christmas, but has repeatedly queried why these events were not being reported, and have still not been reported (9) .

Well that is a fascinating tale and a lot more to it.

CRYPTOME: YET ANOTHER LEAKED TSA DOC (AN ADMINISTRATIVE APPEAL)

Who doesn't enjoy a leaked TSA PDF? This one features the intrepid efforts of Stanley J Miller, Appellant vs Department of Homeland Security in the Nether World Of Obscure Administrative Law Judges... Miller wins a dramatic appeal about [CENSORED] and [REDACTED] which was all a [GO AWAY]. This just broke over the holiday!

Cryptome: TSA Sensitive Security Information Unredacted 2

More: For fired air marshal, Christmas attack was terribly familiar - OC Watchdog : The Orange County Register

Last year: Email Goof Exposes Whistleblower Problems at FAMS

MORE ON DETROIT: MADSEN BITS ON DETROIT BOMBING, ICTS & CIA/MOSSAD/RAW JUST FOR FUN
--below teh fold--

There was a quip about this a while ago, now it is more established. Posted in full cause it's a big deal.... via Agonist .

These people are criminals!

Drug money saved banks in global crisis, claims UN advisor

Drugs and crime chief says $352bn in criminal proceeds was effectively laundered by financial institutions

• The Observer, Sunday 13 December 2009

Drugs money worth billions of dollars kept the financial system afloat at the height of the global crisis, the United Nations' drugs and crime tsar has told the Observer.

Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, said he has seen evidence that the proceeds of organised crime were "the only liquid investment capital" available to some banks on the brink of collapse last year. He said that a majority of the $352bn (£216bn) of drugs profits was absorbed into the economic system as a result.

This will raise questions about crime's influence on the economic system at times of crisis. It will also prompt further examination of the banking sector as world leaders, including Barack Obama and Gordon Brown, call for new International Monetary Fund regulations. Speaking from his office in Vienna, Costa said evidence that illegal money was being absorbed into the financial system was first drawn to his attention by intelligence agencies and prosecutors around 18 months ago. "In many instances, the money from drugs was the only liquid investment capital. In the second half of 2008, liquidity was the banking system's main problem and hence liquid capital became an important factor," he said.

Some of the evidence put before his office indicated that gang money was used to save some banks from collapse when lending seized up, he said.

"Inter-bank loans were funded by money that originated from the drugs trade and other illegal activities... There were signs that some banks were rescued that way." Costa declined to identify countries or banks that may have received any drugs money, saying that would be inappropriate because his office is supposed to address the problem, not apportion blame. But he said the money is now a part of the official system and had been effectively laundered.

"That was the moment [last year] when the system was basically paralysed because of the unwillingness of banks to lend money to one another. The progressive liquidisation to the system and the progressive improvement by some banks of their share values [has meant that] the problem [of illegal money] has become much less serious than it was," he said.

The IMF estimated that large US and European banks lost more than $1tn on toxic assets and from bad loans from January 2007 to September 2009 and more than 200 mortgage lenders went bankrupt. Many major institutions either failed, were acquired under duress, or were subject to government takeover.

Gangs are now believed to make most of their profits from the drugs trade and are estimated to be worth £352bn, the UN says. They have traditionally kept proceeds in cash or moved it offshore to hide it from the authorities. It is understood that evidence that drug money has flowed into banks came from officials in Britain, Switzerland, Italy and the US.

British bankers would want to see any evidence that Costa has to back his claims. A British Bankers' Association spokesman said: "We have not been party to any regulatory dialogue that would support a theory of this kind. There was clearly a lack of liquidity in the system and to a large degree this was filled by the intervention of central banks."

*****

Thanks Costa!!