Wiki: Peter Videnieks

Peter Videnieks is a Commissioner with the United States-China Economic and Security Review Commission. He was recently reappointed by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid for a second two-year term expiring December 31, 2010.

Prior to his appointment, Videnieks served on the staff of Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV).

Biography

Videnieks' wife, Barbara Videnieks, also served on Senator Byrd's staff. During the early-1990s, she was Chief of Staff. On the evening of August 9, 1991, freelance writer Danny Casolaro intended to meet in Martinsburg, West Virginia, with two employees of Senator Byrd's staff. Barbara Videnieks was believed to be related to one of Casolaro's contacts.

Shortly before noon, the following day, Casolaro was found dead in his hotel bathtub, the apparent victim of a suspicious suicide. Casolaro had been researching material for Inslaw Inc. and that material had centered on Inslaw's arguments in a very contentious bankruptcy liquidation case against the United States Department of Justice.

Inslaw

Videnieks was the Contract Officer who oversaw Inslaw Inc.'s Promis contract for the Management Division of the United States Department of Justice. Prior to joining the DoJ, Videnieks had administered three contracts between the Customs Service and Hadron Inc. Hadron was a competitor to Inslaw, and was under the direction of controlling shareholder, Earl Brian, the former California health secretary under Gov. Ronald Reagan from 1971-3.

At the time of Inslaw's contracts with Justice, Brian had become a venture-capitalist with a suspected connection to Director of Central Intelligence William J. Casey's covert intelligence operations. During investigations surrounding the Inslaw Affair, Brian was accused of receiving a stolen copy of Inslaw's Promis software from Videnieks.

In a court affidavit filed on March 21, 1991, by Michael Riconosciuto, on behalf of Inslaw's case, Riconosciuto claimed that "the Justice Department stole the Promis software as part of a payoff to Brian for helping to get some Iranian leaders to collude in the so-called October surprise." Moreover, Riconosciuto named both Brian and Videnieks as being "among the frequent visitors" to the Cabazon Indian Reservation in Indio, California, where the Cabazon Band of Indians had formed a joint venture with the Wackenhut Corporation of Coral Gables, Florida, to developed and market munitions "to support the needs of a number of foreign governments and forces, including forces and governments in Central America and the Middle East." By the early-1990s, the joint venture was rumored to be a California extension of the Iranian and Nicaraguan policy objectives of President Ronald Reagan's White House staff, more commonly known as the Iran Contra Affair.

Riconosciuto was a shady character with equally as shady contacts in black ops, according to the Executive Summary of the House Judiciary Investigation on Inslaw. He claimed to have been directed by Brian to reprogram Inslaw's software sometime between 1983–84 so that it could be sold to dozens of foreign governments with a secret "back door" which allowed outsiders to track individuals using the Promis software. Riconosciuto further claimed that Videnieks in a telephone conversation prior to Riconosciuto's filing of his affidavit threatened Riconosciuto's family with DoJ reprisals if Riconosciuto divulged any of this information in his initial interviews with House Judiciary investigators. Eight days after he filed his affidavit, Riconosciuto was arrested on serious drug charges, then later convicted, and sentenced to 30 years in federal prison. Soon afterwards, Riconosciuto's wife was arrested on child custody charges; she eventually lost custody of their children. During Riconosciuto's Tacoma, Washington, trial in which Riconosciuto claimed that he had been "set up" by the government on fraudulent drug charges, Videnieks denied ever having known Riconosciuto.

To this day, there has never been any reliable or conclusive documentation in support of Riconosciuto's allegations. Riconosciuto claimed to have made three tape recordings of their telephone conversation; however no tapes to corrobrate Riconosciuto's claims have ever surfaced. Additionally, in House Judiciary investigations into the Inslaw Affair both Brian and Videnieks "denied under oath even knowing each other" though the House Judiciary investigating committee received information from Margaret Wiencek and John Schoolmeester in apparent contradiction to both Brian and Videnieks.

Other

Videnieks has been an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) revenue officer. (One of two Enterprise Computing Centers for the IRS is located in Martinsburg, West Virginia.)..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Videnieks

Reel America Preview: Church Committee 40 Years Later

What Happens When the Surveillance State Becomes an Affordable Gadget?

When Daniel Rigmaiden was a little boy, his grandfather, a veteran of World War II and Korea, used to drive him along the roads of Monterey, California, playing him tapes of Ronald Reagan speeches. Something about the ideals of small government and personal freedom may have affected him more deeply than he realized. By the time Rigmaiden became a disaffected, punk-rock-loving teenager, everything about living in America disappointed him, from the two-party system to taxes. “At that age, everybody’s looking for something to rebel against,” he tells me over Mexican food in Phoenix—where, until recently, he was required to live under the conditions of his parole. “I thought, ‘I either have to fight the rigged system, or I have to opt out completely.’ ”

Rigmaiden is 35 and slender, quiet with a sardonic smile and thick shock of jet-black hair. Speaking softly and rapidly, he tells the story of how he evolved from a bottom-feeding Internet outlaw to one of the nation’s most prescient technological privacy activists. Rigmaiden left home in 1999 after graduating high school and spent almost a decade knocking around college towns in California, living under a series of assumed names. “I didn’t want to be constrained by all the rules of society,” he says. “It just didn’t seem real to me.” He’d spend weeks living in the woods, scrounging for food and water, testing his limits; then he’d find a place to crash for a while and make a little money on the Internet—first selling fake IDs, then moving on to more serious crimes. In 2006 he wrote software to mine information from databases on the Internet—names, birthdates, Social Security numbers, and the employer identification numbers of businesses. Then he filed fake tax returns, hundreds of them, collecting a modest refund with each.

He bought gold coins with cash, built a nest egg of about $500,000, and planned to move to South America when the time was right. Then, in 2008, an FBI, IRS, and U.S. Postal Service task force grabbed Rigmaiden at his apartment in San Jose and indicted him on enough wire fraud and identity theft charges to put him away for the rest of his life. Only after he was caught did the authorities learn his real name.

The mystery, at least to Rigmaiden, was how they found him at all. He’d been living completely off the grid. The only thing connecting him to the world outside his apartment, he knew, was the wireless AirCard of his laptop. To find him, he reasoned, the people who caught him would have had to pluck the signal from his particular AirCard out of a wilderness of other signals and pinpoint his location. To do that, they’d need a device that, as far as he knew, didn’t exist...

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-03-10/what-happens-when-the-surveillance-state-becomes-an-affordable-gadget

PROTON, CLEARWATER and Lexis-Nexis

"Given the use of constitutionally repulsive practices by the Department of Justice, the Internal Revenue Service and other federal agencies, this information is being made public to educate and inform so they might arm themselves against government intrusion and for attorneys as a backgrounder for future appeals.

I suggest American guerillas seek non-Internet modes of communication. If you think Rex Sherwood was pulled over for not using a turn signal, you are wrong.

I was "read on" the PROTON/CRISSCROSS program in late 2006 and was a frequent user of this system for over a year. As part of my duties, I employed PROTON/CRISSCROSS in HUMINT exploitation role. In the Intelligence Community, PROTON/CRISSCROSS is referred to as PROTON. Unless otherwise specified, the same is true in this report.

PROTON is a storage and analysis system of telecommunications selectors at the TS/SI/FISA/ORCON/NOFORN level of classification and handling. PROTON is the program name as well as the name of the technology. It has been described as "SAP-like", and I suspect that PROTON was once a DEA special program. PROTON is well known in HUMINT and DOJ clandestine law enforcement. It remains the primary, if not fundamental, tool of HUMINT and DOJ law enforcement operations, both of which have considerable overlap in phenomenology and methodology. PROTON carries the FISA caveat because Top Secret FISA collection is contained in PROTON's massive database..."

http://cryptome.org/2013/08/proton-clearwater-lexis-nexis.htm

CIA-IRS Agreement

America: Freedom to Fascism (Full Length Documentary)