01.17.14
Posted in Action at 8:01 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: News from the past couple of days about the practice of spying on people and then killing some of them
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The state-level campaign to turn off power to the NSA got a big boost January 15, 2014, as Washington became the first state with a physical NSA location to consider a Fourth Amendment protection act designed to make life extremely difficult for the massive spy agency.
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A campaign which aims to turn off the electricity to the NSA so that it can’t store data on citizens is in full swing.
The campaign has started in Washington and appears to be part of a partisan effort to rein in the country’s Men in Black.
Washington became the first state with a physical NSA location to consider the Fourth Amendment Protection Act, designed to make life extremely difficult for the massive spy agency.
The Bill, which has the catchy title HB2272, has been designed by Republican David Taylor and Democrat Luis Moscoso. It was introduced to the house in the dead of night and is based on model language drafted by the OffNow coalition.
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Throughout the NSA leak scandal, the surveillance agency’s defenders have insisted its actions are legitimate in part because they’re overseen by all three branches of government. The characterization has always been extremely misleading. For example, the secret FISA court system is often incapable of verifying the truth of what they’re told by the NSA, and so many members of Congress were ignorant of how the Patriot Act has been interpreted prior to the last reauthorization that, had the ignorant voted the other way, it would’ve changed the outcome.
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President Barack Obama is to announce changes to US electronic spy programmes after revelations made by ex-intelligence contractor Edward Snowden.
He aims to restore public confidence in the intelligence community.
Mr Obama is expected to create a public advocate at the secretive court that approves intelligence collection.
His proposals come hours after UK media reports that the US has collected and stored almost 200 million text messages per day across the globe.
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The U.S. National Security Agency has been gathering nearly 200 million text messages a day from around the world, gathering data on people’s travel plans, contacts and credit card transactions, Guardian newspaper reported on Thursday.
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A slide from a presentation, seen by The Guardian and Channel 4 News, shows how Dishfire gave spies access to a trove of information. For example, by intercepting the welcome messages phone users receive when they arrive in a new country, the NSA tracked the movements of more than 1.5 million people every day. The agency spied on phone users’ contacts by hoovering up five million missed call alerts per day, as well as business cards sent by text message.
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The US National Security Agency (NSA) has collected and stored almost 200 million text messages a day from around the world, UK media report.
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During a speech at a hacker convention five months ago, NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander showed a PowerPoint slide that listed eight things his agency “does NOT collect.” In the months since, every single claim has been proven a lie.
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NSA has come under intense scrutiny because of Edward Snowdens disclosures about their spying on all Americans. But there are more problems at NSA than their violation of the fourth amendment protections of the constitution.
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Mounting evidence shows surveillance has had no impact on preventing terrorism. Is the public paying attention?
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President Barack Obama tomorrow will create a panel to examine how data-collection efforts like the National Security Agency’s spy programs affect Internet companies and privacy rights, said two people familiar with White House deliberations.
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Former NSA employee Edward Snowden’s leaks to the public have sparked months of controversy and could lead to reforms.
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President Barack Obama’s plan to keep phone data with the National Security Agency for now is a victory for telecommunications companies, which resisted the idea of holding the records themselves over concerns about lawsuits, lost business and unwanted responsibility.
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It’s been a mixed week for Chinese telecoms giant Huawei after the firm announced impressive financials but was forced again to deny allegations of security weaknesses in its products.
The device and telecoms kit maker announced its unaudited financials on Wednesday, claiming sales revenue for 2013 will reach between 238 billion and 240 billion yuan (£24bn). This will be a year-on-year jump of around 8 per cent, or 11.6 per cent when measured in US dollars.
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This issue is headed to the Court of Appeals. From there, it will likely go the Supreme Court. The high court checked and balanced President George W. Bush when he overstepped his legal authority by establishing military commissions that violated due process, and attempted to deny constitutional habeas corpus to Guantanamo detainees. It remains to be seen whether the court will likewise refuse to cower before President Barack Obama’s claim of unfettered executive authority to conduct dragnet surveillance. If the court allows the NSA to continue its metadata collection, we will reside in what can only be characterized as a police state.
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In the world of cybersecurity, Bruce Schneier is an unusually accessible voice for those of us who feel we don’t quite understand what’s going on. The author of 12 books, and a prolific blogger and speaker, Schneier helped the Guardian go through the top-secret documents from the U.S. National Security Agency leaked by Edward Snowden last year.
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U.S. officials are reacting cautiously to revelations published in The New York Times that the National Security Agency has found a way to spy on computers even when they are not connected to the Internet. Report says software was implanted into 100,000 computers worldwide.
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As President Obama prepares to announce Friday what action he will take with the future of the National Security Agency, two whistleblowers visited West Chester University with recommendations on how to roll back government surveillance.
The two former NSA employees, William Binney and Thomas Drake, sat down with a WCU class Tuesday to discuss the current state of privacy in the country and their struggle for freedom.
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With Alpine and the area off limits to drone testing, Texas still was one of the six states selected for “drone test sites,” the Federal Aviation Administration has announced.
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The United States carried on two ten-year wars in Iraq and Afghanistan where we killed an estimated 250,000 civilians. We killed many more Muslim fighters by the tens of thousands. We destroyed their country with our bombs. Because those third world countries lack birth records, identification and death certificates–the numbers could be much higher.
In most large city in America, such as Denver, newscasters relate killings every night of the week. Chicago, Houston, Detroit and Los Angeles suffer gang killings nightly.
One in four children suffers bullying by a teen thug in high schools across America every day during school terms. In other words, our children cannot attend school without fear of being beat up, harassed, called names and demeaned by meaner, bigger students who have no other purpose in life but to manifest their thuggery.
What bothers me: we promote horrific violence via our continuous wars promoted by bankers and the military industrial complex that profit at the cost of human lives. We promote TV violence such as “Criminal Minds” and “NCIS” where lots of people commit diabolical mayhem. We support social media arcade games for kids like “Doom” and worse. Our movies feature horrific violence that pours into our kids minds and emotions. It’s like the 60s movie “Clockwork Orange” seems normal. You can watch television “Cops” where violence becomes normal. Our drones in the Middle East kill any number of humans without identity.
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President Barack Obama said last May that control of the United States’ weaponized drone program would shift away from the Central Intelligence Agency and into the hands of the Pentagon, but a new report suggests Congress could keep that from happening.
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The authoritarian regimes, bloody revolutions and tense diplomatic relations in the Middle East dominate the news today. Much of this turmoil was presaged by the activities and experiences of three covert CIA officers in the 1940s and 1950s, says Hugh Wilford, professor of history at California State University, Long Beach. In “America’s Great Game: The CIA’s Secret Arabists and the Shaping of the Modern Middle East,” Wilford chronicles American adventures in the Middle East after World War II. He recently spoke to U.S. News about romanticized spy games, staged coups and the consequences of it all. Excerpts:
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A “progressive” columnist whose own organization is pursuing a “fresh approach” in contrast to “a far-right Republican Party that is a wholly owned subsidiary of corporate America,” is petitioning the Washington Post to publicize its owners’ financial investments each time it reports on the CIA.
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The Rev. Jeremiah Wright, speaking at a Martin Luther King Jr. birthday celebration in Chicago Wednesday, took several swipes at President Barack Obama, at one point saying that while King would have said, “I have a dream,” the president would have to say “I have a drone.”
According to a story in The Chicago Sun Times, Wright, Obama’s former pastor, spoke at the breakfast hosted by the Chicago Teachers Union and called on those there to reject the “three-headed demon” of “racism, militarism and capitalism” — the foundations of Western society.
Wright went on to slam the president by saying that each week Obama presides at a meeting to decide where drones will be launched.
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Congress’ $1.1 trillion spending bill contains a secret provision torpedoing President Obama’s plans to pass the drone program from the CIA to the Pentagon. In a classified annex, the bill specifically prohibits any funds being used to facilitate such a transfer, the Washington Post reports. Obama wants to shift the CIA from its paramilitary footing back to an intelligence one, and perhaps bring greater transparency to the drone program. But lawmakers don’t trust the military with the keys.
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Congress has moved to block President Barack Obama’s plan to shift control of the U.S. drone campaign from the CIA to the Defense Department, inserting a secret provision in the massive government spending bill introduced this week that would preserve the spy agency’s role in lethal counterterrorism operations, U.S. officials said.
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01.16.14
Posted in Action, Africa, Asia at 10:01 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Stories about military interventions (analysis of the present)
Syria and Libya (Weapons)
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The absence of immediate alarm inside the American intelligence community demonstrates that there was no intelligence about Syrian intentions in the days before the attack. And there are at least two ways the US could have known about it in advance: both were touched on in one of the top secret American intelligence documents that have been made public in recent months by Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor.
On 29 August, the Washington Post published excerpts from the annual budget for all national intelligence programmes, agency by agency, provided by Snowden. In consultation with the Obama administration, the newspaper chose to publish only a slim portion of the 178-page document, which has a classification higher than top secret, but it summarised and published a section dealing with problem areas. One problem area was the gap in coverage targeting Assad’s office. The document said that the NSA’s worldwide electronic eavesdropping facilities had been ‘able to monitor unencrypted communications among senior military officials at the outset of the civil war there’. But it was ‘a vulnerability that President Bashar al-Assad’s forces apparently later recognised’. In other words, the NSA no longer had access to the conversations of the top military leadership in Syria, which would have included crucial communications from Assad, such as orders for a nerve gas attack. (In its public statements since 21 August, the Obama administration has never claimed to have specific information connecting Assad himself to the attack.)
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The Times article, based on dozens of interviews in Benghazi, asserts that the attack that killed four Americans, including US Ambassador Christopher Stevens, was carried out by Libyans who had previously been allied with the US government in the 2011 war that overthrew and murdered Gaddafi. Times correspondent David D. Kirkpatrick writes that the attack was not organized by Al Qaeda or any other group from outside Libya, but “by fighters who had benefited directly from NATO’s extensive air power and logistics support during the uprising against Colonel Qaddafi.”
Ed: Reports from last year, which are based on leaks, indicated that Benghazi had been used to funnel weapons to Syria. The leak’s coverage started in CNN and as the British press put it, “The television network said that a CIA team was working in an annex near the consulate on a project to supply missiles from Libyan armouries to Syrian rebels.”
PJ Harvey Brings Guests to BBC
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January 05, 2014 “Information Clearing House – When I travelled in Iraq in the 1990s, the two principal Moslem groups, the Shia and Sunni, had their differences but they lived side by side, even intermarried and regarded themselves with pride as Iraqis. There was no Al Qaida, there were no jihadists. We blew all that to bits in 2003 with ‘shock and awe’. And today Sunni and Shia are fighting each other right across the Middle East.
Iraq
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Ten years after the US invasion began, a stable democracy in Iraq seems further away than ever
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Africa
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New biography of Darcus Howe claims struggle is ignored because it does not fit idea of Britain as ‘utopia of fair play’
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U.S. media coverage of Nelson Mandela’s legacy celebrates the late icon’s forgiveness. They mean his ability to reconcile with some of the leaders of South Africa’s apartheid years, of course; but one area that gets relatively little attention is US support for the racist government Mandela fought against.
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Designed to compete in the DARPA Robotics Challenge, this “female” robot could be the precursor to robo-astronauts that will help colonize Mars.
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For a memorial service it was a remarkably jovial scene: Barack Obama, David Cameron and Helle Thorning-Schmidt, the Danish prime minister, huddled together for a smart phone photograph.
But one person looked distinctly less amused by the world leaders’ “selfie” – Michelle Obama.
The First Lady stared straight ahead, hands clasped in her lap, while her husband laughed with the Europeans at Nelson Mandela’s memorial in Johannesburg.
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The US president was the first of six foreign heads of state to address the crowd assembled in Johannesburg’s FNB Stadium. Filled with demagogic phrases about “struggle,” “liberation,” “freedom” and “revolution,” the speech’s attempt to cloak Obama in the legacy of Mandela’s years of sacrifice, imprisonment and persecution was an obscene exercise in hypocrisy.
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Most telling of all is the BBC’s reference to Libya – another nation destroyed by Western military aggression that saw both Russian and Chinese interests crumble overnight and replaced by Western corporations. While South Sudan’s chaos is being orchestrated more covertly by the West, the final goal of pushing out the Chinese and taking over is the same.
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Draft plans for a European Union military mission in the Central African Republic envisage the deployment of hundreds of ground troops to buttress African and French forces struggling to prevent a bloodbath there, according to diplomats briefed on the proposal.
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In 2011, the U.S. midwifed the creation of a new nation, South Sudan. Though at the time Obama invoked the words of Dr. Martin Luther King speaking about Ghana (“I knew about all of the struggles, and all of the pain, and all of the agony that these people had gone through for this moment”) in officially recognizing the country, many were more focused on the underlying U.S. motives, isolating the rest of Sudan as part of the war on terror, and securing the oil reserves in the south for the U.S. The State Department rushed to open an embassy in South Sudan, and U.S. money poured in to pay for the new government. Like his counterparts from Iraq and Afghanistan when the U.S. was still in charge of those places, the new South Sudan president was brought to the White House for photos, all blithely pushed out to the world via the Voice of America. The two leaders were said to have discussed “the importance of maintaining transparency and the rule of law.”
Eastern Tensions
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Zhongye (Pag-asa) Island, the second largest in the South China Sea’s Spratly Islands, has an area of 0.33 square km, and is of great strategic significance for China if it wants to control a vast part of the South China Sea that it claims to be its territorial waters.
As the Island is located roughly in the middle of the area, if China builds an air force and naval base there, it will more easily control the sky and sea in the claimed area.
The “Nazi” Smears and WW2 Recalled
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The vast majority of students are exposed to marketing campaigns by food and beverage companies at their schools, usually for unhealthy products, according to a new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Pediatrics.
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Sweden’s Justice Minister Beatrice Ask has been criticized for sharing a satirical article about legalized marijuana killing scores of people in the US and tying it to her anti-narcotics stand as a youth politician. Her critics did not hold back.
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It is a story with deep roots: The chaos and destruction of World War II left a horribly fragmented cultural world: art lost forever in the confusion or destroyed in battle; art declared “degenerate” and destroyed by Hitler (whose opinions on racial purity were mirrored in his opinions on purity in art); art seized throughout the continent and carted back to Germany; and art stolen from or sold under duress by Jewish collectors. It’s now almost 70 years since the war’s end, but European authorities and the descendants of the original owners of looted art are still attempting to put the pieces back where they belong.
Close to 1,400 of these missing pieces were found in the home of 80-year-old Cornelius Gurlitt, a recluse who has been painted by the media as tragic, bizarre and potentially culpable. He inherited the art from his father, one of only four art dealers licensed by Hitler’s propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels, to purchase and sell “degenerate” art during the war.
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“There are so many unburied soldiers, it will take decades to find them. There will definitely be work for our grandchildren,” says Marina. “But nature is working against us. The remains are decomposing and it is getting harder to find the bones, ID tags and army kit.” The more years that go by. The less information there is.
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An Alfred Hitchcock documentary about the Holocaust which was suppressed for political reasons is to be screened for the first time in the form its director intended after being restored by the Imperial War Museum, reports the Independent.
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Posted in Action at 6:36 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: News, opinions and analysis from the past couple of weeks, concentrating on the imperial systems of the West
UK, Ireland, and Falklands
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Sometimes what is revealed by the State papers is of undoubted importance. The papers from 1982 released this New Year fleshed out, for instance, the tensions between Ireland and Britain over Northern Ireland and the Falklands conflict; as well as the contrasting closeness between the then government and the Catholic bishops in advance of the abortion referendum.
Other items are intriguing because they show how little has changed in the interim. Thirty years ago, Charles Haughey was apparently as eager as Health Minister James Reilly nowadays to clamp down on Irish smokers; and women’s groups were complaining about the “degrading treatment of women as sex objects in all forms of the media”. Plus ca change, indeed.
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Mexico
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Between 2000 and 2012, the US government had a deal with Mexican drug cartel Sinaloa that allowed the group to smuggle billion of dollars of drugs in return for information on its rival cartels, according to court documents published by El Universal.
Written statements made by a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent and a US Department of Justice official in US District Court of Chicago following the 2009 arrest of Jesus Vicente Zambada-Niebla – son of a Sinaloa leader Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada and the organization’s alleged “logistics coordinator” – indicate that DEA agents met with top Sinaloa officials over 50 times beginning in 2000.
Asia
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The arrest and imprisonment in North Korea of US citizen Kenneth Bae raises once again the issue of the use of religion and humanitarianism as covert vehicles for furthering US hegemony.
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It still remains a mystery just exactly what Kenneth Bae was doing in North Korea.
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Terrorism came into being as soon as humanity appeared, but the US special services turned it into a threat of global scale. The end of the 1970s can be considered as the starting point. Back then the Central Intelligence Agency launched a training program for «Islamic brigades» to entangle the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic into the war in Afghanistan. In 1998 Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote, «According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahedeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise. Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention». That was the time Osama bin Laden was recruited.
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This was the life of a few elite American Middle East specialists and spies in the early days of the Cold War: intrigue and a self-possessed sense of adventure in a region emerging from European colonialism and into, they insisted, a more magnanimous American orbit of what historian Hugh Wilford has called “disinterested benevolence.” If only it had happened that way.
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We’ve written a few times about the troubling case of Rahinah Ibrahim, a PhD. student at Stanford who was wrongfully placed on the “no fly” list because (it appears) some clueless law enforcement officials mixed up the names of a networking group of professional Muslims in Malaysia who had returned from work or study in the US and Europe (which she was a part of) and a very, very different terrorist organization. While she had received something of an apology for initially not being allowed to fly to Malaysia (and then allowed to fly), it appeared that her name was then placed on the no fly list, preventing her from ever returning. She was later blocked from even flying back to the US for her lawsuit against the government.
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United States military spending has ballooned since World War II, although Americans have historically been reluctant to go to war. The Times’s Sam Tanenhaus explains why.
Silencing the Press
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The Justice Department under President Barack Obama insists a journalist must testify against his source so they can prosecute and convict a former CIA officer for a leak. It has spent about six years trying to force him to testify, and now, having lost in an appeals court, he is taking his case to the Supreme Court.
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A New York Times reporter has asked the US Supreme Court to block an order that would require him to reveal the confidential source for his book exposing CIA secrets.
Conquering the Press
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A tip-off is that the Washington Post refuses to face up to a conflict of interest involving Jeff Bezos — who’s now the sole owner of the powerful newspaper at the same time he remains Amazon’s CEO and main stakeholder.
The Post is supposed to expose CIA secrets. But Amazon is under contract to keep them. Amazon has a new $600 million “cloud” computing deal with the CIA.
The situation is unprecedented. But in an email exchange early this month, Washington Post executive editor Martin Baron told me that the newspaper doesn’t need to routinely inform readers of the CIA-Amazon-Bezos ties when reporting on the CIA. He wrote that such in-story acknowledgment would be “far outside the norm of disclosures about potential conflicts of interest at media organizations.”
But there isn’t anything normal about the new situation. As I wrote to Baron, “few journalists could have anticipated ownership of the paper by a multibillionaire whose outside company would be so closely tied to the CIA.”
Domestic Backlash
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One month to the day after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas, former President Harry Truman recommended that the U.S. abolish the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
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expansion of presidential powers in the United States.
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Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF – September 2001) approved open-ended permanent wars. They rage out-of-control. They do so at home and abroad.
The FY 2014 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) targets freedom. It prioritizes militarism and permanent wars. It authorizes over $600 billion for global belligerence, mass killing and destruction.
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Blum is the author of the famous book Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventionssince World War II (Common Courage Press). The book enjoyed remarkable success, becoming required reading for students and professions in numerous fields. Professor Noam Chomsky said of the book, “It is far and away the best book on the topic.” The book is astounding, as Blum breaks down the post-war CIA in more than 50 fascinating chapters. Actions everywhere from Albania to Zaire are discussed in the book. I met with William Blum in early December in Washington, DC.
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Washington has had the US at war for 12 years: Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Pakistan, Yemen, and almost Syria, which could still happen, with Iran waiting in the wings. These wars have been expensive in terms of money, prestige, and deaths and injuries of both US soldiers and the attacked civilian populations. None of these wars appears to have any compelling reason or justifiable explanation. The wars have been important to the profits of the military/security complex. The wars have provided cover for the construction of a Stasi police state in America, and the wars have served Israel’s interest by removing obstacles to Israel’s annexation of the entire West Bank and southern Lebanon.
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A workable solution to the perpetual foreign policy crisis requires a new economy and civil society institutions that provide a political fund to promote demilitarized politicians, supported by an alternative ethos of diplomacy, foreign aid, and non-militarized soft power. Social movements might explore how universities contribute to the cycle of violence by marginalizing discourses related to disarmament, alternative security and an ecologically-rooted conversion of big oil, auto and defense firms. Otherwise, expect another several years of dismal headlines in newspapers chronicling blow back, terror states, and meaningless violence.
Slow Justice
Mandela
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A Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate student sued the Central Intelligence Agency on Wednesday to compel release of its records on Nelson Mandela, the former South African president and anti-apartheid activist who died last month at age 95.
Border Tyranny
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Security staff allegedly plumb new depths when they subjected D. to a humiliating body search, referencing the Holocaust during their invasive actions.
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A former college student detained at Philadelphia International Airport after Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officials discovered he was carrying Arabic language flashcards lost his bid to sue the federal agents who detained him.
Nicholas George alleged that the TSA agents violated his First and Fourth Amendment rights when they arrested him as he tried to board a flight from his Philadelphia home to Pomona College in 2009.
According to Chief Judge Theodore McKee’s ruling, despite the fact that George clearly had the right to carry the flashcards, the TSA agents were “at the outer boundary” of justifiability in detaining him. In addition to everyday words and phrases like “day before yesterday,” “fat,” “cheap,” and “pink,” the deck of flashcards also contained and phrases like “bomb,” “terrorist,” “explosion,” and “to target.”
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Misc.
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Stewart was convicted of helping a blind Egyptian sheik communicate with his followers from prison. She had been imprisoned since 2009 and had said she didn’t want to die in “a strange and loveless place.”
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Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks who has been holed up in an embassy in London for more than a year, is to be a guest on BBC Radio 4′s Today programme.
Assange, who has been granted asylum by Ecuador but faces arrest if he leaves the country’s London embassy, will be giving his thoughts on the history of the control of information on Thursday.
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Americans who volunteered to distribute books in Russia didn’t know the CIA paid for the printing.
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Posted in Action at 5:14 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Police abuses reported in the UK, as well as the US, with more interesting stories from Australia, Germany, and Argentina
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Taylor Radig worked undercover at a cattle company and documented horrific abuses of dairy calves. She turned her footage over to the Weld County Sheriff’s Office, and police said they were charging three of the farm workers with animal cruelty.
But when Radig walked into the sheriff’s office to provide a formal statement a few months ago, the police turned around and told her that she, the whistleblower, was also being charged with animal cruelty for her investigation.
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Mark Kennedy undercop cop spyThe story of Mark Kennedy, the undercover cop who targeted social activists throughout Europe, was shocking to activists and the general public alike — among them Kennedy’s former friend Jason Kirkpatrick. Now, Kirkpatrick is creating a documentary about Kennedy’s spy ops. He’ll be in New York City and San Francisco this month to preview clips from Spied Upon.
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Labour calls on justice secretary to give private firm six months to improve situation at prison facing series of disturbances
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Protesters, buskers, preachers, the young: all could end up with ‘ipnas’. Of course, if you’re rich, you have nothing to fear
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In 2003 Operation Tiberius found that men suspected of being Britain’s most notorious criminals had compromised multiple agencies, including HM Revenue & Customs, the Crown Prosecution Service, the City of London Police and the Prison Service, as well as pillars of the criminal justice system including juries and the legal profession.
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Secret networks of Freemasons have been used by organised crime gangs to corrupt the criminal justice system, according to a bombshell Metropolitan Police report leaked to The Independent.
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As Mike reported recently, the NSA has presented no credible evidence that its bulk metadata collection is stopping terrorist attacks, or keeping people safe. Instead, the argument in support of the secret activities of the NSA and its friends abroad has become essentially: “Trust us, we really have your best interests at heart.” But that raises the question: Can we really do that? New revelations from The Independent newspaper about massive and thorough-going corruption of the UK police and judiciary a decade ago show that we can’t…
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At least five people have been killed as looting spreads through Argentina.
Hundreds have been injured as people took advantage of a police strike to rob shops and homes.
Police have refused to go on patrol until their demands for a salary rise are met.
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Police in north London have seized blankets, sleeping bags and food donations from rough sleepers in a crackdown on homelessness.
A local paper reported that the belongings, mostly donated by sympathetic members of the community, were snatched by police from a group of homeless people as they sheltered in an abandoned public baths for the night.
The nine people, including a man in his sixties, were seeking cover from a cold night in Redbridge and were left stunned when their worldly possessions disappeared into the back of a police car.
One of the men targeted in the action, Adam Jaskowiak, pleaded with officers to be allowed to keep his possessions for warmth. The 34-year-old said: “They [the police officers] were just taking the sleeping bags and chucking out everything. I asked to keep it, and the food, but they said ‘No’.
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The incident, which began with Officer Ramos putting on gloves and announcing to Thomas that his “fists” were getting ready to “fuck him up,” and ended with Thomas in an irreversible coma, was caught on surveillance tape and synched to Ramos’ body mic recording. The tortured screams and gasps of the 135-lb. Thomas were unable to convince the jury find one of the cops guilty of lesser charges (Officer Cicinelli — charged with involuntary manslaughter and use of excessive force). Even Cicinelli’s own words — “I ran out of options and just started bashing the hell out of [Thomas'] face [with the butt end of his taser]” — failed to persuade the jury that the force used was excessive.
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Police officials are refuting City Council President Pro Tem George Cushingberry’s claim that officers pulled him over Tuesday because he was black, pointing out that one of the officers involved was African-American.
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Lostutter believes that the FBI investigation and raid of his house been motivated by local officials in Steubenville. “They want to make an example of me.” Now, he is facing 10 years in prison for his “crime” of exposing the Steubenville rapists.
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A teenager in Australia who thought he was doing a good deed by reporting a security vulnerability in a government website was reported to the police.
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A Boiling Springs Lakes, North Carolina family is looking for answers after local police shot and killed their mentally ill teenage son while responding to a call for help.
The family contends that Keith Vidal, 18, was “killed in cold blood” after police were requested to help calm the teenager down during a schizophrenic episode.
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Stemming from an incident in June where plainclothes Alcoholic Beverages Control (ABC) agents attempted to apprehend her, Elizabeth Daly is now planning on pursuing legal action for a wrongful arrest and a night spent in jail.
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At noon on Dec. 30, protesters in central Kyiv held mirrors in front of police for 30 minutes to commemorate the night of Nov. 30 when riot police used excessive force to breakup a peaceful rally on Independence Square consisting mostly of university students.
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Police obtained legal permission to impose a curfew by conservative politicians a while ago, and they use it to retaliate against people who defend Rote Flora from being evicted in the name of capitalist gentrification policies. Cops claimed that they were attacked at their police station “Davidswache” on December 20th and on December 28th, in separate clashes from the demonstration on December 21st, but a lawyer in Hamburg says there was no second attack at the police station Davidswache on the 28th. He has demanded the videos of the incident from the surveillance cameras.
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Zeit Online has reported, citing a non-government organization, that about 500 protesters being injured, 20 of them seriously. However, this information cannot be independently verified.
The cultural center’s squatting history dates back to 1989, when the Schanzenviertel area’s Rote Flora center was first occupied. Since then, its reputation as the central point for leftist rallying has been further cemented.
But the public anger itself had also to do with the wider issue of migrant and refugee rights, including those of the squatters at a run-down apartment block in Hamburg’s Reeperbahn area – also the city’s red-light district, which contains the so-called Esso Houses. The buildings, also often home to Germany’s Lampedusa refugees, were evacuated last weekend because of their poor condition.
After the initial chaos at the Rote Flora had subsided, the crowds migrated toward the Reeperbahn, where they were chased around the streets by the police.
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Posted in Action at 4:49 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Reports and analyses of so-called ‘interrogation’ techniques and their impact on society
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Reporters Without Borders is relieved by yesterday’s announced release of Ahmed Al-Fardan, a photojournalist who had been held arbitrarily in deplorable conditions since 26 December. He is nonetheless still facing prosecution on a charge of “trying to participate in an illegal demonstration”: here.
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European court rules that alleged torture in Riyadh jails did not breach Convention on Human Rights.
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John Rizzo disputes former President George W. Bush’s claim that the CIA sought his permission to use waterboarding and other techniques on Al Qaeda suspects.
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In the years following Sept. 11, many Americans heard the term waterboarding for the first time — a technique aimed to simulate the act of drowning. Waterboarding was at the center of the debate about what the CIA called “enhanced interrogation techniques” — and what critics called “torture.”
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Former CIA officer John Kiriakou, who is serving a thirty-month jail sentence in the federal correctional institution in Loretto, Pennsylvania, has resumed writing letters from prison after the Bureau of Prisons failed to give him nine months in a halfway house to finish out his sentence.
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To date, only one person has been jailed in connection to the US torture program. One man has been put behind bars for the part that the United States has played in torturing prisoners of war around the globe. On January 25th, 2013, John Kiriakou was sentenced to 30 months in prison. He reported to a Federal correction facility in Loretto, Pennsylvania in late February, 2013. Kiriakou was the only person jailed in connection to the US torture program, but ironically, John has never tortured anyone. His crime: he revealed classified information to a reporter confirming the use of torture as an official US government policy, specifically, the CIA use of waterboarding in interrogations.
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Shortly after the Abu Ghraib photographs became public, Secretary of State Colin Powell described telling foreign audiences, “Watch America. Watch how we deal with this. Watch how America will do the right thing. Watch what a nation of values and character, a nation that believes in justice, does to right this kind of wrong.” Powell assured them that “they will see a free press and an independent Congress at work,” that there would be “multiple investigations to get to the facts,” and that “the world will see that we are still a nation with a moral code that defines our national character.”
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On his second day in office, President Obama signed an executive order banning the use of torture in interrogation, and has consistently spoken out against torture. The president has adopted a policy of “looking forward, not backward,” but several members of the Bush administration and Bush-era CIA have looked backward in memoirs (such as CIA counsel John Rizzo’s forthcoming “Company Man”) and asserted that torture “worked.” Whenever the topic resurfaces, as it did with the release of “Zero Dark Thirty,” they jump into the spotlight to defend torture.
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Zero Dark Thirty is torture porn.
I’m so intimidated by Homeland’s Emmys and fan loyalty, not to mention almost unanimous critical praise, I hesitate to connect this show and its reckless, self-confessed “bipolar” CIA heroine with Bigelow’s austere heroine with her taste for sadism. And – what a stretch, right? – to Hitler’s furies.
Homeland did three full seasons of multi-episodes. So it’s no spoiler to reveal that the heroine “Carrie” (Claire Danes), a creepy, ethics-challenged, guilt-scarred young CIA counter-intelligence employee, has a “crazy” womanly intuition that a returned Marine hero (Damian Lewis), who has been an Al Queda captive for eight years, is actually a sleeper double or is it triple agent?
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Talking to Gordon Corera on Newsnight, he also said capturing and interrogating terrorists was a better method than killing people through drone strikes.
John Rizzo, who retired in 2009, was the CIA’s chief legal officer for seven years.
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There is a moment in John Rizzo’s new memoir when the longtime CIA lawyer has the chance to change history. It is March 2002, and Rizzo has just been briefed on the agency’s proposals for interrogating suspected terrorists.
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The Russian foreign ministry has said the investigation on the so-called CIA “black sites” in Poland and Lithuania has lost its steam.
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Posted in Action at 4:40 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The latest news and analysis about a controversial strategy of assassinating people (and those around them) selected by the NSA
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The future has sneaked up on us unnoticed. What was science fiction a couple of decades ago is now everyday reality. But it’s not only computers and smartphones – the progress has brought us new war machines – unmanned drones striking from the skies are no surprise for anyone today. But what has the progress of warfare prepared for us in the coming years? Today we speak to a Nobel Peace Prize-winning woman, who has fought against landmines – and won. Now she is on a crusade against the new deadly threat – killer robots. Jody Williams is today’s guest on Sophie&Co.
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Yemeni legislators are aware that the drone war is deeply unpopular. Since the Dec,. 12 strike, our parliament has unanimously voted to ban drone flights in Yemeni airspace, declaring them a “grave breach” of the country’s sovereignty. For a country so often divided, this unanimity from Yemen’s most representative bodies testifies to the strength of opinion against drones. But their calls have thus far met only with more bombings from the skies. How can the people of Yemen build trust in their fledgling democracy when our collective will is ignored by democracy’s greatest exponent?
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On December 12 a bride and groom traveled to their wedding in al-Baitha province, Yemen. It was supposed to be a day of celebration. Instead, in a few seconds, their happiness was obliterated. A U.S. drone fired at the wedding procession, destroying five vehicles and killing most of their occupants. Not even the bride’s car, beautifully decorated with flowers, was spared from the carnage.
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First it was “extraordinary rendition,” sending people we suspected of being terrorists or being affiliated in some vague way with terrorists, to friendly countries whose enthusiasm for brutalizing folks exceeded our proclaimed standards. That policy emerged in the Clinton administration. Second was condoning torture (a Bush-Cheney policy). Next, drones that kill our enemies and also cause “collateral damage,” a sanitized term for murdering innocent bystanders, including babies (refined to a high art in the Obama administration).
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Invasion of the drones. As corporations and government agencies alike prepare for their part in the coming drone invasion–it is expected that at least 30,000 drones will occupy U.S. airspace by 2020, ushering in a $30 billion per year industry–it won’t be long before Americans discover first-hand that drones–unmanned aerial vehicles–come in all shapes and sizes, from nano-sized drones as small as a grain of sand that can do everything from conducting surveillance to detonating explosive charges, to middle-sized copter drones that can deliver pizzas to massive “hunter/killer” Predator warships that unleash firepower from on high.
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To the left is an F-35. It is — at least in theory — the pinnacle of American military aviation.
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And so, for the first time in recent history, it seems that the “war against terror” – and specifically against al-Qa’ida – is being fought by Middle East regimes rather than their foreign investors.
Sure, American drones still smash into al-Qa’ida operatives, wedding parties and innocent homes in Pakistan. But it’s General al-Sisi of Egypt, President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki of Iraq, President Hassan Rouhani of Iran – even powerless President Michel Sleiman of Lebanon – who are now fighting “terrorists”.
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But then, on the following night after the government began broadcasting the videos, and as rage against Aqap was reaching a fevered pitch, an unmanned American military drone flying over the Radaa province, some 150 kilometres south-east of Sanaa, fired a missile into Yemen. It struck a vehicle in a wedding procession, killing 12 people and wounding dozens more. Almost instantly, the public discourse shifted, the anger redirected. Al Qaeda had almost destroyed itself but America came to its rescue.
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At least ten states will be sites for testing drones — unmanned aircraft — in the next couple of years, the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) announced on Monday. Six institutions have been authorized to operate test locations for the use of drones and for studying how they will interact with air traffic systems.
The drones are not the Predators, Global Hawks or other government-operated long-range planes but aircraft with potentially commercial and other uses. For instance, a Styrofoam helicopter powered by lighter fluid could be sent over fields to detect agricultural pests. An electric helicopter could be dispatched to the roof of a building to check on a water tower.
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A recent report by the U.S. Department of Defense highlights the Pentagon’s desire to adapt roughly 11,000 drones for “lightweight, precision-guided weapons” for emerging threats in the Asia-Pacific region,
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The Syracuse Post-Standard reports: “For protesters of U.S. military drone use in Afghanistan, [the recent FAA] announcement that Central New York would become a test site for integrating drones into commercial air space was unwelcome news.
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The drones which today indiscriminately kill men, women and children in Pakistan and Yemen appeared first in the history of the technology as children’s toys, not weapons.
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Drones will soon take to the skies across the United States in federally approved tests that are meant to clear the way for the commercial use of unmanned aircraft. But before that happens, lawmakers and regulators need to deal with a host of unresolved privacy and safety concerns.
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Drones will soon be buzzing over every city in America.
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The US is due to release a new national security strategy early this year to define targets for the next stage of fighting Al-Qaeda. The document is being drafted amid the growing criticism of the ways of the fighting in question. The extensive use of drones in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Yemen raises numerous legal and other questions.
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Two alleged Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) affiliates were killed in a drone strike on Tuesday in the Al-Mahfad district of Abyan governorate in southern Yemen, according to the Interior Ministry. Three others, also alleged to be associated with AQAP, were injured in the aerial attack.
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Our government lies to itself — and to us. Like Edward Snowden, it is time for us all to stand up for our values
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Members of the Yemeni Tays and Bin Amr tribes were returning home from a wedding ceremony on December 12. The convoy of cars was heavily armed, which isn’t surprising in a country where gun ownership is as culturally acceptable as it is in the United States.
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Two suspected al Qaeda militants were killed in a U.S. drone strike in the southeastern province of Hadramout on Wednesday, residents and local officials said.
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It is troubling that the American, Israeli, Iraqi and Egyptian governments last week have all signaled their determination to make poor policy decisions that are certain to lead to higher levels of violence, resistance, militancy, terror and instability in the months and years ahead. These and other governments have been doing this for years, without learning the lessons of their own sustained failures.
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The US said it is mapping out a new national security strategy that will be announced in early 2014. The white paper on the next stage of Washington’s war on al-Qaeda will be released at the time of mounting international criticism of US drone strikes in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Yemen.
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Nearly 25 percent of the 68 countries surveyed by WIN/Gallup International named the US the biggest threat to world peace today.
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Finding inspiration from the ancients, Stanford philosopher Christopher Bobonich underscores the moral consequences of reflecting upon bad means to good ends.
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01.15.14
Posted in Action, Europe at 6:44 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Business controls the filters in the West
Summary: How Western censorship proved itself to be all about protecting the villains while blocking justice
WHEN society is run by businesses (which is true in the West), then censorship by businesses is natural; it’s only to be expected.
Here in the UK we now officially have Internet censorship, just like in China, Iran, Russia etc. Our government would be too hypocritical to criticise those nations over censorship. One leading British civil rights groups asks rhetorically [1], “what could possibly go wrong?”
Here is what goes wrong.
Recently we saw a news site getting censored by the British Web filters [2]. Why? Probably because it delivers an alternative message that puts in jeopardy the copyright monopoly/cartel.
“UK ISPs Need To Be Sued Way Out Into Atlantic,” said the founder of the original Pirate Party after this incident [3]. We are gradually getting rather petty and becoming no better than Russia, which “Orders Pirate Party to Drop ‘Pirate’ From Its Name” (according to the censored news site) [4]. Notice what they do here; it is clear that when language is policed we are basically losing our ability to express ourselves. The censored news site also says that “Record Label Asks Google to Censor Artists’ Twitter Accounts” [5] (censorship for the copyright monopoly/cartel), helping to shed light on he sheer abuse of those companies and proving the value/importance of such news sites.
“In other words, the filters are now being turned from tools of law enforcement into tools of protecting criminals and banning those who report crime.”There are some other new examples of censorship (by intimidatiob) for business reasons, courtesy of Digital Ocean [6] and SeaWorld [7,8].
Isn’t it funny that those who engage in misconduct or unethical behaviour get to use censorship in their favour? In other words, the filters are now being turned from tools of law enforcement into tools of protecting criminals and banning those who report crime. That’s what government- and corporations-controlled filters are bound to achieve. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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ISPs exist to provide us with unfettered access to the Internet, not the version they or their technology partners feels is appropriate for us. Their ‘parental controls’ do not achieve their stated aim of “protecting children” and are already causing collateral damage by blocking totally innocent sites such as the one you are reading now. It’s hard not to get angry when you realize your website’s accessibility is becoming disabled by default.
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A long-running battle between the Pirate Party of Russia and the Russian Government has concluded with disappointment for the Pirates. In an announcement yesterday that finally brings an end to a number of appeals, the Ministry of Justice declared that since piracy – sea piracy – is a crime under Russian law, no political party may have that word as part of its name. As a result the Pirate Party can never become officially recognized unless it calls itself something else.
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Spinnin’ Records, one of the largest independent dance music labels, has been sending several unusual takedown requests to Google. The record label asked the search engine to take down the Twitter pages of several of its own top artists, including Afrojack, as well as its own account. Google, thus far, has refused to help out with this blatant attempt at self-censorship.
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This is a story about how the VPS provider Digital Ocean required me to either delete a blog post or make it anonymous by removing any reference to the person I was writing about. If I refused to do it, Digital Ocean said they would terminate my account. The person I wrote about (Googler Travis Collins) in the blog post happened to be a friend of a Digital Ocean executive, but Digital Ocean said the only reason the blog post needed to be removed was due to a terms of service violation. Here’s the blog post in its original form. I describe below how this whole incident came to pass and provide screenshots of Digital Ocean’s communications. Digital Ocean promotes itself as a great place to setup a blog, and they provide instructions to make it easy for you, but you might want to learn how Digital Ocean applies its terms of service before investing a lot of time in writing blog posts.
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Well folks, I suppose it was bound to happen. I wrote a dozen pieces for Forbes.com and enjoyed it very much. But the 13th–an article critical of SeaWorld (a 2.5 billion dollar company partially owned by the Blackstone Group) and praiseworthy of ‘Blackfish” (made on a small budget)–rattled some corporate cages.
After I posted, editorial management demanded changes that I could not, in good conscience, make. So the article got pulled (after 77,000 hits in one day) and I left my position.
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Posted in Action at 6:21 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Censorship and discrimination in access/speech increase on the Internet after a US court rules against net neutrality
WITH Western censorship, DRM in standards, and surveillance by design, the Web is already a dying medium as an independent, neutral ground for communication. Now comes another blow to net neutrality, basically jeopardising non-discrimination and introducing a form of ‘soft’ censorship. We have already written a great deal about net neutrality, including for example the following articles:
Here in Europe net neutrality is dying [1], but in the US it is already dead, officially so after this new court decision [2,3]. It might be possible to get net neutrality back [4], but it’s going to be extremely hard and the future looks grim [5] (the press of Rupert Murdoch, who is an opponent of the Internet and net neutrality, pretends nothing has changed [6]). This latest travesty [7] is following outrageous moves by AT&T just a week earlier [8-11], turning data caps into profits although there is no real capacity issue, just an imaginary issue, an excuse. The saddest thing is that not only the Web is affected; if an alternative to the Web was made and was designed to sit on top of the Internet, then too discrimination per protocol or content would be permitted. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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A broad coalition of civil Liberties NGOs launched SaveTheInternet.eu, a campaign to protect Net neutrality in upcoming EU legislation. A recent proposal from the European Commission will restrict freedom of speech on the Internet, increase prices and stifle online innovation unless urgent action is taken. Citizens should contact parliamentarians in the European Parliament’s Industry Committee and urge them to defend the open Internet.
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Three judges in D.C. just killed Net Neutrality.
This could be the end of the Internet as we know it. But it doesn’t have to be.
The big news: A federal appeals court on Tuesday struck down the Federal Communications Commission’s Open Internet Order. This decision means that companies like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon — which brought the lawsuit — are now free to block or slow down any website, application or service they like.
These companies will rush to change the Web and line their own pockets at our expense — creating new tolls for app makers, expensive price tiers for popular sites, and fast lanes open only to the few content providers that can afford them.
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A US court has ruled against the FCC’s Open Internet regulations, putting the future of net neutrality completely up in the air.
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A U.S. Appeals Court just invalidated the FCC’s net neutrality rules that would’ve made it illegal for telecom companies to favor certain types of traffic over others. The court ruled that the commission lacked the authority to implement and enforce such rules which were embedded in a complicated legal framework.
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AT&T’s (NYSE:T) Sponsored Data announcement at 2014 International CES instantly drew concerns from Internet advocates and even the Federal Communications Commission, or FCC. However, the wireless communications giant is unfazed by public response, maintaining that Sponsored Data complies with FCC Net neutrality rules.
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