More Links: Human Rights, Intervention, Surveillance, Wikileaks
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2014-03-25 19:47:50 UTC
- Modified: 2014-03-25 19:47:50 UTC
Human Rights
Mariam Kirollos, a women's rights activist, said on Twitter that the dean should be "interrogated and expelled" and that "investigations into the incident should start immediately".
Intervention
-
Raúl Capote is a Cuban. But not just any Cuban. In his youth, he was caught up by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). They offered him an infinite amount of money to conspire in Cuba. But then something unexpected for the US happened. Capote, in reality, was working for Cuban national security. From then on, he served as a double agent.
Something else must be added instantly. It is no good thinking that the vote was somehow forced by the barrels of Russian rifles. The imagery is familiar, time-tested Cold War stuff with obvious truth in a lot of cases. And scarcely would Putin be above intimidation. But it does not hold up this time, if only because there was no need of intimidation.
The plain reality is that Putin knew well how the referendum would turn out and played the card with confidence. Washington and the European capitals knew, too, and this is why they were so unseemly and shamelessly hypocritical in their desperation to cover the world’s ears as Crimeans spoke.
This raises the legality question. There is blur, certainly, but the legal grounding is clear: International law carefully avoids prohibiting unilateral declarations of independence. In any case, to stand on the law, especially Ukraine’s since the coup against President Viktor Yanukovych last month, is a weak case in the face of Crimeans’ expression of their will.
There was a splendid image published in Wednesday’s New York Times. Take a look. You have a lady in Simferopol, the Crimean capital, on her way to something, probably work. Well-dressed, properly groomed, she navigates the sidewalk indifferently between a soldier and a tank.
CIA
The hotel bar TVs were all flashing clips of Senate intelligence committee chair Dianne Feinstein denouncing the CIA for spying on her staff, when I met an agency operative for drinks last week. He flashed a wan smile, gestured at the TV and volunteered that he'd narrowly escaped being assigned to interrogate Al-Qaida suspects at a secret site years ago.
The Senate Intelligence Committee is poised to send a long-awaited report on the CIA’s interrogation practices to President Barack Obama’s desk for his approval — or redaction.
Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) says she has the votes on the narrowly divided panel to publicly reveal the executive summary and key conclusions of a 6,300-page report on Bush-era interrogation tactics, a move sure to fuel the Senate’s intense dispute with the CIA over how the panel pieced together the study. That vote is likely to happen sometime this week.
The President of the United States has one overriding obligation: to uphold the Constitution and to enforce the laws of the land. That is the oath he swears on Inauguration Day. Failure to meet fully that obligation breaks the contract between him and the citizenry from whom he derives his authority and on whose behalf he acts. The consequence is to jeopardize the well-being of the Republic.
The City of Sunrise, Florida, tried to take a page from the CIA’s anti-transparency playbook last week when it responded to an ACLU public records request about its use of powerful cell phone location tracking gear by refusing to confirm or deny the existence of any relevant documents. And the state police are trying to get in on the act as well. We have written about the federal government’s abuse of this tactic—called a “Glomar” response—before, but local law enforcement’s adoption of the ploy reaches a new level of absurdity. In this case, the response is not only a violation of Florida law, but is also fatally undermined by records the Sunrise Police Department has already posted online.
This topic is the center of a serious debate between the president of the US Senate Intelligence Committee, Dianne Feinstein and the CIA, especially about spionage on the employers of the panel and about if they acceded to non-authorized information.
Last week, Senator Ron Wyden spoke to an audience of about 700 in downtown Portland on the current state of our national surveilliance and national security system.
Over the weekend, I finally found the time to listen to it -- and man, you should listen to his speech. It is both a high-level overview of everything that's going on, as well as a specific rundown of Wyden's concerns about the challenges posed to our civil liberties.
- See more at: http://www.blueoregon.com/2014/03/wyden-cia-fisa-electronic-surveillance/#sthash.vtncHcUG.dpuf
In a remarkable about-face, the Central Intelligence Agency recently came under attack from one of the Senate’s staunchest defenders of national surveillance in the name of national security. On the Senate floor, Dianne Feinstein dramatically made public her accusation that the CIA spied on her committee’s staff in Congress’ lengthy investigation of U.S. interrogation methods.
Among the reporter-columnists whose bylines I never miss, Pulitzer Prize winner Charlie Savage of The New York Times is at the top of the list. He is penetratingly factual and stays on stories that are often surprising.
At the bottom of page 12 of the March 14 Times — in what should have been on the front page, garnering Savage another Pulitzer — was this: “U.S., Rebuffing U.N., Maintains Stance That Rights Treaty Does Not Apply Abroad.”
This treaty, signed by our Senate in 1992, is the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which, Savage notes, “bans arbitrary killings, torture, unfair trials and imprisonments without judicial review” (The New York Times, March 14).
This treaty jumped into the news, thanks to Savage, because, as he states in his opening paragraph: “The Obama administration declared ... that a global Bill of Rights-style treaty imposes no human rights obligations on American military and intelligence forces when they operate abroad.”
Wikileaks
Cables posted on the whistleblowing website show a US ambassador telling Hillary Clinton Wales is 'not necessarily interested in producing energy/electricity for the rest of the UK'
The Army private who was tried and convicted as Bradley Edward Manning for leaking U.S. secrets to WikiLeaks is petitioning a Kansas court for a name change, to Chelsea Elizabeth Manning.
Privacy
When former NSA analyst Edward Snowden revealed the U.S. government’s near-limitless ability to hoard and monitor private communications, it created shockwaves of indignation and forever changed the way we all conduct our digital business.
Since May 2013, consecutive revelations have increasingly exposed the extent and severity of the extralegal surveillance activities conducted by French authorities. It is time for the French government to break its deafening silence on this issue and allow for an open and democratic debate on the extent of its surveillance practices. This is all the more important following the "Loi de programmation militaire" and these recent revelations regarding the cooperation of network operator Orange with French intelligence services. France must make it a priority to revise its current legislation in order to respect international law on privacy.
An Oxford debate in late February posed the question: Is Edward Snowden a hero? In an impassioned defense of a patriotism that courageously stands against the abuse of state power, Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges said yes, and by a vote of the those present, won the contest.
Glenn Greenwald wrote on Tuesday that President Obama's new proposals to overhaul the NSA's bulk collection of phone data are a vindication of Edward Snowden and the journalists who have been reporting on the revelations contained in the documents he provided.
Recent Techrights' Posts
- Coming Soon: Microsoft Fake Results, Mass Layoffs, and Silence About All the People Microsoft Pressured to "Quit" (So That They Don't Get Counted as Layoffs)
- there will be more mass layoffs
- Speed of GNU/Linux
- The media seldom speaks of the dangers of "proprietary software"
- Proprietary Windows Versus "Linux" News (Trying to Keep People on Windows, Never Exploring GNU/Linux)
- Good editors know better how to recognise threats and not give them lip service
- Ensuring That Every Computer User Anywhere in the World Can Take Control of All His or Her Computers
- We must fight the people who attack general-purpose computing, in particular those who push this agenda very aggressively inside Linux
- Gemini Links 28/04/2025: Autism and Structural Navigation
- Links for the day
- What Happened to the Open Source Initiative (OSI) Elections: The Purge, the Cover-up, and the Witch-hunts
- OSI has gone "full Microsoft"
-
- China is Already Culling GAFAM (Not Just Microsoft Windows)
- OS monoculture or "OS hegemony" may be coming to an end
- The "Telephone Operating System in the Vatican" is 95 Years Old, Vatican Moved to GNU/Linux
- Maybe Microsoft is down to zero already
- If Tesla Shares (and Alleged Value) Fell 55% (From $489 to $222) in a Few Months Maybe It's Not Worth Anything At All (It's Just Gambling)
- Tesla swasticars have turned from a "status symbol" into a "public embarrassment" and cause for casual humiliation
- Chromebooks' Adoption in Sweden No Longer Depends on Schools
- School breaks are when classrooms are shut
- No, IBM is Not Investing $150 Billion in the US and It Doesn't Even Have That Kind of Money
- Here we go again... media as a vehicle of lobbying and misinformation
- Leak: The EPO's General Consultative Committee (GCC) Does Not Consult Staff on Crucial Matters and Bypasses the Administrative Council (AC) to Do Illegal Things
- violations against the EPO's very staff
- New Leaks Coming Soon, We Maintain 100% Record of Successful Resistance to Censorship
- We won't be told what we can and cannot say (especially when it's true)
- Central African Republic (CAR): Vista 11 is Only ~0.2% Market Share
- 99.8% to go!
- BSD and GNU/Linux Replaced Microsoft in Secure Servers, All Microsoft Has Left is LLM Slop for Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD)
- the FUD machine never rests
- Gemini Links 28/04/2025: A Simple Task Tracking and Auto-Prioritization Tool and Other Programs
- Links for the day
- Links 28/04/2025: Canada's Election, Pakistan-India Conflict
- Links for the day
- Glue Inside Your Pizza (or Why People Will Get Fed Up With Slop)
- People are given "answers" from non-intelligence word dumpsters
- Links 28/04/2025: Cyberattacks Happening, Chatbots Disappointing, and "Free Speech Under Fire"
- Links for the day
- Phone Adoption Very Low in Vatican, Windows Usage Fell Nonetheless
- Even in places where people still use desktops/laptops most of the time (and have access to these) Windows is gradually losing ground
- GNU/Linux 9% in Cuba, Vista 11 Waning, Android Dominant
- Microsoft has pretty much lost Cuba
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Sunday, April 27, 2025
- IRC logs for Sunday, April 27, 2025
- In 24 Countries Observed by statCounter Vista 11 is Still Less Than a Quarter of Windows Users Despite All Other Versions Being 'Expired'
- They ought to move to GNU/Linux
- Links 27/04/2025: Pope Goodbyes, "Politics of Fear", Slop Redux and More Google Shutdowns (Google Debt Had Grown This Year)
- Links for the day
- Links 27/04/2025: Serenity Dialectics, Hockey Jersey Ethics, and More
- Links for the day
- Links 27/04/2025: Death of Nest Thermostats, Death of Metaverse
- Links for the day
- Links 27/04/2025: Projects Workflow and Discovering Technology
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Saturday, April 26, 2025
- IRC logs for Saturday, April 26, 2025
- Microsoft Isn't on the Map in USSR
- To them, it's either Google or Yandex
- In Central America Windows Became a Small Force
- These are countries where Windows used to have well over 95% of the "market"
- What's Very Vexing to GAFAM, EPO and Others Is That It's Incredibly Hard to Censor Us (and Nobody Ever Successfully Did That Before)
- resist, do not capitulate
- Site May be Even Faster Now
- It basically takes less than a tenth of a second to serve the page
- Receiving SLAPPs and Collecting Them Like Trophies (the SLAPPs Always Fail)
- People who file lawsuits bring even more attention to themselves (or to embarrassing statements about them)
- Year of GNU/Linux on the Laptop?
- It's not happening only in Lenovo
- What People Must Understand About the Open Source Initiative (OSI)
- some facts about the Open Source Initiative (OSI)
- Many of the Scandals Are Interconnected (Overlapping People and Corporations)
- We're only getting started
- More Copyright Lawsuits Against LLM Slop Providers and Suppliers of LLM Slopfarms Would Benefit Society
- It's not just bad for the Web and for society; it's also legally dangerous
- Links 26/04/2025: General Assassinated in the Town of Balashikha, US Promoting Seafloor Mining
- Links for the day
- Links 26/04/2025: Facebook Layoffs Again, Remembering What's Real, and Say No to Mass Surveillance
- Links for the day
- Links 26/04/2025: NOAA Budget Cuts and "Dog Days Ahead"
- Links for the day
- In defence of JD Vance, death of Pope Francis
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Three Years in Prison for Disney Employee’s ‘Menu Hacking’: The Economic Fallout of Digital Menus
- Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Friday, April 25, 2025
- IRC logs for Friday, April 25, 2025