02.10.13
Posted in Apple, Google, Microsoft, Patents at 11:41 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Updates (mostly from Groklaw) about FRAND lawsuits of Microsoft and Apple
FRAND battles against Android have been waged by Microsoft and Apple, the patent allies (or conspiracy), for quite some time. It’s unfair and unreasonable. There are some updates about it in links shared by Groklaw, which in many of its relevant news picks talks about Apple ‘s fight against Motorola:
Motorola and Apple are currently facing off over patent-related issues in several ongoing judicial proceedings, including multiple appeals before the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. One of these Federal Circuit appeals was brought by Apple over Judge Crabb’s dismissal of Apple’s claims that Motorola violated the antitrust laws and breached its contracts with SSOs in conducting its SEP-related licensing and enforcement activities. But on January 25, Motorola filed a motion with the Federal Circuit to dismiss Apple’s appeal (or transfer it to the Seventh Circuit), asserting that the Federal Circuit lacks jurisdiction to hear the case. While at first blush this seems like just a mundane dispute over civil procedure issues, a decision on this motion may have significant consequences for future FRAND-related proceedings.
Pamela Jones alludes to this case but still focuses on Microsoft, which chose its back yard, Seattle, for this biased and hypocritical FRAND plot. Here is the latest:
Judge James Robart in the Microsoft v. Motorola litigation in Seattle has ruled now on Microsoft’s partial summary judgment motion that they held the hearing about last week. He has — surprise, surprise — once again ruled for Microsoft. He has not yet ruled on the other issue the hearing was about, the issue of the Google license agreement with MPEG LA.
Aided by Microsoft boosters (some are Gates-funded) who had flooded the court, Microsoft won those biased trials before. Trial by media much? █
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Posted in America, Patents at 11:24 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“Patent monopolies are believed to drive innovation but they actually impede the pace of science and innovation, Stiglitz said. The current “patent thicket,” in which anyone who writes a successful software programme is sued for alleged patent infringement, highlights the current IP system’s failure to encourage innovation, he said.”
–IP Watch on Professor Joseph Stiglitz
Summary: Signs of massive backlash against the US patent system as patent trolls spread collective damage
TThe previous post spoke about the low standards of the USPTO. Something has got to change. Zach Carter has this amazing news, adding to Nobel celebrities (in economics [1, 2]) who slam the US patent system. He writes:
Patent Reform, System Should Be Abolished, Fed Economists Say
Two economists at the St. Louis Federal Reserve published a paper arguing to abolish the American patent system, saying there’s “no evidence” patents improve productivity and that they have a “negative” effect on “innovation.”
The research suggests that President Barack Obama’s 2011 patent reform legislation — one of only a handful of major bills to clear Congress with bipartisan support in recent years — was wrong-headed.
A popular political site berates the system for the trolls it harbours and money has just been granted for a law professor to study the subject. To quote: “Santa Clara Law’s Professor Colleen Chien has received a $35,000 research grant from the New America Foundation to expand her work relating to “Start-ups and Trolls”. This grant will fund an expanded survey to determine the impacts of Patent Assertion Entities (PAEs) on the operations, growth, and innovation of startups. This version of the survey will also explore trends in patent purchasing, strategies for responding, and the market for “troll solution” providers.”
Watch what RIM has had to say on the subject after its very existence was compromised by trolls.
‘$30B’ spent on patent battles
Heins also spoke on Tuesday at Toronto’s Empire Club, making a point to discuss how legal battles over patents, especially in the United States, have been detrimental to the mobile technology industry.
“This past year, our sector spent almost $30 billion in courtrooms — particularly in U.S. courtrooms — defending cases against non-practicing entities — or ‘patent trolls’ — who produce nothing,” he said in prepared remarks.
“Patent trolls hold genuine innovators hostage and patents have become weapons in an international technology arms race. This is crazy. We have to shift our resources from litigation back to innovation, investment and job creation.”
BlackBerry holds over 3,400 U.S. patents, making it one of the top patent-holders in the country.
RIM is actually not a patent aggressor. It’s more like Google in this regard and in a later post we will show that Google now seeks to abolish software patents. █
“IP is often compared to physical property rights but knowledge is fundamentally different.”
–IP Watch on Professor Joseph Stiglitz
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Posted in America, Patents at 11:17 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The latest new examples which show that the US patent system is not hinged on reality; a call for action
The US patent system, protected by the USPTO and SCOTUS as validator, coercing others through the courts and ITC, serves as protectionism for corporations at the expense of people and to the benefit of patent lawyers.
SCOTUS Blog bloggers talk about gene patenting, one of the most controversial types of patents. Rather then seek a ban, a symposium is organised and one can bet it will be stacked by lawyers. This system is rigged. Watch USPTO patent #8,370,951, granted February 5th, 2013. It is titled “Securing the U.S.A” and it is not a satire. A Seattle blog tells us that lending goods online is also a granted patent now, assigned to Amazon along with this ‘milkman’ patent. USPTO quickly becomes a source of comedy, but it’s not funny to those who get sued. There are some more new reports that show laughable patents and the EFF reportedly fights an infamous patent on podcasting:
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital civil liberties group, is declaring war on a company claiming it made the podcast possible.
EFF said Tuesday it was organizing companies that face threats from patent trolls – a derogatory term for companies that earn most of their money from patent licensing or litigation.
The EFF no longer busts just one patent at a time. It now runs a well-funded campaign to eradicate software patents as a whole (in the US).
New Zealand is meanwhile resisting attempts to expand US patent law — a subject on which Dr. Glyn Moody had this to say:
Let’s hope Mr Foss listens, and New Zealand programmers can continue to focus on creating great software, rather than needing to look anxiously over their shoulders all the time for fear that they might accidentally infringe on a software patent that has been granted to some deep-pocketed software company or – even worse – a predatory patent troll.
We must destroy software patents in the US or else they might spread elsewhere, e.g. through trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific ‘free’ ‘trade’ treaties. There is need for global action because US policy usually become universal or global policy, shows history. The clock is ticking and patent lawyers fight against developers’ interests. █
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Posted in IRC Logs at 4:50 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
IRC Proceedings: February 3rd, 2013
IRC Proceedings: February 4th, 2013
IRC Proceedings: February 5th, 2013
IRC Proceedings: February 6th, 2013
IRC Proceedings: February 7th, 2013
IRC Proceedings: February 8th, 2013
IRC Proceedings: February 9th, 2013
Enter the IRC channels now
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02.09.13
Posted in GNU/Linux, Kernel, Microsoft, Vista 8, Windows at 10:12 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Microsoft unable to compete amid new wave of form factors and deterrence against Linux installs put in place, with patent baggage too
THE Microsoft booster whom we like to cite for his ridiculous spin is already recognising the undeniable. As he put it in his headline, “Dismal news for Microsoft’s mobile efforts: Windows Phone and Windows 8 tablets sales are in the dumper” (yes, indeed).
Microsoft just got hit with a double-whammy: Reports show that Windows Phone market share is in the very low single digits in the U.S. and have declined since the release of Windows Phone 8, and Microsoft’s tablet share is scraping the bottom. Will Microsoft eventually be forced to run up the white flag?
The latest figures about Windows Phone share from Comscore are grim. In the quarter ending in December 2012, Microsoft had a 2.9% market share of the smartphone market in the U.S., compared to 53.4% for Android, 36.3% for the iPhone, and 6.4% for Blackberry. More disturbing still is that Microsoft’s market share declined from the quarter previous, when it had a 3.6% market share. That means that Microsoft’s share of the smartphone market declinced since the release of Windows Phone 8.
Yes, it’s ComScore again, the company we've just mentioned. They’re Microsoft-friendly. So the real numbers are probably far worse for Microsoft.
It is clear to us what Microsoft can do now in order to stay relevant. It will resort to dirty tricks and market distortion, as usual. We should boycott Microsoft Dell and not expect it to be a GNU/Linux player anymore:
Microsoft scared of Linux, hence loans Dell to distribute PCs with Windows
The Redmond based software giant, Microsoft, has a good hold on the market when it comes to computers, both desktops and laptops. But in the post PC market, eh. There are many players in the post PC market who do better than Microsoft. For example, Apple is doing very well in the tablet and smart phone market, and Samsung has become the top dog when it comes to Android based smart phones, but may not be for tablets.
Microsoft is also screwing with Linux booting abilities, as evidenced by this latest update from Dr. Garrett:
The recent Linux kernel commits avoid one mechanism by which Samsung laptops can be bricked, but the information we now have indicates that there are other ways of triggering this.
Here is a report about it:
Garrett, who was involved in work on UEFI support in the Linux kernel, bases his comments on the information available to him. His comment about other ways of triggering the problem chimes with a report from a reader who, in creating UEFI boot entries, managed to confuse the firmware on his Samsung laptop to the extent that it was no longer possible to access the UEFI setup. When the problem first came to light, Greg Kroah-Hartman, who worked on the samsung-laptop driver, made it clear in a post on Google+ that, in his view, Samsung was the only party in a position to resolve the cause of the problem and that a firmware update was required.
In Garrett’s recent talk about it he said that UEFI is also FAT-encumbered (patents), which makes one wonder. Don’t allow anyone to tell you that UEFI is a solved problem. █
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Posted in Google, Microsoft, Search at 9:47 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Bing keeps falling, now as low as 5th, according to a Microsoft-friendly source
Microsoft’s partners at ComScore deliver some raw numbers which show Microsoft declining in search (we still have an issue with proxies and we challenged them over it, only to receive a weak response).
RUSSIAN SEARCH ENGINE Yandex surpassed Microsoft on the number of monthly search queries worldwide in November and December 2012, according to a recently released Comscore report.
Microsoft websites processed 4.477 billion queries, while Yandex processed 4.844 billion.
As you’d expect, Google still reigned supreme with 114.73 billion search queries and 65.2 percent market share. Chinese search giant Baidu was second globally with 14.5 billion and 8.2 percent, and Yahoo came in third with 8.63 billion and 4.9 percent.
Bong [sic], the latest of many names for Microsoft’s search, has hardly gotten press in recent years. It got a lot of publicity when Microsoft paid a lot of money for this publicity. It all clearly failed because Microsoft still loses billions of dollars online. █
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Mono, Ubuntu at 9:35 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Ubuntu One stops support of Tomboy, a notorious application best known for its pulling of Mono into numerous distributions of GNU/Linux
Based on the news from FOSDEM, Xamarin‘s Mono is rapidly collapsing. In Techrights, a prominent and longtime opponent of Mono, someone recently showed us reports about people losing data due to Ubuntu One-Tomboy connectivity.
This thread is located here and it says “tomboy deleted all my notes after last synchronisation. Something to do with ubuntu one dropping support. I’m mad as hell, somebody should have told us, my last backup was a month ago, I’ve just lost a pile of information.”
The person who brought this to our attention noted, “C# / Mono is garbage. There is also the bad design on top of the bad language which follows from importing the Microsoft mindset.”
The pulling of Tomboy support is also corroborated here:
Ubuntu One discontinues support to Tomboy
In the past I’ve talked about Tomboy, that i was not liking too much to have a Mono application in all my computers, but that Tomboy sync feature was really too good for me, well it seems that someone else has decided that it’s times for me to switch to another Notes program.
Over time we see fewer and fewer cases of support for Mono. █
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02.08.13
Posted in News Roundup at 10:02 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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January has come to an end and the highlight of the month was undoubtedly, the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) held annually at Las Vegas. With each new events featuring latest and greatest from the world of consumer electronics, Linux and products based on it are becoming more prominent than ever. This year’s CES was no different. Here’s a quick roundup of 5 very unique Linux based devices introduced during CES 2013.
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Arctic is now selling a small form-factor desktop computer with an Intel Atom processor, AMD Radeon HD graphics, and a Linux-based operating system designed to support the XBMC Media Center application.
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In the digital age, we have barely any use for the common pen. What good is something that doesn’t even have WiFi? Luckily, a European startup is creating a “learning pen” to drag penmanship lessons into the 21st century.
The Lernstift digital pen vibrates to warn you that your handwriting is becoming illegible or that you’ve made a grammatical error. Its goal is to help teach kids to write using instantaneous feedback.
Though it has an actual ballpoint pen inside, it also recognizes writing done in the air, so it can be used on any surface or no surface at all. In case you need a virtual whiteboard, perhaps.
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Desktop
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To make my point, I’ll take us back to 2006.
Just like now, in 2006 the FOSS press was busy at work asking, “Will this be the year for Linux on the desktop?” Let’s start by looking at what we meant by “desktop” in those days, because what we really meant was the personal computer.
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Server
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This week IBM released a bunch of new hardware, including 8 new Power Systems, 3 PureSystems models, and new storage technology. This is good news for small and medium businesses, because it means the same powerful hardware that powers Watson (http://www-03.ibm.com/innovation/us/watson/) is now available at prices designed to compete with commodity hardware from other vendors.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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Donnie Berkholz presented at FOSDEM 2013 with various X.Org statistics and a look at the health of the development community. Not counting just the X.Org Server but also related components within the X.Org umbrella, the pace of development appears to be on the decline.
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Applications
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Proprietary
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First of all, upstream has been at least discussing how to deal with these kind of complains: while some commenters complained about leaving Gentoo because of our decision of not bumping to 2.65a (yet), with the idea that it’d be much easier to have Blender on Debian, Arch Linux or whatever else, it turns out that Gentoo was not alone having trouble with Blender, and indeed Matteo asked our help with patching at least for libav-9 support.
For what concerns Gentoo, while I keep getting bugs requesting an update to version 2.65a, I’ve been basically closing them every time, as none seem to care about getting it right — and I really don’t want to get a crappy ebuild in, as I’d be the one taking the pieces anyway. Mostly, what we need is a version of Blender ebuild that does use CMake, but also does not use the bundled libraries for all the code we have in the system already. The main issue here is Bullet, which requires a version bump, possibly with a pre-release snapshot of 2.82, due to the patches that are applied on top of the copy that comes with Blender.
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Instructionals/Technical
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The cron daemon is a core component of any Unix-like operating system. On the surface, cron is a scheduler, meant to run a command at regular intervals. However, if we dig a little deeper into the configuration options, we find that we can configure cron to be as detailed and granular as we need. If you need a script to run every seven minutes, five days a week, between the hours of 8AM and 4PM, cron has you covered.
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Games
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The story of the game is that you escape from the clutches of an opressive government that made the humans work like machines around the clock and you are that one guy who manages to escape from this horrible routine and make a run for it.
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After Counter-Strike 1.6 and Half-Life 1, another important game is now available in Steam for Linux: Counter-Strike: Source (CS: S), a popular first-person shooter developed by Valve.
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Savage 2: A Tortured Soul, a game developed and published by the S2 Games, LLC studio, will be launched on Steam for Linux.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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The GNOME developers behind the GNOME Session application, which is part of the GNOME desktop environment, have announced the immediate availability for download and testing of the 3.7.4 development release.
GNOME Session 3.7.4 (yes, 3.7.4 and not 3.7.5) is part of the upcoming GNOME 3.7.5 desktop environment, a development version towards the highly anticipated GNOME 3.8 release, which should see the light of day sometime at the end of March 2013.
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SolusOS is a new Debian-based distro that uses the GNOME 2.3 desktop. SolusOS comes with such core applications as Firefox, VLC, and LibreOffice. It’s a relatively easy way to get both Debian and a GNOME 2 desktop in one, convenient package.
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Which Linux operating systems are the most popular among home and small business users? Which Linux desktop is the best choice for enterprise users? Questions like these are meaningless and unanswerable, even for Linux developers. “Measuring Linux adoption … has always been — and will likely always be — a difficult task, due to the lack of empirical data,” said Jeremy Garcia, founder of LinuxQuestions.org.
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New Releases
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) CEO Jim Whitehurst says it’s too soon to pinpoint the number of jobs his company will create in the next year — but jobs are coming.
The open source company’s chief information officer Lee Congdon has been quoted as saying Red Hat plans to add 1,000 jobs worldwide.
“I think somebody just threw that number out there,” Whitehurst said. “We’re in the middle of our budget process, so it’s impossible to answer that, whether it’s 800 or 1,500. I don’t know.”
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Fedora
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During FUDCon, I got to wondering: with all the rewriting and refactoring and fixing we’ve done on anaconda in the past couple years, is there any of the old code left anymore?
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Perhaps most interestingly, the “superphones” will be able to dock to a monitor, keyboard, and mouse and deliver a PC-like experience. That’s a lot of computing power in a little package — the Galaxy Nexus, to be exact, one of the current flagships of the Android fleet.
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It asks me if I work for Canonical, the makers of Ubuntu Linux (for the uninitiated). I don’t. Not a company I am either for or against to any great degree. They do some great stuff I like and other stuff I don’t so much They know how to ignite some angry beards though, which are a bit like Angry Birds only more hairy. Just thought this was quirky enough to share with you.
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A mobile version of the world’s most widely used Linux operating system shows promise, but it will face stiff competition.
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The Raspberry Pi foundation has signalled that a camera module for the device could be available in a matter of weeks.
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Phones
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Android
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Last month we reported how Android enthusiasts on the XDA Developer forum had worked out a method to estimate the smartphone’s production run based on each device’s IMEI number. Going into the end of 2012 the estimate suggested LG had produced about 400,000 devices in total. Now, according to a post on the same forum by member draugaz, Nexus 4 production has passed the millionth device.
Google declined to comment on Nexus 4 sales figures when contacted by TechCrunch but a source close to the company indicated that Mountain View is very happy with the take up so far.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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We know ASUS is king of the low-priced tablet market, given the popularity of the Nexus 7, but it seems that they just can’t help themselves from going lower and lower. They recently launched the 7″ MeMo Pad in Europe for about $150, and now there is new talk of an Intel-powered “ultra-budget” tablet.
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Financial firms need to take an active role in adopting and governing OSS’s broader usage, according to Black Duck Software’s CEO.
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OS X has a massive following of web developers who constantly used Linux based web server stacks to run their CMS stacks – it’s actually a pretty common trend at the moment. Within Apple’s OS X App Store, users can now find four of the most popular CMS’s that run inside BitNami – Drupal, WordPress, Joomla, and a generic MAMP stack (Mac, Apache, MySQL and PHP).
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Not satisfied with the experience on current forum software packages, Stack Exchange co-founder Jeff Atwood founded Civilized Discourse Construction Kit Inc to come up with a software package to replace them. Its open source Discourse software is built with JavaScript, Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL and, according to the developers, can be used whenever a mailing list or forum is needed. According to the team: “Discourse is a from-scratch reboot, an attempt to re-imagine what a modern, sustainable, fully open-source Internet discussion platform should be”.
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Over the last several years, Netflix has put a lot of work into building a cloud-based architecture off of Amazon Web Services (AWS) to run its video streaming and DVD rental services. Then the company announced that it was going to open source those same tools and make them available to other developers. Ever since, Netflix has been slowly making other cloud-management tools available for others to build off of. Now it’s hoping to make it easier for others to implement not just one or two of those tools, but all of them.
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Events
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Berners-Lee was reportedly paid in excess of $200,000 for his visit.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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For someone who works with, writes about and teaches cutting-edge technologies, I tend to be a bit of a laggard when adopting new ones. I upgrade my laptop and servers very conservatively. I got my first smartphone just earlier this year. I still use the Apache HTTP server, even though I know that nginx is a bit faster. And until recently, Mozilla’s Firefox was my default browser.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The team has revamped the LibreOffice.org, bidding goodbye to the ‘boring’ and aged design. The new design is jazzy and reflects how aggressive the ‘new’ LibreOffice community is, shedding the old brand image it inherited from the doomed OpenOffice. This change also gives a hint that the UI of this popular open source office suite may also get the same make-over
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LibreOffice 4 has just arrived and, at first glance, this popular open-source office suite looks really good.
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With LibreOffice 4.0, the Document Foundation has bumped the major version number of its office suite for the first time since the project split from the OpenOffice.org code base. This version increase is more of a cultural and symbolic change than it is an indicator of major new features. Nonetheless, LibreOffice 4.0 introduces a number of functional improvements and underlying polish to the open source office package that is worth a look.
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I love the new LibreOffice 4 even though I’ve only kissed her once.
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Today saw the release of a landmark update of LibreOffice, the community successor to OpenOffice.org that’s developed by TDF (The Document Foundation) and its global volunteer community. LibreOffice version 4 looks fresh, includes new enterprise features, and offers improved performance.
TDF is a nonprofit that allows a wide range of corporate sponsors to join with individual volunteers to build, localize, and test LibreOffice. I spent some time with core developer Michael Meeks of Suse to understand the highlights of the new release.
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CMS
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We’re going to tip our hand here at the start by admitting that the question is unanswerable. The answer depends on who you are and why you’re asking. This is sort of like the question, “What’s better — chocolate ice cream or vanilla ice cream?” There’s no right answer. It all depends on whom you’re asking. Unfortunately, the open vs. closed debate engenders more negative emotions than choosing ice cream flavors.
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BSD
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PC-BSD is a multi-purpose distribution of FreeBSD. The last stable release is PC-BSD 9.1. Development and releases tend to be slow and infrequent, and it does not get as much press coverage as Linux distributions.
I have been reviewing its major releases since this website was launched, though I’m yet to review the last stable edition.
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Licensing
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Not only are open source applications and platforms continuing to raise their profiles, but many businesses now use open source components without even knowing that they are doing so. All of which means that it is more important than ever to know your way around the world of laws and licenses that pertain to open source software. Leaders of new projects need to know how to navigate the complex world of licensing and the law, as do IT administrators.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open source software — code that’s free for anyone to use, as long as they share what they’re doing with it — plays a small, but growing, role in the smart grid. Examples include OpenADR, a Berkeley Labs-California Energy Commission-backed standard for automating demand response, and OpenPDC, a Tennessee Valley Authority’s Hadoop-based data management tool for transmission grid synchrophasor data.
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A White House petition to build the death star from Star Wars received the 25,000 necessary signatures to warrant an official response. The official White House response was essentially a no, citing the estimated $852 quadrillion dollar cost of building a death star as the reason. Hey, that’s only 13,000 times the entire world’s yearly GDP and a redonkulous amount of steel. No biggie.
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Open Data
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The Open Data Day wiki (sans logo, so a little rough around the edges) is now live and ready for action.
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Open Access/Content
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One of the staunchest Republicans in Congress, House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), attended a Capitol Hill memorial on Monday for progressive activist Aaron Swartz, praising the fallen Internet icon’s political courage and saying he has common ground with much of Swartz’s legacy.
“He and I probably would have found ourselves at odds with lots of decisions, but never with the question of whether information was in fact a human right,” Issa said at the memorial.
Swartz, who was one of the earliest minds behind Reddit, took his own life in January after fighting federal hacking charges for two years. He had long been an advocate for both an open Internet and the democratization of knowledge. Prosecutors pursued him for downloading millions of academic journal articles from the online database JSTOR, but Swartz had devoted much of his activist energy to liberating information. At age 14, he helped develop the Creative Commons license, an alternative to copyright that allows works to be shared freely, so long as they are not used for profit. The license is used heavily by Flickr and many other websites. Later, Swartz downloaded public court documents from the PACER system in an effort to make them available outside of the expensive service. The move drew the attention of the FBI, which ultimately decided not to press charges as the documents, were, in fact, public.
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Open Hardware
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Defense Distributed, the project that aims to release an open-source, print-it-yourself assault rifle, has succeeded in 3D-printing a high-capacity AR-15 magazine, dubbed Cuomo. The magazine has so far survived the firing of 342 rounds — 227 of which were in full auto mode.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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The CIA’s biggest ally in Congress for its targeted killing program is Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who chairs the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. But there’ll be hell to pay at Langley if Feinstein learns the CIA is misrepresenting how many civilians its lethal Predator and Reaper drones kill, she indicated to Danger Room on Friday.
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While the Gang of Four do not have access to the CIA’s kill list (and therefore did not know whether Samir Khan was on it before his death), they are the only people outside the Executive Branch who had, before today, seen the government’s rationale for killing Anwar al-Awlaki (and DOJ still has 8 memos on targeted killing to turn over). Thus, up until today, the Gang of Four has been the only outside review on that killing, 16 months after Awlaki’s death.
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…can’t (or refuses to) say whether waterboarding is torture because he is not a lawyer…
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John Brennan and John Kiriakou worked together years ago, but their careers have dramatically diverged. Brennan is now on track to head the CIA, while Kiriakou is headed off to prison. Each of their fates is tied to the so-called war on terror, which under President George W. Bush provoked worldwide condemnation. President Barack Obama rebranded the war on terror innocuously as “overseas contingency operations,” but, rather than retrench from the odious practices of his predecessor, Obama instead escalated. His promotion of Brennan, and his prosecution of Kiriakou, demonstrate how the recent excesses of U.S. presidential power are not transient aberrations, but the creation of a frightening new normal, where drone strikes, warrantless surveillance, assassination and indefinite detention are conducted with arrogance and impunity, shielded by secrecy and beyond the reach of law.
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But even if capture is not feasible at the moment, if the suspect is not about to attack us, it is possible that capture will become feasible later. Self defense requires that lethal force be used only as a last resort; the Obama administration’s redefinition of “imminence” permits it to be used as a first resort. Is it any wonder that the administration has killed hundreds of suspected terrorists outside Afghanistan, but captured almost none?
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For starters, as American officials confirmed, the attack was not carried out by the Yemeni Air Force but, rather, by the United States. The U.S. had launched a volley of Tomahawk cruise missiles from a ship off the coast. (As far as we know, most of the attacks in Yemen since then have been carried out with drones.) As was later revealed in documents released by Wikileaks, American and Yemeni officials had reached a secret agreement that allowed the U.S. to take action against suspected terrorists. The Yemeni President told General David Petraeus, then the head of CENTCOM, “We’ll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours.”
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A lawsuit challenging a provision in the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) – which gives the federal government the right to indefinitely detain American citizens suspected of terrorism-related activities, sans charge or trial – was back in court yesterday. Last December, GAP filed an amicus curiae brief in the lawsuit challenging the overbroad and vague provisions, which specifically, as the brief states, “greatly expands [sic] the Executive’s military detention authority,” which allows the federal government to indefinitely detain American citizens, such as those who: a) “substantially supported” groups engaged in hostilities against the U.S., b) substantially supported “associated forces” engaged in such hostilities, or c) have “directly supported” such hostilities.
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Uproar has been evident on both sides of the aisle following the recent news about President Obama‘s drone program. Not everyone, however, has been critical. Including Fox & Friends co-host Gretchen Carlson, who questioned some of the outrage during this morning’s show.
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As a special service to emptywheel readers, I am going to provide an abridged version of John Brennan’s answers to Additional Prehearing Questions in advance of his confirmation hearing on Thursday.
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But, Wyden had been requesting “secret legal opinions.” That suggests the existence of more than one memo. (Marcy Wheeler wrote in a recent post on how the release of the memos is being misreported.)
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Same goes for Islamist radical attacks on American interests overseas – it’s just not happening to the degree that our favorite jihad hunters here in the U.S have been ranting about for the last 12 years. Turns out that most of the terror attacks occurring in the world today, according to 2012 Global Terrorism Index, are happening to someone else, and in many cases associated with conditions created by western military interventions.
According to that report, the top places for terror remain Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, where their civilians are dying, not ours. In fact, Iraq is by far the worst. But no American has died there since November, while more than 200 Iraqis have been killed since Jan. 1 in violence perpetuated by Al-Qaeda in Iraq and other terrorists who are the direct outgrowth of the U.S occupation of that country in the last decade.
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However, Stewart noted that the definition of “imminent threat” in the leaked document wasn’t particularly imminent.
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Miami police officers learned that lesson the hard way after the internal affairs division, acting on an unknown tip, turned common police surveillance tools against police officers and uncovered serious abuse of power. The investigators used surveillance cameras and GPS trackers to monitor a unit’s behavior, finding that instead of responding to calls for service, officers were making out with their girlfriends, drinking coffee, going shopping, and spending hours just hanging out.
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Right now, the Senate Intelligence Committee possesses a 6,000-page report on detention and interrogation techniques used by the CIA in the War on Terrorism. As yet, it remains classified, but White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan has a copy, and at his confirmation hearing to be CIA director, Senator Dianne Feinstein asked if he’s read it, or at least the 300-page summary.
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Slovak national accused of spying for US set free after ‘difficult and complicated’ bilateral negotiations
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The report was issued on Feb. 4 in wake of a ban on Israel by a new U.S.-sponsored counter-insurgency forum. Officials acknowledged that opposition by Muslim states, particularly Turkey, prevented the attendance of Israel.
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The White House on Friday defended its decision not to endorse a CIA plan to arm the Syrian rebels, saying it was worried that U.S. weapons could “fall into the wrong hands” and worsen the situation in the civil war-torn country.
In his remarks, Press Secretary Jay Carney specifically mentioned danger to “our ally Israel” as one of the reasons President Barack Obama rejected providing lethal aid to rebels fighting to topple the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad.
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I’m in good company when I contemplate a world without AIPAC. Upon his election as prime minister in 1992, Yitzhak Rabin told the lobby that Israel would be better off without it and that it did more harm than good. He wanted AIPAC out of the way because he was planning a peace initiative with the Palestinians and knew that AIPAC would try (as it did) to thwart his efforts.
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Nominated to head the CIA, John Brennan told a protest-disrupted Senate confirmation hearing that every US drone strike ordered is considered in depth, and that he no longer sure that waterboarding ever garnered “valuable” information.
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As Brennan took the floor to begin his opening statement, a woman in the audience clutching a sign that said “Brennan = drone killing,” launched into an only occasionally comprehensible tirade about drones, torture, and protecting soldiers. Feinstein promptly ordered the police to remove the woman who – clearly eager to make her 15 seconds in the spotlight count – continued hollering her discontents as she was escorted away from the hearing. As she left, several audience members lifted their hands in what appeared to be a gesture of solidarity. Feinstein then let it be known that she’d be happy to clear the room if the audience failed to control itself.
As he began singing the praises of his wife Kathy, a second protester began shouting abuses about a 16-year-old who was killed in a drone strike.
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Lawyers for Liberty is shocked and outraged at Malaysia’s involvement…
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Britain’s ambitious plans to store all government data on the so-called G-Cloud have led to warnings from the European Union that security will be compromised now that U.S. intelligence agencies have the legal right to survey all data held on U.S. owned Cloud services.
At least four U.S. companies are involved in the U.K. government’s G-Cloud project which Whitehall hopes will slash costs and “deliver fundamental changes in the way the public sector procures and operates.”
Eventually, it is hoped the G-Cloud will hold the bulk of State data in addition to that of schools, charities, the BBC and police, even the Bank of England.
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The investment is an interesting one for Samsung, but even more interesting for throwing light on Cloudant’s other investors. Which include, as it turns out, In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital fund, headquartered on the 11th floor of a nondescript office building in Arlington, Va.
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The Senate Intelligence Committee hearing to confirm John Brennan as the next director of the CIA was briefly suspended on Thursday after anti-war Code Pink protesters repeatedly interrupted the session.
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…maintain control over the Paraguayan government.
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Interview with William Blum…knowledge of US military and CIA interventions
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He described as “reprehensible” the use of waterboarding on detainees, which simulates drowning, and said it should never have been carried out by the CIA, but he stopped short of describing it as torture.
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The cover of the Feb. 4 issue of Time features Kathryn Bigelow, the director of Zero Dark Thirty, and dubs her new film ‘the year’s most controversial movie’ in its headline. The article inside makes an even bigger claim, calling Zero Dark Thirty “the most politically divisive motion picture in memory.” Though Bigelow has made a point in interviews to condemn torture as “reprehensible”, her depiction of torture in the Oscar-nominated dramatic thriller about the hunt for Osama bin Laden has created a firestorm, and could create some frissons at the 85th Academy Awards telecast later this month.
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Diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks showed that former United States ambassador James Kenny had noted in 2006 that the Irish Government “acted to ensure continued US military transits at Shannon in the face of public criticism.”
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“Six drones were hovering in the sky at the time of the attack. One drone fired two missiles at a house,” a security official in Miran Shah said.
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The Committee on the Rights of the Child says the casualties were “due notably to [a] reported lack of precautionary measures and indiscriminate use of force.”
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Have you heard? George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are up to their old tricks.
It wasn’t so long ago that they cited congressional authorization for the war on terror, passed by Congress one week after September 11, 2001, to justify their use of rendition, torture and widespread wiretapping. Now Bush and Cheney are claiming that the same law gives them unlimited authority to use unmanned drones to kill American citizens overseas without a trial.
Gotcha! As much as Democrats might like to blame Bush and Cheney for America’s vastly expanded drone warfare, it’s not the previous occupants of the White House who are sending out the drones. It’s today’s. The Obama administration made its case for lethal use of drones in a white paper provided by the Justice Department to key members of Congress last summer and leaked this week to NBC News.
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If you really want Washington’s chattering classes to pay attention to something, an old saying goes, leak it to the media.
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…”extraordinary rendition” (kidnapping) and “enhanced interrogation” (torture) are now part of the political language.
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Cablegate
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Last week I posted on the Bank Mellat case where an Iranian Bank succeeded in persuading the General Court to unfreeze its assets from orders made by EU institutions. The Bank Saderat case is virtually identical, and annulment was duly granted by the General Court. But it is troubling that the EU Council should go so wrong in wielding its draconian powers more than once. It does rather support the suspicions of the Bank (common to this and the Bank Mellat case) that pressure was brought to bear on the Council ultimately emanating from the US – hence the Wikileaks cables again – such that the EU did not robustly analyse the assertions made to them before making the orders. Basic errors were made again, and, as will emerge, the EU had no evidence for much of what it said.
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Finance
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According to Anonymous’ Twitter account, the hacktivist group is planning on shutting down Goldman Sachs’ Facebook and Twitter page on Feb. 14 to express their hatred of the financial behemoth. The account tweeted out the request to their 869,000-plus Twitter followers on Thursday.
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The early headline on a New York Times story (2/7/13) by Adam Nagourney was, “Millionaires Consider Leaving California Over Taxes.” At some point they changed the headline, probably because there’s nothing in the article that would support it.
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Afghanistan’s near-legendary levels of corruption continue to worsen, with the latest UN report putting the bribery industry at $3.9 billion, twice what the Afghan government actually collects in above-the-table revenue.
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There seems to be a consensus of opinion that our Members of Parliament are not that truthful which is probably why I have heard so many people express the view, “Of course Chris Huhne lied, he’s a politician”.
That the people who make the laws we have to live by are flat out lying doesn’t seem to overly bother us any more and we just seem to accept the fact as just something they do. That strikes me as strange.
It wasn’t that long ago that a significant amount of politicians were revealed to be fraudulently abusing the expenses system to the tune of many hundreds of thousands of pounds and after an initial show of public anger, it has been conveniently forgotten – much to the relief of the right honourable Members of Parliament who were claiming for such things as toilet seats and duck houses.
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And on the eighth day God looked down on his planned paradise and said, “I need someone who can flip this for a quick buck.”
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Anonymous published a file revealing significant access to the Federal Reserve’s internal files and servers; amid accusations of inaction and non-transparency the FBI has opened a criminal investigation into Sunday’s bank hack.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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A key figure involved in designing the president’s signature health insurance mandate referred to as Obamacare has left her role at the White House to work for one of the very companies profiting off the bill she helped create.
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Censorship
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The members of Russia’s lower house of Parliament — which last year passed so many harsh new laws with so little debate that commentators compared it to a “rabid printer” — returned to work last week as the standard-bearers for President Vladimir V. Putin’s brand of patriotism.
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Privacy
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It’s been all drones and all John Brennan all the time this week: ever since Michael Isikoff dropped his bombshell about an administration white paper justifying targeted killing on Monday, everyone’s been talking about flying death robots. Last night the White House announced that it would allow Congress access to the Office of Legal Counsel memos that lay out why it thinks it can kill American citizens. Today John Brennan gets grilled by the Senate Intelligence Committee.
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U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton has been appointed presiding judge of a secretive special court that oversees warrants for government surveillance in spy and terrorism cases.
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President Dwight D. Eisenhower is remembered for issuing the first screaming alarm about the growing power of what he called the military-industrial complex. His farewell address in 1961 is largely remembered for this major milestone, but it’s worth listening to the entire fifteen minute speech to see how directly his warning applies to us today, in the 21st century.
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Civil Rights
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Ethiopian Jews are challenged daily by white Israelis for not being “real” Jews. About a year ago a national television station in Israel broadcasted a story of an Ethiopian family that sparked protests across the country among Ethiopian Jews living in Israel. The story took place in the southern city of Kiryat Malachi where a family with an Ethiopian background struggled to buy an apartment and soon discovered that many tenants in the city have signed agreements not to sell or rent properties to Ethiopians (3). The WikiLeaks cable adds that 50% of Ethiopian parents in Israel are not equipped to support their children stay in school. As a result, according to the cable, in 2009 roughly 26% of the children dropped out of school at early ages.
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The Home Secretary has published her long-awaited proposals to change to the way extradition decisions are taken in the UK. The proposed amendments introduce only one new safeguard against unjust extradition, relating to forum.
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For years, the Obama administration refused to make public the Justice Department’s classified legal opinions on the “targeted killing” of terrorism suspects. But Wednesday’s news that the administration will let some members of Congress see the memos explaining the administration’s legal justification for killing American citizens does not mean this administration is suddenly “the most transparent administration ever.” In fact, forget classified memos: The administration can’t even get the Freedom of Information Act right. On Monday, two congressmen demanded the Obama administration answer for its failure to improve the public’s access to information through FOIA, under which American citizens can request government documents.
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Yesterday, was the appeal hearing in one of the most important cases going on in the country: challenging the National Defense Authorization Act’s (NDAA) pernicious provision for indefinite preventive detention by the military.
In September, U.S. District Court Judge Katherine Forrest struck down the indefinite detention language as an unconstitutional First Amendment violation of free speech rights. Government lawyers quickly made an emergency appeal of the ruling because our military is already doing this, and now could be held in contempt of court.
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After a court hearing over the 2012 NDAA in Manhattan on Wednesday, Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges appeared on a panel of activists who are suing the Obama administration over its attempt to claim the right to indefinitely hold U.S. citizens in military detention.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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The ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, Dutch Ruppersberger, stated that he plans to re-introduce CISPA (Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act) along with Mike Rogers, the current Intelligence Chairman this year.
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