02.17.14

Latest Headlines About Surveillance and Drone Strikes

Posted in News Roundup at 11:45 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Sunday’s and Monday’s coverage of surveillance matters and foreign policy that’s connected to it

Unity

• What can unite liberals and tea partyers? The NSA

  Who or what could get them thinking the same?

  Edward Snowden and the National Security Agency.

  By exposing the NSA’s vast surveillance web, Snowden created a link between tea partyers and liberals — two tribes camped on opposite sides of the nation’s political chasm.

• The History of Surveillance and the Black Community

• Academics and Researchers Against Mass Surveillance

  Academics have joined the fight against mass surveillance. Two open letters were published last month from the academic and research communities. One is signed by U.S. information security and cryptography researchers, and the other is signed by over one thousand scholars from a wide range of disciplines who work in universities all over the world.

Europe

• Merkel, Hollande to discuss European communication network avoiding U.S.

  German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Saturday she would talk to French President Francois Hollande about building up a European communication network to avoid emails and other data passing through the United States.

• Surveillance revelations: Angela Merkel proposes European network to beat spying by NSA and GCHQ

• The NSA Spying Scandal: How should German authorities respond?

  In the interview: The president of the German Domestic Intelligence Service Hans-Georg Maassen

• NSA Revelations Prompt EU Call for Shift Away from U.S. Internet Governance

Reform

• NSA Reform Bill Stuck in Committee

  The big blow is in the Senate, where chairman Sen. Patrick Leahy (D – VT) was the author of the legislation and has loudly pushed the reforms for months. Yet he too is suddenly in the “wait and see” camp, apparently content to give the Obama Administration the benefit of the doubt on reforms that will likely never come.

• NSA reform stalls in committee

  Legislation to rein in the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs has stalled in the House and Senate.

Lawyers

• Humiliating ordeal: Snowden’s lawyer ‘harassed’ at Heathrow Airport

• The NSA May Not “Target” Lawyers, But It Does “Spy” on Them

  Congratulations to Ben Wittes who, with this post, demonstrates how the NSA can “spy” on Americans without “targeting” them.

• Indonesian intel not for commercial use: Australian PM

  Asked about the report, Abbott said: “We never comment on operational intelligence matters”.

  Australia did not use any intelligence it gathers “to the detriment of other countries”, he told reporters in Bourke in western NSW.

  “We use it for the benefit of our friends. We use it to uphold our values. We use it to protect our citizens and the citizens of other countries.

• NSA leak suggests Australia had wide-scale access to Indonesia’s telecoms network

  A new leak from NSA documents obtained by whisteblower Edward Snowden have cast light on Australia’s national security agency — the Australian Signals Directorate — and its access to Indonesia’s telecoms network.

Journalism

• Journalists who broke NSA story in Guardian receive George Polk Awards

  The three journalists who broke the National Security Agency revelations from Edward Snowden in the Guardian are among the recipients of the prestigious 2013 George Polk Awards in Journalism.

  Glenn Greenwald, Ewen MacAskill and Laura Poitras will receive the award for national security reporting, along with Barton Gellman of the Washington Post.

• Reporting based on NSA leaks wins Polk Award

Surveillance

• Gmail’s new tracker tells when, where users open email

  Google’s found a new tracking tool, and it’s called the Streak plugin, an email watchdog that allows users to tell just when their sent messages were opened — and where the recipients were when they read them.

• How NSA spying disclosures influence security strategies

  How has whistleblower Edward Snowden’s exposés affected the ways organisations deal with internal and external security threats?

  Edward Snowden’s revelations about mass internet surveillance conducted by the US National Security Agency (NSA) and the UK’s GCHQ has caused consternation around the world, particularly in Europe.

Human Rights (Foreign Policy)

• Civilians are dying. Campaigners are being kidnapped. The world cannot turn a blind eye to America’s drone attacks in Pakistan

  Karim Khan is a lucky man. When you’re picked up by 20 armed thugs, some in police uniform – aka the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) – you can be “disappeared” forever. A mass grave in Balochistan, in the south-west of the country, has just been found, filled with the “missing” from previous arrests. But eight days after he was lifted and – by his own testimony, that of his lawyer Shasad Akbar and the marks still visible on his body – tortured, Mr Khan is back at his Pakistani home. His crime: complaining about US drone attacks – American missiles fired by pilotless aircraft – on civilians inside Pakistan in President Obama’s Strangelove-style operation against al-Qa’ida.

• US Drones Reaping Death by Sim Card

  Michael Ratner: Eliminating Targets Based on NSA spying but not verified by human intelligence demonstrates Obama’s false promise of oversight

• U.S. seeks new bases for drones targeting Al Qaeda in Pakistan

  If the U.S. must withdraw all forces from Afghanistan by the end of 2014, alternative sites will be needed for drone strikes on Pakistan targets.

• Fox’s Dishonest Benghazi Conflation Attack

  Fox News’ Chris Wallace baselessly suggested that Hillary Clinton dishonestly conflated the 2012 attacks on diplomatic facilities in Benghazi, Libya, with protests sparked by an anti-Islam video.

• US weighs military options for Syrian aid

• Convicted Criminals Serve as “Freedom Fighters” in Syria: Saudi, Pakistani and Iraqi Prison Inmates Replenish Al Qaeda Ranks

• Israel Supports US plan to Arm Syria Al Qaeda Rebels. Financing Terrorists To Wage the “Global War on Terrorism”

• Protect American Commercial Fleet From Shoulder-Fired Missiles

  While the Obama Administration issued a statement assuring Americans that most of Libya’s weapons, including shoulder-fired Manpads, had been secured, NATO’s then-military committee chairman, Admiral Giampaolo di Paola, was not so sure. His fear that Libyan Manpads could be scattered “from Kenya to Kunduz [Afghanistan]” subsequently materialized.

• Drone Killing the Fifth Amendment

  At the moment, we are threatened with a return to a pre-Constitutional situation that Americans would once have dismissed out of hand, a society in which the head of state can take a citizen’s life on his own say-so. If it’s the model for the building of post-Constitutional America, we’re in trouble. Indeed the stakes are high, whether we notice or not.

• Yemeni suspect sought by U.S. wants meeting

  Abd al-Wahhab al-Humayqani says the United States is doing more to stoke terrorism here, in the heartland of al-Qaida’s most active franchise, than to defeat it. What the United States ought to do, he argues, is strengthen Yemen’s state institutions rather than create enemies by carrying out drone strikes.

• CIA Fears Afghan Pullout Would Stall Their Drone War

• Where In Central Asia Would The U.S. Put A Drone Base?

  The U.S. is making plans to set up drone bases in Central Asia in the case that the government of Afghanistan doesn’t allow U.S. troops to remain in that country past this year, the Los Angeles Times has reported. The military wants to maintain the ability to carry out attacks against militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan even if it has no military presence in those countries, and the next best options are the Central Asian states. The officials interviewed didn’t specify which countries were being considered: “There are contingency plans for alternatives in the north,” said one official quoted by the paper.

• ‘CIA may start using new drones to target militants in Pakistan’

Civil Rights (Police)

• Police Officers Who Shot at Two Innocent Women 103 Times Won’t Be Fired

  The eight Los Angeles police officers who shot at two women over 100 times will not lose their jobs. They won’t even be suspended. They’ll just get some additional training.

• EXCLUSIVE: Detective is NYPD’s most sued cop, with 28 lawsuits filed against him since 2006

  Detective Peter Valentin (top) and (from left) Detective Vincent Orsini, Sgt. Fritz Glemaud and Detective Warren Rohan are among the 55 NYPD cops who have been sued at least 10 times over the past decade.

• Anders Breivik threatens hunger strike over “torture” of only getting a PS2

  Mass-murderer Anders Breivik has issued a second letter of complaint about the conditions he’s endured in a Norwegian prison since killing 77 teenagers attending a conference for the youth wing of a left-wing political party (here’s the first, which runs to 27 pages and features a demand for moisturizer). This time around, Breivik is upset that he is forced to use an outdated Playstation 2 and isn’t allowed to choose his own games; wants his uncomfortable cell-chair replaced with an armchair or sofa; and more. He threatens a hunger-strike if his 12 demands are not met.

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