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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Posted in Action at 5:59 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: News regarding privacy from the weekend and so far this week
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Privacy rights groups are calling on comedian Stephen Colbert to cancel his guest speaker appearance at a conference organised by RSA, the security firm accused of accepting millions from the National Security Agency to weaken encryption software.
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A key US senator left one meeting at the White House with the impression that President Obama has yet to decide on specific reforms. “The debate is clearly fluid,” senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, a longtime critic of bulk surveillance, told the Guardian after the meeting. “My sense is the president, and the administration, is wrestling with these issues,” Wyden said.
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The protest, called the Day We Fight Back, comes a month after the anniversary of Internet activist Aaron Swartz’s death. Swartz committed suicide last January while facing a 35-year prison sentence for hacking into a Massachusetts Institute of Technology network and downloading research articles.
Among the organizations participating in the protest are Demand Progress, an activist group Swartz co-founded, as well as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Free Press, Reddit and Mozilla.
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Today The Global Mail introduces a new, secure way for sources to work with our journalists to expose wrongdoing. The TGM Vault is powered by SecureDrop, “an open-source whistleblower submission system”, managed by Freedom of the Press Foundation. The Vault is a discreet, private place to share information the public has a right to know about; think of it as the digital age equivalent of the parking garage where Bob Woodward met Deep Throat. It’s the most sophisticated of many ways sources can communicate with The Global Mail.
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The code for SecureDrop was originally written by the late Aaron Swartz, a 26-year-old computer programmer and open-government activist who – facing prosecution for downloading paywalled academic research articles – committed suicide a year ago today, January 11, 2013. In creating SecureDrop, Swartz was assisted by Wired editor Kevin Poulsen and security expert James Dolan, who has continued to refine the program’s code with the Freedom of the Press Foundation. The Foundation continually audits and tests SecureDrop’s security.
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Saturday marked one year since the death of the internet activist Aaron Swartz. The 26-year-old, who was one of the builders of Reddit, killed himself in New York City on Friday 11 January 2013.
At the time of his death, Swartz was facing trial over charges of hacking arising from the downloading of millions of documents from the online research group JSTOR. He faced up to 50 years in prison.
On Saturday, the home page of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was hacked, reportedly by the Anonymous group. Last year Swartz’s family accused MIT and government prosecutors of being complicit in his death.
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The details of the THINTHREAD development and the decision by senior NSA officials eventually to discard it are part of a new memo sent to President Barack Obama by a group of former agency officials, some of whom were directly involved in the system’s development. The memo, signed by William Binney, Thomas Drake, Edward Loomis and J. Kirk Wiebe, asks Obama to meet with the former intelligence officers to discuss the recent NSA revelations and the recommendations of the president’s own review group on how to fix the agency.
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For the actions of Snowden have indeed laid bare the fact that we are living in a global crisis of civilization. To date it is estimated that we have only seen about 1 percent of the documents he disclosed – the merest hint of the tip of a monstrous iceberg. What further horrors await us in 2014 and beyond?
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FBI Director Jim Comey says he’s “confused” by reports that characterize NSA contractor Edward Snowden as a “whistleblower” or a “hero” because, he says, all three branches of America’s government have approved the bulk collection of U.S. phone records, one of the most important revelations in Snowden’s cascade of leaks.
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Edward Snowden is a hero and a patriot says ex-Minnesota governor and wrestling star Jesse Ventura.
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A European Parliament committee has invited Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who has leaked classified government documents and is now in hiding in Russia, to testify via video link as part of an investigation into how to protect the privacy of European citizens.
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This past year has been the one when it finally came out in the open that we’re all under surveillance – on the internet, on the phone – 24 hours a day.
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Some 25 years after Sir Tim Berners-Lee wrote his proposal, the challenge is to protect rights to privacy and freedom of opinion online
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A survey conducted by Vancouver, British Columbia-based web hosting service PEER 1 finds that a quarter of Canadian and UK businesses are looking outside of US borders for data storage. Companies outside of the US are leery of using data services hosted in the country due to the spying activities of the US National Security Agency (NSA).
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Bosses from Internet giants including Twitter and Facebook Tuesday pressed President Barack Obama for reforms of US spy agency snooping, adding to rising heat from the courts and American allies.
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Chris Hedges and NSA whistle-blower William Binney tell Paul Jay, in his “Reality Asserts Itself” program, that there should be accountability, including the President himself, for the criminal practices used by the NSA against the American people.
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One year ago today, internet activist and technologist Aaron Swartz ended his life. For over a year, Swartz had been fighting a brutal federal case stemming from his sneaky placement of a laptop in an MIT wiring closet, which pilfered stores of academic articles from the JSTOR database. The goal: give 4.8 million scholarly articles to the masses, which Swartz argued was humanity’s birthright in his “Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto“:
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This week, more news emerged about the theft of classified government documents, leaked to the press, that revealed a massive, top-secret surveillance program. No, not news of Edward Snowden and the National Security Agency, but of a group of anti-Vietnam war activists who perpetrated one of the most audacious thefts of government secrets in U.S. history, and who successfully evaded capture, remaining anonymous for more than 40 years. Among them: two professors, a day-care provider and a taxi driver.
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One nation asks for new parts on two satellites for fear of U.S. eavesdropping. Other companies spend money to show that their products do not contain “spycraft.”
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Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA routinely lied to Congress, which is a serious federal crime. These revelations make him a whistleblower who should be protected under U.S. law.
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Snowden is by definition a whistleblower because his revelations have inspired widespread public ire, curiosity, debate and political action. It appears that citizens needed to know what the NSA was hiding. Snowden is simply more famous than the nuclear plant workers and the documents he leaked were more highly classified. He is also more vulnerable to severe punishment because he worked in the U.S. intelligence industry.
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My wish is for the custodians of these documents to deliver bundles – or megabytes – to good reporters.
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One year after the death of Aaron Swartz, a group of Internet activists joined up to protest against what they call “mass suspicionless surveillance.”
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Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., wrote to Gen. Keith Alexander, director of the National Security Agency, and asked plainly whether the NSA has been or is now spying on members of Congress or other public officials.
The senator’s letter was no doubt prompted by the revelations of Edward Snowden to the effect that the federal government’s lust for personal private data about all Americans and many foreigners knows no bounds and its respect for the constitutionally protected and statutorily enforced right to privacy is nonexistent.
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The decision by the European Parliament’s Committee on Civil Liberties to invite ex-CIA worker Edward Snowden to give evidence by video link from Moscow on the US National Security Agency (NSA) mass surveillance of EU citizens has divided MEPs amid fears of damaging US-EU relations.
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Thousands of surveillance cameras are showing up in cities across the country without a corresponding reduction in crime. Citizens are taking notice of this fact of the federal takeover of local police, and they are speaking out.
On January 8, for example, the Texas Civil Rights Project-Houston issued a statement on its Facebook page criticizing their city’s participation in the construction of the surveillance state.
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After about five months of hearings and investigating, the European Parliament’s civil liberties committee has published its report on the revelations about mass surveillance leaked by the American former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.
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As you probably suspected, the NSA’s massive phone record collection “has had no discernible impact on preventing acts of terrorism,” according to a new study. In fact—and perhaps more interestingly—the agency’s real problem isn’t a lack of information. It’s an excess of secrecy.
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The NSA’s controversial spying programs have had “no discernible impact on preventing acts of terrorism,” a new study by the New America Foundation has claimed.
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He stayed there till September 9 while he took classes, and then returned for one more night at the Hyatt before leaving India on September 11, the school was quoted as saying.
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Martin Luther King Jr. day is being celebrated on January 20th 2014 amid heated debate on massive dragnet surveillance by the National Security Agency (NSA). Ironically, he was himself a victim of NSA surveillance as unveiled by declassified documents in September last year. Dr. King’s status as an NSA target has been known since the 1970s; nevertheless, this was probably the first time that the U.S. government had declassified it.
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The investigation ruled that activities of NSA and GCHQ have ‘profoundly shaken’ the faith between countries that believed themselves supporters.
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My expectations were low when I asked the National Security Agency to cooperate with my story on the impact of Edward Snowden’s leaks on the tech industry. During the 1990s, I had been working on a book, Crypto, which dove deep into cryptography policy, and it took me years — years! — to get an interview with an employee crucial to my narrative. I couldn’t quote him, but he provided invaluable background on the Clipper Chip, an ill-fated NSA encryption runaround that purported to strike a balance between protecting personal privacy and maintaining national security.
[...]
Why the turnaround? Apparently, the rep told me, Crypto has some fans at Fort Meade. But my professional credentials were obviously not the sole reason for the invite. The post-Snowden NSA has been forced to adopt a more open PR strategy. With its practices, and even its integrity, under attack, its usual Sphinx-like demeanor would not do.
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Congress’s decline from the Founders’ vision as “first among equals” in government to an echo chamber of the unitary executive, has been a slow but steady process. In the process we have seen a steady stream of unconstitutional wars and civil liberties abuses at home. Nowhere is this decline more evident than in the stark contrast between the Congressional response to intelligence agencies’ abuses during the post-Watergate era and its response to the far more serious NSA abuses uncovered in recent years.
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As revelations of the US’s widespread digital intelligence gathering techniques continue to populate headlines worldwide, non-US businesses’ trust in American providers of cloud services continues to plummet. A study published at the end of last week suggests one in four Canadian and UK businesses are moving their data outside the US in a bid to evade the NSA’s watchful eye, a significant increase on results reported just six months ago.
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When mass political protests erupted throughout Brazil in June, Miguel Freitas did what countless others did: He followed the news on Twitter. Tweets revealed information he couldn’t get anywhere else, including the mainstream media. “Brazilian media is highly concentrated,” says Freitas, an engineer based in Rio de Janeiro. “I have been able to read news that a lot of friends never heard about.”
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Maintaining the public’s side of that equation means that the public must be in a continuing state of rebellion against the forces working against the public interest. That’s where whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden come in.
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While the Fourth Amendment [of the U.S. Constitution] was most immediately the product of contemporary revulsion against a regime of writs of assistance, its roots go far deeper. Its adoption in the Constitution of this new Nation reflected the culmination in England a few years earlier of a struggle against oppression which had endured for centuries. The story of that struggle has been fully chronicled in the pages of this Court’s reports, and it would be a needless exercise in pedantry to review again the detailed history of the use of general warrants as instruments of oppression from the time of the Tudors, through the Star Chamber, the Long Parliament, the Restoration, and beyond.
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More than a half-century before Edward Snowden slipped out the door with the National Security Agency’s most closely held secrets, a panel convened by the then-fledgling agency warned of a Soviet nuclear attack and said there was a big vulnerability in the NSA’s ability to see it coming: its own people.
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The White House has said that its review of NSA spying in the aftermath of Edward Snowden’s revelations is “near completion,” but reports in Germany suggest several of Berlin’s demands are already off the table.
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Telephone companies are quietly balking at the idea of changing how they collect and store Americans’ phone records to help the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs. They’re worried about their exposure to lawsuits and the price tag if the U.S. government asks them to hold information about customers for longer than they already do.
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For supporters of the National Security Agency’s surveillance program, the monitoring of American phone and web activity is a cheap price to pay for keeping our country safe from terrorist attacks. But how many terrorists attacks does the NSA’s eavesdropping actually prevent? Seeing as the intelligence organization is spending time and money listening to the German chancellor’s cell phone calls, it’s a little hard to believe that they are also shutting down terrorist cells around the globe.
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Stephen Colbert has done tons of sarcastic and critical segments about the NSA (“The more I learn the safer I feel,” he said in October), but now he’s being called on to put those words into action. Colbert is scheduled to speak at an annual conference organized by security firm RSA, but privacy advocates are agitating for him to withdraw because of reports that the NSA paid RSA $10 million to weaken one of its own encryption algorithms.
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The president will embrace some surveillance reforms, but he’s not about to scale back the national security state.
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What seems par for the course in America, after a serious trauma affects the nation such as the Kennedy assassination or 9/11 or now over revelations of government wrongdoing exposed by Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing of the NSA’s collection of electronic communications of just about everyone here and abroad, what usually happens is the president calls for a commission to investigate.
Call it something to soothe the public’s anguish, (Kennedy and 9/11) or indignation over violation of people’s privacy rights (NSA) but in reality these commissions are a sideshow, a diversionary tactic where the investigation isn’t thorough and complete and the truth behind the wrongdoing is far from being discovered.
As to the latest commission, a presidential task force looking into the NSA’s data mining operation, has recently concluded there is no evidence in any instance where the NSA’s snooping operations prevented a terrorist attack. None!
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During an NPR interview, the NSA’s outgoing deputy director John C Inglis — the top civilian official in the NSA hierarchy — admitted that the NSA’s mass surveillance program had foiled a total of one terrorist plot (an attempt to wire some money to al-Shabaab in Somalia) in its entire history. But he doesn’t want to get rid of his agency’s program of spying on everything every American does, because it’s an “insurance policy” in case someone tries the kind of terrorist attack that it might foil.
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Edward Snowden revealed last summer that the U.S. is conducting mass surveillance of our internet activity, and now the internet is fighting back. On Feb. 11, a collection of popular sites and activist groups are staging a mass protest against the National Security Administration (NSA) and the blanket, warrantless spying that they do in the name of security.
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A slide from material leaked by ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden to the Washington Post, showing what happens when an NSA analyst ·tasks· the PRISM system for information about a new surveillance target.
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Former NSA Director Michael Hayden long ago made it clear that – given the rapid changes in networked communications and associated technologies – NSA needed to master the “net.” There was no mistaking the intent. He even said he consulted with large Internet companies and their experts in Silicon Valley.
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The US National Security Agency’s (NSA) dragnet that drew in masses of ordinary citizens’ communications data only supplied “minimal” assistance in catching terrorists, according to a report from the New America Foundation.
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Hugo Chavez was always a stone in the imperial shoe. Underestimated by analysts and consultants ‘Cold War mind’ in Washington, Chavez ended the influence and domination of the United States in Latin America in less than a decade. Transformed Venezuela from a dependent country and delivered to American culture and politics to be a sovereign, free, independent, dignified and proud of its roots, its history and its Indo-Afro-American culture.He rescued the control of strategic resources not only in Venezuela, but throughout Latin America, always with the banner of social justice. He promoted regional integration and the creation of organizations such as the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), among others. His stand against U.S. aggression hand gave an example and an inspiration to millions around the world, who viewed with hope the revolution in Venezuela and its regional expansion.
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The leaked documents from the NSA by Edward Snowden revealed that President Chavez and his government were on the list of the six main targets of U.S. intelligence since at least 2007. Just one year ago, the White House created a special intelligence mission to Venezuela that reported directly to the National Director of Intelligence, above the CIA and 15 other intelligence agencies in the United States. A special mission was completely illegal, with great resources and capabilities. There were only two other missions that style: for Iran and North Korea. Venezuela include two enemy countries was held in Washington indicator of threat posed by Hugo Chavez to U.S. power.
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A coalition of Internet activist groups has announced a worldwide day of solidarity and activism opposing the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs and honoring the memory of open-Internet activist Aaron Swartz.
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It’s something that we’re hearing a lot, both from NSA Director General Keith Alexander and others: the NSA’s mass surveillance programs could have stopped 9/11. It’s not true, and recently two people have published good essays debunking this claim.
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Last year, we wrote about a troubling case in Virginia, in which a cleaning company, Hadeed Carpet Cleaning, sued seven anonymous Yelp reviewers in an attempt to discover who they were. Hadeed did not dispute the contents of the negative reviews, but rather said that, comparing the information to their own database, they could not identify the reviewers, and thus believed that they might not actually have been customers. Thus, Hadeed claims, the reviews would be defamatory since they didn’t actually represent the experiences of actual customers. Yelp fought back on behalf of its users, pointing out that the First Amendment protects anonymous speech. Yelp pointed out that 11 different states had adopted the so-called Dendrite rules concerning the high bar necessary to force a company to reveal anonymous commenters. The basic idea is that you need to really show that the law has almost certainly been broken before you can identify the individuals.
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Edward Snowden said:
It is tremendously humbling to be called to serve the cause of our free press. . . on FPF’s Board of Directors. The unconstitutional gathering of the communications records of everyone in America threatens our most basic rights, and the public should have a say in whether or not that continues. Thanks to the work of our free press, today we do, and if the NSA won’t answer to Congress, they’ll have to answer to the newspapers, and ultimately, the people.
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