01.11.15
Posted in Europe, Patents at 12:29 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: How the EPO constructed an unaccountable tyranny through which to act without any outside scrutiny, not even internal scrutiny, e.g. from the Administrative Council (AC)
OUR MANY ARTICLES about misconduct and misbehavior at the EPO go several years back. The EPO is not only emulating the USPTO‘s corporate patriarchy (things get better in the US these days) but is also borrowing a page from totalitarian regimes by appointing crooks to top positions while assaulting oversight. It’s like a state within a (super)state, the European Union. There is no accountability, definitely not to European citizens, let alone their elected officials.
Our coverage about EPO corruption wasn’t the first of its kind. Battistelli’s Jesper Kongstad connection was even noted in an article from the middle of last year — an article that said:
Back in 2010, when Benoît Battistelli was first appointed as President of the European Patent Office (EPO), there was a certain lack of transparency in the election process. As a blog post by IAM Magazine reported at the time, mischievous rumours quickly emerged from the EPO staff union newsletter (PDF link) to fill the vacuum of information regarding the circumstances of Mr Battistelli’s appointment.
Battistelli’s original contract was negotiated in secret with Mr Jesper Kongstad, the then Acting (and now actual) Chairman of the Administrative Council. It was rumoured, intriguingly, that the contract specified that Mr B’s place of employment was the Parisian suburb of Saint Germain-en-Laye (the town of which he was deputy major, the spiritual home of football team Paris Saint-Germain and the birthplace of Louis XIV, the Sun-King), and that it contained an annex granting him full pension rights at the end of his five-year contract. While Merpel, whose nine lives invariably make any sort of pension annuity unaffordable since the pension must last so much longer than expected, can see the attraction of having full pension rights after a relatively short employment stint, she wonders what advantage or reason could lie behind deeming Mr Battistelli’s place of employment to be 700 km west of where his office is actually located, if there is any substance behind that improbable rumour. The union newsletter, SUEPO Informs, also reported that Mr Kongstad refused to show the final contract negotiated with Mr Battistelli to the Administrative Council (‘AC’), despite repeated requests by its apparently quite powerless members
“Google, for instance, has been stuffed using some puff piece of both Battistell and Kongstad.”Florian Müller, who insists that it has been a while since Microsoft last paid him, recently wrote that the Administrative Council of Kongstad is a sham. “Instead of exercising oversight,” he wrote, “that body is largely responsible for the banana republic that the EPO has become.”
He also told us that “on [SUEPO] they’ve announced a new demo, this time in front of Kongstad’s country’s embassy” (Denmark).
“I just checked,” he added, “it’s the Munich consulate to be precise (embassy would be in Berlin). I may go there, take pictures and report.”
Here is the original announcement.
Searching the Web for information about the Battistelli-Kongstad connection isn’t too helpful. Google, for instance, has been stuffed using some puff piece of both Battistell and Kongstad. “Managing IP,” says one activist site, “is the magazine which published the controversial interview of Mr Battistelli and Mr Kongstad on 19 December 2014.”
They have a lot to cover up or lie about. We have already refuted many of their claims (responses to softball questions). The relationship between Battistelli and Kongstad, as evidenced by the joint interview, helped reaffirm if not expose a complete conflict. Merpel at IP Kat recently said: “Even the renominations in the December AC meeting, announced in the 12 December Communique, were, Merpel understands, only those for members whose term would expire before the next AC meeting. According to Article 11(3) EPC, second sentence **, these re-appointments require only the consultation, not a proposal, from the President. Previously, these re-appointments have been confirmed well in advance of the 5-year deadline. What is the cause, or intended effect of this brinkmanship? A worrying but plausible conclusion is that it is to make the Members concerned more biddable as their term comes up. Any such pressure, whether subtle or overt, would of course completely conflict with accepted principles of judicial independence.”
This speaks not only about the AC but also the Boards of Appeal. Basically, the EPO now has merely an illusion of separation of powers.
The EPO is something that acts a bit like the Kremlin. It hides behind European flag, symbolism, etc. and has among its staff people from different nations; in practical terms, it’s like a country (or cult) within a country and it is run by crooks who work hard to eliminate anyone not belonging to the cult. We urge our readers in Germany and EPO staff to attend protests until the issues are rectified and the EPO regains some sense of legitimacy. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 12:05 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Under Schmitz, the site was nothing if not eccentric. Although it lost its “mainstream” appeal (as much as a site focusing on FOSS can be said to be mainstream), it seemed to have gained a following of readers who appreciated Schmitz’s often confrontational style.
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Desktop
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Businesses can and do run GNU/Linux on their clients, especially if they are thin clients, they use web-applications or a GNU/Linux application will do the jobs businesses need done.
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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Following last month’s failed vote due to not having a quorum, SPI on Thursday voted to officially invite the X.Org Foundation to become an SPI associated project. X.Org would live under the SPI umbrella and let the organization take care of its managerial tasks so the X.Org Foundation board and members could focus more on the actual development.
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This weekend I got around to trying out the GeForce GTX 970 and GTX 980 “Maxwell” graphics cards with the Linux 3.19 kernel now that there’s initial support for these new GPUs via the open-source Nouveau DRM driver.
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Applications
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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I have a good news for Firefox and Plasma 5 users: I ported KDE Wallet password integration extension to KDE Frameworks 5!
It seems to me that this plugin is unmaintained because both the released version and the SVN one do not support Firefox 33 or newer. So, as first step I took Guillermo’s code and bumped the Firefox version.
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In late November was when the MATE and Cinnamon editions of Linux Mint 17.1 were released while today finally marks the official availability of the KDE spin of Linux Mint 17.1 Rebecca.
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First off we want to thank all the work put in by developers to maintain Krita, and the community that helps to fund and push Krita. At the risk of sounding really cliché, you all help to make our dreams, and many others’dreams, come true!
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In the upcoming release of Plasma we’ve done some work on the humble cursor; we’ve added a few missing states, and there will also be a brand new “snow” version, along with minor tweaks to the existing Breeze cursors. But me being lazy and the merge window having closed, there are a great many more cursors which haven’t made it into this release, so I’m putting them here for everyone to use and redistribute.
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This post was inspired by another article written by Damián Nohales. During his GSoC work at the GNOME project in the previous year he integrated the Foursquare service into this environment so users can make checkins from their laptop or PC.
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Today I took the plunge into the next-generation KDE desktop, performing a dirty upgrade from Kubuntu 14.04 to 14.10 before installing the plasma-5-desktop package; and this is my first impression of KF5.x and Plasma 5. This is also a bit of a primer, because when Plasma 5.2 enters the stage I’m interested to see the comparison and do a second write-up, using my experience in both 5.1 and 4.x as points-of-reference.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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FreeBSD GNOME developers have had various GNOME 3.x components in the FreeBSD Ports repository for months, and with GNOME 2.x now being decommissioned by this BSD operating system, the GNOME3 X11 desktop has replaced GNOME2 on the DVD install media script.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family
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Recently, OpenMandriva Association has launched a campaign to fund the development of the beautiful OpenMandriva Lx.
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Arch Family
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Enter Manjaro Linux. This was one of the last distros I’d tried during my hopping days that I really thought had some potential. Based on Arch, which has a lot going for it to begin with, and with extremely well written and maintained documentation and helpful forums, Manjaro is an attractive option, maybe even for the Linux neophyte. I liken it to what Mint does for Ubuntu, in that it polishes things up nicely, adds some useful software out of the box, and makes the installation a breeze. Arch itself can be a scary install requiring lots of reading and step by step, piece by piece building of your system. Manjaro does most of the dirty work for you, especially if you know which desktop you want from the get-go. I knew I wanted KDE, so I grabbed that and was off to the races.
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Science
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The Falcon rocket landed too heavily on the barge and broke apart, according to SpaceX founder Elon Musk, while the unmanned Dragon cargo capsule went into orbit.
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“Rocket made it to drone spaceport ship but landed hard,” he wrote on Twitter, adding “no cigar this time,” so that the 14-story rocket could be reused unscathed for future launches.
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NASA has generally had to rely on Russia’s Soyuz capsules to ferry astronauts to the ISS since retiring its aging shuttle fleet in 2011.
Last month, the agency successfully tests a version of its next-generation, long-distance Orion spaceship on a short flight.
On board ISS is a crew of three Russians, two Americans and an Italian.
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SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket that successfully put a Dragon cargo capsule in orbit on Saturday, but its unprecedented attempt to land the uncrewed rocket’s first stage at sea ended with a crash.
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Security
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It was critical for the U.S. to publicly denounce North Korea’s role the cyberattack on Sony, National Security Agency (NSA) Director Adm. Michael Rogers said Thursday.
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As the Philippines prepares for the visit of Pope Francis on January 15, efforts have been stepped up to prevent a repeat of the security breaches during previous papal visits. An estimated 37,000 police and military personnel are being deployed to secure Francis, in what the top military commander Gregorio Catapang Jr described as “the biggest security nightmare” of the government.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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The mugshot provided by the police shows a sleepy-eyed young woman, her face and brown hair showing, whom they had questioned in 2010 about Coulibaly.
She is suspected of being Coulibaly`s accomplice in the murder of a policewoman in southern Paris on Thursday, during a massive manhunt for two brothers who a day earlier massacred 12 people at the offices of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo.
Police also suspect she might have been involved in Coulibaly`s supermarket hostage-taking, though she was not identified among the dead or wounded.
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Florida authorities say George Zimmerman, whose acquittal of murdering an unarmed black teen sparked a national debate on race and self-defense laws, has been arrested for allegedly throwing a wine bottle at his girlfriend.
The Seminole County Sheriff’s Office says the 31-year-old Zimmerman was arrested for aggravated assault in Lake Mary about 10 p.m. Friday and is being held at the John E. Polk Correctional Facility.
Zimmerman was released on a $5,000 bond Saturday afternoon. At a court appearance earlier Saturday, he was ordered to avoid contact with the woman, who was not identified.
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But, as art imitates life from a bygone era, the plan to kill the North Korean leader harkens back to the days in the late 1960s and 1970s when scores of attempts were made by U.S. intelligence services to kill Cuban leader Fidel Castro, including by hired Sicilian Mafia hitmen.
The hilarious plots included an attempt to smuggle poisoned cigars into Castro’s household and also plant soluble thallium sulphate inside Castro’s shoes so that his beard will fall off and make him “the laughing stock of the socialist world.”
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In 1992 Miami Herald commentator Andrés Oppenheimer won a Pulitzer Prize for his book Castro’s Final Hour, thus giving “new meaning to the words final and hour,” as the late filmmaker and writer Saul Landau would wryly remark many years later. Fidel Castro would survive 11 U.S. presidents, at least eight [PDF] CIA plots to assassinate him, and a few premature obituaries, and live to see world’s most powerful country finally give in and recognize — in principle, at least — Cuba’s right to national self-determination.
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From December 1959, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) worked on numerous projects to assassinate Fidel Castro, even before Eisenhower approved a military invasion. By early February 1960, the United States government had given the CIA the green light to organize an invasion force to be trained in Guatemala and Nicaragua, then ruled by two brutal right-wing dictatorships. Meanwhile, counterrevolutionaries inside the island received training and resources such as incendiary bombs from the CIA to stage terrorist attacks in Havana and other urban areas while fast boats and airplanes engaged in constant sabotage of economic and coastal facilities from bases in south Florida. The Cuban authorities continuously denounced the incursions, the plots and the policy of violence and harassment.
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We are witnessing classic conservative hypocrisy with their predictable opposition to the lifting of the 54-year-old U.S. embargo against Cuba. That includes many Latin American conservatives who have come to view the U.S. government as their “papasito” and who are now lamenting that the U.S. government might no longer be intervening on their behalf in Cuba.
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A former commander of Army Special Operations and the officer who led the first Green Berets on the ground in Afghanistan has joined the CIA.
Lt. Gen. John F. Mulholland Jr. is the new associate director for military affairs at the nation’s top intelligence agency, the CIA announced in a statement from Director John Brennan.
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We have the Windows 95 of intelligence. We need Linux.
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The ones killed in the US strike were reportedly ethnic Uzbeks, while the ones killed in the Pakistani campaign were apparently local tribesmen. As usual, no names were provided for the slain.
This is standard operating procedure for both Pakistan and the US in strikes in the area, as they offer little more than a vague assurance of suspicion in their killings, and never follow through except on the rare occasions when they managed to kill someone they’ve heard of.
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In October, the US celebrated (if that is the word) its 400th drone strike on Pakistan.
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Though many Americans may not have realized it, December 28th marked what the U.S. government called the official end of the war in Afghanistan. That war has been the longest in U.S. history – but despite the new announcement that the formal conflict is over, America’s war there is far from finished. In fact, the Obama administration still considers the Afghan theater an area of active hostilities, according to an email from a senior administration official – and therefore exempts it from the stricter drone and targeted killing guidelines the president announced at a major speech at the National Defense University in 2013.
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Early this year, the time travel thriller Predestination with Ethan Hawke hits theaters, but it looks like we might get a double dose of the Boyhood star because the drone pilot drama Good Kill just released an international trailer. Hit or miss sci-fi director Andrew Niccol (Gattaca, In Time) is at the helm of this film that follows Hawke as a fighter pilot who has adapted with technology and become a drone pilot. However, the task of piloting a drone for 12 hours a day and carrying out targeted kills from thousands of miles away just doesn’t feel right for the Air Force veteran. It looks like we might get some provocative political commentary on drones, not unlike what Niccol delivered with Lord of War before.
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The American military may have launched hundreds of airstrikes on Iraq and Syria. But it’s not so sure who was on the receiving end of those bombs.
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The Bureau of Investigative Journalism claims that 2,379 people were killed by the strikes. The Bureau also says that only 12 percent of the victims actually identified have been linked to any militant organizations. The victims are routinely described as suspected militants.
In October of last year Rafiq ur Rehman, a school teacher and his two young children testified before the US Congress about the death of his 67 year old mother as she gathered okra in her garden a year earlier when she was killed by a drone strike. Only five members of Congress bothered to show up.
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President Obama promised to end our ‘forever war,’ but he could leave office having wrapped the entire world in war.
The Obama administration has adopted the view that the United States should use deadly force against its enemies wherever they are. That’s the terrifying and all-encompassing characteristic of America’s war. If enemies of the United States go to Pakistan, or Morocco, or the Philippines, the war can follow them.
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While there have been more strikes in the past six years, the casualty rate has been lower under Obama than under his predecessor. The CIA killed eight people, on average, per strike during the Bush years. Under Obama, it is less than six. The civilian casualty rate is lower too – more than three civilians were reported killed per strike during the past presidency. Under Obama, less than one.
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The number of drone strikes carried out in Pakistan by the United States dropped by more than 32 per cent in 2014 as compared with the previous year, according to the Pakistan Institute of Peace Studies’ (PIPS) Pakistan Security Report 2014. A total of 21 strikes were reported last year, killing an estimated 144 and wounding 29 over a period of six months.
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Cohn said many people don’t realize that attacks authorized by President Obama have “killed more people with drones than died on 9/11,” and that only “a tiny percentage” were al-Qaeda or Taliban leaders.
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An estimated 3,500 people – hundreds of them children – have been killed by drones. While some of those killed were undoubtedly violent terrorists, fewer than 50 (2 percent) were confirmed to be high-level targets, according to a study undertaken by Stanford Law School and New York School of Law. There are numerous allegations, some confirmed by reliable news sources, of entire wedding parties and extended families killed by U.S. drones.
Also troubling is the blowback these strikes create. They may in fact produce more terrorists, more angry young people who see their families and their countries torn apart by U.S. violence. We can’t help but wonder if U.S. policy may contribute to destabilization and recruitment of terrorists.
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With the formal conclusion of US-led hostilities in Afghanistan, new attention has been focused on the role the US will play as trainers and advisers to the Afghan National Security Forces. Specifically, what the US counterterror (CT) mission against terrorist organizations such as al-Qaeda and the Taliban will look like. President Obama has already increased the residual force for 2015 adding 1,000 extra troops to the previously stated 9,800. Interestingly, commentators have been examining how the US will continue its CT campaign, which relies heavily on controversial drone strikes against known terrorist actors and their positions.
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Despite the December 28th “official” end of the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan, a new Rolling Stone article provides more proof that armed combat is nowhere near over: the Obama administration still considers the country to be an “area of active hostilities” and therefore does not impose more stringent standards aimed at limiting civilian deaths in drone strikes.
At issue are the Presidential Policy Guidelines (pdf), passed in May 2013 in response to widespread concerns about the killing and wounding of non-combatants by U.S. drone strikes. The new guidelines impose the requirement that “before lethal action may be taken,” U.S. forces are required to attain “near certainty that non-combatants will not be injured or killed.” It is impossible to verify the impact of this reform on civilian deaths and injuries, because U.S. drone attacks are shrouded in near total secrecy.
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Finance
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A top official in the Treasury Department will become the next deputy director of the CIA, the White House announced Friday.
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Treasury Department official David Cohen will be the new deputy director of the CIA, President Obama announced on Friday.
Obama appointed David Cohen to be the spy agency’s second in command, after having overseen sanctions regimes on Russia and Iran.
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President Barack Obama has chosen David Cohen, a top Treasury official specializing in terrorism and financial intelligence, to be deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, the White House said on Friday.
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David S. Cohen has been the Obama administration’s point man on economic sanctions for three years, serving as undersecretary of the Treasury for terrorism and financial intelligence. His move to a top intelligence post underscores how how important the government’s financial tools have been in combating terrorism since 2001.
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Privacy
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Publicly available encryption programmes are so tough that they can’t be cracked by the experts at the US National Security Agency (NSA), an authoritative expert has told one of the world’s top hacker jamborees.
The assurance, delivered by Jacob Applebaum during this month’s Chaos Communication Congress (CCC) in Hamburg, Germany, ends months of speculation that the NSA may have found a backdoor into such privacysoftware.
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The bureau has been strangely silent on how it came to finger the Nork government for the comprehensive ransacking of the Hollywood movie studio. So silent, in fact, seasoned computer security experts refused to believe the claims until they see more evidence.
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After a reform bill was narrowly blocked on the Senate floor late last year, civil libertarians hoped that an upcoming deadline to reauthorize some of the spy agency’s controversial powers would give them another opportunity to force changes.
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If you’re planning on spying on someone in the Land of a Thousand Lakes, a local legislator has something to say about that: not gonna happen.
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A Minnesota lawmaker introduced a bill this week that would effectively make National Security Agency (NSA) spying illegal in the Gopher State, Sputnik News is reporting.
Republican Senator Branden Petersen introduced SF 33, which forbids evidence caught by illegal NSA surveillance inadmissible in court.
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For years privacy advocates have been pushing against the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), which eliminates all privacy protections on the sharing of private information so long as it is done for “cybersecurity purposes.”
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CISPA is back. You might remember the bill as the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act—or perhaps as “the worst privacy disaster our country has ever faced.” Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger reintroduced the bill to the House Intelligence Committee on Friday under the auspices of preventing another Sony hack.
Silly Dutch. (The congressman is @Call_Me_Dutch on Twitter, so I’m calling him Dutch.) Why so silly? Well, in order to comprehend what Dutch is doing you have to understand what CISPA is supposed to accomplish. Hint: It has nothing to do with preventing another Sony attack.
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This week’s high-profile attack in Paris, France has US government agencies salivating at the opportunity to capitalize on this new round of fear to secure major additional funding.
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It is a Friday afternoon as I write this, and about an hour ago, the Director of National Intelligence published a report to its Tumblr page evaluating the over-classification of government documents. The intelligence community has a habit of dropping recently declassified documents on Friday afternoons, the motive for which we will leave as an exercise for the reader.
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The Review Group was prescient: Now the NSA-enablers in the Senate are trying to use the Charlie Hebdo tragedy to scare Americans into foregoing their constitutional right to be free from pervasive government surveillance.
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As politicians drape themselves in the flag of free speech and freedom of the press in response to the tragic murder of Charlie Hebdo cartoonists, they’ve also quickly moved to stifle the same rights they claim to love. Government officials on both sides of the Atlantic are now renewing their efforts to stop NSA reform as they support free speech-chilling surveillance laws that will affect millions of citizens that have never been accused of terrorism.
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It was critical for the U.S. to publicly denounce North Korea’s role the cyberattack on Sony, National Security Agency (NSA) Director Adm. Michael Rogers said Thursday.
“Sony is important to me because the entire world is watching how we as a nation are going to respond to this,” Rogers said at a cybersecurity conference at the Fordham University School of Law, Time reported. “If we don’t name names here, it will only encourage others to decide, ‘Well this must not be a red line for the United States.’ ”
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Said and Cherif Kouachi’s faces were unknown to the French public before Wednesday’s terrorist attack in Paris.
But to the French police, they were very well known indeed – and it must have been with despair that the authorities realised that the men they had once watched so closely had been allowed to drop off their radar, slip away, and plot their attacks.
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French security agencies stopped monitoring the brothers who attacked the staff of Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine months before they carried out the attack, despite a previous tip-off from American intelligence agencies that one of them had likely trained with al Qaeda in Yemen, a French news magazine reported Saturday.
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U.S. Customs and Border Protection flies nine of the aircraft. Most are based on the U.S. border with Mexico, but they also conduct surveillance along the Canadian border, from a base in North Dakota.
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Experience tells us to expect two hard-and-fast outcomes from federal spending initiatives.
The first is that costs will be more than expected, and, often, far more. Wild-eyed optimism, not realism, often is the driving force behind new spending programs.
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In today’s Daily Mail, “Sir” Max “I have always loved Israel” Hastings claimed that me and Mr. Snowden are responsible for the bloodbath in Paris: “Traitors.. Assange and Snowden have damaged the security of each and every one of us, by alerting the jihadis and Al Qaeda, our mortal enemies, to the scale and reach of electronic eavesdropping”. That a state security vampire like Hastings has pounced on the still warm corpses strewn about Paris is as grotesque as it is predictable.
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The acclaimed documentary CITIZENFOUR, one of the most talked-about films of 2014, will debut MONDAY, FEB. 23 (9:00-11:00 p.m. ET/PT), exclusively on HBO, it was announced today by Sheila Nevins, president, HBO Documentary Films.
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The Palm Springs International Film Festival had to create an award for Laura Poitras, bestowing her Friday with the Filmmakers Who Make a Difference Award for “Citizenfour” — a documentary that captures whistleblower Edward Snowden’s NSA surveillance leak unfolding in real time.
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Civil Rights
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In a surprising development, the New York Times reported late Friday that the FBI and Justice Department have recommended felony charges against ex-CIA director David Petraeus for leaking classified information to his former biographer and mistress Paula Broadwell. While the Times does not specify, the most likely law prosecutors would charge Petraeus under is the same as Edward Snowden and many other leakers: the 1917 Espionage Act.
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Recently I came across a report in The Guardian about the murder of José Tendetza, a Shuar indigenous leader, in a remote region of the Ecuadorian Amazon near the Peruvian border. The Guardian gave the impression that Ecuador’s left-wing government had turned murderous in an obsession with exploiting mineral wealth; the death of the indigenous leader was all but explicitly blamed on President Rafael Correa.
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By all outward appearances, David Petraeus appears to be mounting a comeback. The former general landed a job at powerhouse private-equity firm KKR, has academic perches at Harvard and the University of Southern California and, according to White House sources, was even asked by the President Barack Obama’s administration for advice on the fight against Islamic State. Yet it turns out that the extramarital affair that forced him to resign as director of the Central Intelligence Agency is still hanging over him.
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US prosecutors have recommended bringing charges against ex-CIA director David Petraeus for providing classified information to a former mistress, the New York Times reports.
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An in-depth investigation into vital unanswered questions raised by the US Senate’s startling report on CIA torture and rendition has been launched in the UK.
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Freedom of the Press Foundation, a nonprofit that counts Daniel Ellsberg, Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and John Perry Barlow among its board members (and me) is launching our first crowd-funding campaign of 2015—in support of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s new reporting project on the Senate’s recently-released report on CIA torture.
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The Bureau is today launching a new investigation in partnership with The Rendition Project to investigate some of the crucial unanswered questions raised as a result of the US Senate’s shocking report on CIA torture.
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This followed the 2007 revelation that the CIA had destroyed videotapes showing detainees held under its secret rendition programme being subjected to the interrogation technique known as waterboarding.
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Left-wing activist group Code Pink held protests at the CIA and former Vice President Dick Cheney’s house Saturday morning — complete with giant paper mache heads, drone replicas and people getting arrested.
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Demonstrators took to the homes of senior U.S. officials Saturday before protesting in front of CIA headquarters to call for accountability in the agency’s interrogation program.
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Police charged two men with trespassing at the home of former Vice President Dick Cheney Saturday morning, at his home in McLean, according to Fairfax County Police.
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And the folks who carried out the torture? Were they relaxed? We can’t imagine what these people were thinking when they brutalized helpless victims. Did they enjoy themselves? It’s unlikely we shall ever know what goes on in the minds of the CIA’s depraved sadists. Perhaps we should be thankful for that.
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“If I am someone implicated in the torture report, I am thinking twice about travelling to Europe any time soon.”
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The report itself was made public in early December, but only via an unwieldy and low-res PDF. Melville House, based in Dumbo, moved quickly into action, line-editing the document, formatting it, and getting it printed and in stores by December 30. The motivation for that mad dash was twofold: to publish the public document before competitors, and to help prevent the report from fading in the public eye. Melville House, which largely specializes in literary fiction and political nonfiction, was successful on both counts. The initial print run of 50,000 copies was shipped, and the publisher has moved on to a second printing.
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The Justice Department earlier dropped its demand that Risen divulge his source, though prosecutors have continued to seek his testimony.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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The much-praised Chilling Effects DMCA archive has taken an unprecedented step by censoring its own website. Facing criticism from copyright holders, the organization decided to wipe its presence from all popular search engines. A telling example of how pressure from rightsholders causes a chilling effect on free speech.
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