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Turkey slaps 36 protesters with terrorist charges

Press TV – January 3, 2014

Prosecutors in Turkey have charged 36 people with terrorism in connection with massive anti-government protests that rocked the country last year.

According to the indictment published on Friday, the suspects face a range of charges including membership in a terrorist organization, illegal possession of hazardous material, and terrorist propaganda.

“Protests that began in May went beyond a democratic reaction and turned into propaganda and demonstration outlets of terrorist organizations with the guidance of marginal groups,” read the document.

“As a result, public property was destroyed, civil servants were incapacitated and security forces were injured,” it added.

The defendants will face up to 58 years in prison if convicted.

In December 2013, more than 250 other protesters were indicted with similar charges.

Anti-government demonstrations erupted in late May 2013, when people in Istanbul protested against the planned destruction of Gezi Park, in the city’s Taksim Square.

However, the protests soon spread across the country and snowballed into a nationwide outburst of anger against Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s rule.

January 3, 2014 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception | | Leave a comment

The Move to Muzzle Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala

The Bête Noire of the French Establishment

By DIANA JOHNSTONE | CounterPunch | January 1, 2014

Paris – French mainstream media and politicians are starting off the New Year with a shared resolution for 2014: permanently muzzle a Franco-African comedian who is getting to be too popular among young people.

In between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, no less than the President of the Republic, François Hollande, while visiting Saudi Arabia on (very big) business, said his government must find a way to ban performances by the comedian Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala, as called for by French Interior Minister, Manuel Valls.

The leader of the conservative opposition party, UMP, Jean-François Copé, immediately chimed in with his “total support” for silencing the unmanageable entertainer.

In the unanimous media chorus, the weekly Nouvel Observateur editorialized that Dieudonné is “already dead”, washed up, finished. Editors publicly disputed whether it was a better tactic to try to jail him for “incitement to racial hatred”, close his shows on grounds of a potential “threat to public order”, or put pressure on municipalities by threatening cultural subsidies with cuts if they allow him to perform.

The goal of national police boss Manuel Valls is clear, but the powers that be are groping for the method.

The dismissive cliché heard repeatedly is that “nobody laughs at Dieudonné any more”.

In reality, the opposite is true. And that is the problem. On his recent tour of French cities, videos show large, packed theaters roaring with laughter at their favorite humorist. He has popularized a simple gesture, which he calls the “quenelle”. It is being imitated by young people all over France. It simply and obviously means, we are fed up.

To invent a pretext for destroying Dieudonné, the leading Jewish organizations CRIF (Conseil Représentatif des Institutions Juives de France, the French AIPAC) and LICRA (Ligue internationale contre le racisme et l’antisémitisme, which enjoys special privileges under French law) have come up with a fantasy to brand Dieudonné and his followers as “Nazis”. The quenelle is all too obviously a vulgar gesture roughly meaning “up yours”, with one hand placed at the top of the other arm pointing down to signify “how far up” this is to be.

But for the CRIF and LICRA, the quenelle is “a Nazi salute in reverse”. (You can never be too “vigilant” when looking for the hidden Hitler.)

As someone has remarked, a “Nazi salute in reverse” might as well be considered anti-Nazi. If indeed it had anything to do with Heil Hitler. Which it clearly does not.

But world media are taking up this claim, at least pointing out that “some consider the quenelle to be a Nazi salute in reverse”. Never mind that those who use it have no doubt about what it means:  F— the system!

But to what extent are the CRIF and LICRA “the system”?

France needs all the laughter it can get

French industry is vanishing, with factory shutdowns week after week. Taxes on low income citizens are going up, to save the banks and the euro. Disillusion with the European Union is growing. EU rules exclude any serious effort to improve the French economy. Meanwhile, politicians on the left and the right continue their empty speeches, full of clichés about “human rights” – largely as an excuse to go to war in the Middle East or rant against China and Russia. The approval rating of President Hollande has sunk to 15%. However people vote, they get the same policies, made in EU.

Why then are the ruling politicians focusing their wrath on “the most talented humorist of his generation” (as his colleagues acknowledge, even when denouncing him)?

The short answer is probably that Dieudonné’s surging popularity among young people illustrates a growing generation gap. Dieudonné has turned laughter against the entire political establishment. This has led to a torrent of abuse and vows to shut down his shows, ruin him financially and even put him in jail. The abuse also provides a setting for physical attacks against him. A few days ago, his assistant Jacky Sigaux was physically attacked in broad daylight by several masked men in front of the city hall of the 19th arrondissement – just opposite the Buttes Chaumont Park. He has lodged a complaint.

But how much protection is to be expected from a government whose Interior Minister, Manuel Valls – in charge of police – has vowed to seek ways to silence Dieudonné?

The story is significant but is almost certain to be badly reported outside France – just as it is badly reported inside France, the source of almost all foreign reports. In translation, a bit of garbling and falsehoods add to the confusion.

Why Do They Hate Him?

Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala was born in a Paris suburb nearly 48 years ago. His mother was white, from Brittany, his father was African, from Cameroun. This should make him a poster child for the “multiculturalism” the ideologically dominant left claims to promote. And during the first part of his career, teaming up with his Jewish friend, Elie Simoun, he was just that: campaigning against racism, focusing his criticism on the National Front and even running for office against an NF candidate in the dormitory town of Dreux, some sixty miles West of Paris, where he lives. Like the best humorists, Dieudonné always targeted current events, with a warmth and dignity unusual in the profession. His career flourished, he played in movies, was a guest on television, branched out on his own. A great observer, he excels at relatively subtle imitations of various personality types and ethnic groups from Africans to Chinese.

Ten years ago, on December 1, 2003, as guest on a TV show appropriately called “You Can’t Please Everybody”, dedicated to current events, Dieudonné came on stage roughly disguised as “a convert to Zionist extremism” advising others to get ahead by “joining the American-Israeli Axis of Good”. This was in the first year of the US assault on Iraq, which France’s refusal to join had led Washington to rechristen what it calls “French fries” (Belgian, actually) as “Freedom fries”. A relatively mild attack on George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil” seemed totally in the mood of the times. The sketch ended with a brief salute, “Isra-heil”.  This was far from being vintage Dieudonné, but nevertheless, the popular humorist was at the time enthusiastically embraced by other performers while the studio audience gave him a standing ovation.

Then the protests started coming in, especially concerning the final gesture seen as likening Israel to Nazi Germany.

“Anti-Semitism!” was the cry, although the target was Israel (and the United States as allies in the Middle East). Calls multiplied to ban his shows, to sue him, to destroy his career. Dieudonné attempted to justify his sketch as not targeting Jews as such, but, unlike others before him, would not apologize for an offense he did not believe he had committed. Why no protests from Africans he had made fun of? Or Muslims? Or Chinese? Why should a single community react with such fury?

Thus began a decade of escalation. LICRA began a long series of lawsuits against him (“incitement to racial hatred”), at first losing, but keeping up the pressure. Instead of backing down, Dieudonné went farther in his criticism of “Zionism” after each attack. Meanwhile, Dieudonné was gradually excluded from television appearances and treated as a pariah by mainstream media. It is only the recent internet profusion of images showing young people making the quenelle sign that has moved the establishment to conclude that a direct attack would be more effective than trying to ignore him.

The Ideological Background

To begin to understand the meaning of the Dieudonné affair, it is necessary to grasp the ideological context. For reasons too complex to review here, the French left – the left that once was primarily concerned with the welfare of the working class, with social equality, opposition to aggressive war, freedom of speech – has virtually collapsed. The right has won the decisive economic battle, with the triumph of policies favoring monetary stability and the interests of international investment capital (“neo-liberalism”). As a consolation prize, the left enjoys a certain ideological dominance, based on anti-racism, anti-nationalism and devotion to the European Union – even to the hypothetical “social Europe” that daily recedes into the cemetery of lost dreams. In fact, this ideology fits perfectly with a globalization geared to the requirements of international finance capital.

In the absence of any serious socio-economic left, France has sunk into a sort of “Identity Politics”, which both praises multiculturalism and reacts vehemently against “communitarianism”, that is, the assertion of any unwelcome ethnic particularisms. But some ethnic particularisms are less welcome than others. The Muslim veil was first banned in schools, and demands to ban it in adult society grow. The naqib and burka, while rare, have been legally banned. Disputes erupt over Halal foods in cafeterias, prayers in the street, while cartoons regularly lampoon Islam. Whatever one may think of this, the fight against communitarianism can be seen by some as directed against one particular community. Meanwhile, French leaders have been leading the cry for wars in Muslim countries from Libya to Syria, while insisting on devotion to Israel.

Meanwhile, another community is the object of constant solicitude. In the last twenty years, while religious faith and political commitment have declined drastically, the Holocaust, called the Shoah in France, has gradually become a sort of State Religion. Schools commemorate the Shoah annually, it increasingly dominates historical consciousness, which in other areas is declining along with many humanistic studies. In particular, of all the events in France’s long history, the only one protected by law is the Shoah. The so-called Gayssot Law bans any questioning of the history of the Shoah, an altogether unprecedented interference with freedom of speech. Moreover, certain organizations, such as LICRA, have been granted the privilege of suing individuals on the basis of “incitement to racial hatred” (very broadly and unevenly interpreted) with the possibility of collecting damages on behalf of the “injured community”. In practice, these laws are used primarily to prosecute alleged “anti-Semitism” or “negationism” concerning the Shoah. Even though they frequently are thrown out of court, such lawsuits constitute harassment and intimidation. France is the rare country where the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement against Israeli settlement practices can also be attacked as “incitement to racial hatred”.

The violence-prone Jewish Defense League, outlawed in the United States and even in Israel, is known for smashing book shops or beating up isolated, even elderly, individuals. When identified, flight to Israel is a good way out. The victims of the JDL fail to inspire anything close to the massive public indignation aroused when a Jewish person falls victim to wanton violence. Meanwhile, politicians flock to the annual dinner of the CRIF with the same zeal that in the United States they flock to the dinner of AIPAC – not so much for campaign funds as to demonstrate their correct sentiments.

France has the largest Jewish population in Western Europe, which actually largely escaped the deportation during German occupation that expelled Jewish immigrants to concentration camps. In addition to an old, established Jewish population, there are many newcomers from North Africa. All this adds up to a very dynamic, successful population, numerous in the more visible and popular professions (journalism, show business, as well as science and medicine, among others).

Of all French parties, the Socialist Party (especially via the Israeli Labor Party of Shimon Peres in the Socialist International) has the closest historic ties with Israel. In the 1950s, when France was fighting against the Algerian national liberation movement, the French government (via Peres) contributed to the Israeli project of building nuclear weapons. Today it is not the Labor Party that rules Israel, but the far right. Hollande’s recent cozy trip to Benjamin Netanyahu showed that the rightward drift of policy in Israel has done nothing to strain relations – which seem closer than ever.

Yet this Jewish community is very small compared to the large number of Arab immigrants from North Africa or black immigrants from France’s former colonies in Africa.  Several years ago, a leading Socialist Party intellectual, Pascal Boniface, cautiously warned party leaders that their heavy bias in favor of the Jewish community could eventually cause electoral problems. This statement in a political assessment document caused an uproar which nearly cost him his career.

But the fact remains: it is not hard for French people of Arab or African background to feel that the “communitarianism” that really has clout is the Jewish community.

The Political Uses of the Holocaust

Norman Finkelstein showed some time ago that the Holocaust can be exploited for less than noble purposes: such as extorting funds from Swiss banks.  However, in France the situation is very different. No doubt, constant reminders of the Shoah serve as a sort of protection for Israel from the hostility aroused by its treatment of the Palestinians. But the religion of the Holocaust has another, deeper political impact with no direct relation to the fate of the Jews.

More than anything else, Auschwitz has been interpreted as the symbol of what nationalism leads to. Reference to Auschwitz has served to give a bad conscience to Europe, and notably to the French, considering that their relatively small role in the matter was the result of military defeat and occupation by Nazi Germany. Bernard-Henri Lévy, the writer whose influence has grown to grotesque proportions in recent years (he led President Sarkozy into war against Libya), began his career as ideologue by claiming that “fascism” is the genuine “French ideology”. Guilt, guilt, guilt. By placing Auschwitz as the most significant event of recent history, various writers and speakers justify by default the growing power of the European Union as necessary replacement for Europe’s inherently “bad” nations. Never again Auschwitz! Dissolve the nation-states into a technical bureaucracy, free of the emotional influence of citizens who might vote incorrectly. Do you feel French? Or German? You should feel guilty about it – because of Auschwitz.

Europeans are less and less enthusiastic about the EU as it ruins their economies and robs them of all democratic power over the economy. They can vote for gay marriage, but not for the slightest Keynesian measure, much less socialism. Nevertheless, guilt about the past is supposed to keep them loyal to the European dream.

Dieudonné’s fans, judging from photographs, appear to be predominantly young men, fewer women, mostly between the ages of twenty and thirty. They were born two full generations after the end of World War II. They have spent their lives hearing about the Shoah. Over 300 Paris schools bear a plaque commemorating the tragic fate of Jewish children deported to Nazi concentration camps. What can be the effect of all this? For many who were born long after these terrible events, it seems that everyone is supposed to feel guilty – if not for what they didn’t do, for what they supposedly might do if they had a chance.

When Dieudonné transformed an old semi-racist “tropical” song, Chaud Cacao, into Shoah Ananas, the tune is taken up en masse by Dieudonné fans. I venture to think that they are not making fun of the real Shoah, but rather of the constant reminders of events that are supposed to make them feel guilty, insignificant and powerless. Much of this generation is sick of hearing about the period 1933-1945, while their own future is dim.

Nobody Knows When to Stop

Last Sunday, a famous football player of Afro-Belgian origin, Nicolas Anelka, who plays in the UK, made a quenelle sign after scoring a goal – in solidarity with his friend Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala. With this simple and basically insignificant gesture, the uproar soared to new heights.

In the French parliament, Meyer Habib represents “overseas French” – some 4,000 Israelis of French origin. On Monday he twittered: “Anelka’s quenelle is intolerable! I will introduce a bill to punish this new Nazi salute practiced by anti-Semites.”

France has adopted laws to “punish anti-Semitism”. The result is the opposite. Such measures simply tend to confirm the old notion that “the Jews run the country” and contribute to growing anti-Semitism. When French youth see a Franco-Israeli attempt to outlaw a simple gesture, when the Jewish community moves to ban their favorite humorist, anti-Semitism can only grow even more rapidly.

Yet in this escalation, the relationship of forces is very uneven. A humorist has words as his weapons, and fans who may disperse when the going gets rough.  On the other side is the dominant ideology, and the power of the State.

In this sort of clash, civic peace depends on the wisdom of those with most power to show restraint. If they fail to do so, this can be a game with no winners.

Diana Johnstone can be reached at diana.johnstone@wanadoo.fr

January 2, 2014 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

A short history of British torture

ICC | December 2005

When the House of Commons was debating how much to increase the time limit for detention without trial the question of torture came up. Officially this was limited to the nice considerations of whether it was all right to send people to places where torture is used and whether Britain can use information collected by the use of torture in other countries. This discussion gave an impression of democratic Britain as the home of civilised behaviour where the very idea of torture is repugnant to our legislators – unlike, say, the US with its secret CIA jails and where Cheney has been labelled the ‘Vice President for Torture’. In reality, the British state has a long history of using and developing a whole range of torture techniques.

Interrogation in Northern Ireland

Between 1971 and 1975 more than 2000 people were interned without trial by the state in Northern Ireland. Picked up without having any charges laid, or knowing when they were going to be released, detainees were subject to all sorts of treatments, some coming under the heading of ‘interrogation in depth’. Apart from prolonged sessions of oppressive questioning, serious threats, wrist bending, choking and beatings, there were instances of internees being forced to run naked over broken glass and being thrown, tied and hooded, out of helicopters a few feet above the ground. The ‘five techniques’ at the centre of the interrogators’ work were: sensory deprivation through being hooded (often while naked); being forced to stand against walls (sometimes for over 20 hours and even for more than 40); being subjected to continuous noise (from machinery such as generators or compressors for periods of up to 6 or 7 days); deprivation of food and water; sleep deprivation for periods of up to week. Relays of interrogation teams were used against the victims.

The British state tried to discredit reports of torture. Stories were fed to the media about injuries being self-inflicted – “one hard-line Provisional was given large whiskies and a box of king-size cigarettes for punching himself in both eyes” (Daily Telegraph, 31/10/77). There were indeed instances of self-harm, but these were either suicide attempts or done with the hope of being transferred to hospital accommodation.

Then the press said that any measures were justified if they helped to ‘prevent violence’. They contrasted “ripping out fingernails, beating people with steel rods and applying electric shocks to their genitalia” (Daily Telegraph 3/9/76), examples of “outright brutality”, with the measures used in Northern Ireland.

In 1978 the European Court of Human Rights said that the techniques Britain had used caused “intense physical and mental suffering and … acute psychiatric disturbance”, but that while this was “inhuman and degrading treatment” it didn’t amount to torture. This was a victory for the British state because it was keen to use means that would cause the maximum distress to the victim with the minimum external evidence. They had been previously referred to the European Court over torture in Cyprus, but in fact British interrogators had been using various combinations of the ‘five techniques’ for a long time. When the army and RUC approached Northern Ireland’s Prime Minister, Brian Faulkner, for formal approval “They told him that the ‘in-depth’ techniques they planned to use were those the army had used … many times before when Britain was faced with insurgencies in her colonies, including Palestine, Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus, the British Cameroons, Brunei, British Guyana, Aden, Borneo, Malaysia and the Persian Gulf” (Provos The IRA and Sinn Fein Peter Taylor).

By any means deemed necessary

British intervention in the Malayan ‘emergency’ in the 1950s has been held up as a model of suppression and ‘counter-insurgency’. Apart from the camps established, the murder squads, use of rigid food controls, burning down villages and the imposition of emergency regulations, the use of torture was an integral part of British operations. With 650,000 people uprooted and ‘resettled’ in New Villages, or put in concentration camps, there was also a programme of ‘re-education’.

British action in Kenya in the 1950s also showed what British civilisation was prepared to do. At various times over 90,000 ‘suspects’ were imprisoned, in either detention camps or ‘protected villages’. At one point Nairobi (population 110,000) was emptied, with 16,500 then detained and 2,500 expelled to reserves. Assaults and violence, often to the point of death, were extensive. As in Malaya, ‘rehabilitation’ was one of the goals of the operation. More than 1000 people were hanged, using a mobile gallows that was taken round the country. Overall, maybe 100-150,000 died through exhaustion, disease, starvation and systematic brutality.

Recent revelations in The Guardian (12/11/5) concerned a secret torture centre, the “London Cage”, that operated between July 1940 and September 1948. Three houses in Kensington were used to interrogate some 3500 German officers, soldiers and civilians. Still in use for three years after the end of the war, interrogation included beatings, being forced to stand to attention for up to 26 hours, threats of execution or unnecessary surgery, starvation, sleep deprivation, dousings with cold water etc. “In one complaint lodged at the National Archives, a 27-year-old German journalist being held at this camp said he had spent two years as a prisoner of the Gestapo. And not once, he said, did they treat him as badly as the British.”

No exceptions

There is a continuity in the British state’s actions. The Lieutenant Colonel in charge of the ‘London Cage’ received an OBE for his interrogation work in the First World War. In the 1950s there were reports of Britain experimenting with drugs, surgery and torture with a view to designing techniques that would be effective but look harmless. In the 1970s thousands of army officers and senior civil servants were trained to use psychological techniques for security purposes. Inevitably, the truth about current activities is not in the public domain.

In general, British democracy has been better than others at concealing the brutal way its state functions. Anything that is exposed is denied or dismissed as being an isolated excess. In France the extensive use of torture in the war in Algeria was publicised as part of a battle between different factions of the colonial apparatus. Victims had hoses inserted in their mouths and their stomachs filled with water, electrodes were put on genitals, heads were immersed in water. During the Battle of Algiers 3-4000 people ‘disappeared’: fatal victims of French torture techniques.

Although France, and more recently the US in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, have been less successful than Britain in keeping their actions under wraps, all these “democracies” use the most brutal methods of interrogation and detention. They also learn from each other’s activities, most notably in Vietnam, where the US drew on British experience in Malaya as much as earlier French experience in Indo-China.

January 1, 2014 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Court Says Border Searches Of Your Computer Are Okay Because You Shouldn’t Keep Important Info On Your Computer

By Mike Masnick | Techdirt | December 31, 2013

This one is hardly a surprise, given how many (though not all) courts have ruled concerning searches of computing devices at the border. The government’s general theory is that there is no 4th Amendment right at the border, and thus customs officials can search anything. The argument that they’re trying to prevent “bad stuff” from getting into the country really doesn’t make much sense though. If bad stuff is “on a computer” it could easily be sent digitally across the border with no intervention from a customs official. Furthermore, making border searches of laptops and phones even more troubling is the nature of how information is stored. When we pack for a trip we deliberately choose what to include in our suitcase — so we know what’s coming with us. However, on our electronic devices, we pretty much store absolutely everything. Arguing that these are subject to a full search seems problematic — but many courts have found otherwise.

And, now there’s another one. A judge in NY has dismissed a challenge to the searches brought by the ACLU. The judge, Edward Korman, repeatedly quotes former head of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff, who now makes money by hyping up the threats the country faces, so it’s not like he’s the most unbiased of folks to be relying on for how important these border searches really are. Judge Korman claims that the defendants have no standing to bring the case in the first place. There is one individual (a PhD. student) who actually had his computer searched, and then some professional organizations who worried about their members having their computers searched. The judge is simply not impressed by their arguments… at all. He notes that Customs and Border Patrol appears to search so few laptops that it’s highly unlikely that any individual will have theirs searched — and thus these groups can’t really allege a likely harm. He points out that it’s wrong to use a declaratory judgment case to address “a claim of alleged injury based on speculation as to conduct which may or may not occur at some unspecified future date.”

As for the one guy, Pascal Abidor, who did have his laptop searched, Judge Korman is also not impressed, noting that he’s not suing over that particular search, but the possibility of future searches. The judge seems a bit perplexed by this decision, but notes that it takes away his ability to get standing:

Abidor could have established standing in this case by adding a cause of action for damages based on his claim that he was subject to an unreasonable search. Such a cause of action would have provided the occasion for a trial or a motion for summary judgment that would have fully developed the record with respect to both the initial quick look search and subsequent forensic search. No such action is alleged.

But, as Judge Korman notes, if he can’t show any real likelihood of future harm, he can’t show standing.

Even after dismissing for lack of standing, the judge decides to take on the issue anyway, and this is where he starts to get really insulting to anyone who thinks that perhaps they should have some privacy rights at the border. He openly mocks the plaintiffs for arguing for the need for a “reasonable suspicion” standard for searches, noting that this bar is so low that it’s not like they’d get much more privacy out if it anyway:

Plaintiffs must be drinking the Kool-Aid if they think that a reasonable suspicion threshold of this kind will enable them to “guarantee” confidentiality to their sources.

He goes on to suggest that since traveling internationally involves going into other countries, these same people would probably have even less privacy over their data, since other countries may be even more willing to search their computers. He even cites the situation of David Miranda having his electronics searched in the UK.

Surely, Pascal Abidor cannot be so naive to expect that when he crosses the Syrian or Lebanese border that the contents of his computer will be immune from searches and seizures at the whim of those who work for Bassar al-Assad or Hassan Nasrallah. Indeed, the New York Times recently reported on the saga of David Michael Miranda who was detained for nine hours by British authorities “while on a stop in London’s Heathrow airport during a trip from Germany to Brazil.”

While the judge’s point is correct that other countries are unlikely to protect the privacy of travelers as well, and that means that any information on a laptop may be inherently unsafe, it seems like a bit of a weak copout to argue that since other countries have no respect for your electronic privacy, that the US shouldn’t either.

He goes even further, arguing that because there’s a “special need” at the border to stop bad people, that it’s perfectly fine to ignore things like probable cause or reasonable suspicion — again quoting Michael Chertoff to suggest that border laptop searches have stopped “bad people” from entering the US.

But then he argues that since everyone knows they may be searched at the border, there isn’t really an invasion of privacy:

The invasion of privacy occasioned by such a border search, however, like the search of luggage, briefcases, and even clothing worn by a person entering the United States, is mitigated by other factors….. As Professor LaFave observes, because “the individual crossing a border is on notice that certain types of searchers are likely to be made, his privacy is less invaded by those searches.” …. Thus, “[t]he individual traveler determines the time and place of the search by his own actions, and he thus has ample opportunity to diminish the impact of that search by limiting the nature and character of the effects which he brings with him.”… Indeed, because of the large number of laptop computers (close to a million per year) that are lost by travelers–numbers that far exceed the comparative handful of laptops that are searched at the border–the sensible advice to all travelers is to “[t]hink twice about the information you carry on your laptop,” and to ask themselves: “Is it really necessary to have so much information accessible to you on your computer.”

This seems problematic on multiple levels. First, if we go by the idea that there’s less of a privacy violation because you know it’s coming, then that gives the government the right to ignore the 4th Amendment so long as it tells you ahead of time that it’s going to ignore the 4th Amendment. Even the Supreme Court in Smith v. Maryland — the infamous case concerning the 3rd party doctrine — states that such a scenario is ridiculous, and that just because you know that you’re going to be searched, it doesn’t automatically make the search reasonable.

As for the suggestion that you shouldn’t store stuff on your computers, I’m sure that’s great in theory, but I’d like judges to make decisions based in reality. This suggestion is basically “don’t use your computer for what it’s designed for, because we might search it.” That’s not exactly compelling.

Again, given past precedents, and the specific facts of this case, it’s not entirely surprising. That doesn’t mean it’s not disappointing to see yet another middle finger given to the 4th Amendment to close out the year.

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January 1, 2014 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

NYPD a ‘quasi-military organization,’ according to outgoing top-cop Ray Kelly

RT | December 31, 2013

During the last few hours of a lengthy tenure atop the New York Police Department tainted by both scandal and success, outgoing-NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly echoed soon-to-be-ex-Mayor Michael Bloomberg with big words about the city’s boys in blue.

Bloomberg provoked a fair share of criticism from Big Apple residents in late 2011 when he said, “I have my own army in the NYPD . . . the seventh biggest army in the world.”

Two years later and new comments from Commissioner Kelly might make the same sort of splash.

The increased militarization of the NYPD and other big city police agencies had already caused concern among many by the mayor’s remarks that November, but both Bloomberg and Kelly’s handling of the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations in Lower Manhattan that autumn and into the winter attracted previously unmatched opposition. Within just a few short months the city had arrested hundreds of peaceful protesters, and tales from Occupiers about being pepper-sprayed by the police became routine over social media.

Two years later, the NYPD’s reputation has not been repaired: the agency’s stop-and-frisk policy remains as controversial as ever, and an award-winning Associated Press report exposed a secretive intelligence-gathering wing of the force that singled out area Muslims for warrantless surveillance.

Now as he throws in the towel after serving as the civilian administrator of the NYPD for 14 of the last 24 years, Kelly has said something that doesn’t shy away from accusations he helped use his police force to make a police-state.

The New York Times was questioning what they called Kelly’s “tight control of the department” when he reportedly looked “pained” and told them, “You can’t win.”

“Obviously, in a quasi-military organization, you need an ultimate decision maker,” he said.

Ominous words about the world’s seventh-biggest army, or an actualization of what the NYPD has become under his command? The New York City blog Politicker was quick to throw Kelly’s quote into a headline for a post they published on Tuesday, and one of the most widely-subscribed Twitter accounts used by Occupy Wall Street linked followers to the Times article by way of Kelly’s quip.

“Oh, so he doesn’t know what ‘quasi’ means,” one Twitter user remarked back.

Rania Khalek, an independent journalist who watched the NYPD evolve under Kelly, weighed in on the comment as well.

“I was surprised by his candidness, but my first thought was, at least’s being honest,” she told RT on Tuesday. “The role of the NYPD, like most city police departments around the country, is indistinguishable from that of the military, especially in poor communities of color where police serve as occupying armies for the most part.”

And as the AP’s investigation has shown, ethnic minorities in the greater New York region have indeed been forced to endure specialized scrutiny under Kelly and Bloomberg by way of the NYPD’s so-called Demographics Unit: a faction of the force dedicated to collecting intelligence on Muslims by seemingly any means necessary.

“Investigations of any community which are not based upon indications of crime create fear and erode the confidence of a community in the power of a legal system to protect it,” New York University law professor Paul Chevigny told Newsday earlier this year.

Combined with an “army” of 35,000 or so police officers, it’s easy to see how that fear has made Kelly a person that many New Yorkers have grown to despise during his tenure. Additionally, retired NYPC Captain John A. Eterno told the Times this week that the way in which the commissioner has operated his organization in recent years has been cloaked in secrecy to a point of contention.

“He’s done very well with technology and made many innovations,” Eterno told the Times, “But lack of transparency is going to be his legacy.”

“He’s simply hidden things over and over that are harmful to democratic policing,” he said.

In a 1995 study, Victor Kappeler wrote in his abstract that the quasi-military structure that Kelly claims to have enforced cannot breed a “truly professional” police force. The “need to balance internal discipline with police-citizen interactions results in pressure on the individual officer to produce results,” he wrote, is accomplished in militarized units “often by relying on various degrees of misconduct.”

Between 2011 and 2012, misconduct within the ranks of the NYPD raised 22 percent, Controller John Liu confirmed back in June, causing a reported 229 NYPD officers to be disciplined last year.

At the same time, however, statistics suggest that the NYPD’s actual ability to fight crime could be on the up as well. The Times reported on Tuesday that the city is expect to log only 330 murders for this year — a record low.

“And these record-breaking successes are all due in great part to the professionalism and skill of the NYPD,” Bloomberg said during a ceremony earlier this month.

Others, however, had not so nice things to say. To commemorate Kelly’s last day as commissioner of NYPD, a few dozen New Yorkers gathered downtown for a “Good Riddance, Ray Kelly” party advertised on Facebook.

“We’re celebrating because we survived this asshole,” activist Cyrus McGoldrick told the New York Daily News from Tuesday’s demonstration.

As RT reported previously, Kelly will soon join the Council on Foreign Relations — a dominant international policy think-tank — where he will still be able to stay close to his fellow New Yorkers. Even in his post-NYPD career, Kelly will receive a taxpayer-funded ten-man security detail that is reported to cost NYC residents around $1.5 million a year.

January 1, 2014 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism, Subjugation - Torture | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

War From Above

By Richard Hugus | Aletho News | December 31, 2013

Drone aircraft, which we first heard of as weapons of war used by the United States in foreign lands, are now poised for a full-scale invasion of the skies above the US itself. On December 30, 2013 the US Federal Aviation Administration announced its choices for drone testing in six states around the country — Alaska, Nevada, New York, North Dakota, Texas and Virginia. These six states may in turn do their testing in more than one location, For example, according to the Anchorage Daily News, drone testing centered in Alaska at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks will be called “the ‘Pan-Pacific Unmanned Aircraft Systems Test Range Complex.’ It includes six flight ranges in Alaska, four in Hawaii and three in Oregon.” According to the Honolulu Star Advertiser “the Pohakuloa Training Area on Hawaii island, the Pacific Missile Range Facility on Kauai and even the island of Niihau have been included in discussions of places where the testing could occur.” According to the East Oregonian, drone testing is likely to involve a former military base in Pendleton, Port of Tillamook, and Warm Springs. Likewise, the New York operation will be run from the former Griffiss Air Force base in Rome, NY and, according to the Cape Cod Times, will also include the former Otis Air Base on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The Times reports that “the Cape site had the support of the state’s congressional delegation, a statewide military asset commission and business leaders” and that “among the institutions involved in the bid are Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Rochester Institute of Technology.”

What this story reveals is the creation of a huge web of DOD-connected Universities, businesses, corporations, defense contractors, and former and current Pentagon facilities spread all over the country. Included in this web are the many and various chambers of commerce, their boosters in the press, and numerous comprador “officials” anxious to bring federal money into their districts, at the expense of all the other people who live in them. Almost no news coverage has appeared that would imply the FAA decision was anything but a boon for the economy and the advent of a wonderful and inevitable new technology.

There is little news about the down side to hosting drones in all these areas of the country, each with a populace that has simply not been consulted. Drones first came to our attention at the beginning of “the war on terror.” We learned of them first as weapons for highly illegal, cowardly, and indiscriminate “targeted killings” in foreign lands. These weapons have murdered countless innocent people in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia pursuant to “kill lists” drawn up every week by the CIA and Pentagon, and approved by the White House. These weapons fulfill the US Air Force’s fantasy of “death from above,” carried out by pilots working in the security and comfort of US bases who, acting as judge, jury, and executioner, destroy supposed enemies from computer consoles as if it were a video game. The cowardliness of wars of aggression being conducted against innocent people in dirt-poor lands by unseen “UAV pilots” in air-conditioned offices thousands of miles away cannot be over-emphasized. This is what unmanned aircraft have brought so far to the reputation of the United States – a new low in the entire universe of human ethics; murder abroad is but the advance of capitalism at home. Wedding parties in Afghanistan have been decimated so that Amazon can deliver CDs and smart phones to our door by drone.

Nor is there news about the introduction of drones domestically as yet another assault on privacy and the human right to be free from surveillance. Domestic law enforcement agencies are just as anxious to spy on the US population and target people they call criminals as the Pentagon and CIA have been to spy on the rest of the world and kill people they call terrorists. It isn’t enough that our phones and computers have been turned by the NSA into astounding instruments of surveillance, that everything we say and do on these instruments is being harvested and stored, and that surveillance cameras are mounted at almost every business and public space. Now the national security state wants to have remote-controlled cameras videotaping us full-time from the sky. The police hope to have drones able to fire “non-lethal weapons” at people they deem to be involved in criminal activity so that they too can play God. Without question, non-lethal weapons will soon become lethal weapons and the US will be trying and executing citizens at home as it has done elsewhere without even a hint of due process.

The domestic military bases which are being revived by this brave new technology originally went out of business because there was nothing for them to do in the fulfillment of their original purpose – defending the country. Otis Air Base, now called “Joint Base Cape Cod”, is a case in point. It used to patrol the skies for Russian aircraft along the northeast coast and ended up being a disaster for the community in which it was situated because it polluted the local groundwater and sole-source drinking water aquifer with untold gallons of dumped jet fuel and cleaning solvents. It sent fighter jets to intercept the two planes hijacked to New York on September 11, 2001, but ended up being part of a ploy to let those planes actually reach the twin towers before they got there. This base and many others have been parasites on the communities around them. They will continue in that role in their new incarnation as hosts to drone spying and drone warfare. The war has come home. The people orchestrating this war – the global elite — have no particular allegiance to the United States. From their point of view, its land and its people must also be brought under control, just like everywhere else. How sad it is to see the scramble to welcome them.

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December 31, 2013 Posted by | Aletho News, Civil Liberties, Militarism | , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Let’s Not Forget The Neocons Who Cheered The Egyptian Military Into Power

By Chris Rossini | Ron Paul Institute | December 28, 2013

Earlier this year, the Egyptian military overthrew the democratically elected Mohammed Morsi. Much has happened since the initial violent crackdown on Morsi’s supporters. The Muslim Brotherhood, which has been around some 80 years, has been labeled a “terrorist organization” by the Egyptian government, and now even bloggers who speak out against the military are being jailed.

Plenty of neocons cheered the military coup from the sidelines when it occurred. With all of their flap about the US “bringing democracy to the world,” this apparently was a case where a coup was necessary.

Now that 6 months has passed, and the Egyptian military continues to flex its iron fist, let’s not forget the neocons who cheered them into power:

John Bolton on July 3: “we needed the military to stop the Muslim Brotherhood, and I think this coup was the right thing.”

Jonathan Tobin on Aug. 8: “There is more to democracy than voting, and any solution that risks giving Morsi another chance to consolidate power would be a disaster for Egypt and the United States. Washington must be prepared to stick with the military no matter what happens in the streets of Cairo.”

Michael Rubin on Aug. 16: “So long as the Muslim Brotherhood seeks to turn back the clock, impose its hateful and intolerant ideology upon Egyptians of all religiosities and religions, and refuses to abide by the pathway to transitional elections, and so long as it continues to fight in the streets, then it should suffer the consequences of its actions. And if those consequences result in exponentially higher Brotherhood casualties than army casualties, then so be it. That is the truest path to peace.”

Peter Wehner on Aug. 20: “So from the perspective of American national security and morality, having the Muslim Brotherhood in power is considerably worse than having the Egyptian military in power.”

Remember the rule: If the winner of a foreign election is someone that the U.S. government approves of: “Democracy = Good”. However, if the U.S. government does not approve of the winner: “Roll in the tanks!”

December 30, 2013 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

NSA collects data from undersea cables

342624_The SEA-ME-WE 4 cable
South East Asia–Middle East–Western Europe 4 (SEA-ME-WE 4) optical fiber submarine communications cable
Press TV – December 29, 2013

The US National Security Agency (NSA) has collected sensitive data on key undersea optical fiber telecommunications cables between Europe, North Africa and Asia.

Citing classified documents labeled “top secret” and “not for foreigners”, German news magazine Der Spiegel reported on Sunday that the NSA spied on the so-called “South East Asia-Middle East-West Europe 4” also known as “Sea-Me-We 4” undersea cable system.

The German magazine said NSA specialists had hacked an internal website belonging to the operator consortium to mine documents about technical infrastructure including circuit mapping and network management information. “More operations are planned in the future to collect more information about this and other cable systems.” Spiegel quoted the NSA documents, dating from February, as saying.

According to the website of the project “the South East Asia-Middle East-West Europe 4 project is a next generation submarine cable system linking South East Asia to Europe via the Indian Sub-Continent and Middle East. The project aims to take these regions to the forefront of global communication by significantly increasing the bandwidth and global connectivity of users along its route between Singapore and France.”

Spiegel reports that “Among the companies that hold ownership stakes in it are France Telecom, now known as Orange and still partly government-owned, and Telecom Italia Sparkle.”

In March 2004, a consortium of 16 international telecommunications companies signed construction and maintenance agreements for the new optical fiber submarine cable system linking South East Asia to Europe via the Indian Sub-Continent and Middle East with Terminal Stations in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Italy, Tunisia, Algeria and France. The contract is being awarded jointly to Alcatel Submarine Networks, France and Fujitsu Ltd., Japan and the estimated project cost is of the order of $500 million.

The submarine cable system is approximately 20,000km long. It consists of the main backbone across the Eastern and Western worlds plus the extension links in various countries. The project seeks to support telephone, internet, multimedia and various broadband data applications.

It seems the method was employed by the NSA’s elite hacking unit (TAO) via incorporating routers and servers from non-NSA networks into its covert network by infecting these networks with “implants” that then allow the government hackers to control the computers remotely.

The document leaked by Der Spiegel proudly says that, on Feb. 13, 2013, TAO “successfully collected network management information for the SEA-Me-We Undersea Cable Systems (SMW-4).” With the help of a “website masquerade operation,” the agency managed to “gain access to the consortium’s management website and collected Layer 2 network information that shows the circuit mapping for significant portions of the network.”

The US government claims that its spying operations that are taking place both at home and abroad are vital for fighting terrorism.

A federal judge ruled Friday that the NSA’s bulk collection of millions of Americans’ telephone and Internet records is legal. US District Judge William Pauley also concluded that the operation is an important part of America’s effort to combat the threat of terrorism.

NSA spies on millions of telephone and Internet records that are routed through American networks on daily basis. According to some estimates, NSA spies on 380 million cellphones in the US.

Prior to Pauley’s ruling, another US District Court Judge, Richard Leon, had described the massive NSA spying program “Almost Orwellian”.

“I cannot imagine a more ‘indiscriminate’ and ‘arbitrary invasion’ than this systematic and high-tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually every single citizen,” Judge Leon wrote.

December 29, 2013 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , | Leave a comment

Is Anything Left of the US Constitution or Privacy Rights?

photo jdgpauley_zpsbd54d86d.jpg

Vying for a Supreme Court appointment? US District Judge William H. Pauley III ruled that the NSA’s massive spying program is legal.

By Franklin Lamb | Fig Trees and Vineyards | December 28, 2013

The answer to this question is being pondered across America in light of two seemingly contradictory federal court decisions handed down this month from two separate courts, one in Washington, the other in New York.

Since the Bush Administration’s “war of terrorism” was launched, civil liberties advocates have voiced growing alarms about the erosion of Constitutional guarantees. Yet with the disclosures by whistle blower Edward Snowden, concerns about what protections Americans have remaining—protections from governmental intrusions into their privacy as well as home or office invasions by police forces—have rapidly gained new impetus. Because of Snowden’s leaks, legal challenges have been brought against the National Security Agency; without the leaks, no challenge could have been mounted.

Now all of a sudden two US Federal District Courts, with identical powers under the US Constitution, have reached seemingly opposite conclusions on the same legal issue, i.e. the right of the NSA to conduct “metadata” searches and store the information of scores of millions of unknowing Americans. This means, given that appeals have been filed in both cases, that the issue is likely going to be decided by the US Supreme Court.

Civil libertarians were encouraged earlier this month when Federal Judge Richard Leon of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia ruled on December 16 that the NSA’s bulk collection of cell phone data of Americans (everyone you called, when you called them, and where you were when you called them) violates the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. Calling the data gathering “Orwellian,” Judge Leon reasoned that we now use our smartphones for a wide variety of personal activities in which we have the expectation of privacy, that probably we have more expectation of privacy from cell phones now than we did, say, from a pay phone in the 1980s. And he also noted, crucially, that cell phones today make it possible to determine the caller’s GPS location. “It’s one thing to say that people expect phone companies to occasionally provide information to law enforcement; it is quite another to suggest that our citizens expect all phone companies to operate what is effectively a joint intelligence-gathering operation with the Government,” Leon wrote.

photo jdgleon_zpsfadd67bc.jpg

US District Judge Richard Leon

The judge then focused on whether the massive NSA surveillance violates the Fourth Amendment, which guarantees, “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

He writes:

“The threshold issue that I must address, then, is whether plaintiffs have a reasonable expectation of privacy that is violated when the Government indiscriminately collects their telephony metadata along with the metadata of hundreds of millions of other citizens without any particularized suspicion of wrongdoing, retains all of that metadata for five years, and then queries, analyzes and investigates that data without prior judicial approval of the investigative targets. If they do – and a Fourth Amendment search has thus occurred– then the next step of the analysis will be to determine whether such a search is ‘reasonable.’”

Judge Leon found that the NSA, when demanding citizens’ telephone metadata, is conducting a search, and that it is most likely an unreasonable search under the Fourth Amendment, given there is no specific suspicion of wrongdoing by any individual whose records are demanded.

In his ruling he granted the request for an injunction against the collection of the plaintiffs’ phone data, ordering the government to destroy any of their records that have been gathered. But the judge stayed action on his ruling pending a government appeal, recognizing in his 68-page opinion what he termed as the “significant national security interests at stake in this case and the novelty of the constitutional issues.”

But no sooner had Judge Leon’s decision been published, bringing hope to civil libertarians, than US District Judge William H. Pauley III in New York issued what looks almost like a diametrically antithetical ruling, making for the latest in a contentious debate that has also seen a presidential commission weighing in on certain aspects of NSA spying as well. On December 27, Pauley ruled that the NSA’s collection of vast oceans of data on private phone calls is legal—meaning that in a period of just 11 days the two judges, along with the presidential panel, had reached “the opposite of consensus on every significant question before them, including the intelligence value of the program, the privacy interests at stake and how the Constitution figures in the analysis,” as the New York Times reported it.

The case in New York was brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, which said it would appeal.

Judges Leon and Pauley have starkly differing understandings on how valuable the NSA program is. Echoing arguments made recently by former FBI director Robert S. Mueller III and other senior government officials, Pauley, whose courtroom is not far from where the World Trade Center towers stood, said he believed the program might have caught the 9/11 hijackers had it been in place at the time. “While robust discussions are underway across the nation, in Congress and at the White House, the question for this court is whether the government’s bulk telephony metadata program is lawful,” Pauley wrote. “This court finds it is.”

The finding stands in stark contrast to Leon’s ruling in Washington:

“The government does not cite a single instance in which analysis of the N.S.A.’s bulk metadata collection actually stopped an imminent attack, or otherwise aided the government in achieving any objective that was time-sensitive in nature,” Judge Leon wrote.

What these conflicting decisions leave us in is a profound quandary with respect to the issues raised by Edward Snowden. In a Christmas address that was carried by British Channel 4 and widely aired on the Internet, the former NSA contractor expressed the legitimate concern of all people who value individual liberty and privacy. A child born today, he said, might “never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves, an unrecorded, unanalyzed thought.” He added that people are essentially walking around with a tracking device in their pockets, noting that this disappearance of privacy is important because privacy “is what allows us to determine who we are and who we want to be.”

December 29, 2013 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Citizen K in the USA

By William Manson | Dissident Voice | December 27, 2013 

In his novel The Trial, Franz Kafka conjured up the nightmarish, surreal yet strangely familiar world of an ordinary person trapped in a web of bewildering governmental repressions. Inexplicably, the eponymous protagonist “Joseph K” suddenly finds himself under relentless investigation—and is then abruptly arrested. Throughout his ordeal, the charges will remain undisclosed. (“Is it political?” gasps Jeanne Moreau, in Orson Welles’ film version; or, as Orwell’s Winston Smith would say, “is it a thought-crime?”) “Free” from incarceration while he awaits trial, Joseph travels through a labyrinth of impersonal offices, baffling court procedures, and inscrutable explanations–only to find himself, once again, back at the beginning of his quest for answers.

The sadistic travesty of justice perpetrated at Guantanamo immediately comes to mind. But what about conditions here in the “Homeland”? Trapped in endless litigation–or in the clutches of creditors or foreclosers—how many millions of U.S. citizens also feel like Joseph K? At one time or another, highly complicated legal quandaries and arcane bureaucratic tangles plague most of us. Lately, however, we’ve been inclined to worry more about our Internet communications: are they being surreptitiously intercepted and stored permanently (PRISM)? In order to be periodically retrieved, scrutinized and “analyzed”? If so, why?

The NSA Director, appearing on TV’s Sixty Minutes, hastened to reassure all (mere) citizens that–despite its mega-billion-dollar budget and ongoing expansion (the giant Utah data-storage complex)–the NSA is currently only actively focusing on less than “60 U.S. persons.” Was Gen. Keith Alexander telling “the whole truth” (to use a quaint phrase)? Or was he giving us, as did James Clapper (DNI) in his unsworn congressional testimony, the “least untruthful” answers he felt obliged to offer?

Therefore, our average Joseph K today is just a tiny bit worried that most (if not all) of his communications are being permanently stored, and subject at any future time to sophisticated “analysis”—under whatever rationale meddlesome technocrats may come up with. If not by the neighborly “analysts” at the NSA, then what about the other dozen-or-so “intelligence” agencies? What mischief are they up to? Joseph, who finds everyday life complicated enough, also finds himself wondering about all those marketing “research” firms, think-tank contractors, credit bureaus, and so on. How are they “mining” and storing his personal data? He doesn’t know.

But enough of that—Joseph K has enough troubles without succumbing to an obsessive paranoia! He’s even tempted to get rid of the Internet all together: his “service” stinks and he’s always hated computers. But wait! Our Joseph K has just been told—by some faceless bureaucrat—that he must quickly go the website “Healthcare.gov” and register to shop for (mandatory) private health insurance. Again, Joseph finds himself perplexed: frankly, he loathes hospitals and drug companies—and has managed quite well without them. Moreover—or so Joseph insists–if he finds himself suffering from terminal cancer, he may choose to die—rather than subject himself to dubious, degrading (and still-expensive) “procedures.” (And Joseph K is also aware that preventable medical errors are, by some estimates, the “third leading cause of death” in the U.S. today.) Joseph, you see, is one of those old-fashioned curmudgeons, the type that once embraced a radical-populism and hated Big Business and Big Government with equal fervor. He even thinks (can you believe it?) that the entire insurance industry is some kind of racket—and wants no part of it!

And admittedly, our Joseph K is not very “computer-literate” and finds it more than a little exasperating to try to comprehend all the provisions of a jerry-built “Affordable” Care Act. Couldn’t the government, he asks, have mailed (simplified) application forms to each and every citizen (counted in the 2010 U.S. Census)? He’s always found legalistic small-print, provisos and disclaimers more than a little confusing (and annoying). Given such typically over-complicated ordeals, Joseph understandably has become a fanatic for simplification. Why can’t “the government,” he again recently demanded, simply establish “Medicare for All”? After all, he pointed out, “we” spend trillions for “defense”—and from whom, exactly? He doesn’t know (but was under the impression that the U.S.-Soviet nuclear arms race ended some time ago).

Well, to make a long story short: our friend Joseph, feeling trapped between corrupt insurance giants and coercive big government, was so demoralized that he decided to leave all this behind. So much so, it turns out, that he urgently asked his creator Kafka to return him back to the world of fiction–wherein he will at least continue his Sisyphean struggle against coercion with some measure of defiance and tragic dignity.

~

William Manson is the author of The Psychodynamics of Culture (Greenwood Press).

December 28, 2013 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Economics, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

Obama regime tries to stop courts from ruling on constitutionality of warrantless spying

By Noel Brinkerhoff | AllGov | December 24, 2013

Even after months of stories exposing the breadth and depth of National Security Agency (NSA) spying on Americans’ communications, the Obama administration insists federal courts should stop hearing cases challenging the agency’s warrantless surveillance on grounds that they might expose the existence of this spying.

Last week, federal lawyers asked a judge, Jeffrey S. White, in Northern California to dismiss cases that could lead to a ruling on the constitutionality of warrantless surveillance programs authorized during the George W. Bush administration.

The Obama administration contends the cases are just too dangerous to continue if they wind up jeopardizing state secrets.

“Disclosure of this still-classified information regarding the scope and operational details of N.S.A. intelligence activities implicated by plaintiffs’ allegations could be expected to cause extremely grave damage to the national security of the United States,” James Clapper Jr., director of national intelligence, wrote in one of the filings. In June, Clapper was exposed for having lied to Congress about the existence of programs that spied on Americans.

Cindy Cohn, legal director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is representing the plaintiffs in the cases, told The New York Times that the government’s assertion was “very troubling.”

She added that despite the revelations by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the administration was essentially saying, “We can’t say whether the American people have been spied on by their government.”

The lawsuits in question were brought by Carolyn Jewel and Virginia Shubert, who claim the NSA’s spying violated their constitutional rights.

Jewel is suing on behalf of all AT&T customers, and Shubert is suing on behalf of all Americans.

The NSA has refused to confirm or deny that either plaintiff’s communications were targeted.

“The American people know they’re being surveilled,” Cohn told The Washington Post. “The government is trying to reset the clock in order to avoid an open judicial determination about whether that surveillance is legal.”

To Learn More:

White House Tries to Prevent Judge From Ruling on Surveillance Efforts (by Charlie Savage and David Sanger, New York Times)

U.S. Government Moves To Block Further Litigation In NSA Surveillance Cases (by Marc Ferranti, IDG News Service)

U.S. Reasserts Need To Keep Domestic Surveillance Secret (by Ellen Nakashima, Washington Post)

Jewel v. NSA (Electronic Frontier Foundation)

NSA Phone Data Collection Made No Difference to National Security (by Noel Brinkerhoff and Danny Biederman, AllGov)

Obama Asks U.S. Supreme Court for Stamp of Approval on Warrantless Cell Phone Searches (by Noel Brinkerhoff, AllGov)

Should National Intelligence Director Clapper be Charged with a Felony for Lying in Sworn Senate Testimony? (by Noel Brinkerhoff, AllGov)

December 26, 2013 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite | , | Leave a comment

Drone-spotting: Survival guide informs on new breed of aerial predators

RT | December 25, 2013

A Drone Survival Guide with hints and tips on how to thwart the “robotic birds” has been published on the internet. With over 30,000 drones expected to be flying over the US by 2030, the Guide urges readers to familiarize themselves with the craft.

In light of the growing number of drones, the Guide advises a number of techniques to evade and scramble drones. The document is available online and has been translated into 17 different languages.

“Our ancestors could spot natural predators from far by their silhouettes. Are we equally aware of the predators in the present-day?” writes the Guide.

It contains the silhouettes and measurements of all of the most widely-used drones, from the ‘Killer Bee’ to ‘The Sentinel’ as well as information on where they are currently operational. It goes on to detail ways you can hide from a drone.

“Most drones are equipped with night vision, and/or infrared vision cameras, so-called FLIR sensors. These can see human heat signatures from far away, day or night. However there are ways to hide from drones.”

Among the tactics it advices for eluding the aerial craft are: hiding “in thick forests,” wearing space blankets to confuse heat sensors, not using wireless communication, and the use of mannequins or human-sized dolls as decoys.

“Wait for bad weather. Drones cannot operate in high winds, smoke, rainstorms or heavy weather conditions.”

As well as avoidance strategies to escape from the craft, the document also gives advice on how to hack into a drone’s systems. The Guide gives the assurance that as long as a drone’s communications are not encrypted then they can be hacked. It describes how to intercept and interfere with the workings of a drone and also details a process called “spoofing”.

“Small, portable GPS transmitters can send fake GPS signals and disrupt the Drones navigation systems. This can be used, for example, to steer drones into self-destruction flight paths or even hijack them and land them on a runway.”

The US’ use of drones for surveillance as well as military strikes has drawn global recognition. Last week the Yemeni parliament passed an anti-drone motion because of the civilian lives lost in the US strikes on Al-Qaeda militants in the country. Pakistan has also condemned the US for its use of the craft, decrying the strikes as an affront to its sovereignty.

Moreover, the Obama Administration has come into the firing line for increasing the amount of drones operating in American air space.

December 26, 2013 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Leave a comment

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