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CISPA passes House in unexpected last-minute vote

RT | 27 April, 2012

The House of Representatives has approved Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act with a vote count of 248-168. The bill is now headed for the Senate. President Barack Obama will be able to sign or cancel it pending Senate approval.

Initially slated to vote on the bill Friday, the House of Representatives decided to pass Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) Thursday after approving a number of amendments.

Apart from cyber and national security purposes, the bill would now allow the government to use private information obtained through CISPA for the investigation and prosecution of “cybersecurity crime,” protection of individuals and the protection of children. The new clauses define “cybersecurity crime” as any crime involving network disruption or hacking.

“Basically this means CISPA can no longer be called a cyber security bill at all. The government would be able to search information it collects under CISPA for the purposes of investigating American citizens with complete immunity from all privacy protections as long as they can claim someone committed a ‘cybersecurity crime.’ Basically it says the Fourth Amendment does not apply online, at all,” Techdirt’s Leigh Beadon said.

Declan McCullagh, correspondent from CNET News, says CISPA will cause more trouble than is immediately apparent.

“The most controversial section of CISPA is the language – that notwithstanding any other portion the of law, companies can share what they want as long as it’s for what they call a ‘cyber security purpose,'” he told RT.

CISPA was introduced in the House last November.  Critics chided the bill, saying its broad wording could allow the government to spy on individual Internet users and block websites that publish vaguely defined ‘sensitive’ data.

“[CISPA] doesn’t really have any protections against cyber threats, all it does is make people share their information. But that’s not going to solve the problem. What’s going to solve the problem is actual security measures, protecting the service in the first place, not spying on people after the fact,” Internet activist Aaron Swartz told RT.

The White House issued a statement Wednesday saying President Barack Obama would be advised to veto the bill if he receives it. The Obama administration denounces the proposed law for potentially giving the government cyber-sleuthing powers that would allow both federal authorities and private businesses to sneak into inboxes and online activities in the name of combating Internet terrorism tactics.

Earlier, the House of Representatives and Senate also considered adopting the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA). These bills sought to entitle the US government to curb access to “rogue websites” that illegally hosted intellectual property. The bills could effectively force search engines to remove these websites from search results, an action many private companies considered intrusive.

PIPA and SOPA were opposed by many Internet giants including Google, Mozilla, Facebook, Yahoo!, Wikipedia and Reddit. Google organized a petition against the legislation, while Wikipedia held a 24-hour blackout to protest the bill in January. As a result, SOPA was recalled while PIPA was postponed indefinitely.

However, CISPA was actually backed by Facebook, despite its opposition to SOPA and PIPA. In a blog post on April 13, Joel Kaplan, Vice President of US Public Policy at Facebook, argued that if enacted into law, the bill would “give companies like ours the tools we need to protect our systems and the security of our users’ information, while also providing those users confidence that adequate privacy safeguards are in place.”

A number of big companies, including AT&T, Microsoft, Boeing, Verizon and Oracle have also supported CISPA.

The CISPA battleground in numbers

April 27, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Security for the 99%

By Dan Auerbach | EFF | April 25, 2012

The House of Representatives kicked off their “cybersecurity week” yesterday with a hearing titled “America Is Under Cyber Attack: Why Urgent Action is Needed.” Needless to say, the rhetoric of fear was in full force. A lot of topics were raised by members of Congress and panelists, but perhaps the most troublesome theme came from panelist and Former Executive Assistant Director of the FBI Shawn Henry, who repeatedly urged that good cybersecurity means going on the offensive:

“the problem with existing […] tactics is that they are too focused on adversary tools (malware and exploits) and not on who the adversary is and how they operate. Ultimately, until we focus on the enemy and take the fight to them […], we will fail.”

This offensively-minded approach has major pitfalls, as it could lead to more government monitoring and control over our communications. While we think an increased focus on catching criminals using existing tools is a fine tactic that could be used by law enforcement, we fear the temptation for law enforcement to increase their surveillance capabilities in order to successfully go on the offensive in the context of computer crimes. This could mean things like breaking into people’s computers without warrants, or disrupting privacy-enhancing tools like Tor. Needless to say, we think it would be a very bad idea to link our safety to the ability for law enforcement to effectively monitor people, and that is a danger of focusing solely on an offensive strategy. Instead, we would like to offer an alternative, defensively-oriented point of view regarding security, an important view that we think was not adequately represented in yesterday’s panel.

Securing U.S. critical infrastructure networks, corporate networks, and the Internet at large depends upon securing our computers and networked devices. Fundamentally, it’s very simple: fewer software vulnerabilities means more security. Once a vulnerability is patched and an upgraded version of software is available and in use, that increases safety for all of us. Ensuring that the right mechanisms are in place to maximize this baseline security should be a major focus area of any organized effort to secure our critical and other Internet infrastructure. This means encouraging the disclosure of vulnerabilities when they are found so that they can be fixed, and no longer exploited. This is what we mean when we talk about security for everyone. This defensive strategy also takes a view of vulnerabilities that includes engineering with security in mind: if software doesn’t force good security on administrators and other humans who have a role to play to keep things secure, then that should be considered a security vulnerability in that software.

In order to understand why vulnerabilities are the foundation of insecurity and ought to be the focus of defensive efforts, let’s take a bit of time for those new to the computer security world to define bugs, vulnerabilities, exploits, and a particularly nasty class of exploits called “zero-day” exploits.

What are bugs, vulnerabilities, exploits and “zero-day” exploits?

A software bug is a general term referring to an unintentional problem with a piece of software that causes the software to work in an unexpected or unintended way. Bugs can refer to low-level issues (“we started counting from 0 over here, but from 1 over there, and now this array is messed up”), or to high-level issues (“we didn’t implement a feature allowing people to see their open orders on this website”).

Security vulnerabilities are a class of bugs in software; these are the bugs that allow an attacker to gain unauthorized access to do something that she couldn’t before. This could mean gaining access to a remote computer, or to a private network, or to other private information. Once again, these range from low-level vulnerabilities (“We weren’t expecting the user to give a name that was 4 gigabytes long; our oversight allowed the user to crash the program and execute her malicious code on the victim’s system”) to high-level (“Since we didn’t force a user to use a strong passphrase, his account could be compromised”).

Exploits are pieces of software that actually take advantage of the security vulnerability and give the user running the software unauthorized access. A security vulnerability could lead to an exploit, although not all vulnerabilities lead to exploits.

Zero-day exploits are exploits that take advantage of an undisclosed vulnerability. Suppose there is a publicly known vulnerability in the browser Internet Explorer 6. Then any exploit based on that vulnerability is NOT considered a zero-day, and you can (often, theoretically) protect yourself from such a vulnerability. In this case, for example, you could do so by downloading Internet Explorer 9. However, if there is a “zero-day” in Internet Explorer 9, there’s nothing you can knowingly do as a user to protect yourself. This makes this type of vulnerability especially scary, since it could be used not just against unwitting users who haven’t upgraded their software, but against anyone.

Ok, got it. To make us safer, we need to patch vulnerabilities and prevent exploits, especially zero-day exploits. Does CISPA encourage this?

Unfortunately, the “cybersecurity” bill CISPA and other legislation under debate does NOT focus on this baseline security. Instead of encouraging the patching of vulnerabilities as quickly as possible, or offering solutions to improve the general security of networked computers, the bill encourages broad surveillance of personal data by companies and the government. This type of information sharing is largely unrelated to the core issue of vulnerabilities that need to be patched at the software level. It’s certainly possible that by mining that data one could come across an exploit or an unknown vulnerability and share it with the vendor, but the bill is NOT about sharing vulnerabilities so that they can be patched – it’s about sharing raw data in a way that could legitimize a public-private surveillance partnership. And this data sharing between companies and the government in no way encourages security vulnerabilities themselves to be shared with the relevant software vendors and developers so that they can be patched. In other words, it just doesn’t attack the root of the problem.

Why is fixing vulnerabilities at odds with taking an offensive approach to security?

If we take an offensive approach as Mr. Henry suggests, a “security for the 1%” situation seems likely to arise, in which vulnerabilities are sometimes kept secret, and mitigations or fixes for these vulnerabilities are selectively doled out by the government or other private security firms only to critical infrastructure or paying clients (the “1%” deemed worthy of protection). The government might even deploy black box systems to companies and infrastructure designed to mitigate exploits based on secret vulnerabilities while giving as little information as possible about those underlying vulnerabilities, even to the companies they are protecting. Either way, the vendor would not be told about the vulnerability and so anyone who wasn’t a recipient of the “privileged” information would be hung out to dry.

What is a better approach to security?

Changing the incentives and culture to encourage the right sort of information sharing concerning vulnerabilities is a complex problem, and we do not purport to have a complete solution. There are many pieces to the puzzle: what should be done about vendors who don’t care about security? What about users who don’t upgrade software, or go out of their way to be vulnerable? What about security researchers who discover vulnerabilities, and choose to sell this knowledge to the highest bidder, instead of ensuring that the vendor knows about the vulnerability and it gets fixed?

There are some common sense tactics that the government can take to help solve these problems. For starters, the government can itself commit to disclosing any known vulnerabilities to vendors so that they are promptly patched. Next, incentives could be put in place to encourage research that has broad beneficial effects for everyone’s security. For example, suppose a researcher invents a new testing technique that reduces how many exploitable vulnerabilities there are in software in general. This is a win for everyone, and we think the government should strongly encourage such research.1

But beyond these common sense suggestions, the main point we want to raise in this post is not to offer a solution to these problems, but rather suggest that anyone interested in security at the national and international level should be thinking hard about them. Taking an offensive approach has the potential to put our civil liberties in danger, and could create a situation in which our safety ebbs and flows with how well the intelligence community can spy on us. This precarious and undesirable situation can be avoided if instead we take a defensive approach to stop the problem at its core, working to ensure that everyone is maximally protected. Mr. Henry suggests that “offense outpaces the defense.” That seems like an oversimplification, but even if one accepts it to be true, we should not take this to be an immutable property of the world. Instead, we should work to change it by increasing our defensive efforts. Unfortunately, the “cybersecurity” debate does not seem to be addressing this point of view, but we hope that somebody brings it up during “cybersecurity week”.

In the mean time, please speak out against the misguided cybersecurity legislation by taking action against CISPA.

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April 26, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , | Leave a comment

The right to water: Water cistern demolitions in Hebron area

23 April 2012 | International Solidarity Movement, West Bank

On Monday April 23, 2012, the Israeli occupation forces destroyed four water cisterns outside of the city of al-Khalil (Hebron). Two of the destroyed cisterns were located in the Abweire area, a small agricultural neighborhood of 400-500 residents northeast of al-Khalil. The other two cisterns destroyed were located in Hal-Houl, south of al-Khalil. The demolitions came just one week after another four cisterns were destroyed in the Meshroona area south of al-Khalil.

Palestinians in these areas, who are located in Area C, are forced to depend on rain water cisterns for their crops and livestock because of unequal distribution of water resources to surrounding illegal, Zionist settlements. The destruction of such cisterns is part of a calculated strategy of forced displacement and ethnic cleansing in occupied Palestine. According to the Israeli organization Diakonia, water cistern demolitions over the past two years have directly affected almost 14,000 Palestinians, among whom several hundred have been forced to leave their homes because of lack of water. International law forbids the targeting of structures essential for the survival of the civilian population.

The day after their water cistern was demolished, activists with ISM visited members of the Ashfour family in Abweire in order to talk and survey the damage. The occupation forces did not stop with removing the top of the cistern, but actually smashed the sidewalls, rendering the structure totally useless. The occupation forces came without warning in four jeeps, an armored personnel carrier, an armored bulldozer, and another armored earth-wrecking machine, along with personnel from the Israeli permits and construction offices. They claimed that the cistern was constructed illegally, without the necessary permits, and began to destroy the cistern.

Within an hour the Ashfour family’s hopes for irrigating their crops lay in ruins. According to Hisham Ashfour, the cistern had been built almost ten years ago and served not only his family but about fifty people in his neighborhood. The other cistern destroyed in Abweire was also rendered completely unusable, having been filled in with dirt by an Israeli bulldozer.

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April 25, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Subjugation - Torture | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Hebron Home Caged Due To Settlements

By Hamza Al-Hattab – WAFA News – April 23, 2012

Steel bars surround the home, not only sliding down the windows, but all over the place, covering it from every side and corner, covering its doors, covering its external yard and topping its walls, making it look like a box, at first you might think it is a big cage for birds, and maybe some animals, but if you look closer, you will find 15 members of Abu Aisha family living there, in their home, that was transformed into a prison due to illegal settlement activities, and extremist, fundamentalist Israeli settlers.

Still From WAFA Video
Still From WAFA Video

The home of Mohammad Hamed Abu Asiha, is there, and has always been there, but now, it is surrounded by illegal Israeli settlements in the heart of the Old City of Hebron, surrounded by Beit Hadassah settlement, Beit Romano and above that by an Israeli military base, wall-to-wall with their home.

Heading home or leaving it requires a permit, a permit from an army that occupies the city, an army that is not there to protect, but to oppress you.

The owner, Hajj Abu Aisha, said that he has owned the land for fifty years, but now, he is imprisoned in his own home.

“I own this land, I built my home on my own land, I live there, and I also rent part of the building out, but in 1984, Israel constructed the illegal Ramat Yishai settlement, and that was when the first of the ongoing attacks against us, started, “Abu Aisha said, “They want us to leave, not only our property, they want us out of the whole area, this is exactly what happened with the family of Zackariah Al-Bakry, when the settlers took his two-story home, and expanded their illegal colony”.

The seventyish old man is there, and will remain there, Israel’s violations, attacks and arbitrary searches are still part of his life, but he turned his home into a “heaven on earth”, simply because it is his home, because, unlike those invaders, he is the owner of his property, while they are the occupiers.

Hajj Abu Aisha has many stories to tell, one of them happened when he was watering and tending to his small garden, a few olive trees, and a number of different plants; the settlers asked him to sell them his home, and his land, and he rejected their “offer”.

He told them he is willing to pay them so that they leave the illegal outpost. When the settlers realized how determined and steadfast he is, they stepped-up the series of endless attacks.

“Every member of my family has been harassed, verbally abused, and physically attacked by them”, the Hajj said, “Children, adults, women… you name it, all of them have been attacked and beaten by the settlers, they even have been hospitalized due to these attacks”.

The attacks have different types, ranging from beating, hurling stones, eggs and trash, to spraying them with waste-water, and ongoing death threats. The family cannot even open its windows, cannot communicate with Palestinian neighbors; their home became their prison.

Reema Abu Asiha said that nobody is able to visit them, her parents, brothers, sisters, relatives, nobody is allowed to visit them; nobody can.

“When my sons and daughters got married, nobody was allowed to come, we had to move the wedding reception to the houses of their uncles”, Reema added, “Even when we need to fix our home, we have to apply for a special permit from the military, yet, we are not allowed to bring construction materials in”.

She continues, with tears flowing down her cheeks; her eyes glossing and her lips moving in pain, “I lost two fetuses in the past, one in 1988, when the ambulance could not enter the area, and I had to walk to hospital while in labor.

A year later I became pregnant again, twins this time, we filed all needed documents, coordinated with the Red Cross one month before my due date, yet, when I was in labor, my husband called the ambulance, but due to Israeli restrictions it took them more than two and a half hours to arrive, by then, my twins were dead”.

The father complained that officials and journalists do not pay attention to their hardships, their misery and suffering.

“Last time we saw any official was in 2007, when the governor of Hebron, Areef Al-Ja’bary visited us”, he said, “The Press does not pay attention to us, even local Palestinian press agencies do not visit us, nobody cares about what is happening to us, nobody helps us”.

The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the occupied territory, B’Tselem, and the youth coalition against settlement, equipped the property with surveillance equipment to document the Israeli violations.

The family filed dozens of complaints, provided the Israeli police with videos and pictures of these attacks, but to no avail.

Hajj Abu Aisha said that every time he and his family were attacked, they filed complaints to the Israeli Police, adding that he keeps count for these attacks, and complaints, but nothing happened; the violations, or at least some of them were exposed, but the Police did nothing. B’Tselem even published the pictures and videos on their webpage exposing these violations, but the Police would not do a thing about it.

But the videos managed to expose these violations, and even led to the release of Abu Aisha and some members of his family when they were arrested by the army and the police; the settlers have their own claims and their own share of fabrications, but the camera reflected the truth, what really happened, and exposed the lies of the settlers.

In one instance the Israeli Authorities even apologized to the family after a settler woman, the wife of extremist settler, Shalom A L Cobi, attacked the children of the family, cursed at them and terrified them, the video reached international media, and Abu Asiha said that “what was shown on TV stations, is only a small part of the real nature of the attacks”.

“What we’ve seen on TV is just a very small part, a small report on the bigger picture”, Abu Aisha said, “The violations we face are constant, we live through these attacks, day by day”.

In 2002, settler Shalom A L Cobi invaded the home of the family after breaking its main door, family members resisted his attack, and caught it on tape.

The family then filed a complaint, and the police admitted the video as evidence, the family was “victorious” this time, but it is still surrounded, imprisoned in its home, and repeatedly attacked.

The family is still there, living under constant harassment and attacks, physical and verbal abuse, but determined to stay.

“This is our home”, they say, “We will not leave it, and we will not abandon it, this is out home, and this is where we will stay”.

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April 25, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Leave a comment

FAA approves spy drones to fly US skies

Press TV – April 23, 2012

US law enforcement agencies have received the approval of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to use unmanned aircraft known as drones for mass surveillance.

More than 50 non-military organizations within the United States have received approval to fly drones, according to documents obtained via the Freedom of Information Act requests by the advocacy group, Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Major agencies like the FBI, the US Department of Homeland Security and the US Department of Justice had been cleared to launch drones, US President Barack Obama administration’s favorite weapon of war which is being used in countries such as Pakistan, Afghanistan and Yemen.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation civil liberty group warned that the use of drones poses a serious threat to personal privacy.

The documents revealed that individual city police forces are also drawing up plans to use the reconnaissance aircraft.

In February, the US Congress passed a bill which approved the government’s deployment of up to 30,000 spy drones in American airspace by 2020.

The Federal Aviation Administration Reauthorization Act, which President Obama is expected to sign, also ordered the FAA to develop regulations for the testing and licensing of drones by 2015.

According to some estimates, the commercial drone market in the United States will be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Currently almost 50 companies are developing some 150 different drone systems.

The US has been using the unmanned vehicles for its spy operations and assassination missions worldwide and the strikes have intensified since Obama took office three years ago.

April 23, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , , | Leave a comment

US Department of Justice sought cover-up on FBI scandal: Review

Press TV – April 23, 2012

A US Department of Justice (DoJ) task force charged with studying the performance of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) laboratories in the 1990s is suspected of having sought to cover up scandalous FBI behavior.

The DoJ set up a task force in the 1990s to investigate reports of data manipulation by the FBI crime laboratories.

The findings of the investigation revealed that the laboratories of the FBI manipulated DNA test results under pressure from superior authorities and presented flawed results for years in order to tilt the case in favor of the claimants and against the defendants.

The issue was first revealed in 1995 when Fredric Whitehurst, a chemist and lawyer who worked at the FBI’s crime lab, testified that he was told by his superiors to perjure in order to facilitate the prosecution of two men accused of involvement in the World Trade Center bombing in February 26, 1993.

“There was a great deal of pressure put upon me to bias my interpretation,” the FBI whistleblower said at the US District Court in New York in 1995.

Whitehurst had written or passed along scores of memos over the years warning about the lack of impartiality and scientific standards in FBI’s forensic research on the World Trade Center attack and in other cases.

After the Justice Department’s inspector general began a review of Whitehurst’s claims, Attorney General Janet Reno and FBI Director Louis J. Freeh decided to launch a task force to dig through thousands of cases involving discredited agents, to ensure that “no defendant’s right to a fair trial was jeopardized.”

It took the task force nine years to complete the mission. However, it never publicly released the results of its case reviews of suspicious lab work, the names of the defendants who were convicted as a result and the nature or scope of the forensic problems it found.

Tens of thousands are probably in jails on account of the flawed and criminal lab work conducted by the FBI, Whitehurst noted.

A recent review by the US daily Washington Post on more than 10,000 pages of the task force documents revealed that “the panel operated in secret and with close oversight by FBI and Justice Department brass – including Reno and Freeh’s top deputy – who took steps to control the information uncovered by the group.”

Innocent prisoners who were probably jailed mistakenly never got the chance to have their cases reviewed, because neither their advocates nor their relatives were informed of the flawed nature of the FBI laboratory results.

The Justice Department continues to decline to release the names of the affected defendants.

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April 23, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Ex-Palestinian prisoner: captivity in Israel, living in graves

Press TV – April 22, 2012

Interview with former Palestinian prisoner Abdulaziz Umar

“They (Palestinian prisoners) just live in graves and their families do not know anything about them; they’re not allowed to contact their families and they are deprived of everything. Some of them are suffering from handicaps and others are even suffering from psychological problems. Of course they spend all this long time in these dark cells under occupation without having any access to the external world.”

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April 22, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Solidarity and Activism, Subjugation - Torture, Video | , , , | Leave a comment

Prisoner society challenges Barghouthi confession report

Ma’an – 22/04/2012

RAMALLAH – Head of the Palestinian Prisoners Society Qadura Fares said Saturday that Israeli media reports on the interrogation of Fatah leader Marwan Barghouthi failed to prove he confessed to any charge.

Israeli daily Haaretz on Friday reported that records of the leader’s questioning by Israeli internal security service Shin Bet show Barghouti giving partial confessions of his awareness of attacks on Israelis, and late President Yasser Arafat’s tacit acceptance of attacks.

Barghouthi — a revered political figure and former presidential candidate — was convicted by Israel of five counts of murder in 2004, but refused to present a defense, saying the trial was illegitimate.

Fares on Sunday questioned the timing and content of the Haaretz report, ten years after the interrogation took place.

“The Israeli security services, which failed to make Barghouthi give any confessions during four months of interrogation using the ugliest ways of psychological and physical torture, come today with false claims and baseless lies,” Fares said.

“If there were such confessions, the Israelis would have disseminated them at that time, and they would have used them for political gains,” he added.

“I challenge any Israeli service to show any document or paper of any kind signed by Marwan Barghouthi.”

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April 22, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Leave a comment

Bahrain: Why Should the Media Care About One Man’s Fast?

By Preethi Nallu | Al Akhbar | April 21, 2012

Bahrain, with a total population of approximately 1.3 million, is smaller than most metropolitan cities in the world. But, over the past week the country has made headlines across global media. The fact that the Formula One Grand Prix is going to be held in the capital Manama this weekend while a majority of the island is besieged by protests, clashes, and arrests has become an ethical quandary with multiple dimensions.

The hunger strike of the country’s most well-known human rights activist, Abdulhadi al-Khawaja has finally “earned” the attention of worldwide media. Despite being in a prison cell, the hunger striker has become the beating pulse of protests in Bahrain, with his photos and posters splashed across the streets and banners calling for his immediate release. After months of torture and 70 days into a painfully prolonged “fast for freedom” al-Khawaja is finally “news.”

But long before the sporting event became an “angle” of focus, al-Khawaja and hundreds of thousands of people in Bahrain have been fighting for greater political rights with sparse attention from the media or the international community-at-large. Geopolitics, sectarian divides, and short attention spans overshadowed grave human rights abuses that have been ongoing for more than one year in Bahrain, without signs of near future reconciliation.

Here are reasons why Bahraini-Danish hunger striker al-Khawaja’s story has always been important, well before he entered this critical phase, where his time is now numbered in days or even hours.

As a man known to practically every household in Bahrain, he commands a mobilizing effect needed to carry on the pro-democracy protests that have been overshadowed by geopolitics involving the US and Iran. The Bahraini regime has taken away an important leader of the revolution because they are simply threatened by his singular presence on the streets that strengthens the voices of more than 70 percent of the population in the country. It is an act of cowardice.

Al-Khawaja has spent his entire adult life advocating for greater political rights for the majority population of Bahrain, starting as a university student in the United Kingdom.

This is not just al-Khawaja’s story. It is also the story of his two activist daughters, son-in-laws, brothers, and wife, all of whom have been persistently targeted by the government and arrested for their dissidence. His story is intertwined with hundreds of thousands of people who have been marching on the streets from Bahrain to London calling for his immediate release. Al-Khawaja’s story illustrates the powerful ties between the Al-Khalifa family in Bahrain and the Saudis, who would like to prevent a similar scenario in Saudi Arabia. The US government, that is in turn close allies with the Saudis, has been unabashedly silent on the issue while simultaneously calling for imminent action on Syria. His story is one that could cause a ripple effect in the Gulf States that continue to stifle protests with unhindered force.

The accusations against al-Khawaja of attempting “to overthrow the Government by force in liaison with a terrorist organisation working for a foreign country” have been unfounded. The “terrorist” organization in question is of course Hezbollah and the foreign country is Iran. The Shias of Bahrain do not wish to see Iranian/Hezbollah influence in their country. They do not wish to have an Islamic theocracy for a leadership. There has been no evidence, whatsoever, of exchanges between al-Khawaja or the February 14th coalition and Iranian/Hezbollah agents.

Al-Khawaja has spent his entire adult life advocating for greater political rights for the majority population of Bahrain, starting as a university student in the United Kingdom. He has been persistently targeted by the government of Bahrain even before he co-founded the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, formed not in Iran or Lebanon, but in Denmark, where al-Khawaja and his family sought political asylum for 11 years. He was repeatedly arrested and beaten for championing human rights and democracy, since his return to Bahrain in 2001, upon an official pardon from the king.

We, as a the media community, remained passive in the face of blatant injustice for a long time.

If the Bahraini government is looking for culpability, they should point toward Copenhagen where he received training as a human rights defender. But since al-Khawaja’s background hardly constitutes grounds for a life sentence based on “conspiring with foreign agents,” the al-Khalifa regime has sought the tried and tested strategy of manipulating sectarian divides. Based on al-Khawaja’s Shia identity and that of at least 70 percent of the population in Bahrain, whose voices have been stifled, they blame the Iranians and their purported aims to create a “Shia Crescent” across the Middle East.

Al-Khawaja must not be allowed to die.

His critical condition has already led to heightened tensions in a country, where protesters have been marching in tens of thousands for his immediate release. His death will lead to irreconcilable anger amongst the protesters who have been promised change again and again, but with no consequence. His death will create a fault line in the movement and minds of the youth who have been met only with resistance to change and oppression without accountability.

We, as the media community, have remained passive in the face of blatant injustice for a long time. We have failed to empower the tens of thousands in Bahrain by highlighting the story of one man’s plight. We have simply stood by until his penultimate moments.

But, It is not too late for us to look beyond the simple appeal of al-Khawaja’s hunger strike and render greater meaning to his struggle. We must learn to better decipher the current state of affairs in the Island Kingdom of Bahrain and the larger picture of how it affects the Gulf and beyond. We must maintain the momentum.

Preethi Nallu is a print and broadcast journalist with a special focus on human rights issues.

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April 21, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Solidarity and Activism | , , | Leave a comment

Secret British Colonial Archive Finally Released

Revealed: Britain’s Orwellian Empire

By GRAHAM MacPHEE | CounterPunch | April 20, 2012

After his death, George Orwell’s terrifying vision in Nineteen Eighty-Four of a future in which the past could be erased and rewritten at will by a faceless bureaucracy was quickly appropriated in the US and Britain for the purposes of Cold War propaganda. The novel was taken as confirmation of a worldview that divided the globe according to an almost ontological opposition, between a ‘free world’ that clung to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and a ‘them’ who were not only violent and cruel (after all, hadn’t ‘we’ had recourse to massive violence, from the fire-bombing of Dresden to Hiroshima and Nagasaki?), but who offended against the very laws of empirical truth and the sanctity of the historical record. But without in any way detracting from the crimes of the Soviet empire or the Communist Party regime in China, in reality the calculus of violence and horror in the postwar world was never so neatly and cleanly divided, especially once the populations excluded from the Cold War algebra of ‘us’ and ‘them’ begins to be taken into account—namely the populations of the ‘Third World,’ upon whom so much of the bloody Cold War was fought out. The upcoming disclosure of a massive haul of some 8,800 secret files—which one respected British historian has called “the ‘lost’ British Empire archive” (BBC News, 17 April 2012)—may require a rethinking of the whole Cold War narrative. For while the Cold War warriors of the West rightly denounced Stalinist and other regimes for their horrifically cynical and insidious rewriting of the past—airbrushing out not only individuals, but whole institutional structures of criminality, and indeed the fate of whole populations—these archives suggest that the decolonizing British state was also guilty of manipulating the historical record and hiding major crimes against humanity, albeit on a scale that has still to be assessed and fully understood.

The secret colonial archive is comprised of thousands of documents that detail the military and police activities of British colonial administrations in 37 British colonial territories, from Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus, and Aden—the scenes of high profile late-colonial wars—to much less well-known and often overlooked colonial flashpoints, such as the Chagos Islands, Guyana, Botswana, and Lesotho. As the prospect of national liberation loomed in each territory, British officialdom conducted a wholesale program of stripping the colonial archives, extracting incriminating documents that recounted acts of murder, torture, and wide-scale human rights abuses, and ‘repatriating’ them to Britain. Significant instances of crimes that are recorded in these files that have emerged so far include the reported murder and torture of Mau Mau insurgents in Kenya in the 1950s, the alleged operation of a secret torture center in Aden in the 1960s, and the forced removal of Chagos Islanders to make way for the massive US base on Diego Garcia  (Guardian, 18 April 2012). There are indications that documents were also removed that might embarrass British allies, especially the United States.

However, in British law such documents once ‘repatriated’ should have become available for public scrutiny; instead they were hidden, and their existence denied. The secret archive only came to light in 2011 as the result of a court case taken by five elderly Kenyans, who sued the British government claiming that they had been tortured during the Mau Mau Emergency, an uprising led by the Kikuyu people against British rule that lasted from 1952 to 1960, and which resulted in an estimated death toll of between 25,000 and 300,000 (Guardian, 21 July 2011). Historians working for the claimants began to unearth evidence of a secret trove of documents that had been deliberately ‘disappeared’ by the Foreign Office, and which appear to record not only atrocities in Kenya, but also a whole host of criminal state actions across the late-colonial world. According to Professor David Anderson of Oxford University, “the British Government did lie about this,” and as he observes “this saga was both a colonial conspiracy and a bureaucratic bungle” (BBC News, 17 April 2012). Shamed by the revelations in court, the British Government has promised full disclosure, with documents being released incrementally in tranches from this month through to the end of 2013. This is a massive archive, and clearly no firm conclusions can be drawn at present. It will need the scrutiny of activists, civil rights professionals, academics, and civil society groups from across the world to begin to make sense of the material, and to begin to understand its importance not only for the historical record, but also for current political circumstances.

Yet even at this early stage, the revelation of this secret archive offers an important insight into the ways in which the British government cynically and quite deliberately sought to reconstruct the postwar record in order to manipulate wider perceptions of the West’s postwar global role. While sometimes conducted hastily, the winnowing of the colonial archive was calculated and designed with systematic intent. Files that could be left behind after independence were classified as “legacy,” while those considered too sensitive to fall into the hands of post-independence governments were designated as “watch,” and could only be handled by colonial officials who were “British subject[s] of European descent” (BBC News, 17 April 2012).

However, not only was the historical record being quite deliberately edited, but in truly Orwellian fashion the process of censorship was itself carefully concealed. As The Guardian newspaper reports:

Painstaking measures were taken to prevent post-independence governments from learning that the watch files had ever existed. One instruction states: “The legacy files must leave no reference to watch material. Indeed, the very existence of the watch series, though it may be guessed at, should never be revealed.” [Therefore, when] a single watch file was to be removed from a group of legacy files, a “twin file”—or dummy—was to be created to insert in its place. If this was not practicable, the documents were to be removed en masse. (Guardian, 18 April 2012)

Given the complicated and time-consuming nature of the process of combing through the files, it appears that in their haste officials increasingly resorted to the wholesale destruction of sections of the colonial archive. A memo from April 1961 advises: “To obviate a too laborious scrutiny of ‘dead’ files, emphasis is placed on destruction—a vast amount of paper in the Ministry of Defence secret registry and classified archives could be burnt without loss” (BBC News, 17 April 2012). The secret cache of 8,800 files is thus most likely the reduced remnant of a much larger ‘ghost’ archive, comprising files destroyed not only to hide evidence of criminal actions but also to conceal the very program of concealment itself. Although initial indications suggest that this archival destruction was conducted on a massive scale, its full extent may never be known.

The intellectual legacy of the Cold War was the starkly melodramatic opposition of ‘free world’ and ‘evil empire’ so memorably rehearsed by President Ronald Reagan. However, one unacknowledged consequence of the overwhelming focus on the crimes of the Soviet regime was the airbrushing from popular consciousness of the continuing historical role of British colonialism in the postwar period, and its continuity with the emergent US hegemony. The aggressive defense of a late colonial edifice based in the Middle East, East Africa, and the Far East—regions that continue to number among the central battlefields of the US ‘war on terror’—was at the time a serious embarrassment to the Western Cold War vocabulary of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy.’ But it now transpires that the West’s capacity to win the propaganda battle was not simply a matter of the best arguments winning the day, but depended on the bureaucratic manipulation of the past and the systematic liquidation of extensive sections of the historical record.

Orwell himself was in fact much less convinced by the Cold War’s stark oppositions than his subsequent promoters were willing to concede. As a former colonial policeman in Burma, he wrote about the insidious suppression of independent thinking among European colonial administrators in his 1934 novel Burmese Days. And although routinely read as a straightforward Cold War text, his more famous novel Nineteen Eighty-Four involves a more complex geopolitical vision than it is usually given credit for. As Orwell explained in a letter to Roger Senhouse dated 26 December 1948, rather than focusing exclusively on the critique of totalitarianism, the novel also sought “to discuss the implications of dividing the world up into ‘Zones of influence,’” an insight that had been prompted by the news of the collaboration between Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin in organizing the postwar world.1 In Orwell’s mind, the suppression of autonomous political action by the emerging geopolitical power blocs of East and West was intimately bound up with the suppression of individual freedom of thought and the destruction of a historical record that functioned according to shared norms of inclusiveness, accuracy, and fidelity to verifiable data. We might speculate with good reason, then, that Orwell would not only have welcomed the revelation of the secret imperial archive, but might not have been so surprised to learn of it in the first place.

Graham MacPhee is Associate Professor of English at West Chester University. He is the author of Postwar British Literature and Postcolonial Studies (Edinburgh University Press, 2011), and co-editor of Empire and After: Englishness in Postcolonial Perspective (Berghahn, 2007).

Notes

1. George Orwell, In Front of your Nose: Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters 1946-1950, edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, Boston: Nonpareil (2000), 460.

April 21, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

Proposed Amendments to #CISPA Don’t Protect Privacy

By Michelle Richardson | ACLU | April 19, 2012

Yesterday, the House Intelligence Committee released proposed changes to the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act of 2011, also known as CISPA that, according to its sponsors, represent “huge progress” towards addressing the privacy and internet freedom community’s concerns.

But, many privacy advocates, including the ACLU, and groups including the Center for Democracy and Technology, Free Press, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Constitution Project still maintain their opposition. The changes are so underwhelming that even the Obama administration issued a statement yesterday that their privacy concerns persist.

Here are some of the main problems with CISPA:

1. CISPA still allows companies to share lots of sensitive and private information about our internet use with the government. The proposal amended the definition of what could be shared by taking out its explicit reference to stealing “intellectual property.” But it still allows the sharing of Internet use records or the content of emails for “cybersecurity purposes” and unlike proposals drafted by Sens. Joe Lieberman and Dianne Feinstein or the Obama administration, CISPA does not require companies to even make an effort to remove information that could be tied to a specific individual.

2. CISPA still lets military agencies such as the National Security Agency directly collect the Internet records of American citizens who use the public, domestic, civilian Internet. The proposed changes state that the Department of Homeland Security should be cc’d when companies share our private details with the military and others, but this is no substitute for ensuring that a civilian agency is put in charge of collecting Americans’ information.

3. CISPA still lets the government use the private information it collects about us for any purpose it deems fit outside of regulation. For four months, the draft bill has remained the same: the government can use information collected under this broad new program for “any lawful purpose” so long as a “significant purpose” of its use is a cybersecurity or national security one. But as former federal and FISA court judge James Robertson said at a congressional briefing this week, this “significant purpose” limitation is meaningless. The Patriot Act inserted this language into our foreign intelligence surveillance laws, and since then, in Judge Robertson’s words, they’ve had a “hole you could drive a truck through.”

Hard to see the progress here.

CISPA is still expected to hit the House floor for “Cybersecurity Week” next week. You can find out more about the bills in this memo, and more importantly, help us spread the word on Twitter and write to your Member of Congress today. Let Congress know that in spite of the minor changes floated by the House Intelligence Committee, you still oppose CISPA.

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April 20, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , | Leave a comment

UK annihilates records of colonial crimes

Press TV – April 20, 2012

Thousands of documents detailing some of the most shameful acts and crimes committed during the final years of the British empire were systematically destroyed to prevent them falling into the hands of post-independence governments, an official review has concluded.

Those papers that survived the purge were flown discreetly to Britain where they were hidden for 50 years in a secret Foreign Office archive, beyond the reach of historians and members of the public, and in breach of legal obligations for them to be transferred into the public domain.

The archive came to light last year when a group of Kenyans detained and allegedly tortured during the Mau Mau rebellion won the right to sue the British government.

The Foreign Office promised to release the 8,800 files from 37 former colonies held at the highly-secure government communications centre at Hanslope Park in Buckinghamshire.

The historian appointed to oversee the review and transfer, Tony Badger, master of Clare College, Cambridge, says the discovery of the archive put the Foreign Office in an “embarrassing, scandalous” position.

“These documents should have been in the public archives in the 1980s,” he said. “It’s long overdue.”

The papers at Hanslope Park include monthly intelligence reports on the “elimination” of the colonial authority’s enemies in 1950s Malaya; records showing ministers in London were aware of the torture and murder of Mau Mau insurgents in Kenya, including a case of aman said to have been “roasted alive”; and papers detailing the lengths to which the UK went to forcibly remove islanders from Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.

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April 20, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , | Leave a comment

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