Adelson removes publisher of LVRJ, sends signal to employees
By Eoin Higgins | American Herald Tribune | February 4, 2016
The Las Vegas Review-Journal has seen its publisher leave in the latest shakeup for the paper since Las Vegas casino mogul Sheldon Adelson purchased it in December of 2015. For the past two months, staffers at the Nevada paper have been waiting for the next domino to fall as the paper works on transitioning its editorial and news reporting over to Adelson’s control.
The Review-Journal was sold to an Adelson family shell company, News + Media Capital Group LLC, by GateHouse Media, a subsidiary of New Media Investment Group. GateHouse had purchased the paper only nine months before, in March 2015.
A source inside the paper reached by phone told The American Herald Tribune that Adelson overpaid for the paper, substantially.
“We all know he offered way above what GateHouse paid for it,” the source said, “Which is why they sold. The sale agreement said that GateHouse would maintain operational control and keep the publisher.”
Within two weeks of Adelson’s purchase of the Review-Journal, the paper’s editor, Michael Hengel, had his contract bought out and left. Hengel had spearheaded the paper’s internal investigation into the identity of the buyer before resigning.
The investigation, undertaken by the paper’s staff, into who was behind News + Media Capital Group had uncovered Adelson’s identity by connecting the dots to a paper in Connecticut. That paper, The New Britain Herald, ran a story in September attacking one of Adelson’s adversaries, Judge Elizabeth Gonzalez.
Gonzalez memorably shut down Adelson in court in 2015, telling the casino mogul “Sir, you don’t get to argue with me” in open court.
It struck Review-Journal staff as odd that a paper from the other end of the country would report on a judge involved in adjudicating a dispute in Las Vegas, so they investigated further. What they found was a direct connection between their new ownership and the ownership of The New Britain Herald. News + Media Capital Group own both papers.
From there it was easy to connect the dots, although getting the story out was difficult. On December 16, the editorial board persevered and Adelson was outed as the buyer of the Review-Journal in the paper’s pages.
On December 19, the paper published an editorial entitled “Review-Journal will fight to keep your trust every day.” The content was provocative, and indicated the editorial board was spoiling for a fight. They got one. Hengel resigned three days later.
In the wake of Hengel’s departure, The American Herald Tribune’s source said, things largely calmed down at the paper. Most changes at the paper, according to our source, have been “subtle.” They have mainly revolved around bureaucratic issues relating to pay, insurance, and benefits.
As the company control transitions over to News + Media, the source said, “it’s been an HR nightmare. There have been signatures needed for documentation of new benefit packages, transitions. It’s been difficult.”
This bureaucratic transition provided News + Media the pretext to replace publisher Jason Taylor. Taylor, a GateHouse employee, was retained by News + Media in the sale agreement to manage the newsroom. His retention also served to give the impression that Adelson would not interfere with the Review-Journal’s work.
His departure was sudden, and a shock.
“The only reason [Taylor] would have left was because of Adelson,” the source told The American Herald Tribune, “The day before we were in an emergency meeting with [Taylor] and he told the staff ‘If I’m leaving, you should worry.’ He was here that Wednesday, and gone on Thursday. Overnight.”
Adelson’s increasing involvement in Review-Journal operations was not unexpected at the paper. Most employees were prepared for impending influence of the billionaire. But Taylor’s ejection was sudden, brash, and blatant.
“All the changes we’ve seen have been subtle,” our source told us, “Taylor protected us from what was going on.”
Taylor, it should be noted, was the most significant roadblock to the article disclosing the new ownership that preceded Hengel’s resignation. Still, his departure opened the publisher’s position for an Adelson partisan.
The new publisher, Craig Moon, is a veteran of USA Today, which he ran from 2003-2009. Moon’s appointment was announced the same day Taylor was fired, unmistakably signaling that the publisher’s replacement had been planned for some time.
Moon told the press after the announcement that he didn’t expect much interference from the Adelson family, but it remains to be seen if that will hold true.
Adelson’s propensity for buying newspapers is not new- he publishes the free daily Israel Hayom in Israel, a paper known for promoting a hard-right slant to coverage of Israeli politics. The paper is known locally as “Bibiton,” or Bibi’s (Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s) newspaper.
Adelson’s record in promoting his political point of view through the press overseas, then, has led to a lot of concern over his plans for the future of the Review-Journal.
“We’ve been looking at the stories coming out of the news department,” said our source. “We’ve been the stories that come out now because ultimately the publisher has the final say in what gets printed.”
The paper recently published an editorial strongly endorsing an Adelson project, a proposed $1 billion stadium at the University of Las Vegas.
The stadium is an Adelson vanity project, one that he has been pushing for quite some time. By purchasing the Review-Journal, Adelson has acquired a productive shaper of opinion in Las Vegas. It’s one that will allow him to move forward with his plans for the stadium.
Our source believes that in the short term, Adelson’s purchase of the Review-Journal was based on his desire for the stadium.
“The Adelson family said they wanted to own the paper as a family legacy, but they’re trying to build a $1 billion stadium,” our source explained. The source added that they were sure that more changes were coming in the near future.
“It’ll be a slow process. Adelson’s smart, he’s not going to risk getting called out. It could be a while.” There was a pause on the phone. “Then again, he did just kick out the publisher.”
MORE…
US & Israeli arms companies bag £500m UK military contract
RT | February 2, 2016
Israeli arms company Elbit Systems and US military contractor Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR) have won a £500-million contract to provide aircraft training for the UK military.
The Affinity venture, in which the two are partners, will provide fixed wing training for sections of the UK Armed Forces concerned with aviation.
Affinity’s component is part of a larger deal led by Ascent Flight training and worth £1.1 billion. Ascent is itself a fifty-fifty venture between international arms firms Babcock and Lockheed Martin.
The aim is to deliver flight training up to the year 2033 in line with the UK Military Flying Training System (UKMFTS).
In a statement, Ascent’s director Paul Livingston said: “The award of these contracts marks a key milestone for the fixed wing element of UKMFTS. Modern training aircraft selected specifically to meet the bespoke needs of the UK’s Armed Forces will deliver optimized training alongside high tech simulators and classroom trainers.”
Ministry of Defence (MoD) Procurement Minister Phillip Dunne said the deal was “fantastic news for the future of our military aircrew” and would provide them with “a modern training system which will equip them to deliver on the front line.”
Elbit Systems are well known for their range of drones and the firm is of particular concern among human rights groups.
According to a report by the charity War on Want, the MoD awarded a £1-billion contract to Elbit and its UK partner Thales to develop the Watchkeeper drone. The model is now in service with the military.
The charity argues that Watchkeepers are field tested in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
“Israeli companies such as Elbit will often boast of their competitive advantage in the global arms market due to their extensive ‘testing’ of their weaponry in ‘real life’ situations,” the report says.
Feds: We can’t disclose FBI records because then public would know how FBI works
PrivacySOS | February 1, 2016
Granting the ACLU and the public access to staffing, budgetary, and statistical information about the Boston Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) and FBI would mean “the public would know where the FBI was putting its resources,” warned an Assistant US Attorney in oral argument in a Boston federal court last week. The government apparently doesn’t want the public to know anything about how the FBI and JTTF spend public money, staff its offices, or conduct investigations.
Heaven forbid the public “know where the FBI [puts] its resources.”
In December 2013 the ACLU of Massachusetts sent a FOIA request to the FBI, which sought basic information about the structure and operations of the Boston JTTF and the Boston FBI field office. Amid the information the FBI redacted from its responsive disclosures were all budget figures, the number of FBI and state and local officials tasked to work on the Boston Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF), and the number of assessments, preliminary investigations, and full investigations the Boston FBI conducted over two years ago. (It’s odd that the government is putting up a fight, resisting disclosure of these records, given that in 2011, it gave Charlie Savage of the New York Times similar information.)
According to the government, this information is exempt from public disclosure under FOIA law pursuant to Exemption 7e, the part of the federal statute that says agencies do not have to disclose records that would reveal law enforcement “techniques” or “procedures.” But as ACLU of Massachusetts staff attorney Jessie Rossman argues, staffing, budgetary, and statistical information about caseloads do not reveal techniques or procedures.
The stakes for the public are high. If the court agrees with the government’s reasoning and denies the public access to this information, it would put the federal judiciary’s stamp of approval on what attorney Rossman rightfully argues the FBI is seeking in this case: “a categorical [FOIA] exemption for all law enforcement information.”
As Rossman said last week during oral argument, that’s not what congress intended when it wrote the Freedom of Information Act. If lawmakers intended to bar the public from accessing all law enforcement records, they would have written that into the FOIA statute—which they didn’t.
At issue in the ongoing litigation over FBI redactions is whether the public can hold law enforcement agencies accountable for how they spend our money and act in our names. If we don’t know anything about how law enforcement agencies operate, we can’t hold them accountable. Unaccountable law enforcement is not only bad for freedom; it also harms public safety. As history demonstrates, when the FBI is allowed to conduct its business in the dark, precious government resources are inevitably dedicated to spying on people who threaten the status quo, but who do not threaten their fellow Americans.
While antidemocratic in the extreme, it’s easy to understand why the FBI wants to keep budget, staffing, and investigations statistics secret from the public.
When the public learned about the FBI’s illegal and antidemocratic COINTELPRO operations in the 1970s, the attorney general imposed rules forbidding the FBI from spying on people unless agents could show the targets were likely violating the law. After 9/11, those rules were scrapped. The new guidelines allow FBI agents to open investigations (called “assessments”) against people absent any suspicion of wrongdoing. Since the 9/11 attacks the Bureau has been free to spy on people it doesn’t suspect of criminal activity, supposedly because suspicionless investigations are required during the permanent “war on terror.”
The ACLU is litigating for this information because we want to know what results from the FBI’s suspicionless investigations, known as assessments. If it’s true, as we suspect, that there are thousands of FBI assessments but comparatively few preliminary or full investigations—let alone arrests or successful prosecutions—it confirms what we and other civil libertarians have been saying for over a decade. Namely, allowing the FBI to spy on people absent criminal predicates isn’t just bad for civil liberties; it’s bad law enforcement. If agents are routinely chasing down leads that go nowhere, those agents are wasting their time spying on ordinary people on the public’s dime.
The FBI refuses to give us this information, which is part of the reason we sued. In essence, the government argues the information must remain secret because if disclosed, it will tip off terrorists to… the fact that the government wants to investigate crimes.
But hiding from the public records revealing how many assessments, preliminary investigations, and full investigations the Boston FBI office has conducted doesn’t protect public safety. Instead, it obstructs precisely the kind of public accountability that would make the FBI better at protecting the public from people who mean us harm. […]
Only when law enforcement agencies are subject to rigorous transparency can the public hold them accountable for their actions, thereby making them more effective at protecting public safety.
The FBI has a long and dirty history of spying on dissidents and activists, instead of investigating and building cases against people who do real harm to Americans, like the bankers who collapsed the US and world economy in 2008. So it’s easy to see why the government doesn’t want the public to learn any meaningful information about the inner workings of the Bureau. But government agencies can’t keep information secret from the public because it would reveal something embarrassing or unconstitutional. And the records at issue don’t reveal “techniques” or “procedures.”
Here’s to hoping the federal court agrees, and compels the FBI to release this basic information about how it spends our money and acts in our names. Only then will we have any meaningful access to judge how the Bureau is conducting itself, and so the opportunity to exert some democratic accountability over its operations.
Feeding the Military-Industrial Complex
By Jonathan Marshall | Consortium News | February 1, 2016
America’s military procurement machine may be the single most successful system of wealth transfer ever devised — moving tens of billions of dollars every year from ordinary taxpayers into the pockets of big defense contractors and their allies in Congress. But as a provider of working equipment to defend the United States against realistic threats, it is becoming more and more dysfunctional with every passing year.
Current administration plans call for spending a trillion dollars over the next 30 years to “modernize” America’s nuclear arsenal to fight a pointless war that would decimate major centers of civilization across the globe. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Learning to Love — and Use — the Bomb”]
At the same time, the Pentagon is also asking for even greater sums to modernize conventional weapons systems that are better suited to East-West conflict scenarios of the 1950s than to today’s skirmishes with insurgents in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa.
Spending on major military acquisition programs is projected to soar 23 percent, after adjusting for inflation, from fiscal year 2015 to 2022. Worse yet, Congress and the administration are spending much of that money on weapons that don’t even work as advertised.
One of the biggest drivers of new procurement spending today is the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter jet. The plane is too expensive and sophisticated for simple bombing runs in Syria or Afghanistan, but too crippled to use in dogfights against Russia’s or China’s most advanced fighters. It’s ideal for one purpose only: With a total projected program cost of more than $1 trillion, this program will keep Lockheed Martin and its subcontractors in 46 states afloat for at least the next two decades.
The F-35 program was awarded more than $12 billion in the omnibus spending bill that passed Congress in December for fiscal year 2016. That money is slated to buy 68 planes, up from 44 purchased in fiscal 2015. Over the entire life of the program, the Pentagon expects to acquire more than 2,400 jets.
The F-35 program has suffered countless ills since 2001. In the words of the New York Times, “The project is seven years behind schedule, costs have soared, and eyebrows arched higher after a prototype was outmaneuvered by an older F-16 in a mock dogfight early last year.”
Critics note that the plane has been grounded because of safety, software or other technical issues — including jets catching fire on the runway — 13 times since 2007. The latest glitch is an over-weight helmet — costing $400,000 a pop — which can cause fatal whiplash for some pilots. Until it is redesigned, pilots weighing less than 136 pounds are grounded.
As of last year, the same helmet was still unable to let pilots distinguish friendly aircraft from foes — a rather critical capability when they are shooting at blips on a radar screen beyond visual range. The stability of the planes’ engines was rated “extremely poor” and other key systems were unreliable as well.
“At best . . . we will be launching an unstable plane that cannot perform many of its core missions for years,” said Rep. Jackie Speier, a California Democrat, last summer. “At worst, it’ll hurt people or we’ll ground it in the hangar and spend billions on a retrofit.”
A test pilot who flew the F-35 in mock air battles in January 2015, against an older (and much cheaper) F-16D, reported that the newfangled jet was incapable of outmaneuvering the F-16 in a dogfight. That was true even though the test was rigged by making the F-16 carry heavy extra fuel tanks to slow it down.
That result confirmed a computer simulation run in 2008 by analysts at RAND, an Air Force contractor. They reported that in a hypothetical conflict with Chinese air and naval forces, the F-35 was quickly wiped out. America’s latest jet suffered “inferior acceleration, inferior climb [rate], inferior sustained turn capability,” they wrote. “Also has lower top speed. Can’t turn, can’t climb, can’t run.”
The F-35’s builders have proven their superiority at political firepower, however. The Center for Responsive Politics reported that in 2014 the plane’s main contractor, Lockheed Martin, forked over $4.1 million in campaign contributions, supplemented by $7.6 million in contributions from three subcontractors: Northrop Grumman, United Technologies, and BAE. Their money poured into members of the House Armed Services Committee, House Appropriations Committee and Senate Appropriations Committee, as well as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.
The F-35 isn’t the only dysfunctional weapons procurement program draining money today. Its predecessor, the F-22, proved to be an expensive dog, suffering a critical failure after every 1.7 hours of flight, on average. Although first flown in 1997, it was not allowed into combat until 2014, on a mission over Syria.
Or take the Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship. Designed for missions close to shore, it has an experimental aluminum hull that may be vulnerable to rough seas and melt at high temperatures (such as caused by a missile or bomb strike). No one will know for sure until at least 2018, but in the meantime, 24 ships have been built or are under construction. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter has asked for cutbacks in the program, but the Navy is in open revolt.
But don’t applaud the Pentagon’s civilian leadership too quickly for challenging the Navy. Carter reportedly wants to use some of the savings from the ship program to buy more F-35 fighter jets.
Latest corruption index does not reveal Britain’s real place in global crime wave
By Graham Vanbergen | TruePublica | February 1, 2016
Transparency International (TI) releases its latest report entitled the Corruption Perceptions Index and continues to find that corruption is rife globally and remains a blight around the world. Overall, two-thirds of the 168 countries on the 2015 index did not fair well.
Denmark took the top spot for the 2nd year running for least corrupt, with North Korea and Somalia the worst performers.
TI states on their website that the goals to aim at for a corruption free country has certain characteristics such as; “high levels of press freedom; access to budget information so the public knows where money comes from and how it is spent; high levels of integrity among people in power; and judiciaries that don’t differentiate between rich and poor, and that are truly independent from other parts of government. Conflict and war, poor governance, weak public institutions like police and the judiciary, and a lack of independence in the media characterise the lowest ranked countries.
Notably the five countries with the biggest declines in these characteristics in the past 4 years include Libya, Australia, Brazil, Spain and Turkey. The big improvers in its report include Greece, Senegal and surprisingly, the UK.
As it turns out sixty-eight per cent of countries worldwide have a serious corruption problem. Half of the G20 are among them. The G20 consists of the top 20 economies in the world but ranks the EU as one economy even though it is made up of 28 countries alone.
The research shows that half of all the 34 OECD countries are violating their international obligations to crack down on bribery by their companies abroad.
Britain has entered the top ten for the first time behind Denmark (1st), Finland, Sweden, New Zealand, Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland, Singapore, Canada, Germany and Luxembourg. The US ranks 16th. In the EU, other countries not doing so well are; France which ranks 23rd, Spain 36th, Italy 61st and Bulgaria, the last of EU nations at 69th place.
The truth is that Britain has not done better, don’t forget this is an index of perception, not actual corruption.
In comments from TI, Britain was found to have conducted an “extraordinarily inept” review of freedom of information laws. The government’s review of the Freedom of Information Act threatens to further undermine trust in politicians and damage democracy. If ever there was a demonstration of the governments intention of transparency, look no further than Former home secretary Jack Straw, who previously stated he wants the act to be scrapped and rewritten, and Lord Carlisle who accused the Guardian of a “criminal act” in publishing the Snowden leaks, both are on the commission. TI fails to mention this.
Even TI’s own UK executive director Robert Barrington said there were “good reasons why people are sceptical about whether Britain really merits a top 10 ranking,” proving not even he believes this ranking.
He went further by highlighting; “overseas bribery by UK companies, the laundering of corrupt assets through the City, the lax regulation and lack of transparency in British-controlled tax havens, to say nothing of corruption scandals here in the UK,” and mentions the “dropping of significant proposals putting personal responsibility on bankers for money-laundering failings.” He continues with “The sequence of petty political scandals around lobbying, the revolving door and party funding discredits the UK in the eyes of the world and gives fuel to the critics who want to portray Mr Cameron’s agenda as nothing more than hypocritical and sanctimonious.”
Barrington is rightly angry.
The Independent reported in July that The City of London is the money-laundering centre of the world’s drug trade, according to an internationally acclaimed crime expert. In addition, every financial expert now agrees that due to lax financial laws by government, that the London property market is built largely on laundered money of crime from all over the world involving hidden tax havens, most of which are British.
In March last year, the Financial Conduct Authority (itself replacing the toothless Financial Services Authority that was funded by the very banks it was supposed to oversee) said that it would conduct a review on whether banking culture was changing after a slew of financial scandals that dogged the industry. Martin Wheatley, the CEO was looking into the rigging of bank lending rates amongst the many crimes perpetrated in The City of London. Chancellor George Osborne then sacked Wheatley as it was clear he was going to do his job and then just a few weeks ago had the review dropped after replacing Wheatley with a person ‘more agreeable’ to the banks. This was a cynical move by Osborne to protect the banking industry.
When it comes to press freedom Britain has no bragging rights. Just two years ago the British government’s draconian response to the Guardian’s reporting of Edward Snowden saw the UK drop five places in TI’s report. Shockingly, Britain languishes globally in 36th position behind countries such as Belize for press freedom, a country that is rife with lawlessness, corruption, suffers a lack of public, business and press freedom, is mired in accusations of labour abuse, crime and unemployment.
It doesn’t help that the Serious Fraud Squad who was investigating high-profile cross-border investigations into business practices at some of the UK’s biggest companies had their budget cut so deeply that the FT reported “The scale and pace of budget cuts inflicted on the SFO will make prosecuting its caseload impossible.” It must be clear by now that the government has an agenda to protect these serial corporate offenders.
David Cameron won praise in 2013 after announcing at the Open Government Partnership summit in London that the UK intended to require companies registered in the UK to reveal the identity of their real owners in public filings at Companies House. This was then heavily watered down after the Queen was warned that her British territories were now the world biggest tax havens, harbouring tens of trillions of illegally stashed cash and assets that was described as a “web of secrecy jurisdictions”. The Tax Justice Network (TJN) said Britain now rules the world of tax havens.
Her Majesty’s British Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies make up around 25 percent of the world’s tax havens which are now blacklisted by the European Commission and now ranked as the most important player in the financial secrecy world, hardly a shining example of integrity and morality.
And the extent of these crimes is almost boundless as TJN said “The victims of this secrecy include, among others, 2 billion Commonwealth citizens. A recent study of 33 African countries found that they lost over $1tr in capital flight since the 1970s, of which $640bn came from 16 Commonwealth countries. These losses dwarf the external debts of ‘just’ $190bn for the 33 countries.”
In the meantime, Suspicious Activity Reports dealt with by a British specialist police unit focusing on the proceeds of crime and corruption blocked just seven transactions in an entire year. Transparency International reported that the police unit during the previous year (2014) for seizing corrupt assets was “not fit for purpose”. Given the sheer scale of financial crimes and corruption taking place, this performance can only be seen as suspicious itself. In 2015, this police unit required emergency funding.
So widespread is corruption in Britain that Keith Bristow, director-general of the UK’s National Crime Agency, said in January that the scale of crime and it’s subsequent money laundering operations was “a strategic threat” to the country’s economy and reputation. “Many hundreds of billions of pounds of criminal money is almost certainly laundered through UK banks and their subsidiaries each year.” And yet the government facilitates it by actively doing nothing.
When it comes to conflict and war, Britain’s international performance is dire. Britain, as we now all know, was heavily involved in the fall and subsequent deaths of over a million innocent Iraqis. Its campaign in Libya has turned the wealthiest and healthiest African nation into a lawless cesspool ruled by terrorism and death. Syria is ongoing. This has manifested itself into a refugee crisis the likes of which has not been seen since the last world war and an escalation of terrorism continues.
The granting of licences by government for the sale of spying equipment and armaments to some of the most oppressive regimes in the world is another scandal that further destabilises world peace.
The Corruption Perception Index does not tackle the issues at hand. It confuses by focusing on pubic sector corruption, but private corporations are the worst offenders backed by significant government cooperation. Britain’s banking industry is not effectively cited even though it is mired in scandal, facilitates a huge international crime wave backed by money laundering services on an industrial scale along with the tax havens that supports it.
George Soros, Haim Saban give $12 million to Clinton campaign
Hillary Clinton has written a letter to Israeli-American billionaire Haim Saban (left), pledging to speak out publicly against the BDS campaign aimed at Israel
Press TV – February 1, 2016
American billionaire George Soros donated $6 million to a super-PAC financing US Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton last month, a report says.
Soros has now provided a total of $7 million in this election cycle to Priorities USA Action, a super-PAC which raised $41 million on behalf of Clinton in 2015, according to the committee’s statement issued on Sunday.
The super-PAC raised $25.3 million during the last 6 months, and Soros’s contribution accounted for almost a quarter of its funding haul.
Haim Saban, an Israeli-American media tycoon, and his wife Cheryl have contributed a total of $5 million to Clinton’s super-PAC.
Clinton has written a letter to Saban, pledging to speak out publicly against the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign aimed at Israel.
Wealthy individuals, who are restricted by law from giving large amounts directly to candidates’ campaigns, donate to political action committees, commonly known as super-PACs.
American billionaire George Soros has contributed a total of $7 million to Hillary Clinton’s campaign so far
In the 2010 Citizens United case ruling, the US Supreme Court allowed unlimited independent spending by corporations in elections.
According to a study published by the New York Times, wealthy individuals and corporations have begun to replace powerless people as direct beneficiaries of the US political system and the Constitution.
Clinton is maintaining a slim lead over Senator Bernie Sanders in Iowa, according to a poll released on Saturday.
Clinton beat out rival Sanders in the Des Moines Register/Bloomberg poll. She has 45 percent support, with Sanders at 42 percent.
On Saturday, The New York Times endorsed Clinton for the 2016 Democratic nomination, a potential boost for the candidate two days before the Iowa caucuses.
Times editors wrote that they chose Clinton over her main rival, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, due to her experience and policy ideas.
The editorial board described Clinton as “one of the most broadly and deeply qualified presidential candidates in modern history.”
Hillary’s Corporate Democrats Taking Down Bernie Sanders
By Ralph Nader | January 29, 2016
Before announcing for President in the Democratic Primaries, Bernie Sanders told the people he would not run as an Independent and be like Nader—invoking the politically-bigoted words “being a spoiler.” Well, the spoiled corporate Democrats in Congress and their consultants are mounting a “stop Bernie campaign.” They believe he’ll “spoil” their election prospects.
Sorry Bernie, because anybody who challenges the positions of the corporatist, militaristic, Wall Street-funded Democrats, led by Hillary Clinton, in the House and Senate—is by their twisted definition, a “spoiler.” It doesn’t matter how many of Bernie’s positions are representative of what a majority of the American people want for their country.
What comes around goes around. Despite running a clean campaign, funded by small donors averaging $27, with no scandals in his past and with consistency throughout his decades of standing up for the working and unemployed people of this country, Sanders is about to be Hillaried. Her Capitol Hill cronies have dispatched Congressional teams to Iowa.
The shunning of Bernie Sanders is underway. Did you see him standing alone during the crowded State of the Union gathering?
Many of the large unions, that Bernie has championed for decades, have endorsed Hillary, known for her job-destroying support for NAFTA and the World Trade Organization and her very late involvement in working toward a minimum wage increase.
National Nurses United, one of the few unions endorsing Bernie, is not fooled by Hillary’s sudden anti-Wall Street rhetoric in Iowa. They view Hillary Clinton, the Wall Street servant (and speechifier at $5000 a minute) with disgust.
Candidate Clinton’s latest preposterous pledge is to “crack down” on the
“greed” of corporations and declare that Wall Street bosses are opposing her because they realize she will “come right after them.”
Because Sanders is not prone to self-congratulation, few people know that he receives the highest Senatorial approval rating and the lowest disapproval rating from his Vermonters than any Senator receives from his or her constituents. This peak support for a self-avowed “democratic socialist,” comes from a state once known for its rock-ribbed conservative Republican traditions.
Minority House Leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi has unleashed her supine followers to start wounding and depreciating Sanders. Pelosi acolyte Adam Schiff (D. California) tells the media he doubts Sanders’s electability and he could have “very significant downstream consequences in House and Senate races.”
Mr. Schiff somehow ignores that the House and Senate Democratic leadership repeatedly could not defend the country from the worst Republican Party in history, whose dozens of anti-human, pro-big business votes should have toppled many GOP candidates. Instead, Nancy Pelosi has led the House Democrats to three straight calamitous losses (2010, 2012, 2014) to the Republicans, for whom public cruelties toward the powerless is a matter of principle.
Pelosi threw her own poisoned darts at Sanders, debunking his far more life-saving, efficient, and comprehensive, full Medicare-for-all plan with free choice of doctor and hospital with the knowingly misleading comment “We’re not running on any platform of raising taxes.” Presumably that includes continuing the Democratic Party’s practice of letting Wall Street, the global companies and the super-wealthy continue to get away with their profitable tax escapes.
Pelosi doesn’t expect the Democrats to make gains in the House of Representatives in 2016. But she has managed to hold on to her post long enough to help elect Hillary Clinton—no matter what Clinton’s record as a committed corporatist toady and a disastrous militarist (e.g., Iraq and the War on Libya) has been over the years.
For Pelosi it’s bring on the ‘old girls club,’ it’s our turn. The plutocracy and the oligarchy running this country into the ground have no worries. The genders of the actors are different, but the monied interests maintain their corporate state and hand out their campaign cash—business as usual.
Bernie Sanders, however, does present a moral risk for the corrupt Democratic Party and the Democratic National Committee, which are already turning on one of their own leading candidates. His years in politics so cleanly contrasts with the sordid, scandalized, cashing-in behavior of the Clintons.
Pick up a copy of Peter Schweizer’s Clinton Cash, previewed early in 2015 by the New York Times. Again and again Schweizer documents the conflicted interest maneuvering of donors to the Clinton Foundation, shady deals involving global corporations and dictators, and huge speaking fees, with the Clinton Foundation and the State department as inventories to benefit the Clintons. The Clintons embody what is sleazy and harmful about corporate political intrigues.
If and when Bernie Sanders is brought down by the very party he is championing, the millions of Bernie supporters, especially young voters, will have to consider breaking off into a new political party that will make American history. That means dissolving the dictatorial two-party duopoly and its ruinous, unpatriotic, democracy-destroying corporate paymasters.
The silent increase in London’s mass surveillance network, one year on…
Image by No CCTV
NO CCTV – 27/1/2016
On 27th January 2015 the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, signed an order that increased the data collected by the police’s network of Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) cameras in the capital by 300% [1]. At the time no-one seems to have noticed. One year on the sound of silence is still deafening.
Johnson achieved this massive increase of blanket surveillance in London without erecting a single new camera. Instead he allowed the police to share Transport for London’s (TfL) network of around 1400 ANPR cameras used for the London Congestion Charge, the Low Emission Zone and other traffic monitoring. This was a policy tucked away in Johnson’s 2012 mayoral crime manifesto [2].
Since 2007 the Metropolitan Police Service has controversially been allowed limited access to TfL’s congestion charge cameras for “national security” purposes only. The new camera sharing arrangement allows the police “general access” to an expanded raft of number plate cameras.
The mayor used powers given to him by the Greater London Authority Act [3] whereby he can do anything that he considers will further one or more of the Authority’s principle purposes. In the case of expanding police use of automatic checkpoint cameras he decided that it will “further the promotion of social development in Greater London”. Quite how Johnson came to this conclusion is a mystery, as is the way in which he was so easily able to trade the freedoms of so many car drivers in London by simply issuing a mayoral decison.
In his 1929 book ‘The New Despotism’ [4] then Lord Chief Justice of England, Lord Hewart coined the phrase “Administrative Lawlessness” to describe a worrying trend in English politics at that time – the exercise of arbitrary power, where decisions are made in the shadows, not based on evidence and without proper debate. Hewart wrote:
Arbitrary power is certain in the long run to become despotism, and there is danger, if the so-called method of administrative “law”, which is essentially lawlessness, is greatly extended, of the loss of those hardly won liberties which it has taken centuries to establish.
Johnson and the police claim that the people of London were consulted, via an 8 week “consultation”. However there were just 2,315 responses to the online survey out of an estimated population in Greater London of over 8 million people [5].
Meanwhile the Metropolitan police responded to what they described as “concerns about the level of surveillance in the capital, data security and misuse” by stating that they are convinced that [6]:
the majority of the public will remain satisfied that this does not represent undue or unnecessary surveillance.
The important thing to the police, then, is not whether the policy is an illiberal assault on individual freedoms and liberties, but rather that most people will not understand or know what is going on, .
No CCTV has repeatedly warned that the UK police’s ANPR camera network is the biggest mass surveillance network that no-one’s ever heard of. We have laid out many of our concerns in our report ‘What’s wrong with ANPR?’ [7]. Police store the details of all cars that pass ANPR cameras in a central database for a minimum of two years. There are currently discussions within the police to extend this to seven years [8].
Whilst the mainstream media have all but ignored this massive expansion of the surveillance state it is worth pointing out that writer and artist James Bridle made a series of Freedom of Information requests in 2013/14 that reveal much of the disturbing progression of this policy [9].
Endnotes:
- [ 1] Mayoral Decision MD1439 and supporting documents https://www.london.gov.uk/decisions/md1439-delegation-transport-london-tfl-grant-metropolitan-police-service-mps-direct-access
- [ 2] 2012 Crime Manifesto p14 http://www.london.gov.uk/sites/default/files/Boris-Johnson-2012-Crime-Manifesto.pdf
- [ 3] The Greater London Authority Act 1999 http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1999/29/contents
- [ 4] ‘The New Despotism’, Lord Hewart, 1929, page 52 https://archive.org/details/LordHewart-TheNewDespotism1929
- [ 5] 2001 census statistics for Greater London http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/census/census-2001-key-statistics/urban-areas-in-england-and-wales/urban-areas-in-england-and-wales-ks01-usual-resident-population.xls
- [ 6] Letter from Cressida Dick, Met Police https://www.london.gov.uk/sites/default/files/gla_migrate_files_destination/Appendix%20C%20-%20Letter%20of%20Response%20from%20Cressida%20Dick.pdf
- [ 7] What’s Wrong With ANPR? http://www.no-cctv.org.uk/whats_wrong_with_anpr.asp
- [ 8] ANPR National User Group Minutes 3rd June 2015 https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/289438/response/730763/attach/6/03%20ANPR%20NUG%20Minutes%2003062015.pdf
- [ 9] James Bridle’s Freedom of Information Requests – https://anon.to/5TtSr3
James Bridle also has an article about London and the congestion charge cameras, ‘ All Cameras Are Police Cameras’ at: http://shorttermmemoryloss.com/nor/2014/11/07/all-cameras-are-police-cameras/
Read more NO CCTV articles on our news/articles page
Documents Reveal Anaheim, CA Has Surprisingly Robust Surveillance Arsenal For Small City
By Matthew Cagle | ACLU | January 27, 2016
Anaheim Police have spent almost a decade secretly building an inventory of powerful cell phone surveillance devices and making them available to neighboring cities in Orange County, documents obtained by the ACLU of California reveal.
This cell phone spying program—which potentially affects the privacy of everyone from Orange County’s 3 million residents to the 16 million people who visit Disneyland every year—shows the dangers of allowing law enforcement to secretly acquire surveillance technology. The devices include the suitcase-sized “Stingray” equipment, another hand-held and easy-to-hide cell phone spy tool, and—most surprisingly—a military-grade piece of equipment known as a “dirtbox” that until now was only thought to be used by the federal government and two major cities.
If a city of only a few hundred thousand people like Anaheim has purchased this wide array of devices, it raises the question of how widespread these tools really are.
Additionally, Anaheim has claimed in its secretive funding requests that “every city in Orange County has benefited” from its cellular surveillance equipment, raising further concerns about transparency, democracy, and accountability. It’s bad enough that Anaheim’s secretive acquisition of this surveillance technology deprived the city’s residents of the opportunity to participate in critical decisions affecting their own community. But by loaning out this technology well outside Anaheim’s borders, the police department has subjected people all over Orange County to surveillance decisions made by unelected leaders from other communities.
A cell site simulator, often referred to as “Stingray,” mimics a cell tower and tricks nearby cell phones into communicating with it. In order to function, these devices interact with all cell phones in radio range, which means they potentially retain data about the communications and locations of innocent people.
Although federal, state and local governments widely use cell cite simulators, governments have gone to great lengths to hide information about how those simulators work and are used. Anaheim’s secrecy here is not an accident. The city and its departments bought these devices in secret and initially refused the ACLU’s request for public records. Only after we filed a public records lawsuit and engaged in extensive discussions did Anaheim produce any documents, which were heavily redacted—an on-going point of contention in our lawsuit.
What the documents show
Anaheim has possessed at least three different forms of cell phone surveillance technology since at least 2009, the documents show. The police department used a federal grant that year to purchase a dirtbox from a Maryland-based company named Digital Receiver Technology, Inc., or DRT. A dirtbox can collect information about thousands of phones at once, and a predecessor version of Anaheim’s device is capable of intercepting and recording digital voice data, according to a classified catalog recently leaked to the media. Other dirtbox models are capable of breaking the encryption of cellphone communications, according to media reports. One of the unique features of a dirtbox is that it can be airborne, and as a consequence scoop up information from not just a few hundred phones in its vicinity, but from thousands of phones. Until now, the only reported domestic use of these powerful devices was by the federal government and the cities of Los Angeles and Chicago.
In 2011, two years after buying the dirtbox, Anaheim appears to have bought a Stingray from Florida-based Harris Corp using a combination of federal grant dollars and local funds. And in 2013, Anaheim’s Chief of Police approved an upgrade to the department’s Stingray the ACLU believes enabled it to monitor modern LTE cellular networks.
Finally, in late 2013 Anaheim also purchased a controversial hand-held cell phone surveillance device manufactured by a company called KEYW and marketed as a tool for covertly locating phones and LTE signals in hard-to-reach places, including the interiors of buildings. The documents turned over to the ACLU, when compared with publicly available price quotes, strongly suggest that Anaheim bought a device called a Jugular. With a lightweight Jugular in hand, individual officers can easily conduct cell phone surveillance around and inside of buildings, including private homes, without alerting bystanders.
Potential warrantless use
The documents obtained in the public records suit do not confirm whether Anaheim police investigators obtain a warrant before using these devices. The records state that Anaheim obtains a “court order” or “court approval” for use of the DRT, KEYW, and Harris devices, but a court order is not necessarily based on probable cause, as is required for a warrant. This is important because devices like the KEYW Jugular can be used to find devices in hard-to-access spaces, such as the interiors of homes where people have the right to be secure from unreasonable searches under the Fourth Amendment.
The ACLU documents predate CalECPA, the new California law requiring a warrant for these devices. We do not know what legal process Anaheim seeks for cell phone surveillance today.
The ever-expanding use of these devices appears to go beyond Anaheim’s city limits. Anaheim represented in funding requests that it makes its cell surveillance arsenal available to other police departments in Orange County and had written procedures for sharing the dirtbox. The secretive use of this equipment outside of Anaheim means the police department not only deprived its own residents of the opportunity to debate or choose whether to be subjected to cell phone surveillance, it also did the same for the residents and elected leaders in neighboring jurisdictions, undermining the democratic process in those places as well.
It’s time for reform
Law enforcement entities should never acquire surveillance technology without telling the public, let alone multiple generations of devices capable of spying on private communications, as these Anaheim documents show has happened there.
Anaheim’s slide towards more and more surveillance illustrates the risks of secret surveillance outside of the democratic process. But communities are fighting back. As federal and state policymakers pass new restrictions on cell surveillance devices, local communities are moving forward with surveillance reforms that range from robust use policies for Stingrays to civilian oversight communities to an ordinance that requires transparency, accountability, and oversight for all surveillance technologies.
The ACLU is hopeful these reforms will take hold in places like Anaheim too so that when police seek the next generation of surveillance technologies, it won’t take the public seven years and a lawsuit to find out about it.
Read the Anaheim cell phone surveillance documents the ACLU received.
This is a condensed version of a post originally published by the ACLU of Northern California.
Documents Uncover NYPD’s Vast License Plate Reader Database
By Mariko Hirose | NYCLU | January 25, 2016
Supporters of license plate readers are fond of saying that unless you’re a criminal, you needn’t fear the invasive technology. But those who adhere to that argument should consider just a few examples from around the country:
- A police officer in Washington D.C. pleaded guilty to extortion after looking up the plates of cars near a gay bar and blackmailing the car’s owners.
- The DEA contemplated using license plate readers to monitor people who were at a gun show. Since the devices can’t distinguish between those who are selling illegal guns and those who aren’t, a person’s presence at the gun show would have landed them in a DEA database.
- A SWAT team in Kansas raided a man’s house where his wife, 7-year-old daughter, and 13-year-old son lived based in part on the mass monitoring of cars parked at a gardening store. The man was held at gunpoint for two hours while cops combed through his home. The police were looking for a marijuana growing operation. They did not find that or any other evidence of criminal activity in the man’s house.
With these stories firmly in mind, the New York Civil Liberties Union’s latest license plate reader discovery is all the more chilling.
Last year, we learned that the NYPD was hoping to enter into a multi-year contract that would give it access to the nationwide database of license plate reader data owned by the company Vigilant Solutions. Now, through a Freedom of Information Law request, the NYCLU has obtained the final version of the $442,500 contract and the scope-of-work proposal that gives a peek into the ever-widening world of surveillance made possible by Vigilant.
Surveillance is about power. Vigilant gives the NYPD power to monitor our whereabouts and, by extension, our affiliations, interests, activities and beliefs.
The scope-of-work proposal explains how Vigilant vastly expands the NYPD’s surveillance capability beyond what was possible with its own license plate database. Known as the Domain Awareness System, it collects the license plate data scanned by the approximately 500 license plate readers operated by the NYPD and combines it with footage from cameras and other surveillance devices around the city. The NYPD holds on to the license plate data for at least five years regardless of whether a car triggers any suspicion.
The Vigilant database raises similar privacy concerns as the Domain Awareness System, but those concerns are greatly magnified because the Vigilant database is massive: It contains over 2.2 billion location data points, and it is growing by almost a million data points per day. The database also isn’t limited to New York City, which means the NYPD can now monitor your car whether you live in New York or Miami or Chicago or Los Angeles. (See Vigilant’s Nationwide Scan Density Map on page 64.) Even more worrisome, the data comes from private license plate readers that scan locations that the police are less likely to scan: residential areas, apartment complexes, retail areas, and business office complexes with large employee parking areas. And, as far as we can tell, there is no limit on how long Vigilant keeps all of this private location data. There is no incentive for Vigilant to delete any data because its business model is to profit off of selling people’s data.
The Vigilant database also boasts “full suite data analytics tools.” These tools allow police officers to track cars historically or in real time, conduct a virtual “stakeout,” figure out which cars are commonly seen in close proximity to each other, and predict likely locations to find a car.
With this volume of private data and these types of tools, Vigilant enables the NYPD to learn intimate details about people’s lives with a click of a mouse. Through the “stakeout” feature, the NYPD may learn who was at a political rally, at an abortion clinic, or at a gay bar. Through the predictive analysis, the NYPD may learn that a person is likely to be near a mosque at prayer time or at home during certain hours of the day. Through the “associate analysis,” the NYPD may come to suspect someone of being a “possible associate” of a criminal when the person is simply a family member, a friend, or a lover.
Until now, law enforcement agencies under contract with Vigilant, including the NYPD, have said very little in public about how they use the database and what privacy protections they implement. That needs to change. Fifty police officers at the NYPD’s Real Crime Center have access to the Vigilant database and tools every day. The public has the right to know what rules regulate their access and what oversight mechanisms, if any, are in place. They have the right to know when and how the police are using the database and what the consequences are.
Surveillance is about power. Vigilant gives the NYPD power to monitor our whereabouts and, by extension, our affiliations, interests, activities and beliefs. By demanding answers to critical questions about NYPD’s use of Vigilant and other surveillance tools, New Yorkers can begin to take back the power imbalance created by the new era of mass digital surveillance.
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Iran UN ambassador calls for destruction of all nuclear weapons
Iran’s ambassador to the UN Gholamali Khoshroo
Press TV – March 29, 2017
Iran’s ambassador to the UN Gholamali Khoshroo has called for the total eradication of nuclear weapons.
Khoshroo reiterated Iran’s call during a UN conference aimed at creating a nuclear weapons ban treaty in New York on Tuesday.
“Iran, as a victim of chemical weapons, strongly feels the danger posed by the existence of weapons of mass destruction and is determined to engage actively in international diplomatic efforts to save humanity from the menace of nuclear weapons,” he said.
Khoshroo stressed that Iran is committed to its Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) obligations, which include negotiations based on effective nuclear disarmament measures.
He added that several countries continue to ignore international calls and treaties for nuclear disarmament and even continue to increase their nuclear stockpiles. “They do not have political determination to abandon doctrines of nuclear deterrence and nuclear terror,” he went on to say.
Iran’s UN ambassador noted that boycotting the talks by many countries, including the US, shows that the world’s nuclear powers are by no means committed to the eradication of nuclear arms. Britain and France were also among the some 40 countries that did not join the talks.
“We note that prohibition of nuclear weapons must be accompanied by the elimination of such weapons. There can be no doubt that without complete abolition of nuclear weapons, there will be no absolute guarantee against the danger of nuclear war and the use of such weapons,” Khoshroo added.
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