Recent Revelations Prompt Motion To Block NYPD’s Surveillance Of Muslims
By Tim Cushing | Techdirt | October 4, 2013
A recent investigative report on the NYPD’s surveillance of mosques has led to a possible revisiting of the Handschu Agreement by the federal judge presiding over a lawsuit filed against the city seeking to bar further surveillance of Muslims in New York City.
According to the 1985 ruling, the Handschu Agreement limited indiscriminate surveillance of purely political activity. If such surveillance was to take place, it first had to be approved by the three-member Handschu Authority and performed only by the specially-designated Public Security Section, a division of NYPD Intelligence. It also prohibited the videotaping or photographing of large public gatherings when there was no indication of criminal activity and forbade the sharing of information with outside agencies unless they agreed to be bound by the limitations of the Agreement.
This is what was assumed to be in place. When the plaintiffs filed in February, their attorney pointed out that the police activity that had been observed clearly violated those limitations.
The police measures directed at Muslims violate the Handschu decree “because they’re not rooted in the fact that there’s a criminal predicate,” said plaintiff attorney Paul Chevigny. “They’re rooted in the fact that the subjects are Muslims.”
It was exactly as it looked: Muslims being placed under surveillance simply because they attended certain mosques — mosques the NYPD had declared to be “terrorist organizations.”
The city has countered by claiming that it closely observes the Handschu guidelines when making decisions about how to fight terror. A city lawyer, Peter Farrell, told the judge on Tuesday that the department launches investigations based on evidence of legitimate threats, not on religion.
“It’s undeniable that New York City remains at the center of the threat by Islamists who have been radicalized to violence,” he said.
What the city lawyer’s conveniently left out was that the Handschu guidelines had been deliberately weakened by the NYPD, thanks to the efforts of a former CIA officer and his CIA liaison, who formed a so-called “Demographics Group” that was charged with monitoring activity by the city’s Muslims.
[T]he activities that [CIA liaison Larry] Sanchez and [former senior CIA officer David] Cohen were proposing would not have been permitted under the Handschu guidelines. So, on September 12, 2002, Cohen filed a 23-page document in federal court asking a judge to throw out the guidelines and give his officers more leeway.
Cohen insisted that the world had changed since Al Qaeda attacked America, and the NYPD needed to change with it. “These changes were not envisioned when the Handschu guidelines were agreed upon,” he wrote, “and their continuation dangerously limits the ability of the NYPD to protect the people it is sworn to serve.”
The severely watered-down Handschu guidelines were approved by Judge Charles Haight. The name remained unchanged and most New Yorkers were unaware that hardly any limitations remained tied to the Agreement.
After securing this expanded definition (which also thoroughly abused the word “related”), the Demographics Group proceeded to declare entire mosques as “terrorist organizations” and began constant surveillance of their members. And, contrary to what the city’s lawyer declared, it has yet to be proven by the NYPD or anyone else that New York is the “center of the threat by Islamists.” The NYPD has spent millions of dollars and thousands of manhours surveilling and investigating Muslims and has turned up exactly zero useful leads.
When the plaintiffs filed this case, they had no idea the Handschu guidelines had been so thoroughly eviscerated. Armed with this new knowledge, the plaintiffs have asked the city to turn over so-called “investigative statements” related to these surveillance operations. The city won’t even meet them halfway, offering only to turn over a “handful” for the plaintiffs’ lawyers to view without making them part of the public record.
Technically, the city is correct: the NYPD is following the guidelines, as they have been altered, not as they were originally written.
The presiding judge says he will rule at a later date. However, one key factor is problematic. The presiding judge is Charles Haight, the same judge who agreed to relax those rules for the NYPD back in 2002. When he says something like this, it’s hard to know how to take it.
“I’ve come to think of this case as a volcano that’s asleep most of the time … but every now and then blows up,” U.S. District Judge Charles Haight said at the start of a hearing in federal court in Manhattan.
This “volcano” is at least partially of his own making. Haight knows how few restrictions remain under those guidelines. The NYPD can “closely observe” the relaxed Handschu guidelines and still place entire mosques under surveillance. The protections remaining are so weak and the scope of what is deemed “terrorist-related” so broad that even the CIA itself is unable to use the information collected by the Demographics Unit because doing so means violating CIA policies regarding domestic surveillance.
But it appears (although details are incredibly light) that Haight may revisit his own decision relaxing those guidelines. His upcoming ruling will determine whether the near-useless offer the city’s lawyer made will be sufficient or if the city will need to cough up what’s been requested: investigative statements related to “any operation targeting Muslims.” Haight will also make the call as to whether the documents will remain “off the record.”
The NYPD has never been very responsive when asked to turn over information, but considering this order may come from a federal judge, rather than a member of the public, the response time might be a little quicker. As for the plaintiffs, it would seem they drew possibly the least sympathetic judge to hear this case. But who knows, maybe Haight’s had a change of heart over the years. Many rash legislative and legal decisions were made shortly after the 9/11 attacks and there have been more than a few who have expressed regret for their decisions or dismay at the continual expansion of already-broad policies. Haight might be one of the ones who regrets his decision. Fortunately, he’s still in a position to make some changes.
Belgium demands explanation from British spy agency
Press TV – October 5, 2013
Belgium has demanded explanations from the British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) over allegations that it infiltrated major Belgian national telecom provider Belgacom.
The allegations against GCHQ were made after documents, leaked by US whistleblower Edward Snowden, pointed to the British agency’s spying activities against Belgium.
According to reports in the German newspaper Der Spiegel, the Cheltenham-based intelligence agency has been accused of hacking the IT system of Belgacom by placing a virus in its network.
“Following the article in Der Spiegel, the government asked Belgian intelligence services to ask their British colleagues for more information,” said a source close to the Belgian government.
Prosecutors in Brussels are now investigating the case against the British spy agency.
A GCHQ spokeswoman declined to comment on the revelation.
Meanwhile, the European Parliament is also examining the activities of the GCHQ. European courts have launched a legal challenge against the agency’s surveillance programs over violating the privacy of millions of people throughout Britain and Europe.
However, London claims the EU does not have the authority to investigate these charges in European courts.
Snowden is currently in Russia, where he has been granted temporary asylum.
Related articles
- Belgium seeks answers from Britain over telecom spying (dnaindia.com)
- UK intelligence spying on Belgium – Snowden leaks (voiceofrussia.com)
- GCHQ: EU surveillance hearing is told of huge cyber-attack on Belgian firm (theguardian.com)
- Privacy advocates vs. GCHQ: Groups launch EU court case against spy agency (RT)
The Trans-Pacific Partnership: We Won’t Be Fooled by Rigged Corporate Trade Agreements
By Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese | Truthout | October 2, 2013
This week, President Obama will attend the Asia-Pacific Economic Coordination (APEC) meeting in Bali, Indonesia, where he is expected to announce his goal of having the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) signed into law by the end of 2013. Obama will host a meeting of the leaders of the TPP nations during the APEC conference.
The Obama administration has been negotiating the TPP in secret for more than three years. Unlike past trade agreements, the text of the TPP is classified, and members of Congress have restricted access to it. If they do read the text, they are not allowed to copy it or discuss any specifics of it. However, more than 600 corporate advisers have direct access to the text on their computers.
The final formal round of negotiations was held in Brunei this August, and since then, there have been informal meetings to try and finalize sections of the agreement. As far as the president is concerned, the TPP is entering the home stretch. All he needs now is for Congress to vote to grant him fast track, also known as trade promotion authority, and it’s a done deal. The facts show that the president may be deluding himself or trying to fool everyone else.
This is because the TPP goes far beyond a trade deal. Only five of the 29 chapters contain provisions related to trade. The other chapters consist of provisions related to patent protections, investor state rights and finance deregulation, among others. The TPP is a backdoor corporate power grab to advance the stalled WTO agenda. Or as Sachie Mizohata writes in Asia Times, “The TPP is a Trojan horse, branded as a ‘free trade’ agreement, but having nothing to do with fair and equitable treatment. In reality, it is precisely ‘a wish list of the 1% – a worldwide corporate power’.”
We expect the president to return from Bali with increased enthusiasm to push for fast track. To accompany this push will be the usual misinformation campaign coming from supporters of the TPP. To prepare the public for the expected propaganda, we will look at what is being said and provide facts to counter their arguments.
As far as some members of Congress are concerned, as well as hundreds of civil society groups and a growing number of US residents, fast track and the TPP are not going to slide through Congress smoothly. Opposition to the TPP is growing as more people come to understand that the TPP is a rigged corporate trade deal and not fair trade that respects the needs of people and the planet.
What’s Wrong with Fast Track?
For most of the past 200 years, Congress negotiated trade policy and wrote the laws to oversee trade, as required in the Constitution’s Commerce Clause. This power was first transferred to the executive office when Nixon was granted fast track in 1974 as part of his consolidation of presidential power. Fast track expired in 2007. Only 16 trade agreements have been passed using fast track, and some of these were the most unpopular and controversial pacts such as the WTO and NAFTA, signed by President Clinton.
The previous fast track legislation required the president to submit both the trade agreement and implementing legislation to Congress for approval. According to a 2011 report by the Congressional Research Services, “The fast-track authority provides that Congress will consider trade agreement implementing bills within mandatory deadlines, with a limitation on debate and without amendment. . .” In other words, fast track permits the president to negotiate an entire trade agreement over many years and then present it to Congress for an up or down vote within a short time period (60 to 90 days), with debate limited to 20 hours and no amendments.
Fast track severely undermines the transparent and democratic process required to ensure that the full implications of the agreement are understood and are acceptable. Trade agreements require that laws, even down to the local level, be changed to be in compliance with provisions in them. For example, when the WTO was passed, which was fast tracked despite having been negotiated for over 10 years and containing thousands of pages, most members of Congress did not read or understand it.
Great Recession Connection
One of the requirements of the WTO was that Glass-Steagall had to be repealed. This removed the wall that protected traditional banking from risky investments and is partially responsible for the current economic crisis, which started in 2008. Similarly, NAFTA was 1,700 pages, including annexes and footnotes. NAFTA involved only three countries, the TPP includes 12. Congress cannot digest all of this information and consider its implications in such a short time.
Passage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and its sister, the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (known as TAFTA), for which negotiations began in July, will require fast track to become law. Supporters of the TPP such as the US Chamber of Commerce and, of course, the office of the US Trade Representative (USTR) are promoting fast rack with flimsy and false arguments. Basically, they boil down to these points:
1. The president should have fast track so he can negotiate job-creating agreements and boost trade and the economy.
2. It’s OK to give the president fast track because Congress is going to include negotiating objectives within the fast track law, and Congress must vote on the agreement.
3. The president should have fast track because other presidents have had it.
So, let’s examine the facts. First, despite promises of American jobs, past free trade agreements have actually been huge job losers. NAFTA is responsible for the loss of nearly 700,000 jobs. The recent Korea Free Trade Agreement was promised to bring 70,000 new jobs, but lost 40,000 jobs in the first year alone instead, and Public Citizen estimates that nearly 160,000 jobs will be lost over the first seven years. In total, US free trade agreements over the past two decades have netted a loss of nearly 5 million American jobs.
In addition to the loss of jobs, free trade agreements have contributed to the stagnation of wages in the United States. American workers cannot compete with extremely low wages in countries like China, Malaysia and Vietnam. A recent study predicts that the TPP will cause wages for 90 percent of American workers to decrease while wealth of the top 1% will soar. How can US workers compete with workers in Malaysia, where the minimum wage is $1.24; Peru, where it is $1.37; or Vietnam, where it is 30 cents? The TPP will increase the race to the bottom that will further impoverish US workers.
The same study predicts that the TPP will only boost US Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by 0.1 percent. In fact, free trade agreements do not seem to work at all when it comes to expanding US exports. According to the data, overall the US trade deficit has increased by 440 percent with countries with which we have free trade agreements and has declined by 7 percent with countries with which we do not have agreements. If we look at the outcome of a “21st century trade agreement,” which is how the office of the USTR describes the TPP, like the Korea Free Trade Agreement, we find that “average monthly exports to Korea since the FTA have sunk 11 percent below the average monthly level before the FTA.” TAFTA is expected to increase US GDP by a mere 0.2 to 0.4 percent, which Public Citizen reports, is “a smaller contribution to GDP than was delivered by the latest version of the iPhone.”
Second, let’s look at Congressional oversight under fast track. Carol Guthrie from the office of the US Trade Representative recently wrote an email response to the producer of a video interview of Margaret Flowers in which she said:
“Checking in on your story on TPP – afraid there seems to be some misunderstanding about trade promotion authority, sometimes known as ‘fast track.’ Under such a law, which lays out just how the administration should consult with Congress on trade agreements, and in which Congress sets out negotiating objectives for the United States, there are indeed hearings and an up or down vote in Congress before the agreement can be implemented in law and enter into force. There are rules in TPA about whether or not the implementing legislation for an agreement can be amended, but it does not allow an agreement to become law or enter into force without Congressional approval. Glad to share more information as it’s helpful to you.”
Flowers wrote back immediately and asked if there was fast track legislation available for review; whether there would be full hearings on the content of the TPP and its implications; and whether amendments would be allowed. That was on September 20 and no response has been received.
In the past, fast track has limited hearings and debate and has not allowed amendments. There have also been negotiating objectives in the past, and these have often been ignored. For example, labor rights were required under the WTO, but still were not included. Even when provisions such as worker protections are included in trade agreements, they are not enforced, as is recently demonstrated in Colombia, where deaths of worker advocates have increased and there are massive strikes and protests since passage of the Colombian FTA.
In the case of the TPP, negotiating objectives enacted now, when the negotiation of the entire agreement is concluding, will have absolutely no effect. The negotiating objectives are merely window dressing designed to confuse labor unions, environmental groups and others into supporting the TPP, when in reality, protections will not be enforced.
Members of Congress are overruled by the agreements when they do try to change the provisions. Ray Rogers writes that trade agreements “have nullified the efforts of political leaders like Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), who introduced legislation in 1994 to ban the imports of products produced by brutal child labor. President Clinton’s US Trade Representative informed him that his bill would violate the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which the United States is obliged to obey.” Thus, trade agreements tie the hands of Congress and undermine US sovereignty.
What is Oversight?
The definition of Congressional oversight by the office of the US Trade Representative falls far short of the degree of oversight necessary if Congress and the public are to have the ability to fully understand what is in the secret TPP and what the economic impact will be on the United States and nations around the world, as well as how it will impact protection of workers, consumers and the environment. What we expect to see under the fast track process are limited hearings in which supporters of the TPP praise it and Congress members are not able to fully question or amend it. How could it be anything else when members of Congress will not even have time to read the agreements?
Lastly, the idea that other presidents had fast track, so President Obama should too, is embarrassing in its lack of logic. Most presidents have not had fast track. And the agreements passed by fast track have caused the loss of US jobs, lowered wages and created higher trade deficits. Congress must serve its Constitutional function as a check and balance to the power of the President and the branch of government responsible for regulating trade and passing legislation. Fast track undermines the constitutional power of Congress and creates an imperial presidency.
Fortunately, the process to grant fast track trade authority this time around has slowed significantly. In February, 2012, then US Trade Representative Ron Kirk, in his testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee, included a request for fast track by the end of 2012 to complete TPP negotiations. Senators Max Baucus and Orrin Hatch urged the White House to request fast track trade authority last April. They expected to have a fast track bill passed in Congress by last June.
President Obama waited until August of this year to formally request fast track and, as of the writing of this article, no fast track bill has been introduced in Congress. A recent report in Politico stated, “Efforts by leaders of Senate Finance and House Ways and Means to craft a bipartisan TPA [Trade Promotion Authority] bill have taken longer than expected, prompting speculation the two panels may not be able to produce a package.”
Bipartisan opposition to fast track has already appeared in Congress. Alan Grayson (D-Florida) voiced opposition and Rosa DeLauro (D-Connecticut) is gathering signatures from other members on a letter to the president opposing fast track. Michelle Bachman (R-Minnesota) and Walter Jones (R-North Carolina) have a similar letter to the president. Many groups are lobbying against fast track, including Public Citizen, environmental groups and labor. We are organizing Fair Trade Brigades to track congressional support for fast track through our Flush the TPP campaign. Everyone is encouraged to participate in that effort.
Don’t Fast Track this Train Wreck
As Mizohata wrote in Asia Times, the TPP is Trojan horse that is not about trade. We know this because only five of its 29 chapters are about trade. Ben Beachy reports that “of the 11 countries negotiating the TPP with the United States, six already have FTAs with the US.”
So, if we already have trade agreements with these countries, and we know that trade deals don’t reduce our trade deficit, what is the reason for the TPP? It looks like a backdoor to the neoliberal economic agenda that has been stalled under the WTO since the Battle of Seattle in 1999. The tremendous secrecy surrounding the TPP is because the policies that are being pushed through are both harmful to – and unpopular with – the American public. Fast track is necessary to protect this secrecy because the TPP would not survive the light of day.
Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) has been one of the most outspoken members of Congress on the need for transparency. She wrote a letter to the president requesting that the text be made available to the public. Even members of Congress have restricted access to the text. Zach Carter writes that “Some [members of Congress] have said they were insulted by the complex administrative procedures the office of the U. Trade Representative, or USTR, imposed to actually access the texts – barriers not imposed on unelected corporate advisers.”
And, it is not only texts, when Rep. Darrell Issa (R-California) sought to observe negotiations being held near his California Congressional District, the US Trade Representative would not allow it. While corporations have been allowed to participate throughout the process, a member of Congress who serves on committees dealing with energy, small businesses, foreign policy and government oversight – which would all be impacted by the TPP – was blocked from merely observing. As Rep. Issa wrote: “Congress has a constitutional duty to oversee trade negotiations and not simply act as a rubber stamp to deals about which they were kept in the dark. While I had hoped the TPP would permit me to observe this round of the negotiation process firsthand, our efforts to open TPP negotiations up to transparency will continue.”
Looking at the office of the USTR website, one would think that the process of negotiating the TPP has been open and broad, rather than closed and exclusive as it has been. Negotiators write that they are reaching out to a “broad cross-section of stakeholders” and they want to “set the stage for a deeper level of engagement with these and other stakeholders in the weeks and months ahead.” But these are empty promises and misleading statements as both members of Congress and stakeholders know.
The actions of the USTR are designed to give the illusion of engagement while the needs and interests of those affected by the TPP will be ignored. One of the authors of this piece, Kevin Zeese, participated in a stakeholder briefing last September. He found that questions from the stakeholders in attendance were not answered by the representatives and the entire event felt like a charade.
That is why last week, we decided to expose the secret TPP and make the public’s demands for democracy and transparency more visible through spectacle protests. On Monday, September 23, eight of us wore work coveralls and hard hats and climbed scaffolding next to the USTR building. We draped the outside of their building with four large banners calling for democracy and transparency and calling the TPP what it is in reality, a global corporate coup against people and the planet. Our effort to raise awareness was successful as the Washington Post reported on the protest, calling it “one of the best ever.” The next day we spread the news by conducting a march featuring a 32-foot fast track train, going back to the US Trade Rep. office, then to the World Bank, White House, Chamber of Commerce, business district, Pennsylvania Ave. and Congress.
It is up to the public and their representatives in Congress to demand that the full text of the TPP be released and that there be a democratic process of review. We must fully understand the effects of the TPP on employment, wages, the environment, Internet freedom, public health and safety, and more. Jim Hightower outlines some of the major concerns in his newsletter, The Lowdown.
We cannot blindly accept the information coming from the USTR, President Obama and Big Business supporters of the TPP. They have misled the public before, and they are doing it again to advance an agenda that puts profits before the needs of people and protection of the planet. The TPP will force smaller countries like Vietnam to change their entire economy by eliminating their publicly supported enterprises and services and opening them up to the private sector and foreign investors. This will increase poverty and suffering while lining the pockets of the wealthy.
Countries negotiating with the United States need to realize that if the TPP becomes law, they will be under the thumb of Monsanto, JPMorgan, Bank of America, Wal-Mart and other US-based transnational corporations. Rodrigo Contreras, Chile’s lead TPP negotiator recently quit to warn people of the dangers of the TPP – highlighting how big financial institutions will dominate their governments and how the TPP “will become a threat for our countries: It will restrict our development options in health and education, in biological and cultural diversity, and in the design of public policies and the transformation of our economies. It will also generate pressures from increasingly active social movements, who are not willing to grant a pass to governments that accept an outcome of the TPP negotiations that limits possibilities to increase the prosperity and well-being of our countries.” The TPP will destroy the sovereignty of the nations who agree to its terms.
The destruction of sovereignty includes the United States. One of the most egregious outcomes of the TPP, if it passes, is the way it will undermine our national sovereignty as well as the ability of state and local governments to pass laws. All laws will have to be brought into compliance with the TPP. This means that public institutions like schools and hospitals can no longer give preference to buying local products, and consumers may be barred from knowing whether foods contain GMOs. It means the “Buy America” laws will be illegal, so Americans will be forced to spend their money on foreign products that create a massive trade deficit.
And if we pass laws that interfere with expected corporate profits, those laws can be challenged in a special court, an international trade tribunal that operates outside of our legal system and that is staffed largely by corporate lawyers on leave from their corporate jobs. There will be no appeal to traditional courts from these rigged trade tribunals.
The TPP Unites Us and We can Stop It
The TPP will affect everything we care about. It is a cause that unites us, and if we work together to stop it, we will have won against the behemoth of transnational corporate power. A broad range of groups across the political spectrum are involved in stopping the TPP from becoming law. This includes Internet freedom, anti-GMO, health care, labor, faith, immigrant rights and environmental groups, among others.
We can stop the TPP. Indeed, 14 trade agreements have been prevented in the last dozen years. As more people know about it, the less popular it will become among politicians who will be held accountable for the TPP’s failures. It is up to the public to demand that our representatives put the interests of their constituents before the profits of their corporate campaign financiers. They must know that they will be held accountable for the detrimental consequences that are being predicted.
Public awareness and pressure are already having an effect. The media is starting to cover the TPP more, and the process of granting fast track has been slowed. We can expect more propaganda to appear as the TPP falters and so we must prepare ourselves to repel it with the truth. And we must remember that no matter what we are told about it, no matter what protections we are told are included in it, we must have access to the text before it is signed and we must review and fully understand what its impacts will be.
Other countries are taking steps to demand transparency and democracy. Recently, the Parliament of Peru passed a resolution “requesting that the government open a ‘public, political, and technical debate’ on the binding rules being negotiated in the TPP.” Protests in Japan have been widespread. The more we are visible in our concerns about the TPP, the more people in other nations will be emboldened to stand up to US imperialism and domination.
It is time to end the era of rigged corporate trade and begin fair trade that respects all people and the planet, and that is developed in an open and transparent manner. Join the Fair Trade Brigade either in Congress or where you live. Tell your member of Congress to vote “no” on fast track and pass a resolution locally that declares your community to be a TPP-free zone. Visit FlushtheTPP.org for more information on what you can do.
For more on the TPP visit here and here.
Other articles on the TPP by Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese:
TransPacific Partnership Will Undermine Democracy, Empower Transnational Corporations Protesters Take Over US Trade Rep Building, Expose Secret NegotiationsWhy It’s Time to Revolt Against the Worst “Trade Agreement” in History
EXPOSED: The iPhone and The Government Biometric Database
RINF Alternative News | October 2, 2013
A recent video released by hacktivist group Anonymous presents compelling evidence which claims that Apple’s TouchID technology is linked to the FBI and NSA and is involved in the provision of information on users for a large-scale biometric database under construction by the US Government for use “both domestically and on the battlefield”.
This biometric database is due to be populated by any personal information retrieved by government agencies, leading to fears that Big Brother’s eye is following us wherever we go and whatever we do, even in the privacy of our own homes.
Anonymous alleges that they have uncovered proof of a corrupt alliance of Department of Defense contractors, NSA and CIA-related venture capital which led to the development of technologies subsequently purchased by Apple.
These findings were the result of investigation by Barrett Brown, the jailed and gagged journalist and links to further enlightening material have been posted on the Pastebin website and were largely based on documents obtained by the US defense contractor ManTech in 2010.
So what exactly are these revelations? Firstly, Anonymous claim that there are links between AuthenTec (the company bought by Apple to enable them to develop the TouchID technology) and the “most powerful and corrupt” Defense Department and intelligence community contractors and officials. Anonymous concentrate largely on one individual – Robert E Grady, a prominent figure and political speechwriter under both Bush administrations – when delineating and highlighting the opaque relationships between big business and the US government.
During his time sitting on the board of AuthenTec, Grady was a formerly leading partner in The Carlyle Group, an investment firm which previously owned not only Authentec, but also was the main shareholder of Booz Allen Hamilton, the NSA contractor and erstwhile employer of whistleblower Edward Snowden.
Anonymous presents further claims that the Authentec board of directors ensured that the company would be sold exclusively to Apple, due to the company’s position as market-leader, as this in turn would encourage rival companies to adopt the same technology in order to compete. They state that the launch of the Apple iPhone 5S has meant that secret surveillance and biometric collection has heightened into a full-scale assault on personal data and privacy.
However, other commentators suggest that Apple’s fingerprint security feature may be the thin end of the wedge in terms of biometric collection and consumer devices. Internationally, increasing numbers of countries are deploying biometric technology within organs of the state and rumours abound that biometrics – such as fingerprinting and facial recognition – will soon be a standard feature on game consoles and other electronic leisure products and household gadgets.
Apple’s lack of transparency regarding their usage of data obtained secretly from their customers is not restricted to their newest innovations, either. As far back as 2011 technological researchers were warning that the company could face law suits for breaches of privacy in relation to the storing of users’ locations and other personal information in secret files, which stores location coordinates with a timestamp to effectively map and record the precise movements of individuals.
The implication of this would be the danger this data could fall into the wrong hands if someone was able to hack the system. It is unclear why Apple is storing this data, but it is clearly intentional as such information on the database is being restored across backups and even device migrations. In 2010 Apple was once again the target of claims of privacy violation when a class-action suit was filed against them in a US Federal Court. The claim was that earlier models of the iPhone and iPad contained unique identifying elements, known as Unique Device Identifiers, which allowed advertising agencies track which applications were being downloaded by users, how frequently they were being used and for what period of time.
Users are unable to block the transmission of the UDID, a 40-character string that uniquely identifies each device. The lawsuit alleged: “Some apps are also selling additional information to ad networks, including users’ location, age, gender, income, ethnicity, sexual orientation and political views.” Apple has continuously denied that it transmits user-data without consent, but this has done little to ease fears that the company’s actions constitute an intrusive tracking scheme which aids and abets serious invasions of privacy.
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NSA chief admits govt collected cellphone location data
RT | October 02, 2013
The director of the National Security Agency admitted this week that the NSA tested a program that collected cellphone location data from American citizens starting in 2010, but suspended it shortly after.
Gen. Keith Alexander, the head of both the NSA and the United States Cyber Command, told lawmakers in Washington early Wednesday that the secretive pilot program was taken offline in 2011, but that the intelligence community may someday in the future make plans to routinely collect location data about US citizens.
Alexander briefly discussed the program during a Senate hearing on the Hill early Wednesday that focused on the data provided to the government through the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, including programs that were exposed earlier this year by unauthorized disclosures attributed to contractor-turned-leaker Edward Snowden.
Only days earlier, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) asked Alexander during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing if the NSA was collecting location data on American citizens.
“I’m asking, has the NSA ever collected, or ever made any plans to collect, American cell site information?” Wyden asked last Thursday.
The NSA, Alexander responded at the time, “is not receiving cell-site location data and has no current plans to do so.”
During this Wednesday’s hearing, Alexander explained that, “In 2010 and 2011, NSA received samples in order to test the ability of its systems to handle the data format, but that data was not used for any other purpose and was never available for intelligence analysis purposes.”
According to a written copy of the statement obtained by The New York Times before Wednesday’s hearing, Alexander said that location information is not being collected by the NSA under Section 215 of the Patriot Act. Alexander did not discuss if any other laws are being implemented to otherwise allow for the collection and analysis of location data.
Moments after Alexander revealed the pilot program before the Senate committee, he said that the NSA may someday want to seek approval from Washington to revive that initiative as part of a fully functioning intelligence gathering operation.
“I would just say that this may be something that is a future requirement for the country, but it is not right now,” Alexander said.
Alexander’s statement regarding the new defunct program was expected, and obtained by The New York Times moments before Wednesday’s hearing was underway. Times reporter Charlie Savage wrote that morning that information about the pilot project was only recently declassified by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and that the draft answer obtained by the paper and later read aloud by Alexander was prepared in case he was asked about the topic.
Still unsatisfied by the intelligence community’s explanation about the collection of cellphone location data, Sen. Wyden supplied the Times with a response suggesting that the truth behind the NSA’s activities isn’t being fully acknowledged by the intelligence community.
“After years of stonewalling on whether the government has ever tracked or planned to track the location of law-abiding Americans through their cellphones, once again, the intelligence leadership has decided to leave most of the real story secret — even when the truth would not compromise national security,” Wyden said.
In March, Wyden asked Clapper to say if the NSA was collecting personal information on millions of Americans. The intelligence director dismissed that allegation, then later apologized to the Senate for offering a “clearly erroneous” response.
“Time and time again, the American people were told one thing about domestic surveillance in public forums, while government agencies did something else in private,” Wyden told the Senate Intelligence Committee panel of witnesses last week, which included Alexander, Clapper, and Deputy Attorney General James Cole.
During last week’s meeting, Wyden said he “will continue to explore that because I believe this is something the American people have a right to know whether the NSA has ever collected or made plans to collect cell-site information.”
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The Government Can’t Even Figure Out How To Shut Down Its Websites In A Reasonable Way
By Mike Masnick | Techdirt | October 2, 2013
With the government shutdown, you have may have come across a variety of oddities involving various government agency websites that were completely taken offline. This seems strange. Yes, the government is shut down, but does that really mean they need to turn off their web servers as well, even the purely informational ones? I could see them just leaving them static without updating them, but to completely block them just seems… odd. Even odder is that not all websites are down and some, such as the FTC’s website appears to be fully up, including fully loading a page… only to then redirect you to a page that says it’s down. Julian Sanchez, over at Cato, explores the various oddities of government domains that are either up or down — or something in between.
For agencies that directly run their own Web sites on in-house servers, shutting down might make sense if the agency’s “essential” and “inessential” systems are suitably segregated. Running the site in those cases eats up electricity and bandwidth that the agency is paying for, not to mention the IT and security personnel who need to monitor the site for attacks and other problems. Fair enough in those cases. But those functions are, at least in the private sector, often outsourced and paid for up front: if you’ve contracted with an outside firm to host your site, shutting it down for a few days or weeks may not save any money at all. And that might indeed explain why some government sites remain operational, even though they don’t exactly seem “essential,” while others have been pulled down.
That doesn’t seem to account for some of the weird patterns we see, however. The main page at NASA.gov redirects to a page saying the site is unavailable, but lots of subdomains that, however cool, seem “inessential” remain up and running: the “Solar System Exploration” page at solarsystem.nasa.gov; the Climate Kids website at climatekids.nasa.gov; and the large photo archive at images.jsc.nasa.gov, to name a few. There are any number of good reasons some of those subdomains might be hosted separately, and therefore unaffected by the shutdown—but it seems odd they can keep all of these running without additional expenditures, yet aren’t able to redirect to a co-located mirror of the landing page.
He also takes on the issue of the FTC redirect, in which he notes that the redirect after loading the full page shows that they’re not saving any money at all this way, meaning it makes absolutely no sense at all.
Still weirder is the status of the Federal Trade Commission’s site. Browse to any of their pages and you’ll see, for a split second, the full content of the page you want—only to be redirected to a shutdown notice page also hosted at FTC.gov. But that means… their servers are still up and running and actually serving all the same content. In fact they’re serving more content: first the real page, then the shutdown notice page. If you’re using Firefox or Chrome and don’t mind browsing in HTML-cluttered text, you can even use this link to navigate to the FTC site map and navigate from page to page in source-code view without triggering the redirect. Again, it’s entirely possible I’m missing something, but if the full site is actually still running, it’s hard to see how a redirect after the real page is served could be avoiding any expenditures.
Sanchez tries to piece together why this might be happening, and points to a White House memo which explicitly says that agencies should shut stuff down even if it’s cheaper to keep them online:
The determination of which services continue during an appropriations lapse is not affected by whether the costs of shutdown exceed the costs of maintaining services…
It’s difficult to see how this helps anyone at all. But it does yet a good job (yet again) of demonstrating that logic and bureaucracy don’t often go well together.
Biomass Industry Fans Flames of Wildfire Hysteria
By Josh Schlossberg | The Biomass Monitor | September 2013
California’s Rim fire, expected to be fully “contained” by October after igniting in Yosemite National Park on August 17, will ultimately benefit the forests it has passed through. While media accounts sensationalize such large wildfires as “catastrophic” and “disastrous,” science demonstrates that, to the contrary, fire is a vital component of western forest ecosystems.
Journalists mischaracterize the ecological function of wildfire as “devastation” or refer to forests that have experienced fire as a “barren wasteland,” exploiting emotions to sell newspapers. Yet media is only an accomplice to one of the masterminds ultimately responsible for fanning the flames of wildfire hysteria: the biomass energy industry.
Ignoring sound science and common sense, the biomass industry insists that cutting more backcountry forests, including native forests, will somehow prevent wildfires and protect people.
In September, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced the siphoning of even more taxpayer dollars to log and burn forests for energy under the guise of “reduc[ing] the risks of catastrophic wildfires.” In this most recent taxpayer handout to the biomass industry, $1.1 million in grants will be diverted to encourage more biomass incineration in California, Idaho, Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Alaska.
The biomass boosters’ well-worn talking points are laid out perfectly by Julia Levin, director of the Bioenergy Association of California, in a recent op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle. Without citing a single scientific study, Levin boldly claims that hacking apart forests to burn for energy would “prevent more Rim Fires,” asserting that keeping chainsaws out a forest is the same thing as letting it go “up in smoke.”
George Wuerthner, ecologist and editor of Wildfire: A Century of Failed Forest Policy, explains that instead of stopping fires, logging “typically has little effect on the spread of wildfires.” Contrary to industry and media spin, large fires such as the Rim fire are a product of “high winds, high temperatures, low humidity and severe drought.” These bigger fires are “unstoppable and go out only when the weather changes — not because of a lack of fuels” in a logged forest.
Wuerthner contends that logging or “thinning” can actually “increase wildfires’ spread and severity by increasing the fine fuels on the ground (slash) and by opening the forest to greater wind and solar penetration, drying fuels faster than in unlogged forests.”
Biomass proponent Levin warns in her op-ed that wildfires have “enormous impacts on public health from the smoke, soot and other emissions.” Yet Levin sees no disconnect in building biomass incinerators that would spew deadly particulate matter into low-income communities twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, at higher levels than most coal plants.
Wildfire can “threaten lives, homes and businesses,” Levin states truthfully, particularly as more forests in the fire plain are opened to development. Yet the industry mouthpiece doesn’t once mention the only action that can actually protect structures from wildfire: maintaining “defensible space” 100-200 feet around a building. Instead, she offers more backcountry logging as the solution.
Levin claims to fret about the impact on climate change from an occasional wildfire, while pushing hard for more biomass incinerators that would pump out more carbon dioxide per unit of energy than some of the dirtiest coal plants in the country.
Recent science demonstrates that big blazes have been typical in western forests for hundreds of years. “If you go back even to the turn of the century, you will find that tens of millions of acres burned annually,” according to Wuerthner. “One researcher in California recently estimated that prior to 1850, an average of 5 million to 6 million acres burned annually in California alone.”
Yet biomass opportunists such as Levin cling to the outdated belief that “wildfires are increasing dramatically in frequency and severity as the result of climate change and overgrown forests.”
It would be unfair to suggest that Levin completely ignores forest ecology in her op-ed. She doesn’t. She just makes up her own version of it to suit industry’s desire to get out the cut, swearing that more intensive logging won’t harm forests, but magically “increase forest ecosystem health.”
That’s just dead wrong, according to ecologist Chad Hanson, director of the John Muir Project of Earth Island Institute in California. Hanson explains that burned forests “support levels of native biodiversity and total wildlife abundance” equal to or greater than any forest type, including old growth. Burned forests are also the rarest kind of forest, and therefore among the most ecologically important.
Black-backed woodpeckers drill their burrows in standing dead snags, according to Hanson, eventually providing homes for other cavity-nesting species of birds and mammals. Native flowering shrubs thriving in the wake of wildfire attract insects, which feeds species of birds and bats. Shrubs and downed logs provide habitat for small mammals, which become food for raptors like the California spotted owl and northern goshawk. Deer live off the tender new tree growth, bears gorge themselves on the resulting berries and grubs, and Pacific fisher hunt the rodents, while the decaying organic material rejuvenates soils for swiftly regenerating seedlings.
Levin and the biomass industry’s “cure” for our “sick” western forests includes a recent bill passed by the California legislature requiring the Public Utilities Commission to generate up to 50 megawatts of biomass power, which Levin says would be extracted from 300,000 acres of forests over a ten year period.
The director of the Bioenergy Association of California specifically advocates for the construction of the 2.2 megawatt Cabin Creek Biomass Energy Facility in Placer County, California. This proposed facility is currently under legal challenge from Center for Biological Diversity, the environmental organization alleging that the Environmental Impact Report “does not comply with the California Environmental Quality Act.”
Related article
- Ecologist: Thinning won’t stop fires (mtexpress.com)
Mother Agnes Mariam attacked… by Human Rights Watch!
Ron Paul Institute | October 2, 2013
Since when does a human rights organization take to arguing the case for a military attack that will kill scores of innocent civilians? If you are Human Rights Watch, it’s all in a day’s work. The US regime’s favorite “human rights ” organization, which once praised the Obama Administration’s continuation of its predecessor’s torturous CIA “extraordinary rendition” program, pulled out all stops to bolster Obama’s claims that the Syrian government was responsible for the August 21st chemical attack near Damascus.
As Obama was ready to teach Syria a lesson via Tomahawk cruise missiles, Human Rights Watch stood virtually alone in the world on the president’s side. The human rights group was not busy trying to help the victims or promote international diplomatic efforts to end the crisis. They were instead feverishly engaged in a convoluted effort to prove that the missiles that purportedly carried the poison gas could only have come from Syrian government positions. They had no investigators on the ground, yet they determined independent of facts that the Syrian government must have been responsible. This is the job for a human rights group? To help a president make the case for war?
Human Rights Watch even repeated the lie that the UN inspectors’ report on the August 21 incident “points clearly to Syrian government responsibility for the attack.” It does no such thing, and in fact the UN had no mandate to determine responsibility for the incident. But this was the US administration’s line and HRW was determined to repeat it — even as the rest of the world gasped in disbelief.
When the Russian effort to head off a US attack on Syria — which would no doubt have killed far more than it was claimed were killed by poison gas on August 21 — was finalized by a UN resolution providing for the destruction of the Syrian government’s chemical weapons and facilities, one would think a human rights group would cheer that diplomacy triumphed over war. Not so Human Rights Watch. The organization’s UN representative Philippe Bolopion blasted the agreement, stating that it “fails to ensure justice.”
At that point, even President Obama was happy to have avoided a military conflict in Syria. Not Human Rights Watch.
The organization has not let up, however. A recent report by Mother Agnes Mariam of the Cross and her Institute for Peace, Justice and Human Rights painstakingly refutes much of the photographic evidence presented of the attack. Being on the ground in Syria, she has also interviewed scores of victims of the insurgents’ attacks. Her organization’s report raises serious questions about whether the YouTube videos presented by the US government as the main US evidence of Syria government responsibility for the attack was manipulated or even entirely faked. Mother Agnes Mariam, dubbed by the BBC as “Syria’s Detective Nun,” finds her work attacked in a recent BBC article by… you guessed it, Human Rights Watch!
Peter Bouckaert, “emergencies director” of Human Rights Watch, who is not on the ground in Syria, brushes off Mother Agnes Mariam’s work, stating flatly that “there’s just no basis for the claims.” He continues that, “she is not a professional video forensic analyst.” Of course she never claimed to be. What she claimed is to have working eyes, which noticed — among other anomalies — that several of the purported victims of the attack were seen at several different locations at supposedly the same time and that it does not take a “professional video forensic analyst” to recognize that is impossible.
Human Rights Watch is a protected, pro-US regime NGO. They want to be the only voice on human rights issues and thanks to their favored status and enormous budget they have much weight on these issues. But how many times can they promote torture and war before people stop listening to their lies?
Related article
- Human Rights Watch is a propaganda agency for the US government (paulcraigroberts.org)
Former Qwest CEO says refusal to comply with NSA spying landed him in jail
RT | October 1, 2013
Former Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio, who spent over four years in prison for insider trading, now says his conviction was based on his company’s refusal to cooperate with NSA requests to spy on its customers.
Nacchio says he feels “vindicated” by ongoing revelations provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden that the NSA does, in fact, access massive amounts of metadata and communications information of both foreigners and Americans.
Nacchio told The Wall Street Journal that the NSA set up a meeting with him in February 2001 wherein he believed they would discuss potential government contracts. But he says the NSA instead asked him for permission to surveil Qwest customers.
He says he refused to cooperate based on advice from his lawyers that such an action would be illegal, as the NSA would not go through the normal process of asking the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for a subpoena. About this time, he says the company’s ability to win unrelated government contracts – something it did not have trouble with before the NSA meeting – slowed significantly.
It took until 2007 before Nacchio was convicted of insider trading. Prosecutors claim he was guilty of selling off Qwest stock in early 2001, not long before the company went through financial ills. Nevertheless, he claimed in court documents that he was still confident in the firm’s ability to win government contracts.
Nacchio believes his conviction was in retaliation for his refusal to play ball with legally dubious NSA spying requests.
“I never broke the law, and I never will,” Nacchio told the WSJ.
His version of events matches reporting by USA Today in 2006, in which the paper noted that Qwest was the lone holdout from the government’s warrantless surveillance operations and that defiance “might affect its ability to get future classified work with the government.”
Yet despite his efforts, Nacchio was barred from using any evidence of potential retaliation in his defense, given that the material was considered classified, and his judge refused requests to allow the evidence in trial. Reports from The Washington Post on evidence that has been made public on his case since that time seem consistent with the CEO’s claims.
As a result of his likely hobbled defense, Nacchio was indicted by federal prosecutors and served four-and-a half years in federal prisons before being released in late September.
The NSA has declined to comment on Nacchio, according to the WSJ and The Washington Post.
While spying operations disclosed by Snowden have had some level of legal backing, President George W. Bush’s wiretapping program did not. Thus, telecom companies that cooperated with the program were eventually given immunity for their compliance in 2008.
Related articles
- Don’t Refuse the Nsa or You’ll Sleep With the Fishes (theburningplatform.com)
- Telco exec who resisted NSA Joe Nacchio released after four years in jail (blacklistednews.com)
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Trump asks Iran not to retaliate after he strikes Pickaxe Mountain
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Book Review & Summary
Calling of an Angel: The True Story of Rene Caisse and an Indian Herbal Medicine Called Essiac (1988)
Dr. Gary L. Glum – 30 Q&As – Book Review & Summary
Lies are Unbekoming | October 17, 2026
On June 10, 1975, Dr. Chester Stock, a vice president at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research, wrote to a Canadian nurse named Rene Caisse: “Enclosed are test data in two experiments indicating some regressions in sarcoma 180 of mice treated with Essiac.” The sentence sat in a letter from one of the world’s largest private cancer research centers, concerning an herbal tea an elderly English woman had learned from an Ojibwa medicine man at a northern Ontario mining camp in the 1890s. The tests were terminated the following year after Sloan-Kettering admitted, in sworn affidavit three years later, that they had prepared the injectable solution improperly from the dried material supplied — freezing and thawing the herb rather than boiling it as Rene had instructed. By the time Calling of an Angel was published in 1988, Rene Caisse had been dead for a decade, having treated thousands of cancer patients across fifty-six years in her Bracebridge, Ontario kitchen, never charging a fee, and refusing every offer — from Memorial Sloan-Kettering, the National Cancer Institute, Merck, Parke Davis, and private corporations dangling contracts up to $1 million — to release her formula before the medical establishment admitted her remedy had merit. … continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Trump asks Iran not to retaliate after he strikes Pickaxe Mountain – w/ Prof. Marandi
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- Latest European Green Energy Debacle; Portugal’s Largest Flagship Solar Park Insolvent!
- Green Energy Debacle: German Expert Professor Fritz Vahrenholt Warns Of Severe Economic And Social Consequences
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- 2025 Nature Paper Claiming Worsening Global Drought Gets RETRACTED …Heavily Flawed
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