Over the weekend, the New York Times’ public editor, Margaret Sullivan, published a piece investigating the Times’ thirteen month delay in the publication of a bombshell report on the Bush Administration’s domestic mass surveillance program back in 2004 and 2005. Sullivan’s revisitation of the issue in light of what we’ve learned since this summer about the NSA was a great public service.
We now know that the government lied to the New York Times about the legality of its spying to delay the publication of the story that would eventually win the Pulitzer Prize, hiding a tremendous fight inside the government about the legality of the spying. The report also contains an important new admission from former NSA chief—and its current public booster—General Michael Hayden, that “he can’t prove any harm to national security from the publication of the eavesdropping stories — then or now.” We hope Mr. Hayden will now revise the many hyperbolic statements he has made to the contrary.
Yet as the folks who, along with the ACLU, have been leading the lawsuits against NSA spying since early 2006, we need to point out a big problem with the New York Times’ characterization of the current mass spying.
The piece quotes Eric Lichtblau as saying that, as a result of the revelations, Congress made “all this stuff” legal, then adds: “There may be public outrage over the latest wave of surveillance revelations, but the government has a helpful defense: Hey, it’s legal.”
Not so. The government’s claims of “legality” are wrong, have been strongly criticized by national security law professors, and are currently being challenged in court by EFF, ACLU, and EPIC, among others. The Times dis-serves its audience by repeating them as if they were true.
In fact, the ACLU has a hearing in New York on Friday, November 22, in its key challenge to one of those “legal” claims: that the NSA’s indiscriminately collecting telephone records is “legal” under a convoluted interpretation of the section 215 of the 2001 Patriot Act that mentions neither telephone records nor the NSA. To try to make it fit, the government attempts to redefine the limits on production of “relevant” things to allow the collection of massive amounts of “irrelevant” information. In other words, by a plain reading of the statute, what the NSA is currently doing in collecting massive amounts of telephone records on an ongoing basis is not legal.
And that’s not even addressing the Fourth Amendment problems with mass, suspicionless seizure of records of our calls with doctors, business associates, churches, friends and lovers, records that can create an extremely intimate portrait of our lives and political activities. The government’s claim that the Fourth Amendment is not triggered by the ongoing collection of this sensitive information in an untargeted mass is far from settled.
The Fourth Amendment isn’t even the only amendment the NSA is violating. EFF focused on the First Amendment in our motion for partial summary judgment against the mass telephone records collection program we filed in California last Wednesday. The motion features declarations from 22 associations, from the California Gun Owners to Patient Privacy Rights to People for the American Way to the First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles, attesting to the First Amendment chilling effect from the collection of telephone records.
Also not “legal” is the mass collection of communications, including content, that the government claims is justified by section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act. That’s the law Lichtblau references, passed in 2008 after the Times revelations. Section 702 also doesn’t say that mass, untargeted surveillance of Americans is allowed. To the contrary, 702 expressly forbids the government from intentionally acquiring any communications that are purely domestic. The NSA’s “upstream” access, tapping into the domestic fiber optic cables of AT&T and other carriers that carry the content of our emails, web searches, social networking posts and many of our phone calls, plainly violates section 702 and also violates the Constitution. EFF will be presenting these arguments before an open, adversarial public federal court starting in the spring.
These points were made well by former EFF attorney Jennifer Granick of Stanford and Professor Christopher Sprigman of the University of Virgnia in a piece in the Times in June, so it’s surprising that the Times simply repeated the government’s conclusions without question.
In short, nowhere in federal law, before or after the Times story in 2005, has Congress ever openly authorized the mass spying on Americans that is taking place. EFF is still fighting to force the release of the key FISA Court rulings, so we don’t know the specifics, but the fact that the government has convinced the secret, non-adversarial Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to sign off, apparently based on contorted statutory interpretation, doesn’t change that. These questions need to be presented in the public courts where rule of law and due process rules are clear.
The piece admits that the Times was taken in by claims of “legality” in 2004. It shouldn’t get fooled again by government claims of “legality” of mass surveillance.
November 12, 2013
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | Electronic Frontier Foundation, Human rights, Michael Hayden, National Security Agency, New York Times, NSA, United States, United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court |
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As more information comes to light about the global snooping being conducted by the NSA and GCHQ, it is becoming clearer that much of it had little to do with combating terrorism, as a recent EFF article makes plain. But most damaging to the idea that massive surveillance was justified, because it was to protect people from extreme threats, is the revelation that commercial espionage was also being conducted. So far, the chief example of that is in Brazil, but The Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) now has information about large-scale industrial spying on Japanese companies carried out by Australian secret services:
BHP [BHP Billton — the world’s largest mining company] was among the companies helped by Australian spy agencies as they negotiated trade deals with Japan, a former Australian Secret Intelligence Service officer says.
A former diplomat has also confirmed Australian intelligence agencies have long targeted Japanese companies. Writing in The Japan Times, Professor Gregory Clark said Australian companies were beneficiaries of intelligence operations.
“In Australia, favoured firms getting spy material on Japanese contract policies and other business negotiations used to joke how [it had] ‘fallen off the back of a truck’,” Professor Clark wrote.
The article has more details, but doesn’t reveal how the materials were obtained. However, since Australia is part of the “Five Eyes” inner circle of snooping countries that also includes the US, UK, Canada and New Zealand, it seems likely that information of interest from those partners also found its way to Australian companies. SMH quotes Clark as saying:
Business information is a main target for [intelligence] agencies
It will be interesting to see if later releases from Snowden’s hoard of documents show any evidence of this Australian use of NSA materials for industrial espionage.Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+
November 12, 2013
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Deception, Economics, Full Spectrum Dominance | Australia, Australian Intelligence Community, Australian Secret Intelligence Service, Espionage, Japan, National Security Agency |
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The list of US spying targets now includes the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, a new report reveals.
The US National Security Agency and the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters infiltrated OPEC’s computer systems to access an internal study in the organization’s research division, the German newspaper Der Spiegel reported, citing documents provided by American whistleblower Edward J. Snowden.
A list of individuals targeted for surveillance included “Saudi Arabia’s OPEC governor”.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court approved the targeting.
Der Spiegel said the information on OPEC had been available to the NSA for years, but in 2008 the agency infiltrated the organization, and has since been able to access Relevant Products/Services information specifically regarding oil exporting countries and the price of oil.
The infiltration however, was not easy for the NSA. A document from GCHQ, released in 2010, announced that after a long period of meticulous work, the two spying agencies had finally infiltrated the systems.
There is no national security justification for the spying effort. But the US needs the information to maintain its economic dominance in the world, some experts say.
OPEC has twelve members and is dedicated to coordinating the policies of the oil-exporting countries.
The American public, some IT corporations, and foreign leaders are all targets of the US super spying agency over the past years, according to documents released by Snowden, who is now in Russia where he was granted temporary asylum. Snowden is wanted in America for espionage charges.
November 12, 2013
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Deception, Economics, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | Government Communications Headquarters, National Security Agency, NSA, OPEC, Saudi Arabia, United States, United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court |
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Even as there have been indications around the globe that perhaps we’ve had enough copyright term extension and it’s time to move back in the other direction, over in the UK, they just put in place a big new copyright extension which increases the term from 50 years to 70 years for sound recordings and performers’ rights. We had discussed the EU decision two years ago to seize the public domain by retroactively pulling works out of the public domain, and now it’s officially gone into effect.
While we’ve pointed out for years that when people claim that infringing works are “stolen,” they’re using the wrong word, since nothing is missing, that is not the case here. Here, things are absolutely missing. The entire purpose of copyright law is to provide the incentives to have the work created in the first place. As such, it’s a deal, where the public grants the creators an exclusive right for a number of years, in return for getting the work (in a limited fashion) for a period of time and then having that work become public domain at the end. Retroactive copyright extension is a unilateral change in that deal — directly taking the work away from the public domain without any recompense to the public the work has been stolen from. This makes absolutely no sense. Clearly, since the work was created, the incentive was good enough at the time of creation. Adding on more years that the public doesn’t get it at the end does nothing to incentivize the work that was already created fifty years ago.
There is simply no reason to have done this, and to have taken these works out of the public domain. Scholars have pointed out that there is no legitimate reason to do this, no evidence that it does anything useful at all. Instead, there’s plenty of evidence that the cost to the public is tremendous — somewhere around a billion euros. The cost to culture in general is even worse, because the longer copyright terms are, the more works disappear entirely, and the more it harms the dissemination of knowledge. It’s basically a disaster all the way around — except for some old record labels that still have the copyrights.
November 11, 2013
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Economics, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | Copyright, European Union, Exclusive right, Mike Masnick, Public domain |
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By Notsilvia Night | July 24, 2009
Have you ever gotten death-threats?
Well, I have… and so have a million or so other people.
It’s not unusual for political activists, writers or even humble bloggers, who even become a bit visible to be the target of threats, if they attack the interests of corrupt people.
But there is one area of political opposition, where you can be absolutely certain to be on the receiving end of all kinds of threats – from losing your job, your livelihood to being sued, physically harmed or even killed – and this area is everything connected to the state of Israel.
Human Rights activists in Palestine, either Palestinian or Internationals receive death-threats on a daily basis, of course, mainly by settlers: “Nazi, I’ll kill you.”
Threatening is part of the Moshe-Dayan-Method. The former Israeli Defence Minister Moshe Dayan once said: “Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother.”
The Jewish settlers in the West-bank are one side of this “mad-dog” appearance, the Israeli army in Gaza is another side, the Israeli prison and torture system is the third and Mossad covered operations abroad the forth side of this “game”.
The settlers are not independent of the Israeli state. They act as the forefront in the land robbing operations. They are like the ugly war paint used in earlier ages by invading tribes to scare the native population to surrender or leave the area.
The recklessness of the soldiers in Gaza, who first commit horrible war crimes, and then make t-shirts portraying a pregnant Palestinian woman as a target, saying “one shot, two kills”, is another example.
Israelis are telling the world with this seemingly insane behavior, they do not have to care what others think about their country:
“International law does not apply to the state of Israel. And nobody can do anything about it. Since this nation is too dangerous for anybody else to bother.”
Fanatical supporters of the state of Israel and influential Zionists have been threatening people for a long time.
Edwin M.Wright, who had worked as an assistant and expert of the Middle East in the State Department for two decades, describes in an oral history of the Truman Library, how Washington’s career politicians from the early 1940′s on were brought under control on the subject of Israel, by using threats and intimidation:
One day I was sitting next to Mr. Henderson, he had his notes out and was dictating to me some letters when the telephone rang. It was Mr. Niles of the White House, and Mr. Niles told him (I got the story later on) that the night before some member of the State Department had been at a dinner party and had criticized President Truman’s statement on a Jewish state.
Mr. Niles said,
“We are not going to tolerate any criticism of the President on this issue, and you let your staff know that if this happens again they must be disciplined.”
Mr. Henderson called a meeting of the staff and told them of the message of Mr. Niles.
He said,
“None of you people are to speak in public about this issue, because if you do we’ll have to send you off to some Siberia if any of you, publicly express your private opinions, even to private groups, and it gets to the White House, you will be purged.”
There were a number of these people that were purged. I can mention them, Stuart Rockwell, Robert Munn. They tried to purge me in every way.
I can’t understand why I survived, and this is one of the strange things in my history, for they had me on their list as an anti-Semitic force operating in the State Department. The American Zionist, which is the paper of the American Zionist organization, came out with a full page attacking me, claiming that I was a source of anti-Semitism. I was called in frequently and told I must not speak on this subject because it was so controversial and I was too indiscrete.
One day George McGhee, who later on was Assistant Secretary of State, called me in. Jacob Blanstein, president of AMOCO had just come in to see him, and somehow or another had picked up the story I was anti-Semitic. He told George McGhee,
“Why do you keep this fellow here?”
There were influences to get rid of anyone who was called “pro-Arab.”
They were not pro-Arab, I must insist upon this, they were acting in accordance with America’s larger interests in the Middle East. The Zionists gave them the title “pro-Arab” and that was enough to destroy them. You had to be pro-Zionist or keep quiet in order to stay in the State Department, and the net result was a whole generation of officers who are simply “Uncle Toms.” They don’t dare to speak or publish things. They are afraid that they will be sent off to Africa, or who knows to some other part of the world, and will stay there the rest of their lives.
After the State-Department, the American Congress was “purged ” of everyone who tried to be fair-minded in regard to the Middle East, mainly through the influence of Israel-friends in campaign financing offices of the two major parties.
Paul Findley, while discussing the book “The Israel Lobby” by Havard Scholars Mearsheimer and Walt, describes it like this:
I know what it is like to be targeted in this way. In the last years of my long service in Congress, I spoke out, making many of the points now presented in the Mearsheimer-Walt book. In 1980, my opponent charged me with anti-Semitism, and money poured into his campaign fund from every state in the Union. I prevailed that year but two years later lost by a narrow margin. In 1984, Sen. Charles Percy, then chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and an occasional critic of Israel, was defeated. Leaders of the Israel lobby claimed credit for defeating both Percy and me, claims that strengthened lobby influence in the years that followed.
The latest victim of this kind of political influence are Democratic Representatives Earl Hilliard and, of course, Cynthia McKinney.
But the political realm isn’t the only one, where careers are threatened. John Pilger, an Australian, and Alan Heart, a British journalist, discuss how Zionist pressure works on the mainline media.
Journalists critical of Israel face a quite real threat for their careers. Only few will take the risk, and even fewer will survive with their journalistic career intact.
Politicians and journalists aren’t the only ones vulnerable to those threats. Everyone working in professional positions in corporations or in public services can be threatened by loss of job and reputation by being called an “Anti-Semite”.
As seen in the case of John Pilger in the above Alan-Hart-program, life, health and families can be threatened as well.
While threats against people’s livelihoods are often followed up by actions, are death threats also to be taken seriously?
Well, it depends.
In Palestine people are getting killed on a daily basis. It is the risk people face for being a Palestinian living on his or her own land, and occasionally for being an international supporter for Palestinian human rights, like Rachel Corrie or Tom Hurndall.
Another group who has to take death-threats very seriously are Revisionists, people who question certain aspects of the “Holocaust”, people like Professor Faurisson and many others.
While Faurisson survived the attacks on his life by Zionist fanatics others did not.
And still, every attack on somebody’s life carries the risk of death. Thousands of people all over the world have been threatened, only few threats can actually be followed through.
Revisionists become easy targets, since they have already been maligned so badly, that some media outlet or other can say “he deserved it”, when a revisionist is being attacked and seriously hurt the reporter will get away with blaming the victim.
In most cases, however, a possible Israeli sponsored assassination is a difficult business, like when the Swedish foreign minister Anna Lind was killed.
She had attempted to get her European counterparts to cut European Union ties to Israel until it would finally agree to a just settlement with the Palestinian people.
Anna Lind also had stated publicly how frustrated she was about Israel’s crimes against Palestine:
“Sometimes the Israeli-Palestinian conflict makes me so angry that I kick the wastepaper bin in my office or throw things around,”
She had described Sharon as a “maniac” and said on Swedish television that she would not buy Israeli goods and fruits sold in Swedish markets.
Hanan Ashrawi, the Palestinian professor and negotiator, wrote after the murder:
“Sweden’s effect on the Middle East has been consistently constructive, positive, and human with a deep-seated tradition of fairness, justice, and peaceful intervention.
Unfortunately, three such Swedish champions had met with violent and untimely deaths, each a tragedy unto itself, but a national and global loss in the larger scheme of things.”
When Anna Lind was murdered in a Stockholm shopping-center, it would have been a well-planned assassination. The real assassin had to be given a good escape plan while a patsy was being prepared to take the fall.
The planners would have to gain close access to the police investigation, to have the patsies DNA transferred to the murder-weapon. They must have had insiders in the Swedish legal system to get the trial shortened and all the eye-witness testimonies, but a single one, to be dismissed. (All other eye-witnesses refuted the claim that the chosen patsy looked actually like the real assassin, and the he had been coming from the direction the prosecution claimed the murderer had come from.)
They must have had a very skilled defense councilor at hand, who was able to persuade the patsy to confess to the crime.
Although the suspect had refused to confess during many weeks of police interrogation, his own defense attorney got the confession out of him. How he did that, isn’t quite clear. He might have promised his client to get him off on an insanity plea, or might have planted even false memories.
Creating false memories is actually not very hard, when you know how memory is normally created and manipulated in the brain. It’s even easier, if you have a psychological vulnerable individual, who might even have been under the influence of mind-altering psychiatric drugs.
The defense attorney was working at the time for the law firm, which just had done the defended the defendant in a case of military espionage against Sweden. The espionage was done on behalf of the Russian Mafia.
In my opinion, Anna Lind was killed, because the Israeli power-elite saw her as a threat to Israeli interests, and because she was indeed an influential politician.
Her death surely scared other European politicians, the Moshe Dayan method worked…. temporarily.
The plotters got away with it in 2002 and in the subsequent trial.
I doubt, they would have such an easy time in 2009.
The fact, that a vast corruption scandal in New Jersey involving Jewish rabbis and an Israel link is being investigated and publicly revealed in the media means, that even in New York and New Jersey in the USA, Israel is losing it’s influence on law enforcement and the judiciary.
Intimidation works to a point on many people, but eventually the true “spirit of humanity” will break through in some of us. And this spirit is more catching than fear ever was.
Whenever I receive threats, I tell enough people about them, even on the risk of seeming paranoid to friends and acquaintances. In this way, it will become riskier for those who consider following up on their threats.
Apart from that, I tell myself to see it logically:
On my own I actually have no influence whatsoever, which means going after me would neither be worth the risk nor the effort. Threatening people, especially with veiled threats, is relatively risk-free, just another form of hasbara (Israeli propaganda).
But I have become part of an ever-growing movement of people in the hundreds of millions, who oppose Israel’s crimes against her neighbors. This is what will indeed threaten the criminal, warmongering project of Zionism.
And no matter how they try Moshe Dayan’s “mad-dog” game, they just can’t kill us all.
November 11, 2013
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | Cynthia McKinney, Israel, Middle East, State Department, Zionism |
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Palestinian journalist, Mohammed Abu Khdeir, secretly arrested by Shabak
Israel’s security services arrested Palestinian journalist, Mohammed Abu Khdeir, after he returned from a reporting trip to Egypt two days ago. Abu Khdeir, who reports for the Palestinian Al Quds and the Kuwaiti Al-Rai, was arrested at Ben Gurion airport when he arrived on a flight from Egypt.
News of his arrest is under Israeli gag. Abu Khdeir, as is common in security cases, has been denied any contact with his attorney. During this period, the Shabak commonly “works over” suspects for information, using abusive techniques like sleep deprivation and hours-long stress-inducing interrogation techniques. That is why it’s critical to spread word of his arrest.
The Israeli court system is complicit in this abuse and in this case a Beersheva court has granted the Shabak request for a gag and ordered him detained without charge until November 13th. It’s also usual in these cases for remand to be extended without any real oversight by the court. You can expect the suspect to be detained as long as the Shabak wants him there.
After examples of behavior like this, it should be no surprise that Israel’s rankings on world press freedom indexes are quite low. Unfortunately, one of the few ways to fight such outrageous violations of freedom of the press is to report them here.
It’s entirely possible that this arrest is based on sheer spite, and is certainly entirely arbitrary. A year ago, the Palestinian journalist embarrassed the Shabak by refusing to cover a Hillary Clinton press conference to which he’d been invited. The Shabak agents who provide “security” for such events, demanded only Palestinian journalists pull down their pants before entering the press venue. Abu Khdeir refused along with several others.
An unnamed Israeli official told FoxNews, apparently with a straight face:
…Israel is trying to provide the best possible security for Clinton and that similar procedures are used at Western airports and in secure facilities in Western capitals.
Last I checked, no Israeli reporters were forced to disrobe before entering the White House to cover Bibi’s press conferences. This is a clear case of Reporting While Palestinian. His recent arrest seems like a good example of payback.
The other possibility is that Abu Khdeir may’ve annoyed the Egyptian military junta during his visit by contacting figures from the Muslim Brotherhood. If he did so, Israel too would want to warn him that such contact with Islamists is considered an offense against Israeli state interests. Not that this is, or should be against the law. But when you’re Palestinian there doesn’t have to be a law. Shabak is the law. You may’ve done something wrong, you may’ve gazed a moment too long into the eyes of the security official at Ben Gurion. There doesn’t have to be a reason.
The only thing we can be thankful for is that Shabak didn’t kidnap him inside Egypt as they did recently in the case of a Gazan who disappeared there and turned up in an Israeli jail, where he presumably still sits. But they knew they didn’t need to since he was returning via Ben Gurion, where they could nab him.
November 9, 2013
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Subjugation - Torture | Abu Khdeir, Ben Gurion Airport, Ben-Gurion, Egypt, Israel, Palestine, Shabak, Shin Bet, Zionism |
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By Fiona de Londras, Durham University | November 6, 2013
Next month the advocate general of the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU), Yves Bot, will publish an opinion on the extent to which the Data Retention Directive, one of the most controversial security measures introduced by the EU in the past decade, is compatible with human rights law. Although not a binding judgement (this will come later), the CJEU’s opinion is a significant intervention in the ongoing debate over how to balance human rights with states’ perceived surveillance needs.
The security-related retention of communications by telecoms firms was on the European agenda well before 9/11, but privacy concerns had led to a limited approach. Telecoms companies in the EU were obliged to delete communications data as soon as all business needs had been met; the data could not be retained for security or criminal investigation purposes. Some states had attempted to adjust this and introduce a retention system in 2000, but this failed – again, largely because of privacy concerns. All this changed, however, after 9/11.
As early as May 2002, a “data retention amendment” had been made to existing EU privacy laws to allow for security-related data retention, and drafts of a provision that would require retention began to circulate. Those proposals attracted so much rights-based criticism that they were apparently abandoned; however, they quickly reappeared in the wake of the London and Madrid bombings, and in 2006, the Data Retention Directive was adopted.
It obliges all member states to introduce national data retention regimes, even where -— as in the UK —- there had already been significant resistance to such regimes when they were previously proposed at national level. The directive requires telecommunications providers to retain data on the source, destination, time, date, duration and type of all communications by fixed and mobile telephone, fax and internet, and on the location and type of equipment used.
The data is to be retained for between six month and two years, with national law deciding on the duration, and can be accessed by state agencies investigating “serious crime” —- a term that has different definitions across the member states.
Blanket surveillance
The volume and extent of information retained under the directive is stunning; in effect, it has introduced a system of blanket surveillance across the entire EU. Although access to the information is regulated by law, state agencies can nonetheless access an enormous amount of information about our communications patterns and activities. This naturally raises serious human rights concerns, especially about privacy.
Security services insist that data retention is an indispensable tool for investigating serious crimes, such as terrorism and the production and distribution of child pornography. Yet different states make use of the Directive to wildly varying extents: in 2012, for example, Cyprus made 22 requests for access to data, while the UK made 725,467.
The question for the advocate general, the CJEU and the EU more broadly is whether or not the approach taken by the directive privileges perceived security needs over human rights. Data retention unquestionably constitutes a prima facie infringement on privacy; the real issue is whether this infringement is justified because it is necessary, effective, and limited. This question is at the core of all debates about “balance” in the security context: how far are we prepared to allow state power into our individual, family, social and democratic lives in order to “secure” us?
Answering this question requires us to decide on what we think “effectiveness” means in the context of security. If the directive helps to resolve a handful of serious crimes per year, or to prevent one terrorist attack, is it effective? Could a more limited approach -— such as requiring telecoms companies to collect data related to certain investigations but not to retain all data -— achieve the same security objectives while better protecting rights?
These are difficult questions, but they are ones we must resolve if we are to have a balanced security system. The advocate general’s opinion will be an important contribution to the debate, but it will not be the final word. Achieving a balanced approach to security requires critical scrutiny at practical, political, social and legal levels. This is all the more true given that, as the Data Retention Directive illustrates, security measures operate upon and have implications for the rights of all of us, all of the time.
Fiona de Londras is the Project Co-Ordinator of SECILE (Securing Europe through Counter-Terrorism: Impact, Legitimacy and Effectiveness), a project that has received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement n° 313195.
This article was originally published at The Conversation.
Read the original article.
November 8, 2013
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | CJEU, Communications data, Data Retention Directive, European Union, Human rights, Surveillance, Yves Bot |
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The head of the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) says Iranian channels have been taken off air from 27 satellites 66 times over the past three years by those claiming to be the advocates of freedom of speech.
Ezzatollah Zarghami made the remarks in an interview with Iran’s Young Journalists’ Club (YJC) on Thursday.
Zarghami noted that in addition to this, the channels have been repeatedly blocked or distorted through jamming of their transponders.
“This is while the Islamic Republic of Iran has been falsely accused of jamming [foreign radio and TV broadcasts] and sometimes it is claimed that the source [of the jamming] is outside Iran,” he stated.
The head of the IRIB said that in the modern world the free flow of information and enlightenment by independent media cannot be blocked.
He noted that the move against the Iranian channels by those who claim to be the advocates of freedom of speech and free flow of information comes as thousands of TV and satellite channels are currently broadcasting their programs onto the Iranian territory.
Iranian channels have come under an unprecedented wave of attacks by European governments and satellite companies since January 2012.
They have been taken off the air in several Western countries, including Britain, France, Germany and Spain.
European companies say they are abiding by the US-engineered sanctions against Iran. However, Michael Mann, the EU foreign policy chief’s spokesman, has told Press TV that sanctions do not apply to media.
In June, in another illegal act against Iranian alternative channels, Intelsat said that it will no longer provide services to Iranian channels, including Press TV.
Press TV later learned that the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) — an agency of the US Treasury Department — was behind the pressure on Intelsat.
Media activists call the attacks on Iranian channels a campaign against free speech launched by the same European governments that preach freedom of expression.
November 8, 2013
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | Intelsat, Iran, Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting, Office of Foreign Assets Control, Press TV, United States, United States Department of the Treasury |
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Congress has taken the first step towards expanding the abilities of the United States intelligence community by advancing a draft bill that will ensure the government’s spy budget stays intact into next year.
A Senate commitee approved the 2014 Intelligence Authorization Act during a closed door session on Tuesday, a bill that if signed into law will allow the US National Security Agency and other departments to keep receiving funding amid an international scandal that has caused calls for reform and even abolishment of the NSA both in the US and abroad in recent months.
Notwithstanding the backlash brought on by an array of secret NSA documents disclosed to the media by contractor-turned-leaked Edward Snowden since June, the Senate Intelligence Committee passed the draft bill by a 13-2 vote. Next, the full chamber will weigh in on the matter before it is reconciled with a sister act by way of the House of Representatives and sent to President Barack Obama to be signed into law.
If approved with all of its current provisions in place, the law will let the government continue to fund programs operated for purposes of counterterrorism and nuclear weapon proliferation prevention, authorizing initiatives within more than a dozen federal departments, including the NSA and others that deal in covert, intelligence-gathering operations.
In a press release issued Tuesday by the committee, however, its members also acknowledged that the bill expands certain intelligence community operations, including in particular the very programs enacted to prevent the unauthorized disclosure of classified information.
The bill, the committee wrote, “includes important provisions to enhance the conduct, accountability and oversight of the intelligence activities of the United States,” such as one intended “to protect against insider threats by adding necessary funds to deploy information technology detection systems across the intelligence community.”
The bill would also empower the Director of National Intelligence to “improve the government’s process to investigate . . . individuals with security clearances to access classified information,” while at same time “Instituting new statutory protections that protect the ability of legitimate whistleblowers to bring concerns directly to the attention of lawmakers, inspectors general and intelligence community leaders.”
Since the identity of the NSA leaker was revealed to be 30-year-old Edward Snowden, opponents of his actions have suggested that alternative, legal routes to questions the intelligence community’s tactics could have been taken, such as appealing to an inspector general. History, however, suggests that recent whistleblowers before him had a nearly impossible time doing as much, including Thomas Drake, a former senior NSA executive who was charged under the Espionage Act after he attempted to draw attention to waste, fraud and abuse within his agency years earlier. Speaking at an anti-NSA rally in Washington last month, Drake told a crowd of a couple thousand, “Any domestic surveillance legislation must include whistleblower protection for the credibility and enforcement of any reform effort, otherwise secrecy enforced by repression will turn into a faux reform passed into simply an honor system” for the NSA.
In a statement released on Tuesday, Committee Vice Chairman Saxby Chambliss (R-Georgia said, “This year’s intelligence authorization bill achieves both objectives by providing clear guidance and appropriate resources to the intelligence community, while enhancing the committee’s oversight of vital intelligence activities.”
If signed into law, the act will allow for funding to continue with regards to a number of intelligence-gathering operations conducted not just by the likes of the NSA, but also the Central Intelligence Agency, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Departments of Defense, State, Treasury, Energy and Justice, among others.
November 7, 2013
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | Central Intelligence Agency, CIA, FBI, Intelligence, Law, National Security Agency, NSA, Security, United States, USA |
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The revelations leaked by Edward Snowden that the NSA committed acts of espionage against top Mexican officials and the president himself have so far provoked only mild indignation from the Mexican political class. Secretary of Foreign Affairs José Antonio Meade appeared to be reassured by President Obama’s ‘word’ that he would launch an investigation into the workings of the U.S. government. Notwithstanding the incongruity that any government investigating its own internal wrongdoing would have any interest in publicizing conclusive evidence of its own criminal activity, President Peña Nieto has been reluctant to push the Obama administration further on the issue, presumably for fear of undermining Mexico’s position as a staunch U.S. economic and political ally.
Ex-president Vicente Fox, meanwhile, enthusiastically endorsed U.S. spying on Mexican politicians, claiming he knew the U.S. spied on him while he was president. Indeed, Fox took comfort in the fact that the world’s superpower monitored his every move and his phone calls, evoking the ominous adage reminiscent of all authoritarian political institutions: one has nothing to be concerned about so long as one has nothing to hide and done nothing wrong. “Everyone will do better if they think they’re being spied on,” he noted, at once reinforcing the dubious entitlement of the U.S. government to act as the world’s police force while simultaneously apologizing for the illegal activities of the NSA. Mr. Fox seems unable to comprehend the basic moral and legal truism that merely because many are involved in committing criminal activities, the moral and legal implications do not simply vanish into thin air. A reasonable observer might instead conclude that the greater the number of international government institutions that are involved in criminal activity, the more serious the problem, not the reverse. “It’s nothing new that there’s espionage in every government in the world, including Mexico’s,” Fox observed. Flummoxed as to why Snowden’s revelations have provoked outrage among the Mexican populace and investigative journalists (if not in government itself), he declared, “I don’t understand the scandal.”
One document obtained by the National Security Archive at George Washington University details Janet Napolitano’s (then Secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security) official meeting with President Peña Nieto in July 2013. According to Napolitano’s briefing, avoiding discussion of NSA spying on the upper echelons appears to be a Mexican, not solely U.S., initiative. The Mexicans, the document claims, wanted to ‘put to bed’ the issue of NSA intrusions. Indeed, nowhere in the summary of their meeting does the issue arise. Instead, discussions focus on maintaining and increasing border security in order to protect commercial interests and on reducing the number of undocumented migrants entering the United States.
The listless and at times surreal reaction to NSA surveillance by Mexico’s political class demonstrates their level of craven subordination to their U.S. counterparts. One can only begin to imagine the response of the U.S. political class and media pundits were they to discover that Mexican intelligence had repeatedly intercepted the electronic communications and tapped the phones of the Commander in Chief himself.
The Mexican reaction to NSA snooping on the inner circle of government stands in stark contrast to that of Brazil’s. Snowden’s leaks provoked fury within the government of President Dilma Rousseff. She blasted the NSA tapping of her phone and interception of government communications in a fiery speech clearly aimed at President Obama at the UN General Assembly. She lambasted the NSA for spying on millions of Brazilian citizens, tapping the phones of Brazilian embassies, and spying on the country’s partly state-owned petroleum giant, Petrobras. Interestingly, she remarked that the bulk of NSA spying in Brazil was not designed to thwart potential terrorists or to undermine the activities of transnational criminal organizations, but instead, to further U.S. business interests through both international economic and commercial spying. As a result, Rousseff cancelled her planned diplomatic visit to Washington, called for an international conference on data security, began setting up a protected governmental electronic communications system, and proposed changing underwater cables so that international Brazilian internet traffic would no longer pass through U.S. territory.
Brazil’s position, of course, is a reflection of the changing nature of U.S.-Latin American relations more generally. Brazil, the emerging regional power and now less of a fixture of Uncle Sam’s backyard, can afford to take an increasingly independent stance from Washington. Several countries in the region are integrating with each other politically and economically and establishing firm trade links with China, India, and South Africa—an unprecedented dynamic which has had the effect of undermining U.S. hegemony in the region.
Mexico, however, dependent on the U.S. market for 80% of its exports, is much less able to stand up to the superpower. Indeed, Mexico’s traditional position as a subordinate and reliable ally of its northern neighbor is becoming all the more crucial in maintaining the waning U.S. empire, increasingly defensive and militaristic as it reasserts its influence over the region. With a myriad of uncertainties lying ahead for U.S. power in a region that has witnessed the birth of new left-wing social movements that have had considerable success at the ballot box, it is becoming imperative for the United States to uphold and preserve its political, economic, and military alliances as per Mexico and Colombia. In Mexico, U.S. funding for the so-called ‘War on Drugs’ has provided a convenient pretext for heavy militarization throughout the country and a clamping down on political dissent and organized popular movements. Spying and surveillance programs are key to achieving the U.S. objective of continuing and reinforcing a status quo that now sees well over half the population in Mexico living in poverty and unparalleled levels of economic inequality.
As in Brazil, U.S. spying in Mexico seems less to do with the ‘War on Terror’ and the ‘War on Drugs’—two key rhetorical tenets of U.S. interventionism—and more to do with the realpolitik of ensuring that a pliant and subservient political class, personified by Fox, Calderón, and Peña Nieto, guard the current transnational dynamics—a socio-economic system that rewards the powerful moneyed neoliberal elites on both sides of the border and keeps the poor and marginalized in their place.
There is a further aspect to the Mexican response to NSA spying which warrants scrutiny. Throughout the Cold War, the CIA and its Mexican counterpart, the DFS, shared all manner of material and intelligence on dissidents (Marxists, communists, students, guerrillas, trade unionists, peasant activists, feminists, etc.) who were often incarcerated or liquidated because, as the authoritarian and paternalistic President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz claimed, they were a threat to ‘national security.’
The current partnership between the U.S. and Mexican governments allows for a level of surveillance of which Mexico’s Cold Warriors could only dream. In collaboration with telecommunications giants, the U.S. and Mexican governments provide the wherewithal and funding for large-scale spying on the Mexican citizenry. Indeed, Mexico’s Federal Ministerial Police (PFM) has recently designed a system of total surveillance and increased storage of electronic communications. In a climate in which there exist widening socio-economic disparities, a grave security crisis, and a growing disillusionment with the status quo, both the U.S. and Mexican governments have a shared interest in forestalling the development of a widespread popular political revolt and a potential ‘Mexican Spring.’ Were there any mystery as to why the Mexican response to Snowden’s revelations was so moderate, one would only need to recall Vicente Fox’s unintentionally shrewd observation that all governments have an interest in spying on one another and on their own citizens. The lackluster reaction from Los Pinos to the NSA revelations is reflective of the extent to which Mexican elite politicians acquiesce in the intrusions, largely because they themselves use domestic spying to further their own sectional interests in a country in which, little more than a decade after the ‘transition to democracy,’ the majority of the population are excluded from meaningful political participation.
Peter Watt teaches Latin American Studies at the University of Sheffield. He is co-author of the book, Drug War Mexico. Politics, Violence and Neoliberalism in the New Narcoeconomy (Zed Books 2012).
November 7, 2013
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Corruption, Economics, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | Brazil, Dilma Rousseff, Enrique Peña Nieto, Espionage, Human rights, Latin America, Mexico, National Security Agency, NSA, Obama, United States |
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Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff said Wednesday that Washington’s refusal to tender an apology for the spying led to her cancelling her crucial state visit to the United States.
“I was going to travel. We said there was only one way to solve the problem, and it was an apology for what happened and a promise that it would not happen again,” she said in a local radio interview.
The trip was initially scheduled to begin on October 23.
The lack of apology from Washington created an impasse, she said, adding that she did not want to run the risk of having a new spying scandal break during her visit, which would be an embarrassment for both sides.
Rousseff also reiterated her charges against the US, saying the NSA surveillance program is economic espionage borne out of commercial and strategic interests.
She said reports of the NSA intercepting communication of state-oil giant Petrobras have belied US claims of the PRISM program being directed to thwart terrorism.
In Wednesday’s interview, Rousseff also responded to a recent story in the Brazilian daily Folha de Sao Paulo, accusing Brazil’s intelligence agency of spying on diplomats from Russia, Iran and Iraq in 2003 and 2004.
She said the agency’s operations did not involve privacy violations as no phone calls or emails were tapped.
Rousseff had attacked the United States in her opening speech at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in September.
“Brazil, Mr President, knows how to protect itself. We reject, fight and do not harbour terrorist groups,” she said.
“As many other Latin Americans, I fought against authoritarianism and censorship and I cannot but defend, in an uncompromising fashion, the right to privacy of individuals and the sovereignty of my country,” she added.
Earlier on Tuesday Brazil made public a draft bill that will allow the government to prevent internet companies like Google and Facebook from storing data about Brazilian citizens outside the country.
Simultaneous revelations regarding the UK embassy housing a secret listening post in Berlin made Germany summon the British Ambassador to respond to the allegations.
With inputs from Agencies
November 7, 2013
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | Brazil, Dilma Rousseff, Human rights, National Security Agency, NSA, Obama, Rousseff, United States |
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The ongoing release of various leaks from Ed Snowden have drawn lots of attention and criticism of the activities of various parties in the intelligence community — especially those who partner closely with the NSA, the so-called “Five Eyes” countries: US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. And while there appears to be real momentum in the US behind limiting this surveillance, apparently New Zealand has decided to go in the other direction, and has passed a very broad new snooping law that will force telcos to basically hand over everything to various intelligence agencies.
The technical Telecommunications Interception Capability and Security Bill will compel telecommunication firms to assist intelligence agencies in intercepting and decrypting phone calls, texts and emails.
Critics say the bill is authoritarian, limits internet freedom and impinges on privacy and civil rights. The Government says it is necessary to replace a decade-old law to keep pace with technology.
We had mentioned this bill back when it was proposed earlier this year (before all the Snowden stuff went down). Given just how much outrage there is around the world about this kind of activity, it’s fairly incredible that the New Zealand government just pushed ahead with it, as if there wasn’t a giant public discussion going on. Oh, and the new legislation also lets New Zealand’s GCSB spy on New Zealanders as well. Until now, its surveillance had been technically limited to foreigners, though they did spy on New Zealanders many times. Rather than push back on the GCSB for this illegal spying, it appears that the New Zealand Parliament just decided to legalize the practice. Shameful stuff.
November 6, 2013
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | Five Eyes, Government Communications Security Bureau, National Security Agency, New Zealand |
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Leftist commentators consistently push a shallow and economically reductive narrative that frames American foreign policy as the sole domain of greedy White capitalists while choosing to ignore the obvious Jewish power structure directing these events. When the veneer of this supposed corporate imperialism is stripped away, it becomes clear that the United States has often served as a vehicle for the specific goals of organized Jewry. The life of Samuel Zemurray stands as prime evidence of this hidden mechanism.
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