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CIA and NSA’s ‘Black Budget’ Massive, Bloated, and Largely Ineffective at Stopping Terrorism

By DSWright | FDL | August 30, 2013

According to the Washington Post, documents released by Edward Snowden provide insight into the so-called “black budget” of the CIA, NSA, and other off-the-books funded entities. Since 9/11 hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent on building a massive intelligence machine that still cannot provide the president with adequate intelligence. It seems the “black budget” has a lot more to do with enriching contractors and building bureaucratic empires than fighting terrorism.

U.S. spy agencies have built an intelligence-gathering colossus since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, but remain unable to provide critical information to the president on a range of national security threats, according to the government’s top-secret budget.

The $52.6 billion “black budget” for fiscal 2013, obtained by The Washington Post from former ­intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, maps a bureaucratic and operational landscape that has never been subject to public scrutiny. Although the government has annually released its overall level of intelligence spending since 2007, it has not divulged how it uses the money or how it performs against the goals set by the president and Congress.

A time of austerity? Where were all these budget hawks during the votes for this? Austerity is just for kids who need food stamps, roads and bridges, and the long term unemployed. Disgusting.

The summary provides a detailed look at how the U.S. intelligence community has been reconfigured by the massive infusion of resources that followed the 2001 attacks. The United States has spent more than $500 billion on intelligence during that period, an outlay that U.S. officials say has succeeded in its main objective: preventing another catastrophic terrorist attack in the United States.

The result is an espionage empire with resources and a reach beyond those of any adversary, sustained even now by spending that rivals or exceeds the levels at the height of the Cold War.

No wonder they kept it a secret. $500 billion to build our own electronic prison? Combine that with the money spent on Homeland Security and it seems there is always money for elite interests, just not for the 99%.

The black budget details over a dozen federal agencies with their snouts in the secret trough. The top five beneficiaries being: the CIA, NSA, National Reconnaissance Office, National Geospatial-Intelligence Program, and the Department of Defense’s General Defense Intelligence Program. With the four main spending categories being: data collection, data analysis, management, facilities and support, and data processing and exploitation. Read electronic spying with a special focus on the internet.

What have we gotten for all this money?

August 31, 2013 Posted by | Corruption, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , , , | Leave a comment

Victory! Federal Court Recognizes Constitutional Rights of Americans on the No-Fly List

By Nusrat Choudhury | ACLU | August 29, 2013 

A federal court took a critically important step late yesterday towards placing a check on the government’s secretive No-Fly List. In a 38-page ruling in Latif v. Holder, the ACLU’s challenge to the No-Fly List, U.S. District Court Judge Anna Brown recognized that the Constitution applies when the government bans Americans from the skies. She also asked for more information about the current process for getting off the list, to inform her decision on whether that procedure violates the Fifth Amendment guarantee of due process.

We represent 13 Americans, including four military veterans, who are blacklisted from flying. At oral argument in June on motions for partial summary judgment, we asked the court to find that the government violated our clients’ Fifth Amendment right to due process by barring them from flying over U.S. airspace – and smearing them as suspected terrorists – without giving them any after-the-fact explanation or a hearing at which to clear their names.

The court’s opinion recognizes – for the first time – that inclusion on the No-Fly List is a draconian sanction that severely impacts peoples’ constitutionally-protected liberties. It rejected the government’s argument that No-Fly list placement was merely a restriction on the most “convenient” means of international travel.

Such an argument ignores the numerous reasons an individual may have for wanting or needing to travel overseas quickly such as for the birth of a child, the death of a loved one, a business opportunity, or a religious obligation.

According to the court, placement on the No-Fly List is like the revocation of a passport because both actions severely burden the right to international travel and give rise to a constitutional right to procedural due process:

Here it is undisputed that inclusion on the No-Fly List completely bans listed persons from boarding commercial flights to or from the United States or over United States air space.  Thus, Plaintiffs have shown their placement on the No-Fly List has in the past and will in the future severely restrict Plaintiffs’ ability to travel internationally. Moreover, the realistic implications of being on the No-Fly List are potentially far-reaching. For example, TSC [the Terrorist Screening Center] shares watchlist information with 22 foreign governments and United States Customs and Boarder [sic] Protection makes recommendations to ship captains as to whether a passenger poses a risk to transportation security, which can result in further interference with an individual’s ability to travel as evidenced by some Plaintiffs’ experiences as they attempted to travel abroad by boat and land and were either turned away or completed their journey only after an extraordinary amount of time, expense, and difficulty. Accordingly, the Court concludes on this record that Plaintiffs have a constitutionally-protected liberty interest in traveling internationally by air, which is affected by being placed on the list.

The court also found that the government’s inclusion of our clients on the No-Fly List smeared them as suspected terrorists and altered their ability to lawfully board planes, resulting in injury to another constitutionally-protected right: freedom from reputational harm.

The importance of these rulings is clear. Because inclusion on the No-Fly List harms our clients’ liberty interests in travel and reputation, due process requires the government to provide them an explanation and a hearing to correct the mistakes that led to their inclusion. But under the government’s “Glomar” policy, it refuses to provide any information confirming or denying that our clients are on the list, let alone an after-the-fact explanation and hearing.

The court has asked the ACLU and the government for more information about the No-Fly List redress procedure to help it decide the ultimate question of whether that system violates the Fifth Amendment right to due process. We are confident the court will recognize that the government’s “Glomar” policy of refusing even to confirm or deny our clients’ No-Fly List status (much less actually providing the reasons for their inclusion in the list) is fundamentally unfair and unconstitutional.

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

Misunderstanding, militarized

By Matt Erickson | LJWorld | August 21, 2013

[Jerry] Dobson, a professor of geography at Kansas University [KU], is the lead researcher on one of 14 projects to win grants this year from the Minerva Research Initiative, a U.S. Department of Defense effort to learn more about other parts of the world through social-science research.  He and other researchers will receive about $1.8 million over three years to study indigenous communities throughout Central America, with a possibility to apply for renewal and receive a total of $3 million over five years. […] “There are too many instances where misunderstanding of other areas has cost us,” Dobson said. From Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan, he says, the United States may have fared better in many of its conflicts over the past half-century with more knowledge about the culture and politics of other parts of the world.

Yes, the Bowman expeditions are back, rebooted by a Department of Defense Minerva grant, and soon to arrive in all seven Central American countries.  To study which indigenous peoples, exactly?  Usually in academia such things are not secret, but this project involves the US military.  After reading Erickson’s story I wrote Professor Dobson to ask for a copy of his research proposal.  In reply to my request, he sent me a link to one of his peevish essays.  I thanked him for the piece and asked for the proposal again; he replied by asking if I had read his essay—which, I gather, he sees as a scathing rebuke of critical scholars like me, hence an answer in itself.  That’s the thing about collaborating with the military: it makes you more cloistered and secretive.  The fraternal romance of power creeps in.  Pretty soon you don’t share basic information about your research with other scholars, even when the work is funded from the public and motivated, ostensibly, by a need to create an “informed public.”

In fairness to Professor Dobson, he has reason to be defensive.  His work has come under sharp criticism (see Joe Bryan’s essay, e.g., and its links).  I recently published a book, Geopiracy: Oaxaca, militant empiricism, and geographic thought, that examines how Dr. Dobson and other geographers from the University of Kansas went to Mexico to map indigenous lands with funds from the US military and, according to the communities they studied, failed to mention the source of their funds and their ties to the US military.  I won’t recapitulate the whole story (you can read Jeremy Crampton’s review here), but it’s worth remembering that the controversy started when indigenous communities in Oaxaca discovered the ties between the Bowman expeditions and the US military.  They rebelled, publishing a trio of public denunciations of the project, such as this 2009 letter from the community of San Miguel Tiltepec, Oaxaca:

[The geographers] never informed us that the data they collected in our community would be given to the Foreign Military Study Office (FMSO) of the Army of the United States, nor did they inform us that this institution was one of the sources of financing for the project.  Because of this, we consider that our General Assembly was tricked by the researchers, in order to draw out the information the[y] wanted.  The community did not request the research[;] it was the researchers who convinced the community to carry it out.  Thus, the research was not carried out due to the community’s need, it was the researchers […] who designed the research method in order to collect the type of information that truly interested them. […] [W]e wish to express to the public […] our complete disagreement with the research carried out in our community, since we were not properly informed of the true goals of the research, the use of the information obtained, and the sources of financing [for the entire statement, see Zoltan Grossman’s website].

The ‘Oaxaca controversy’ shocked many by revealing US military collaboration with academic geographers.  With his NSF/Minerva grant, Professor Dobson is again spearheading the military front within the discipline.  Although to read the coverage of his work in LJWorld, it seems the sole motivation is cultural understanding.

Thanks to the Public Records Office at the University of Kansas, I was able to obtain a copy of the proposal that won Dr. Dobson the $3 million.  As a scholarly proposal it is not worth serious discussion.  The text is comprised mainly of recycled bits of Bowman Expedition doggerel; superficially it resembles an NSF proposal, but the analytical architecture is just shoddy.  For instance, their research hypothesis is: “certain land tenure and land use practices will mean significant level of cultural resilience, with associated benefits, such as environmental conservation and tourism development…” (p 4).  Yet these “certain” practices are never defined and the brief theoretical discussion on land tenure relies mainly on a handful of US military sources.  Their methodology is to vacuum up as much material about indigenous communities as they can obtain and repackage everything into one giant “ArcGIS database of digital maps, data, and statistics” (p 5).

Nevertheless, the proposal contains these useful hints about the project.  Their fieldwork is based out of the Department of Anthropology at the National Autonomous University of Honduras (or UNAH) where they are collaborating with anthropologist Dr. Silva Gonzalez (p 5).  They aim to study all the municipalities in Central America where at least 30% of the population is indigenous as classified by language (p 7).  Presumably this means that they will conduct considerable fieldwork in Guatemala – home to the largest percentage of indigenous people in Central American – although, curiously, Honduras is the only country singled out for fieldwork in the proposal.

Less ambiguous are their promises about the project’s usefulness to the US military.  The proposal’s one-page ‘abstract’ includes this statement:

Impact on DoD Capabilities and Broader Implications for National Defense: The proposed research addresses recognized deficiencies in U. S. foreign policy, military strategy, and foreign intelligence.  DoD will gain new capabilities to conduct human geographic research, similar to but more advanced than those employed extensively in World Wars I and II.  DoD will benefit directly and abundantly from the openly-reported research and the geographic information disseminated and from a greatly improved pool of regional experts, an improved labor pool, and a better informed public in times of future political debates and conflict [my italics].

Never mind a weak analytical argument; this is the stuff that wins Minerva grants.

The Minerva program emerged out of the DoD circa 2007, i.e. the same era as the Bowman expeditions.  Through Minerva the DoD seeks to derive ideas and data about potential targets from US-based social scientists.  To do so, the Pentagon has teamed up with NSF (which engages the scholars and handles the money).  The funding isn’t enormous – a few million dollars per grant – but these are times when money is scarce and even research proposals rated as ‘excellent’ are not necessarily funded by NSF.  Ironically, the competitiveness of normal NSF (scientific) funding increases the prestige value of the Minerva (military) grants.  And the NSF helps some Minerva applicants assuage their fears that they are not actually conducting military research.  But make no mistake; it is the DoD’s money and they shape the agenda.  They will also certainly get the ArcGIS database being built by the Kansas geographers.

Geographers have not been at the forefront of the Minerva program; Dr. Dobson’s was, I believe, the only geography proposal funded in this year’s batch.  Among geographers there is practically nothing written on Minerva, but perhaps Dobson’s grant will change that (the Social Science Research Council has posted a useful overview on Minerva with some good essays, such as this one by Priya Satia at Stanford).  To grasp something of the psychology of those geographers working with the US military today, we are best served by studying the recent pair of extraordinary papers published by Trevor Barnes on Walter Christaller’s work for the Nazi regime (including this one, coauthored with Claudio Minca, in Annals of the AAG 103(3)).  And in times of Bowman redux, we should reread the late Neil Smith’s outstanding biography of Isaiah Bowman, American Empire:

[C]iting the ‘growing influence of geography among military men,’ [Bowman] even urged the War Department [today’s Department of Defense] to send some officers to the AGS [sponsor of today’s Bowman expeditions] to advance their studies in ‘the field of geography as applied to military operations’.  He hedged about whether Latin American governments should be informed.  What became of these plans tendering geography for the purpose of government spying is not clear.  There have always been social scientists who have collaborated with government intelligence organizations, and from the time of the Roman geographer Strabo to the current CIA [headed by Petraeus], geography as a scholarly pursuit has traditionally operated as a handmaiden to the state.  But the great majority of scholars have traditionally frowned on collusion with military intelligence operations, and scholarly associations often carry explicit prohibitions against spying. […] What is remarkable about Bowman’s injudicious peddling of geography and the services of the AGS is the lack of any sense that his eager cooperation with Military Intelligence, the government’s premier spy agency of this period, in any way compromises his scientific integrity or endangers scientists (pp. 89-90).

The Bowman Expeditions represent only one side-project for the US state/military and a small one at that.  Thanks to Edward Snowden, the NSA’s spying has been exposed and we’ve learned how hundreds of thousands of people in the US have been subject to government surveillance.  The situation is much worse when we consider US state surveillance of the rest of the world.  The task of systematically collecting geospatial data and conducting routine surveillance around the world for the US state/military falls to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), an organization that has not received the scrutiny given to the NSA.  (On the NSA revelations and the NGA, see Jeremy Crampton’s excellent essay at the Society and Space website.)  No less worrying are the myriad military programs to improve how the US armed forces – particularly the Army – ‘uses’ human geography as a weapon.  As I have discussed elsewhere, these are geographical projects of much greater significance than the Bowman expeditions and led by people who are more dangerous than Professor Dobson.

We are witnessing an unprecedented attempt by one state to collect data – much of it geocoded – from multiple sources (data mining, satellites, outright spying, and much more), reaching into the most intimate spaces of our lives and saturating our very means of communication.  The US government has constructed an unparalleled platform for geospatial data collection and analyses, capable of mapping people’s movements and communications across the entire planet.  All of this has potential military ‘applications’, meaning the potential to harm people, including US citizens (since we can have little faith that these tools cannot be used on civilians through police, FBI, or other agencies).  The capacity of the US state/military to locate, follow, track, and kill people is without precedent and without equal, and that is the point.  Given the extraordinary record of violence carried out by the US government over the past century – from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan – one would have to have an almost religious faith in the infallibility of US leadership and the rightness of their ideology not to look at the government’s military/intelligence capacities and feel enraged at the injustices already committed—and the many more to come.

What are we to do?  One way to answer this question, as Professor Dobson reminds us, is to ask how we can “reduce international misunderstandings.”  His approach is to militarize those misunderstandings by providing maps and data to the Pentagon.  There is another way, one elaborated beautifully by Edward Said in a 1991 interview.  Allow me to quote at length:

There’s only one way to anchor oneself [as an intellectual], and that is by affiliation with a cause, a political movement.  There has to be identification not with the secretary of state or the leading philosopher of the time but with matters involving justice, principle, truth, conviction.  Those don’t occur in a laboratory or a library.  For the American intellectual, that means, at bottom, that the relationship between the United States and the rest of the world, now based upon profit and power, has to be altered to one of coexistence among human communities that can make and remake their own histories and environments together. … [Unfortunately, even] inside the university, the prevalence of norms based upon domination and coercion is so strong because the idea of authority is so strong, whether it’s derived from the nation-state, from religion, from the ethnos, from tradition. … Part of intellectual work is understanding how authority is formed.  Authority is not God-given.  It’s secular.  And if you can understand that, then your work is conducted in such a way as to be able to provide alternatives to the authoritative and coercive norms that dominate so much of our intellectual life, our national and political life, and our international life above all.

If we are going to criticize the formation of authority and provide alternatives to the norms that dominate intellectual life, we have no choice: we must confront the US military.

~

Joel Wainwright is an Associate Professor in Geography at The Ohio State University. His most recent book Geopiracy: Oaxaca, Militant Empiricism, and Geographical Thought delivers an expanded critique of the first round of Bowman expeditions.

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August 29, 2013 Posted by | Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Palestinian schools in Jerusalem offered money to switch to Israeli curriculum

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Al-Akhbar | August 28, 2013

Several Palestinian schools in Jerusalem will incorporate Israeli educational material in their curriculum after receiving financial incentives from Israeli officials, Ma’an news agency reported on Wednesday.

An education official told Ma’an that the Israeli municipality in Jerusalem had offered increased salaries for teachers and principals who implement Israeli course material in the classes, bringing an estimated $550 for each student enrolled in schools agreeing to the switch.

Some Palestinian and Israeli school principals and teachers met in Tel Aviv last week to discuss the change, the official added.

Jerusalem’s director of education Samir Jibril said at least five Palestinian schools in Jerusalem will switch from Palestinian Authority to Israeli education plans at certain grade levels.

“This step is very dangerous and touches the awareness of Palestinians in Jerusalem in an effort to brainwash them and control them, especially young generations,” a teacher identifying only as Jibril told Ma’an.

The Israeli curriculum purportedly includes maps marking the West Bank as part of Israel and identifying territories by their Jewish Biblical names.

The history material also identifies Jerusalem as the capital of Israel despite the fact that the United Nations and most states do not recognize Israel’s claim on the city.

The apartheid wall in the West Bank is also referred to as Israel’s security fence, and Israel is described as a bastion of human rights and democracy.

Another section depicts a conversation between Arab students who praise Israel’s development of Palestinian cities and decide to sing the Israeli national anthem.

(Al-Akhbar, Ma’an)

August 28, 2013 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Honduras: Congress Resurrects Military Police Force

Weekly News Update on the Americas | August 25, 2013

Honduras’ National Congress voted on Aug. 21 to approve a law creating the Military Police of Public Order (PMOP), a new 5,000-member police unit composed of army reservists under the control of the military. This will be in addition to a 4,500-member “community police” force that the government is forming, according to an Aug. 12 announcement by Security Minister Arturo Corrales. Although he called the move a “change of course,” Corrales failed to explain the difference between the community police, which is to be operative by September, and the existing national police force.

The government’s plan to raise the number of police agents by 9,500 is clearly meant to respond to the dramatic increase in crime in Honduras; according to the United Nations, the country now has an annual murder rate of 84 for every 100,000 people, the highest in the world. Police corruption is a major problem, and police agents have been convicted of high-profile crimes [see Update #1187]. The current police force had 14,472 agents on the payroll as of May, but in a new police scandal, only 9,350 agents could be found at work during July.

The police changes come as candidates prepare for Nov. 24 general elections, which will choose a new president, the 128 members of Congress, the 20 representatives to the Central American Parliament (PARLACEN), and local mayors [Update #1162]. The main force behind the new military police is Juan Orlando Hernández, who has resigned from his post as president of the National Congress to run as the presidential candidate of the center-right National Party (PN)—the party of current president Porfirio (“Pepe”) Lobo Sosa, who has governed Honduras since January 2010 without being able to contain the crime wave.

Human rights activists strongly oppose the proposed military police unit. “In no part of the world have the soldiers resolved security problems,” Omar Rivera, who directs the Alliance for Peace and Justice (APJ), a coalition of civil society, organizations, told the French wire service AFP. He added that a serious fight against crime would require a fight against impunity. Bertha Oliva, the coordinator of the Committee of Relatives of Disappeared Detainees in Honduras (COFADEH), called the creation of the new force “a step backwards in the demilitarization of society and the democratization of the country.” “The soldiers in the streets have only left more death and mourning, because they aren’t prepared for being guarantors of security,” she said. The national police were removed from the military and put under civilian control in 1997. Death squads operated by the military and the police were implicated in the killings of 184 government opponents in the 1980s.

Critics also asked how the government would be able to pay for two new police units that would double the current number of active agents. José Simón Azcona, a legislative deputy from the centrist Liberal Party (PL) who supported the measure, suggested that the US would pay. The US government “offered collaboration… under the previous administration” for the conversion of four military battalions into police units, he said. (It is unclear whether he was referring to a previous administration in Honduras or in the US.) (El Nuevo Diario (Nicaragua) 8/12/13 from ACAN-EFE; Honduras Culture and Politics 8/22/13; El Heraldo (Tegucigalpa) 8/22/13; La Nación (Costa Rica) 8/23/13 from AFP, EFE; Prensa Latina 8/24/13)

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August 27, 2013 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Full Spectrum Dominance, Militarism | , , , , | Leave a comment

U.S. spied on UN: German weekly

Xinhua | August 26, 2013

BERLIN — The U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) bugged the video conferencing system at the UN headquarters in New York and cracked its encryption, German weekly Der Spiegel reported Sunday.

The tapping scheme succeeded in the summer of 2012, the magazine said, citing secret documents disclosed by former U.S. intelligence contractor Edward Snowden.

The move offered the NSA “a dramatic improvement of data on video conferencing and the ability to decrypt that data,” a quoted document said, noting that the number of decrypted communications jumped from 12 to 458 within three weeks.

Der Spiegel also reported that the U.S. intelligence agency spied on the European Union mission after it moved to its new embassy in New York last September.

The new embassy’s plans, as well as its IT infrastructure and servers, were among the copies of relevant NSA documents provided Snowden.

According to the documents analyzed by the weekly, the NSA also ran a monitoring program covering more than 80 embassies and consulates worldwide.

The program was called “the Special Collection Service” and operated without the knowledge of the host country, said the magazine.

NSA documents urged to keep the existence of the program as a secret at all costs, as “relations with the host country would be seriously damaged” if it was leaked, Der Spiegel reported.

Revelations about PRISM and other surveillance programs that obtain personal information by hacking phone calls and emails have embarrassed Washington and triggered outrage around the world.

Some EU privacy watchdogs are demanding an independent investigation into the extent of PRISM as well as other platforms used by the NSA.

U.S. President Barack Obama defended the spying program as a “modest encroachment” on privacy necessary to prevent terror attacks, but pledged to overhaul U.S. surveillance and turn it more transparent.

August 26, 2013 Posted by | Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , | Leave a comment

Egyptian media outlet condemns government intimidation

MEMO | August 26, 2013

The Cairo-based Rassd News Network has condemned the latest intimidation by the coup government which has seen the killing and arbitrary arrests of journalists, including of five of its own correspondents. The network’s Executive Director, Samihi Mustafa, and founding member Dr Abdullah Al-Fakharani are among those detained by the authorities since the start of the bloody campaign against anti-coup demonstrators.

According to Rassd, neither Al-Fakharani nor Mustafa, the father of a new-born boy, were armed when they were arrested. “They were only armed with the truth about what is going on out there,” said a spokesperson. “Professional journalists are attempting to break the media blackout imposed by the coup authorities and government-controlled media on what is happening in Egypt.” Freedom of expression, it was pointed out, is a basic human right.

Describing a “savage and vengeful” campaign of arrests, the spokesperson said that the government is targeting Rassd journalists after killing photographer Musaab Al-Shami while he was covering the violent assault on Rabaa Al-Adawiyya Square. He was shot in the head and chest by soldiers. Rassd correspondents Mahmoud Abdul-Nabi and his brother Ibrahim, both professional journalists, were arrested in Alexandria at the start of the coup. Both men are on hunger strike in protest at the conditions under which they are being held by the authorities.

Rassd not only condemned the killing, arrest and harassment of its staff but also holds the Egyptian coup government fully responsible for the safety and well-being of those in detention. It demanded their immediate release.

“We will not give up in our efforts to protect human rights and the right of journalists to carry out their work unimpeded by the brutal acts of the security forces,” said the Rassd spokesperson. “We will use all legal means to defend them and to hold accountable those responsible for their illegal detention.”

The network insists that it remains committed to the professional ethics of journalism, including accuracy, balance, independence and integrity, to convey the truth as it is without any bias or distortion. Rassd appealed to all colleagues in the profession, international press associations and human rights organisations to stand by all detained journalists, to press for their release, and to ensure their right to work without threats or harassment.

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August 26, 2013 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

Creating Chilling Effects On Speech Is A Feature, Not A Bug, Of The Surveillance State

By Mike Masnick | Techdirt | August 23, 2013

We’ve discussed a few times how the pervasive surveillance efforts of the NSA and others have tremendous chilling effects on how people communicate and how they act. We’ve discussed how this is a “cost” to the program that not many, especially those who are backing these programs, seem interested in measuring or even thinking about. Of course, implicit in our assumption is that these “costs” are things that are negatives of the program. Others would point out that for those in power, that’s not so much a cost as a benefit. It’s not a bug or an unintended consequence, but a feature. Chilling speech and clamping down on communications? Why that’s a good thing for those in power.

Josh Levy, from Free Press, has a great guest post over at Boing Boing where he discusses how the NSA’s surveillance regime is a huge attack on free speech, and how this is both inevitable, and for some, the intent of the program:

The chilling of free speech isn’t just a consequence of surveillance. It’s also a motive. We adopt the art of self-censorship, closing down blogs, watching what we say on Facebook, forgoing “private” email for fear that any errant word may come back to haunt us in one, five or fifteen 15 years. “The mind’s tendency to still feel observed when alone… can be inhibiting,” writes Janna Malamud Smith. Indeed.

Peggy Noonan, describing a conversation with longtime civil liberties advocate Nat Hentoff, writes that “the inevitable end of surveillance is self-censorship.”

Hentoff stressed that privacy invasions of this magnitude are “attempts to try to change who we are as Americans.” In fact, they are attempts to define who we are as human beings.

Meanwhile, over at the Atlantic, Bruce Schneier has a post discussing the detainment of David Miranda, where he comes to similar conclusions, that these authoritarian police states clearly have no practical benefit, except to enable a powerful government to show off its power to invade your lives:

This leaves one last possible explanation — those in power were angry and impulsively acted on that anger. They’re lashing out: sending a message and demonstrating that they’re not to be messed with — that the normal rules of polite conduct don’t apply to people who screw with them. That’s probably the scariest explanation of all. Both the U.S. and U.K. intelligence apparatuses have enormous money and power, and they have already demonstrated that they are willing to ignore their own laws. Once they start wielding that power unthinkingly, it could get really bad for everyone.

Of course, Schneier sees some upside to this in the long run — which is that such blatantly ridiculous activity seems to only embolden others to push back on this trampling of our rights. Hopefully, that pushback works, because the alternative is horrifying to those who believe in a free and open society.

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August 24, 2013 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Solidarity and Activism, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Independent Media as Vehicle for Character Assassination

By Kim Petersen | Dissident Voice | August 23, 2013

Common decency demands that when someone slanders you in a public forum that you should have the right to respond in that same forum.

TRNN is an independent news network that provides thought-provoking news, analysis, and commentary. TRNN is much more than news headlines. For the greatest part, news events are reported in context and with relevant background information. This distinguishes TRNN very much from state and corporate media news. In addition, TRNN senior editor Paul Jay is very adept at playing devil’s advocate, laying out the corporate media/government line whereby guest analysts can probe and expose propaganda and disinformation.

Since criticizing the corporate media is very much like flogging a dead horse and because getting the real news out there is so important, I tend to focus my media criticism on TRNN. For instance, I criticized TRNN for parroting a corporate-state media message about North Korea (without providing relevant background information).1 Its US electoral coverage in 2008 and 2012 was fundamentally anti-democratic because of its inordinate focus on the evilist parties rather than allotting equal coverage to all parties (albeit third party coverage did increase from 2008 to 2012).

Recently TRNN has been presenting a series called “Reality Asserts Itself.” Some fine insight has been provided by Chris Hedges, Vijay Prashad, and Max Blumenthal. However, in a recent installment of the show, Blumenthal engaged in, what can best be described as, character assassination. Blumenthal’s target was the jazz musician/author Gilad Atzmon.2

At the beginning of the segment, Jay stated “some criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic.” Jay provided no examples of this. I am failing to see how criticism of a state can be construed as anti-the people. If someone criticizes the Canadian state, should he also be construed as anti-Canadian? I have heard of people who criticized the United States subsequently being denounced as anti-American, but outside of the examples of criticizing Israel or the US, I have seldom, if ever, encountered charges of being anti-the people because of criticizing the people’s state. Maybe what Jay claims could be true, but as its stands, what he has said is just an assertion.3

Blumenthal responded “some who criticize Israel are anti-Semites.” This is likeliest true. And Jay agreed.

Blumenthal continued, charging that some of Israel’s critics are neo-fascists, racists, Islomophobic, and fearful of the Other.

Then Blumenthal launched into his character assassination of Gilad Atzmon “who,” claims Blumenthal, “pretends to be an anti-Zionist but is actually just pure anti-Semitic.” Without specific examples, Blumenthal’s charge amounts to pure ad hominem. Ad hominem, as Israel critic Noam Chomsky argued, is a despicable tactic:

If someone calls you an anti-Semite, what can you say? I’m not an anti-Semite? If someone says you’re a racist, you’re a Nazi or something, you always lose. The person who throws the mud always wins because there is no way of responding to such charges.4

There’s something unsettling and peculiar in denouncing racism (holding derogatory opinions or beliefs about the entirety of a particular group – ethnic, religious, gender, national, etc.) and then engaging in, what can be labeled as, personism (holding derogatory opinions about a person based on who one believes – as opposed to knows — that person is).

Jay appeared caught-off-guard by Blumenthal’s calumny; he left the character assassination unchallenged, and he quickly moved on to the next topic.

Atzmon says Blumenthal has not read his book,5 The Wandering Who.6 ‎ Since Blumenthal did not provide evidence for his ad hominem other than hearsay, his acerbic position is mired in epistemological quicksand.

Jay also allowed his guest to denigrate historical revisionists — Holocaust deniers Blumenthal calls them. That might also be more ad hominem. The right to challenge the historical record and narrative must be inalienable, otherwise history risks becoming mere propaganda.7 Nonetheless, Blumenthal did proffer an explanation for his attack noting that historical revisionists told him they dislike Jews because they are liberals.

I have read Atzmon’s book. Unless it is racist to explore the relations among Jews and how they integrate or separate from others, view the Other, accept or oppose occupation, then the book is not anti-Semitic. There is a certain tribalism among Jews. This is true among many groups except the tribalism takes the form of allegiance to a nation state (referred to as patriotism) rather than to a pseudo ethnic/religious affiliation.

I do not need to defend Atzmon; he can do that quite well himself. What I will call for is Atzmon’s right to defend himself in the same forum.

Does TRNN want a free thinking viewership who consider the facts, analysis, and conclusions presented and arrive at their own reason-based conclusions after examining, discussing with others, cogitating over the facts, and testing the cogency of the logic? Or does TRNN want viewers who uncritically accept what is said on their reports as gospel? It must not be the latter as this would thoroughly undermine the raison d’être of The Real News Network.

Consequently, since TRNN has allowed its program to be used as a vehicle for character assassination, it is incumbent on an ethical, professional, self-respecting, viewer-respecting news organization to allow the maligned Gilad Atzmon a chance at an on-air rebuttal.

  1. See Kim Petersen, “Independent Media as Mouthpiece for Centers of Power,” Dissident Voice, 28 May 2010.
  2. See “Israel, Anti-Semitism, and Negotiations Without End,” TRNN, 22 August 2013.
  3. During this episode of “Reality Asserts Itself,” Jay and Blumental both disdained, and rightfully so, anti-Semitism, anti-Arabism, Islamophobia, Zionism, and racism in general.
  4. From Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick’s documentary Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media NFB, 1992. Cited in Kim Petersen, “Anti,” Dissident Voice, 6 April 2004.
  5. Gilad Atzmon, “Max Blumenthal on Anti Semitism, Neo Fascists and Gilad Atzmon (Amusing As Well As Tragic),” 22 August 2013.
  6. See review.
  7. See Kim Petersen, “Progressivism, Skepticism, and Historical Revisionism: The Inalienable Right to Question History,” Dissident Voice, 19 December 2005.

Kim Petersen can be reached at: kim@dissidentvoice.org.

August 23, 2013 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , | Leave a comment

The Terrifying World of Electronic Monitoring

By JAMES KILGORE | August 23, 2013

I spend a considerable part of my life doing research and writing about electronic monitors-those  black plastic ankle bracelets best known for landing on the legs of a number of the rich and notorious-Martha Stewart, Paris Hilton, Michael Vick, and Charley Sheen, just to name a few.  I hear stories about house arrest and the absurd sets of obstacles authorities put in peoples’ way as they try to wend their way back into life post-incarceration while being tracked by the latest technology.

I reflect a lot about little computer chips and spying and what some lawyers call the deprivation of liberty by technological means.  In essence, electronic monitoring is about tracking and marking. The GPS technology that is trending  in electronic monitors tracks people’s every movement with the purpose of marking them for punishment if they deviate from the program (or at least if the technology reports that they have deviated from the program.)

Though everyone keeps telling me that at least being on a monitor is better than being in prison, (which I agree with, having done both) I keep telling them they are missing the point. The point is that we need to have some control over this technology, some clear rules, guidelines and ideas about what it should and should not be allowed to do, that while it may be applied to those “guilty” of a crime today, we don’t actually know who is next.

Edward Snowden’s revelations have awakened people to this sort of reality since NSA surveillance is all about tracking and marking. Only the NSA is monitoring everyone-tracking and marking, though none of us are exactly sure who is being marked, why they are being marked or what the consequences of that marking will be. We are leaving the whole process to the security and technology experts to decide. They will determine what patterns of telecommunications amount to a threat or a violation warranting action by the authorities.

None of this comes as a big shock to me since I have seen how with the advance of GPS, people on parole who are minding their own business trying to do what normal people do-shop, get their laundry done, play with their child in the park, are constantly presented with the record of their movements.  If they stop at an address that is not on the approved list, if they go to a store that is not on the approved list they run the risk of being violated and either kept under lockdown (24 hour a day house arrest) or sent back to prison.

Not long ago I heard the story of a man who stopped for nine minutes at a house a block away from where he lived to ask about some things the owner was selling. Those nine minutes got sent to the parole office via his GPS tracker and he got a few days of lockdown in response.  The neighbor’s address was not on the approved list.

And then there are the dozen cases in Wisconsin unveiled by journalist Mario Koran where the GPS device falsely reported people  as out of the house when they were at home.  Aaron Hicks served 51 days in jail for what he claims was one of those false violations. You can’t argue with the facts. As one man on monitoring who chose to remain anonymous because he’s still on parole told me, “we are the guinea pigs.”

But this mark and track process hit a new low last week with the release of Gregory Johnsen’s Atlantic magazine story about an eight year old Yemeni boy named Barq al-Kulaybi.  Once an impoverished  street child in the village of Baty-al-Ahmar, al-Kulaybi had been taken in by an apparently kind man named Adnan al-Qadhi.  Unbeknownst to the little boy, Yemeni authorities (and likely the CIA)  suspected al-Qadhi of having links with Al Qaeda.  In a bizarre translated video, al-Kulaybi told the story of how last year his biological father, a member of the Yemeni  Republican Guard, and some fellow security personnel persuaded him to plant a computer chip on al-Qadhi.  Given precise instructions on how to activate the chip, the boy explained how he dropped it into the man’s coat pocket when al-Qadhi was out of the room.  The boy had kicked off a track and mark process with a tragic ending.  On November 7, 2012 a US drone strike killed al-Qadhi. Subsequently, Al Qaeda kidnapped the boy and his father and produced the video mentioned above.  According to a Johnsen interview on Democracy Now, Al-Qaeda has apparently executed the boy’s father.  Tracking and marking can be a deadly business.

The story of Barq al-Kulaybi is disturbing on many levels.  The use of an eight year old boy as an operative in this instance qualifies as one of the low points even in the murky amoral world of surveillance.  But the real problem is that like with the NSA monitors and with the parole agents who put people on lockdown at their own discretion, there is no process of accountability, not even any transparent guidelines of operation.  The technology experts (read: boys with toys) are in the driver’s seat and following a map that no one else can see, much less read. I wish the case of Barq al-Kulaybi would give people pause, would at least occasion a few  sighs of distress before we think about how small these chips are going to be in the future, all the new “apps” they will have, who will control them and whose pocket they may end up in. Who is next to be tracked and marked? By the way, have you switched off your cellphone?

James Kilgore is a research scholar at the Center for African Studies at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign). He writes on issues of mass incarceration with a focus on electronic monitoring and labor. He is also the author of three novels, all of which he drafted during his six and a half years in prison, 2002-09.  He can be contacted at waazn1@gmail.com

Source

August 23, 2013 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

Terms and Conditions May Apply

August 18, 2013

This is an important and frightening film, about how Google, Amzaon, Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Linkdin – and IMDb? – harvest our personal information and onsell it to the highest bidder, or to the government. How we don’t read that wodge of text in capitals comprising “Terms and conditions” before we click “Accept” – nobody could, it would take a month per year for everything we sign. But even when that text is brief and written in plain English, it gives those corporations unprecedented power over our personal information – including the right to change the rules without telling us, to increase their power without limit and without asking again, and to keep it forever, even after we have “deleted” it.

August 23, 2013 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , , , , | Leave a comment

NSA Program Found Unconstitutional Went On For 3 Years; Started Right After Telcos Got Immunity

By Mike Masnick | Techdirt | August 21, 2013

A further delve into the latest NSA surveillance bombshell from the WSJ highlights the ridiculousness of the claims that there were “no violations” by the NSA over the years. We’ve been aware for a while that the FISC ruled a certain NSA program unconstitutional, but the details had been kept secret. It only came out that something was found unconstitutional a year ago, through the efforts of Senator Ron Wyden. Since then, people have been digging for more. The DOJ finally has agreed to release a redacted version of the FISC ruling after fighting it for a while, but as we wait, some more details have been coming out. Last week’s Washington Post story about abuses claimed that this particular program wasn’t reported to the FISC for “many months.”

Yet, as we mentioned last night, the WSJ article claims that the program actually went on for three years:

For example, a recent Snowden document showed that the surveillance court ruled that the NSA had set up an unconstitutional collection effort. Officials say it was an unintentional mistake made in 2008 when it set filters on programs like these that monitor Internet traffic; NSA uncovered the inappropriate filtering in 2011 and reported it.

No biggie. The NSA just illegally collected information that clearly violated the 4th Amendment (even the rubberstamp FISC says so!) for three years. But there’s no abuse. No sir. No problems at all.

Marcy Wheeler, however, puts two and two together, and notes that the “start” of this admitted unconstitutional spying was in 2008 — which is exactly when the telcos received immunity from all such cases involving warrantless wiretapping. And, so, she points out the administration and various NSA defenders may actually be using an incredibly twisted level of reasoning to claim that this program that violated the 4th Amendment doesn’t count as a “violation” because since the telcos have immunity, there’s no one to “prosecute” for breaking the law. Under this twisted interpretation, the government grants telcos retroactive immunity on such surveillance, and can then use that immunity to pretend that everything it does is legal since the telcos can’t be prosecuted. If that turns out to be true, it’s downright evil.

And, you wonder why the key part of CISPA was to basically extend blanket immunity on privacy violations between not just telcos and the government, but basically all tech companies. The more immunity the government grants, the more “legal” all its actions become. It’s sickening.

August 22, 2013 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | Leave a comment

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