EU subservient to US – Irish MP who called Obama ‘war criminal’
RT | July 12, 2013
Standing up to one’s government is becoming the only way for citizens to stop the spread of Western imperialism and its double standards, said Clare Daly, the now famous Irish MP who lambasted President Obama at Northern Ireland’s G8 summit.
RT recently interviewed Daly, discussing matters of politics, economics and human rights set against a backdrop of US pressure on the world to comply with its vision.
Despite hefty political backlash incurred after the summit for calling Obama a “war criminal,” Daly appeared optimistic that her views were shared by many across the world. She ultimately believes, she said, that it is those people across Europe and America who should scrutinize their politicians and demand greater accountability in foreign affairs and a lesser flexibility to US coercion where matters like war in the Middle East and the fate of whistleblowers are concerned.
Speaking of Ireland, which some may remember was the subject of her attack at the summit, she complained of the country’s “unprecedented slobbering” whenever Obama appeared on the horizon, saying that, “It’s hard to know which is worse, whether it’s the outpourings of the Obamas themselves, or the sycophantic fawning over them by sections of the media and the political establishment.”
But she also takes a more encompassing view of things, underlining the suffering of the austerity-ridden Irish.
“When Obama visited, [the government] would make no points of criticism, everything was wonderful. We must get American companies into this country to create employment, but the reality is that most of the American companies come to avoid paying their taxes at home and in Ireland, which means it is ordinary people who suffer, and the very wealthy are those who want these companies to benefit,” she said, emphasizing Europe’s economic subservience to the United States.
The political and moral implications of this subservience are Daly’s main targets.
Ireland, she says, is a neutral country. But that policy loses meaning already at Ireland’s Shannon airport: whether it is the government’s ignoring of planes armed to the teeth, or suspicious cargo that could be anything from arms deliveries for third parties, to prisoners being relayed for rendition by the CIA, there is a relationship of unquestioning submissiveness when it comes to the Irish government and the US.
“The arrangement is that when a military aircraft lands on our territory, they are not supposed to be armed, carrying explosives, weapons, not engaged in intelligence or in any military exercise. But our question is, how do we know they are not providing ammunition for Syria? We don’t know that, because the Irish government won’t investigate or carry out inspections of those flights as they should.”
“They never go on to an aircraft when the US carries people suspected of being trafficked on rendition flights – do they ask them about passports? The Irish government turned a blind eye on that.”
The opposite logic was applied to the rumor of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden stopping over in Ireland on a commercial flight from Moscow to Cuba, with the Americans sending a provisional arrest warrant to the Irish in the hopes that they would hand him over. Daly herself is a great supporter of Snowden’s struggle and considers him an international hero.
And Daly is not surprised with the lax attitude European governments took to Snowden’s revelations about the US spying on the world and its governments. She believes those governments ultimately want the same thing, on the one hand, and on the other – they fear economic and political pressure from the US.
“They have a reason to be fearful because the United States is using its weight – its economic weight, in some instances, and its military weight in others – to intimidate those countries. I think we saw that graphically with Ecuador – threatening to take their trade preferences from them if they were to give him asylum.”
The grounding of the Bolivian president’s plane in Vienna and the collusion of every major Western European country in the incident is seen by Daly as a supreme example of this process.
Her final conclusion is that ordinary people must not give up the fight for what they believe is right. And that fight must encompass all spheres of life – from economics to politics and to the defense of people and whistleblowers of all kinds – because their governments appear unwilling to take the stance against US hegemony themselves.
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Microsoft helped the NSA bypass encryption, new Snowden leak reveals
RT | July 11, 2013
Microsoft worked hand-in-hand with the United States government in order to allow federal investigators to bypass encryption mechanisms meant to protect the privacy of millions of users, Edward Snowden told The Guardian.
According to an article published on Thursday by the British newspaper, internal National Security Agency memos show that Microsoft actually helped the federal government find a way to decrypt messages sent over select platforms, including Outlook.com Web chat, Hotmail email service, and Skype.
The Guardian wrote that Snowden, the 30-year-old former systems administrator for NSA contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, provided the paper with files detailing a sophisticated relationship between America’s intelligence sector and Silicon Valley.
The documents, which are reportedly marked top-secret, come in the wake of other high-profile disclosures attributed to Snowden since he first started collaborating with the paper for articles published beginning June 6. The United States government has since indicted Snowden under the Espionage Act, and he has requested asylum from no fewer than 20 foreign nations.
Thursday’s article is authored by Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, two journalists who interviewed Snowden at length before he publicly revealed himself to be the source of the NSA leaks. They are joined by co-authors Ewen MacAskill, Spencer Ackerman and Dominic Rushe, who wrote that the classified documents not only reveal the degree in which Microsoft worked with the feds, but also detail the PRISM internet surveillance program. The US government’s relationships with tech companies are also included in the documents, according to the journalists.
“The latest NSA revelations further expose the tensions between Silicon Valley and the Obama administration,” the journalists wrote. “All the major tech firms are lobbying the government to allow them to disclose more fully the extent and nature of their cooperation with the NSA to meet their customers’ privacy concerns. Privately, tech executives are at pains to distance themselves from claims of collaboration and teamwork given by the NSA documents, and insist the process is driven by legal compulsion.”
In the case of Microsoft, however, it appears as if the Bill Gates-founded tech company went out of its way to assist federal investigators.
Among the discoveries made by the latest Snowden leaks, Guardian journalists say that Microsoft specifically aided the NSA in circumventing encrypted chat messages sent over the Outlook.com portal before the product was even launched to the public.
“The files show that the NSA became concerned about the interception of encrypted chats on Microsoft’s Outlook.com portal from the moment the company began testing the service in July last year,” they wrote. “Within five months, the documents explain, Microsoft and the FBI had come up with a solution that allowed the NSA to circumvent encryption on Outlook.com chats.”
According to internal documents cited by the journalists, Microsoft “developed a surveillance capability” that was launched “to deal” with the feds’ concerns that they’d be unable to wiretap encrypted communications conducted over the Web in real time.
“These solutions were successfully tested and went live 12 Dec 2012,” the memo claims, two months before the Outlook.com portal was officially launched.
In a tweet, Greenwald wrote that “the ‘document’ for the Microsoft story is an internal, ongoing NSA bulletin over 3 years,” and that The Guardian “quoted all relevant parts.” The document is not included in the article.
The Guardian revealed that Microsoft worked with intelligence agencies in order to let administrators of the PRISM data collection program easily access user intelligence submitted through its cloud storage service SkyDrive, as well as Skype.
“Skype, which was bought by Microsoft in October 2011, worked with intelligence agencies last year to allow Prism to collect video of conversations as well as audio,” the journalists wrote.
That allegation comes in stark contrast to claims made previously by Skype, in which it swore to protect the privacy of its users. RT reported previously that earlier documentation supplied by Snowden showed that the government possesses the ability to listen in or watch Skype chats “when one end of the call is a conventional telephone and for any combination of ‘audio, video, chat and file transfers’ when Skype users connect by computer alone.”
RT earlier acknowledged that Microsoft obtained a patent last summer that provides for “legal intercept” technology. The technology allows agents to “silently copy communication transmitted via the communication session” without asking for user authorization. In recent weeks, however, Microsoft has attacked the government over its secretive spy powers and even asked the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court if it could be more transparent in discussing the details of FISA requests compiling tech companies for data.
“We continue to believe that what we are permitted to publish continues to fall short of what is needed to help the community understand and debate these issues,” Microsoft Vice President John Frank wrote last month.
“In the past, Skype made affirmative promises to users about their inability to perform wiretaps,” Chris Soghoian of the American Civil Liberties Union told The Guardian. “It’s hard to square Microsoft’s secret collaboration with the NSA with its high-profile efforts to compete on privacy with Google.”
Earlier this week, Yahoo requested that the FISA court unseal documents from its own FISA battle. The court ruling in 2008 compelled Yahoo – and later other Silicon Valley entities – to supply the government with user data without requiring a warrant.
“Blanket orders from the secret surveillance court allow these communications to be collected without an individual warrant if the NSA operative has a 51 percent belief that the target is not a US citizen and is not on US soil at the time,” The Guardian reporters wrote. “Targeting US citizens does require an individual warrant, but the NSA is able to collect Americans’ communications without a warrant if the target is a foreign national located overseas.”
During a March press conference, FBI general counsel Andrew Weissman said that federal investigators plan on being able to wiretap any real-time Internet conversation by the end of 2014.
“You do have laws that say you need to keep things for a certain amount of time, but in the cyber realm you can have companies that keep things for five minutes,” he said. “You can imagine totally legitimate reasons for that, but you can also imagine how enticing that ability is for people who are up to no good because the evidence comes and it goes.”
Former CIA officer Ray McGovern expanded further on the subject to RT, remembering the Bush presidency and how unsurprising it is that this sort of breach of rights continues to exist.
“If you look at what happened when Bush, Cheney and General Hayden – who was head of the NSA at the time – deliberately violated the law to eavesdrop on Americans without a warrant, did the telecommunications companies cooperate? Verizon, AT&T…All the giants did…the one that didn’t was Quest. And what happened to Quest? Well, the CEO ended up in jail – and he still might be in jail – on some unrelated charges.”
Later the Congress voted to hold everyone in an innocent light, including the companies who were complicit in the spying. So there is absolutely no disincentive not to engage in violating people’s rights, McGovern warns.
Related article
NSA Spying on Latin American Countries Included Targeting of Trade Secrets
By Noel Brinkerhoff | AllGov | July 11, 2013
The United States has been accused of spying on numerous countries in Latin America in an effort to collect intelligence on trade secrets and military capabilities.
Using information provided by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden, a Brazilian newspaper, O Globo, published a story that said the U.S. spy agency has gathered data on telephone calls and emails from Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Venezuela and others.
The account indicated that the NSA had collected military and security data on countries including Venezuela, while also carrying out surveillance operations to acquire trade secrets from within the oil industry in Venezuela and the energy sector in Mexico.
O Globo also published a story over the weekend saying Brazil was a major target of the NSA’s global spying on telecommunications, which involved the cooperation of American and Brazilian companies (which were not named).
It was additionally reported that the CIA and NSA jointly operated monitoring stations to gain foreign satellite data in 65 countries, including five in Latin America.
In response to the accusations, the U.S. ambassador to Brazil, Thomas Shannon, reportedly denied that Washington has been conducting surveillance operations on Brazilian communications.
News of the alleged spying upset many in Brazil and other Latin countries, which have a history of military governments—often supported by the United States—that spied on their own people.
Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, who was jailed and tortured in the 1970s under the ruling junta, said her government would raise concerns with the U.N. Commission on Human Rights.
“Brazil’s position on this issue is very clear and very firm,” Rousseff told the media. “We do not agree at all with interference of this kind, not just in Brazil but in any other country.”
To Learn More:
U.S. Spy Spread Through Latin America (by Glenn Greenwald, and Kaz and Roberto Jose’ Casado; O Globo)
Capitals 4 Countries Also Housed the Office of the NSA and CIA (by Kaz and Roberto Jose’ Casado; O Globo)
U.S. and Britain Eavesdropped on World Leaders at 2009 Summits (by Noel Brinkerhoff, AllGov)
US NSA Spied on Venezuela When President Chavez Died, Documents Reveal (alethonews.wordpress.com)
Press TV, iFilm airing on new frequency on Express AM44
Press TV – July 10, 2013
Iran’s entertainment and movie channel iFilm as well as the 24-hour English-language news channel Press TV are airing with new parameters on the Express AM44 satellite.
Viewers can watch Press TV and the English version of iFilm on the following frequency:
Satellite: Express AM44 at 11.0 W
Transponder: B5
Frequency: 11109
Polarization: Horizontal
Symbol Rate: 9479
FEC: ¾
The Arabic version of iFilm and the Spanish-language Hispan TV have also been uplinked with the same parameters on the Express AM44 at 11.0 W.
Press TV and other 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 anti-Iran sanctions. However, Michael Mann, the EU foreign policy chief’s spokesman, has told Press TV that sanctions do not apply to media.
The latest move against Iranian alternative channels came in June when Intelsat told Iran’s national broadcasting corporation, Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB), that it will no longer provide services to Iranian channels, including Press TV, as of July 1.
Intelsat made the move under the pretext of the US sanctions against the head of the IRIB, Ezzatollah Zarghami.
Press TV later learned that the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) — an agency of the US Treasury Department headed by an Ashkenazi Jew called Adam Szubin — 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.
Related articles
- Iran media ban, War on Free Speech (alethonews.wordpress.com)
- Intelsat suspends satellite services to Iranian TV channels (alethonews.wordpress.com)
Obama gives himself control of all communication systems in America
RT | July 11, 2013
US President Barack Obama quietly signed his name to an Executive Order on Friday, allowing the White House to control all private communications in the country in the name of national security.
President Obama released his latest Executive Order on Friday, July 6, a 2,205-word statement offered as the “Assignment of National Security and Emergency Preparedness Communications Functions.” And although the president chose not to commemorate the signing with much fanfare, the powers he provides to himself and the federal government under the latest order are among the most far-reaching yet of any of his executive decisions.
“The Federal Government must have the ability to communicate at all times and under all circumstances to carry out its most critical and time sensitive missions,” the president begins the order. “Survivable, resilient, enduring and effective communications, both domestic and international, are essential to enable the executive branch to communicate within itself and with: the legislative and judicial branches; State, local, territorial and tribal governments; private sector entities; and the public, allies and other nations.”
President Obama adds that it is necessary for the government to be able to reach anyone in the country during situations it considers critical, writing, “Such communications must be possible under all circumstances to ensure national security, effectively manage emergencies and improve national resilience.” Later the president explains that such could be done by establishing a “joint industry-Government center that is capable of assisting in the initiation, coordination, restoration and reconstitution of NS/EP [national security and emergency preparedness] communications services or facilities under all conditions of emerging threats, crisis or emergency.”
“The views of all levels of government, the private and nonprofit sectors, and the public must inform the development of NS/EP communications policies, programs and capabilities,” he adds.
On the government’s official website for the National Communications Systems, the government explains that that “infrastructure includes wireline, wireless, satellite, cable, and broadcasting, and provides the transport networks that support the Internet and other key information systems,” suggesting that the president has indeed effectively just allowed himself to control the country’s Internet access.
In order to allow the White House to reach anyone within the US, the president has put forth a plan to establish a high-level committee calling from agents with the Department of Homeland Security, Pentagon, Federal Communications Commission and other government divisions to ensure that his new executive order can be implemented.
In explaining the order, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) writes that the president has authorized the DHS “the authority to seize private facilities when necessary, effectively shutting down or limiting civilian communications.”
In Section 5 of his order, President Obama outlines the specific department and agency responsibilities that will see through his demands. In a few paragraphs, President Obama explains that Executive Committee that will oversee his order must be supplied with “the technical support necessary to develop and maintain plans adequate to provide for the security and protection of NS/EP communications,” and that that same body will be in tasked with dispatching that communiqué “to the Federal Government and State, local, territorial and trial governments,” by means of “commercial, Government and privately owned communications resources.”
Later, the president announces that the Department of Homeland Security will be tasked with drafting a plan during the next 60 days to explain how the DHS will command the government’s Emergency Telecommunications Service, as well as other telecom conduits. In order to be able to spread the White House’s message across the country, President Obama also asks for the purchasing of equipment and services that will enable such.
Israeli court sentences Palestinian MPs
Ma’an – 11/07/2013
JERUSALEM – An Israeli court on Thursday sentenced two Palestinian MPs to 30 months, a committee official said.
PLC deputy Mohammad Tawtah and former Jerusalem affairs’ minister Khalid Abu Arafa were sentenced to 30 months plus a one-year suspended sentence for conducting “Hamas activities,” said Amjad Abu Asab, the director of the Jerusalem prisoners’ families committee.
The judge ruled that the MPs must serve an additional six months if they enter Jerusalem, their hometown, Abu Asab told Ma’an.
The MPs have been in Israeli custody since Israeli police detained them in a raid on the Jerusalem headquarters of the International Committee of the Red Cross in January 2012.
The elected officials took refuge at the Red Cross building in East Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah in July 2010 along with lawmaker Ahmad Attoun after Israel revoked their residency permits.
Merkel justifies NSA eavesdropping surveillance
RT | July 11, 2013
Despite “justified questions” to the American intelligence community regarding eavesdropping on German networks, the US remains Berlin’s “most loyal ally”, announced Chancellor Angela Merkel in interview to Die Zeit weekly.
Merkel has made her first detailed comment into the unraveling diplomatic scandal with the America’s National Security Agency (NSA) global telecommunication eavesdropping, including those of its European allies, Germany foremost among them.
It emerged recently that Germany happens to be the most-snooped-on EU country by the American National Security Agency (NSA). The NSA’s real-time online surveillance PRISM program allows US intelligence agencies to intercept virtually any communications over the internet, phone calls and makes possible direct access to files stored on the servers of major internet companies.
Merkel declared that she herself has learnt about the US surveillance programs, such as the NSA’s PRISM spy program, “through the current reporting” in the media.
In early July spokesman Steffen Seibert announced on the behalf of Chancellor Merkel that “The monitoring of friends – this is unacceptable. It can’t be tolerated,” adding that Merkel had already delivered her concerns to the US. “We are no longer in the Cold War,” Seibert added.
The German government subsequently summoned US Ambassador Philip Murphy to Berlin to explain the incendiary reports.
At the same time according to new revelations made by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden to Germany’s Spiegel magazine, the American NSA and Germany’s intelligence agencies are “in bed together.”
Seibert told Reuters this week that German’s Federal Intelligence Agency’s (BND) cooperation with the NSA “took place within strict legal and judicial guidelines and is controlled by the competent parliamentary committee.”
‘Intelligence is essential for democracies’
Merkel stressed that intelligence “has always been and will in future be essential for the security of citizens” of democratic countries. “A country without intelligence work would be too vulnerable,” Merkel said.
At the same time, she observed that there must be a “balance between maximum freedom and what the state needs to give its citizens the greatest possible security.”
Merkel emphasized that German-American special relationship should not be endangered by the incident.
“America has been, and is, our most loyal ally over all the decades,” Merkel said, but pointed out that Washington should clear up the situation with the US allegedly bugging the embassies of the European countries and the EU facilities, noting that “the Cold War is over.”
Stasi and NSA are not comparable
In acknowledgment of the Germany’s contemporary history, Merkel, who grew up in East Germany, refused to make any parallels between the methods of work of DDR’s secret police Stasi and America’s NSA.
“For me, there is absolutely no comparison between the Stasi and the work of intelligence agencies in democratic states,” she was quoted as saying. “They are two completely different things and such comparisons only lead to a trivialization of what the Stasi did to [East Germany’s] people,” said Merkel.
Rhetoric shift
In the face of the national elections in September, Angela Merkel has come under fierce criticism in connection with the NSA spying scandal for not protesting unequivocally enough, while various German politicians demanded to stop spying immediately.
Germany’s center-left opposition insists on questioning country’s officials with a view to find out what exactly they knew about the American surveillance of German communications before the eavesdropping scandal emerged.
Earlier Germany’s Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich and Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger both declined any knowledge of the eavesdropping performed by the American US in German networks.
In the interview to Die Zeit Chancellor Merkel revealed that reports from German intelligence agencies are being delivered to her chief of staff, Ronald Pofalla who coordinates their work from the chancellery.
The head of the center-left opposition Social Democratic Party (SPD) Sigmar Gabriel told Spiegel Online that “Ms. Merkel is now trying to shift political responsibility to her chief of staff.”
“That’s an old game: [pretending] not knowing anything at first, trying to play down the problem and then finally pointing the finger at a staff member. But it’s not going to work because it’s clear that the dimensions of this scandal are so great that no person other than the chancellor can ensure that basic rights are defended in Germany,” the SPD leader claimed.
Today battling terrorism is impossible “without the possibility of telecommunications monitoring,” Merkel told the weekly. “The work of intelligence agencies in democratic states was always vital to the safety of citizens and will remain so in the future.”
In the meantime, Friedrich is meeting US Attorney General Eric Holder and White House counterterrorism adviser Lisa Monaco in Washington on Friday for talks dedicated to the NSA scandal. Though Merkel’s government is not likely to pedal the spying issue, Berlin surely expects explanation from Washington in regards of the ‘Snowdengate’ “for all the more-than-justified questions”, Merkel was quoted as telling Die Zeit.
Luxembourg PM resigns over spying scandal
RT | July 11, 2013
Luxembourg’s long-serving Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker officially announced he would resign following a spying scandal involving illegal phone-taps and other illicit activities.
The announcement comes as Juncker’s junior coalition partner called for the dissolution of the house and early parliamentary elections.
Juncker’s departure follows allegations the country’s security services abused their power under his watch, including illegally bugging politicians, purchasing cars for private use, and taking payments and favors in return for access to local officials from 2003 to 2009.
A report commissioned by Luxembourg’s parliament into the matter determined that Juncker failed to rein in the agency despite it being under his auspices. The July 5 document further said that the outgoing PM was “politically responsible” for failing to inform the parliamentary committee of control or justice authorities about the Luxembourg State Intelligence Service’s (SREL) alleged illegalities.
The report was commissioned after a Luxembourg weekly newspaper published a secretly-taped conversation from 2008 between Juncker and the head of SREL at the time, Marco Mille.
On tape, Mille revealed that his staff had secretly recorded a conversation involving Luxembourg’s Grand Duke – the monarchial head of state – and that the sovereign was in regular contact with Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service.
The ensuing parliamentary inquiry revealed extensive illicit activity: the existence of 13,000 secret files on people and businesses, illegal wire-taps on business leaders, and a counter-terror operation which was in actually a front to help a Russian oligarch pay US$10 million to a Spanish spy, and even a shadowy private dealership in luxury cars, AFP reports.
In June, the PM survived Luxembourg’s first no confidence vote in 150 years after the opposition Liberals and Greens accused Finance Minister Luc Frieden of pressuring the state prosecutor to stop legal proceedings against a group implicated in a series of 1980s bombings.
However, the specter of a fresh no confidence vote once again hung over Juncker, who became prime minister in 1995 and is the European Union’s longest-serving head of government, following the report.
The PM delivered a defiant speech to lawmakers on Wednesday in which he attempted to refute allegations that he has used the SREL to bolster both him and his Christian Social People’s Party.
Juncker initially refused to step down, claiming the PM should not be expected to resign over the alleged wrongdoing of a few intelligence agents.
“The intelligence service was not my top priority,” Juncker told parliament. “Moreover, I hope Luxembourg will never have a prime minister who sees SREL as [his or her] priority.”
However, Junker’s junior partner, Luxembourg Socialist Workers’ Party (LSAP) President Alex Bodry, called on the PM to take” full political responsibility” for the scandal.
“We invite the prime minister to take full political responsibility in this context and ask the government to intervene with the head of state to clear the path for new elections,” Bodry said.
Juncker, who said it would be impossible to take personal responsibility for the allegations leveled at him, ultimately resigned to avoid a vote of no confidence.
“I will convene the government tomorrow morning at 10am (08:00 GMT) and will go to the Palace to suggest snap elections to the Grand Duke,” he told parliament on Wednesday.
As head of state, only the Grand Duke can officially dissolve parliament.
In line with Junker’s recommendation, the government will continue its work until early elections are held on October 20. It remains unclear whether the outgoing PM intends to run.
Political responsibility as last resort
Luxembourg, a tiny state nestled between Belgium, France and Germany, is viewed as a major European financial hub, where some 40 percent of the country’s 500,000 residents are foreigners working in banks and other European institutions.
Juncker’s departure over intelligence service malfeasance was a major wave in one of Europe’s most politically-stable states.
As the outgoing PM admitted the intelligence service scandal left him “no other choice than to hand in the government’s resignation,” other European leaders are increasingly being scrutinized for the alleged role in sweeping surveillance activities.
UK Foreign Secretary William Hague, who oversees the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), has recently come under fire for the agency’s Tempora surveillance program, as well as its collusion with US National Security Agency’s (NSA) sweeping spying programs.
Last week the European Union began investigating whether Britain had broken EU law following reports it had tapped international phone traffic and shared vast amounts of personal data with the US, an EU source told Reuters.
Viviane Reding, the vice-president of the European Commission and EU commissioner for justice, wrote to Hague asking him to clarify the “scope of the [Tempora surveillance] program, its proportionality and the extent of judicial oversight that applies.”
In Germany, where the US a reportedly combs through half a billion German phone calls, emails and text messages on a daily basis, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden recently accused the country’s political leadership of ‘being in bed’ with the NSA.
On Wednesday Chancellor Angela Merkel defended Germany’s cooperation with US intelligence, dismissing charges its methods resembled those deployed in the former German Democratic Republic.
“For decades, intelligence services have been working together under certain conditions that are tightly regulated in our country, and this serves our security,” Merkel told the German weekly Die Zeit.
“For me, there is no comparison at all between the state security [Stasi] of the GDR and the work of intelligence services in democratic states,” she continued.
“These are completely different things and such comparisons only lead to a trivialization of what the state security did to people in East Germany,” she said.
With elections slated for September 22, the center-left opposition has pounced on the issue, claiming Merkel, whose office coordinates and oversees Germany’s intelligence services, must have known more about NSA operations.
Related article
- Veteran Luxembourg PM Juncker resigns in spy scandal (vietnamnews.vn)
UK has a CCTV for every 11 people
Press TV – July 10, 2013
Britain has a CCTV camera for every 11 people, a security industry report disclosed, as privacy campaigners criticized the growth of the “surveillance state”.
Britain has a CCTV camera for every 11 people including 750,000 in “sensitive locations” such as schools and hospitals, British Security Industry Authority (BSIA) says.
The BSIA said there are up to 5.9 million closed-circuit cameras across Britain dramatically raising the previous estimates that put the number of cameras somewhere between 1.5 million and four million.
“Because there is no single reliable source of data no number can ever be held as truly accurate however the middle of our range suggests that there are around five million cameras,” Simon Adcock, of the BSIA, said.
The revelations drew angry criticism from privacy campaigners Big Brother Watch who described the CCTV culture as a sign of an ailing democracy in Britain.
“This report is another stark reminder of how out of control our surveillance culture has become,” Big Brother Watch director Nick Pickles said.
“With potentially more than five million CCTV cameras across country, including more than 300,000 cameras in schools, we are being monitored in a way that few people would recognize as a part of a healthy democratic society,” he added.
Pickles also compared the situation to the dystopia represented in George Orwell’s 1984 novel.
“This report should be a wakeup call that in modern Britain there are people in positions of responsibility who seem to think ‘1984’ was an instruction manual,” he said.
The novel pictures a society where every single private move of the citizens in the then future Britain of 1984 is monitored by the eye of the state.
Related article
NSA Blackmailing Obama? | Interview with Whistleblower Russ Tice
breakingtheset · July 9, 2013
Abby Martin talks to Russell Tice, former intelligence analyst and original NSA whistleblower, about how the recent NSA scandal is only scratches the surface of a massive surveillance apparatus, citing specific targets the he saw spying orders for including former senators Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama.
Supreme Court asked to end NSA spying program
RTAmerica · July 9, 2013
The National Security Agency continues to experience fallout for the surveillance programs which spy on millions of American’s phone records and online activities, and this time the Electronic Privacy Information Center is filing an emergency petition to end the spy program. Alan Butler, Appellate Advocacy Counsel for EPIC, joins us with the details on the demand.
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A Secret Court Making Secret Laws? That’s No Democracy
By Mike Masnick | TechDirt | July 8th 2013
Last December, well before the Ed Snowden leaks revealed some information about the FISA court (FISC) and its rulings, we had already noted that the court itself was almost certainly unconstitutional. More recently, we talked about how the fact that all the court’s judges are appointed by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court means that the court has turned into a rubber stamp made in the image of some of the most “law and order”-minded Chief Justices from the past few decades. Ezra Klein has since expanded on that to discuss the oddity of how current Chief Justice John Roberts is basically the Chief Justice of the Surveillance State, answerable to absolutely no one: “You have exclusive, unaccountable, lifetime power to shape the surveillance state.”
Over the weekend, the NY Times put out a powerful piece discussing how FISC has basically become a shadow Supreme Court, doling out all sorts of important rulings in total secrecy. It rules on cases where it only hears one side, and where there are no appeals, no guarantee that the full story is presented, and involves a bunch of judges who tend to have law enforcement backgrounds before being appointed to the court. In the end, you have a secret court issuing secret rulings by ex-law enforcement officials, allowing their former colleagues ever greater power to spy on everyone.
The 11-member Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, known as the FISA court, was once mostly focused on approving case-by-case wiretapping orders. But since major changes in legislation and greater judicial oversight of intelligence operations were instituted six years ago, it has quietly become almost a parallel Supreme Court, serving as the ultimate arbiter on surveillance issues and delivering opinions that will most likely shape intelligence practices for years to come, the officials said.
[….] Unlike the Supreme Court, the FISA court hears from only one side in the case — the government — and its findings are almost never made public. A Court of Review is empaneled to hear appeals, but that is known to have happened only a handful of times in the court’s history, and no case has ever been taken to the Supreme Court. In fact, it is not clear in all circumstances whether Internet and phone companies that are turning over the reams of data even have the right to appear before the FISA court.
As an example of how FISC has basically completely overturned the rules of surveillance in secret, the NY Times reveals the details of some of its thinking, taking a extremely narrow ruling meant to apply in special cases, and turning it into a general rule that has allowed the vast capture of information:
In one of the court’s most important decisions, the judges have expanded the use in terrorism cases of a legal principle known as the “special needs” doctrine and carved out an exception to the Fourth Amendment’s requirement of a warrant for searches and seizures, the officials said.
The special needs doctrine was originally established in 1989 by the Supreme Court in a ruling allowing the drug testing of railway workers, finding that a minimal intrusion on privacy was justified by the government’s need to combat an overriding public danger. Applying that concept more broadly, the FISA judges have ruled that the N.S.A.’s collection and examination of Americans’ communications data to track possible terrorists does not run afoul of the Fourth Amendment, the officials said.
That legal interpretation is significant, several outside legal experts said, because it uses a relatively narrow area of the law — used to justify airport screenings, for instance, or drunken-driving checkpoints — and applies it much more broadly, in secret, to the wholesale collection of communications in pursuit of terrorism suspects. “It seems like a legal stretch,” William C. Banks, a national security law expert at Syracuse University, said in response to a description of the decision. “It’s another way of tilting the scales toward the government in its access to all this data.”
I don’t care where you come down on the importance of widespread surveillance — I just don’t see how you can possibly square the above interpretation of the law with the 4th Amendment. If “special needs” can be used to justify mass collection of data on just about everyone “just in case” it might stop some sort of terrorist attack, then you no longer have a 4th Amendment. At all.
But, the bigger issue here is just the fact that we have a secret court issuing secret interpretations of the law that have a massive impact on our privacy. This is supposed to be an open democracy. An open democracy doesn’t involve secret courts and secret laws. We have laws that everyone knows, and which the public can discuss and weigh in on through their elected officials. When you set up a secret court, making secret rules with no oversight, and with all of the judges appointed by a single Supreme Court Justice with a particular bias, you no longer have a functioning democracy at all. And that’s downright scary.
This is a point that some Senators have been making for years now, but the leaks from Ed Snowden have really made it that much clearer just how insane the situation is. Earlier, it had seemed like perhaps there was one or two rulings from FISC that had some oddities in the interpretation, and which should probably be revealed to the public. However, the various revelations so far suggest that the issue is much, much bigger, and we have a secret “shadow court” system that is systematically obliterating the 4th Amendment and helping to create and then “legitimize” the vast surveillance state.
The Snowden leaks have shone a number of lights on various bad things within our government, but one thing that they have made abundantly clear is that the FISC needs to go. Whether that means it needs to be opened up, or to have greater oversight, or just be done away with completely, could be up for discussion. But if it remains the way it is, it’s clear that we’ve thrown away our basic democratic principles, and moved towards the same sorts of autocratic regimes with secret courts that the US has always presented itself as being against.
Related article
- Five unanswered questions about the NSA’s surveillance programs (alethonews.wordpress.com)
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From the Archives
Genetic baloney in thick slices
MAYBE COULD BE INC.
By Jon Rappoport | No More Fake News | July 8, 2021
Gene research companies tend to come and go. They start out banging and popping like fireworks in the sky, and then they fade out—selling themselves to larger outfits who’ve hired better liars…
Once upon a time, it sounded easy. Start with a disease, find the gene responsible for the disease, and correct the problem.
Then, researchers wondered, was disease the result of one gene or a group of genes acting together?
Either way, the proof would be in devising cures for diseases using gene therapy. “Not yet, but soon…”
And regardless, the major need was: money. Lots and lots of money.
This need required good PR people. “We have to pump up the idea that we’re on the edge of tremendous breakthroughs. We’re always on that edge…”
This hype also needed to obscure the fact that there wasn’t (and isn’t) ANY gene cure for ANY disease. … continue
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