Leaked Australian blacklist reveals banned sites
Asher Moses | Sydney Morning Herald | March 19, 2009
The Australian communications regulator’s top-secret blacklist of banned websites has been leaked on to the web and paints a harrowing picture of Australia’s forthcoming internet censorship regime.
Wikileaks, an anonymous document repository for whistleblowers, obtained the list, which has been seen by this website, and plans to publish it for public consumption on its website imminently.
Wikileaks has previously published the blacklists for Thailand, Denmark and Norway.
University of Sydney associate professor Bjorn Landfeldt said the leaked list “constitutes a condensed encyclopedia of depravity and potentially very dangerous material”.
He said the leaked list would become “the concerned parent’s worst nightmare” as curious children would inevitably seek it out.
But about half of the sites on the list are not related to child porn and include a slew of online poker sites, YouTube links, regular gay and straight porn sites, Wikipedia entries, euthanasia sites, websites of fringe religions such as satanic sites, fetish sites, Christian sites, the website of a tour operator and even a Queensland dentist.
“It seems to me as if just about anything can potentially get on the list,” Landfelt said.
The blacklist is maintained by ACMA and provided to makers of internet filtering software that parents can opt to install on their PCs.
However, if the Government proceeds with its mandatory internet filtering scheme, sites on the blacklist will be blocked for all Australians. The Government has flagged plans to expand the blacklist to 10,000 sites or more.
In a special report, written in conjunction with the Internet Industry Association and presented to the Government over a year ago, Landfeldt warned that “list leakage” was one of the main issues associated with maintaining a secret blacklist of prohibited sites.
Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, dug up the blacklist after ACMA added several Wikileaks pages to the list following the site’s publication of the Danish blacklist.
He said secret censorship systems were “invariably corrupted”, pointing to the Thailand censorship list, which was originally billed as a mechanism to prevent child pornography but contained more than 1200 sites classified as criticising the royal family.
“In January the Thai system was used to censor Australia reportage about the imprisoned Australian writer Harry Nicolaides,” he said.
“The Australian democracy must not be permitted to sleep with this loaded gun. This week saw Australia joining China and the United Arab Emirates as the only countries censoring Wikileaks.”
The leaked list, understood to have been obtained from an internet filtering software maker, contains 2395 sites. ACMA said its blacklist, as at November last year, contained 1370 sites.
Assange said the disparity in the reported figure is most likely due to the fact that the list contains several duplicates and variations of the same URL that stem from a single complaint. Alternatively, some sites may have been added to the list by the filter software maker.
ACMA said Australians caught distributing the list or accessing child pornography sites on the list could face criminal charges and up to 10 years in prison.
Opposition communications spokesman Nick Minchin said the leaking of the list was irresponsible but highlighted how this type of information could surface despite the efforts of ACMA to protect it, and could be used by those with a perverse interest in its content.
“The regrettable and unfortunate reality is there will always be explicit and illegal material on the web and – regardless of blacklists, filters and the like – those with the means and know-how will find ways of accessing it,” he said.
“Adult supervision is the most effective way of keeping children safe online and people shouldn’t be led into believing by Labor that expanded blacklists or mandatory filters are a substitute for that.”
Colin Jacobs, spokesman for the online users’ lobby group Electronic Frontiers Australia, said the leak was not surprising and would only get worse once the list was sent to hundreds of Australian ISPs as part of the Government’s mandatory internet filtering policy.
He said the Government could be considered a “promoter and disseminator of links to some pretty unsavoury material”.
“The list itself should concern every Australian – although plenty of the material is unsavoury or even illegal, the presence of sites like YouTube, MySpace, gambling or even Christian sites on the list raises a lot of questions,” he said.
“There is even a harmless tour operator on there, but there is no mechanism for a site operator to know they got on or request to be removed. The prospect of mandatory nation-wide filtering of this secret list is pretty concerning from a democratic point of view.”
The Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, said the leak and publication of the ACMA blacklist would be “grossly irresponsible” and undermine efforts to improve cyber safety.
He said ACMA was investigating the matter and considering a range of possible actions including referral to the Australian Federal Police. Australians involved in making the content available would be at “serious risk of criminal prosecution”.
“Under existing laws the ACMA blacklist includes URLs relating to child sexual abuse, rape, incest, bestiality, sexual violence and detailed instruction in crime,” Senator Conroy said.
“No one interested in cyber safety would condone the leaking of this list.”
Obama Czar Wants Mandatory Government Propaganda On Political Websites
Paul Joseph Watson | Prison Planet.com | May 17, 2010
Disturbing audio has emerged of White House information czar Cass Sunstein, who in a previous white paper called for banning “conspiracy theories,” demanding that websites be mandated by law to link to opposing information or that pop ups containing government propaganda be forcibly included on political blogs.
In an audio excerpt of an interview which was posted on the Breitbart.tv website today, Sunstein discusses how conservative websites should provide links to liberal websites and vice versa or even how political blogs should be made to include pop ups that show “a quick argument for a competing view”.
Sunstein said that if this system couldn’t be implemented voluntarily, “Congress should hold hearings about mandates,” which would legally force people to dilute their own free speech. The Harvard Professor also said that blogs should be forced to list a random draw of 25 popular websites, such as CNN.com.
“The best would be for this to be done voluntarily,” said Sunstein, “But the word voluntary is a little complicated and people sometimes don’t do what’s best for our society,” he added (emphasis mine).
“The idea would be to have a legal mandate as the last resort….an ultimate weapon designed to encourage people to do better,” Sunstein concluded.
As we previously reported, in a January 2008 white paper entitled “Conspiracy Theories,” the Harvard Professor who is currently President Obama’s head of information technology in the White House called for “conspiracy theories,” that is any political opinion which didn’t concur with the establishment view, to be taxed or even banned outright.
In a set of proposals designed to counter “dangerous” ideas, Sunstein suggested that the government could, “ban conspiracy theorizing,” or “impose some kind of tax, financial or otherwise, on those who disseminate such theories”.
So-called “conspiracy theories that Sunstein said could be subject to government censorship included beliefs held by the vast majority of Americans, such as the notion that the JFK assassination occurred as part of a wider plot.
In his white paper, Sunstein also cited the belief that “global warming is a deliberate fraud” as another marginal conspiracy theory to be countered by government censorship.
Ludicrously, the Harvard Professor even characterized as “false and dangerous” the idea that exposure to sunlight is healthy, despite the fact that top medical experts agree prolonged exposure to sunlight reduces the risk of developing certain cancers.
Essentially, Sunstein wants it to be written into law that the government can dictate the very nature of reality to Americans and that their opinions can only be voiced at best when accompanied by mandatory federal propaganda or at worst that Americans can be silenced entirely by federal decree.
This callous disregard for the First Amendment represents a fundamental threat the very fabric of the country and is even more alarming considering the position of Obama’s Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan with regard to free speech. During the Citizens United vs. FEC case, Kagan’s office argued that the government can ban books and political pamphlets. In separate writings, Kagan argued that the government could “disappear” free speech it deemed to be offensive.
“Israel” calls for expelling anyone marking Nakba from occupied Palestinian lands
Palestine Information Center | May 17, 2010
NAZARETH – Israeli minister of finance Yuval Steinitz called for withdrawing the nationality from everyone inciting against Israel and commemorating the 62nd anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe).
During the weekly cabinet meeting on Sunday, Steinitz said it was intolerable and unforgivable to see Arabs and some Jews challenging the mere existence of Israel.
The Israeli minister also condemned the recent remarks made by head of the Islamic Movement Sheikh Ra’ed Salah in which he highlighted the Arab identity of occupied Jerusalem and the Aqsa Mosque and defended the right of return.
For its part, the right-wing party of Yisrael Beiteinu led by foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman called for opening investigation with Arab Knesset member Jamal Zahalka for his participation in a march organized to mark the Nakba anniversary.
In a separate incident, Israeli minister of education Gideon Sa’ar declared his intention to force the Palestinian high school students in the 1948 occupied lands to study the Nazi holocaust as of next year.
Yedioth Ahronoth on Sunday reported that Sa’ar also intends to send a delegation of Arab teachers and school principals to Poland to visit the alleged Nazi extermination camp in order to qualify them to teach this subject efficiently.
In the same context relating to Nakba, Palestinian officials and politicians called Sunday for pooling the efforts to protect the right of return and confront attempts to dilute this right and twist its concept into the idea of resettling Palestinian refugees in their current residential countries and compensating them.
They stressed during their participation in a conference on the Nakba held in Gaza the need for raising the awareness of the Arab nation about the right of return so as to sustain it.
Dr. Ahmed Bahar, the first deputy speaker of the Palestinian legislative council, stated in his speech that the right of return is a sacred right that belongs to all Palestinians and anyone waiving it is considered an apostate from the Palestinian national rank as stipulated by the right of return law.
Dr. Bahar stressed that the Palestinian people reject being resettled in alternative homelands and insist on returning to their homes which they were expelled from, adding that this right can come true only through the option of resistance and national unity.
Shin Bet blackmails Jerusalem medical students
Press TV – May 12, 2010
The Shin Bet is reportedly trying to entice Palestinian medical students to join the Israeli intelligence service by promising entry permits to al-Quds (Jerusalem).
The spying agency allegedly tried to blackmail two fifth-year medical students at al-Quds University who are pursuing internships in Palestinian university hospitals in the city, Israel’s English-language Haaretz newspaper said on its website on Wednesday.
A “Captain Biran” who introduced himself as the Shin Bet agent responsible for monitoring the university told the two to report on other students and their activities as a condition for renewing their entry permits, Haaretz reported.
The medical faculty of the university — located in the village of Abu Dis near East al-Quds — is affiliated with some of the oldest and largest hospitals in al-Quds and have up to 200 students of medicine, nursing and physiotherapy who need entry permits to enter the occupied city.
Hospital officials file requests to authorities of the al-Quds Civil Administration in the settlement of Beit El who at the discretion of the Shin Bet issue permits valid for between three and six months.
One of the two Palestinians in question encountered the recruitment request in mid 2009 after his entry permit into al-Quds was not renewed following his pilgrimage to Mecca. He was then told by the Civil Administration to meet with a Shin Bet coordinator.
In his meeting with Biran, the agent allegedly threatened the student that the Shin Bet could “interfere with your ability to finish your studies,” but that if he acceded to “help” him monitor other students, the agency would even grant him entry to the prestigious Hadassah medical center.
The other student met Biran in March, days after his entry permit to al-Quds was confiscated at Zeitim checkpoint outside East al-Quds. He was told that his entry permit had been seized because “some illegal things were found in your bag” and was similarly instructed to report to the Shin Bet about students traveling abroad.
The Palestinian students said they were effectively prevented from choosing a residency specialty and continuing their medical training when they both refused to spy on their peers.
The Shin Bet said in response that the entry permits for the two students had not been renewed for security reasons, but did not comment on the blackmail claims.
Shin Bet deports Spain’s most famous clown upon arrival in Israel
Ben Gurion Airport security officials detain Ivan Prado for six hours, accusing the Spanish entertainer of ties with Palestinian terror groups.
Barak Ravid | Haaretz | 09 May 2010
Ivan Prado, the most famous clown in Spain, did not expect to be put on a return flight back to Madrid soon after arriving at Ben-Gurion International Airport late last month, after spending six hours with officials from the Shin Bet security service and the Interior Ministry. The officials accused Prado of having ties to Palestinian terror organizations.
Foreign Ministry officials, meanwhile, say the incident caused grave damage to Israel’s image in Spain.
Prado, director of the International Clown Festival in Galicia, arrived at Ben-Gurion Airport on April 26 with a Spanish national of Arab origin. They planned to go to Ramallah to help organize a similar festival, but at passport control Prado was taken aside by a Shin Bet officer who asked him about his planned visit to the West Bank and about his connections to various Palestinian organizations. He and his female companion were held for six hours, during which they were questioned repeatedly, and their passports were confiscated.
They were sent back to Spain after an Interior Ministry official informed them that they would not be permitted into Israel.
After Prado returned to Madrid he launched a media campaign denouncing Israel and comparing the situation of Palestinians in the West Bank with Jews in Poland.
The incident sparked tension between the Israeli Embassy in Madrid and the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem, prompted by questions to the embassy from Spanish journalists and fueled by the diplomats’ anger at the Foreign Ministry’s explanation that Prado was turned away at the airport “for security reasons.”
The Shin Bet issued a statement to Haaretz lacking significant details about the reasons behind the decision. “We recommended to the Interior Ministry to prevent his entry into Israel after the findings of the security check produced suspicions about him,” the statement said. “The man declined to provide complete information to the security people, especially in regard to his links with Palestinian terror organizations.”
Israeli official in LA denounces National Geographic water exhibit
Ma’an -08/05/2010
Bethlehem – Israeli Consul General in Los Angeles Jacob Dayan reportedly sent a letter of complaint to the venue hosting a National Geographic photo exhibition highlighting Israel’s unequal water policy, Israeli media reported on Friday.
The Annenberg Space for Photography exhibit, coinciding with the magazine’s special issue Water: Our Thirsty World, features the works of award-winning photographers looking at water from environmental, social, political and cultural perspectives.
The Consul General voiced complaint over photo captions which include “Israelis relax by the Sea of Galilee, a lake near the Golan Heights that is fed by the Jordan River and that supplies a third of Israel’s fresh water. Since 1967, Israel has blocked Syria’s access to the shoreline,” the Israeli news site Yedioth Aharonot reported.
According to the news site Dayan’s letter said the venue is being used as a political tool to spread lies about Israel’s part in the global effort to provide clean and fresh drinking water, and the exhibit falsely depicts Israel as a country that steals water while its neighbors suffer from a drought. The opposite is true, wrote the consul general.
The original feature published in April 2010 by the National Geographic writes that since occupying the West Bank in 1967, settlements have been supplied water by Mekorot, Israel’s national water authority, “which has drilled 42 deep wells in the West Bank, mainly to supply Israeli cities.”
The article further said according to a 2009 World Bank report, “Israelis use four times as much water per capita as Palestinians, much of it for agriculture. Israel disputes this, arguing that its citizens use only twice as much water and are better at conserving it.”
In contrast, Don Belt writes, West Bank Palestinians “have been largely prevented from digging deep wells of their own, limiting their water access to shallow wells, natural springs, and rainfall that evaporates quickly in the dry desert air.”
When these sources run dry in the summer, experts told Belt, Auja’s Palestinians “have no choice but to purchase water from Israel for about a dollar a cubic yard—in effect buying back the water that’s been taken out from under them by Mekorot’s pumps, which also lower the water table and affect Palestinian springs and wells.”
The three Israeli, Jordanian and Palestinian experts interviewed by Belt were further featured in an a recent IRIN article, in which the environmentalists paint a grim picture of the state of the Jordan River, and urge swift action.
“If immediate action is not taken the River Jordan will run dry by 2011,” Baha Afaneh, Jordanian coordinator for the Jordan River Project of Friends of the Earth Middle East (FOEME), said at a conference in Amman on 3-4 May.
According to a FOEME report, the once mighty river is now barely a trickle, fed by saline water and sewage from Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority.
“Israel has diverted saline water from springs into the river. Today some 20,000 million cubic metres [of saline water] flow into the river annually,” said Gideon Bromberg, the Israeli director of FOEME.
Some three million cubic meters of untreated sewage per year pours into the river from Beit Shea’an Municipality in Israel, despite the fact that Israel is considered a leading country in the region in terms of sewage treatment, Bromberg said.
In March, four days after an Israeli minister threatened to restrict the West Bank’s water supply, Israeli authorities closed off the main water source used for agriculture in a Jordan Valley village committee members and lawyers said.
Israel’s Stasi watch over Imams
By Jonathan Cook in Jaffa | The National | May 4, 2010
Job interviews for the position of imam at mosques in Israel are conducted not by senior clerics but by the Shin Bet, Israel’s secret police, a labour tribunal has revealed.
Sheikh Ahmed Abu Ajwa, 36, is fighting the Shin Bet’s refusal to approve his appointment as an imam in a case that has lifted the lid on Israel’s secret surveillance of the country’s Islamic leaders.
At a hearing last month, a senior government official admitted that 60 undercover inspectors were employed effectively as spies to collect information on Muslim clerics, reporting on political opinions they expressed in sermons and relaying gossip about their private lives.
Sheikh Abu Ajwa took his case to the tribunal after the Shin Bet rejected him three years ago as the imam of a mosque in Jaffa, next to Tel Aviv, despite his being the sole candidate. He was told after a security clearance interview that his views were “extremist” and too critical of Israel, even though an imam is not officially defined as a security-related position.
“During one interview with the Shin Bet, they told me they had been collecting information on me since I was 15,” Sheikh Abu Ajwa said.
“I am the first imam ever to challenge the Shin Bet’s role in our appointments. It’s important to win a precedent-setting ruling from the courts to stop this kind of interference.”
Michael Sfard, a human rights lawyer representing Sheikh Abu Ajwa, said that, as far as it could be determined, no similar vetting of rabbis took place before their hiring.
“This sort of surveillance relating to a non-security position like an imam comes straight out of the era of the Stasi police in East Germany or the McCarthy period in the United States,” he said.
The traditional independence of the local Islamic authorities was removed at Israel’s creation in 1948, when the government confiscated almost all waqf property — endowments of land and property used for the benefit of the Palestinian Muslim community — removing the main source of income for clerics, the Islamic courts and charitable services.
According to experts, as much as a fifth of Palestine’s cultivated land was waqf property before 1948. Israel passed most of it to Zionist organisations like the Jewish National Fund or sold it to developers.
Responsibility for hundreds of mosques, cemeteries and other holy sites, meanwhile, was handed either to the religious affairs ministry or to Islamic boards of trustees appointed by the government.
Today, most imams and all Islamic judges must submit to a security clearance interview before being awarded a state salary.
Israel’s Arab minority, one fifth of the population, have long charged that many of its Muslim leaders are little more than government placemen, whose Islamic learning takes second place to their co-operation with the authorities.
Sabri Jiryis, a historian of Israel’s early years, has noted that the boards of trustees repeatedly rubber-stamped government decisions to sell off Islamic property to developers. Most notoriously Jaffa’s board approved in 1971 selling an Islamic cemetery in Tel Aviv on which the Hilton hotel was built.
Sheikh Abu Ajwa said: “In Jaffa, the government appointed many clerics because they had proved their loyalty, though not to other Muslims. They sold off our property — but you can’t sell what belongs to Allah.”
Jaffa, which was once the commercial capital of Palestine, today has a population of nearly 50,000 residents, of which two thirds are Jewish and the rest Muslim.
The sheikh has been preaching at the seafront Jabalya mosque, one of six in the town, since he was 19, making him reportedly the youngest person to serve as an imam in Israel’s history. He qualified as an imam at an Islamic college in the Israeli Arab city of Umm al Fahm in 1998.
The local community universally backed him as the new imam when his predecessor retired three years ago, but he cannot be officially recognised, and is ineligible for a salary, without the interior ministry’s approval.
As part of his application, he was interviewed by a Shin Bet officer named “Dror” who, he said, waved at him a folder of confidential information collected by undercover inspectors. “We will decide who is the next imam,” Dror told him, according to Sheikh Abu Ajwa. The sheikh was asked mainly about his political opinions and demonstrations he had attended.
The Shin Bet’s assessment, revealed to the tribunal, was that Sheikh Abu Ajwa’s appointment “may jeopardise security and peace in Jaffa”. In addition, the agency told the Haaretz newspaper that the sheikh “has had a long involvement in hostile activity, which manifested itself in incitement against the state and its Jewish citizens”.
Sheikh Abu Ajwa said this was a reference to his position as the leader in Jaffa of the popular northern wing of the Islamic Movement. Its leader, Sheikh Raed Salah, has raised the hackles of Jewish officials both by running a campaign warning of Israel’s intentions to take over the Al Aqsa mosque compound in Jerusalem and by promoting a boycott of parliamentary elections.
The head of the Shin Bet, Yuval Diskin, warned in 2007 that his agency’s role was to prevent any activities, including democratic ones, that worked against the interests of a Jewish state.
Yaakov Salameh, the head of the religious minorities department at the interior ministry, told the tribunal last month that his inspectors collected information on Muslim religious leaders, including rumours about their private lives, such as whether they had had an affair or beat their children. The information was then handed to the Shin Bet, which assessed whether they were suitable to be appointed.
Mr Sfard said it was an “extraordinary” admission, given that under Israeli law the criminal records of candidates for religious appointments could only be considered if the applicant agreed to the information being handed over.
David Baker, a spokesman for the prime minister’s office, which is responsible for the Shin Bet, refused to comment on whether the appointment of rabbis followed the same procedures as those for imams.
Sheikh Abu Ajwa observed that many rabbis, particularly those in the settlements, said “very extreme things but no one spies on them. In fact, they have full government support.”
He admitted he was outspoken in his sermons, but said he had never broken any laws and never advocated violence. “I talk about our Palestinian identity and criticise the policies of the state in its treatment of us as a minority,” he said. “These are very sensitive things that they want to prevent us from talking about.”
During one Shin Bet interview, he said, he had been told: “We know everything about you, we are always watching you.”
The goal of such interviews was often to recruit Muslim clerics to become informers themselves, he added.
Obama’s Favorite Weapons
By Nat Hentoff | CATO | April 14, 2010
With President Barack Obama’s firm approval, CIA pilotless Predator and Reaper drone planes — firing Hellfire missiles — are killing actual and suspected high-level terrorists. As Jane Perlez reports (New York Times, April 4), “flying overhead, sometimes four at a time” in Pakistan, the drones are also engaged in targeted assassinations in Afghanistan. It has been reported — but the CIA and Obama give us no facts — that in his first year, Obama has authorized more of these strikes than in President George W. Bush’s eight years.
Operated half a world away by remote control in Langley, VA., and outside of Las Vegas, the deaths sometimes unintentionally include those of innocent civilians, and are criticized here and in the targeted countries as “extra-judicial executions.”
Amid the growing controversy, State Department Legal Adviser Harold Koh insists that these drone attacks “comply with all applicable law, including the (international) laws of war.” (“Legality of Drone Strikes Still in Question,” InterPress Service, April 3).
The United States, he explains, “is in armed conflict with al-Qaida as well as the Taliban and associated forces in response to the horrific attacks of 9/11.”
Koh, when he was Dean of Yale Law School, was a strong critic of the legal rationalizations of the Bush-Cheney war on terrorism. He is now part of what I call “The Obama Metamorphosis,” along with such other vehement opponents of the previous administration’s “dark side” as Attorney General Eric Holder and CIA Director Leon Panetta. These former critics are now loyal members of the Obama team.
There is some concern within the Obama administration that the drone planes’ corollary termination of civilians may aid our enemies’ recruiting efforts, as did the Bush torture policies at Abu Ghraib in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay. But Koh claims it is required that “the damage to civilians caused by those attacks … not be excessive.”
However, The Economist in England speaks of “a moral quandary” when “drone attacks often kill civilians,” pointing to “June 23, 2009, for example, an attack on a funeral in South Waziristan” (in northwest Pakistan, bordering on Afghanistan.) Those Hellfire missiles “killed 80 non-combatants.”
Does Koh regard that “damage” as “excessive?” Does Panetta? The ACLU has filed a Freedom of Information Act request for answers to such questions, along with many other acutely relevant queries on what the Predators and Reapers are doing in our name. As of this writing, there has yet to be a reply to this uncomfortable FOIA request.
The Economist’s report on “remote-control warfare” refers troublingly to an ongoing refinement in automated warfare aimed at answering those here and abroad who are questioning the ethics of this futuristic form of combat. Cited is Ronald Arkin of the Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Interactive Computing.
He “proposes involving the drone itself — or rather, the software that is used to operate it — in the decision to attack.
“In effect,” the article continues, “he plans to give the machine a conscience.”
Is this science-fiction? As I will demonstrate next week, Arkin is not alone among American high-tech explorers devising non-human target killings in attacks on terrorism. To elaborate on the inventive Arkin approach, “The software conscience that Dr. Arkin and his colleagues have developed is called Ethical Architecture.”
During attacks, the judgment of the automated and autonomous Predator or Reaper drone “may be better than a human’s because it operates so fast and knows so much. And — like a human but unlike most machines — it can learn.” After a strike, this ever-alert machine can indeed learn from other sources whether the damage it caused — including dead civilians — exceeded its intentions.
With this information, a drone with a conscience can more precisely tailor future attacks and instruct other drones on how to more carefully direct their Hellfire missiles. Thereby, these ethical drones can provide support to future American officials defending the use of killer drones by showing how carefully the United States is working to be humane in its self-defense against international terrorism.
On March 23, in testimony before the House National Security subcommittee’s largely pro-drone panel. John Edward Jackson, professor of unmanned systems at the U.S. Naval War College, warned:
“If trends in computer science and robotics engineering continue, it is conceivable that autonomous systems could soon be developed that are capable of making life and death decisions without direct human intervention.” (Dan Froomkin, commondreams.org, March 24).
Another witness, Edward Barrett — director of research for the U.S. Naval Academy’s ethics and military policy think tank at the Stockdale Center — focused on whether these autonomous drones would make waging war too easy as this intensive research on robotic warfare continues.
He asked whether these nonhuman attacks “reduce the vigor with which nonviolent alternatives are pursued, and thus encourage unnecessary — and therefore unjust — wars.”
Added ethicist Edward Barrett: “Would a self-conscious and willful machine choose its own ends?”
Next week: More specific factual information on the active planning to make robotic warfare more “humane” and, indeed, human. It would be very helpful if President Obama would tell us — at a nationally televised press conference — what his own concerns are about this rapidly developing global technology.
Will there be any mention of drones by candidates of either party in the midterm elections?
What happened to “look forward, not backward”?
By Glenn Greenwald | April 16, 2010
The Obama Justice Department today announced that it has secured a ten-felony-count indictment against Thomas Drake, an official with the National Security Agency during the Bush years. Drake’s indictment, of course, has nothing to do with the criminal surveillance undertaken by the NSA. Rather, the DOJ alleges “that between approximately February 2006 and November 2007, a newspaper reporter published a series of articles about the NSA,” and it claims “Drake served as a source for many of those articles, including articles that contained classified information.” In other words, he’s being subjected to what The New York Times’ Scott Shane calls a “highly unusual” prosecution for being a whistle-blower on the Bush era’s sprawling and secretive Surveillance State. Although the indictment does not specify Drake’s leaks, it is highly likely (as Shane also suggests) that it is based on Drake’s bringing to the public’s attention major failures and cost over-runs with the NSA’s spying programs via leaks to The Baltimore Sun.*
Let’s spend just a moment thinking about what this means. We’ve known since December, 2005, that Bush officials, including at the NSA, committed felonies by eavesdropping on Americans without the warrants required by law — crimes punishable by a five-year prison term and$10,000 fine for each offense. All three federal judges to rule on the question have found those actions to be in violation of the law. Yet there have been no criminal investigations, let alone indictments, for those crimes, and there won’t be any, due to Barack Obama’s dictate that we “Look Forward, Not Backward.” Thus, the high-level political officials who committed crimes while running the NSA will be completely immunized for their serious crimes.
By stark contrast, an NSA official who brought to the public’s attention towering failures and waste at the NSA — revelations that led to exposés that, as Shane put it, were “honored with a top prize from the Society for Professional Journalists” — is now being prosecuted for crimes that could lead to a lengthy prison term. Why doesn’t Obama’s dictate that we “Look Forward, Not Backward,” protect this NSA whistle-blower from prosecution at least as much as the high-level Bush officials who criminally spied on American citizens? Isn’t the DOJ’s prosecution of Drake the classic case of “Looking Backward,” by digging into Bush-era crimes, controversies and disclosures?
Interestingly, the Bush DOJ long threatened to prosecute not only NSA whistle-blowers but also The New York Times for revealing its illegal spying. It never did so, however, likely because, as Shane speculates, prosecutions for those leaks would cause light to be shined on what the NSA actually did when eavesdropping on Americans. Yet here is the Obama DOJ prosecuting a whistleblower, a prosecution that is certain to intimidate and deter other whistle-blowers, thus choking off one of the very few avenues which Americans have left for learning about what this sprawling, obsessively secret Surveillance State does. As Lucy Dalglish, Executive Director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Presss, told the NYT today: “The whole point of the prosecution is to have a chilling effect on reporters and sources, and it will.”
For that reason, the DOJ’s aggressive prosecution of someone who exposed serious waste and mismanagement at the NSA could, as the NYT‘s Shane put it, “raise questions about whether the government is merely moving to protect itself from public scrutiny.” Whatever else is true, decreeing that we must “Look Forward, not Backward” — and then bestowing that Imperial Generosity only to the crimes of the President and his aides but not to courageous whistle-blowers (or, for that matter, anyone else) — is anything but “Justice.”
* The Atlantic‘s Marc Ambinder summarizes The Baltimore Sun revelations which are almost certainly what Drake is accused of leaking:
In 2006 and 2007, Siobahn Gorman, a highly regarded intelligence reporter for the Baltimore Sun, wrote a series of articles about how the National Security Agency was (mis)managing a highly sensitive, very expensive collection program known as Trailblazer. Relying on interviews with current and former senior intelligence officials as well as internal documents, Gorman was able to show that the NSA’s “state-of-the art tool for sifting through an ocean of modern-day digital communications” was a boondoggle of sorts — and that the agency had removed several of the privacy safeguards that were put in place to protect domestic conversations and e-mails from being stored and monitored.
In Germany, 56% lose trust in Church
Press TV – April 11, 2010
In the Pope’s homeland, Germany, revelations of sex abuse by Catholic clergy have triggered an unprecedented lack of trust in the Church.
An opinion poll conducted by the Focus magazine found that 56 percent of the 600 German participants have no confidence in the Church, which has been rocked by an unending stream of sex abuse allegations against priests.
In Addition to the uproar from the disturbing nature of some of the cases, accusations of decades-long cover-ups by the Catholic officials, which allowed some pedophile priests to find new victims, have further tainted the Church’s reputation.
Some 26 percent of the country’s Catholic population is now considering quitting the Church, according to the study which is to be published in the magazine on Monday. The respondents said that this is regardless of the consequences of the move on their income tax.
The figure shows a notable rise compared to a poll conducted by the Stern magazine last month, which indicated that 19 percent of those surveyed were undecided about following the Church.
Germany is among a number of European countries that impose Church tax (8-9%) on followers of any religious congregation, unless a member officially quits their communion.
Munich reportedly lost 472 Catholic worshippers last month alone, nearly four times the number for the past three months. Since the German tax department documents deregistrations at the cost of EUR 30 (USD 40), the figures are precise.
The tax provides 70% of the German Church’s revenues.
Since January, hundreds of cases of sexual abuse connected to the Catholic Church have come to light in Germany, including one of the most high-profile revelations that centered on mishandled abuse complaints in the Pope’s former diocese in Bavaria.
The Dark Underbelly of Israel’s Security State
The Anat Kamm Affair
By JONATHAN COOK | April 9, 2010
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Israeli forces have extrajudicially executed hundreds of Palestinians during the past several years. (Wissam Nassar/MaanImages) |
Next week 23-year-old Anat Kamm is due to stand trial for her life — or rather the state’s demand that she serve a life sentence for passing secret documents to an Israeli reporter, Uri Blau, of the liberal Haaretz daily. She is charged with spying.
Blau himself is in hiding in London, facing, if not a Mossad hit squad, at least the stringent efforts of Israel’s security services to get him back to Israel over the opposition of his editors, who fear he will be put away too.
This episode has been dragging on behind the scenes for months, since at least December, when Kamm was placed under house arrest pending the trial.
Not a word about the case leaked in Israel until this week when the security services, who had won from the courts a blanket gag order — a gag on the gag, so to speak — were forced to reverse course when foreign bloggers began making the restrictions futile. Hebrew pages on Facebook had already laid out the bare bones of the story.
So, now that much of the case is out in the light, what are the crimes committed by Kamm and Blau?
During her conscription, Kamm copied possibly hundreds of army documents that revealed systematic law-breaking by the Israeli high command operating in the occupied Palestinian territories, including orders to ignore court rulings. She was working at the time in the office of Brig Gen Yair Naveh, who is in charge of operations in the West Bank.
Blau’s crime is that he published a series of scoops based on her leaked information that have highly embarrassed senior Israeli officers by showing their contempt for the rule of law.
His reports included revelations that the senior command had approved targeting Palestinian bystanders during the military’s extra-judicial assassinations in the occupied territories; that, in violation of a commitment to the high court, the army had issued orders to execute wanted Palestinians even if they could be safely apprehended; and that the defence ministry had a compiled a secret report showing that the great majority of settlements in the West Bank were illegal even under Israeli law (all are illegal in international law).
In a properly democratic country, Kamm would have an honorable defence against the charges, of being a whistle-blower rather than a spy, and Blau would be winning journalism prizes not huddling away in exile.
But this is Israel. Here, despite a desperate last-stand for the principles of free speech and the rule of law in the pages of the Haaretz newspaper today, which is itself in the firing line over its role, there is almost no public sympathy for Kamm or even Blau.
The pair are already being described, both by officials and in chat forums and talkback columns, as traitors who should be jailed, disappeared or executed for the crime of endangering the state.
The telling comparison being made is to Mordechai Vanunu, the former technician at the Dimona nuclear plant who exposed Israel’s secret nuclear arsenal. Inside Israel, he is universally reviled to this day, having spent nearly two decades in harsh confinement. He is still under a loose house arrest, denied the chance to leave the country.
Blau and Kamm have every reason to be worried they may share a similar fate. Yuval Diskin, the head of the Shin Bet, Israel’s secret police, which has been leading the investigation, said yesterday that they had been too “sensitive to the media world” in pursuing the case for so long and that the Shin Bet would now “remove its gloves”.
Maybe that explains why Kamm’s home address was still visible on the charge sheet published yesterday, putting her life in danger from one of those crazed talkbackers.
It certainly echoes warnings we have had before from the Shin Bet about how it operates.
Much like Blau, Azmi Bishara, once head of a leading Arab party in Israel, is today living in exile after the Shin Bet put him in their sights. He had been campaigning for democratic reforms that would make Israel a “state of all its citizens” rather than a Jewish state.
While he was abroad in 2007, the Shin Bet announced that he would be put on trial for treason when he returned, supposedly because he had had contacts with Hizbullah during Israel’s attack on Lebanon in 2006.
Few experts believe Bishara could have had any useful information for Hizbullah, but the Shin Bet’s goals and modus operandi were revealed later by Diskin in a letter on its attitude to Bishara and his democratisation campaign. The Shin Bet was there, he said, to thwart the activities of groups or individuals who threatened the state’s Jewish character “even if such activity is sanctioned by the law”.
Diskin called this the principle of “a democracy defending itself” when it was really a case of Jewish leaders in a state based on Jewish privilege protecting those privileges. This time it is about the leaders of Israel’s massive security industry protecting their privileges in a security state by silencing witnesses to their crimes and keeping ordinary citizens in ignorance.
Justifying his decision to “take the gloves off” in the case of Kamm and Blau, Diskin said: “It is a dream of every enemy state to get its hands on these kinds of documents” — that is, documents proving that the Israeli army has repeatedly broken the country’s laws, in addition, of course, to its systematic violations of international law.
Diskin claims that national security has been put at risk, even though the reports Blau based on the documents — and even the documents themselves — were presented to, and approved by, the military censor for publication. The censor can restrict publication based only on national security concerns, unlike Diskin, the army senior command and the government, who obey other kinds of concerns.
Diskin knows there is every chance he will get away with his ploy because of a brainwashed Israeli public, a largely patriotic media and a supine judiciary.
The two judges who oversaw the months of gagging orders to silence any press discussion of this case did so on the say-so of the Shin Bet that there were vital national security issues at stake. Both judges are stalwarts of Israel’s enormous security industry.
Einat Ron was appointed a civilian judge in 2007 after working her way up the ranks of the military legal establishment, there to give a legal gloss to the occupation. Notoriously in 2003, when she was the chief military prosecutor, she secretly proposed various fabrications to the army so that it could cover up the killing of an 11-year-old Palestinian boy, Khalil al-Mughrabi, two years earlier. Her role only came to light because a secret report into the boy’s death was mistakenly attached to the army’s letter to an Israeli human rights group.
The other judge is Ze’ev Hammer, who finally overturned the gag order this week — but only after a former supreme court judge, Dalia Dorner, now the head of Israel’s Press Council, belatedly heaped scorn on it. She argued that, with so much discussion of the case outside Israel, the world was getting the impression that Israel flouted democratic norms.
Judge Hammer has his own distinguished place in Israel’s security industry, according to Israeli analyst Dimi Reider. During his eight years of legal study, Hammer worked for both the Shin Bet and Israel’s Mossad spy agency.
Judge Hammer and Judge Ron are deeply implicated in the same criminal outfit — the Israeli security establishment — that is now trying to cover up the tracks that lead directly to its door. Kamm is doubtless wondering what similar vested interests the judges who hear her case next week will not be declaring.
Writing in Haaretz today, Blau said he had been warned “that if I return to Israel I could be silenced for ever, and that I would be charged for crimes related to espionage”. He concluded that “this isn’t only a war for my personal freedom but for Israel’s image”.
He should leave worrying about Israel’s image to Netanyahu, Diskin and judges like Dorner. That was why the gag order was enforced in the first place. This is not a battle for Israel’s image; it’s a battle for what is left of its soul.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel.
Israeli Police Break Into Media Office In East Jerusalem, Attack Locals and Visitors
By Saed Bannoura – IMEMC & Agencies – April 02, 2010
The Israeli Police attacked on Thursday Wadi Hilwa Media Center, in Silwan’s Wadi Hilwa neighborhood, in occupied East Jerusalem, and violently attacked employees and visitors, leading to several injuries, the Palestine News Network (PNN) reported.
Fakhri Abu Diab, head of the Committee for Defending the Lands and Properties of Silwan, said that Jawad Siyam, head of the center was wounded in his shoulder and back, while employee Ramadan Al Banna, and resident Ahmad Al Natsha suffered eye injuries, while two women, visiting the center, were violently pushed around by the police.
The police also kidnapped Yazan Siyam, 14, while he was at the center and violently attacked his younger brother, Ali, as he followed the soldiers crying, while they dragged his brother.
Abu Diab slammed the Israeli attack, especially since the soldiers were accompanied by extremist Jewish settlers.
Speaking from his hospital bed at the Al Makassid Hospital in East Jerusalem, Jawad Siyam, said that the attack is “barbaric” , and that when he asked the police about a warrant, the police and the settlers said “we are the law here, nothing is above us”, and started attacking and insulting every person who was there.
On Thursday at dawn, the Israelis invaded Al Bustan neighborhood and kidnapped five residents identified as Khalaf Odah, 62, Mohammad Odah, 38, Hammouda Siyam, Sa’id Zaytoun, and Daoud Siyam.
Khalad, Mohammad and Hammouda were released on bail, while the remand of the Sa’id and Daoud was extended until Sunday for further interrogation.
Abu Diab stated that Silwan is subject to frequent Israeli military and settler attacks, and that the provocative acts of the police and fundamentalist settlers are meant to terrify the residents to force them out of their homes and lands.
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