Press TV – May 8, 2024
US police have arrested dozens of students after clearing an encampment of pro-Palestinian protesters at George Washington University in Washington, DC.
Just before dawn, hundreds of officers entered the campus and used pepper spray to disperse the protesters and clear the encampment, according to GW Hatchet, the university’s independent student-run newspaper.
“Officers gave their third and final warning to demonstrators to move at about 3:30 a.m., saying all who remained in U-Yard and the stretch of H Street in front of the plaza would be arrested,” GW Hatchet wrote.
Between 30 and 40 protesters were arrested, according to CNN.
Citing familiar sources, the newspaper said police charged several protesters with unlawful entry.
Protesters were carrying signs that read, “Free Palestine” and “Hands off Rafah.”
Since mid-April, students have been demonstrating against Israel’s war on Gaza at about 140 colleges in the United States.
The demonstrators are demanding their universities cut direct or indirect financial ties with US weapons manufacturers and Israeli institutions.
Many also want their universities to end academic relationships with the regime’s institutions.
Similar demonstrations have also spread to campuses in Britain, France, Australia, Canada and elsewhere.
In New York, hundreds of protesters have been marching through the city on Wednesday against Israel’s invasion of Rafah, and US support for the regime’s military.
An estimated 1.4 million people, displaced from elsewhere in Gaza by Israel’s seven-months war, are now sheltering in the southern city of Rafah.
Israel on Tuesday seized control of Gaza’s vital Rafah border crossing, prompting fears of a planned ground offensive on the last refuge of the Palestinians.
By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | May 7, 2024
On Tuesday, TikTok, together with its parent company ByteDance, took legal action in the US federal court to challenge a new law endorsed by President Joe Biden.
This legislation mandates that ByteDance either sell TikTok by January 19 or cease its operations in the US. The suit, filed in the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, claims that the law infringes on several constitutional grounds, particularly violating the First Amendment’s free speech protections.
We obtained a copy of the lawsuit for you here.
TikTok, immensely popular among 170 million Americans, faces an existential threat under this law, enacted on April 24. The filing emphatically states that divestiture is unfeasible — “not commercially, not technologically, not legally.” It warns of an inevitable shutdown, which would “silence the 170 million Americans who use the platform to communicate in ways that cannot be replicated elsewhere.”
Here are the key points you should know about TikTok’s argument:
Unprecedented and Discriminatory Legislation: TikTok claims that the Act is the first of its kind to single out and ban a specific online platform, infringing upon the rights of 170 million American users to participate in a global community of over a billion users.
Violation of First Amendment Rights: TikTok argues that the Act violates the First Amendment by imposing a ban on a major platform for speech and expression. They contend that the legislation infringes on free speech rights by selectively targeting TikTok based on its ownership and content.
Impractical Divestiture Requirements: The Act provides TikTok the option to divest its U.S. operations as an alternative to a ban. TikTok contends this divestiture is commercially, technologically, and legally infeasible, especially within the mandated timeline, making it a non-viable option.
Lack of Substantive Justification: TikTok criticizes the Act for lacking concrete legislative findings or evidence that TikTok poses a national security threat. They argue the legislation is based on speculative risks rather than substantiated threats.
Existence of Less Restrictive Alternatives: TikTok points out that they have proposed and negotiated comprehensive security measures with the U.S. government, referred to as “Project Texas”, which were disregarded in favor of the more extreme measure of banning the platform.
First Amendment Concerns: The First Amendment argument is particularly strong. US courts generally apply strict scrutiny to laws that target specific speech platforms or types of speech. Under strict scrutiny, the government must prove that the law is narrowly tailored to achieve a compelling governmental interest. TikTok’s claim that the Act fails to meet this standard because it is overbroad and not the least restrictive means to address the alleged security concerns could resonate with the courts.
Selective Targeting and Discrimination: TikTok’s argument that the Act discriminates against it by specifically targeting its platform while offering other companies potential exemptions or less severe restrictions could be seen as a violation of the equal protection principles implicit in the Fifth Amendment. This argument about selective targeting could strengthen TikTok’s case if they can convincingly argue that similar platforms are treated differently without a reasonable basis.
Feasibility of Alternatives: The argument regarding the feasibility of divestiture and the existence of less restrictive means (such as the security measures TikTok proposed) could also be pivotal. Courts often look favorably on arguments that a law is not narrowly tailored if there are obvious, less restrictive alternatives that could achieve the same goals.
Critics argue that the law encroaches on the First Amendment rights of TikTok users and labels the law as an unjustified overreach by the government. On the other hand, proponents of the law cite national security concerns, fearing that the Chinese government might access or manipulate data collected on American users.
The legislation was swiftly moved through Congress amid bipartisan concerns over potential data privacy violations and content manipulation by Chinese authorities via TikTok. Despite such claims, the US government has yet to disclose concrete evidence supporting these allegations.
The ongoing battle over TikTok is part of a broader dialogue concerning the intersection of technology, privacy, and national security. Legal scholars note that the outcome of this lawsuit might set a significant precedent affecting digital media regulations in the US.
Adding complexity to the situation, the lawsuit reveals that TikTok has invested $2 billion in data protection measures for US users and engaged in extensive negotiations with the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS). These discussions culminated in a draft National Security Agreement, which included severe measures such as a “shut-down option” for the US government. However, meaningful negotiations ceased in August 2022, and by March 2023, CFIUS demanded a divestiture of the US TikTok operations.
British-based investigation unveils targeting, destruction of land by Israeli forces in Gaza Strip since last October
By Dilara Hamit – AA – 05.05.2024
A British-based investigation group has unveiled the systematic targeting and destruction of orchards and greenhouses by Israeli forces in the Gaza Strip since last October, when the current conflict in Gaza began, undermining Gazan Palestinians’ ability to feed and provide for themselves.
Analysis by Forensic Architecture, a multidisciplinary research group based at Goldsmiths, University of London, identified more than 2,000 agricultural sites, including farms and greenhouses, that have been deliberately destroyed, and often replaced with Israeli military earthworks.
The destruction, particularly intense in northern Gaza, has led to the devastation of nearly one-third of the region’s greenhouses and approximately 40% of agricultural land previously used for food production.
The investigation suggests that the destruction is a deliberate act of ecocide exacerbating the ongoing catastrophic famine in Gaza, part of a wider pattern of depriving Palestinians of critical resources for survival.
“Since 2014, Palestinian farmers along Gaza’s perimeter have seen their crops sprayed by airborne herbicides and regularly bulldozed, and have themselves faced sniper fire by the Israeli occupation forces. Along that engineered ‘border,’ sophisticated systems of fences and surveillance reinforce a military buffer zone,” according to a statement from Forensic Architecture marking March 30, Land Day, a day when Palestinians protest and plant olive trees to reaffirm their connection to the land.
The investigation, built on collaborations with local farmers’ associations and agricultural workers, highlights the ongoing Israeli destruction of vegetation in Gaza and its severe effects on Palestinian food security and livelihoods.
The analysis indicates the ongoing resilience of Palestinian farmers who continue to cultivate their lands despite forced alterations to the landscape by the Israeli occupation.
Greenhouses, farmland replaced by Israeli military construction
Before 2023, Gaza boasted 170 square kilometers (65 square miles) of agricultural land, or 47% of its total area. The fields and orchards were crucial for local food security amid the siege conditions faced by Palestinians under the 15-year blockade of Gaza since 2007, followed by the even harsher blockade since last Oct. 7.
“Our analysis shows that Israel’s ground invasion has advanced over nearly 50 percent of Gazan farms and orchards,” said Forensic Architecture.
“We used remote sensing to measure the scale of agricultural destruction resulting from this military activity, by comparing the region’s ‘vegetation index’ (an indicator of the health and robustness of plant life, measured by analysing satellite imagery) before and after the invasion. This comparison reveals that as of March 2024, of the agricultural areas targeted, approximately 40 percent of the land in Gaza previously used for food production has been destroyed.”
The findings show that the destruction of agriculture along Gaza’s perimeter suggests a potential expansion of the Israeli army’s buffer zone, further limiting livable space for Palestinians.
Additionally, vital agricultural infrastructure like greenhouses has been systematically targeted since the onset of the ground invasion.
It stressed that satellite imagery reveals extensive destruction of greenhouses, with nearly one-third of Gaza’s greenhouses demolished between last October and this March. Forensic Architecture identified more than 2,000 agricultural sites, including farms and greenhouses, destroyed during that period, often replaced by Israeli military constructions.
The destruction has been particularly severe in northern Gaza, where 90% of greenhouses were demolished in the early stages of the invasion, an area which the head of the UN World Food Program (WFP) said Saturday was in “full-blown famine.”
“As the Israeli military advances south, destruction of agricultural land and infrastructure moves with it. We observe that 40% of the greenhouses in the areas around the southern city of Khan Younis, where many hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are now displaced, have been destroyed since January 2024,” said Forensic Architecture.
“Military support vehicles and tractors accompany the Israeli ground invasion, routinely building earthworks to reinforce military outposts. Once those vehicles depart, they leave behind a devastated and unliveable area,” it added.
The Cradle | May 7, 2024
Riot police bulldozed barricades and temporarily detained 125 people to break up a pro-Palestine student protest at the University of Amsterdam in the early hours of 7 May, Reuters reported.
Four of the protesters are still being held on charges of public violence and insulting an officer, while the remainder have been released.
Organizers said they were “taking back this campus” in solidarity with Palestine and “in the spirit” of student protests that began in the US in response to Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Along with pro-Palestine demonstrators at universities in the US and Europe, the Dutch students are demanding the university boycott academics and businesses in Israel.
Similar protests have occurred at Ghent University in Belgium and France’s prestigious Sciences Po University.
The National reported that in a social media message shortly before 3 am, organizers said they were being “violently evicted” by police arriving in riot vans.
Dutch television showed footage of police wielding batons advancing on the protesters and destroying tents.
Reuters adds that the police claimed student protesters ignored requests from university administrators and the mayor for the protesters to leave the campus and threw stones and fireworks.
“The police’s input was necessary to restore order. We see the footage on social media. We understand that those images may appear as intense,” police claimed.
Due to pressure from students, the University of Amsterdam published a list of eight research projects with ties to Israel.
It said one was about detecting explosives but “does not contribute to Israel’s military actions,” while others involved machine learning, gender issues, and safer streets.
Israel has used machine learning and artificial intelligence to generate bombing targets in Gaza.
A group of academics called Dutch Scholars for Palestine expressed support for the student protests.
“We have to resist political frames that will cast their efforts as antisemitic or a danger to the university community,” they said.
The media in the US and Europe have attempted to cast the protests as driven by antisemitism rather than by anger at Israel’s horrific bombing campaign in Gaza that has killed over 14,000 children.
Many Jewish students have participated in the university protests in opposition to Israeli policies.
“As the death toll and humanitarian crisis in Gaza increases … we should be proud of our students who are standing up to these abhorrent atrocity crimes,” the academics added.
By Jeremy Kuzmarov | CovertAction Magazine | May 6, 2024
In 1991, Frank Donner, former director of the ACLU’s Project on Political Surveillance, published a book entitled Protectors of Privilege, which provided a history of police suppression of left-wing and labor protests in the United States.
A key chapter in the book focused on the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), whose reactionary political function was epitomized by two of its most notorious chiefs: William Parker and Daryl Gates, who were overtly racist and supported anti-democratic paramilitary policing practices.
The LAPD’s true colors were on display at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) at the end of April when its officers stood by for hours as hundreds of right-wing vigilantes attacked pro-Palestinian demonstrators in what Al Jazeera described as a “really shocking and ugly scene of violence.”
The LAPD then aggressively broke up the pro-Palestinian demonstrators’ encampment using flash bangs and riot gear, arresting around 200 of the anti-genocide protesters who were entirely peaceful. (none of the vigilantes were arrested).[1]
![Pro-Israel attackers try to remove barricades at a pro-Palestinian encampment at the University of California, Los Angeles, on May 1, 2024 [David Swanson/Reuters]](https://i0.wp.com/covertactionmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/pro-israel-attackers-try-to-remove-barricades-at-a.jpeg?resize=696%2C473&ssl=1)
On May 2, a day after the break-up of the encampment, I visited the UCLA campus and witnessed students and university employees clearing the protest area.
Though many of the students were refusing to speak to any media, I managed to interview one, Lisa Cooper, who described herself as a seasoned organizer originally from New York who had joined the protesters in solidarity with them.
Cooper told me that she helped run a wellness center in the encampment that brought in acupuncturists who administered treatment to students who had either been physically attacked or were dealing with emotional trauma and the stress of living in the encampment while studying for mid-terms.
The students believed they had to do something in the face of the horrific atrocities going on in Gaza.
Cooper said that dissent was currently under siege in the U.S. and that the protests provided an opportunity to get people thinking about societal problems and realities, and that the students involved felt empowered by their experience, which they would take with them into other aspects of their lives.
As part of the daily programming, students coordinated teach-in events like during the 1960s era Vietnam campus protests. Benjamin Kersten, a Ph.D. student in art history, told the UCLA Daily Bruin that “this is a public university that preaches the importance of education, and yet, topics like Palestine are not taught. A lot of the programming shows that people here are taking their education into their own hands, and learning what it means to teach each other and enact activist values.”[2]
According to Cooper, public protest is a right Americans enjoy under the U.S. Constitution and that this should not be forgotten.
Cooper said that the right wing vigilantes who stormed the encampment were equipped with bear mace, projectiles and other weapons that they deployed against protesters, causing injuries to some of the students.
One protester had 16 staples inserted into his scalp.
Because the students did not want to call 911 and put themselves at risk of suspension or arrest, other students drove them to the hospital by car.
Cooper herself was not injured in the attack, but said that the vigilantes hurled racial slurs at her (she is African-American).
The main police units that broke up the encampment were officers of the California Highway Patrol (CHP) who, she said, are not required to wear body cam devices. CHP was backed up by the LAPD, whose presence was ubiquitous around the campus during my visit.
Cooper said that UCLA should be called to account for not allowing peaceful protests on public property.
UCLA President Michael Drake released a statement supporting the university’s decision to label the protest encampment as unlawful, noting that, “when it threatens the safety of students or everyone else, we must act.”[3]
However, there is no evidence that the encampment threatened the safety of UCLA students in any way[4]; rather, it was the vigilante counter-demonstrators who compromised the safety of UCLA students expressing their constitutional right to dissent.
By Alastair Crooke | Strategic Culture Foundation | May 6, 2024
The Transformation is accelerating. The harsh, often violent, police repression of student protests across the U.S. and Europe, in wake of the continuing Palestinian massacres, exposes sheer intolerance towards those voicing condemnation against the violence in Gaza.
The category of ‘hate speech’ enacted into law has become so ubiquitous and fluid that criticism of the conduct of Israel’s behaviour in Gaza and the West Bank is now treated as a category of extremism and as a threat to the state. Confronted by criticism of Israel, the ruling élites respond by angrily lashing out.
Is there a boundary (still) between criticism and anti-semitism? In the West the two increasingly are being made to cohere.
Today’s stifling of any criticism of Israel’s conduct – in blatant contradiction with any western claim to a values-based order – reflects desperation and a touch of panic. Those who still occupy the leadership slots of Institutional Power in the U.S. and Europe are compelled by the logic of those structures to pursue courses of action that are leading to ‘system’ breakdown, both domestically – and concomitantly – provoking the dramatic intensification of international tensions, too.
Mistakes flow from the underlying ideological rigidities in which the ruling strata are trapped: The embrace of a transformed Biblical Israel that long ago separated from today’s U.S. Democratic Party zeitgeist; the inability to accept reality in Ukraine; and the notion that U.S. political coercion alone can revive paradigms in Israel and the Middle East that are long gone.
The notion that a new Israeli Nakba of Palestinians can be forced down the throats of the western and the global public are both delusional and reek of centuries of old Orientalism.
What else can one say when Senator Tom Cotton posts: “These little Gazas are disgusting cesspools of antisemitic hate, full of pro-Hamas sympathisers; fanatics and freaks”?
When order unravels, it unravels quickly and comprehensively. Suddenly, the GOP conference has had its nose rubbed in dirt (over its lack of support for Biden’s $61bn for Ukraine); the U.S. public’s despair at open border immigration is disdainfully ignored; and Gen Z’s expressions of empathy with Gaza is declared an internal ‘enemy’ to be roughly suppressed. All points of strategic inflection and transformation – likely as not.
And the rest of the world now is cast as an enemy too, being perceived as recalcitrants who fail to embrace the western recitation of its ‘Rules Order’ catechism and for failing clearly to toe the line on support for Israel and the proxy war on Russia.
It is a naked bid for unchecked power; one nevertheless that is galvanising a global blow-back. It is pushing China closer to Russia and accelerating the BRICS confluence. Plainly put, the world – faced with massacres in Gaza and West Bank – will not abide by either the Rules or any western hypocritical cherry-picking of International Law. Both systems are collapsing under the leaden weight of western hypocrisy.
Nothing is more obvious than Secretary of State Blinken’s scolding of President Xi for China’s treatment of the Uighurs and his threats of sanctions for Chinas trade with Russia – powering ‘Russia’s assault on Ukraine’, Blinken asserts. Blinken has made an enemy of the one power that can evidently out-compete the U.S.; that has manufacturing and competitive overmatch vs the U.S.
The point here is that these tensions can quickly spiral down into war of ‘Us’ versus ‘Them’ – ranged against not just the China, Russia, Iran “Axis of Evil”, but vs Turkey, India Brazil and all others who dare to criticise the moral correctness of either of the West’s Israel and Ukraine projects. That is, it has the potential to turn into the West versus the Rest.
Again, another own goal.
Crucially, these two conflicts have led to the Transformation of the West from self-styled ‘mediators’ claiming to bring calm to flashpoints, to being active contenders in these wars. And, as active contenders, they can permit no criticism of their actions – either inside, or out; for that would be to hint at appeasement.
Put plainly: this transformation to contenders in war lies at the heart of Europe’s present obsession with militarism. Bruno Maçães relates that a “senior European minister argued to him that: if the U.S. withdrew its support for Ukraine, his country, a Nato member, would have no choice but to fight alongside Ukraine – inside Ukraine. As he put it, why should his country wait for a Ukrainian defeat, followed by [a defeated Ukraine] swelling the ranks of a Russian army bent on new excursions?”
Such a proposition is both stupid and likely would lead to a continent-wide war (a prospect with which the unnamed minister seemed astonishingly at ease). Such insanity is the consequence of the Europeans’ acquiescence to Biden’s attempt at regime change in Moscow. They wanted to become consequential players at the table of the Great Game, but have come to perceive that they sorely lack the means for it. The Brussels Class fear the consequence to this hubris will be the unravelling of the EU.
As Professor John Gray writes:
“At bottom, the liberal assault on free speech [on Gaza and Ukraine] is a bid for unchecked power. By shifting the locus of decision from democratic deliberation to legal procedures, the élites aim to insulate [their neoliberal] cultish programmes from contestation and accountability. The politicisation of law – and the hollowing out of politics go hand in hand”.
Despite these efforts to cancel opposing voices, other perspectives and understandings of history nonetheless are reasserting their primacy: Do Palestinians have a point? Is there a history to their predicament? ‘No, they are a tool used by Iran, by Putin and by Xi Jinping’, Washington and Brussels says.
They say such untruths because the intellectual effort to see Palestinians as human beings, as citizens, endowed with rights, would force many Western states to revise much of their rigid system of thinking. It is simpler and easier for Palestinians to be left ambiguous, or to ‘disappear’.
The future which this approach heralds couldn’t be farther from the democratic, co-operative international order the White House claims to advocate. Rather it leads to the precipice of civil violence in the U.S. and to wider war in Ukraine.
Many of today’s Woke liberals however, would reject the allegation of being anti-free speech, labouring under the misapprehension that their liberalism is not curtailing free speech, but rather is protecting it from ‘falsehoods’ emanating from the enemies of ‘our democracy’ (i.e. the ‘MAGA contingent’). In this way, they falsely perceive themselves as still adhering to the classical liberalism of, say, John Stuart Mill.
Whilst it is true that in On Liberty (1859) Mill argued that free speech must include the freedom to cause offence, in the same essay he also insisted that the value of freedom lay in its collective utility. He specified that “it must be utility in the largest sense – grounded on the permanent interests of man as a progressive being”.
Free speech has little value if it facilitates the discourse of the ‘deplorables’ or the so-called Right.
In other words, “Like many other 19th-century liberals”, Professor Gray argues, “Mill feared the rise of democratic government because he believed it meant empowering an ignorant and tyrannical majority. Time and again, he vilified the torpid masses who were content with traditional ways of living”. One can hear here, the precursor to Mrs Clinton’s utter disdain for the ‘deplorables’ living in ‘fly-over’ U.S. states.
Rousseau too, is often taken as an icon of ‘liberty’ and ‘individualism’ and widely admired. Yet here too, we have language which conceals its’ fundamentally anti-political character.
Rousseau saw human associations rather, as groups to be acted upon, so that all thinking and daily behaviour could be folded into the like-minded units of a unitary state.
The individualism of Rousseau’s thought, therefore, is no libertarian assertion of absolute rights of free speech against the all-consuming state. No raising of the ‘tri-colour’ against oppression.
Quite the reverse! Rousseau’s passionate ‘defence of the individual’ arises out of his opposition to ‘the tyranny’ of social convention; the forms, rituals and ancient myths that bind society – religion, family, history, and social institutions. His ideal may be proclaimed as that of individual freedom, but it is ‘freedom’, however, not in a sense of immunity from control of the state, but in our withdrawal from the supposed oppressions and corruptions of collective society.
Family relationship is thus transmuted subtly into a political relationship; the molecule of the family is broken into the atoms of its individuals. With these atoms today groomed further to shed their biological gender, their cultural identity and ethnicity, they are coalesced afresh into the single unity of the state.
This is the deceit concealed in classical Liberalism’s language of freedom and individualism – ‘freedom’ nonetheless being hailed as the major contribution of the French Revolution to western civilisation.
Yet perversely, behind the language of freedom lay de-civilisation.
The ideological legacy from the French Revolution, however, was radical de-civilisation. The old sense of permanence – of belonging somewhere in space and time – was conjured away, to give place to its very opposite: Transience, temporariness and ephemerality.
Frank Furedi has written,
“Discontinuity of culture coexists with the loss of the sense of the past … The loss of this sensibility has had an unsettling effect on culture itself and has deprived it of moral depth. Today, the anticultural exercises a powerful role in western society. Culture is frequently framed in instrumental and pragmatic terms and rarely perceived as a system of norms that endow human life with meaning. Culture has become a shallow construct to be disposed of – or changed.
“The western cultural elite is distinctively uncomfortable with the narrative of civilisation and has lost its enthusiasm for celebrating it. The contemporary cultural landscape is saturated with a corpus of literature that calls into question the moral authority of civilisation and associates it more with negative qualities.
“De-civilization means that even the most foundational identities – such as that between man and woman – is called into question. At a time when the answer to the question of ‘what it means to be human’ becomes complicated – and where the assumptions of western civilisation lose their salience – the sentiments associated with wokeism can flourish”.
Karl Polyani, in his Great Transformation (published some 80 years ago), held that the massive economic and social transformations that he had witnessed during his lifetime – the end of the century of “relative peace” in Europe from 1815 to 1914, and the subsequent descent into economic turmoil, fascism and war, which was still ongoing at the time of the book’s publication – had but a single, overarching cause:
Prior to the 19th century, he insisted, the human way of being had always been ‘embedded’ in society, and that it was subordinated to local politics, customs, religion and social relations i.e. to a civilisational culture. Life was not treated as separated into distinct particulars, but as parts of an articulate whole – of life itself.
Liberalism turned this logic on its head. It constituted an ontological break with much of human history. Not only did it artificially separate the ‘economic’ from the ‘political’, but liberal economics (its foundational notion) demanded the subordination of society – of life itself – to the abstract logic of the self-regulating market. For Polanyi, this “means no less than the running of society as an adjunct to the market”.
The answer – clearly – was to make society again a distinctly human relationship of community, given meaning through a living culture. In this sense, Polanyi also emphasised the territorial character of sovereignty – the nation-state as the pre-condition to the exercise of democratic politics.
Polanyi would have argued that, absent a return to Life Itself as the pivot to politics, a violent backlash was inevitable. (Though hopefully not as dire as the transformation through which he lived.)
By Ken Macon | Reclaim The Net | May 5, 2024
The Australian government’s decision to institute a pilot program testing an online age verification system digital ID system was overshadowed by a privacy scandal concerning a legal requirement for bars and clubs in the region.
The wrinkle juxtaposed these two narratives in a glaring light and shows how the push for digital ID raises privacy concerns that transcend the initial point-of-sale or point-of-access and becomes an ongoing data-invasive system that makes surveillance much easier.
In New South Wales (NSW), clubs must legally collate personal information from patrons upon entry under the state’s registered clubs legislation, a mandate echoing the proposed age verification and digital ID requirement for websites. The data gathered, meant to be safeguarded under federal privacy laws, has become the heart of recent concerns on privacy and data risks surrounding age verification as it has ended up getting leaked.
However, following hard on the heels of the government’s announcement of an online age verification system, the privacy of club-goers and bar attendees was threatened in a substantial data privacy issue.
There are now suspicions of a considerable data violation, involving personal data collected under law by these venues. An unauthorized platform has purportedly made accessible the personal data of over a million customers from at least 16 licensed NSW clubs, forcing cybercrime detectives into action.
The alleged data spill includes records and personal data of high-level government officials. Outabox, an IT service provider, stated it had been notified about the potential data breach involving a sign-in system used by its clients by an “unrestricted” third party.
Government representatives, in the face of this serious data breach, attempted to understate the magnitude of the incident. The Gaming Minister David Harris, in response to the crisis, clarified the incident wasn’t a hack as it stemmed from a data breach of a third-party vendor.
“We know that this is an alleged data breach of a third-party vendor, so it wasn’t a hack,” he said.
“There was a high-level meeting yesterday and the authorities, cybersecurity and police organizations are currently investigating that and when we get authorization we can give more information.”
But such an incident underscores precisely the apprehensions articulated about online age verification and digital ID mandates. It’s also underscored by the fact that the government wants to backdoor encrypted messaging, ending privacy for all. But as with all of this data surveillance, you can’t control who ultimately gets their hands on that data.
Press TV – May 6, 2024
A dozen American senators have strongly warned the International Criminal Court (ICC)’s chief prosecutor against the UN court’s potential issuance of arrest warrants against Israeli officials over the regime’s ongoing genocidal war on the Gaza Strip.
The warning was issued in a harshly-toned letter addressed by the senators to the British lawyer Karim Khan on Monday.
“Target Israel and we will target you,” wrote the senators, who included Tom Cotton, Mitch McConnell, Rick Scott, Tim Scott, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio.
The ICC, located in The Hague, is currently conducting investigations into reported war crimes committed by the Israeli military.
Speculations have been rife that the court could issue arrest warrants against top Israeli officials over the October-present war that has so far killed nearly 35,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children.
The Israeli officials facing the prospect include Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Minister for Military Affairs Yoav Gallant, and the Israeli military’s Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi.
The senators, however, said by serving the warrants, the ICC risked losing the United States’ support.
The undersigned also cautioned Khan that they would move to “sanction your employees and associates, and bar you and your families from the United States,” adding, “You have been warned.”
Back in January, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the United Nations’ legal arm, ruled that “there is a plausible risk of genocide in Gaza and the continuing serious harm to civilians since then.” The court ordered Tel Aviv to take all measures to prevent genocide in the coastal sliver, but stopped short of ordering a ceasefire.
Ever since the ruling, though, the regime has even stepped up its deadly assaults on the Palestinian territory, and has vowed to carry out a ground invasion against the southern Gazan city of Rafah, where some 1.5 million people are seeking refuge from the ravages of the war.
Press TV – May 6, 2024
Israel has bombed a building belonging to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) in the besieged Gaza Strip.
Israel’s broadcaster KAN said the military hit the UN facility late Sunday on the proclaimed grounds that it was being used as a “military command center” by the resistance movement Hamas.
Many people were also killed in airstrikes by Israeli warplanes on two schools in Gaza where displaced families had taken shelter.
Israel has previously targeted UNRWA centers and UN-run schools across the besieged Palestinian territory.
UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini recently called for countries to back an independent investigation into killings and detentions of its staff and damage to its premises in Gaza.
UNRWA has accused Israel of targeting its facilities since early October.
The agency says 182 of its staff there had been killed and more than 160 of its shelters hit, resulting in the death of hundreds of people fleeing Israeli bombardment.
UNRWA is the biggest humanitarian aid provider in Gaza, where its 13,000 staff there also run schools and social services for the refugees who make up the majority of Gazans.
The regime is forcibly evacuating Palestinians from the eastern part of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip amid the prospect of its widely-discouraged ground invasion.
Hamas has called on humanitarian organizations, including UNRWA, not to leave Rafah.
The Palestinian resistance movement has also called on the international community to take urgent action to stop Israel’s planned invasion.
Israel has killed nearly 34,700 Palestinians, mostly women and children, in Gaza since October 7, 2023.
The International Court of Justice has said it is “plausible” that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
or go to
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By Lisa Pease | Consortium News | September 16, 2013
More than a half century ago, just after midnight on Sept. 18, 1961, the plane carrying UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld and 15 others went down in a plane crash over Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). All 16 died, but the facts of the crash were provocatively mysterious. … continue
Aletho News If Americans Knew No Tricks Zone
Aletho News 