Big Brother – on the semi-periphery

Assange, 3 out 4 charges to be dropped?

Posted on 2015/08/12 - 2015/08/12 by jd

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The only country that has come out looking worse than the USA for this witchhunt is Sweden.

‘In a few days time, unless something unexpected happens, Julian Assange will no longer be facing three of the four potential charges against him in respect of what happened in Sweden in August 2010.This is because of the Swedish law of limitation which for certain offences means that the suspect has to be charged within five years of the alleged incident….’
Source: Assange, the law of limitation, and the next eight days | Jack of Kent blog

Video: ‘Sweden, August 3, 2015: Sveriges Television (SVT) sits down with Thomas Olsson, attorney for Julian Assange, to discuss what is happening in the Assange case.’

WikiLeaks release: Target Tokyo and the Five Eyes

Posted on 2015/07/31 - 2015/08/01 by jd

I think the most important phrase to understand in our Manning/Wikileaks/Snowden/etc era is…. Five Eyes. If one does not grasp it then one does not understand what is happening in the world today. imho.

Today’s publication also contains NSA reports from intercepts of senior Japanese government officials. Four of the reports are classified TOP SECRET. One of the reports is marked “REL TO USA, AUS, CAN, GBR, NZL“, meaning it has been formally authorised to be released to the United States’ “Five Eyes” intelligence partners: Australia, Canada, Great Britain and New Zealand.
[….]
The documents demonstrate intimate knowledge of internal Japanese deliberations on such issues as: agricultural imports and trade disputes; negotiating positions in the Doha Round of the World Trade Organization; Japanese technical development plans, climate change policy, nuclear and energy policy and carbon emissions schemes; correspondence with international bodies such as the International Energy Agency (IEA); strategy planning and draft talking points memoranda concerning the management of diplomatic relations with the United States and the European Union; and the content of a confidential Prime Ministerial briefing that took place at Shinzo Abe’s official residence.
via WikiLeaks – Target Tokyo.

liberté / sécurité

Posted on 2015/06/20 - 2015/06/20 by jd

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— Le Journal du Siècle.

TSA agents failed 67 out of 70 fake-bomb tests

Posted on 2015/06/01 - 2015/06/01 by jd

‘…An internal investigation of the Transportation Security Administration revealed security failures at dozens of the nation’s busiest airports, where undercover investigators were able to smuggle mock explosives or banned weapons through checkpoints in 95 percent of trials, ABC News has learned.

The series of tests were conducted by Homeland Security Red Teams who pose as passengers, setting out to beat the system.

According to officials briefed on the results of a recent Homeland Security Inspector General’s report, TSA agents failed 67 out of 70 tests, with Red Team members repeatedly able to get potential weapons through checkpoints.

via EXCLUSIVE: Undercover DHS Tests Find Security Failures at US Airports – ABC News.

‘Redacted’ is the new American hero

Posted on 2015/05/20 - 2015/05/20 by jd

Redacted,
Snowden,
Manning…

‘A CIA interrogator of "high-value detainees" filed a complaint in April 2013 with the agency’s internal watchdog in which he sought "whistleblower protection," claiming the CIA punished him as a "reprisal" for him cooperating with investigations into the treatment of detainees. The punishment, he said, was the CIA failing to reimburse him for legal fees he incurred as a result of the investigations. [….]

"[Redacted] contacted the CIA Office of Inspector General via the Report Fraud electronic database alleging reprisal," says the April 12, 2013 closing memorandum in the interrogator’s case. "[Redacted] alleged that [redacted] legal fee reimbursement claim to the CIA was intentionally delayed by Office of General Counsel (OGC) personnel as reprisal for [redacted] cooperation with OIG investigations and other matters involving the Detainee Interrogation Program. [Redacted] served as an interrogator with the Renditions and Detention Group (RDG) of the [CIA’s] National Clandestine Service (NCS)."

via A CIA Interrogator Said the Agency Punished Him For Cooperating With Torture Probe | VICE News.

Israel Jails Palestinian for Facebook posts

Posted on 2015/05/14 by jd

Notice that the NYT assures us that this is rare.

TEL AVIV, Israel — An Israeli court on Tuesday sentenced a Palestinian for incitement and for supporting a terrorist organization based on Facebook posts that applauded militant attacks, his lawyer said. It was a rare case in which statements on social media were regarded as a crime.

[….] “These posts motivated other Facebook users who shared the inciting contents with their friends and followers, who in turn supported the posts by pressing the “like” button,” the indictment said. “The mere use of this media, as the defendant has done, serves as a severe act, given the extensive circulation of the messages, as well as the ease with which these messages spread.”

Mr. Shalabi’s lawyer, Tariq Bargouth, said the basis for the conviction and punishment never established that Mr. Shalabi’s posts had encouraged any specific militant attack.

via Israel Jails Palestinian Who Applauded Militant Attacks on Facebook – NYTimes.com.

Deprecating HTTP: Thank you Edward Snowden

Posted on 2015/05/14 by jd

‘Mozilla recently announced their intent to deprecate the insecure HTTP protocol in Firefox in favor of HTTPS (https://). In practice, they plan to do this by gradually removing the ability for HTTP websites to use various web features. They’re joined by the Chrome security team, who declared something similar in December…’
via We're Deprecating HTTP And It's Going To Be Okay.

How Glenn Greenwald explains Baltimore to Brazil

Posted on 2015/05/05 - 2015/05/05 by jd

Elias Isquith: You’re in Brazil; what has the unrest in Baltimore looked like from outside the U.S.?

Glenn Greenwald: I think that sometimes it’s hard for people who are Americans and living in the United States to appreciate the vast gap between how they’re taught to think about America and how the rest of the world perceives America. This has probably been one of the most eye-opening things for me from living outside the United States now for as long as I have, which is an appreciation of just how viscerally the rest of the world sees that discrepancy. Obviously there’s polling that shows that if you ask people around the world who the greatest threat to world peace is, overwhelmingly they’ll say the United States, which most Americans find bizarre, to the extent that they’re aware of it at all.

The perception that America has a radical problem with race and that it has become an extremely abusive penal state are very widespread in the rest of the world — or at least lots of parts of the rest of the world — and it’s also quite accurate. Just from my own experience, when I talk to people in Brazil about things like Ferguson or Baltimore, there’s not a surprise or bewilderment; it’s sort of a confirmation of the fact that America has a serious problem with racism and that police abuse and this abusive penal state seems to be getting worse.
via “It’s pure authoritarianism”: Glenn Greenwald exposes the link between Baltimore’s uprising and the NSA – Salon.com.

Ten times the amount of US Gov’t informants since J. Edgar’s day

Posted on 2015/04/16 - 2015/04/16 by jd

‘…Torres isn’t an all-American guy. He’s an FBI informant, one of more than 15,000 domestic spies who make up the largest surveillance network ever created in the United States. During J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO operations, the bureau had just 1,500 informants. The drug war brought that number up to about 6,000. After 9/11, the bureau recruited so many new informants — many of them crooks and convicts, desperate for money or leniency on previous crimes — that the government had to develop software to help agents track their spies….’

via The FBI Informant Who Mounted a Sting Operation Against the FBI – The Intercept.

Killer Robots = Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems (LAWS)

Posted on 2015/04/14 by jd

Yes, we have reached the evolutionary level of humanity’s history where civilization will be measured by how we control our killer robots. And again, the role of Mini-Me is played by the UK for the USA — imagine the outrage if Nobel Peace Prize winner President Obama openly opposed this proposal? And, there should be a special war crime tribunal for the Pentagon freaks who come up with newspeak acronyms like this!…

‘…The UK is opposing an international ban on so-called “killer robots” at a United Nations conference that is this week examining future developments of what are officially termed Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems (Laws).

[….] The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, an alliance of human rights groups and concerned scientists, is calling for an international prohibition on fully autonomous weapons.

Last week Human Rights Watch released a report urging the creation of a new protocol specifically aimed at outlawing Laws….’

via UK opposes international ban on developing 'killer robots' | Politics | The Guardian.

When Julian Assange tried to call Hillary Clinton

Posted on 2015/04/13 by jd

‘I decided it was necessary to bring forward our publication schedule by four months and contact the State Department to get it on record that we had given them advance warning. The situation would then be harder to spin into another legal or political assault. Unable to raise Louis Susman, then US ambassador to the UK, we tried the front door. WikiLeaks investigations editor Sarah Harrison called the State Department front desk and informed the operator that “Julian Assange” wanted to have a conversation with Hillary Clinton. Predictably, this statement was initially greeted with bureaucratic disbelief. We soon found ourselves in a reenactment of that scene in Dr. Strangelove, where Peter Sellers cold-calls the White House to warn of an impending nuclear war and is immediately put on hold. As in the film, we climbed the hierarchy, speaking to incrementally more superior officials until we reached Clinton’s senior legal advisor. He told us he would call us back. We hung up, and waited….’
via Julian Assange – Google Is Not What It Seems.

New Zealand needs the USA to target Whistleblowers

Posted on 2015/03/16 by jd

And, what did the NZ government have to do to receive this kind of info this info from the USA? This is probably the real scandal. How many other government need the USA to target whistleblowers in their own countries?

‘New Zealand’s eavesdropping agency used an Internet mass surveillance system to target government officials and an anti-corruption campaigner on a neighboring Pacific island, according to a top-secret document.

Analysts from Government Communications Security Bureau, or GCSB, programmed the Internet spy system XKEYSCORE to intercept documents authored by the closest aides and confidants of the prime minister on the tiny Solomon Islands. The agency also entered keywords into the system so that it would intercept documents containing references to the Solomons’ leading anti-corruption activist, who is known for publishing government leaks on his website….’

via New Zealand Used NSA System to Target Officials, Anti-Corruption Campaigner – The Intercept.

Edward Snowden worked only in one of 17 spy agencies

Posted on 2015/03/15 by jd

Tom Engelhardt writes:

I’ve often said that Edward Snowden’s revelations gave us the impression that we now more or less know what the American secret world of intelligence, surveillance, and spying is doing. We don’t. Snowden illuminated the workings of one of 17 intelligence outfits in the U.S. Intelligence Community. To have a real sense of what’s been going on, we would need Edward Snowdens to walk out of the CIA, the DIA, and a whole series of other agencies and outfits. Until then, we don’t even know what we don’t know.
via TomDispatch – I've often said that Edward Snowden's revelations….

Tom Engelhardt: TomDispatch.com

Yes, Petraeus did betray us. And, Manning and Snowden are American heros

Posted on 2015/03/06 by jd

Trevor Timm writes:

‘…Much of this was Top Secret, and some was SCI (Sensitive Compartmented Information) higher than Top Secret – and he admitted in his plea to lying to the FBI about his leaks, knowing that doing so was a crime in itself.

Despite the gravity of Petreaus’ actions, he agreed to a single misdemeanor guilty plea for improperly “retaining” classified information, and prosecutors agreed to recommend a sentence of two years probation and no jail time.

Compare that to the actions of Chelsea Manning, who is serving 35 years for leaking classified information. As Ellsberg noted: “Chelsea Manning had access to SCI every day… where she worked in Iraq. She chose to disclose none of it, nothing higher than Secret”.

[….] Petraeus is apparently an exception only because his leaks came to the attention of the FBI inadvertently, and they involved a large volume of exceptionally sensitive information.)

The government had the chance to hold Petreaus out as an example on the same felony Espionage Act charges they’ve leveled (unfairly) against every conscientious whistleblower they’ve indicted. Their answer? Leaking should no longer be a felony. Let’s make sure we hold them to that, and not only for CIA Directors….’

via Petraeus won't serve a day in jail for his leaks. Edward Snowden shouldn't either | Comment is free | The Guardian.

928 Americans killed by police annually

Posted on 2015/03/06 by jd

‘An average of 545 people killed by local and state law enforcement officers in the US went uncounted in the country’s most authoritative crime statistics every year for almost a decade, according to a report released on Tuesday.

The first-ever attempt by US record-keepers to estimate the number of uncounted “law enforcement homicides” exposed previous official tallies as capturing less than half of the real picture. The new estimate – an average of 928 people killed by police annually over eight recent years, compared to 383 in published FBI data – amounted to a more glaring admission than ever before of the government’s failure to track how many people police kill….’

via Police killed more than twice as many people as reported by US government | US news | The Guardian.

Chicago’s Black Sites

Posted on 2015/02/26 - 2015/02/26 by jd

Rahm Emanuel was Obama’s right-hand man for years in the White House, today domestic ‘black sites’ exist in his city. Who will be held responsible?

In a letter to Rahm Emanuel, Amnesty USA’s executive director Steven Hawkins wrote: “As the mayor of Chicago, you have a responsibility under US and international law to ensure that human rights violations are not committed within the city.”
via ‘Gestapo’ tactics at US police ‘black site’ ring alarm from Chicago to Washington — The Guardian

Yes, Freedom is Slavery. No irony implied this time.

Posted on 2015/02/23 - 2015/02/23 by jd

‘In all, Gemalto produces some 2 billion SIM cards a year. Its motto is “Security to be Free.”…’
via The Great SIM Heist: How Spies Stole the Keys to the Encryption Castle.