Category: The Regime

‘The internet’s own boy’

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

I didn’t know Aaron Swartz, but I knew some of his friends — and of course I knew all about his work. It was hard to be an online activist and not cross paths with him somewhere: Creative Commons, Demand Progress, Progressive Change Campaign Committee, and so on. Everyone knew Aaron was the David who helped slay SOPA and saved the internet.

And so, even though I didn’t know him personally, I cried the day he died. I just couldn’t believe he was gone. He was so young, he still had so much left to do! But thanks to an overzealous federal prosecutor who pushed him over the edge, and an administration who really (when you get right down to it) doesn’t understand the internet at all, and sees it mainly as a threat, Aaron hung himself.

There are still people who see the internet as a mere tool, and want to impose the standards of the marketplace on its culture. I remember how baffled the press was about Creative Commons: You want to give your work away? For free? And we’d say, no, we want to share it. If the internet is about anything, it’s sharing knowledge.

Either you get the internet, or you don’t.

It’s okay if you don’t. But don’t make rules for the rest of us.

So Brian Knappenberger just released this documentary about Aaron, called “The Internet’s Own Boy: The Life and Legacy of Aaron Swartz.” You should watch it, because you probably don’t know why we should all be so grateful to him. And because the people who worked on this film do get the internet, you can watch it on YouTube, Viveo, Amazon, Comcast, and a bunch of places — some of them free.

FISA abuse

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

So the new Greenwald story is out, and it involves spying on prominent Muslim-Americans, apparently for no other reason than that they’re Muslims. One of them even worked for the Bush administration and held a security clearance:

But a three-month investigation by The Intercept—including interviews with more than a dozen current and former federal law enforcement officials involved in the FISA process—reveals that in practice, the system for authorizing NSA surveillance affords the government wide latitude in spying on U.S. citizens.

The five Americans whose email accounts were monitored by the NSA and FBI have all led highly public, outwardly exemplary lives. All five vehemently deny any involvement in terrorism or espionage, and none advocates violent jihad or is known to have been implicated in any crime, despite years of intense scrutiny by the government and the press. Some have even climbed the ranks of the U.S. national security and foreign policy establishments.

“I just don’t know why,” says Gill, whose AOL and Yahoo! email accounts were monitored while he was a Republican candidate for the Virginia House of Delegates. “I’ve done everything in my life to be patriotic. I served in the Navy, served in the government, was active in my community—I’ve done everything that a good citizen, in my opinion, should do.”

H/t Steve Duckett Attorney at Law.

A view from Gaza: This is a brutal attack, not a ‘military operation’

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

Via Common Dreams:

by Mona El-Farra

(Image: Middle East Children’s Alliance)
In Gaza last night, while Israeli army forces launched military attacks against Gaza, by sea, air and via artillery shells, hundreds of thousands of Palestinian children were unable to sleep inside their roof- tinned homes, clinging to their parents, crying, and terrified. The shelling last night was earth shattering, and went through the entirety of the Gaza strip- at least 100 attacks have already taken place .

In Gaza, we do not have bomb shelters to escape and hide.

In Gaza, these bombs fall on top of our deteriorating economic situation. Unemployment because of the Israeli blockade against civilians is almost 40%. It is Ramadan, making it more difficult to get basic foods, and thousands of government employees cannot reach banks to access their salaries. I know there are internal problems between Fatah and Hamas, but the outcome is hardship, while the bombs keep dropping on top of our heads.

In Gaza, the feeling of insecurity throws its shadow against all of the population, and the military operation continues. With threats of expansion in the coming few days, there is no news about any ceasefire.

Prior to the attack, the local authorities warned the population against swimming in the Mediterranean sea (the only recreational outlet for 1.7 million people). The sea around Gaza has become overly polluted with sewage and wastewater, that the authority, due to lack of fuel, had to pump untreated into the sea.

In Gaza, over 90% of water is unsuitable for drinking.

Through my work at the Middle East Children’s Alliance (MECA), we continue to implement the water purification systems at schools and kindergartens, to provide over 50,000 Palestinian children with clean water. Even though it is the summer holiday, the community had accessibility to our water units in schools, but the attacks make travel dangerous.

In Gaza today, imagine choosing between your child’s thirst and your child’s safety.

Also, at MECA, because of our deep understanding of the poor recreational facilities for Palestinian children, we continue our educational, entertainment and recreational activities, inside our partners’ community centres. It will be even more important during the difficult times ahead, to help the children and attract their attention away of the night shelling. Let the Children Play & Heal is an ongoing program, and I fear that there will be the need for more psycho-social programming, like we did in 2009 and 2012. While we help these children, we take care of the mothers too, via psycho-social trainings that aim to educate women about trauma, and how to deal with family and children during times of crises.

Today, different health facilities announced a need for more emergency supplies, which were already lacking because of the closure of the borders and the ongoing Israeli siege of Gaza. Just before the attacks, MECA managed to send some highly needed emergency medications to the Red Crescent Society, but more is needed.

In Gaza, MECA’s team, along with the many humanitarian and health organisations are going through a very difficult situation. We are physically unsafe, and we cannot sleep. But we work hard to support people at this very difficult times.

The streets of Gaza are empty, few cars are here and there, and Israel continues a collective punishment assassination policy demolishing homes by aerial bombardment.

These air raids fall on the majority of the population living in very crowded areas, so while they hit their targets, civilians pay a big price- we have many causalities and the numbers are rising every hour.

In Gaza, it is not a war or a military operation though it may look so. It is collective punishment and it is a brutal attack against all Palestinian people, and mainly civilians are paying the price.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Oops

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Liar, liar...
Remember when the NSA said Edward Snowden didn’t have access to surveillance intercepts? Liar, liar, pants on fire! Kevin Drum:

Among the most valuable contents — which The Post will not describe in detail, to avoid interfering with ongoing operations — are fresh revelations about a secret overseas nuclear project, double-dealing by an ostensible ally, a military calamity that befell an unfriendly power, and the identities of aggressive intruders into U.S. computer networks.

Months of tracking communications across more than 50 alias accounts, the files show, led directly to the 2011 capture in Abbottabad of Muhammad Tahir Shahzad, a Pakistan-based bomb builder, and Umar Patek, a suspect in a 2002 terrorist bombing on the Indonesian island of Bali. At the request of CIA officials, The Post is withholding other examples that officials said would compromise ongoing operations.

Many other files, described as useless by the analysts but nonetheless retained, have a startlingly intimate, even voyeuristic quality. They tell stories of love and heartbreak, illicit sexual liaisons, mental-health crises, political and religious conversions, financial anxieties and disappointed hopes. The daily lives of more than 10,000 account holders who were not targeted are catalogued and recorded nevertheless.

….If Snowden’s sample is representative, the population under scrutiny in the PRISM and Upstream programs is far larger than the government has suggested. In a June 26 “transparency report,” the Office of the Director of National Intelligence disclosed that 89,138 people were targets of last year’s collection under FISA Section 702. At the 9-to-1 ratio of incidental collection in Snowden’s sample, the office’s figure would correspond to nearly 900,000 accounts, targeted or not, under surveillance.

Looks like the Israelis screwed the pooch this time

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

This is an American kid, the cousin of the teenager who was tortured and killed by Israelis last week. Now the State Department is involved and I don’t think they’ll get away with it this time. They’re still trying (they are “investigating” and will no doubt try to save face by pinning something on this boy) but I don’t think it will work:

Just before noon Tarek Abu Khdeir, the 15-year-old American-Palestinian who was brutally beaten by Israeli police last Thursday, walked into court wearing the same clothes he had on when arrested. After a brief closed deliberation, with media corralling in the narrow hallway of the Jerusalem District Court, he was released after the payment of $880 (3,000 NIS) and under the condition of spending nine days under house arrest, despite not being charged with any crime. During arraignment, prosecutors for the police originally requested Abu Khdeir remain in the country for 15 days– an additional six days past his scheduled flight out– during which time an investigation against him will continue. Police have sealed the details of the on-going inquiry.

The youth will be remanded to a relative’s house in nearby Beit Hanina, East Jerusalem, as the judge issued a stay away order against his uncle’s home where he was apprehended.  Indeed it is a family vacation gone terribly awry, leaving the high schooler at risk of detention in a foreign prison, and his parents mystified.

“They are holding him under investigation to try to pin something on him and I’m not happy with that,” said the youth’s mother, Suha Abu Khdeir outside of the Jerusalem District Court. If police decide to charge Abu Khdeir, he will not be allowed to exit Israel on July 16th as planned. “Why should he have to stay here,” she continued, “my son almost died from that beating.”

Police assert Abu Khdier was detained because he threw rocks during a demonstration. However his family rejects the claim, maintaining he was picked up at random in a sweep during a demonstration near their home. There is a video of the arrests that a neighbor filmed, which picks up with Abu Khdeir already lying on the pavement, with police striking his body until he lost consciousness.

You are not in a police state

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

Of course not! This is just…. caution.

I was talking to a high-end geek friend some months ago after the Snowden stories came out, and he told me bluntly: “If you use Tor or anything like that, you will bring yourself to the NSA’s attention.” And of course, he was right!

The NSA marks and considers potential “extremists” all users of the internet anonymizer service Tor, German media reports. Among those are hundreds of thousands of privacy concerned people like journalists, lawyers and rights activists.

Searching for encryption software like the Linux-based operating system Tails also places you on the NSA grid, says a report by German broadcasters NDR and WDR. The report is based on analysis of the source code of the software used by NSA’s electronic surveillance program XKeyscore.

Tor is a system of servers, which routes user requests through a layer of secured connections to make it impossible to identify a user’s IP from the addresses of the websites he/she visits. The network of some 5,000 is operated by enthusiasts and used by hundreds of thousands of privacy-concerned people worldwide. Some of them live in countries with oppressive regimes, which punish citizens for visiting websites they deem inappropriate.

But merely visiting Tor project’s website puts you on the NSA’s red list, the report says. But more importantly it monitors connections to so-called Directory Authorities, the eight servers, which act as gateways for the entire system.

New FBI records on 9/11 terror activities in Florida

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

saudihouse

Dan Christensen and Anthony Summers of BrowardBulldog.org have been literal bulldogs in pushing the U.S. for information about the activities of 9/11 hijackers in Florida — and how much the U.S. knew. For years, the FBI has been denying they even investigated Florida connections. Fascinating:

Freshly released, but heavily-censored FBI documents include tantalizing new information about events connected to the Sarasota Saudis who moved suddenly out of their home, leaving behind clothing, jewelry and cars, about two weeks before the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

The documents were released to BrowardBulldog.org Monday amid ongoing Freedom of Information Act litigation. The news organization sued in 2012 after being denied access to the Bureau’s file on a once secret investigation focusing on Abdulaziz al-Hijji, his wife, Anoud and her father Esam Ghazzawi, an advisor to a Saudi prince.
Continue reading “New FBI records on 9/11 terror activities in Florida” →

Protected

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

blackwater

The only reason I can think of that explains that kind of top-level protection is if the private mercenary army Blackwater was acting as a surrogate for the CIA — and I think we’ve already assumed as much:

WASHINGTON — Just weeks before Blackwater guards fatally shot 17 civilians at Baghdad’s Nisour Square in 2007, the State Department began investigating the security contractor’s operations in Iraq. But the inquiry was abandoned after Blackwater’s top manager there issued a threat: “that he could kill” the government’s chief investigator and “no one could or would do anything about it as we were in Iraq,” according to department reports.

American Embassy officials in Baghdad sided with Blackwater rather than the State Department investigators as a dispute over the probe escalated in August 2007, the previously undisclosed documents show. The officials told the investigators that they had disrupted the embassy’s relationship with the security contractor and ordered them to leave the country, according to the reports.

After returning to Washington, the chief investigator wrote a scathing report to State Department officials documenting misconduct by Blackwater employees and warning that lax oversight of the company, which had a contract worth more than $1 billion to protect American diplomats, had created “an environment full of liability and negligence.”

The point of war is to keep it going

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

AFTER SEVERAL MONTHS' BREAK - US DRONE STRIKE ON NORTHERN WAZIRISTAN KILLS TWO TO THE DISMAY OF MANY PAKISTAN PEOPLE

Drones are perfect for that. No muss, no fuss, no need for silly Congressional resolutions!

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration’s embrace of targeted killings using armed drones risks putting the United States on a “slippery slope” into perpetual war and sets a dangerous precedent for lethal operations that other countries might adopt in the future, according to a report by a bipartisan panel that includes several former senior intelligence and military officials.

The group found that more than a decade into the era of armed drones, the American government has yet to carry out a thorough analysis of whether the costs of routine secret killing operations outweigh the benefits. The report urges the administration to conduct such an analysis and to give a public accounting of both militants and civilians killed in drone strikes.

The findings amount to a sort of report card — one that delivers middling grades — a year after President Obama gave a speech promising new guidelines for drone strikes and greater transparency about the killing operations. The report is especially critical of the secrecy that continues to envelop drone operations and questions whether they might be creating terrorists even as they are killing them.

“There is no indication that a U.S. strategy to destroy Al Qaeda has curbed the rise of Sunni Islamic extremism, deterred the establishment of Shia Islamic extremist groups or advanced long-term U.S. security interests,” the report concludes.