NEWS2U MediaThe Truth Mainstream Media Avoids

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 10 Dec 2015 12:42:00 +0000

The Paris Attacks Are Just The Beginning

Storm Clouds Gathering
Dec. 9. 2015

It might be tempting to react to this event emotionally without looking beyond the official narrative, without examining the evidence, without questioning where this is headed. You wouldn't be alone, but blind indignation lends itself to easy answers, half truths and comforting lies.

On the evening of November 13th 2015, Paris was shaken by a series of coordinated attacks. 129 people were killed, hundreds more wounded. An ambience of fear gripped the country. Terrorists could strike anywhere at any time. Nothing was safe. Even the smallest venue could be targeted.

Any time a population is attacked (or believes that they have been attacked) by an outside force, the reaction is as predictable as it is dangerous. New wars, and totalitarian laws that would have been unthinkable days before are easily justified, voices of reason are drowned out, and entire nations can be driven towards a cliff. Given the nature of this particular cliff it would behoove you to look a little deeper this time.

There are several moving parts in this story: the Syrian war, ISIS and the push to remove Assad from power, the expansion of a militarized police state throughout Europe, and of course the refugee crisis. All of which has been conveniently tied together, by a passport, carried by a suicide bomber, a passport which miraculously survived the blast unscathed. (Never mind the fact that German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere came forward to say that he had reason to suspect that the passport had been planted.)

Let's deconstruct this one piece at a time.

Evidence of Foreknowledge

Without even looking beyond mainstream sources, we find evidence that the French government knew that the attacks were coming. They were warned by the Iraqi government, they were warned by the Turkish government twice, and according to this article from the Times of Israel (which as since been edited), security officials in Paris were specifically warned of an impending attack that very morning. (The same article goes on to mention that the Bataclan theater had financial ties to the Israeli Military.)

And of course the French government just happened to be running an exercise simulating a mass shooting in Paris just hours before the attacks began. Where have we seen that before?

Could someone please explain how Iraq, and the Turkey government (which are developing countries), were able to see this coming, while the NSA and French intelligence were caught completely off guard? Are we really to believe that this was just incompetence?

The Setup

Before the dust had even settled, the official narrative was clear. ISIS was responsible. This was war, and France was going to escalate that war, both at home and abroad. A state of emergency was declared, road blocks, border controls and a curfew were imposed, freedom of assembly was restricted, and the military was deployed on the streets. French President Francois Hollande soon announced that he intended to extend the state of emergency for three months (some are even saying it may be extended indefinitely), and to alter the French constitution.

The state of emergency gives the police the power to detain people without trial, search without warrants and to block any website they see fit.

France's parliament has already voted to extend the country's state of emergency following the Paris attacks for three months, giving the police powers to keep people in their homes without trial, search the homes of people without a warrant from a judge and block any website deemed a problem.

These powers are already being used! Activist have already been placed under house arrest, and not for crimes that they have been accused of actually committing, but preemptively!

The attacks are also being used as a pretext to justify the establishment of a new European Intelligence Agency modeled after the CIA. See also here.

Who Created ISIS?

And speaking of the CIA... let's not forget who actually created ISIS.

France didn't seem too concerned about the rise of Islamic extremism when they joined the U.S. in the 2011 regime change operation in Libya. If mainstream news outlets were publishing evidence of jihadists among the CIA backed rebels, (secondary confirmation from the BBC here) it would be utterly naive to think that French intelligence services didn't know.

France also didn't seem to mind the fact that Islamic extremists were receiving the lion's share of the weapons that were looted from Gaddafi's armories, and shipped through Turkey, and into Syria.

France didn't stand up or speak out for years as the U.S. government continued arming, funding and training these extremists.

There was no righteous indignation at the atrocities they were committing.

There were no calls for criminal proceedings after those same rebels got caught using sarin gas against thousands of civilians, and the French government has never so much as verbally condemned the numerous state actors which have been caught assisting ISIS and/or its allies logistically (Turkey, Jordan, Qatar and Saudi Arabia & Israel for example).

Why? Because ISIS serves a purpose. ISIS and its associates, Al-Nusra and the FSA are weakening the Syrian government, creating a pretext for military intervention, and providing the perfect excuse for a massive power grab on the home front.

"Whoah! That's not fair to equate the FSA with ISIS!"

Really? Then explain this away: ISIS and Al-Nusra have officially formed alliances, FSA commanders have gone on record to say that they cooperate with, and conduct joint operations with Al-Nusra, and it has been well established that the FSA command is dominated by Islamic extremists. Do The Math.

The Rise of Fascism in Europe

What's happening in France should not be viewed in isolation. Xenophobic sentiment has been on the rise throughout Europe, and is gaining ground politically. This trend has clearly been exacerbated by the ongoing migrant crisis (which is obviously tied to the regime change policies of the West) but one variable in this equation that no one is talking about is the fact that the way immigration has been handled in Europe is not merely a question of short sightedness, it is a reflection of policy.

In 2012 UN migration chief Peter Sutherland urged the EU to "do its best to undermine" the "homogeneity" of its member states. Such a proposition may sound absurd, unless you take into account that breaking down the national identity of a country makes it much easier to dissolve political boundaries and independence. And that's precisely what the technocrats in Brussels want.

Hollande has been one of the most outspoken voices in this push to hand over more power to a centralized European government, effectively stripping member states of any meaningful sovereignty. Give that European government a military, it's own surveillance apparatus and public which is struggling financially, looking for someone to blame, and practically begging for war, and you have a recipe for the rise of overt fascism in Europe.

Many have remarked that recent moves by the French president take several pages from the extreme right. Some have interpreted this as an attempt to prevent the right from capitalizing on the event, but it hasn't worked out that way, at all. (See also this article)

Taken on its own one might be inclined to interpret this as a political miscalculation, but what if it's not? Hollande's actions don't make much sense if we view him as an independent leader, but they make perfect sense if you understand that he's just a puppet.

The powers seized by Holland following the Charlie Hebdo and Paris Attacks, are not suited for the political left. The left is held back by the need to maintain a soft spoken, inclusive veneer. Those rising up to replace them will not be.

The right will not scale back these powers. They will expand them, and they will use them, even more than they are being used now.

It's the left, right, left, right two step to tyranny.

Problem, Reaction, Solution

This formula is not new. These tactics are not original, nor are the motives or response. Like the American public following 9/11, it's going to take the European population quite some time to realize where they are being led, and they're only going to come to that realization if those who see what is happening have the courage to speak out.

And make no mistake, this is just the beginning. They'll take it as far as you let them.

Source:

http://stormcloudsgathering.com/paris-attacks

____________

“Get Your Loved Ones Off Facebook”

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 27 Aug 2015 01:37:00 +0000

A Very Disturbing and Powerful Post – “Get Your Loved Ones Off Facebook”

By Michael Krieger
Feb. 5, 2015
Liberty Blitzkrieg

“Oh yeah, I’ve been meaning to ask you why you’re getting off Facebook,” is the guilty and reluctant question I’m hearing a lot these days. Like we kinda know Facebook is bad, but don’t really want to know.

I’ve been a big Facebook supporter – one of the first users in my social group who championed what a great way it was to stay in touch, way back in 2006. I got my mum and brothers on it, and around 20 other people. I’ve even taught Facebook marketing in one of the UK’s biggest tech education projects, Digital Business Academy. I’m a techie and a marketer — so I can see the implications — and until now, they hadn’t worried me. I’ve been pretty dismissive towards people who hesitate with privacy concerns.

With this latest privacy change on January 30th, I’m scared.

– From Salim Varani’s blogpost: Get Your Loved Ones Off Facebook

I never heard of Salim Varani before today, but when I came across his blogpost “Get Your Loved Ones Off Facebook,” it immediately piqued my interest given my less than positive feelings toward the company. It took on an even greater degree of importance in my mind considering that I had just finished reading what appeared to be a Facebook puff piece at Fusion.net about how the company, guided by “privacy sherpa” Yul Kwon, was suddenly making user privacy a core focus. It read like a PR release.

Here are a few excerpts:

The face of the new, privacy-conscious Facebook is Yul Kwon, a Yale Law grad who heads the team responsible for ensuring that every new product, feature, proposed study and code change gets scrutinized for privacy problems. His job is to try to make sure that Facebook’s 9,199 employees and the people they partner with don’t set off any privacy dynamite. Facebook employees refer to his group as the XFN team, which stands for “cross-functional,” because its job is to ensure that anyone at Facebook who might spot a problem with a new app — from the PR team to the lawyers to the security guys — has a chance to raise their concerns before that app gets on your phone.

“We refer to ourselves as the privacy sherpas,” says Kwon. Instead of helping Facebook employees scale Everest safely, Kwon’s team tries to guide them safely past the potential peril of pissing off users.

Kwon, 39, has a million-dollar testament to his ability to orchestrate group dynamics. He was the winner of the 13th season of Survivor, the season in which the CBS reality show controversially divided contestants by race (Kwon is of South Korean descent). His competitors said his gift of diplomacy helped him win — though some called him a “puppetmaster.” “I learned how to navigate difficult environments,” Kwon now says.

Kwon has been bouncing back and forth between Silicon Valley and D.C. for most of his career, with a few stops in front of T.V. cameras. His roller coaster of a resume includes business consulting at Google, crafting Joe Lieberman’s security legislation (in the emotionally-charged but bipartisan period after September 11th), working on net neutrality at the FCC (the first time it came around), acting as a TV host for CNN and PBS (for shows on Asian-American issues and American infrastructure), and making People Magazine’s Sexiest Men Alive and Hottest Bachelors lists (he’s married with kids now).

The privacy sherpas seem to be effective. James Grimmelmann, a University of Maryland professor with a long history of analyzing Facebook’s privacy mistakes, says the company has turned a new page. “Facebook is not my go-to suspect when I open up the news and look for privacy problems. In 2008 and 2009, they did something wrong like clockwork every few months. It was a nasty cycle,” he says. “Facebook moves carefully now. It doesn’t want to move fast and break things anymore.”

Ok, so they make this guy seem like a combination of Obi-Wan Kenobi and James Bond. The message is clear: Facebook cares about privacy now.

Well about five minutes after reading that, I read a post by the aforementioned Salim Varani, who in no uncertain terms claims precisely the opposite.

One thing is clear. One of these articles is very right, and the other is very wrong. Given my bias, I lean with Varani.

Here are some excerpts from his powerful piece:

“Oh yeah, I’ve been meaning to ask you why you’re getting off Facebook,” is the guilty and reluctant question I’m hearing a lot these days. Like we kinda know Facebook is bad, but don’t really want to know.

I’ve been a big Facebook supporter – one of the first users in my social group who championed what a great way it was to stay in touch, way back in 2006. I got my mum and brothers on it, and around 20 other people. I’ve even taught Facebook marketing in one of the UK’s biggest tech education projects, Digital Business Academy. I’m a techie and a marketer — so I can see the implications — and until now, they hadn’t worried me. I’ve been pretty dismissive towards people who hesitate with privacy concerns.

With this latest privacy change on January 30th, I’m scared.

Facebook has always been slightly worse than all the other tech companies with dodgy privacy records, but now, it’s in it’s own league. Getting off isn’t just necessary to protect yourself, it’s necessary to protect your friends and family too. This could be the point of no return — but it’s not too late to take back control.

It’s not just what Facebook is saying it’ll take from you and do with your information, it’s all the things it’s not saying, and doing anyway because of the loopholes they create for themselves in their Terms of Service and how simply they go back on their word. We don’t even need to click “I agree” anymore.

They just change the privacy policy and by staying on Facebook, you agree. Oopsy!

Facebook doesn’t keep any of your data safe or anonymous, no matter how much you lock down your privacy settings. Those are all a decoy. There are very serious privacy breaches, like selling your product endorsement to advertisers and politicians, tracking everything you read on the internet, or using data from your friends to learn private things about you – they have no off switch.

Facebooks gives your data to “third-parties” through your use of apps, and then say that’s you doing it, not them. Everytime you use an app, you’re allowing Facebook to escape it’s own privacy policy with you and with your friends. It’s like when my brother used to make me punch myself and ask, “why are you punching yourself?” Then he’d tell my mum it wasn’t his fault.

They have and continue to create false endorsements for products from you to your friends – and they never reveal this to you.

When you see a like button on the web, Facebook is tracking that you’re reading that page. It scans the keywords on that page and associates them to you. It knows much time you spend on different sites and topics.

They read your private messages and the contents of the links you send privately.

They’ve introduced features that turn your phone’s mic on — based on theirtrack-record changing privacy settings, audio surveillance is likely to start happening without your knowledge.

They can use face recognition to track your location through pictures , even those that aren’t on Facebook. (Pictures taken with mobile phones have time, date and GPS data built into them.)

They’ve used snitching campaigns to trick people’s friends into revealing information about them that they chose to keep private.

They use the vast amount of data they have on you, from your likes, things you read, things you type but don’t post, to make highly accurate models about who you are — even if you make it a point of keeping these things secret. There are statistical techniques, which have been used in marketing for decades, that find correlating patterns between someone’s behaviour and their attributes. Even if you never posted anything, they can easily work out your age, gender, sexual orientation and political views. When you post, they work out much more. Then they reveal it to banks, insurance companies, governments, and of course, advertisers.

The issue here isn’t what we have to hide, it’s maintaining an important right to our freedom — which is the right to privacy, and the right to have a say in how information about us is used. We’ve giving up those rights forever by using Facebook.

There’s no need to talk hypothetically about government surveillance here.

One of the first Facebook investors called Greylock has board connections to a CIA investment firm called In-Q-Tel. According to their website, it “identifies cutting-edge technologies to help the Central Intelligence Agency and the broader US Intelligence Community to further their missions”.

And if you haven’t heard – it was revealed that Facebook data is delivered directly to the PRISM programme .

That’s why they slowly changed the default privacy settings to public, made privacy settings harder and harder to use, and now are pretending that their privacy helper will change this.

In reality, there a loads of privacy breaches you can’t turn off, like allowing advertisers to use your endorsement to your friends, turning off how Facebook tracks what you read on the internet, or disallowing Facebook from collecting other information about you. You can’t turn them off!

Even if you have nothing to hide, you have to worry about the opposite, what Facebook chooses to hide that you want to be shared.

They filter you.

“I’ve been meaning to ask you why you’re getting off” usually comes after something like, “didn’t you see my post last week?”

If you’ve ever had that conversation, you’ve noticed that there’s a big disconnect between your expectations when you communicate on Facebook and what really happens. Basically, Facebook filters out your posts based on whether or not people will use Facebook more if they don’t see it.

In reality, lots of your posts are never seen by anyone!

And you miss out on their stuff too. Even if your friends’ stuff gets to you fine, it doesn’t mean your stuff gets to them.

Facebook’s blocks posts based on political content it doesn’t like. They blocked posts about Fergusson and other political protests. When Zuckerberg alledgedly went a bit nuts and banned the word “privacy” from meetings at Facebook, it was also blocked from any Facebook post. You just got an error message about “inappropriate content”. Yeah, uh huh.

Inappropriate for who?

Facebook goes so far as to let political organisations block your communication. It just takes a few people to mark the same news article as offensive, and it drops from everyone’s feed. This is often abused. I can block any article from Facebook by getting a few friends to mark it as offensive. Cheap and easy censorship.

If you’ve ever used Facebook contact sync, or used Facebook on your mobile phone, Facebook took your complete contact list. Real names, phone numbers, addresses, emails, everything.

They then use that to create “shadow profiles” of the people you know who aren’t on Facebook. Non Facebook users often see this in action, in the form of emails to them from Facebook, containing their personal information. Facebook users can see this when they upload a picture of a non-Facebook user, and they’re automatically tagged. My friend’s not on Facebook, but since me and a few friends used Facebook on our phones, Facebook has his name and contact information, plus knows who his friends are because it sees him in their address book and calling records.

In Europe, Facebook is legally oblidged to share exactly what information it has about you – but they refuse. So there’s yet another class action lawsuit against them.

Through it’s labyrinth of re-definitions of words like “information”, “content” and “data”, you’re allowing Facebook to collect all kinds of information about you and expose that to advertisers. With your permission only they say, but the definition of “permission” includes using apps and who knows what else.

On top of this, they allow all the Facebook apps full access to your information – with your name and everything. And even if you never use any apps on Facebook, your friends do. When they use apps, your friends share all your information for you. There’s a whole industry behind this.

Some things DO have off buttons, but keep in mind they are temporary, and as Facebook has done in the past, it will switch them back on without letting you know. When Facebook started (and probably when you joined) it was clearly a safe place to share with your friends only.

That was their big promise. Over time, they switched the default privacy setting to public so that if you still wanted to keep Facebook for friends only, you had to manually find over 100 settings on multiple hidden settings pages. Then, they started dropping those settings and forced information to be public anyway.

That’s even scarier because Facebook is used heavily for political advertising, and product endorsements. People know I raised money for kids with cancer before, so they might not be surprised if they see an ad where I’m endorsing a Christian outreach programme poor kids in Africa. But I categorically only support programmes that don’t have religious allegiances, since they’re known to bias their support to people who convert. Worse, a lot of people might assume things about my religious beliefs based on these false endorsements. Don’t even get me started on all the hypey startup stuff I don’t condone!

That’s simply insane and incredibly creepy.

We can have no idea if our endorsement has been used to sell flakey crap in our name. I don’t want to think about my mom wasting her money on something she thought I was endorsing, or my startup founder clients seeing adverts for useless products with my face under them.

Using Facebook means this happens all the time. Advertisers can buy your endorsement on Facebook and your information from third-party data brokers. You never get to know about it, and you can’t turn it off.

Facebook is also insisting to track your location via your phone’s GPS, everywhere and all the time. It’ll know extactly who you spend your time with. They’ll know your habits, they’ll know when you call in sick at work, but are really out bowling. “Sal likes 2pm Bowling at Secret Lanes.” They’ll know if you join an addict support group, or go to a psychiatrist, or a psychic, or a mistress. They’ll know how many times you’ve been to the doctor or hospital, and be able to share that with prospective insurers or employers. They’ll know when you’re secretly job hunting, and will sell your endorsement for job sites to your friends and colleagues — you’ll be revealed.

This is simply a consequence of their business model. Facebook sells you out, because that’s exactly how they make money. And they’re under heavy pressure from their investors to make more.

According to the FTC settlement from a few years ago, after Facebook was sued by the US goverment for its privacy practices, Facebook is “required to prevent anyone from accessing a user’s material more than 30 days after the user has deleted his or her account;”

There are different interpretations of this. Some say you need to delete each post separately, others say delete your account, and some say they’ll still keep your data anyway — that all you can do is stop giving them more data.

I’m going to do both as a precaution. There are a few helpful browser add-ons that will delete your posts individually, which I’m running now but needs some baby-sitting to keep running.

And some great instructions on actually deleting your account while Facebook tries to trick you into deactivating it instead.

To stop Facebook from tracking what I read on the web, (they do this even if you don’t have a Facebook account) I’ve installed ~~Ghostery.~~ It’s been pointed out to me that Ghostery provides information to advertising networks if you enable GhostRank, and have been recommended Privacy Badger or disconnect.meinstead. (And while you’re at it, the EFF made this great plugin that automatically chooses the most secure web connection, making it more difficult for governements and ISPs to snoop your web activity.)

I considered a bunch of Facebook alternatives, and might end up on Diaspora butemail and phone have actually been much better! After a month off Facebook, I don’t feel the need for a direct replacement. The phone – go figure. Everyone already has one, and we forget how super easy and convenient they are to use. I see fewer pictures, but I actually talk to people.

Remember, this isn’t just about the technical stuff. By staying on Facebook, you’re granting them permission to collect and use information about you, regardless of you even using the Internet. And by staying on, the data they collect on you gets used to create models about your closest friends and family, even the ones who opted out.

Lastly, the world is full of people who say “it’ll never happen”, and when it does, they switch to “there’s nothing we can do.” There is. The Internet was decentralised for 50 years, and is full of options, by design, that allow us to maintain privacy. We have a say in the world we want to live in — if we take action ourselves. Plus, we can help everyone understand, and help them make their own choices more informed.

This post has been read by 300,000 people now. It’s a positive sign that we can inform and educate ourselves!

If any of your friends and family use Facebook you owe it to them to share this post. I also suggest reading his entire article, which contains a huge amount of links and can serve as a resource for a lot more information on the topic.

As I tweeted the other day:

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. We’ll know America is growing up once Facebook starts to bleed users.

— Michael Krieger (@LibertyBlitz) January 28, 2015

*The awesome thumbnail photo at the top of this post is by Polish illustrator Pawel Kuczynski. Check out his site here.

For related articles, see:

In Liberty,
Michael Krieger

Sources:

http://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2015/02/05/a-very-disturbing-and-powerful-post-get-your-loved-ones-off-facebook/

http://saintsal.com/facebook/
__________________

Interesting security implications with Win 10

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 14 Aug 2015 01:38:00 +0000

Analysis of Windows 10: In its principle, it is only a terminal to collect information about the user's fingers, eyes and voice!

Aug 11, 2015

News editors AE delivers exclusive insights from our administrator on the latest operating system Windows 10 from Microsoft. We expect that after reading the article already will look differently on your computer, and every time you turn it on.

With the advent of Windows 10, I decided to investigate this operating system a few tests and the results of my research, I would now like to introduce. The collected knowledge can be alarming for someone, but I must admit that at the time of mobile platforms, Android and iOS, it's not surprising, at least for me.

Operating system Windows 10 is inherently more of a terminal end, than the operating system, because many processes and function of this system are directly or indirectly dependent on remote servers and databases. Microsoft Windows 10 is the first operating system from Microsoft that some of the functions of the extended core operating remotely placed on their servers.

What is happening under your fingers?

Windows 10 performs a collection of texts entered on the keyboard. The texts are stored in temporary files and 1x 30 minutes shall be sent to the following sites:

oca.telemetry.microsoft.com.nsatc.net
pre.footprintpredict.com
reports.wes.df.telemetry.microsoft.com

The transfer is encrypted and should be anonymous. However, there is the risk that the transmission contains or may optionally contain identifiers of your machine or your person. Telemetry server collects information about your location in the network, IP and geographical location. ‘Footprintpredict’ transmits your keyboard input of the search engine Bing from Microsoft.

This is a smart solution, if that is you're writing to chat about the holiday, Windows 10 will send your text data taken from the keyboard and Bing, and your input, the next day when you come to Bing you will see the main page of search engines offers on hotels and shopping suggestions because yesterday you wrote on Windows 10 "in encrypted chat program” to a friend that you are going to a hotel, etc.

So your 'secret' conversation with a friend is now part of a Bing ad with all the trimmings. And when you talk of encrypted via SIP communications, voice port Cortana search, everything you say, but more on that later in this article. Microsoft is not the only marketing company dependent on user input in the browser Edge, but it can intercept keyboard input text in any application running on Windows 10. That is ahead of Google to Microsoft.

Voice port in Windows 10 marketing promotes a virtual person "Cortana"

Surely by now you guess what it is. Even if you install Windows 10 on an encryption program to communicate with someone over the Internet, by gathering information from the keyboard (key logging), Microsoft can read what you wrote. It can’t seem to capture what you wrote the other side of encrypted communication, but at least one side intercepting communications, this is a very serious matter.

The third server is again in charge of the machines Tele-metrics, new Windows 10 now behaves very much like Android, where most of the operations at the operating system includes a telemetry hook, ie. clues that relate to any information about the user. If, for example. I will write to the browser Edge any telephone number, up to approx. 5 minutes to gradually send information about the number of these telemetric Microsoft servers:

A special situation occurs if anywhere in Windows 10 you type the name of a famous American film. Windows 10 will start by itself after some time to look at your hard drive in a folder with media files and index them. Indexed file is then anonymously sent to those servers in about 30 minutes when the computer is idle, I was unable to accurately determine the time period:

df.telemetry.microsoft.com
reports.wes.df.telemetry.microsoft.com
cs1.wpc.v0cdn.net
vortex-sandbox.data.microsoft.com
pre.footprintpredict.com

Collecting information entered via the keyboard is alarming security risk

Czech films did not work, no packet communication on the internet while typing on the keyboard of Czech films has taken place. This feature is very dangerous, because what happens if Windows 10 in a media folder, finds illegally ripped American film? If you name it to the disc as a "seminarka.mkv" about it not to declare Windows 10 (Windows 10 apparently does not scan the file contents, index, and it only sends metadata). It is possible that this is the collection of data for future targeted offers to purchase movies.

Waiting for a passport photo? With Windows 10 you have it with the American authorities, apparently after turning on webcams.

After the first activation of Windows 10, and after the first turn on the web camera over the Internet sends around 35 MB of data to these servers:

oca.telemetry.microsoft.com
oca.telemetry.microsoft.com.nsatc.net
vortex-sandbox.data.microsoft.com
i1.services.social.microsoft.com
i1.services.social.microsoft.com.nsatc.net

The operation is executed only 1x and I failed to capture the data. It is possible that sending data from a web camera runs at longer intervals (days or weeks). I do not know what and why the camera is turned on after my first hook reached the Internet and dispatched much data. Given the two above mentioned servers last I fear that this is a "feature" on the social network that integrates your photo someplace, but I really do not know where and rather not think I wanna know. The problem for deeper analysis is that all transfers of data to Microsoft servers are encrypted and not without some deeper reverse engineering can figure out what's actually sent. Your picture from web camera for US national security might not be completely excluded variant. Quite I wonder expression of someone from Microsoft, what it meant.

On a laptop it is always good to blind the webcam, maybe a piece of tape. In Windows 10 you will probably need to ...

Exactly the same, if not worse is the situation with Android, which all photographs and inputs from a mobile camera can store on their servers and even if you do not use Google Drive cloud storage is certainly not the problem remotely from your phone, pull the picture. The Windows operating system is a bit different situation. It is a working system in companies and in offices and such massive spying and data collection can be abused must also industrial espionage against the United States to countries in Europe and other countries.

Tell me who you are and I will remember you, wherever you are!

The biggest problem I see in the voice port Windows 10, which is newly equipped with a voice assistant Cortana. The system responds only to English (yet). But nevertheless quite intimidating.

Voice samples of what you say in a voice port, they are immediately sent to the following Microsoft servers:

oca.telemetry.microsoft.com
oca.telemetry.microsoft.com.nsatc.net
vortex-sandbox.data.microsoft.com
pre.footprintpredict.com
i1.services.social.microsoft.com
i1.services.social.microsoft.com.nsatc.net
telemetry.appex.bing.net
telemetry.urs.microsoft.com
cs1.wpc.v0cdn.net
statsfe1.ws.microsoft.com

Cortana sends data to the internet, even though it is disabled in Windows 10, which is a scandal that goes through already here , where it is stated that customer support Microsoft said that even after the "off" setting runs on Cortana, Cortana continues in record and store in memory, which confirms my analysis.

Communication is really runs the servers MS still. This is not a bug, but a feature in Windows 10. Confirms it but my assumption that voice port is completely separated from the voice of Cortana and analysis on Windows 10 takes place at a lower level operating system without your knowledge, even though Cortana "uninstall". According voice samples, should be sufficient in number and amount of falling into the hands example. NSA, it would be possible to identify the person, for example. At airports from eavesdropping microphones with accuracy exceeding 99%, or wherever you approached the microphone.

Interestingly sending data from the voice port. Cortana first converts voice to text. They are sent to the server:

pre.footprintpredict.com
reports.wes.df.telemetry.microsoft.com
df.telemetry.microsoft.com

Cortana and then sends voice samples (.wav files), but not always. From the measurements, I found that Cortana has a basic dictionary installed locally, it can be seen learning algorithm distinguishes Cortana after a period of better words, and complex sentences and servers polls less frequent but larger volumes of data traffic, which is a bit disturbing.

Roughly 1 in 15 minutes is dispatched (when the computer is idle) a summary of data of nearly 80 MB on servers:

oca.telemetry.microsoft.com
oca.telemetry.microsoft.com.nsatc.net
vortex-sandbox.data.microsoft.com
i1.services.social.microsoft.com
i1.services.social.microsoft.com.nsatc.net
pre.footprintpredict.com
telemetry.appex.bing.net
telemetry.urs.microsoft.com
cs1.wpc.v0cdn.net

In the settings you can key keyboard logging, Cortana, her voice collecting samples and sending to Microsoft servers shut down, but the current version of Windows 10 has a "bug" and the data is sent regardless of the settings on this screen, even though Cortana is off and the same probably also applies to logging keyboard input.

This is too big a package on "metadata", so I have a reasonable suspicion that sends voice compressed .wav samples from user to analyze. Windows 10 is in normal use behave normally, not too much traffic to the Internet, but once you leave the computer and enters screensaver 15 minutes suspiciously high activity begins sending data.

Here is for the sake of all Microsoft servers, on which the new Windows 10 " call "and transmit data about the user:

vortex.data.microsoft.com
vortex-win.data.microsoft.com
telecommand.telemetry.microsoft.com
telecommand.telemetry.microsoft.com.nsatc.net
oca.telemetry.microsoft.com
oca.telemetry.microsoft.com.nsatc.net
sqm.telemetry.microsoft.com
sqm.telemetry.microsoft.com.nsatc.net
watson.telemetry.microsoft.com
watson.telemetry.microsoft.com.nsatc.net
redir.metaservices.microsoft.com
choice.microsoft.com
choice.microsoft.com.nsatc.net
df.telemetry.microsoft.com
reports.wes.df.telemetry.microsoft.com
wes.df.telemetry.microsoft.com
services.wes.df.telemetry.microsoft.com
sqm.df.telemetry.microsoft.com
telemetry.microsoft.com
watson.ppe.telemetry.microsoft.com
telemetry.appex.bing.net
telemetry.urs.microsoft.com
telemetry.appex.bing.net:443
settings-sandbox.data.microsoft.com
vortex-sandbox.data.microsoft.com
survey.watson.microsoft.com
watson.live.com
watson.microsoft.com
statsfe2.ws.microsoft.com
corpext.msitadfs.glbdns2.microsoft.com
compatexchange.cloudapp.net
cs1.wpc.v0cdn.net
a-0001.a-msedge.net
statsfe2.update.microsoft.com.akadns.net
sls.update.microsoft.com.akadns.net
fe2.update.microsoft.com.akadns.net
diagnostics.support.microsoft.com
corp.sts.microsoft.com
statsfe1.ws.microsoft.com
pre.footprintpredict.com
i1.services.social.microsoft.com
i1.services.social.microsoft.com.nsatc.net
feedback.windows.com
feedback.microsoft-hohm.com
feedback.search.microsoft.com
rad.msn.com
preview.msn.com
ad.doubleclick.net
ads.msn.com
ads1.msads.net
ads1.msn.com
a.ads1.msn.com
a.ads2.msn.com
adnexus.net
adnxs.com
az361816.vo.msecnd.net
az512334.vo.msecnd.net

The list of servers is taken from a Windows 10 application Destroy Spying see. below. In its testing, I caught a live communication servers with about half of that list.

Of course, the first thing that comes to mind is disabling communication with these servers (by introducing the server into the hosts file and settings to 127.0.0.1 localhost), but as I tried, after disabling the Windows 10 start acting suspiciously otherwise. Error messages pop up, sometimes the message of "service failure", there are problems with Skype, it is not possible to maintain a stable connection. The problem is with VPN connections that fail. But it is possible that this is just some incompatibilities and nevyladěnost new OS.

Apparently, it is necessary not to prohibit certain sites and have available to make things work, but I had no time to analyze them one by one, what causes them off in the long run in Windows 10 .

If you do not have the technical knowledge and know how to manually edit the hosts file, you can use Windows 10 Destroy Spying, downloadable from the internet here . (http://www.softpedia.com/get/Tweak/System-Tweak/Destroy-Windows-10-Spying.shtml)

Note that this does not guarantee anonymity because Windows 10 within the framework updates may download lists of other Microsoft server, respectively. Windows 10 themselves can write and change the settings in the hosts file, eg. In the diagnosis of Windows, without warning when you erase Windows server settings override the hosts file.

Windows 10 also bypass the hosts file, because some of the key Microsoft servers connect hard by IP addresses, ie. without communication with the DNS servers or the hosts file, but does not need to download updates. It is interesting that when you disable the hosts file on Windows Update servers, Windows 10 will join them as well, but directly with IP addresses and bypass override the hosts file. But it does not download updates. Basically, it's just sort of announcement by Microsoft that you disabled in the hosts file update servers. This is interesting behavior, certainly not an end in itself. Zeroing communication with servers across hosts file in addition suffer psychological instability in some programs and components. If you choose to use Windows 10, use this tool only if you know what you're doing.

Windows 10 because of its nature thought the shift to terminal service platform that collects information about the user, to give him in exchange for granted maximum service and adapt to their needs. However, there is a very high risk of misuse of biometric data (voice, eyes, face, etc.) and information privacy, business and family users. Capture text from the keyboard also poses a high risk to safety, where hackers can through security holes in Windows 10 in the future to capture the Windows 10 password entry to emails, banking, etc. Additionally, encrypted using the tools in Windows 10 loses sense because Windows 10 sees your fingers and hears what you say. So encrypted chat or encrypted SIP call to help.

Maybe that's why the Windows 10 for free?

If someone thought very badly and insidiously to spy on users and citizens, offering them a free operating system, or at least a free upgrade, which is riddled spyware programs, the very foundation of the operating system. Windows 10 it is really free, for all owners of previous Windows operating systems from Version 7. But Microsoft is not the first with this idea. With that has come to Android from Google many years ago.

Until Microsoft makes available an explanation of what the servers collect, it is not safe to install Windows 10 on a production computer at home or at work or business. I would completely avoid this operating system should people encrypts data. In essence, the Windows 10 system is more analytical than operational. This represents a substantial risk for potential abuse.

Update

Because of the discussion questions appeared, with what instruments measurements were carried out, there is a list:

For monitoring network activity Windows 10 tools were used PRTG Network Monitor and Wireshark. Tracking data and program activities was used Windows Resource Monitor.
Measurements were carried out on the installation of Windows 10 RTM Build 10240, ISO installer downloaded from the MSDN

Note: Anyone can make their own measurements. System for the transmission of telemetry data and algorithm sending user data to Microsoft servers is not known, so I welcome the experience of other volunteers to share readings and recitations transfer servers that Windows 10 contact. The server list is not exhaustive, here are a fresh change for a list of advertising and "3rd party" servers, which are Windows 10 to communicate:

licensing.md.mp.microsoft.com
solitaireprod.maelstrom.xboxlive.com
go.microsoft.com
tunnel.cfw.trustedsource.org
download-ssl.msgamestudios.com
mobileads.msn.com
fw.adsafeprotected.com
sc.iasds01.com
dt.adsafeprotected.com
ad.doubleclick.net
googleads4.g.doubleclick.net
dc.services.visualstudio.com
mpd.mxptint.net
updatekeepalive.mcafee.com
sm.mcafee.com
su3.mcafee.com
ocsp.usertrust.com
storeedgefd.dsx.mp.microsoft.com
mscrl.microsoft.com

With some of these servers communicate and play Solitaire on Windows 10, the source of information here . As you can see, my measurements not only a list of servers on which Windows 10 "call", seems to be about endless. Remember the Czech proverb that "beggars can not be choosers?" So the teeth of this "horse" you should definitely take a look because it might sooner or later begin to bite.

-Administrator-

Source:
https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=cs&tl=en&u=http://aeronet.cz/news/analyza-windows-10-ve-svem-principu-jde-o-pouhy-terminal-na-sber-informaci-o-uzivateli-jeho-prstech-ocich-a-hlasu/

http://aeronet.cz/news/analyza-windows-10-ve-svem-principu-jde-o-pouhy-terminal-na-sber-informaci-o-uzivateli-jeho-prstech-ocich-a-hlasu/
________________

THEY EVIL

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 07 Aug 2015 10:53:00 +0000

Many people in their life time will never wake up to the necessary fiction provided by the oligarchy that controls the United States from behind the scenes

by Ron Patton
August 5, 2015
Ground Zero Media

On July 31st, 2015, Rowdy Roddy Piper died in Hollywood, California. While he was famous for his career as a wrestler, many people remember his appearance in the John Carpenter film “They Live.”

For those who have not yet seen this classic movie, the movie is about a homeless drifter discovers by accident that the world’s population is actually being controlled and exploited by aliens working in partnership with an oligarchic elite.

The populace that is blissfully unaware has been lulled into complacency, indoctrinated into compliance, bombarded with media distractions, and hypnotized by subliminal messages beamed out of television and various electronic devices.

There are even subliminal messages hidden in magazines, newspaper and billboards.

John Nada, played by Roddy Piper, is a homeless drifter looking for a job.

He discovers a pair of doctored sunglasses. When he puts them on he sees what lies beneath the elite’s fabricated reality.

When viewed through the lenses, the elite, who appear human until stripped of their disguises, are shown to be alien monsters who have enslaved the citizenry in order to prey on them. Piper’s character also looks through these special glasses and sees a bikini-clad woman in one ad ordering viewers to “MARRY AND REPRODUCE.” Magazine racks scream “CONSUME” and “OBEY.” A wad of dollar bills in a vendor’s hand proclaims, “THIS IS YOUR GOD.”

Some of the other hidden messages being drummed into the people’s subconscious include: NO INDEPENDENT THOUGHT, CONFORM, SUBMIT, STAY ASLEEP, BUY, WATCH TV, NO IMAGINATION, and DO NOT QUESTION AUTHORITY.

This indoctrination campaign engineered by the elite in “They Live” is painfully familiar to anyone who has studied the decline of American culture. A citizenry that does not think for themselves, obeys without question, is submissive, does not challenge authority, does not think outside the box, and is content to sit back and be entertained is a citizenry that can be easily controlled.

We live in a culture of bread and circuses; we are highly entertained, but are less informed about important subjects. We drink beer, and over-eat toxic foods. Our waters are chemically treated, and are bodies are on maintenance medications to numb us from our frightening reality.

Many people in their life time will never wake up to the necessary fiction provided by the oligarchy that controls the United States from behind the scenes.

In his Brave New World Revisited, Aldous Huxley described a society in which “the first aim of the rulers is at all costs to keep their subjects from making trouble.” He described a likely future: “The completely organized society, the abolition of free will by methodical conditioning, the servitude made acceptable by regular doses of chemically induced happiness.”

It can be argued that the over-medicating of the population by doctors with psychoactive drugs, SSRI’s, opiates and the decriminalizing of the use of marijuana is contributing to the chemically induced state of our nation and that reality is now being clouded by these methods.

Huxley predicted democracies would change their nature: elections, parliaments, and courts will remain but the underlying substance will be non-violent totalitarianism, quite frankly a socialist state and quasi fascism where the populace would demand their chemical and physical enslavement.

He also said that democracy and freedom would be the theme of every broadcast and editorial — but democracy and freedom in a strictly non-literal sense. Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit.

The people once again would not question it. The majority would demand their police state welfare society out of fear, long term brainwashing from media, and from the drugs and preparations they would be given on a daily basis.

Much like the social commentary of the film “They Live” our world is not as it seems. There are things that are hidden underneath the noise of the propaganda and if there were special sunglasses that could see the truth, would you be willing to put them on?

Would you buy pairs for all of your friends so they could see, or would you decide that being in ignorance has no responsibility and therefore is without blame or guilt?

Revelation is important before the revolution and sometimes if the eyes glance at the right things the necessary fiction provided by our masters becomes more apparent and that behind the scenes there are men making plans against us.

On March 1st, 2002, many people do not know that a mainstream newspaper actually confirmed what conspiracy theorists had been saying for years. The Washington Post reported the shadow government’s existence. They noted that the shadow government was needed and that it had been established as part of the Reagan era security initiatives. The Bush administration explained that the shadow government existed as a precaution to ensure the continuation of government in case of a terrorist attack.

The day after the Washington Post ran a subsequent headline that U.S. Congress was unaware that the shadow government existed. It was outlined for the American people about how present law provides for the speaker of the house, followed by the president pro tempore of the Senate, to assume the presidency should the President and the Vice President become unable to perform their duties.

The shadow government apparently was a group appointed to call the shots even when there was no real reason to employ their services and of course the mainstream reported that they did not know why Congress was in the dark about such a shadow government.

Many believe that the shadow government is calling the shots in government affairs now, some say that the cryptocracy is about to make its move and that by the fall a looming crisis is about to unfold and eventually cripple the United States and will give this so called shadow government to suspend the Constitution.

Should the Constitution be suspended, control of the country passes to the executive branch? There is also direct control of FEMA to organize and maintain government continuity.

The President would oversee the affairs of government with a suspended Constitution that would take all power away from the congress. This would be an excellent opportunity for a “thinly veiled coup” presided over by the President, his appointed yes men and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

In America today, we have seen the preparations for such a coup and indications that the circus that is the American political process has now offered us a small group of Democratic candidates and a super long list of Republican candidates and what appears to be a loud and popular ring master named Donald Trump.

Donald Trump is leading polls, and people are starting to listen to him.

This comes, despite his repeated politically incorrect comments that everyone has tried to insinuate will get him in big trouble, but actually have inspired many Americans to get behind him. So, with Trump looking more and more every day like he might just have a real impact on the vote, it is beginning to look more like the political circus may be a red herring and that the American people are being entertained with politics rather than being informed by them.

Republican voters have mixed feelings about the way an ever-expanding pool of GOP candidates will affect their party, according to a Monmouth University poll.

Thirty-nine percent of Republican voters say the number of candidates is bad for the party, while a similar thirty-four percent disagree, saying that the number of candidates is good for the party. Twenty-two percent say the unprecedented number of GOP hopefuls has no impact on their party.

The number of GOP candidates is quickly approaching 20 which are unprecedented.

So far, there are 5 Democratic candidates that wish to have the baton passed to them from President Obama.

Does this even smell of a conspiracy where one side knows what is coming and the others are playing along to impress their party?

For the Democrats it seems that the only names that matter are Biden and Clinton and while the GOP was hoping that Bush would be the name that only mattered, Trump has made Jeb look like a contestant on the TV show “The Apprentice.”

Does this seem like a dog and pony show to you. Is this political theater in order to make it look like an important election that will not happen?

The show must go on, as the shadow government secretly makes its plans to destabilize our constitutional republic.

I was asked by one of my friends last weekend if I thought that Donald Trump was being used by the shadow government to create a circus atmosphere in the political arena because he and the other GOP candidates who are seriously wanting to change things don’t stand a chance because plans are underway to suspend the constitution in an as yet unseen country wide crisis, that would require martial law.

The “shadow government” is now pulling the strings of every puppet for what appears to be a final curtain call. In fact there are so many politicians looking for acknowledgement that you would think that what you are witnessing a real life political greeting card from Jib Jab.

We are being fed a series of carefully contrived fictions that bear no resemblance to reality.

In fact, a 2014 study conducted by Princeton and Northwestern University concluded that the U.S. government does not represent the majority of American citizens. Instead, the study found that the government is ruled by the rich and powerful, or the so-called “economic elite.” Moreover, the researchers concluded that policies enacted by these governmental elite nearly always favor special interests and lobbying groups.

In other words, we are being ruled by an oligarchy disguised as a democracy, and arguably on our way towards fascism a form of government where private corporate interests rule, money calls the shots and the people are seen as mere subjects to be controlled.

By creating the illusion that it preserves democratic traditions, fascism creeps slowly until it consumes the political system. And in times of “crisis,” expediency is upheld as the central principle—that is, in order to keep us safe and secure, the government must militarize the police, strip us of basic constitutional rights, criminalize virtually every form of behavior, and build enough private prisons to house all of us nonviolent criminals.

Consider this: it is estimated that the 2016 presidential election could cost as much as $5 billion, more than double what was spent getting Obama re-elected in 2012.

Not only do you have to be rich or kiss the rings of the rich to get elected these days, but getting elected is also a surefire way to get rich.

CBS News reports, “Once in office, members of Congress enjoy access to connections and information they can use to increase their wealth, in ways that are unparalleled in the private sector. And once politicians leave office, their connections allow them to profit even further.”

Clearly, we are now ruled by oligarchic elite of governmental and corporate interests. We have moved into “corporatism”, which is a halfway point on the road to full-blown fascism.

The invisible order will do everything to maintain the illusion of freedom and will do their best to convince you that your vote and your participation in the system is important.

One does not need special glasses to reveal the illusion, they just need to think critically, remove distractions and open their eyes.

They Live. We sleep.

Source:
http://www.groundzeromedia.org/they-evil/
_______________

Davos: Inequality Causes Concern, Few Expect Improvement, More Regulation, More Unrest

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 01 Feb 2015 22:04:00 +0000

Comment:
Growing income inequality was one of the top four issues at the 2015 World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, ranking alongside European adoption of quantitative easing and geopolitical concerns.Felix Salmon, senior editor at Fusion, said there was a consensus that global inequality is getting worse, fueling overriding pessimism at the gathering. The result, he said, could be that the next big revolution will be in regulation rather than innovation.

With growing inequality and the civil unrest from Ferguson and the Occupy protests fresh in people's mind, the world's super rich are already preparing for the consequences. At a packed session, former hedge fund director Robert Johnson revealed that worried hedge fund managers were already planning their escapes. "I know hedge fund managers all over the world who are buying airstrips and farms in places like New Zealand because they think they need a getaway," he said.
http://www.theguardian.com/public-leaders-network/2015/jan/23/nervous-super-rich-planning-escapes-davos-2015

Looking at studies like NASA's HANDY and by KPMG, the UK Government Office of Science, and others, Dr Nafeez Ahmed, executive director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development, warns that the convergence of food, water and energy crises could create a "perfect storm" within about fifteen years.
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/mar/14/nasa-civilisation-irreversible-collapse-study-scientists

~~~~~~~~~~

Capital Financial International
January 26, 2015

Forum (WEF) has finished this year’s proceedings and most of the 2,633 participants have returned home. Crews are busy disassembling the vast quantities of hi-tech hardware that provided security, communications, and other conveniences for the event.

Après-Davos is usually somewhat of a downer. This year is no exception. As summits go, the WEF stands apart: no decisions are taken or final statements released. The forum is first and foremost a networking event that allows high-level participants to swap ideas and experiences, and express opinions.

This time around, most participants seemed particularly concerned about inequality. The concentration of wealth into the pockets and portfolios of ever fewer people was considered the top trend on the WEF Global Agenda for 2015. On the eve of the Davos get-together, anti-poverty organisation Oxfam International released a study showing that by this time next year the wealthiest 1% of the world population will own assets equal in value to those held by the remaining 99%.

In a panel discussion on rising inequality, Professor Christopher Pissarides of the London School of Economics said that simply taxing the rich and handing money to the poor is unlikely to decrease inequality in today’s open and globalised world. Prof Pissarides, recipient of the 2010 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, argued that fiscal receipts should go towards job creation and education rather than direct income support.

“Governments would be well-advised to use more imaginative ways of rebalancing incomes with policies supporting the creation of more and better jobs at the lower level while simultaneously investing in education.” Prof Pissarides dismissed the Oxfam International study on income inequality as gratuitous: “Of course it’s a shocking statistic and given the inequality it’s not difficult to construct other shocking statistics. It’s obviously something to worry about, but my view is that the real issue, and what you should really address, is poverty. We’d be doing better by emphasising ways of reducing poverty rather than by sensationalising the issue by saying how much the very rich people are worth.”

Lack in Social Cohesion

According to Anne-Marie Slaughter of the New America Foundation, a US think-tank, government leaders the world over seem unable to ensure or deliver social cohesion: “In the United States, we are grappling with a racial divide and class divide the likes of which we have not seen for decades. We should be having a national dialogue about race, class, and justice, but we are not. We are seeing demonstrations, hearing different views through media but we are not having a national conversation.”

Mrs Slaughter emphasised that voter apathy is part of the problem: “The political system is broken and we are unable to fix it.” Similar views were echoed by most participants of the panel discussion on the last day of the Davos meeting. However, few of the attendees expected change anytime soon.

“Pessimism prevails. Most of the people I spoke with do not consider innovative policy initiatives likely to deliver tangible results,” concluded Felix Salmon, editor at Fusion – a US television and digital news network. Mr Salmon predicted a regulatory revolution may in the end be called for to redress inequality.

Back in Business

Meanwhile, UK Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne called on the countries of the Eurozone to follow the example set by Britain’s economic policy. In Davos, Mr Osborne said that both France and Italy could benefit from UK-style reforms. The chancellor also commented that Europe needs to get “back in business” and become more competitive and fiscally responsible.

Mr Osborne said that the $1.2tn quantitative easing (QE) programme announced last week by the European Central Bank (ECB) will not of itself prove sufficient to reanimate the lacklustre economies of the Eurozone: “In order for that to happen, the ECB’s initiative will need to be accompanied by clear plans to make the continent more competitive.”

George Soros, the flamboyant US business magnate and investment guru who in September 1992 broke the Bank of England and made over a billion pounds short-selling sterling, said that Germany is not being helpful by imposing austerity on troubled Eurozone member states and suggested that instead of QE, the bloc could have used its AAA credit rating to raise cash on the cheap.

Mr Soros is unimpressed by the ECB’s big move and warned that it may lead to asset bubbles. However, Mr Soros’ main concern is that QE could further exacerbate income inequality: “It will benefit the owners of assets while wages will remain under pressure through competition and unemployment.” Mr Soros expects the divergence between rich and poor to have “serious political consequences.”

No Comment

Also present, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble refrained from offering direct comments on the ECB’s QE programme other than remarking that the central bank was doing its job “very well.” Mr Schäuble reiterated his view that Eurozone fiscal policies have ample room for improvement. He also cautioned against complacency: “The moral hazard is that some countries may perhaps misunderstand the reasons behind this major injection of liquidity and postpone urgently needed reforms.”

Though its flagship meeting in Davos has now ended, the World Economic Forum is by no means done. The foundation is already busy at work preparing for the East Asia regional meet – Anchoring Trust in East Asia’s New Regionalism – scheduled to take place from April 21 to 23 in Nusa Dua, Indonesia. Other regional WEF events planned for this year are Advancing through a Renovation Agenda (May 06-08, Rivera Maya, Mexico), Shaping a New Strategic Context (May 21-23, Dead Sea, Jordan), and Then and Now: Reimagining Africa’s Future (June 03-05, Cape Town, South Africa).

Source:
http://cfi.co/europe/2015/01/davos-inequality-causes-concern-few-expect-improvement/
_______________

US Media Blackout - MUST SEE!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 12 Feb 2014 01:28:00 +0000

Edward Snowden on German TV
Full Video and Transcript

This interview with Edward Snowden was blocked from US & German television networks. No major news outlets are covering this story. The video is immediately taken down every time it’s posted on Youtube.

Next News Network
Jan 26, 2014

FULL TRANSCRIPT:
Interviewer: Mr. Snowden, did you sleep well the last couple of nights? Because, I was reading that you asked for a kind of police protection. Are there any threats?

Snowden: There are significant threats but I sleep very well. There was an article that came out in an online outlet called BuzzFeed where they interviewed officials from the Pentagon, from the National Security Agency and they gave them anonymity to be able to say what they wanted, and what they told the reporter was that they wanted to murder me. These individuals, and these are acting government officials, they said they would be happy, they would love to put a bullet in my head, to poison me as I was returning from the grocery store, and have me die in the shower.

Interviewer: But, fortunately, you are still alive with us.

Snowden: Right, but I’m still alive, and I don’t lose sleep because I’ve done what I feel I needed to do. It was the right thing to do. And, I’m not going to be afraid.

Interviewer: “The greatest fear I have,” and I quote you, “regarding these disclosures is nothing will change.” That was one of your greatest concerns at the time, but in the meantime there is a vivid discussion about the situation with the NSA. Not only in America but also in Germany and in Brazil, and President Obama was forced to go public and to justify what the NSA was doing on legal grounds.

Snowden: What we saw initially in response to the revelations was sort of a circling of the wagons of government around the National Security Agency. Instead of circling around the public and protecting their rights, the political class circled around the security state and protected their rights. What’s interesting is, though that was the initially response, since then we’ve seen a softening. We’ve seen the President acknowledge that when he first said “we’ve drawn the right balance, there are no abuses,” we’ve seen him and his officials admit that there have been abuses. There have been thousands of violations of the National Security Agency and other agencies, authorities, every single year.

Interviewer: Is the speech of Obama recently the beginning of a serious regulation?

Snowden: It was clear from the President’s speech that he wanted to make minor changes to preserve authorities that we don’t need. The President created a review board from officials that were personal friends, from national security insiders, former Deputy of the CIA, people who had every incentive to be soft on these programs and to see them in the best possible light. But what they found was that these programs have no value, they’ve never stopped a terrorist attack in the United States, and they have marginal utility at best for other things. The only thing that the Section 215 phone meta-data program, actually it’s a broader meta-data program of bulk collection, bulk collection means mass surveillance, program was in stopping or detecting a $8,500 wire transfer from a cab driver in California. And, it’s this kind of review, where insiders go “we don’t need these programs, these programs don’t make us safe. They take a tremendous amount of resources to run, and they offer us no value.” They go “we can modify these.” The National Security agency operates under the President’s executive authority alone. He can end, or modify, or direct a change in their policies at any time.

Interviewer: For the first time President Obama did concede that the NSA collects and stores trillions of data.

Snowden: Every time you pick up the phone, dial a number, write an email, make a purchase, travel on the bus carrying a cell phone, swipe a card somewhere, you leave a trace. And, the government has decided that it’s a good idea to collect it all. Everything. Even if you’ve never been suspected of any crime. Traditionally the government would identify a suspect, they would go to a judge, they would say we suspect he’s committed this crime, they would get a warrant and then they would be able to use the totality of their powers in pursuit of the investigation. Nowadays what we see is they want to apply the totality of their powers in advance, prior to an investigaion.

Interviewer: You started this debate. Edward Snowden is, in the meantime, a household name for the whistleblower in the age of the internet. You were working until last summer for the NSA, and during this time you collected, secretly, thousands of confidential documents. What was the decisive moment, or was there a long period of time, or something happening? Why did you do this?

Snowden: I would say sort of the breaking point is seeing the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, directly lie under oath to Congress. There’s no saving an intelligence community that believes it can lie to the public and the legislators who need to be able to trust it and regulate its actions. Seeing that, for me, really meant for me there was no going back. Beyond that, it was the creeping realization that no one else was going to do this. The public had a right to know about these programs. The public had a right to know that which the government is doing in its name, and that which the government is doing against the public, but neither of these things we were allowed to discuss, we were allowed no, even the wider body of our elected representatives were prohibited from knowing or discussing these programs, and that’s a dangerous thing. The only review we had was from a secret court, the FISA Court, which is a sort of rubber stamp authority.

When you are on the inside and you go into work everyday and you sit down at the desk and you realize the power you have, you can wiretap the President of the United States, you can wiretap a Federal Judge, and, if you do it carefully no one will ever know because the only way the NSA discovers abuses are from self reporting.

Interviewer: We’re not talking only of the NSA as far as this is concerned. There is a multilateral agreement for cooperation among the services and this alliance of intelligence operations is known as The Five Eyes. What agencies and countries belong to this alliance, and what is its purpose?

Snowden: The Five Eyes alliance is sort of an artifact of the post World War II era where the Anglophone countries are the major powers banded together to sort of cooperate and share the costs of intelligence gathering infrastructure.

So we have the UK’s GCHQ, we have the US NSA, we have Canada’s C-Sec, we have the Australian Signals Intelligence Directorate and we have New Zealand’s DSD. What the result of this was, over decades and decades, what sort of a supra-national intelligence organization that doesn’t answer to the laws of its own countries.

Interviewer: In many countries, as in America too, the agencies like the NSA are not allowed to spy within their own borders on their own people. So, the Brits for example, they can spy on everybody but the Brits. But, the NSA can conduct surveillance in England. So, in the very end they could exchange their data and it would be, they would be, strictly following the law.

Snowden: If you ask the governments about this directly they would deny it and point to policy agreements between the members of the Five Eyes saying that they won’t spy on each other’s citizens. But, there are a couple of key points there. One is that the way they define spying is not the collection of data. The GCHQ is collecting an incredible amount of data on British citizens, just as the National Security Agency is gathering an enormous amount of data on US citizens. What they are saying is that they will not then target people within that data. They won’t look for UK citizens or British citizens. In addition, the policy agreements between them that say British won’t target US citizens, US won’t target British citizens, are not legally binding. The actual memorandums of agreement state specifically on that that they are not intended to put a legal restriction on any government. Their policy agreements that can be deviated from or broken at any time. So if they want to spy on a British citizen, they can spy on a British citizen, and then they can even share that data with the British government that is itself forbidden from spying on UK citizens. So there is a sort of a trading dynamic there, but it’s not, it’s not open, it’s more of a nudge and wink. And, beyond that, the key is to remember the surveillance and the abuse doesn’t occur when people look at the data, it occurs when people gather the data in the first place.

Interviewer: How narrow is the cooperation of the German Secret Service BND with the NSA and the Five Eyes?

Snowden: I would describe it as intimate. As a matter of fact, the first way I described it in our written interview, was that the German Services and the US Services are in bed together. They not only share information, the reporting of results from intelligence, but they actually share the tools and the infrastructure. They work together against joint targets in services. And, there’s a lot of danger in this. One of the major programs that face abuse in the National Security Agency is what’s called “XKeyscore.” It’s a front end search engine that allows them to look through all of the records they collect worldwide every day.

Interviewer: What could you do if you would sit so to speak in their place with this kind of instrument?

Snowden: You could read anyone’s email in the world. Anybody you got an email address for, any website you can watch traffic to and from it, any computer that an individual sits at, you can watch it, any laptop that you’re tracking, you can follow it as it moves from place to place throughout the world. It’s a one stop shop for access to the NSA’s information. And what’s more, you can tag individuals using “XKeyscore.” Where, let’s say I saw you once and I thought what you were doing was interesting, or you just have access that’s interesting to me. Let’s say you work at a major German corporation, and I want access to that network. I can track your username on a website, on a form somewhere, I can track your real name, I can track associations with your friends, and I can build what’s called a fingerprint, which is network activity unique to you, which means anywhere you go in the world, anywhere you try to sort of hide your online presence, hide your identity, the NSA can find you. And, anyone who’s allowed to use this, or who the NSA shares their software with, can do the same thing. Germany is one of the countries that have access to “XKeyscore.”

Interviewer: This sounds rather frightening. The question is, does the BND deliver data of Germans to the NSA?

Snowden: Whether the BND does it directly, or knowingly, the NSA gets German data. Whether it’s provided, I can’t speak to until it’s been reported, because it would be classified. And, I prefer that journalists make the distinctions, and the decisions, about what is public interest and what should be published. However, it’s no secret that every country in the world has the data of their citizens in the NSA. Millions and millions and millions of data connections, from Germans going about their daily lives, talking on their cell phones, sending SMS messages, visiting websites, buying things online, all of this ends up at the NSA. And, it’s reasonable to suspect that the BND may be aware of it in some capacity. Now, whether or not they actively provide the information, I should not say.

Interviewer: The BND basically argues if we do this, we do this accidentally actually, and our filter didn’t work.

Snowden: Right. So, the kind of things that they’re discussing there are two things. They’re talking about filtering of ingest, which means when the NSA puts a secret server in a German telecommunications provider, or they hack a German router and they divert the traffic in a manner that let’s them search through things, they’re saying “if I see what I think is a German talking to another German I’ll drop it.” But, how do you know? You could say “well, these people are speaking the German language, this IP address seems to be from a German company to another German company,” but that’s not accurate, and they wouldn’t dump all of that traffic because they’ll get people who are targets of interest, who are actively in Germany using German communications. So, realistically, what’s happening is when they say “there’s no spying on Germans,” they don’t mean that German data isn’t being gathered, they don’t mean that records aren’t being taken or stolen. What they mean is that they’re not intentionally searching for German citizens. And, that’s sort of a fingers crossed behind the back promise, it’s not reliable.

Interviewer: What about other European countries, like Norway and Sweden for example, because we have a lot of, I think, underwater cables going through the Baltic Sea.

Snowden: So, this is sort of an expansion of the same idea. If the NSA isn’t collecting information on German citizens in Germany, are they as soon as it leaves German borders? And, the answer is “yes.” Any single communication that transits the internet, the NSA may intercept at multiple points. They might see it in Germany, they might see it in Sweden, they might see it in Norway or Finland, they might see it in Britain, and they might see it in the United States. Any single one of these places that a German communication crosses, it’ll be ingested and added to the database.

Interviewer: So, let’s come to our southern European neighbors then. What about Italy? What about France? What about Spain?

Snowden: It’s the same deal worldwide.

Interviewer: Does the NSA spy on Siemens? On Mercedes? On other successful German companies, for example, to prevail, to have the advantage of knowing what is going on in a scientific and economic world?

Snowden: I don’t want to preempt the editorial decisions of journalists.

Interviewer: Ok.

Snowden: But, what I will say is there’s no question that the US is engaged in economic spying. If there’s information at Siemens that they think would be beneficial to the national interests, not the national security of the United States, they’ll go after that information, and they’ll take it.

Interviewer: There is this old saying “you do whatever you can do.” So, the NSA is doing whatever is technically possible.

Snowden: This is something that the President touched on last year, where he said that just because we can do something, and this was in relation to tapping Angela Merkel’s phone. Just because we can do something, doesn’t mean that we should. And, that’s exactly what’s happened. The technological capabilities that have been provided, because of sort of weak security standards in internet protocols and cellular communications networks, have meant that intelligence services can create systems that see everything.

Interviewer: Nothing annoyed the German government more than the fact that the NSA taped the private phone of the German Chancellor Merkel over the last 10 years, obviously. Suddenly this invisible surveillance was connected with a known face and was not connected with a kind of watery, shady terrorist background. Obama now promised to stop snooping on Merkel, which raises the question “did the NSA tape already previous governments, including the previous chancellors, and when did they do that? And, how long did they do this for?”

Snowden: This is a particularly difficult question for me to answer, because there’s information that I very strongly believe is in the public interest. However, as I’ve said before, I prefer for journalists to make those decisions in advance, review the material themselves, and decide whether or not the public value of this information outweighs the sort of reputational cost to the officials that ordered the surveillance. What I can say is we know Angela Merkel was monitored by the National Security Agency. The question is how reasonable is it to assume that she is the only German official that was monitored? How reasonable is it to believe that she’s the only prominent German face who the National Security Agency was watching? I would suggest it seems unreasonable that if anyone was concerned about the intentions of German leadership, that they would only watch Merkel and not her aides, not other prominent officials, not heads of ministries, or even local government officials.

Interviewer: How does a young man from Elizabeth City in North Carolina, 30 years old, get in such a position in such a sensitive area?

Snowden: That’s a very difficult question to answer. In general, I would say it highlights the dangers of privatizing government functions. I worked previously as an actual staff officer, a government employee for the Central Intelligence Agency, but I’ve also served much more frequently as a contractor in a private capacity. What that means is, you have private for-profit companies doing inherently governmental work, like targeted espionage, surveillance, compromising foreign systems. And, anyone who has the skills, who can convince a private company that they have the qualifications to do so, will be empowered by the government to do that, and there’s very little oversight. There’s very little review.

Interviewer: Have you been one of these classical computer kids sitting red eyed during the nights in the age of 12, 15, and your father was knocking on your door and saying “switch off the light, it’s too late now?” Did you get your computer skills from that side? Or, when did you get your first computer?

Snowden: (laughter) Right, right. I definitely have had a, shall we say, a deep informal education in computers and electronic technology. They’ve always been fascinating and interesting to me. (laughter) The characterization of having your parents telling you to go to bed, I would say is fair.

Interviewer: If one looks to the little public data of your life, one discovers that you, obviously, wanted to join in May 2004, the Special Forces to fight in Iraq. What did motivate you at the time? You know, Special Forces, looking at you in the very moment, means grim fighting, and it means probably killing. And, did you ever get to Iraq?

Snowden: No, I didn’t get to Iraq. One of the interesting things about the Special Forces are that they’re not actually intended for direct combat. They’re what’s referred to as “a force multiplier.” They’re inserted behind enemy lines. It’s a squad that has a number of different specialties in it, and they teach and enable the local population to resist, or to support, US forces in a way that allows the local population a chance to help determine their own destiny. And, I felt that was an inherently noble thing at the time. In hindsight, some of the reasons that we went into Iraq were not well founded. And, I think did a disservice to everyone involved.

Interviewer: What happened to your adventure then? Did you stay long with them? Or, what happened to you?

Snowden: No, I broke my legs when I was in training and was discharged.

Interviewer: So it was a short adventure in other words?

Snowden: It was a short adventure.

Interviewer: In 2007 the CIA stationed you with a diplomatic cover in Geneva, in Switzerland. Why did you join the CIA by the way?

Snowden: I don’t think I can actually answer that one.

Interviewer: OK, if it’s what you have been doing there, forget it. But why did you join the CIA?

Snowden: In many ways I think it’s a continuation of trying to do everything I could to prosecute the public good in the most effective way. And, it’s in line with the rest of my government service where I tried to use my technical skills in the most difficult positions I could find in the world, and the CIA offered that.

Interviewer: If we go back, Special Forces, CIA, NSA, it’s not actually in the description of a human rights activist, or somebody who becomes a whistleblower after this. What happens to you?

Snowden: I think it tells a story, and that’s, no matter how deeply an individual is embedded in the government, no matter how faithful to the government they are, no matter how strongly they believe in the causes of their government, as I did during the Iraq war, people can learn, people can discover the line between appropriate government behavior and actual wrongdoing. And, I think it became clear to me that that line had been crossed.

Interviewer: You worked for the NSA through a private contractor with the name Booze Allen Hamilton, one of the big ones in the business. What is the advantage for the US Government, or the CIA, to work through a private contractor, to outsource a central government function?

Snowden: The contracting culture of the national security community in the United States is a complex topic. It’s driven by a number of interests between primarily limiting the number of direct government employees at the same time as keeping lobbying groups in Congress, typically from very well funded businesses such as Booze Allen Hamilton. The problem there is you end up in a situation where government policies are being influenced by private corporations who have interests that are completely divorced from the public good in mind. The result of that is what we saw at Booze Allen Hamilton, where you have private individuals who have access to, what the government alleges were millions and millions of records that they could walk out the door with at any time with no accountability, no oversight, no auditing, the government didn’t even know they were gone.

Interviewer: At the very end you ended up in Russia. Many of the intelligence communities suspect you made a deal, classified material for Asylum here in Russia.

Snowden: The Chief of the Task Force investigating me, as recently as December, said that their investigation had turned up no evidence, or indications at all, that I had any outside help, or contact, or had made a deal of any kind to accomplish my mission. I worked alone. I didn’t need anybody’s help. I don’t have any ties to foreign governments. I’m not a spy for Russia, or China, or any other country for that matter. If I am a traitor, who did I betray? I gave all of my information to the American public, to American journalists, who are reporting on American issues. If they see that as treason, I think people really need to consider who do they think they’re working for. The public is supposed to be their boss, not their enemy. Beyond that, as far as my personal safety, I’ll never be fully safe until these systems have changed.

Interviewer: After your revelations, none of the European countries really offered you asylum. Where did you apply in Europe for asylum?

Snowden: I can’t remember the list of countries with any specificity because there were many of them. But, France, Germany were definitely in there, as was the UK. A number of European countries, all of whom, unfortunately, felt that doing the right thing was less important than supporting US political concerns.

Interviewer: One reaction to the NSA snooping is in the very moment that countries like Germany are thinking to create national internets, an attempt to force internet companies to keep their data in their own country. Does this work?

Snowden: It’s not gonna stop the NSA. Let’s put it that way. The NSA goes where the data is. If the NSA can pull text messages out of telecommunication networks in China, they can probably manage to get Facebook messages out of Germany. Ultimately, the solution to that is not to try to stick everything in a walled garden, although that does raise the level of sophistication and complexity of taking the information. It’s also much better simply to secure the information internationally against everyone, rather than playing ‘let’s move the data.’ Moving the data isn’t fixing the problem. Securing the data is the problem.

Interviewer: President Obama, in the very moment, obviously doesn’t care too much about the message of the leak. And, together with the NSA, they do care very much more about catching the messenger in that context. Obama asked the Russian president several times to extradite you. But Putin did not. It looks that you will stay to the rest of your life, probably in Russia. How do you feel about Russia in that context, and is there a solution to this problem.

Snowden: I think it’s becoming increasingly clear that these leaks didn’t cause harm, in fact, they served the public good. Because of that, I think it will be very difficult to maintain sort of an ongoing campaign of persecution against someone who the public agrees serve the public interest.

Interviewer: The New York Times wrote a very long comment, and demanded clemency for you. The headline “Edward Snowden Whistleblower,” and I quote from that, “the public learned in great detail how the agency has extended its mandate and abused its authority.” And, the New York Times closes, “President Obama should tell his aides to begin finding a way to end Mr. Snowden’s vilification, and give him an incentive to return home.” Did you get a call in between from the White House?

Snowden: I’ve never received a call from the White House, and I am not waiting by the phone. But, I would welcome the opportunity to talk about how we can bring this to a conclusion that serves the interest of all parties. I think it’s clear there are times where what is lawful is distinct from what is rightful. There are times throughout history and it doesn’t take long for, either an American, or a German, to think about times in the history of their country where the law provided the government to do things which were not right.

Interviewer: President Obama, obviously, is in the very moment not quite convinced of that, because he said to you are charged with three felonies. And, I quote, “if you, Edward Snowden, believe in what you did, you should go back to America, appear before the court with a lawyer and make your case.” Is this the solution?

Snowden: It’s interesting because he mentions three felonies. What he doesn’t say is that the crimes that he’s charged me with are crimes that don’t allow me to make my case. They don’t allow me to defend myself in an open court to the public and convince a jury that what I did was to their benefit. The Espionage Act was never intended, it’s from 1918, it was never intended to prosecute journalistic sources, people who are informing the newspapers about information that’s of public interest. It was intended for people who are selling documents in secret to foreign governments, who are bombing bridges, who are sabotaging communications, not people who are serving the public good. So, it’s, I would say, illustrative that the president would choose to say someone should face the music when he knows the music is a show trial.

Source:
http://nextnewsnetwork.com/news/full-video-edward-snowden-on-german-tv-us-media-blackout/
__________________________

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 10 Feb 2014 12:32:00 +0000

FEBRUARY 11TH 2014 IS

The Day We Fight Back

AGAINST MASS SURVEILLANCE

"Accountability journalism can’t be done without the courageous acts exemplified by Snowden, and we need more like him.”

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 30 Jan 2014 02:35:00 +0000

Edward Snowden To Join Daniel Ellsberg, Others on Freedom of the Press Foundation’s Board of Directors

By Board of Directors
Press Freedom Foundation
Jan. 14, 2014

Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) is proud to announce NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden will join its board of directors.

“I am proud and honored to welcome Edward Snowden to Freedom of the Press Foundation’s board of directors. He is the quintessential American whistleblower, and a personal hero of mine,” said FPF’s co-founder Daniel Ellsberg. “Leaks are the lifeblood of the republic and, for the first time, the American public has been given the chance to debate democratically the NSA’s mass surveillance programs. Accountability journalism can’t be done without the courageous acts exemplified by Snowden, and we need more like him.”

Freedom of the Press Foundation was founded in 2012 in part to build a movement to support and strengthen the First Amendment and defend those who are on the front lines holding power to account. Its founding board members include Daniel Ellsberg, Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, John Cusack, Xeni Jardin, and John Perry Barlow. The NSA revelations Mr. Snowden brought to light represent one of our generation's greatest threats to press freedom. Mr. Snowden is joining the board to be part of solution, to help protect today's journalists and inspire tomorrow’s watchdogs.

FPF co-founder Glenn Greenwald said: "We began this organization to protect and support those who are being punished for bringing transparency to the world's most powerful factions or otherwise dissent from government policy. Edward Snowden is a perfect example of our group's purpose, as he's being persecuted for his heroic whistleblowing, and it is very fitting that he can now work alongside us in defense of press freedom, accountability, and the public’s right-to-know."

Mr. Snowden said: "It is tremendously humbling to be called to serve the cause of our free press, and it is the honor of a lifetime to do so alongside extraordinary Americans like Daniel Ellsberg on FPF’s Board of Directors. The unconstitutional gathering of the communications records of everyone in America threatens our most basic rights, and the public should have a say in whether or not that continues. Thanks to the work of our free press, today we do, and if the NSA won't answer to Congress, they'll have to answer to the newspapers, and ultimately, the people."

Snowden brings a deep knowledge about how journalists and sources can communicate securely in the age of mass surveillance. Protecting digital communications is turning into the press freedom battle of the 21st Century.

"Journalism isn't possible unless reporters and their sources can safely communicate," said Mr. Snowden, "and where laws can't protect that, technology can. This is a hard problem, but not an unsolvable one, and I look forward to using my experience to help find a solution.”

Freedom of the Press Foundation is currently raising money and awareness for a variety of open-source encryption tools, along with helping media organizations install SecureDrop, a whistleblower submission system.

Ellsberg added: “The secrecy system in this country is broken. No one is punished for using secrecy to conceal dangerous policies, lies, or crimes, yet concerned employees who wish to inform the American public about what the government is doing under their name are treated as spies. Our ‘accountability’ mechanisms are a one-sided secret court, which acts as a rubber stamp, and a Congressional ‘oversight’ committee, which has turned into the NSA’s public relations firm. Edward Snowden had no choice but to go to the press with information. Far from a crime, Snowden’s disclosures are a true constitutional moment, where the press has held the government to account using the First Amendment, when the other branches refused.”

Freedom of the Press Foundation was founded in 2012 to support and defend aggressive, public-interest journalism dedicated to transparency and accountability. It has raised over $500,000 for such news organizations as WikiLeaks, MuckRock, National Security Archive, Bureau of Investigative Journalism, and Center for Public Integrity.

Snowden will officially join the board of directors in February 2014.

Source:
https://pressfreedomfoundation.org/blog/2014/01/edward-snowden-join-daniel-ellsberg-others-freedom-press-foundations-board-directors
___________________

The financial networks that support groups denying the science behind climate change bankrolled by conservative billionaires.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 19 Jan 2014 19:27:00 +0000

Billion-dollar climate denial network exposed

by Duncan Geere
Politics
Wired UK
Dec. 21, 201

An extensive study into the financial networks that support groups denying the science behind climate change and opposing political action has found a vast, secretive web of think tanks and industry associations, bankrolled by conservative billionaires.

"I call it the climate-change counter movement," study author Robert Brulle, who published his results in the journal Climatic Change, told the Guardian. "It is not just a couple of rogue individuals doing this. This is a large-scale political effort."

His work, which is focused on the United States, shows how a network of 91 think tanks and industry groups are primarily responsible for conservative opposition to climate policy. Almost 80 percent of these groups are registered as charitable organisations for tax purposes, and collectively received more than seven billion dollars between 2003 and 2010.

Among those named as key nodes of the network were theAmerican Enterprise Institute, which claims to have no institutional position on climate change, and the Heritage Foundation, which campaigns on a number of issues.

However, Brulle admitted that tracing the funding back to its original sources was difficult, as around three quarters of the money has been routed through trusts that assume anonymity to their donors.

While it was not always possible to separate funds designated strictly for climate-change work from overall budgets, Brulle said: "This is how wealthy individuals or corporations translate their economic power into political and cultural power."

He added: "They have their profits and they hire people to write books that say climate change is not real. They hear people to go on TV and say climate change is not real. It ends up that people without economic power don't have the same size voice as the people who have economic power, and so it ends up distorting democracy."

Source:
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-12/21/denial
_________________________

The west coast of the United States is being absolutely fried by radiation from the Fukushima nuclear disaster

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 06 Jan 2014 01:44:00 +0000

36 Signs The Media Is Lying To You About How Radiation From Fukushima Is Affecting The West Coast

By Michael Snyder
The Truth
December 31, 2013

The west coast of the United States is being absolutely fried by radiation from the Fukushima nuclear disaster, and the mainstream media is not telling us the truth about this. What you are about to see is a collection of evidence that is quite startling. Taken collectively, this body of evidence shows that nuclear radiation from Fukushima is affecting sea life in the Pacific Ocean and animal life along the west coast of North America in some extraordinary ways.

The mainstream media continues to insist that we don’t have a thing to worry about. The mainstream media continues to insist that radiation levels in the Pacific and along the west coast are perfectly safe.

Are they lying to us? Evaluate the linked evidence compiled below and come to your own conclusions…

#1 Independent researchers have measured alarmingly high levels of radiation on the beaches of the west coast. For example, the video posted below was taken on December 23rd, 2013 at Pacifica State Beach. As you can see in this video, radiation levels near the water are up to five times higher than normal background radiation…

#2 According to Oceanus Magazine, the total amount of cesium-137 that has been released into the Pacific Ocean from Fukushima is 10,000 to 100,000 times greater than the amount released into the oceans by the Chernobyl disaster or by the atmospheric nuclear weapons tests of the 1960s.

#3 Former MSNBC host Cenk Uygur has admitted that while he was at MSNBC he was instructed not to warn the public about the radiation coming from Fukushima…

“I was on MSNBC at the time when this happened, I said, “Don’t trust what the Japanese government is saying, they’ll say trust what the electric power company is saying. Go, go, go, get outta there. Get as far away from that plant as you can. It’s literally a core meltdown.” And they always don’t want people to panic, so they were always like, “Oh it’s going to be okay.” [...] I’m like, “You’re crazy man, don’t be anywhere near that reactor.” And I remember at the time, of course not at The Young Turks, but on cable news, people were like, “Hey Cenk, you know, I don’t know that you want to say that, because the official government position is that it’s safe.” Oh, is that the official government position? Now go explain that to the people who served on the USS Ronald Reagan.”

#4 71 U.S. sailors who assisted with the initial Fukushima relief efforts have developed serious diseases such as testicular cancer, thyroid cancer, Leukemia, “unremitting gynecological bleeding” and brain tumors since that time as a result of exposure to radiation coming from Fukushima.

#5 Something is causing starfish all along the west coast of the United States to literally disintegrate into piles of “white goo“…

Researchers say nuclear pollution from the 2011 earthquake in Japan that damaged the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant could be partially to blame for a disease wiping out starfish along the West Coast.

Dr. Peter Raimondi of the University of Santa Cruz says something is making starfish susceptible to whats believed to be a bacteria coined “Wasting Disease.” It essentially disintegrate the marine invertebrates into a white goo, after the starfish loses its legs.

#6 Bald eagles are dying in unprecedented numbers in Utah, and nobody can figure out why this is happening…

Bald eagles are dying in Utah — 20 in the past few weeks alone — and nobody can figure out why.

Hundreds of the majestic birds — many with wing spans of 7 feet or more — migrate here each winter, gathering along the Great Salt Lake and feasting on carp and other fish that swim in the nearby freshwater bays.

Earlier this month, however, hunters and farmers across five counties in northern and central Utah began finding the normally skittish raptors lying listless on the ground. Many suffered from seizures, head tremors and paralysis in the legs, feet and wings.

#7 Huge numbers of dead birds are dropping dead and washing up along the coastlines of Alaska. It is being reported that many of the carcases of the dead birds are “broken open and bleeding”.

#8 The recent deaths of thousands of birds in Oregon is absolutely baffling scientists.

#9 Something is causing large numbers of seals and walruses up in Alaska to lose hair and develop “oozing sores”.

#10 Substantial numbers of polar bears along the coast of Alaska are suffering from fur loss and open sores.

#11 There is an epidemic of sea lion deaths along the California coastline.

#12 The population of sockeye salmon along the coastlines of Alaska is at a “historic low”.

#13 Something is causing Pacific herring to bleed from their gills, bellies and eyeballs.

#14 Dangerous levels of cesium-137 have been discovered in mushrooms and berries grown along the west coast.

#15 According to an absolutely shocking report put out by the National Academy of Sciences, it has been proven that Pacific Bluefin tuna have transported radioactive material “across the entire North Pacific Ocean”…

“We report unequivocal evidence that Pacific Bluefin tuna, Thunnus orientalis, transported Fukushima-derived radionuclides across the entire North Pacific Ocean.”

#16 Something seems to be causing a substantial spike in the death rate for killer whales living off of the coast of British Columbia.

#17 Experts have found very high levels of cesium-137 in plankton living in the waters of the Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and the west coast.

#18 One test in California found that 15 out of 15 Bluefin tuna were contaminated with radiation from Fukushima.

#19 Back in 2012, the Vancouver Sun reported that cesium-137 was being found in a very high percentage of the fish that Japan was selling to Canada…

• 73 percent of the mackerel

• 91 percent of the halibut

• 92 percent of the sardines

• 93 percent of the tuna and eel

• 94 percent of the cod and anchovies

• 100 percent of the carp, seaweed, shark and monkfish

#20 An EU-funded study concluded that Fukushima released up to 210 quadrillion becquerels of cesium-137 into the atmosphere.

#21 One very experienced Australian adventurer has stated that he felt as though“the ocean itself was dead” as he journeyed from Japan to San Francisco recently…

The next leg of the long voyage was from Osaka to San Francisco and for most of that trip the desolation was tinged with nauseous horror and a degree of fear.

“After we left Japan, it felt as if the ocean itself was dead,” Macfadyen said.

“We hardly saw any living things. We saw one whale, sort of rolling helplessly on the surface with what looked like a big tumour on its head. It was pretty sickening.

“I’ve done a lot of miles on the ocean in my life and I’m used to seeing turtles, dolphins, sharks and big flurries of feeding birds. But this time, for 3000 nautical miles there was nothing alive to be seen.”

In place of the missing life was garbage in astounding volumes.

“Part of it was the aftermath of the tsunami that hit Japan a couple of years ago. The wave came in over the land, picked up an unbelievable load of stuff and carried it out to sea. And it’s still out there, everywhere you look.”

#22 It is being projected that the radioactivity of coastal waters off the U.S. west coast could double over the next five to six years.

#23 The deputy chairman of Russia’s State Duma Committee for Natural Resources, Maxim Shingarkin, says that seafood captured off the northwest coast of the United States is so radioactive that it represents a “danger for mankind”…

“Currents in the world ocean are so structured that the areas of seafood capture near the U.S. northwest coast are more likely to contain radioactive nuclides than even the Sea of Okhotsk, which is much closer to Japan. These products are the main danger for mankind because they can find their way to people’s tables on a massive scale.”

#24 According to one recent scientific report, radiation from Fukushima could affect our seafood for “many generations” and ultimately kill more than a million people…

This cycle will last for many generations, because of the food chain of fish and other marine fauna, and the radioactivity will be recycled and in fact the meat content will increase rather than decreasing by decay. Even if only one one-hundredth of the radioactivity (more than 1e15 Bq of CS137) were to enter this recirculation pattern, the collective whole body ingestion dose over many generations would exceed 1e7 Sv, sufficient to kill more than 1,000,000 people.

#25 The Japanese government has estimated that approximately 300 tons of highly radioactive water is pouring into the Pacific Ocean from the destroyed Fukushima nuclear facility every single day.

#26 A senior researcher of marine chemistry at the Japan Meteorological Agency’s Meteorological Research Institute says that “30 billion becquerels of radioactive cesium and 30 billion becquerels of radioactive strontium” are being released into the Pacific Ocean from Fukushima every single day.

#27 According to Tepco, a total of somewhere between 20 trillion and 40 trillion becquerels of radioactive tritium have gotten into the Pacific Ocean since the Fukushima disaster first began.

#28 According to a professor at Tokyo University, 3 gigabecquerels of cesium-137 are flowing into the port at Fukushima Daiichi every single day.

#29 It is being projected that significant levels of cesium-137 will reach every corner of the Pacific Ocean by the year 2020.

#30 It has been estimated that the entire Pacific Ocean will soon “have cesium levels 5 to 10 times higher” than what we witnessed during the era of heavy atomic bomb testing in the Pacific many decades ago.

#31 The immense amount of radioactive material being released into the Pacific Ocean from Fukushima has caused environmental activist Joe Martino to issuethe following warning…

“Your days of eating Pacific Ocean fish are over.”

#32 The Iodine-131, Cesium-137 and Strontium-90 that are constantly being released from Fukushima are going to affect the health of those living in the northern hemisphere for a very, very long time. Just consider what Harvey Wasserman had to say about this…

Iodine-131, for example, can be ingested into the thyroid, where it emits beta particles (electrons) that damage tissue. A plague of damaged thyroids has already been reported among as many as 40 percent of the children in the Fukushima area. That percentage can only go higher. In developing youngsters, it can stunt both physical and mental growth. Among adults it causes a very wide range of ancillary ailments, including cancer.

Cesium-137 from Fukushima has been found in fish caught as far away as California. It spreads throughout the body, but tends to accumulate in the muscles. Strontium-90’s half-life is around 29 years. It mimics calcium and goes to our bones.

#33 Outdoor radiation levels at Fukushima recently hit a new all-time high.

#34 According to the Wall Street Journal, it is being projected that the cleanup of Fukushima could take up to 40 years to complete.

#35 Yale Professor Charles Perrow is warning that if the cleanup of Fukushima is not handled with 100% precision that humanity could be threatened “for thousands of years”…

“Conditions in the unit 4 pool, 100 feet from the ground, are perilous, and if any two of the rods touch it could cause a nuclear reaction that would be uncontrollable. The radiation emitted from all these rods, if they are not continually cool and kept separate, would require the evacuation of surrounding areas including Tokyo. Because of the radiation at the site the 6,375 rods in the common storage pool could not be continuously cooled; they would fission and all of humanity will be threatened, for thousands of years.”

#36 There are very alarming reports that new “unexplained plumes of radioactive steam” are rising at Fukushima. Japanese officials are not able to get inside and see what is causing these plumes. Some are speculating that the crisis at Fukushima just got a whole lot worse. The following is from a recent Ecologist article…

Unexplained plumes of radioactive steam have been rising from Fukushima’s Reactor Building 3, Could a major meltdown be on the way?

Fukushima’s Reactor Building 3 exploded on 13th March 2011 as a result of a hydrogen buildup, breaching the building’s containment and emitting a huge plume of radiation. The reactor itself is in meltdown.

And now fresh plumes of steam have been seen coming out the structure. These have now been confirmed by Tepco, the owner of the nuclear plant, from 19th December onwards. The company believes the steam is coming from the fifth floor of the building.

However it does not know the cause of the steam. Lethal levels of radiation and the physical damage to the structure have so far made entry and inspection impossible.

If a full-blown meltdown does happen at Fukushima, it would be an environmental disaster unlike anything that we have ever seen before in human history.

As we enter 2014, we are entering a time when the world is becoming increasingly unstable. The global economy is being shaken, political corruption is seemingly everywhere, evidence of advanced social decay is all around us and the earth itself is starting to groan and crack with increasingly regularity. But the mainstream media continues to insist that everything is going to be just fine. That is one of the reasons why I wrote my new novel. The American people deserve to hear the truth and be warned about the great challenges that are rapidly approaching.

In the end, millions upon millions of people could end up getting seriously ill as a result of all of this radiation coming from Fukushima. Most of them will never even know why they have gotten sick.

And if there is a major earthquake or a significant accident during the cleanup at Fukushima, we could actually see huge sections of Japan be evacuated permanently.

It would be hard to overstate just how serious all of this is. But you won’t hear about this from the mainstream media. Their story is that “everything is okay” and they are sticking to it.

So what do you think?

About the author: Michael T. Snyder is a former Washington D.C. attorney who now publishes The Truth. His new thriller entitled “The Beginning Of The End” is now available on Amazon.com.

Source:
http://thetruthwins.com/archives/36-signs-the-media-is-lying-to-you-about-how-radiation-from-fukushima-is-affecting-the-west-coast
_________________

Citizens across over 60 nations were asked: “Which country do you think is the greatest threat to peace in the world today?”

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 03 Jan 2014 02:55:00 +0000

US the biggest threat to world peace in 2013

RT.com
January 02, 2014

The US has been voted as the most significant threat to world peace in a survey across 68 different countries. Anti-American sentiment was not only recorded in antagonistic countries, but also in many allied NATO partners like Turkey and Greece.

A global survey conducted by the Worldwide Independent Network and Gallup at the end of 2013 revealed strong animosity towards the US’s role as the world’s policeman.

Citizens across over 60 nations were asked: “Which country do you think is the greatest threat to peace in the world today?”

The US topped the list, with 24 percent of people believing America to be the biggest danger to peace. Pakistan came second, with 8 percent of the vote and was closely followed by China with 6 percent. Afghanistan, Iran, Israel and North Korea came in joint fourth place with 5 percent of the vote.

The threat from the US was rated most highly in the Middle East and North Africa, those areas most recently affected by American military intervention. Moreover, the survey showed that even Americans regard their country as a potential threat with 13 percent of them voting the US could disrupt global status quo.

Latin America expressed mixed feelings towards its northerly neighbor, with Peru, Brazil and Argentina all flagging the US as the most dangerous country.

After its numerous threats of a strike on Iran, many countries voted Israel was the biggest threat to prosperity. Morocco, Lebanon and Iraq all chose Israel as the number one danger to world peace.

In the survey participants were also asked: “If there were no barriers to living in any country of the world, which country would you like to live in?” Despite being the perceived largest threat to world peace, the US still topped the tables by a narrow margin of 9 percent.

In general 2013 saw a drop in approval ratings for the Obama Administration. A poll conducted by the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research revealed that 50 percent of those asked thought that the political system in the US needed a “complete overhaul.”

In addition, 70 percent of Americans believe the government lacks the ability to make progress on the important problems and issues facing the country in 2014.

The survey comes two months after the first government shutdown in 17 years in the US which cost the country an estimated $10 billion.

The American government’s credibility was dealt a blow earlier this year when President Obama made a call to strike Syria following a suspected chemical weapons attack by the Syrian government on civilians. The American public and the international community both opposed the action.

Source:
http://www.rt.com/news/us-biggest-threat-peace-079/
____________________

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 29 Nov 2013 03:59:00 +0000

Healthcare.gov and the Gulf Between Planning and Reality

By Clay Shirky
Weblog
Nov. 19, 2013
[Emphasis added]

Back in the mid-1990s, I did a lot of web work for traditional media. That often meant figuring out what the client was already doing on the web, and how it was going, so I’d find the techies in the company, and ask them what they were doing, and how it was going. Then I’d tell management what I’d learned. This always struck me as a waste of my time and their money; I was like an overpaid bike messenger, moving information from one part of the firm to another. I didn’t understand the job I was doing until one meeting at a magazine company.

The thing that made this meeting unusual was that one of their programmers had been invited to attend, so management could outline their web strategy to him. After the executives thanked me for explaining what I’d learned from log files given me by their own employees just days before, the programmer leaned forward and said “You know, we have all that information downstairs, but nobody’s ever asked us for it.”

I remember thinking “Oh, finally!” I figured the executives would be relieved this information was in-house, delighted that their own people were on it, maybe even mad at me for charging an exorbitant markup on local knowledge. Then I saw the look on their faces as they considered the programmer’s offer. The look wasn’t delight, or even relief, but contempt. The situation suddenly came clear: I was getting paid to save management from the distasteful act of listening to their own employees.

In the early days of print, you had to understand the tech to run the organization. (Ben Franklin, the man who made America a media hothouse, called himself Printer.) But in the 19th century, the printing press became domesticated. Printers were no longer senior figures — they became blue-collar workers. And the executive suite no longer interacted with them much, except during contract negotiations.

This might have been nothing more than a previously hard job becoming easier, Hallelujah. But most print companies took it further. Talking to the people who understood the technology became demeaning, something to be avoided. Information was to move from management to workers, not vice-versa (a pattern that later came to other kinds of media businesses as well.) By the time the web came around and understanding the technology mattered again, many media executives hadn’t just lost the habit of talking with their own technically adept employees, they’d actively suppressed it.

I’d long forgotten about that meeting and those looks of contempt (I stopped building websites before most people started) until the launch of Healthcare.gov.

* * *

For the first couple of weeks after the launch, I assumed any difficulties in the Federal insurance market were caused by unexpected early interest, and that once the initial crush ebbed, all would be well. The sinking feeling that all would not be well started with this disillusioning paragraph about what had happened when a staff member at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the department responsible for Healthcare.gov, warned about difficulties with the site back in March.

In response, his superiors told him…

[...] in effect, that failure was not an option, according to people who have spoken with him. Nor was rolling out the system in stages or on a smaller scale, as companies like Google typically do so that problems can more easily and quietly be fixed. Former government officials say the White House, which was calling the shots, feared that any backtracking would further embolden Republican critics who were trying to repeal the health care law.

The idea that “failure is not an option” is a fantasy version of how non-engineers should motivate engineers. That sentiment was invented by a screenwriter, riffing on an after-the-fact observation about Apollo 13; no one actually said it at the time. (If you ever say it, wash your mouth out with soap. If anyone ever says it to you, run.) Even NASA’s vaunted moonshot, so often referred to as the best of government innovation, tested with dozens of unmanned missions first, several of which failed outright.

Failure is always an option. Engineers work as hard as they do because they understand the risk of failure. And for anything it might have meant in its screenplay version, here that sentiment means the opposite; the unnamed executives were saying “Addressing the possibility of failure is not an option.”

* * *

The management question, when trying anything new, is “When does reality trump planning?” For the officials overseeing Healthcare.gov, the preferred answer was “Never.” Every time there was a chance to create some sort of public experimentation, or even just some clarity about its methods and goals, the imperative was to avoid giving the opposition anything to criticize.

At the time, this probably seemed like a way of avoiding early failures. But the project’s managers weren’t avoiding those failures. They were saving them up. The actual site is worse—far worse—for not having early and aggressive testing. Even accepting the crassest possible political rationale for denying opponents a target, avoiding all public review before launch has given those opponents more to complain about than any amount of ongoing trial and error would have.

In his most recent press conference about the problems with the site, the President ruefully compared his campaigns’ use of technology with Healthcare.gov:

And I think it’s fair to say that we have a pretty good track record of working with folks on technology and IT from our campaign, where, both in 2008 and 2012, we did a pretty darn good job on that. [...] If you’re doing it at the federal government level, you know, you’re going through, you know, 40 pages of specs and this and that and the other and there’s all kinds of law involved. And it makes it more difficult — it’s part of the reason why chronically federal IT programs are over budget, behind schedule.

It’s certainly true that Federal IT is chronically challenged by its own processes. But the biggest problem with Healthcare.gov was not timeline or budget. The biggest problem was that the site did not work, and the administration decided to launch it anyway.

This is not just a hiring problem, or a procurement problem. This is a management problem, and a cultural problem. The preferred method for implementing large technology projects in Washington is to write the plans up front, break them into increasingly detailed specifications, then build what the specifications call for. It’s often called the waterfall method, because on a timeline the project cascades from planning, at the top left of the chart, down to implementation, on the bottom right.

Like all organizational models, waterfall is mainly a theory of collaboration. By putting the most serious planning at the beginning, with subsequent work derived from the plan, the waterfall method amounts to a pledge by all parties not to learn anything while doing the actual work. Instead, waterfall insists that the participants will understand best how things should work before accumulating any real-world experience, and that planners will always know more than workers.

This is a perfect fit for a culture that communicates in the deontic language of legislation. It is also a dreadful way to make new technology. If there is no room for learning by doing, early mistakes will resist correction. If the people with real technical knowledge can’t deliver bad news up the chain, potential failures get embedded rather than uprooted as the work goes on.

At the same press conference, the President also noted the degree to which he had been kept in the dark:

OK. On the website, I was not informed directly that the website would not be working the way it was supposed to. Had I been informed, I wouldn’t be going out saying “Boy, this is going to be great.” You know, I’m accused of a lot of things, but I don’t think I’m stupid enough to go around saying, this is going to be like shopping on Amazon or Travelocity, a week before the website opens, if I thought that it wasn’t going to work.

Healthcare.gov is a half-billion dollar site that was unable to complete even a thousand enrollments a day at launch, and for weeks afterwards. As we now know, programmers, stakeholders, and testers all expressed reservations about Healthcare.gov’s ability to do what it was supposed to do. Yet no one who understood the problems was able to tell the President. Worse, every senior political figure—every one—who could have bridged the gap between knowledgeable employees and the President decided not to.

And so it was that, even on launch day, the President was allowed to make things worse for himself and his signature program by bragging about the already-failing site and inviting people to log in and use something that mostly wouldn’t work. Whatever happens to government procurement or hiring (and we should all hope those things get better) a culture that prefers deluding the boss over delivering bad news isn’t well equipped to try new things.

* * *

With a site this complex, things were never going to work perfectly the first day, whatever management thought they were procuring. Yet none of the engineers with a grasp of this particular reality could successfully convince the political appointees to adopt the obvious response: “Since the site won’t work for everyone anyway, let’s decide what tests to run on the initial uses we can support, and use what we learn to improve.”

In this context, testing does not just mean “Checking to see what works and what doesn’t.” Even the Healthcare.gov team did some testing; it was late and desultory, but at least it was there. (The testers recommended delaying launch until the problems were fixed. This did not happen.) Testing means seeing what works and what doesn’t, and acting on that knowledge, even if that means contradicting management’s deeply held assumptions or goals. In well run organizations, information runs from the top down and from the bottom up.

One of the great descriptions of what real testing looks like comes from Valve software, in a piece detailing the making of its game Half-Life. After designing a game that was only sort of good, the team at Valve revamped its process, including constant testing:

This [testing] was also a sure way to settle any design arguments. It became obvious that any personal opinion you had given really didn’t mean anything, at least not until the next test. Just because you were sure something was going to be fun didn’t make it so; the testers could still show up and demonstrate just how wrong you really were.

“Any personal opinion you had given really didn’t mean anything.” So it is in the government; any insistence that something must work is worthless if it actually doesn’t.

An effective test is an exercise in humility; it’s only useful in a culture where desirability is not confused with likelihood. For a test to change things, everyone has to understand that their opinion, and their boss’s opinion, matters less than what actually works and what doesn’t. (An organization that isn’t learning from its users has decided it doesn’t want to learn from its users.)

Given comparisons with technological success from private organizations, a common response is that the government has special constraints, and thus cannot develop projects piecemeal, test with citizens, or learn from its mistakes in public. I was up at the Kennedy School a month after the launch, talking about technical leadership and Healthcare.gov, when one of the audience members made just this point, proposing that the difficult launch was unavoidable, because the government simply couldn’t have tested bits of the project over time.

That observation illustrates the gulf between planning and reality in political circles. It is hard for policy people to imagine that Healthcare.gov could have had a phased rollout, even while it is having one.

At launch, on October 1, only a tiny fraction of potential users could actually try the service. They generated concrete errors. Those errors were handed to a team whose job was to improve the site, already public but only partially working. The resulting improvements are incremental, and put in place over a period of months. That is a phased rollout, just one conducted in the worst possible way.

The vision of “technology” as something you can buy according to a plan, then have delivered as if it were coming off a truck, flatters and relieves managers who have no idea and no interest in how this stuff works, but it’s also a breeding ground for disaster. The mismatch between technical competence and executive authority is at least as bad in government now as it was in media companies in the 1990s, but with much more at stake.

* * *

Tom Steinberg, in his remembrance of his brilliant colleague Chris Lightfoot, said this about Lightfoot’s view of government and technology:

What he fundamentally had right was the understanding that you could no longer run a country properly if the elites don’t understand technology in the same way they grasp economics or ideology or propaganda. His analysis and predictions about what would happens if elites couldn’t learn were savage and depressingly accurate.

Now, and from now on, government will interact with its citizens via the internet, in increasingly important ways. This is a non-partisan issue; whichever party is in the White House will build and launch new forms of public service online. Unfortunately for us, our senior political figures have little habit of talking to their own technically adept employees.

If I had to design a litmus test for whether our political class grasps the internet, I would look for just one signal: Can anyone with authority over a new project articulate the tradeoff between features, quality, and time?

When a project cannot meet all three goals—a situation Healthcare.gov was clearly in by March—something will give. If you want certain features at a certain level of quality, you’d better be able to move the deadline. If you want overall quality by a certain deadline, you’d better be able to simplify, delay, or drop features. And if you have a fixed feature list and deadline, quality will suffer.

Intoning “Failure is not an option” will be at best useless, and at worst harmful.

There is no “Suddenly Go Faster” button, no way you can throw in money or additional developers as a late-stage accelerant; money is not directly tradable for either quality or speed, and adding more programmers to a late project makes it later. You can slip deadlines, reduce features, or, as a last resort, just launch and see what breaks.

Denying this tradeoff doesn’t prevent it from happening. If no one with authority over the project understands that, the tradeoff is likely to mean sacrificing quality by default. That just happened to this administration’s signature policy goal. It will happen again, as long politicians can be allowed to imagine that if you just plan hard enough, you can ignore reality. It will happen again, as long as department heads imagine that complex technology can be procured like pencils. It will happen again as long as management regards listening to the people who understand the technology as a distasteful act.

Source:
http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2013/11/healthcare-gov-and-the-gulf-between-planning-and-reality
______________________

US and UK drop in Web rankings for freedom and openness in 2013 Web Index

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 24 Nov 2013 03:19:00 +0000

Insidious government surveillance may be worse than outright censorship

By Tim Berners-Lee
Ars Technica
Nov. 22, 2013

The insidious nature of government spying has a chilling and subtle effect on Web freedoms that could ultimately be more damaging to society than outright censorship, World Wide Web creator Tim Berners-Lee told the audience at the launch of the World Wide Web Foundation's 2013 Web Index findings.

The legacy of the revelations made by whistleblower Edward Snowden into the actions of national security agencies (the NSA, GCHQ, and others) will be long-lasting, intimated Berners-Lee. While nations such as China openly engage in censorship, what the US and the UK have done could potentially leave a trail of paranoia that in turn leads to a trend for self-censorship among citizens of the allegedly "free" West.

"The question of 'who is it that's got the off switch for our connectivity' started to be asked because of Egypt," said Berners-Lee. "It's a rather obvious thing you can see happening, and a country that does that doesn't get very far. Turning off the Internet got the youths onto the streets because that's what they had left to do. So blocking of the Internet is kind of obvious. And censorship in places like China is obvious too when it comes to blocking whole websites. It's hard to pretend it doesn't exist when the rest of the Web has links to those websites."

"But spying is this insidious form, because of its chilling effect if you feel someone's looking over your shoulder, there's all kinds of things you will not do… [You're not going to be] able to use facilities because of nameless fear."

This year's Web Index was finished in September, so Berners-Lee suggests some countries may have ranked even lower considering the revelations of the past few months. The US and the UK predictably fell a few spots down the table on the sub-index Freedom and Openness. Though the UK came out third overall, one spot ahead of the US, it came 24th for Freedom and Openness. It came eighth for Universal Access, first for Relevant Content, and third for Empowerment.

It shows the contradiction that can exist between the public's perceived freedoms online, and the government's control of those freedoms. For instance, while the US is first for Empowerment—defined as "how far the Web is empowering people not just to receive information, but to voice their own views, participate in public affairs, and take action to improve their lives"—it came 27th for Freedom and Openness. Citizen empowerment and public engagement is concealing the darker underbelly of wider-spread abuses of personal privacy. "Provisions against cybercrime, terrorism, or blasphemy are frequently being employed to silence legitimate dissent or justify blanket digital surveillance," explains the report.

Anonymity is a key area where the state's agenda directly clashes with concepts of freedom, suggested Berners-Lee, and it will be a complex issue to solve.

"Some things are good, like the openness of government data, and some things are just bad. But anonymity is one where it's not so simple. NGOs that work under oppressive regimes and are in contact with the underground campaign for it. Then we have people dealing with cyber bullying where clearly if someone's saying nasty, mean untrue things about you then you can reveal who they are."

In any situation where users say they need a secondary identity, Berners-Lee says we need "a whole social system and machinery" around that service to protect others. Communities need to be self-monitoring so that anonymity can legitimately exist where necessary—as with whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Mass surveillance for everyone!

The revelations of the US and UK's mass surveillance of their own citizens could also have a knock-on effect among those countries employing more obvious means of censorship.

"In my work, I campaign in countries in a diplomatic way to explain why it's important for their economy and future to have freedom of expression," said Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, also at the Web Index launch. "Wikipedia provides a great platform for doing that, and in countries where it's blocked or restricted, it's hard to say we only block terrorists or pedophiles—it's not exactly a crazy thing. But when I'm sitting down with the state council information officer in China or Kazakhstan and saying to them, 'you're on the wrong side of history. This is not the approach that will be here with us in 20 years and it will look bad,' it's important to be able to point to the UK and US. And when we're no longer able to do that, it rings a little hollow to say 'you shouldn't be spying.'"

As such, Wales said it's important we as citizens voice our concerns before that mentality of entitlement makes matters worse. "We may trust GCHQ not to disappear activists, but China may feel more justified and will disappear activists. That's something we should be concerned about."

"I have some real concerns about the direction the Web is taking."

Rebecca MacKinnon, author of Consent of the Networked and co-founder of Global Voices Online, reiterated that now is the time for citizens to empower themselves and ensure these matters are not left to governments alone, a point backed up by the fact that 94 percent of all countries surveyed in the Index fail to meet "best practice standards for checks and balances on government interception of electronic communications."

"Trust no one unless you can hold them accountable," she said. "In China, where they block international sites heavily and control data tightly, they're saying from a national security point of view, we did exactly the right thing."

"There's potential for people to assert more localized power over how the Web is developing in their own countries. If that drive is coming from the government claiming to be acting on behalf of government, it's an excuse for more control and surveillance. The role of citizens in insisting on accountability is key."

Bright Simons, president of the mPedigree Network, said he doesn't believe trust has been irrevocably broken by the NSA-GCHQ revelations, mainly because people weren't all that trusting beforehand. "It's leading to a backlash of fascinating proportions. People are going to make a choice. There is awareness among citizens that it's an issue to be concerned about, and a greater level of citizen empowerment is needed. It's an important milestone in citizen digital rights."

Berners-Lee suggested that empowerment should be facilitated by the destruction of the gulf that exists between the technology world and the policy world—our technology pioneers should not be afraid to engage in political matters, and policymakers need to understand the tech when drafting relevant legislation.

"I spend a lot of time encouraging people to program, not just because we need some people to understand technology—we need lawyers and those in parliament to understand it, otherwise they're not going to be able to make appropriate steps." We need those with the technological knowledge to be writing policy as well as standards in protocols.

Despite the air of pessimism surrounding the Web Index 2013 launch in light of the state spying controversies, Berners-Lee remained positive about the many good things that are happening around the globe. According to the report, the Internet remains vital in catalyzing citizen action and real world change. Despite the fact that 30 percent of nations engage in targeted Web censorship and "moderate to extensive blocking or filtering of politically sensitive content," the Web and social media played a big role in "public mobilization" in 80 percent of nations.

"This is not being spearheaded by political parties and NGOs," said Anne Jellema, CEO of the World Wide Web Foundation. "It's spontaneous and grassroots action driven by social media." The Philippines, for instance, came 20 places higher in the table than its GDP per capita. This, she said, is because those connected are "active and creative users of the Web," as demonstrated last year when they fought back against a proposed cybercrime bill and ultimately crowd sourced its replacement, a bill of rights for the Internet. It demonstrates that wealth does not necessarily correlate to a free and open Web practice. In fact some of the world's wealthiest nations fell far short of the Web Index's standards. Saudi Arabia, for instance, lingered near the bottom of the table for all sub-indexes.

"I am optimistic," said Berners-Lee. "I think the people will win. I have faith in people and humanity as a whole. There's going to be some push back, but change will come in lots of different ways—from activism, but also UN resolutions. Also from within government. There are people that care about this stuff."

This story originally appeared on Wired UK.

Source:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/11/berners-lee-insidious-government-surveillance-may-be-worse-than-outright-censorship/
___________________

JFK Assasination Anniversary

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 22 Nov 2013 13:00:00 +0000

The CIA And Lee Harvey Oswald - Questions Remain

By Joseph Lazzaro
International Business Times
November 15 2013

When analyzing the assassination of President John F. Kennedy -- a murder that changed the trajectory of U.S. public policy, both foreign and domestic -- it is reasonable to ask questions because a mystery remains at the center of this case.

In other words, the American people most likely did not get the truth -- or at least the full truth -- from the woefully deficient and inadequate Warren Commission, the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) or the Assassinations Records Review Board (ARRB).

The reason? At the top of the list has been the obstruction and deception exhibited by the Central Intelligence Agency -- which hindered investigators on each panel, failed to tell the full truth, did not disclose key allegiances, and/or engaged in other acts that prevented each board from undertaking a comprehensive investigation.

For proof of that obstruction and deception, one need not go any further than G. Robert Blakey, staff director and chief counsel for the House Select Committee on Assassinations, 1977-1979

In 2003, Blakey said it best regarding the Central Intelligence Agency’s conduct and policies during the HSCA’s investigation into the Nov. 22, 1963, assassination of President John F. Kennedy:

“... I no longer believe that we were able to conduct an appropriate investigation of the [Central Intelligence] Agency and its relationship to Oswald ... We now know that the Agency withheld from the Warren Commission the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro. Had the commission known of the plots, it would have followed a different path in its investigation. The Agency unilaterally deprived the commission of a chance to obtain the full truth, which will now never be known. Significantly, the Warren Commission's conclusion that the agencies of the government co-operated with it is, in retrospect, not the truth. We also now know that the Agency set up a process that could only have been designed to frustrate the ability of the committee in 1976-79 to obtain any information that might adversely affect the Agency. Many have told me that the culture of the Agency is one of prevarication and dissimulation and that you cannot trust it or its people. Period. End of story. I am now in that camp.”

But Don’t Jump To A Conclusion

At the same time, one should not jump to the conclusion that President Kennedy was murdered in a plot/conspiracy coordinated by the CIA, perhaps with the help of organized crime and anti-Castro Cuban rebels, as many have suggested. First, at the present time, there simply isn’t enough hard evidence to incontrovertibly prove a CIA-led plot.

Second, and equally significant, there are a series of scenarios -- gross incompetence, obstruction of justice or criminal negligence -- that may ultimately turn out to be closer to what really happened in Dealey Plaza in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963 -- once still-classified JFK assassination files are made public by the CIA.

Specifically, those scenarios are:
a) Classified, non-public information that, if released, would reflect adversely on the CIA.

b) Information that indicates CIA agents, contractors, assets or informers made enormous and unconscionable mistakes in monitoring accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald’s file following his return from Russia (then the Soviet Union), including the failure to properly monitor his presence in Dallas and alert all law enforcement authorities of the threat he posed to public officials.

c) The failure to discipline and remove from intelligence work Agency extremists in the CIA who went rogue and then planned and implemented their own assassination operation, with or without Oswald.

In other words, as your fifth-grade elementary school teacher taught you, “Don’t jump to a conclusion without enough evidence” -- of a plot/conspiracy.

Reasonable To Doubt Lone-Gunman Theory

At the same time, it is not unreasonable to doubt the Warren Commission’s conclusion that Oswald, acting alone, fired three shots from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository building in Dealey Plaza in Dallas and assassinated President Kennedy, while also wounding Texas Gov. John Connally and one bystander. Many assassination researchers reject the Warren Commission’s conclusion, arguing that through omission and/or commission, the committee’s investigation was deeply flawed.

The problem is, as noted, there’s still not enough hard evidence to determine what really happened in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, and it is that gap -- including the failure to make public all classified U.S. government documents related to the case -- that has led to a condition in which it’s both difficult to accept the Warren Commission’s conclusion and report -- its incompleteness is one reason it is implausible -- or construct a better one.

And, again, the incompleteness of the Warren Commission’s investigation -- and the HSCA’s and ARRB’s for that matter -- speaks to the need to make public all still-classified JFK assassination files held by the CIA.

What’s more, not only do the American people not have the truth -- or at least the full truth -- regarding the attack in Dealey Plaza, the American people don’t even have the full truth on Lee Harvey Oswald, or on Oswald’s interactions with the CIA, or on how the CIA treated and handled Oswald’s file.

Here’s a classic example of that information/data gap: In the course of author and JFKFacts.org moderator Jefferson Morley’s lawsuit -- Morley v CIA -- which seeks the release of the classified records of CIA Undercover Officer George Joannides, who was chief of psychological warfare operations at the CIA’s Miami station, the CIA acknowledged in a sworn affidavit that the agency retains 1,100 records related to JFK’s assassination that have never been made public.

Specifically, classified records of key CIA officers/personnel William Harvey, David Phillips, Birch D. O’Neal, E Howard Hunt, Anne Goodpasture, David Sanchez Morales and the aforementioned George Joannides -- when made public -- will help the nation determine what really happened in Dallas, who Lee Harvey Oswald was, and how the CIA treated and handled his file.

According to the CIA, these files are “not believed relevant” to JFK’s death.

In an affidavit filed in federal court, the CIA asserted that the 1,100 documents must remain secret until at least October 2017, due to “national security.”

The 1964 Conclusion May Be Correct

Further, of course, if you’re someone who supports the Warren Commission’s conclusion, than as far as you're concerned, there's really no need to make public the CIA’s JFK assassination files: From that standpoint, the issue of who committed the most devastating murder in modern American history has been resolved. Moreover, it is entirely possible that Oswald murdered President Kennedy while acting alone -- and that he alone is responsible.

However, the reasoning forwarded here argues that the sheer weight of the anomalies, including the Warren Commission’s grossly slipshod collection of evidence -- failing to collect 100 percent of the evidence and failing to analyze evidence -- and numerous other violations of protocols for criminal investigations involving ballistic, forensic and autopsy evidence, plus the failure to obtain witness testimony and other serious violations -- combined with the analyses of other researchers, makes that scenario unlikely.

In Dealey Plaza, It Is Always Nov. 22, 1963

Since the assassination of President Kennedy, there has never been a poll in which a majority of Americans believed Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone and fired three rifle shots from the Texas School Book Depository building. Are the American people thinking incorrectly, even irrationally? Do the American people have it wrong? Travel to Dealey Plaza in Dallas, and instead of visiting the TSBD’s Sixth Floor, stand on the sidewalk on the north side of Elm Street where the presidential motorcade approached the grassy knoll.

Stand there for 10, 20, 30 minutes. Soak in the environment and location. Look at the grassy knoll, turn east to the Dal-Tex Building, then west toward the triple overpass above the Stemmons Freeway, and then back again toward the grassy knoll. If you’re like many Americans, your inner sense, your intuition, that resonance to the depth of your being, is correct. You’re correct in concluding that the American people have not received the truth -- or at least the full truth -- regarding Nov. 22, 1963.

But what that full truth is will not be known until the CIA makes public all JFK files.

Source:
http://www.ibtimes.com/jfk-assassination-cia-lee-harvey-oswald-questions-remain-1472050
________________________

A Fifth of Americans Go Hungry

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 09 Nov 2013 01:23:00 +0000

An August 2012 Gallup poll showed that 18.2 percent of Americans lacked sufficient money for needed food at least once over the previous year. To make matters worse, the worst drought in half a century impacted 80 percent of agricultural lands in the country, increasing food prices. Despite this, in 2012, Congress considered cutting support for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)— the official name of its food stamp program—as part of the 2013 Farm Bill.

Proposed Senate cuts would cost approximately 500,000 households about ninety dollars a month in nutritional assistance. Proposed cuts in the House of Representatives would go much further than the ones in the Senate, and would have removed at least 1.8 million people from SNAP. Republicans controlling the House have been eager to cut spending and were the primary supporters of food stamp cuts.

Opponents have expressed concern over the harm the cuts would cause to society’s more vulnerable members, including seniors, children, and working families. Rising food prices would hit Southern states the hardest, while Mountain-Plains and Midwest states would be least affected. Despite all the food hardship, the National Resources Defense Council reported that 40 percent of food in the country goes to waste.

Sources:
Mike Ludwig, “Millions Go Hungry as Congress Considers Food Stamp Cuts and Drought Threatens Crops,” Truthout, August 23, 2012, http://truth-out.org/news/item/11067-millions-go-hungry-as-congress-considers-food-stamp-cuts-and-drought-threatens-crops.

Student Researcher: Noah Tenney (Sonoma State University) Faculty Evaluator: Andy Lee Roth (Sonoma State University)

http://www.projectcensored.org/13-fifth-americans-go-hungry
___________________________

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 14 Oct 2013 23:52:00 +0000

Committee to Protect Journalists issues scathing report on Obama administration

Obama's anti-press measures 'are the most aggressive I've seen since the Nixon administration'

By Glenn Greenwald
TheGuardian.com
October 10, 201

It's hardly news that the Obama administration is intensely and, in many respects, unprecedentedly hostile toward the news-gathering process. Even the most Obama-friendly journals have warned of what they call"Obama's war on whistleblowers".

James Goodale, the former general counsel of the New York Times during its epic fights with the Nixon administration, recently observed that "President Obama wants to criminalize the reporting of national security information" and added: "President Obama will surely pass President Richard Nixon as the worst president ever on issues of national security and press freedom."

Still, a new report released today by the highly respected Committee to Protect Journalists - its first-ever on press freedoms in the US - powerfully underscores just how extreme is the threat to press freedom posed by this administration. Written by former Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie, Jr., the report offers a comprehensive survey of the multiple ways that the Obama presidency has ushered in a paralyzing climate of fear for journalists and sources alike, one that severely threatens the news-gathering process.

The first sentence: "In the Obama administration's Washington, government officials are increasingly afraid to talk to the press." Among the most shameful aspects of the Obama record:

Six government employees, plus two contractors including Edward Snowden, have been subjects of felony criminal prosecutions since 2009 under the 1917 Espionage Act, accused of leaking classified information to the press—compared with a total of three such prosecutions in all previous U.S. administrations. Still more criminal investigations into leaks are under way. Reporters' phone logs and e-mails were secretly subpoenaed and seized by the Justice Department in two of the investigations, and a Fox News reporter was accused in an affidavit for one of those subpoenas of being 'an aider, abettor and/or conspirator' of an indicted leak defendant, exposing him to possible prosecution for doing his job as a journalist. In another leak case, a New York Times reporter has been ordered to testify against a defendant or go to jail."

It goes on to detail how NSA revelations have made journalists and source petrified even to speak with one another for fear they are being surveilled:

'I worry now about calling somebody because the contact can be found out through a check of phone records or e-mails,' said veteran national security journalist R. Jeffrey Smith of the Center for Public Integrity, an influential nonprofit government accountability news organization in Washington. 'It leaves a digital trail that makes it easier for the government to monitor those contacts,' he said."

It quotes New York Times national security reporter Scott Shane as saying that sources are "scared to death." It quotes New York Times reporter David Sanger as saying that "this is the most closed, control freak administration I've ever covered." And it notes that New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan previously wrote that "it's turning out to be the administration of unprecedented secrecy and unprecedented attacks on a free press."

Based on all this, Downie himself concludes:

The administration's war on leaks and other efforts to control information are the most aggressive I've seen since the Nixon administration, when I was one of the editors involved in The Washington Post's investigation of Watergate. The 30 experienced Washington journalists at a variety of news organizations whom I interviewed for this report could not remember any precedent."

And this pernicious dynamic extends far beyond national security: "Ellen Weiss, Washington bureau chief for E.W. Scripps newspapers and stations, said 'the Obama administration is far worse than the Bush administration' in trying to thwart accountability reporting about government agencies." It identifies at least a dozen other long-time journalists making similar observations.

The report ends by noting the glaring irony that Obama aggressively campaigned on a pledge to usher in The Most Transparent Administration Ever™. Instead, as the New Yorker's investigative reporter Jane Mayer recently said about the Obama administration's attacks: "It's a huge impediment to reporting, and so chilling isn't quite strong enough, it's more like freezing the whole process into a standstill."

Back in 2006, back when I was writing frequently about the Bush administration's attacks on press freedom, the focus was on mere threats to take some of these actions, and that caused severe anger from vocal progressives. Now, as this new report documents, we have moved well beyond the realm of mere threats into undeniable reality, and the silence is as deafening as the danger is pronounced.

Related matter

Along with David Miranda, I testified yesterday before a Committee of the Brazilian Senate investigating NSA spying, and beyond our latest revelations about economic spying aimed at Brazil, one of the issues discussed was the war on press freedoms being waged by the US and UK governments to prevent reporting of these stories. The Guardian, via Reuters, has a two-minute video with an excerpt of my testimony on that issue.

UPDATE

Edward Snowden was awarded this year's Sam Adams Whistleblower Award, and several of his fellow heroic whistleblowers - including Thomas Drake, Jesselyn Radack and Coleen Rowley - traveled to Moscow to present it to him. An excellent photo of that event is here.

Source: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/10/cpi-report-press-freedoms-obama

____________________

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 14 Oct 2013 22:01:00 +0000

Chipotle's Choice: A Shift Away From Responsibly Raised Beef

For a company that markets itself by lambasting the industrial food system, Chipotle's offerings are starting to look a lot like many other fast-food chains out there, complete with growth hormones, feedlots, GMOs, and more.

By James McWilliams'
Pacific Standard
October 9, 2013

Fast-food empires—McDonald's, Burger King, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and so on—fuel the engine of agribusiness. They support an industrialized supply stream clogged with hormone-laden beef, genetically modified corn and soy, and an endless flow of processed “food-like substances.” They support the alienation and mistreatment of farm laborers, who are paid a pittance for their neck-down work. They support meals weighted with alarming quantities of sodium and fat, leading to an obesity and diabetes crisis. Fast food means high volume and high volume means industrial agriculture and industrial agriculture means food that’s bad for animal welfare, bad for the environment, and bad for people’s health (PDF). For any conscientious consumer, this paragraph is, unfortunately, very old news.

Perhaps more surprising, though, is the fact that Chipotle Mexican Grill—the foodie’s alternative for a relatively quick and responsible meal—is often complicit in these culinary crimes and misdemeanors. Despite the company’s savvy effort to brand itself otherwise, it inevitably finds itself ensnared in an industrial system that effectively churns out a smorgasbord of meat, beans, cheese, sour cream, guacamole, tomatoes, salsa, and a steady flow of condiments. Insisting that, as spokesperson Danielle Winslow told me, “our first priority is to accommodate our customers”—which effectively means supplying all ingredients at full capacity all the time—Chipotle has yet to roll a burrito that evades the reach of factory farming.

You’d never know this from the company’s successful promotional campaigns. Through advertising endeavors such as its “Food With Integrity” program, or its declaration that a Chipotle burrito is a “hand crafted, local farm supporting, food culture changing cylinder of deliciousness,” or in-store signs that declare “no prescription needed” (if the meat is antibiotic-free), or, most recently (and virally), a short video—"The Scarecrow"—thoroughly lambasting the industrial food system, the publicly traded company with 1,500 stores nationwide has established a reputation so deeply infused with agrarian virtue that many consumers simply assume that the company really is leading a revolution to produce burritos high in rectitude, low in guilt, and wrapped in responsibility. For the effectiveness of its advertisements, Chipotle is in a league of its own.

To its credit, the company hasn’t ignored the disparity between its advertised ideals and actual choices. It’s usually the first to recognize its shortcomings and, as conversations with company representatives reiterate, transparency seems genuinely valued. Generally, it adopts a sensible “we’re doing our best under the circumstances” approach to external criticisms about its linkages to industrial agriculture, arguing that by demanding “all-natural” and “humanely raised” meat it’s incentivizing the current food system to scale down, decentralize, and return to more authentic methods of production. This position seems reasonable enough, if not revolutionary, given that it’s coming from “the third largest publicly traded restaurant in terms of market capitalization” behind McDonald's and Yum! Brands.

But here’s the deal: The logic only sticks if the company decides to buck up and honestly adhere to the sustainable food movement’s most basic tenets, ones to which it so vigorously appeals in its marketing endeavors. Two precepts in particular—eating what’s in season and deciding that when the supply of one responsibly sourced ingredient declines you make up for it with another responsibly sourced ingredient—are, according to the movement that Chipotle has so successfully tapped into, critical to achieving the genuine change it promotes. When it comes time to walk this walk, though, Chipotle goes risk averse.

Consider Chipotle’s recent response to declining supplies of “responsibly raised” beef. In 1999 the company started sourcing “all-natural” beef from producers that raised animals mostly on pasture and eschewed antibiotics and growth hormones. Over the years Chipotle has formed strong relationships with smaller-scale beef producers including Niman, Country Natural, and Meyer. Last August, however, the beef supply lagged. This was not an unusual experience. Historically, when pork supplies declined, the company waited patiently until they resumed. Beef, however, is a more popular menu choice than pork. So Chipotle now faced a critical decision: it could accept the diminished supply of all-natural beef or it could replace it with what Winslow called “commodity beef”—that is, factory farmed beef.

Chipotle chose the latter. A month before its influential anti-factory farm video went viral Chipotle co-CEO Steve Ells, citing declining supplies of all-natural beef, said in a press release that, with regards to allowing antibiotics back in the company’s beef supply, “we are certainly willing to consider this change.”

Winslow made it clear in a phone interview that this change had been considered and a decision had been made. The “short-term disruption” in the supply of beef from smaller suppliers, she said, “has forced us to use commodity beef.” Twenty percent of the company’s beef will now come from producers that typically use GMO-based feed, antibiotics, growth hormones, feedlots, and all the other unsavory aspects of industrial animal agriculture that Chipotle condemns as loudly as anyone else. The company, which insists the change is only temporary, will alert consumers with in-store notices.

Chipotle is a company that’s trying to buck the fast-food norm. It should be commended for doing so. But it must understand that reforming the food system means more than supporting responsible choices. It also means rejecting irresponsibly produced choices—something that a relatively small (20 percent) drop in one ingredient suggests it could do. Having once removed commodity meat from its supply chain, Chipotle should, as a matter of immutable policy, never let it back in. My guess is that patrons would happily accept this stance, as well as the inconvenience that might follow.

To do otherwise is to acknowledge industrial animal agriculture as a viable choice. And when a fast-food chain trying to change the game does that, when it legitimates industrial animal agriculture as an option in the breach, there will be no food revolution. Not even close. If Chipotle decides that, as a publicly traded company beholden to shareholders, it cannot operate without constant access to industrial agriculture, that’s fine. In fact, it’d be perfectly understandable. But then it should stop making ads that suggest otherwise.

Source: http://www.psmag.com/environment/chipotle-mexican-grill-fast-food-beef-sustainable-agriculture-67867/

______________________

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 13 Oct 2013 16:18:00 +0000

Google: Doing Evil with ALEC

Quietly, Google has joined ALEC—the American Legislative Exchange Council—the shadowy corporate alliance that pushes odious laws through state legislatures.

By Norman Solomon
Nation of Change
October 12, 2013

Google Inc. is now aligned with the notorious ALEC.

In the process, Google has signed onto an organization that promotes such regressive measures as tax cuts for tobacco companies, school privatization to help for-profit education firms, repeal of state taxes for the wealthy and opposition to renewable energy disliked by oil companies.

ALEC’s reactionary efforts -- thoroughly documented by the Center for Media and Democracy -- are shameful assaults on democratic principles. And Google is now among the hundreds of companies in ALEC. Many people who’ve admired Google are now wondering: how could this be?

Well, in his recent book “Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy,” Robert W. McChesney provides vital context. “It is true that with the advent of the Internet many of the successful giants -- Apple and Google come to mind -- were begun by idealists who may have been uncertain whether they really wanted to be old-fashioned capitalists,” he writes. “The system in short order has whipped them into shape.”

McChesney adds: “Any qualms about privacy, commercialism, avoiding taxes, or paying low wages to Third World factory workers were quickly forgotten. It is not that the managers are particularly bad and greedy people -- indeed their individual moral makeup is mostly irrelevant -- but rather that the system sharply rewards some types of behavior and penalizes other types of behavior so that people either get with the program and internalize the necessary values or they fail.”

Google has widely mythologized itself as some kind of humanistic techno-pioneer. Obscured in a fog of digital legend is the agenda that more than ever is transfixed with maximizing profits while capitalizing on anti-democratic leverage of corporate power. Google’s involvement in ALEC is consistent with the company’s mega-business model that relentlessly exploits rigorous data-mining of emails, online searches and so much more.

Yet image-conscious companies can be skittish about public pressure. That helps to explain why dozens of firms withdrew from ALEC during the last year.

A few days ago -- when my colleagues at RootsAction.org sent out an email alert about news of ALEC’s connection with Google as well as with Facebook and Yelp -- more than 25,000 people quickly signed a petition urging those companies to “stop funding ALEC.” Several thousand of the petition signers added comments that can be read online along with the petition.

Those comments reflect widening comprehension of Google and the significance of its alignment with ALEC. Here’s a sampling:

“I expected better. Maybe that was naive.” James C., San Jose, CA

“What happened to your big pledge? ‘Don't be evil’? Guess it was just words...” Lois W., Sun City, AZ

“Better check your definition of EVIL -- look it up on Google…” Armando A., Vista, CA

“Please don't fund tyranny. You were supposed to be one of the good guys.” Ernest W., Easthampton, MA

“Your credibility is fading associating with this kind of scum.” John B., Easton, CT

“You are subverting the wishes of your clients/users while undermining democracy.” Vincent G., Sioux Falls, SD

“Shame on you. Think about what the majority of your users want instead of the ‘rich’ guys.” Karen B., Westminster, CO

“If you continue to support ALEC, I will along with countless others, discontinue use of ALL your products and services!” Ronald P., Milford Center, OH

“Quit helping to Destroy our democracy.” Kevin B., Lynnwood, WA

“Corporate power is corrupting this nation's ability to have a decent governing system.” Jean and Jesper C., Louisville, KY

“What is wrong with Google acting like the one tenth of the 1%? Too much filthy lucre has covered their conscience.” Doug Y., Albany, CA

“Google! How could you do this? Don't you realize this organization stands for ALL the wrong things? I'm sure most of your employees would not want to belong to ALEC. Please reconsider for their sake and that of all of us.” Judith S., Carbondale, IL

“If you sleep with dogs, you get fleas.” Robert J., Fern Park, FL

“Shame! We thought you were supposed to be a tool for the people, not a tool for the corporations!” Sharon T., Irvine, CA

“Happy Sociopath Day to you people!” Gary S., Big Bear Lake, CA

Article image “Google has evolved to be one of the most unethical corporations in the world!” Eric K., Montclair, NJ

“This is so obviously evil, and it causes real suffering.” Terrell S., Seattle, WA

“Don't you corporate executives make enough money? How much can you spend? Don't you realize that people have to have money to buy your product? What the heck are you ‘dumb-asses’ thinking?” Lon K., Waterloo, IA

“Good companies are becoming evil in order to please ALEC and the upper 1%. I thought Google would never need to stoop to that. I'm sadder than sad.” Linda A., Medina, WA

“ALEC promotes corporate dominance over the democratic processes that our country was founded on. Shame on you!” Judy D., Port Townsend, WA

“Laws should be written by elected representatives with citizen input, NOT by cookie-cuttered legalese templates created by and for the corporate interests.” Liz A., Los Angeles, CA

“Noooooo Google! I love you but I will have to abandon you and many of your products should you do this. I really, really, really don’t want to do that! But will...” Rochelle W., Reading, PA

“ALEC organizes capital to crush people by gaining any all benefits for the wealthy. That has consequences for children, elderly, disabled, veterans, working people -- your customers. Please look beyond the near-term bottomline.” Benita C., Burgettstown, PA

“Greed may be the worst terror facing this country. Greed, of corporations and some individuals, seems bent on destroying our democracy. We have to fight back!” Anne G., Arlington, TX

“ALEC is evil. Those who fund ALEC are enabling evil. Enough said.” Monty N., Helena, MT

“Google: Better get your house in order and your priorities straight. Average Americans are in no mood for this crap.” Lawrence H., Fall Creek, WI

“For a company that loves to talk about the forward thinking way it treats employees, it surely seems acts just like every other ultra conservative corporate giant.” Andrew W., Pittsfield, MA

“Why such cowardice?” Mitchell S., Philadelphia, PA

“I knew the Don't Be Evil mantra would disappear once the big money started flowing in. They're no different than any other sleazy money-grubbing corporation in the cesspool of greed the USA has become.” Gill F., Olympia, WA

“Disgusting professional activity on the part of this huge corrupt business. Google is going to have to do a lot of work to earn back the respect of a huge segment of the public; this only one of many recent revelations about Google's despicable conduct as an entity.” Susan H., Lafayette, IN

“Big money, big business, big lies.” Stephen D., Grants Pass, OR

“Please stand for individual's freedom rather than corporate greed and stop supporting ALEC.” Carol B., San Rafael, CA

“Your company went from hip and caring to right of Attila the Hun and nasty in a few years...” Roger W., Montpelier, VT

“ALEC has been a disaster for the vast majority of citizens in Wisconsin and other states. It has become a leading supporter of fascist attacks on women's sacred reproductive rights.” Edith M., Milwaukee, WI

“ALEC has done tremendous harm to this country and its political system. Any support for the organization is support for tearing down constitutional government.” James F., Minneapolis, MN

“Just provide a service and take home your inflated paycheck. Stay out of the rest. And by the way, erase my browsing history, you nosey anti-American hacks.” Jeff Cole, Tucson, AZ

“If Google and Facebook have any integrity left, please prove it by not funding ALEC!” Douglas W., Chicago, IL

“ALEC is trying to dismantle our civil society. Do not be part of it.” Jean Beck, Lynnwood, WA

“Have a heart!!!!!!” Artalious S., McDonough GA

“ALEC is a big step backwards in human evolution, or a big step toward Big Brother.” Victoria G., Portland, OR

“Disgusting. More government for the highest bidders.” Michael P., Morton Grove, IL

“The worst thing about ALEC is its anti-democratic nature which buys votes to override the will of the people. As an information source this should violate your principles.” Lon H., Ferndale, MI

“When you are as giant as Google, you ALMOST have stomp on us little people. Please please please be with US…” Jon S., Lafayette, CO

“This is indicative of what happens when the founders of a company grow extremely wealthy. They align themselves more and more with the organizations that will further their agenda of market dominance and profit taking. The support of ALEC by the two founders of Google is particularly hypocritical because of their original pledge to not be evil. Shame on both of you.” Bruce B., Port Townsend, WA

Source:
http://www.nationofchange.org/google-doing-evil-alec-1381584886
___________________

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 25 Sep 2013 00:51:00 +0000

Former FBI Agent to Plead Guilty to Being AP Source

A former FBI agent and contractor has agreed to plead guilty to being the source for an Associated Press report that revealed a foiled bomb plot in Yemen, led to the uncovering of a double agent and prompted the Obama administration to secretly subpoena the phone records of Associated Press journalists. Under the agreement, Donald Sachtleben will serve more than three-and-a-half years in prison for the disclosure.

Separately, Sachtleben has agreed to plead guilty to child pornography charges that carry an even longer sentence. Officials seized Sachtleben’s computer in May 2012, days after the leak, as part of the child pornography case. But federal investigators say they did not connect Sachtleben to the AP disclosures until after they secretly obtained a trove of phone logs from AP reporters in what the news agency’s president termed a "massive and unprecedented intrusion" involving offices where more than 100 journalists worked. Sachteleben’s prosecution is the eighth related to leaks under President Obama. Before his presidency, there were only three such cases in all of U.S. history.

Source:

http://www.democracynow.org/2013/9/24/headlines#9243

________________________

U.S. Military to Stop Releasing Tally of Guantánamo Prisoners on Hunger Strike

The U.S. military says it will stop reporting the number of prisoners on hunger strike at Guantánamo Bay after its official tally has dropped to just 19 prisoners. Eighteen of the prisoners are listed for force-feeding with nasal tubes. The hunger strike against indefinite detention began in February. At its peak, the military counted 106 participants, while prisoner attorneys said the number was higher, with nearly all 166 prisoners taking part. The strike forced President Obama to publicly address his failure to deliver on a promise to close Guantánamo. Last month, two prisoners were moved to Algeria in the first transfer out of Guantánamo in nearly a year.

Source:

http://www.democracynow.org/2013/9/24/headlines#9246

______________________

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 21 Sep 2013 18:35:00 +0000

Everything We Know About What Data Brokers Know About You

by Lois Beckett
ProPublica,
Sep. 13, 2013

Sept. 13: This story has been updated. It was originally published on March 7, 2013.

We're continuing to learn new details about how the American government is collecting bulk records of citizens' communications -- from demanding that a telephone company hand over the daily records of "all telephone calls in its systems," to collecting an unknown number of emails, instant messages and Facebook messages.

It's not clear how much information about ordinary people's conversations the National Security Agency has gathered. But we do know there's a thriving public market for data on individual Americans -- especially data about the things we buy and might want to buy.

Consumer data companies scoop up large amounts of consumer information about people around the world and sell it, providing marketers details about whether you're pregnant or divorced or trying to lose weight, about how rich you are and what kinds of cars you drive. But many people still don't know data brokers exist.

Regulators and some in Congress have been taking a closer look at this industry, and are beginning to push the companies to give consumers more information and control over what happens to their data. The prominent data broker Acxiom recently launched aboutthedata.com, a site that allows you to review some of the information the company has connected to your name -- and, potentially, edit and update it as well.

Here's a look (originally published in March) at what we know about the consumer data industry.
How much do these companies know about individual people?

They start with the basics, like names, addresses and contact information, and add on demographics, like age, race, occupation and "education level," according to consumer data firm Acxiom's overview of its various categories.

But that's just the beginning: The companies collect lists of people experiencing "life-event triggers" like getting married, buying a home, sending a kid to college 2014 or even getting divorced.

Credit reporting giant Experian has a separate marketing services division, which sells lists of "names of expectant parents and families with newborns" that are "updated weekly."

The companies also collect data about your hobbies and many of the purchases you make. Want to buy a list of people who read romance novels? Epsilon can sell you that, as well as a list of people who donate to international aid charities.

A subsidiary of credit reporting company Equifax even collects detailed salary and paystub information for roughly 38 percent of employed Americans, as NBC news reported. As part of handling employee verification requests, the company gets the information directly from employers.
Equifax said in a statement that the information is only sold to customers "who have been verified through a detailed credentialing process." It added that if a mortgage company or other lender wants to access information about your salary, they must obtain your permission to do so.

Of course, data companies typically don't have all of this information on any one person. As Acxiom notes in its overview, "No individual record ever contains all the possible data." And some of the data these companies sell is really just a guess about your background or preferences, based on the characteristics of your neighborhood, or other people in a similar age or demographic group.

Where are they getting all this info?

The stores where you shop sell it to them.

Datalogix, for instance, which collects information from store loyalty cards, says it has information on more than $1 trillion in consumer spending "across 1400 leading brands." It doesn't say which ones. (Datalogix did not respond to our requests for comment.)

Data companies usually refuse to say exactly what companies sell them information, citing competitive reasons. And retailers also don't make it easy for you to find out whether they're selling your information.

But thanks to California's "Shine the Light" law, researchers at U.C. Berkeley were able to get a small glimpse of how companies sell or share your data. The study recruited volunteers to ask more than 80 companies how the volunteers' information was being shared.

Only two companies actually responded with details about how volunteers' information had been shared. Upscale furniture store Restoration Hardware said that it had sent "your name, address and what you purchased" to seven other companies, including a data "cooperative" that allows retailers to pool data about customer transactions, and another company that later became part of Datalogix. (Restoration Hardware hasn't responded to our request for comment.)

Walt Disney also responded and described sharing even more information: not just a person's name and address and what they purchased, but their age, occupation, and the number, age and gender of their children. It listed companies that received data, among them companies owned by Disney, like ABC and ESPN, as well as others, including Honda, HarperCollins Publishing, Almay cosmetics, and yogurt company Dannon.

But Disney spokeswoman Zenia Mucha said that Disney's letter, sent in 2007, "wasn't clear" about how the data was actually shared with different companies on the list. Outside companies like Honda only received personal information as part of a contest, sweepstakes, or other joint promotion that they had done with Disney, Mucha said. The data was shared "for the fulfillment of that contest prize, not for their own marketing purposes."

Where else do data brokers get information about me?

Government records and other publicly available information, including some sources that may surprise you. Your state Department of Motor Vehicles, for instance, may sell personal information 2014 like your name, address, and the type of vehicles you own 2014 to data companies, although only for certain permitted purposes, including identify verification.

Public voting records, which include information about your party registration and how often you vote, can also be bought and sold for commercial purposes in some states.

Are there limits to the kinds of data these companies can buy and sell?

Yes, certain kinds of sensitive data are protected 2014 but much of your information can be bought and sold without any input from you.

Federal law protects the confidentiality of your medical records and your conversations with your doctor. There are also strict rules regarding the sale of information used to determine your credit-worthiness, or your eligibility for employment, insurance and housing. For instance, consumers have the right to view and correct their own credit reports, and potential employers have to ask for your consent before they buy a credit report about you.

Other than certain kinds of protected data 2014 including medical records and data used for credit reports 2014 consumers have no legal right to control or even monitor how information about them is bought and sold. As the FTC notes, "There are no current laws requiring data brokers to maintain the privacy of consumer data unless they use that data for credit, employment, insurance, housing, or other similar purposes."

So they don't sell information about my health?

Actually, they do.

Data companies can capture information about your "interests" in certain health conditions based on what you buy 2014 or what you search for online. Datalogix has lists of people classified as "allergy sufferers" and "dieters." Acxiom sells data on whether an individual has an "online search propensity" for a certain "ailment or prescription."

Consumer data is also beginning to be used to evaluate whether you're making healthy choices.
One health insurance company recently bought data on more than three million people's consumer purchases in order to flag health-related actions, like purchasing plus-sized clothing, the Wall Street Journal reported. (The company bought purchasing information for current plan members, not as part of screening people for potential coverage.)

Spokeswoman Michelle Douglas said that Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina would use the data to target free programming offers to their customers.

Douglas suggested that it might be more valuable for companies to use consumer data "to determine ways to help me improve my health" rather than "to buy my data to send me pre-paid credit card applications or catalogs full of stuff they want me to buy."

Do companies collect information about my social media profiles and what I do online?

Yes.

As we highlighted last year, some data companies record 2014 and then resell 2014 all kinds of information you post online, including your screen names, website addresses, interests, hometown and professional history, and how many friends or followers you have.

Acxiom said it collects information about which social media sites individual people use, and "whether they are a heavy or a light user," but that they do not collect information about "individual postings" or your "lists of friends."

More traditional consumer data can also be connected with information about what you do online. Datalogix, the company that collects loyalty card data, has partnered with Facebook to track whether Facebook users who see ads for certain products actually end up buying them at local stores, as the Financial Times reported last year.

Is there a way to find out exactly what these data companies know about me? (Updated 9/5/2013)

Not really -- although that's beginning to change.

You have the right to review and correct your credit report. But with marketing data, there's often no way to know exactly what information is attached to your name 2014 or whether it's accurate.
Most companies offer, at best, a partial picture.

In September, Acxiom debuted aboutthedata.com, which allows to you review and edit some of the company's marketing data on you, by entering your name, address, birth date and the last four digits of your social security number.

The Federal Trade Commission's Julie Brill tweeted that "more data brokers should follow" Acxiom's example. But the effort received mixed reviews from users, privacy advocates and government regulators, the New York Times reported.

Previously, Acxiom only let customers review a smaller slice of the information the company sells about them, including criminal history, as New York Times reporter Natasha Singer described last year. When Singer requested and finally received her report in 2012, all it included was a record of her residential addresses.

Other companies also offer some access. A spokeswoman for Epsilon said it allows consumers to review "high level information" about their data 2014 like whether or not you've purchased "home furnishings" merchandise. (Requests to review this information cost $5 and can only be made by postal mail.)

RapLeaf, a company that advertises that it has "real-time data" on 80 percent of U.S. email addresses, says it gives customers "total control over the data we have on you," and allows them to review and edit the categories it associates with them (like "estimated household income" and "Likely Political Contributor to Republicans").

How do I know when someone has purchased data about me?

Most of the time, you don't.

When you're checking out at a store and a cashier asks you for your Zip code, the store isn't just getting that single piece of information. Acxiom and other data companies offer services that allow stores to use your Zip code and the name on your credit card to pinpoint your home address 2014 without asking you for it directly.

Is there any way to stop the companies from collecting and sharing information about me?
Yes, but it would require a whole lot of work.

Many data brokers offer consumers the chance to "opt out" of being included in their databases, or at least from receiving advertising enabled by that company. Rapleaf, for instance, has a "Permanent opt-out" that "deletes information associated with your email address from the Rapleaf database."

But to actually opt-out effectively, you need to know about all the different data brokers and where to find their opt-outs. Most consumers, of course, don't have that information.

In their privacy report last year, the FTC suggested that data brokers should create a centralized website that would make it easier for consumers to learn about the existence of these companies and their rights regarding the data they collect.

How many people do these companies have information on?

Basically everyone in the U.S. and many beyond it. Acxiom, recently profiled by the New York Times, says it has information on 500 million people worldwide, including "nearly every U.S. consumer."

After the 9/11 attacks, CNN reported, Acxiom was able to locate 11 of the 19 hijackers in its database.

How is all of this data actually used?

Mostly to sell you stuff. Companies want to buy lists of people who might be interested in what they're selling 2014 and also want to learn more about their current customers.

They also sell their information for other purposes, including identity verification, fraud prevention and background checks.

If new privacy laws are passed, will they include the right to see what data these companies have collected about me?

Unlikely.

In a report on privacy last year, the Federal Trade Commission recommended that Congress pass legislation "that would provide consumers with access to information about them held by a data broker." President Barack Obama has also proposed a Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights that would give consumers the right to access and correct certain information about them.

But this probably won't include access to marketing data, which the Federal Trade Commission considers less sensitive than data used for credit reports or identity verification.

In terms of marketing data, "we think at the very least consumers should have access to the general categories of data the companies have about consumers," said Maneesha Mithal of the FTC's Division of Privacy and Identity Protection.

Data companies have also pushed back against the idea of opening up marketing profiles for individual consumers' inspection.

Even if there were errors in your marketing data profile, "the worst thing that could happen is that you get an advertising offer that isn't relevant to you," said Rachel Thomas, the vice president of government affairs at the Direct Marketing Association.

"The fraud and security risks that you run by opening up those files is higher than any potential harm that could happen to the consumer," Thomas said.

Source:
http://www.propublica.org/article/everything-we-know-about-what-data-brokers-know-about-you
__________________

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 15 Sep 2013 18:14:00 +0000

What Witchcraft Is Facebook?

By Laura Dimon
The Atlantic Monthly
Sept.11, 2013
[emphasis added]

Those are the words that Robert Bartholomew used to describe this past winter’s outbreak of mass hysteria in Danvers, Massachusetts, a town also known as “Old Salem” and “Salem Village.”

Bartholomew, a sociologist in New Zealand who has been studying cases of mass hysteria for more than 20 years, was referring to the Salem Witch Trials of 1692-1693, the most widely recognized episode of mass hysteria in history, which ultimately saw the hanging deaths of 20 people.

Fast-forward about 300 years to January 2013, when a bizarre case of mass hysteria again struck Danvers. About two dozen teenagers at the Essex Agricultural and Technical School began having “mysterious” hiccups and vocal tics. “The Massachusetts State Health Department refuses to say publicly,” Bartholomew wrote in an email in late August, “but I have heard from some of the parents privately who say that the symptoms are still persisting.”

The location might be eerie, but Bartholomew is not surprised by the outbreak in the slightest. He said that there has been a “sudden upsurge” in these types of outbreaks popping up in the U.S. over the past few years.

It starts with conversion disorder, when psychological stressors, such as trauma or anxiety, manifest in physical symptoms. The conversion disorder becomes “contagious” due to a phenomenon called mass psychogenic illness (MPI), historically known as “mass hysteria,” in which exposure to cases of conversion disorder cause other people—who unconsciously believe they've been exposed to the same harmful toxin—to experience the same symptoms.

Though the Massachusetts State Health Department still has not declared the Danvers outbreak to be MPI, back in March, Bartholomew said, “[Danvers] could turn into another Le Roy, if they don’t watch their step.”

Typically, mass hysteria is confined to a group of girls or young women who share a common physical space for a majority of the time. Bartholomew has studied over 600 cases, dating back to 1566, and said that the gender link is undeniable; it’s just a question of why. It is accepted within the psychiatric community that conversion disorders are much more common in females. There are also social, biological, and anthropological theories that have to do with how and why females might cope with stress.

He was referring to an episode of mass hysteria in Le Roy, a small town in western New York, that garnered massive media attention in the winter of 2011 when about 18 girls at the local high school came down with a very dramatic—and very real—case of hysteria. Bartholomew said that the Danvers case looks extremely similar to the case in Le Roy and that the lessons from Le Roy have gone “unheeded.”

One major lesson missed: the power of social media to spread and exacerbate an episode.

According to Bartholomew, there is “potential for a far greater or global episode, unless we quickly understand how social media is, for the first time, acting as the primary vector or agent of spread for conversion disorder.” He believes that epidemics spread by social media are “inevitable” and that “it's just a matter of time before we see outbreaks that are not just confined to a single school or factory or even region, but covering a disperse geographical area and causing real social and economic harm.”

Le Roy was the first majorly reported case during the era of social media. But there is another significant, related detail of the Le Roy case that sets it apart from the scores of mass hysteria that had come before it.

Marge Fitzsimmons, a 36-year-old nurse in town, also “caught” the disease. Bartholomew said that it’s not unheard of for one or two adults to be affected, but he cannot recall any cases like Marge’s, in which the adults were not intimately involved with the children suffering from the malady. Marge said that she knew about what was going on in town mainly through Facebook postings.

Catching an illness through Facebook sounds wonky.

But the contagion of hysteria relies, among many things, upon the unconscious interpretation of what is suggested to us. Fitzsimmons did not even have to be in physical contact with the other girls to “catch” their disease. Marge encapsulates the power of social media to penetrate and trigger actions of the unconscious mind. She marks “a historical shift in terms of the trigger for people being affected and sucked into these cases,” Bartholomew said.

Here is her story.

It was December 2011, and Marge Fitzsimmons was sick. Marge, a nurse, was familiar with the many ways that the body can betray us, but this was different. It wasn't the flu or cancer or even depression, but an illness more mysterious, fraught with anxiety and fear. Marge was a grown woman with a daughter of her own, but that winter, more than anything, she needed her mom.

Her mother, Margaret, 60, had moved 250 miles south to Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, 10 years earlier. It was the first time since that Marge had insisted she visit. Marge was suffering from something she felt was deeply “private and personal,” so she wanted Margaret to visit without her husband, Marge’s stepfather. It was nothing against him, Marge said, but Margaret took it as an insult.

After several failed entreaties over the phone, Marge hand-wrote a three-page letter. “I ask you this one time, and you deny me,” it read. “I’m really sick, and I just need my mom.”

Weeks passed. It was the first Christmas that the two didn't speak. The problem wasn't only that Margaret was offended by Marge’s request. It was also that she hadn't yet grasped the gravity of her daughter’s situation. She did not yet realize that Marge was stricken by the mysterious sickness that was spreading through Le Roy, a town of 4,000 near the Canadian border.

The strange illness began that fall, when a few teenage girls at the high school started exhibiting uncontrollable tics and stutters, jerking their heads and limbs, and having verbal outbursts and seizures. The symptoms were likened to those of Tourette syndrome. The specifics of the twitches and tics were particular to each girl, but most of the girls exhibited consistency in their movements.

The Touch-Screen Generation

The outbreak began slowly among girls at Le Roy High School, but in February, CNN reported that 16 girls had symptoms. Panic was building and speculation flew around town. It was the Gardasil vaccine; it was the bad marijuana that had been going around; it was something in the water.

The spreading illness was also beginning to draw attention from around the country. Superintendent of the Le Roy school system Kim Cox reflected in an interview, “We had trucks parked on Main Street for two weeks. You couldn't get a cup of coffee without having a camera shoved in your face.”

It was as though media attention had been switched on and couldn't be switched off. There were the dramatic scenes, seemingly staged for the cameras: local police escorting the team of celebrity environmental activist Erin Brockovich off school grounds; screaming parents at a community meeting. And the public was getting to know some of the girls, such as Thera Sanchez, cheerleader and town darling, who went on national television with her alarming tics. And, of course, there were mentions of the one adult, the 36-year old nurse, who had also “caught” the disease.

There were two factors, seemingly unique to Le Roy, that exacerbated and perpetuated the community’s fear that there was an environmental toxin. There had been a nearby toxic spill in 1971, and there was strong speculation that it had never been properly cleaned up. The other factor was that, because of Marge, the symptoms appeared to have spread beyond the walls of the high school.

The tension boiled over at a February 4 press conference and community meeting, where Cox reported that after various tests of the school’s air, water, and soil, there was no linkable environmental toxin to blame. To some frustrated parents, it was an inadequate response. One mother yelled, “You are not doing your job!” at Cox.

Marge attended that meeting, her verbal and physical tics clearly visible. People “stopped and stared,” she said, and the media “bombarded” her on her way out.

She wanted to see what was happening in her town, but actually, at that point, she’d already met with doctors and been given a diagnosis that had nothing to do with soil or toxic spills: conversion disorder. Dr. Laszlo Mechtler treated Marge as well as several of the girls, and insisted they were all suffering from the same condition. Mechtler and other doctors agreed it was mass hysteria.

Marge accepted the diagnosis and still deems it accurate, but her case continues to stand out. Bartholomew says that it is not unheard of for there to be one or two adults affected in an outbreak of MPI. But he could not come up with any cases like Marge’s, in which those adults were not teachers or exposed constantly to the girls in some way. He says that Marge’s case is an example of why MPI is “becoming more common and making a resurgence.”

More than one year later, a look back at Marge’s story reveals a stirring reality about why MPI could be making a comeback and spreading beyond its usual confines.

Marge is a licensed practical nurse, working with adults who have developmental disabilities and genetic disorders. Her warm smile is suited to the work; it changes her whole face and creases the corners of her large, almond-shaped brown eyes in a wonderfully calming way.

Her Rochester office, on Elmgrove Road off of Route 33, sits in a complex next to a YMCA and behind a coffee shop called “Jitters.” On a December 2012 afternoon, her desk was extremely, conspicuously organized, with pens, papers, and office supplies placed either parallel or at right angles to one another. Comics pinned to her bulletin board read: “I am not crazy, I am mentally unrestricted” and “heavily medicated for your protection.” They were unfortunately appropriate. All told, in the past year, she had seen 32 doctors and tried 27 different medications.

She started from the beginning.

Her motor tics began in August 2011 and became more severe that October. At first, she jerked her head uncontrollably to the right, “Like I had something in the corner of my eye and had to look,” she said. She developed a bruise on her right shoulder from where her chin jabbed into it. Mike, 39, her boyfriend of eight years and the father of her three-year-old daughter, Abbie, became increasingly worried about the situation.

Mike and Marge both noted that their friend’s daughter, a student at Le Roy High School, was having similar symptoms, and Marge noticed through newspaper articles posted to Facebook that several other girls at the high school were starting to report the same symptoms as well.

Marge’s vocal tics came later, in a meeting at work in early December 2011. “It was like I was trying to say something, but it came out as a stutter,” she said.

On December 5, 2011, she decided to take long-term leave from work. “I had gotten so scared because of how my symptoms had progressed, that I couldn't… I didn't feel like I could do my job at that point,” she said. She decided later to file for family medical leave instead of disability leave. It would not be paid, as disability is, but it would hold her position for 12 weeks instead of six.

On the day she decided to take the leave of absence, she went to the emergency room at Strong Hospital at the University of Rochester. She waited for 14 hours to be seen, and was isolated, she presumed because her tics were disturbing to other patients. When the doctor came in to see her, he was baffled, and brought in five other doctors. After blood tests, X-rays, and CAT scans, they concluded that her symptoms were anxiety-related and sent her home with a prescription for Valium.

Marge had struggled with anxiety in the past, and felt strongly that this was something more. So the next day, she went to the Dent Neurologic Institute in Buffalo to see a neurologist. Movement disorder specialist Xiuli Li treated Marge for the neck pain her tics caused, but told her that she did not have a movement disorder that would explain the symptoms.

Marge and Li began talking about non-neurological causes for symptoms like this, including psychological ones. One part of their discussion struck a raw nerve for Marge. Li did not ask Marge if she had psychological trauma in her past. She asked when the trauma was.

Throughout December and January, Marge’s condition worsened. She hardly ate because the uncontrollable and unpredictable motor and verbal tics made it “next to impossible” to chew and swallow. She’d choke even on water, so she couldn't take her pills. She lost 35 pounds.

She desperately wanted her mother to visit, but also had her own daughter to worry about. She told Abbie that the tics were “Mommy’s hiccups,” but said, “It’s hard to explain to a three-year-old that suddenly Mommy is different.”

By the time Marge tried to explain the severity of the situation to Margaret over the phone, the stuttering was already extreme. She often lost the words and went silent, struggling to get something out. Margaret assumed it was bad cell phone reception, and jumped to fill in her sentences. “I got so upset with her,” Marge said. “She couldn’t just stop and listen.”

Just before Christmas, Marge wrote and sent the letter pleading with her mother to come. Margaret posted a Facebook status that suggested she had received her daughter’s letter, but still, weeks passed until they spoke. Through Facebook messages, Margaret asked Marge’s friend how Marge was doing, and the friend said that Margaret would have to come to Le Roy and see for herself. Marge believes that’s what got her mother to Le Roy.

Margaret visited from January 13 to 15, 2012. Two days after Margaret left, Marge went public with her condition, appearing on YNN, a local station. She wanted the town to know that it was not only teenage girls who were affected.

Shortly thereafter, neurologist Lazlo Mechtler from the Dent Neurologic Institute contacted Marge, saying he wanted to take over her case. “I agreed, and I am so glad that I did,” she said. “He listened to what I had to say. He was one of the few people that didn't make me feel crazy, which, at that point, was very important to me. He was the first person that could touch me and my skin didn't crawl.” She also liked that he was thorough. She could come up with any blood tests that he hadn't already run, she said. They tested for Lyme disease, thyroid dysfunction, genetic disorders, lead and heavy metal poisoning, and illicit drugs. “At one point, they took 16 vials of blood,” she said.

Finally, after everything else had been ruled out, Mechtler diagnosed her with conversion disorder, which the National Institutes of Health define as a “mental health condition in which a person has blindness, paralysis, or other nervous system (neurological) symptoms that cannot be explained by medical evaluation.”

Though the term “conversion disorder” may sound unfamiliar, it occurs commonly, in various shades and degrees. Orrin Devinsky, a neurologist at New York University’s Langone Medical Center, explains that most people have experienced low-level conversion disorder. Knots in the stomach, sweaty palms, or a fast heartbeat when nervous are examples of overflow in the autonomic nervous system, which controls unconscious bodily activity such as breathing and digestion, caused by stressful conditions.

The sort of “motor overflow” that Marge and the girls from Le Roy experienced involves different neural wiring, but has the same basic concept of unconscious activity. It can be as simple as chewing on a pen cap, biting one’s nails, or tapping a foot. It can express itself as insomnia or impotence, and in severe cases, it can be as debilitating as Marge’s illness was. These reactions are physical expressions of something intangible, something in the brain. Steven Novella, a neurology professor at Yale School of Medicine, writes, “Most people underestimate the ability of our brains to generate physical symptoms.”

Conversion disorder is three times more likely to occur in females than in males, and often is related to emotionally traumatic events—hence Li’s question to Marge about psychological trauma in her past. Devinsky says classic examples include a woman who was raped and, years later, is on the ground, flailing uncontrollably, or a solider who sees his best friend die and then goes blind years later. However, emotionally traumatic events don’t always cause conversion disorder later in life. If anything, emotional environment is more a more significant predictor, says Richard Friedman, a psychiatrist at Weill Cornell Medical College.

In Marge’s case, both a traumatic event and a stifling environment were at work. And she knew it. Before she was even diagnosed, she had a feeling that—in order to get better—she had to tell her mother a secret that she’d harbored for 22 years.

Marge grew up an only child and Margaret was a single mother who worked three jobs. When Margaret was home, she was verbally and sometimes physically abusive, Marge said. But for the most part, Marge spent a lot of time alone.

Margaret started leaving Marge home alone when she was five years old. Le Roy was different back then, Marge said. Everyone watched everyone else’s kids; everyone knew and trusted each other. Kids played outside until the street lamps switched off, the signal to go home.

When Marge was 14 years old, her 19-year-old neighbor and friend said he had something to give her, a t-shirt, Marge thinks, and led her into his room. He forced himself on her, despite her pleas for him to stop. Marge called the rape “horrific,” and said that it caused her “extensive physical damage,” not only because it was forceful, but also because she was a virgin. She bled enough in the days that followed that she assumed she’d gotten her period for the first time. In fact, she didn't begin menstruating for two more years.

At the time of the rape, she only told one person, a friend, and swore him to secrecy. It was “never spoken about, never acknowledged,” Marge said. “From that point forward, I suppressed everything.”

Devinsky explained that conversion disorder can function as catalyst for a person to seek help. “Your subconscious mind is as smart as you are. Smarter in certain ways,” he said.

Marge is an example of that. She said that before her illness, “I used to just bury, bury, bury. And now I deal. I would never wish this on anybody, but I am somewhat glad it happened to me. It made me stop and take care of myself.”

Marge’s latent psychological stress might never have taken the form of severe tics and stutters if not for what was already happening in the town. Dozens of other girls were going through the same thing, and Marge was aware of that. Although she was two decades older, she was, in some ways, not so different from them. Perhaps the timing of the unresolved trauma of Marge’s rape froze some part of her unconscious mind at the same age as the other girls, so the processes of “mass hysteria” operated the same for Marge as they did for the others.

The question remains: How did she “catch” it?

MPI is not a new phenomenon. Devinsky hails the 1965 book Hysteria: The History of a Disease as the best historical road map of the illness. In it, author Ilza Veith, who holds a PhD in the history of medicine, writes that hysteria is traced as far back as the ancient Egyptians in 1900 B.C., who believed that it resulted from the “discontent” womb of a woman who didn't reproduce soon enough after puberty (hystera is Greek for “uterus”.

Various outbreaks can be traced through history; there were probably 50 outbreaks in medieval European nunneries during the latter Middles Ages alone, Bartholomew says, when theories of witchcraft were prevalent. The Salem Witch Trials resulted from a well-known example of MPI.

Notable outbreaks since then include a 1962 incident at an all-girls boarding school in Kashasha, Tanzania, where there was a “laughing epidemic,” and a 1965 incident in Blackburn, England at another girls school, where 85 girls were sent to the hospital with dizziness and convulsions, with no medical or environmental culprits found. More recently, in the winter of 2012, there was an outbreak of MPI that affected more than 1,000 students and five teachers across 15 different schools in Sri Lanka, where people complained that they were having vertigo and uncontrollable coughing.

Bartholomew differentiates MPI into two categories: mass anxiety hysteria and mass motor hysteria. Cases of mass anxiety are often precipitated by a stress-inducing belief—commonly, that there is a weird smell or noxious gas in the air—but the belief and the effects dissipate in hours or days. He estimates that there are hundreds of unrecognized outbreaks of this type of hysteria in the U.S. each year.

Cases of mass motor hysteria, on the other hand, take months or years to build, and weeks or months to dissipate, as in the case of Le Roy. Bartholomew says that today, mass motor hysteria outbreaks are very rare in Western societies, but happen monthly in Asia and Africa. Historically, they occur in “pressure-cooker” environments, like factories, that have intolerable and inescapable social settings and preexisting tensions. “People are repressed, and that’s when you get the motor symptoms,” he says. “The twitching, the shaking, the trance-like states … and it builds up, over weeks or months, and it does not go away.”

But still, Le Roy was different, and not just because of the 1971 toxic spill, or because of Marge, or because of the media blitz, which, by itself, was unprecedented. But the social media was another critical factor that separates Le Roy from other documented cases of MPI. Bartholomew said that Le Roy was the first case of this magnitude to occur in the U.S. during the social networking era. When a case of MPI occurred in 2002 in a high school in North Carolina, the last major reported case in the U.S. before Le Roy, Facebook and YouTube did not exist yet—both were introduced in 2004. Some believe that the Le Roy outbreak was a direct result of videos posted to YouTube by Lori Brownell, a girl with severe tics in Corinth, New York, 250 miles east of Le Roy.

Bartholomew said that sometimes, social science is “more ‘social’ than ‘science.’” While there is no clear pattern or personality trait that makes one person more likely than another to fall victim to MPI, about 98 percent of the subjects in the cases he’s studied were female, usually adolescents. He explained that with adolescent girls in particular, interpersonal conflict can be “very sordid.” He said, “With some of these girls, it gets really nasty, and (unlike boys), girls hold it in.”

Facebook allows adolescent girls to more deeply internalize interpersonal conflict, adding to preexisting tension.

“In the past, you have a problem with another girl at school or a group of girls, you go home, you might make a phone call,” he says. “Now, you’re talking to a whole bunch of people at once. You brood and internalize it more deeply.” Le Roy Superintendent Kim Cox said that among the high school students, Facebook use “was happening to a much greater extent than we knew.”

Bartholomew said that mass hysteria spreads through sight and sound, and historically, one person would have to be in the same room as somebody exhibiting symptoms to be at risk of “catching” the illness. “Not anymore,” he says, noting that social media—“extensions of our eyes and ears”—speeds and extends the reach of mass hysteria.

In a paper, he wrote, “Epidemic hysterias that in earlier periods were self-limited in geography now have free and wide access to the globe in seconds.” He says, “It’s a belief, that’s the power here, and the technology just amplifies the belief, and helps it spread more readily.”

Marge, in particular, was a signal that this was true. She was not involved with the school in any way and did not have constant exposure to any of the girls. They were not her peer group or even part of her social environment, previously key ingredients in the MPI recipe.

Facebook was not only increasing the spread of the illness to new people, it was also exacerbating the stress, and therefore the symptoms, of those already suffering.

Marge got a Facebook message shortly after she went public that said, “You should just kill yourself.” Melisa Phillips, Thera Sanchez’s mother, said that Facebook was “insanity and destroyed the community.” She says that during the time of Thera’s illness, “I did not have cable or Internet, which was my saving grace. It saved my sanity.”

Thera accessed Facebook through her phone during that time, but said, “I could not turn my phone on after The Today Show, because it froze. I had over 1,000 Facebook messages. Every two minutes, 30 new messages would pop up.”

Mechtler, Marge’s physician, who recommended that Marge avoid Facebook, told the press at the time that the girls staying away from social media were the ones getting better.

In a paper titled “Mass Psychogenic Illness and the Social Network: is it changing the pattern of outbreaks?” Bartholomew writes, “Local priests, who were inevitably summoned to exorcise the ‘demons’, faced a daunting task given the widespread belief in witchcraft, but they were fortunate in one regard: they did not have to contend with mobile phones, Twitter and Facebook.”

However, the old and the new are more intertwined than one might expect. Two separate strangers messaged Thera through Facebook saying she needed an exorcism. One person told her to let God into her life.

MPI itself is born from an intersection between and old and the new. Veith wrote in her 1965 book that MPI is “a shifting, changing, mist-enshrouded phenomenon,” whose specifics adapt based on the society in which it takes place, but whose “predispositions and basic features have remained more or less unchanged.”

The illness is thousands of years old, but some of the new modes of transfer are novel. Marge is an embodiment of how an age-old affliction, in which demons in the brain convert and surface in the body, is itself converting and resurfacing once again.

This article available online at:
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/09/what-witchcraft-is-facebook/279499/
Copyright © 2013 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.
__________________

WHERE IS THE TRUTH IN THE FOG OF WAR?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 03 Sep 2013 23:34:00 +0000

News on the Eve of Destruction

THE TRUTH OF SYRIA IS OUT THERE, THE CORPORATE MEDIA HAS AN AGENDA, JUST LOOK THE OTHER WAY

September 3, 2013

CIA secretly providing training for Syrian rebels: report

www.france24.com/en/20130622-cia-secretly-providing-training-syrian-rebels-report

Commit a War Crime to Cover Up a War Crime? Phoney Syria Poison Gas Story Planted By Mossad in the Western Media

http://www.globalresearch.ca/commit-a-war-crime-to-cover-up-a-war-crime-phoney-syria-poison-gas-story-planted-by-mossad-in-the-western-media/5347311

Dennis Kucinich says attack on Syria would make U.S. "al Qaida's air force"

http://www.cleveland.com/open/index.ssf/2013/08/dennis_kucinich_says_attack_on.html

Does Obama know he’s fighting on al-Qa’ida’s side?

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/does-obama-know-hes-fighting-on-alqaidas-side-8786680.html

Evidence Indicates that Syrian Government Did Not Launch a Chemical Weapon Attack Against Its People

http://www.globalresearch.ca/evidence-indicates-that-syrian-government-did-not-launch-a-chemical-weapon-attack-against-its-people/5346804

Evidence: Syria gas attack work of U.S. allies

http://www.wnd.com/2013/08/video-shows-rebels-launching-gas-attack-in-syria

EU ends arms embargo on Syria rebels

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-22684948

Fanatic Zionists Seek to Spark New Middle East War

http://davidduke.com/fanatic-zionists-seek-to-spark-new-middle-east-war/

Former Syria 'rebel' admits use of chemical weapons

http://nsnbc.me/2013/08/25/former-jabhat-al-nusrah-member-admits-chemical-weapons-use/

General Wesley Clark's warning about the Pentagon's Plan for the Middle East.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023524967

Inspectors In Syria Forbidden From Finding Out WHO Used Chemical Weapons, Only IF They Were Used

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/08/inspectors-in-syria-forbidden-from-finding-out-who-used-chemical-weapons-only-if-they-were-used.html

Jewish Press Confirms that Zionist Supremacists are Behind War Propaganda

http://davidduke.com/jewish-press-confirms-that-zionist-supremacists-are-behind-anti-syrian-propaganda/

Jewish Press Unleash Hatred against Britain

http://davidduke.com/jewish-press-unleash-bile-and-hatred-against-britain/

Lies upon Lies: US “Evidence” for “Chemical Attack” based upon “Israeli Intercept”

http://davidduke.com/lies-upon-lies-us-evidence-for-chemical-attack-based-upon-israeli-intercept/

Mossad Spying Threat against America Casts New Doubts over Israeli “Evidence” for Syrian “Chemical Attack”

http://newobserveronline.com/mossad-spying-threat-against-america-casts-new-doubts-over-israeli-evidence-for-syrian-chemical-attack/

My Thoughts on Syria and the “Chemical Weapons” Charge

https://therealzcf.wordpress.com/2013/08/26/my-thoughts-on-syria-and-the-chemical-weapons-charge/

NATO data: Assad winning the war for Syrians’ hearts and minds

http://www.worldtribune.com/2013/05/31/nato-data-assad-winning-the-war-for-syrians-hearts-and-minds/

New poll: Syria intervention even less popular than Congress

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/08/26/new-poll-syria-intervention-even-less-popular-than-congress/

Russia: Syrian Rebels Used Chemical Weapons in Aleppo

http://www.voanews.com/content/russia-syrian-rebels-used-cyhemical-weapons-in-aleppo/1698281.html

Saudis Threaten Russia With Olympic Terrorist Attacks Unless It Abandons Syria Support

http://www.infowars.com/saudis-threaten-russia-with-olympic-terrorist-attacks-unless-it-abandons-syria-support/print/

“Short of Confirmation”: What the US Government’s Assessment Actually Says

http://newobserveronline.com/short-of-confirmation-what-the-us-governments-assessment-of-syrian-chemical-weapons-attack-actually-says/

Snipers Fire At UN Inspectors: Another Rebel Crime?

http://www.activistpost.com/2013/08/snipers-fire-at-un-inspectors-another.html

Syria: Another Western War Crime In The Making

http://www.globalresearch.ca/syria-another-western-war-crime-in-the-making/5347038

Syria ‘Chemical Attack’ was ‘Planned Provocation’ by Rebels

http://www.globalresearch.ca/russia-suggests-syria-chemical-attack-was-planned-provocation-by-rebels/5346604

Syria False Flag Caught On Video! Video Shows FSA Rebels Launch Chemical Attacks In Syria!

http://beforeitsnews.com/middle-east/2013/08/video-shows-fsa-rebels-launch-chemical-attacks-in-syria-2453742.html

Syria Timeline of Events Definitively Exposes Zionist Lies

http://davidduke.com/syria-timeline-of-events-definitively-exposes-zionist-lies/

Syrian rebels pledge loyalty to al-Qaeda

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/04/11/syria-al-qaeda-connection/2075323/

Syrian rebels used Sarin nerve gas, not Assad’s regime: U.N. official

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/may/6/syrian-rebels-used-sarin-nerve-gas-not-assads-regi/

Syrian rebels use toxic chemicals against govt troops near Damascus - state media

http://rt.com/news/rebel-tunnel-damascus-chemical-940/

'Syrian rebels take responsibility for the chemical attack admitting the weapons were provided by Saudis' - source

http://voiceofrussia.com/news/2013_08_30/Syrian-rebels-take-responsibility-for-the-chemical-attack-admitting-the-weapons-were-provided-by-Saudis-1203/

Syrians In Ghouta Claim Saudi-Supplied Rebels Behind Chemical Attack

http://www.mintpressnews.com/witnesses-of-gas-attack-say-saudis-supplied-rebels-with-chemical-weapons/168135/

The Next Big Lie and the Next War: This Time Syria!

http://davidduke.com/the-next-big-lie-and-the-next-war-this-time-syria/

The rush to judgment on Syria is a catastrophic and deadly error

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/10271248/The-rush-to-judgment-on-Syria-is-a-catastrophic-and-deadly-error.html

The Stampede of Lies That’s Pushing the West Towards War in Syria

http://21stcenturywire.com/2013/08/31/the-stampede-of-lies-thats-pushing-the-west-towards-war-in-syria/

Turkey finds sarin gas in homes of suspected Syrian Islamists – reports

http://rt.com/news/sarin-gas-turkey-al-nusra-021/

UK drafts resolution blaming Assad for ‘chemical weapons’ attack

http://rt.com/news/uk-resolution-syria-security-council-099/

UK-Qatari plot against Syria revealed

http://www.presstv.com/detail/2013/01/30/286331/ukqatari-plot-against-syria-revealed/

UN accuses Syrian rebels of carrying out sarin gas attacks which had been blamed on Assad's troops

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2320223/UN-accuses-Syrian-rebels-carrying-sarin-gas-attacks-blamed-Assads-troops.html

U.N. has testimony that Syrian rebels used sarin gas: investigator

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/05/05/us-syria-crisis-un-idUSBRE94409Z20130505

US attempts to sabotage UN chemical weapons investigation

http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2013/08/28/320834/us-un-chemical-investigation-syria/

US 'backed plan to launch chemical weapon attack on Syria, blame it on Assad govt': Report

http://in.news.yahoo.com/us-backed-plan-launch-chemical-weapon-attack-syria-045648224.html

http://web.archive.org/web/20130129213824/http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2270219/U-S-planned-launch-chemical-weapon-attack-Syria-blame-Assad.html

U.S. Intervention in Syria Will Put America into Alliance with al-Qa’ida

http://davidduke.com/u-s-intervention-in-syria-will-put-america-into-alliance-with-al-qaida/

U.S. rejects Syrian request that U.N. inspectors stay longer, possibly delaying military strike

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/syria-wants-un-weapons-inspectors-to-stay-longer-move-could-forestall-us-military-strike/2013/08/28/69855348-1008-11e3-85b6-d27422650fd5_story.html

U.S. to increase military support to Syria rebels

http://in.reuters.com/article/2013/06/14/syria-crisis-scenarios-idINDEE95D01620130614

Use of chemical weapons in Syria may be Israeli false flag op: former US official

http://www.presstv.com/detail/2013/05/05/301842/israeli-chem-weapons-false-flag-in-syria/

‘War on chemical weapons’: Obama traps himself into Syrian combat

http://rt.com/op-edge/war-chemical-weapons-obama-syria-120/

Wheels Start to Fall Off Zionist Supremacist Warmongering Conspiracy

http://davidduke.com/wheels-start-to-fall-off-zionist-supremacist-warmongering-conspiracy/

Why the claims about Syria and Chemical Weapons are Bullshit!

http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/syriabovine.php

Video Links

David Icke on the real background to Syria

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=gNDw4rDG5vg

David Icke on the People of the Revolution

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=C1HktMcvs_k

Chemical Hypocrisy: Lies and Disinformation on the Road to War

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNtkmuk9NVw

FSA Al Qaeda 'Jabhit Al Nasra' Brigade killing Syrian civilians

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S49ZJTHqFdE

FSA using a chemical warhead shell on civilian areas during the attack on Aleppo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EA5t9xK6Kjk

General Wesley Clark: Wars Were Planned - Seven Countries In Five Years

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=9RC1Mepk_Sw

Israel behind violence in Syria: Madsen

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceOp5I4NJcI

Leaked Documents: US Framed Syria in Chemical Weapons Attack

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTUcvKO3js8

Rebel Eats Heart of Syrian Soldier

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFfnxK-YGGQ

Rivero and Ry on Syria Bankers lies and hypocrisy

http://vimeo.com/73400943

Ron Paul destroys neo-con argument on Syria poison gas

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-361y3W6IE

Ron Paul: Why Are We On The Side Of Al-Qaeda In Syria?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0HqCWG171g

Syria - Al Qaeda's Nusra Front Beheads Christian Priest

www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdGvST3v3Zo

Syrian Criminal Rebel Chemical warfare weapons Captured in Jobar:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGz_LCGg2TI

Syria CW "Evidence" by "Brown Moses Blog" Debunked

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5MAmQiYRRQ

Syria Rebels testing Tekkim chemicals to use as chem weapons

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-6O-gApVrU

The "Free Syrian Army" Has a Brigade Called "Osama bin Laden", Same FSA that West Wants to Arm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=DdWVOI3NsR8

Toxic Catch: Syria rebels' chemical lab uncovered near Damascus

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXezs1YY01I

US has a long history of starting wars based on 'fabrications'

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hksURKWwsO4

95% of 'Syrian rebels' not Syrians - report

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbmczLdvZVY

Once we start there will be no way out!

__________________

What Morale Code Does the US Regime Follow?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 01 Sep 2013 16:04:00 +0000

What Is America’s Code of Morality?

What we saw in Syria last week should shock the conscience of the world. It defies any code of morality. – US Secretary of state, John Kerry

by Kim Petersen
Dissident Voice
August 29th, 201

John Kerry is correct. The massacre in Syria was a moral obscenity. However, just how credible is Kerry’s railing against the perpetrators of the massacre in the suburbs of east Damascus?

Kerry spoke of the “gut wrenching” emotions he felt: “As a father, I can’t get the image out of my head of a man who held up his dead child, wailing while chaos swirled around him; the images of entire families dead in their beds without a drop of blood or even a visible wound; bodies contorting in spasms; human suffering that we can never ignore or forget.”

Does Kerry’s memory falter when one applies a code of morality to US crimes past and present?

1) Hiroshima and Nagasaki. With World War II winding down in 1945, the US military dropped two non-discriminating (because they destroy everything and everyone in its blast radius) nuclear bombs on civilian-populated cities killing about 200,000 humans.

2) Tokyo holocaust. “More people were killed in the Tokyo firebombing of March 9-10 than in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki five months later…

During the March 9-10 raid, some 1,700 tons of incendiary bombs were scattered across Tokyo’s densely populated Shitamachi (downtown) district in an effort to disrupt war production and destroy Japanese morale. The firestorm boiled water in Tokyo’s rivers and canals, melted glass and towering columns of heat brought down nearly a dozen B-29s.”¹

3) Burning civilians. On 13 February 1991 the US air force targeted a civilian air-raid shelter in Amiriyah, Iraq, incinerating the 408 civilians inside.

4) Half a million kids worth killing. On 12 May 1996, on the current affairs show 60 Minutes, TV journalist Lesley Stahl posed a question to then US ambassador to the UN, Madeleine Albright, on US sanctions against Iraq: “We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?”

Albright responded: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price–we think the price is worth it.” [emphasis added]

5) Napalm. US forces widely used napalm, a fuel gel that sticks and burns through flesh, in Viet Nam. The humans who were scorched by napalm became casualties of war. The US also used napalm more recently in Iraq along with white phosphorus, another burning chemical.²

6) “… the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” That is how the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg described the crime of aggression. UN secretary general Kofi Annan held that the US attack on Iraq was illegal.³

Benjamin Ferencz, a former chief prosecutor of the Nuremberg Trials, stated of the invasion of Iraq by the US and its allies that a “prima facie case can be made that the United States is guilty of the supreme crime against humanity, that being an illegal war of aggression against a sovereign nation.”⁴

7) US convicted in World Court of terrorism. In the 1984 case The Republic of Nicaragua v. The United States of America, the International Court of Justice ruled the US had wielded “unlawful use of force” for mining the Nicaraguan ports, violating Nicaraguan air space, and aiding insurgents to bring about a coup. The US was ordered to pay reparations, but it ignored the judgement.

8. Torture. The US is a signatory to the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. Yet its CIA engages in renditions, kidnapping, and torture. A nefarious case is that of Khalid el-Masri, who during the GW Bush presidency, was kidnapped and tortured by the CIA — including “forced anal penetration.”⁵ The military is sullied by torture at gulags such as Bagram, Abu Ghraib, and Gunatanamo Bay. Stripping, waterboarding, attack dogs, sleep deprivation, and stress positions are standard tactics used against prisoners-of-war.

9. Killing as a video game. It used to be that refusing to face your enemy in combat was considered the nadir of cowardice. US forces (despite overwhelming superiority in weaponry) are increasingly less likely to face their designated enemies. The killing is more and more being carried out by joystick wielding drone operators thousands of kilometers from the battlefield. The presumption of innocence does not apply to targets, as they are summarily executed by executive fiat. President Barack Obama is judge, jury, and arms-length executioner. Civilians become collateral fatalities in drone warfare.⁶

10. Wounded Knee. While Lakota chief Spotted Elk was leading his people to consult Red Cloud and other Oglala leaders about brokering peace with the government, they were intercepted by the Seventh Calvary near Wounded Knee Creek. Two hundred and seventy to 300 Lakota were massacred; 170 to 200 were women and children.⁷ The infamy of US government depredations against the Lakota would occur again at Wounded Knee. Between 1973 and 1976, 69 American Indian Movement activists were murdered at Oglala Oyanke (Pine Ridge Nation).⁸

What Morale Code Does the US Regime Follow?

When discussing moral obscenities what should one conclude about a nation state founded in racism and genocide of the Original Peoples?

The so-called father of the US, George Washington, saw Indians as wolves: “both being beasts of prey, tho’ they differ in shape.”⁹ The Haudenosaunee called Washington the “town destroyer” for wiping out their villages.¹⁰

Thomas Jefferson boasted: “in war, they will kill some of us; we shall destroy all of them.”¹¹

Andrew Jackson referred to the Original Peoples as “savage dogs” and bragged of preserving a scalp collection.¹²

Theodore Roosevelt’s racism was unabashed, “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn’t inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.”¹³

The list of acts by the US of A, whose morality is highly dubious, would be exhaustive:

slavery, lynchings, imperialism, colonialism, regime changes, supporting Zionism and its crimes against the Palestinian people, internment camps, hyperbolic incarceration rates, capital punishment, poverty, spy wars, class war, drug wars, cyber wars, military invasions, war on whistleblowers, war upon war, etc.

Echoing the words of John Kerry: what does all this reveal about America’s code of morality? How does it affect (or does it affect?) the conscience of Kerry? The conscience of the citizenry of the USA? The conscience of the world?

Assuming that the aforementioned plethora of evidence is factually accurate, does Kerry’s posturing and fulmination not represent a moral obscenity?

The iniquity of Kerry’s false moral consciousness is its deceitful intent: to serve as a pretext for carrying out a moral obscenity against Syria.

War correspondent Chris Hedges was forthright about the US moral code:

We accept, if not condone, the maiming and killing of others as the regrettable cost of war. We operate under a new moral code.¹⁴

Kirk Spitzer, “A Forgotten Horror: The Great Tokyo Air Raid,” Time, 27 March 2012. [↩]
George Monbiot, “The US used chemical weapons in Iraq – and then lied about it,”Guardian, 15 November 2005. [↩]
Ewen MacAskill and Julian Borger, “Iraq war was illegal and breached UN charter, says Annan,” Guardian, 16 September 2004. [↩]
Jan Frel, “Could Bush Be Prosecuted for War Crimes?” AlterNet, 9 July 9 2006. See also Rahul Mahajan, “UN Resolution or Not, This War Violates International Law,”Dissident Voice, 15 March 2003. [↩]
See “Petition alleging violations of the huiman rights of Khaled El-Masri by the United States of America with a request for an investigation and hearing on the merits,” ACLU, 9 April 2008. [↩]
Khawar Ghumman, “400 civilians died in 339 drone attacks, NA told,” Dawn, 27 August 2013. [↩]
Jeffrey Ostler, The Lakotas and the Black Hills: The Struggle for Sacred Ground(Toronto: Viking, 2010). [↩]
See Anthony J. Hall, The American Empire and the Fourth World: The Bowl With One Spoon, Part One (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Native and Northern Series #35, 2003): 272. [↩]
David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (London: Oxford University Press, 1992): 119. [↩]
From Roland Bainton, Early Christianity (Princeton: D. Van Nostrand Co., 1960). Cited in Stannard, 120. [↩]
Stannard, 120. [↩]
Stannard, 121. [↩]
Stannard, 245. [↩]
Chris Hedges, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (Toronto: Anchor Books, 2002): 35 [↩]

Source:
http://dissidentvoice.org/2013/08/code-of-morality-american/
_____________________

State-loyal journalists seem to believe in a duty to politely submit to bullying tactics from political officials

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 23 Aug 2013 14:53:00 +0000

'Sending a message': what the US and UK are attempting to do

By Glenn Greenwald
The Guardian
August 21, 2013

Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger on Monday night disclosed the remarkable news that UK authorities, several weeks ago, threatened the Guardian UK with prior restraint if they did not destroy all of their materials provided by Edward Snowden, and then sent agents to the basement of the paper's offices to oversee the physical destruction of hard drives. The Guardian has more details on that episode today, and MSNBC's Chris Hayes interviewed the Guardian's editor-in-chief about itlast night.

As Rusbridger explains, this behavior was as inane as it was thuggish: since this is 2013, not 1958, destroying one set of a newspaper's documents doesn't destroy them all, and since the Guardian has multiple people around the world with copies, they achieved nothing but making themselves look incompetently oppressive.

But conveying a thuggish message of intimidation is exactly what the UK and their superiors in the US national security state are attempting to accomplish with virtually everything they are now doing in this matter.

On Monday night, Reuters' Mark Hosenball reported the following about the 9-hour detention of my partner under a terrorism law, all with the advanced knowledge of the White House:

One US security official told Reuters that one of the main purposes of the British government's detention and questioning of Miranda was to send a message to recipients of Snowden's materials, including the Guardian, that the British government was serious about trying to shut down the leaks."

I want to make one primary point about that. On Monday, Reuters did the same thing to me as they did last month: namely, they again wildly distorted comments I made in an interview - speaking in Portuguese, at 5:00 am at the Rio airport, waiting for my partner to come home after finally being released - to manufacture the sensationalizing headline that I was "threatening" the UK government with "revenge" journalism. That wasn't remotely what I said or did, as I explained last night in a CNN interview (see Part 2).

But vowing to report on the nefarious secret spying activities of a large government - which is what I did - is called "journalism", not "revenge".

As the Washington Post headline to Andrea Peterson's column on Monday explained: "No, Glenn Greenwald didn't 'vow vengeance.' He said he was going to do his job." She added:

"Greenwald's point seems to have been that he was determined not to be scared off by intimidation. Greenwald and the Guardian have already been publishing documents outlining surveillance programs in Britain, and Greenwald has long declared his intention to continue publishing documents. By doing so, Greenwald isn't taking 'vengeance.' He's just doing his job."

But here's the most important point: the US and the UK governments go around the world threatening people all the time. It's their modus operandi. They imprison whistleblowers. They try to criminalize journalism. They threatened the Guardian with prior restraint and then forced the paper to physically smash their hard drives in a basement.

They detained my partner under a terrorism law, repeatedly threatened to arrest him, and forced him to give them his passwords to all sorts of invasive personal information - behavior that even one of the authors of that terrorism law says is illegal, which the Committee for the Protection of Journalists said yesterday is just "the latest example in a disturbing record of official harassment of the Guardian over its coverage of the Snowden leaks", and which Human Rights Watch says was "intended to intimidate Greenwald and other journalists who report on surveillance abuses."

And that's just their recent behavior with regard to press freedoms: it's to say nothing of all the invasions, bombings, renderings, torture and secrecy abuses for which that bullying, vengeful duo is responsible over the last decade.

But the minute anyone refuses to meekly submit to that, or stands up to it, hordes of authoritarians - led by state-loyal journalists - immediately start objecting: how dare you raise your voice to the empire?

How dare you not politely curtsey to the Queen and thank the UK government for what they have done. The US and UK governments are apparently entitled to run around and try to bully and intimidate anyone, including journalists - "to send a message to recipients of Snowden's materials, including the Guardian", as Reuters put it - but nobody is allowed to send a message back to them. That's a double standard that nobody should accept.

If the goal of the UK in detaining my partner was - as it now claims - to protect the public from terrorism by taking documents they suspected he had (and why would they have suspected that?), that would have taken 9 minutes, not 9 hours.

Identically, the UK knew full well that forcing the Guardian UK to destroy its hard drives would accomplish nothing in terms of stopping the reporting: as the Guardian told them, there are multiple other copies around the world. The sole purpose of all of that, manifestly, is to intimidate.

As the ACLU of Massachusetts put it:

The real vengeance we are seeing right now is not coming from Glenn Greenwald; it is coming from the state."

But for state-loyal journalists, protesting thuggish and aggressive behavior from the state is out of the question. It's only when aggressive challenges come from those who are bringing transparency and accountability to the state do they get upset and take notice. As Digbywrote last night: "many elite journalists seem to be joining the government repression of the free press instead of being defiant and protecting their own prerogatives."

That's because they believe in subservient journalism, not adversarial journalism. I only believe in the latter.

Related matters

The Wall Street Journal reported last night that NSA surveillance has a far greater reach than previously imagined - including 75% of domestic traffic - and included this excellent graphic with it about how that is done, taken in part from the Snowden materials we have been reporting.

Here is David Miranda explaining to the BBC what it's like to be forced to turn over your passwords to security agents who have detained you under a terrorism law, so they can troll through your emails and Facebook account and Skype program while you are detained. Just watch that short video and judge for yourself.

Finally, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow had an excellent commentary on Monday about all of this that really captures the heart of it all:

'Journalism is not terrorism'

Rachel Maddow excoriates U.S. and British authorities for harassing journalists like Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald's partner, David Miranda, and squandering U.S. credibility on questions of government overreach.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Source:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/21/sending-message-miranda-gchq-nsa
________________________

Democracy Now Interview

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 21 Aug 2013 12:17:00 +0000

Owner of Snowden’s Email Service on Why He Closed Lavabit Rather Than Comply With Gov’t

By Amy Goodman
Democracy Now
August 13, 2013

Lavabit, an encrypted email service believed to have been used by National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden, has abruptly shut down. The move came amidst a legal fight that appeared to involve U.S. government attempts to win access to customer information. In a Democracy Now! broadcast exclusive, we are joined by Lavabit owner Ladar Levison and his lawyer, Jesse Binnall. "Unfortunately, I can’t talk about it. I would like to, believe me," Levison says. "I think if the American public knew what our government was doing, they wouldn’t be allowed to do it anymore."

In a message to his customers last week, Levison said: "I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people, or walk away from nearly 10 years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit." Levison said he was barred from discussing the events over the past six weeks that led to his decision. Soon after, another secure email provider called Silent Circle also announced it was shutting down. (Related: Watch our continued discussion with Levison and Nicholas Merrill, who took FBI to court after receiving a national security letter.)

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AARON MATÉ: We turn now to the news an encrypted email service believed to have been used by National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden has abruptly shut down. The move came amidst a legal fight that appeared to involve U.S. government attempts to win access to customer information.

The owner of Lavabit, Ladar Levison, wrote a message online saying, quote, "I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people, or walk away from nearly 10 years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit." Ladar Levison said he was barred from discussing the events over the past six weeks that led to his decision.

He went on to write, quote, "This experience has taught me one very important lesson: without congressional action or a strong judicial precedent, I would strongly recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States."

Later on Thursday, another secure email provider called Silent Circle also announced it was shutting down.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, in a Democracy Now! broadcast exclusive, we go to Washington, D.C., where we’re joined by Ladar Levison, founder, owner and operator of Lavabit. We’re also joined by his lawyer, Jesse Binnall.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Ladar Levison, let’s begin with you. Explain the decision you made.

LADAR LEVISON: Yeah, well, I’ve—thank you, Amy. I’ve compared the decision to that of, you know, putting a beloved pet to sleep, you know, faced with the choice of watching it suffer or putting it to sleep quietly. It was a very difficult decision. But I felt that in the end I had to pick between the lesser of two evils and that shutting down the service, if it was no longer secure, was the better option. It was, in effect, the lesser of the two evils.

AMY GOODMAN: What are you facing? When you say "the lesser of two evils," what was the other choice?

LADAR LEVISON: Unfortunately, I can’t talk about that. I would like to, believe me. I think if the American public knew what our government was doing, they wouldn’t be allowed to do it anymore, which is why I’m here in D.C. today speaking to you. My hope is that, you know, the media can uncover what’s going on, without my assistance, and, you know, sort of pressure both Congress and our efforts through the court system to, in effect, put a cap on what it is the government is entitled to in terms of our private communications.

AARON MATÉ: For those who aren’t familiar with what encrypted email is, can you walk us through that and talk about what your service provided?

LADAR LEVISON: Certainly. You know, I’ve always liked to say my service was by geeks, for geeks. It’s grown up over the last 10 years, it’s sort of settled itself into serving those that are very privacy-conscious and security-focused. We offered secure access via high-grade encryption. And at least for our paid users, not for our free accounts—I think that’s an important distinction—we offered secure storage, where incoming emails were stored in such a way that they could only be accessed with the user’s password, so that, you know, even myself couldn’t retrieve those emails. And that’s what we meant by encrypted email. That’s a term that’s sort of been thrown around because there are so many different standards for encryption, but in our case it was encrypted in secure storage, because, as a third party, you know, I didn’t want to be put in a situation where I had to turn over private information. I just didn’t have it. I didn’t have access to it. And that was sort of—may have been the situation that I was facing. You know, obviously, I can’t speak to the details of any specific case, but—I’ll just leave it at that.

AMY GOODMAN: NSA leaker Edward Snowden recently described your decision to shut down Lavabit as, quote, "inspiring." He told The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald, quote, "America cannot succeed as a country where individuals like Mr. Levison have to relocate their businesses abroad to be successful. Employees and leaders at Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, Apple, and the rest of our internet titans must ask themselves why they aren't fighting for our interests the same way small businesses are. The defense they have offered to this point is that they were compelled by laws they do not agree with, but one day of downtime for the coalition of their services could achieve what a hundred Lavabits could not."

Snowden went on to say, quote, "When Congress returns to session in September, let us take note of whether the internet industry’s statements and lobbyists—which were invisible in the lead-up to the Conyers-Amash vote—emerge on the side of the Free Internet or the NSA and its Intelligence Committees in Congress."

Ladar, you were the service provider for Edward Snowden?

LADAR LEVISON: I believe that’s correct. Obviously, I didn’t know him personally, but it’s been widely reported, and there was an email account bearing his name on my system, as I’ve been made well aware of recently.

AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald also wrote, "What is particularly creepy about the Lavabit self-shutdown is that the company is gagged by law even from discussing the legal challenges it has mounted and the court proceeding it has engaged. In other words, the American owner of the company believes his Constitutional rights and those of his customers are being violated by the US Government, but he is not allowed to talk about it."

Greenwald goes on to write, quote, "Just as is true for people who receive National Security Letters under the Patriot Act, Lavabit has been told [that] they would face serious criminal sanctions if they publicly discuss what is being done to their company."

Ladar Levison, why did you start Lavabit?

LADAR LEVISON: Well, just to add one thing to Greenwald’s comments, I mean, there’s information that I can’t even share with my lawyer, let alone with the American public. So if we’re talking about secrecy, you know, it’s really been taken to the extreme. And I think it’s really being used by the current administration to cover up tactics that they may be ashamed of.

But just to answer your question, why did I start Lavabit? It was right out of college. I was sitting around with a group of my friends. I owned the domain name nerdshack.com, and we thought it would be cool to offer, you know, a free private email with a large quota, just like Gmail, and we sort of built the service along those lines. And as I was designing and developing the custom platform, it was right around when the PATRIOT Act came out. And that’s really what colored my opinion and my philosophy, and why I chose to take the extra effort and build in the secure storage features and sort of focus on the privacy niche and the security focus niche. And it’s really grown up from there. We’ve seen a lot of demand for, you know, people who want email but don’t necessarily want it lumped in and profiled along with their searches or their browsing history or any of their other Internet activities. And that’s really where we’ve focused and really how we’ve grown over the years, up to when I shut down 410,000 registered users.

AARON MATÉ: And, Ladar, during this time, you’ve complied with other government subpoenas. Is that correct?

LADAR LEVISON: Yeah, we’ve probably had at least two dozen subpoenas over the last 10 years, from local sheriffs’ offices all the way up to federal courts. And obviously I can’t speak to any particular one, but we’ve always complied with them. I think it’s important to note that, you know, I’ve always complied with the law. It’s just in this particular case I felt that complying with the law—

JESSE BINNALL: And we do have to be careful at this point.

LADAR LEVISON: Yeah, I—

JESSE BINNALL: But I think he can speak philosophically about the—his philosophy behind Lavabit and why it would lead to his decision to shut down.

LADAR LEVISON: Yeah, I have—

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Jesse Binnall, by the way. And, Jesse, how difficult is this for Ladar Levison, what he can say, what he can’t say? How high are the stakes here?

JESSE BINNALL: The stakes are very high. It’s a very unfortunate situation that, as Americans, we really are not supposed to have to worry about. But Ladar is in a situation where he has to watch every word he says when he’s talking to the press, for fear of being imprisoned. And we can’t even talk about what the legal requirements are that make it so he has to watch his words. But the simple fact is, I’m really here with him only because there are some very fine lines that he can’t cross, for fear of being dragged away in handcuffs. And that’s pretty much the exact fears that led the founders to give us the First Amendment in the first place. So it’s high stakes.

LADAR LEVISON: Yeah.

AARON MATÉ: And, Ladar, in your letter, you write that "A favorable decision would allow me to resurrect Lavabit as an American company." So, are you suggesting perhaps that you would consider moving it abroad?

LADAR LEVISON: I don’t think I can continue to run Lavabit abroad as an American citizen. I would have to move abroad, effectively, to administer the service. As an American citizen, I’m still subject to the laws and jurisdiction of the United States, particularly as long as I continue to live here. You know, that’s why I have a lot of respect for Snowden, because he gave up his entire life, the life that he’s known his entire life, so that he could speak out. I haven’t gotten to that point. I still hope that it’s possible to run a private service, private cloud data service, here in the United States without necessarily being forced to conduct surveillance on your users by the American government.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you say, Ladar, if you’ve received a national security letter?

LADAR LEVISON: No.

JESSE BINNALL: Unfortunately, he can’t.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to talk about that in a minute, the overall issue of what these are, for listeners and viewers who are not familiar with this. But, Ladar Levison, soon after you pulled the plug on Lavabit, another encrypted email provider called Silent Circle also shut down. Mike Janke, Silent Circle’s CEO and co-founder, said, quote, "There was no 12-hour heads up. If we announced it, it would have given authorities time to file a national security letter. We decided to destroy it before we were asked to turn (information) over. We had to do scorched earth." Ladar, your response?

LADAR LEVISON: I can certainly understand his position. If the government had learned that I was shutting my service down—can I say that?

JESSE BINNALL: Well, I think it’s best to kind of avoid that topic, unfortunately. But I think it is fair to say that Silent Circle was probably in a very different situation than Lavabit was, and which is probably why they took the steps that they did, which I think were admirable.

LADAR LEVISON: Yeah. But I will say that I don’t think I had a choice but to shut it down without notice. I felt that was my only option. And I’ll have to leave it to your listeners to understand why. But it’s important to note that, you know, Lavabit wasn’t the first service provider to receive a government request, and we’re not the first service provider to fight it. We’re just the first service provider to take a different approach. And it could very well be because of our size that we have that option. We’re wholly focused on secure email. Without it, we have no business. You take a much larger provider with a greater number of employees, and shutting down a major section of their company, when they have to answer to shareholders, may not be a viable option.

AMY GOODMAN: Why have you decided to speak out today, Ladar?

LADAR LEVISON: Because my biggest fear when I shut down the service was that no good would come of it. And I’m hoping that by speaking out, I can prompt, hopefully, Congress to act and change the laws that put me in this circumstance to begin with. I know that’s a little ironic, considering I can’t speak about the specific laws that put me in this position, but, you know, there’s a real need in this country to establish what the rights are of our cloud providers. And unless we take actions to ensure that, you know, we can continue to operate secure, private services, I think we’re going to lose a lot of business over the next few years. And I think all the major providers, not just Lavabit, have gone on record to say the same.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you think people should use email?

LADAR LEVISON: Yeah, I think it’s a great way to communicate. I think we’re entering a world where we have any number of ways of communicating, from postal mail to Twitter, to text messaging, to Facebook, to instant messenger, to email, to telephone, to video chat. They all kind of blend together. They all sort of fit their own niche, their own purpose. And I think email still has a very important role to play in communication between people.

AMY GOODMAN: Should we just assume it’s all being read?

LADAR LEVISON: I think you should assume any communication that is electronic is being monitored.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to break and then come back to our discussion. And we’ll be joined by a service provider who did get a national security letter and is now able to talk about it. We’ve been speaking with Ladar Levison, Lavabit owner, who just shut down the—as a service provider, provided services to Edward Snowden; and Jesse Binnall, his lawyer. We’ll be back in a minute.

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

Source:
http://www.democracynow.org/2013/8/13/exclusive_owner_of_snowdens_email_service
__________________________