NEWS2U International NewsConnecting the Dots

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 10 Dec 2015 12:43:00 +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

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UK Digital Surveillance Is "Worse Than Orwell"

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 26 Aug 2015 01:04:00 +0000

New UN Privacy Chief Proclaims we are dealing with a world even worse that anything Orwell could have foreseen.

By Michael Krieger
August 25, 2015
Liberty Blitzkrieg

Cannataci says we are dealing with a world even worse that anything Orwell could have foreseen. “It’s worse,” he said. “Because if you look at CCTV alone, at least Winston was able to go out in the countryside and go under a tree and expect there wouldn’t be any screen, as it was called. Whereas today there are many parts of the English countryside where there are more cameras than George Orwell could ever have imagined. So the situation in some cases is far worse already.

– UN Privacy chief, Joseph Cannataci

The UN special rapporteur on privacy, Joseph Cannataci, pulls no punches when it comes to privacy. It’s hard to disagree with what he has to say.

From the Guardian:

The first UN privacy chief has said the world needs a Geneva convention style law for the internet to safeguard data and combat the threat of massive clandestine digital surveillance.

Speaking to the Guardian weeks after his appointment as the UN special rapporteur on privacy, Joseph Cannataci described British surveillance oversight as being “a joke”, and said the situation is worse than anything George Orwell could have foreseen.

He added that he doesn’t use Facebook or Twitter, and said it was regrettable that vast numbers of people sign away their digital rights without thinking about it.

One thing that is certainly going to come up in my mandate is the business model that large corporations are using

“Some people were complaining because they couldn’t find me on Facebook. They couldn’t find me on Twitter. But since I believe in privacy, I’ve never felt the need for it,” Cannataci, a professor of technology law at University of Groningen in the Netherlands and head of the department of Information Policy & Governance at the University of Malta, said.

Appointed after concern about surveillance and privacy following the Edward Snowden revelations, Cannataci agreed that his notion of a new universal law on surveillance could embarrass those who may not sign up to it. “Some people may not want to buy into it,” he acknowledged. “But you know, if one takes the attitude that some countries will not play ball, then, for example, the chemical weapons agreement would never have come about.”

Cannataci came into his new post in July after a controversial spat involving the first-choice candidate, Katrin Nyman-Metcalf, who the Germans in particular thought might not be tough enough on the Americans.

But for Cannataci – well-known for having a mind of his own – it is not America but Britain that he singles out as having the weakest oversight in the western world: “That is precisely one of the problems we have to tackle. That if your oversight mechanism’s a joke, and a rather bad joke at its citizens’ expense, for how long can you laugh it off as a joke?”

However, Cannataci says we are dealing with a world even worse that anything Orwell could have foreseen. “It’s worse,” he said. “Because if you look at CCTV alone, at least Winston [Winston Smith in Orwell’s novel 1984] was able to go out in the countryside and go under a tree and expect there wouldn’t be any screen, as it was called. Whereas today there are many parts of the English countryside where there are more cameras than George Orwell could ever have imagined. So the situation in some cases is far worse already.

“The way we handle it is going to be the difference. But Orwell foresaw a technology that was controlling. In our case we are looking at a technology that is ever-developing, and ever-developing possibly more sinister capabilities.” Because of this, the Snowden revelations were very important, he said.

“We have a number of corporations that have set up a business model that is bringing in hundreds of thousands of millions of euros and dollars every year and they didn’t ask anybody’s permission. They didn’t go out and say: ‘Oh, we’d like to have a licensing law.’ No, they just went out and created a model where people’s data has become the new currency. And unfortunately, the vast bulk of people sign their rights away without knowing or thinking too much about it,” he said.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way…

Yes, the UK is particularly bad when it comes to privacy, as has been noted on many occasions. See:

Top Computer Security Expert Warns – David Cameron’s Plan to Ban Encryption Would “Destroy the Internet”

The Mindset of UK Prime Minister David Cameron – It’s Not Enough to Follow the Law, You Must Love Big Brother

Britain’s “War on Terror” Insanity Continues – David Cameron Declares War on Encryption

“Minority Report”-esque Big Brother Billboards are Coming to England

Press Rebellion in the UK – British Media Launches Protest Against Spying, as GCHQ Places Investigative Journalism in Same Category as Terrorism

In Liberty,
Michael Krieger

Source:

http://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2015/08/25/new-un-privacy-chief-proclaims-uk-digital-surveillance-is-worse-than-orwell/

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Backdoors Won't Solve Comey's Going Dark Problem

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 16 Aug 2015 15:30:00 +0000

CRYPTO-GRAM

August 15, 2015
by Bruce Schneier
CTO, Resilient Systems, Inc.
schneier@schneier.com

At the Aspen Security Forum two weeks ago, James Comey (and others) explicitly talked about the "going dark" problem, describing the specific scenario they are concerned about. Maybe others have heard the scenario before, but it was a first for me. It centers around ISIL operatives abroad and ISIL-inspired terrorists here in the US.

The FBI knows who the Americans are, can get a court order to carry out surveillance on their communications, but cannot eavesdrop on the conversations, because they are encrypted. They can get the metadata, so they know who is talking to who, but they can't find out what's being said.

"ISIL's M.O. is to broadcast on Twitter, get people to follow them, then move them to Twitter Direct Messaging" to evaluate if they are a legitimate recruit, he said. "Then they'll move them to an encrypted mobile-messaging app so they go dark to us."

The FBI can get court-approved access to Twitter exchanges, but not to encrypted communication, Comey said. Even when the FBI demonstrates probable cause and gets a judicial order to intercept that communication, it cannot break the encryption for technological reasons, according to Comey.

If this is what Comey and the FBI are actually concerned about, they're getting bad advice -- because their proposed solution won't solve the problem.

Comey wants communications companies to give them the capability to eavesdrop on conversations without the conversants' knowledge or consent; that's the "backdoor" we're all talking about. But the problem isn't that most encrypted communications platforms are securely encrypted, or even that some are -- the problem is that there exists at least one securely encrypted communications platform on the planet that ISIL can use.

Imagine that Comey got what he wanted. Imagine that iMessage and Facebook and Skype and everything else US-made had his backdoor. The ISIL operative would tell his potential recruit to use something else, something secure and non-US-made. Maybe an encryption program from Finland, or Switzerland, or Brazil. Maybe Mujahedeen Secrets. Maybe anything. (Sure, some of these will have flaws, and they'll be identifiable by their metadata, but the FBI already has the metadata, and the better software will rise to the top.)

As long as there is *something* that the ISIL operative can move them to, some software that the American can download and install on their phone or computer, or hardware that they can buy from abroad, the FBI still won't be able to eavesdrop.

And by pushing these ISIL operatives to non-US platforms, they lose access to the metadata they otherwise have.

Convincing US companies to install backdoors isn't enough; in order to solve this going dark problem, the FBI has to ensure that an American can only use backdoored software. And the only way to do that is to prohibit the use of non-backdoored software, which is the sort of thing that the UK's David Cameron said he wanted for his country in January:

But the question is are we going to allow a means of communications which it simply isn't possible to read. My answer to that question is: no, we must not.

And that, of course, is impossible. Jonathan Zittrain explained why. And Cory Doctorow outlined what trying would entail:

For David Cameron's proposal to work, he will need to stop Britons from installing software that comes from software creators who are out of his jurisdiction. The very best in secure communications are already free/open source projects, maintained by thousands of independent programmers around the world. They are widely available, and thanks to things like cryptographic signing, it is possible to download these packages from any server in the world (not just big ones like Github) and verify, with a very high degree of confidence, that the software you've downloaded hasn't been tampered with.

This, then, is what David Cameron is proposing:

* All Britons' communications must be easy for criminals, voyeurs and foreign spies to intercept.

* Any firms within reach of the UK government must be banned from producing secure software.

* All major code repositories, such as Github and Sourceforge, must be blocked.

* Search engines must not answer queries about web-pages that carry secure software.

* Virtually all academic security work in the UK must cease -- security research must only take place in proprietary research environments where there is no onus to publish one's findings, such as industry R&D and the security services.

* All packets in and out of the country, and within the country, must be subject to Chinese-style deep-packet inspection and any packets that appear to originate from secure software must be dropped.

* Existing walled gardens (like IOs and games consoles) must be ordered to ban their users from installing secure software.

* Anyone visiting the country from abroad must have their smartphones held at the border until they leave.

* Proprietary operating system vendors (Microsoft and Apple) must be ordered to redesign their operating systems as walled gardens that only allow users to run software from an app store, which will not sell or give secure software to Britons.

* Free/open source operating systems -- that power the energy, banking, ecommerce, and infrastructure sectors -- must be banned outright.

As extreme as it reads, without all of that, the ISIL operative would be able to communicate securely with his potential American recruit. And all of this is not going to happen.

Last week, former NSA director Mike McConnell, former DHS secretary Michael Chertoff, and former deputy defense secretary William Lynn published a Washington Post op-ed opposing backdoors in encryption software.

They wrote:

Today, with almost everyone carrying a networked device on his or her person, ubiquitous encryption provides essential security. If law enforcement and intelligence organizations face a future without assured access to encrypted communications, they will develop technologies and techniques to meet their legitimate mission goals.

I believe this is true. Already one is being talked about in the academic literature: lawful hacking.

Perhaps the FBI's reluctance to accept this is based on their belief that all encryption software comes from the US, and therefore is under their influence.

Back in the 1990s, during the first Crypto Wars, the US government had a similar belief. To convince them otherwise, George Washington University surveyed the cryptography market in 1999 and found that there were over 500 companies in 70 countries manufacturing or distributing non-US cryptography products. Maybe we need a similar study today.

This essay previously appeared on Lawfare.
http://www.lawfareblog.com/...

Aspen Security Forum:
http://www.aspeninstitute.org/events/2015/07/22/...

Comey's remarks at the forum:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RyVXLKO0DM
http://www.aspentimes.com/news/17381873-113/...

Mujahedeen Secrets:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mujahedeen_Secrets

Identifying encryption programs from the metadata:
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/07/...

What Cameron wants:
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/jan/12/...

Zittrain's rebuttal:
https://medium.com/message/...

Doctorow's explanation:
http://boingboing.net/2015/01/13/...

Washington Post op-ed:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/...

Lawful hacking:
http://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/...

The First Crypto Wars:
http://www.newamerica.org/oti/...

George Washington University survey from 1999:
http://cryptome.org/cpi-survey.htm

Source:

https://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram/archives/2015/0815.html#1

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The TPP - What You're Not Being Told

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 01 Aug 2015 20:30:00 +0000

There's a reason this is being hidden from the public.

Storm Clouds Gathering June 11. 2015

What is the TPP? The average person has never heard of it, and most of those who have couldn't tell you what it is. That's no accident.

The TPP, or the Trans-Pacific Partnership, is a trade deal that has been negotiated in secret for years now. The deal encompasses the United States, Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam. A lot of people are going to be affected by this, but for some reason the public is not allowed to see what's in it. In fact many of the lawmakers which are about to vote on this deal haven't even read it themselves. Those who have, are forbidden to expose what it contains. If that strikes you as fishy, you're not alone.

http://citizen.typepad.com/eyesontrade/2013/06/for-once-we-have-some-good-news-after-years-of-calling-for-release-of-the-secretive-draft-text-of-the-trans-pacific-partner.html

We the people don't get a word to say about the TPP, but multinational corporations do. There are 600 corporate representatives participating in these closed door negotiations. Obviously these representatives are looking after their employers' interests not ours.

Though the public doesn't have access to the full text of this agreement, the contents of leaked drafts make it pretty obvious why this is being pushed through in such a sneaky way.

Now you might have heard some people focus on the probability that the TPP will cause the U.S. economy to loose jobs, much like NAFTA did, only worse. Though this concern may be valid, it's hardly the most dangerous part of the agreement.

The real danger lies in the way that this agreement subverts the sovereignty of nations. The TPP would create a system of shadowy trade tribunals which would allow companies to to override and nullify laws in any member country.

http://www.citizen.org/tppinvestment

These tribunals are extrajudicial. Their authority is outside above national justice systems. The arbitrators are unelected, and completely unaccountable to the people.

The laws which will be subject to this new agreement include (but are not limited to) intellectual property rights, food and product safety, environmental standards, and just about any regulation that may affect the way companies do business.

Under the TPP, if a country passes a law to protect its citizens or reduce pollution in a particular sector, a multinational corporation which is affected by that law can take that country to a tribunal. The ruling will be legally binding. It doesn't matter what people voted for.

An example of what this will look can be found in Uruguay, which has been sued by the Philip Morris tobacco company. You see, Uruguay passed a law requiring particularly aggressive warning labels on cigarettes. These warning labels have been very effective. Smoking in Uruguay has declined by about 4 percent annually. Obviously that's bad for business.

The fact that intellectual property rights are covered by the TPP has grave implications for the future of the internet. Under this agreement companies claiming to be harmed by lenient copyright enforcement would have a backdoor means to push new draconian regulations on every participating country. This would bypass normal legislative processes completely.

Remember SOPA? Under the TPP they wouldn't even have to pass a new law. Unpopular measures like this could be imposed through a ruling. Politicians wouldn't have to risk anything.

Don't live in one of the countries implicated in the TPP? Have no fear, chances are they're cooking something up for you as well. The TPP is only one of several alphabet soup trade agreements currently in the works. The TTIP (aka the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership) would extend this system of extrajudicial trade tribunals to the entire European Union.

If they get away with phase one of this power grab you can rest assured that there will be more to come.

This isn't about trade. This isn't about jobs. This is about power, power that is being covertly shifted farther and farther away from the people.

Isn't it beautiful, this rare show of Bipartisanship we're seeing. It's enough to give you the warm and fuzzies. Who would have guessed that the same Republicans who shut down the government over Obamacare would rally so enthusiastically to ram Obamatrade down our throats? It appears that those who line their pockets are in agreement on this one

It isn't enough for the corporate ruling class to have the politicians in their pocket. Now they want the ability to bypass elections and constitutions completely. How does that make you feel?

Well, don't waste your time telling me. The politicians who are pushing this bill have names and addresses. Look them up. Give them a ring. Rattle their cages. There is a time and a place for politeness. This isn't one of them.

If you're a resident of any of the countries involved in the TTP or TTIP now is the time to put pressure on the walking haircuts presiding over your particular region. Let them know that you know what they are up to. Make it clear that you will hold them personally responsible if they don't back out.

These trade agreements are just the beginning. They'll take this as far as you let them.

George Carlin said it in 3 minutes!

Source:
http://stormcloudsgathering.com/the-tpp-what-youre-not-being-told#top_of_page
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Memorial Day 2015

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 25 May 2015 17:54:00 +0000

In Their Own Words

by Ron Forthofer
May 24th, 2015
Dissident Voice

Here in the US, we have been led to believe that we are an exceptional people and the indispensable nation. During our lifetime we have been exposed to lots of myths about the US, particularly about how we are always on the side of good. Below are insider comments challenging this key myth.

Before presenting the quotes, note that US crimes of stealing lands and resources and killing and exploiting people are, disturbingly, nothing new.

Many other nations/empires have committed similar crimes throughout history. Morality, legality or altruism are not considerations that apply to the acts of powerful nations. The US is the most recent and perhaps the most successful incarnation of empire that skillfully uses puppet leaders, international organizations, financial means, and modern technology, including propaganda techniques, to expand, consolidate and to maintain its control.

Laudable words

In 1821, when he was US Secretary of State, John Quincy Adams wrote a “Warning Against the Search for “Monsters to Destroy”. The excerpt below shows how America once viewed itself in the international arena.

Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy…. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force…. She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit….

Unfortunately, Adams didn’t seem to recognize that US treatment of the Native Americans and African slaves had already undercut the high ideas of liberty and independence. The US certainly did not heed Adams’ warning as the use of force or coercion were the primary ways the US conducted foreign policy, especially on the North American continent.

Use of the military

Native American nations suffered incredible slaughter, dispossession and devastation at the hands of the US military and citizens. The widespread killing of Native Americans preceded and continued throughout the ‘Manifest Destiny’ era. A Century of Dishonor by Helen Hunt Jackson, first published in 1881, provides details about this unconscionable mistreatment. Two other major US foreign 19th century campaigns were the war of conquest against Mexico (1846-1848) and, after the defeat of the Spanish during the Spanish-American War, the brutal US campaign against Philippine independence at the turn of the 20th century.

President Ulysses S. Grant

Regarding the war with Mexico, former President and General Ulysses S. Grant wrote in his autobiography:

For myself, I was bitterly opposed to the measure, and to this day regard the war, which resulted, as one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation. It was an instance of a republic following the bad example of European monarchies, in not considering justice in their desire to acquire additional territory.

Major General Smedley Butler

US Marine Corps legend Major General Smedley Butler described his early 20th-century experiences in a powerful and telling speech in 1933.

War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses. …

I wouldn’t go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. …

I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country’s most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.

I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.

General David M. Shoup

An echo of Butler’s comments is found in a 1967 speech by General David M. Shoup, former Commandant of the USMC (the US Congressional Record from February 20, 1967). General Shoup said:

I believe that if we had and would keep our dirty, bloody, dollar-crooked fingers out of the business of these nations so full of depressed, exploited people, they will arrive at a solution of their own. That they design and want. That they fight and work for.

Thomas Friedman

In a 1999 column, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman also echoed General Butler’s comments when he admitted the linkage between the military and the ability of US corporations to thrive internationally. Friedman wrote:

For globalization to work, America can’t be afraid to act like the almighty superpower that it is…The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist–McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the builder of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force Navy and Marine Corps.

General Douglas MacArthur

In 1957, another of the leading US military figures during the 20th century,
General Douglas MacArthur, explained the support for increasing military budgets.

Our swollen budgets constantly have been misrepresented to the public. Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear … with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant funds demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real.

Oil — a great prize

A 1945 memorandum to President Truman written by the Chief of the Division of Near Eastern Affairs in the U.S. State Department, Gordon Merriam, stated:

In Saudi Arabia, where the oil resources constitute a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history, a concession covering this oil is nominally in American control.

Adolf A. Berle, one of Franklin Roosevelt’s closest advisers, particularly in relation to the construction of the post-WWII world, later remarked that controlling the oil reserves of the Middle East would mean obtaining “substantial control of the world.”

The US and its oil industry have worked assiduously to extend their influence over nations with large supplies of oil and natural gas or along possible pipeline routes.

Maintaining US standard of living

A 1948 State Department Policy Planning Paper by George Kennan, architect of the ‘containment’ policy toward the USSR, discussed the rationale behind US foreign policy. Kennan explained that, following World War II, America held 50% of the world’s wealth, yet had only 6.3% of the world’s population. According to Kennan, the real task for America:

… is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.

By overthrowing governments

Consistent with Kennan’s recommendation, the US used the Central Intelligence Agency to overthrow or to assassinate democratically elected leaders. More recently, the Agency for International Development and non-governmental organizations such as the National Endowment for Democracy prepare the ground for coups.

Amazingly, leaders more amenable to the US usually came to power after these coups! Examples of coups welcomed by the US include Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Brazil (1964), Indonesia (1965), Chile (1973), Honduras (2009) and Ukraine (2014).

William Blum‘s book Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Intervention Since World War II examines this topic in detail.

Through economic agreements

In 1944, a conference of the 44 Allied nations was held at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire to establish regulation of the international monetary and financial systems after the war. Britain and the US had competing versions for a reserve currency and other issues. Due to overwhelming US power and wealth, the nations went along with the US version that effectively resulted in making the US dollar the reserve currency, a decision with major implications for the world. (See Linda McQuaig’s excellent book The Cult of Impotence: Selling the Myth of Powerlessness in the Global Economy, pages 214-224 for more on Bretton Woods and the role played by the US banking industry.)

The International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (now part of the World Bank) were also created at Bretton Woods. The US has used these institutions and their structural adjustment programs along with its trade policies and foreign aid to, in effect, keep third-world nations as colonies. These policies simultaneously expanded the power of Western corporations and Wall Street banks. (See Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins for more information.)

A coup led by Wall Street and transnational corporations

US policy has morphed into a policy that puts the interests of giant financial institutions and transnational corporations ahead of US national interests. The Bretton Woods plan along with so-called trade agreements clearly demonstrate this point as these agreements really focus on the expansion and consolidation of the power of giant banks and corporations.

Nomi Prins‘ exceptional book All the Presidents’ Bankers: The Hidden Alliances that Drive American Power strongly makes the case that the power of leading US bankers to influence US domestic and foreign policy has existed since at least the beginning of the 20th century.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership is the latest predatory scheme that reflects the power of Wall Street and transnational corporations. The TPP expands the power of these groups at the public’s expense. Among the rules being secretly negotiated is the particularly egregious ‘Investor State Dispute Settlement’ process. This process would allow a foreign corporation to sue a government over profits it could potentially lose due to a law that protects, for example, the environment or labor rights or buy local programs. Fortunately there is a good chance that this scheme may be defeated due to strong public pressure.

Also under current negotiation is another part of the corporate coup, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the US and European nations. Again there is strong opposition, mostly in Europe so far, to this predatory scheme.

Clearly US foreign policies seldom have little relation to the fine sounding line spouted by our elected officials and corporate dominated mainstream news media. The officials and the media work in tandem to convince the US public to support wars or other policies that are harmful to people here and around the world.

Backlash to this Wall Street/corporate coup

There is rising opposition to the Washington consensus of neo-liberal policies. A number of South American nations are showing that an alternative path can be charted. Several of the democratically elected leaders there have enacted policies benefiting the public interest, not just the interest of the elite. Unfortunately, by adopting these policies, these leaders become targets of the US and at risk of being overthrown.

Russia and China are working more closely together in response to US policies/provocations in Ukraine and Southeast Asia. The BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) have formed institutions to offer an alternative to the World Bank and the IMF. A number of nations are using their own currencies instead of the dollar in their trade transactions with one another. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization is another political, economic and military group working together outside of the orbit of the US and the West.

The financial catastrophe of 2008 further undercut confidence in the neoliberal policies of the West. The immediate bailout of the gigantic banks without concurrent action to help the public provided another demonstration of the power of the banks over governments. As a result of the crisis and bank bailout, more and more people in Western Europe and the US are beginning to recognize that the predatory policies of the Wall Street-led US are taking us down the wrong path. For example, in Greece and Spain, the mandated austerity programs have caused people to challenge the existing order.

Unbridled capitalism is slowly destroying the environment as well as the economic well being of the public. If we want future generations to have any chance at a decent life, an alternative path to the neoliberal model must be pursued. Fortunately, the seeds of a seismic shift are being planted. Whether or not, they will sprout in time is still unknown.

Ron Forthofer is a retired professor of biostatistics from the University of Texas School of Public Health in Houston and was a Green Party candidate for Congress and also for governor of Colorado. Read other articles by Ron.

This article was posted on Sunday, May 24th, 2015 at 10:21pm and is filed under BRICS, Finance, IMF, Militarism, Original Peoples, TPP, Wall Street.

Source:
http://dissidentvoice.org/2015/05/in-their-own-words/
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Bust of Edward Snowden Stuck to a War Monument in Brooklyn

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 07 Apr 2015 17:01:00 +0000

THERE’S A MASSIVE, ILLICIT BUST OF EDWARD SNOWDEN STUCK TO A WAR MONUMENT IN BROOKLYN

By Bucky Turco

April 6, 2015 - 11:03AM

While most people slept, a trio of artists and some helpers installed a bust of NSA whistleblowerEdward Snowden in Brooklyn on Monday morning. The group, which allowed ANIMAL to exclusively document the installation on the condition that we hide their identities, hauled the 100-pound sculpture into Fort Greene Park and up its hilly terrain just before dawn. They fused it to part of the Prison Ship Martyrs Monument, a memorial to Revolutionary War soldiers. As of press time, the sculpture was still there. UPDATE: Parks Department put a tarp over the bust and removed it this afternoon.

The idea for the Snowden tribute was conceived about a year ago by two New York City-based artists with a history of pulling off notable public interventions. They linked up with a renowned sculptor on the West Coast who was sympathetic to their cause.

The artists admit that Snowden probably wouldn’t approve of the project, since he never wanted the leaks to be about him, but they hope he’d understand why they did it. In a statement about the project, which they have entitled, “Prison Ship Martyrs Monument 2.0,” they wrote:

Fort Greene’s Prison Ship Martyrs Monument is a memorial to American POWs who lost their lives during the Revolutionary War. We have updated this monument to highlight those who sacrifice their safety in the fight against modern-day tyrannies. It would be a dishonor to those memorialized here to not laud those who protect the ideals they fought for, as Edward Snowden has by bringing the NSA’s 4th-Amendment-violating surveillance programs to light. All too often, figures who strive to uphold these ideals have been cast as criminals rather than in bronze.

Our goal is to bring a renewed vitality to the space and prompt even more visitors to ponder the sacrifices made for their freedoms. We hope this inspires them to reflect upon the responsibility we all bear to ensure our liberties exist long into the future.

In 2013, the Snowden leaks exposed an expansive, covert surveillance program that spied on U.S. citizens, residents and even persons abroad, the likes of which the world had never before seen. While activists and a number of journalists have hailed Snowden as a hero, conservatives and politicians have called him a “coward” and a “traitor.” Snowden sought asylum in Moscow, where he remains in exile.

The artists said they’re dismayed that despite the trove of damning evidence the leaks exposed, the public has largely moved on from the story and no substantial actions have been taken against the NSA. “There’s a media landscape that has painted him as a criminal,” said one of the two New York artists. “You need something theatrical and large to counterbalance the Fox News-iness of the texture of the conversation out there.” At first, the pair thought about making a full-size statue of the former NSA contractor, but were later talked down from that idea by the sculptor. He recommended a bust.

Measuring 4-feet tall, Snowden’s head was placed atop one of the four columns that lie at the monument’s edge, above the eagles. The bust is made of hydrocal, a high quality sculpting material that’s commonly used in places like Las Vegas to create Roman-looking things, castles and other mega props casinos incorporate into their facades. Seeing it up close, you could never tell that you were looking at a plaster-like substance. In fact, over a dozen people walking their dogs passed by the new bust on Monday morning without noticing the unsanctioned piece. Both the color and design of the bust expertly matches the existing sculptures there, from its bronze patina finish to Snowden’s hair — which mimics the texture of the feather on the eagle. The artists also added letters spelling out Snowden’s name in an official-looking font befitting of a monument.

While it was very important that the piece be more than just a prop or paper mache effigy, the artists didn’t want to damage the surface that the bust would be bound to, either. After some debate, they decided on an adhesive that would firmly hold the head in place, yet could be removed without marring the monument.

The materials needed to create a bust of this type cost thousands of dollars, and the pair ponied up the cash. It then took a little over six months to sculpt, mold, cast and ship to New York. Had the sculptor charged market rates, he said it would have cost tens of thousands of dollars. “The amount of work that goes into this kind of stuff, it’s easily a 30 grand project,” said the 30-something sculptor. “If it were bronze, it could be a $100,000 piece of artwork, maybe more.”

The artists are fully aware of the bust’s inevitable destruction and have left themselves a few options, including one that involves deploying an army of mini-Snowden heads. “We have a full size mold that can be poured again and its been 3D rendered, so we have the ability to print smaller ones at scale,” they said.

(Video/Photos: Aymann Ismail/ANIMALNewYork)

Source:

http://animalnewyork.com/2015/theres-a-massive-illicit-bust-of-edward-snowden-stuck-to-a-war-monument-in-brooklyn/

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The Great SIM Heist“We need to stop assuming that the phone companies will provide us with a secure method of making calls or exchanging text messages”

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 20 Feb 2015 15:03:00 +0000

The Intercept
by Jeremy Scahill and Josh Begley
Feb19, 2015

American and British spies hacked into the internal computer network of the largest manufacturer of SIM cards in the world, stealing encryption keys used to protect the privacy of cellphone communications across the globe, according to top-secret documents provided to The Intercept by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The hack was perpetrated by a joint unit consisting of operatives from the NSA and its British counterpart Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ. The breach, detailed in a secret 2010 GCHQ document, gave the surveillance agencies the potential to secretly monitor a large portion of the world’s cellular communications, including both voice and data.

The company targeted by the intelligence agencies, Gemalto, is a multinational firm incorporated in the Netherlands that makes the chips used in mobile phones and next-generation credit cards. Among its clients are AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, Sprint and some 450 wireless network providers around the world. The company operates in 85 countries and has more than 40 manufacturing facilities. One of its three global headquarters is in Austin, Texas and it has a large factory in Pennsylvania.

In all, Gemalto produces some 2 billion SIM cards a year. Its motto is “Security to be Free.”

With these stolen encryption keys, intelligence agencies can monitor mobile communications without seeking or receiving approval from telecom companies and foreign governments. Possessing the keys also sidesteps the need to get a warrant or a wiretap, while leaving no trace on the wireless provider’s network that the communications were intercepted. Bulk key theft additionally enables the intelligence agencies to unlock any previously encrypted communications they had already intercepted, but did not yet have the ability to decrypt.

As part of the covert operations against Gemalto, spies from GCHQ — with support from the NSA — mined the private communications of unwitting engineers and other company employees in multiple countries.

Gemalto was totally oblivious to the penetration of its systems — and the spying on its employees. “I’m disturbed, quite concerned that this has happened,” Paul Beverly, a Gemalto executive vice president, told The Intercept. “The most important thing for me is to understand exactly how this was done, so we can take every measure to ensure that it doesn’t happen again, and also to make sure that there’s no impact on the telecom operators that we have served in a very trusted manner for many years. What I want to understand is what sort of ramifications it has, or could have, on any of our customers.” He added that “the most important thing for us now is to understand the degree” of the breach.

Leading privacy advocates and security experts say that the theft of encryption keys from major wireless network providers is tantamount to a thief obtaining the master ring of a building superintendent who holds the keys to every apartment. “Once you have the keys, decrypting traffic is trivial,” says Christopher Soghoian, the principal technologist for the American Civil Liberties Union. “The news of this key theft will send a shock wave through the security community.”

THE MASSIVE KEY THEFT IS “BAD NEWS FOR PHONE SECURITY. REALLY BAD NEWS.”

Beverly said that after being contacted by The Intercept, Gemalto’s internal security team began on Wednesday to investigate how their system was penetrated and could find no trace of the hacks. When asked if the NSA or GCHQ had ever requested access to Gemalto-manufactured encryption keys, Beverly said, “I am totally unaware. To the best of my knowledge, no.”

According to one secret GCHQ slide, the British intelligence agency penetrated Gemalto’s internal networks, planting malware on several computers, giving GCHQ secret access. We “believe we have their entire network,” the slide’s author boasted about the operation against Gemalto.

Additionally, the spy agency targeted unnamed cellular companies’ core networks, giving it access to “sales staff machines for customer information and network engineers machines for network maps.” GCHQ also claimed the ability to manipulate the billing servers of cell companies to “suppress” charges in an effort to conceal the spy agency’s secret actions against an individual’s phone. Most significantly, GCHQ also penetrated “authentication servers,” allowing it to decrypt data and voice communications between a targeted individual’s phone and his or her telecom provider’s network. A note accompanying the slide asserted that the spy agency was “very happy with the data so far and [was] working through the vast quantity of product.”

The Mobile Handset Exploitation Team (MHET), whose existence has never before been disclosed, was formed in April 2010 to target vulnerabilities in cellphones. One of its main missions was to covertly penetrate computer networks of corporations that manufacture SIM cards, as well as those of wireless network providers. The team included operatives from both GCHQ and the NSA.

While the FBI and other U.S. agencies can obtain court orders compelling U.S.-based telecom companies to allow them to wiretap or intercept the communications of their customers, on the international front this type of data collection is much more challenging. Unless a foreign telecom or foreign government grants access to their citizens’ data to a U.S. intelligence agency, the NSA or CIA would have to hack into the network or specifically target the user’s device for a more risky “active” form of surveillance that could be detected by sophisticated targets. Moreover, foreign intelligence agencies would not allow U.S. or U.K. spy agencies access to the mobile communications of their heads of state or other government officials.

“It’s unbelievable. Unbelievable,” said Gerard Schouw, a member of the Dutch Parliament, when told of the spy agencies’ actions. Schouw, the intelligence spokesperson for D66, the largest opposition party in the Netherlands, told The Intercept, “We don’t want to have the secret services from other countries doing things like this.” Schouw added that he and other lawmakers will ask the Dutch government to provide an official explanation and to clarify whether the country’s intelligence services were aware of the targeting of Gemalto, whose official headquarters is in Amsterdam.

Last November, the Dutch government amended its constitution to include explicit protection for the privacy of digital communications, including those made on mobile devices. “We have, in the Netherlands, a law on the [activities] of secret services. And hacking is not allowed,” Schouw said. Under Dutch law, the interior minister would have to sign off on such operations by foreign governments’ intelligence agencies. “I don’t believe that he has given his permission for these kind of actions.”

The U.S. and British intelligence agencies pulled off the encryption key heist in great stealth, giving them the ability to intercept and decrypt communications without alerting the wireless network provider, the foreign government or the individual user that they have been targeted. “Gaining access to a database of keys is pretty much game over for cellular encryption,” says Matthew Green, a cryptography specialist at the Johns Hopkins Information Security Institute. The massive key theft is “bad news for phone security. Really bad news.”

As consumers began to adopt cellular phones en masse in the mid-1990s, there were no effective privacy protections in place. Anyone could buy a cheap device from RadioShack capable of intercepting calls placed on mobile phones. The shift from analog to digital networks introduced basic encryption technology, though it was still crackable by tech savvy computer science graduate students, as well as the FBI and other law enforcement agencies, using readily available equipment.

Today, second-generation (2G) phone technology, which relies on a deeply flawed encryption system, remains the dominant platform globally, though U.S. and European cellphone companies now use 3G, 4G and LTE technology in urban areas. These include more secure, though not invincible, methods of encryption, and wireless carriers throughout the world are upgrading their networks to use these newer technologies.

It is in the context of such growing technical challenges to data collection that intelligence agencies, such as the NSA, have become interested in acquiring cellular encryption keys. “With old-fashioned [2G], there are other ways to work around cellphone security without those keys,” says Green, the Johns Hopkins cryptographer. “With newer 3G, 4G and LTE protocols, however, the algorithms aren’t as vulnerable, so getting those keys would be essential.”

The privacy of all mobile communications — voice calls, text messages and Internet access — depends on an encrypted connection between the cellphone and the wireless carrier’s network, using keys stored on the SIM, a tiny chip smaller than a postage stamp, which is inserted into the phone. All mobile communications on the phone depend on the SIM, which stores and guards the encryption keys created by companies like Gemalto. SIM cards can be used to store contacts, text messages, and other important data, like one’s phone number. In some countries, SIM cards are used to transfer money. As The Intercept reported last year, having the wrong SIM card can make you the target of a drone strike.

SIM cards were not invented to protect individual communications — they were designed to do something much simpler: ensure proper billing and prevent fraud, which was pervasive in the early days of cellphones. Soghoian compares the use of encryption keys on SIM cards to the way Social Security numbers are used today. “Social security numbers were designed in the 1930s to track your contributions to your government pension,” he says. “Today they are used as a quasi national identity number, which was never their intended purpose.”

Because the SIM card wasn’t created with call confidentiality in mind, the manufacturers and wireless carriers don’t make a great effort to secure their supply chain. As a result, the SIM card is an extremely vulnerable component of a mobile phone. “I doubt anyone is treating those things very carefully,” says Green. “Cell companies probably don’t treat them as essential security tokens. They probably just care that nobody is defrauding their networks.” The ACLU’s Soghoian adds, “These keys are so valuable that it makes sense for intel agencies to go after them.”

As a general rule, phone companies do not manufacture SIM cards, nor program them with secret encryption keys. It is cheaper and more efficient for them to outsource this sensitive step in the SIM card production process. They purchase them in bulk with the keys pre-loaded by other corporations. Gemalto is the largest of these SIM “personalization” companies.

After a SIM card is manufactured, the encryption key, known as a “Ki,” is burned directly onto the chip. A copy of the key is also given to the cellular provider, allowing its network to recognize an individual’s phone. In order for the phone to be able to connect to the wireless carrier’s network, the phone — with the help of the SIM — authenticates itself using the Ki that has been programmed onto the SIM. The phone conducts a secret “handshake” that validates that the Ki on the SIM matches the Ki held by the mobile company. Once that happens, the communications between the phone and the network are encrypted. Even if GCHQ or the NSA were to intercept the phone signals as they are transmitted through the air, the intercepted data would be a garbled mess. Decrypting it can be challenging and time-consuming. Stealing the keys, on the other hand, is beautifully simple, from the intelligence agencies’ point of view, as the pipeline for producing and distributing SIM cards was never designed to thwart mass surveillance efforts.

One of the creators of the encryption protocol that is widely used today for securing emails, Adi Shamir, famously asserted: “Cryptography is typically bypassed, not penetrated.” In other words, it is much easier (and sneakier) to open a locked door when you have the key than it is to break down the door using brute force. While the NSA and GCHQ have substantial resources dedicated to breaking encryption, it is not the only way — and certainly not always the most efficient — to get at the data they want. “NSA has more mathematicians on its payroll than any other entity in the U.S.,” says the ACLU’s Soghoian. “But the NSA’s hackers are way busier than its mathematicians.”

GCHQ and the NSA could have taken any number of routes to steal SIM encryption keys and other data. They could have physically broken into a manufacturing plant. They could have broken into a wireless carrier’s office. They could have bribed, blackmailed or coerced an employee of the manufacturer or cellphone provider. But all of that comes with substantial risk of exposure. In the case of Gemalto, hackers working for GCHQ remotely penetrated the company’s computer network in order to steal the keys in bulk as they were en route to the wireless network providers.

SIM card “personalization” companies like Gemalto ship hundreds of thousands of SIM cards at a time to mobile phone operators across the world. International shipping records obtained by The Intercept show that in 2011, Gemalto shipped 450,000 smart cards from its plant in Mexico to Germany’s Deutsche Telekom in just one shipment.

In order for the cards to work and for the phones’ communications to be secure, Gemalto also needs to provide the mobile company with a file containing the encryption keys for each of the new SIM cards. These master key files could be shipped via FedEx, DHL, UPS or another snail mail provider. More commonly, they could be sent via email or through File Transfer Protocol, FTP, a method of sending files over the Internet.

The moment the master key set is generated by Gemalto or another personalization company, but before it is sent to the wireless carrier, is the most vulnerable moment for interception. “The value of getting them at the point of manufacture is you can presumably get a lot of keys in one go, since SIM chips get made in big batches,” says Green, the cryptographer. “SIM cards get made for lots of different carriers in one facility.” In Gemalto’s case, GCHQ hit the jackpot, as the company manufactures SIMs for hundreds of wireless network providers, including all of the leading U.S.— and many of the largest European — companies.

But obtaining the encryption keys while Gemalto still held them required finding a way into the company’s internal systems.

Diagram from a top-secret GCHQ slide.

Top-Secret GCHQ documents reveal that the intelligence agencies accessed the email and Facebook accounts of engineers and other employees of major telecom corporations and SIM card manufacturers in an effort to secretly obtain information that could give them access to millions of encryption keys. They did this by utilizing the NSA’s X-KEYSCORE program, which allowed them access to private emails hosted by the SIM card and mobile companies’ servers, as well as those of major tech corporations, including Yahoo and Google.

In effect, GCHQ clandestinely cyberstalked Gemalto employees, scouring their emails in an effort to find people who may have had access to the company’s core networks and Ki-generating systems. The intelligence agency’s goal was to find information that would aid in breaching Gemalto’s systems, making it possible to steal large quantities of encryption keys. The agency hoped to intercept the files containing the keys as they were transmitted between Gemalto and its wireless network provider customers.

GCHQ operatives identified key individuals and their positions within Gemalto and then dug into their emails. In one instance, GCHQ zeroed in on a Gemalto employee in Thailand who they observed sending PGP-encrypted files, noting that if GCHQ wanted to expand its Gemalto operations, “he would certainly be a good place to start.” They did not claim to have decrypted the employee’s communications, but noted that the use of PGP could mean the contents were potentially valuable.

The cyberstalking was not limited to Gemalto. GCHQ operatives wrote a script that allowed the agency to mine the private communications of employees of major telecommunications and SIM “personalization” companies for technical terms used in the assigning of secret keys to mobile phone customers. Employees for the SIM card manufacturers and wireless network providers were labeled as “known individuals and operators targeted” in a top-secret GCHQ document.

According to that April 2010 document, “PCS Harvesting at Scale,” hackers working for GCHQ focused on “harvesting” massive amounts of individual encryption keys “in transit between mobile network operators and SIM card personalisation centres” like Gemalto. The spies “developed a methodology for intercepting these keys as they are transferred between various network operators and SIM card providers.” By that time, GCHQ had developed “an automated technique with the aim of increasing the volume of keys that can be harvested.”

The PCS Harvesting document acknowledged that, in searching for information on encryption keys, GCHQ operatives would undoubtedly vacuum up “a large number of unrelated items” from the private communications of targeted employees. “[H]owever an analyst with good knowledge of the operators involved can perform this trawl regularly and spot the transfer of large batches of [keys].”

The document noted that many SIM card manufacturers transferred the encryption keys to wireless network providers “by email or FTP with simple encryption methods that can be broken … or occasionally with no encryption at all.” To get bulk access to encryption keys, all the NSA or GCHQ needed to do was intercept emails or file transfers as they were sent over the Internet — something both agencies already do millions of times per day. A footnote in the 2010 document observed that the use of “strong encryption products … is becoming increasingly common” in transferring the keys.

In its key harvesting “trial” operations in the first quarter of 2010, GCHQ successfully intercepted keys used by wireless network providers in Iran, Afghanistan, Yemen, India, Serbia, Iceland and Tajikistan. But, the agency noted, its automated key harvesting system failed to produce results against Pakistani networks, denoted as “priority targets” in the document, despite the fact that GCHQ had a store of Kis from two providers in the country, Mobilink and Telenor. “[I]t is possible that these networks now use more secure methods to transfer Kis,” the document concluded.

From December 2009 through March 2010, a month before the Mobile Handset Exploitation Team was formed, GCHQ conducted a number of trials aimed at extracting encryption keys and other personalized data for individual phones. In one two-week period, they accessed the emails of 130 people associated with wireless network providers or SIM card manufacturing and personalization. This operation produced nearly 8,000 keys matched to specific phones in 10 countries. In another two-week period, by mining just six email addresses, they produced 85,000 keys. At one point in March 2010, GCHQ intercepted nearly 100,000 keys for mobile phone users in Somalia. By June, they’d compiled 300,000. “Somali providers are not on GCHQ’s list of interest,” the document noted. “[H]owever, this was usefully shared with NSA.”

The GCHQ documents only contain statistics for three months of encryption key theft in 2010. During this period, millions of keys were harvested. The documents stated explicitly that GCHQ had already created a constantly evolving automated process for bulk harvesting of keys. They describe active operations targeting Gemalto’s personalization centers across the globe, as well as other major SIM card manufacturers and the private communications of their employees.

A top-secret NSA document asserted that, as of 2009, the U.S. spy agency already had the capacity to process between 12 and 22 million keys per second for later use against surveillance targets. In the future, the agency predicted, it would be capable of processing more than 50 million per second. The document did not state how many keys were actually processed, just that the NSA had the technology to perform such swift, bulk operations. It is impossible to know how many keys have been stolen by the NSA and GCHQ to date, but, even using conservative math, the numbers are likely staggering.

GCHQ assigned “scores” to more than 150 individual email addresses based on how often the users mentioned certain technical terms, and then intensified the mining of those individuals’ accounts based on priority. The highest-scoring email address was that of an employee of Chinese tech giant Huawei, which the U.S. has repeatedly accused of collaborating with Chinese intelligence. In all, GCHQ harvested the emails of employees of hardware companies that manufacture phones, such as Ericsson and Nokia; operators of mobile networks, such as MTN Irancell and Belgacom; SIM card providers, such as Bluefish and Gemalto; and employees of targeted companies who used email providers, such as Yahoo and Google. During the three-month trial, the largest number of email addresses harvested were those belonging to Huawei employees, followed by MTN Irancell. The third largest class of emails harvested in the trial were private Gmail accounts, presumably belonging to employees at targeted companies.

“PEOPLE WERE SPECIFICALLY HUNTED AND TARGETED BY INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES, NOT BECAUSE THEY DID ANYTHING WRONG, BUT BECAUSE THEY COULD BE USED.”

The GCHQ program targeting Gemalto was called DAPINO GAMMA. In 2011, GCHQ launched operation HIGHLAND FLING to mine the email accounts of Gemalto employees in France and Poland. A top-secret document on the operation stated that one of the aims was “getting into French HQ” of Gemalto “to get in to core data repositories.” France, home to one of Gemalto’s global headquarters, is the nerve center of the company’s worldwide operations. Another goal was to intercept private communications of employees in Poland that “could lead to penetration into one or more personalisation centers” — the factories where the encryption keys are burned onto SIM cards.

As part of these operations, GCHQ operatives acquired the usernames and passwords for Facebook accounts of Gemalto targets. An internal top-secret GCHQ wiki on the program from May 2011 indicated that GCHQ was in the process of “targeting” more than a dozen Gemalto facilities across the globe, including in Germany, Mexico, Brazil, Canada, China, India, Italy, Russia, Sweden, Spain, Japan and Singapore.

The document also stated that GCHQ was preparing similar key theft operations against one of Gemalto’s competitors, Germany-based SIM card giant Giesecke and Devrient.

On January 17, 2014, President Barack Obama gave a major address on the NSA spying scandal. “The bottom line is that people around the world, regardless of their nationality, should know that the United States is not spying on ordinary people who don’t threaten our national security and that we take their privacy concerns into account in our policies and procedures,” he said.

The monitoring of the lawful communications of employees of major international corporations shows that such statements by Obama, other U.S. officials and British leaders — that they only intercept and monitor the communications of known or suspected criminals or terrorists — were untrue. “The NSA and GCHQ view the private communications of people who work for these companies as fair game,” says the ACLU’s Soghoian. “These people were specifically hunted and targeted by intelligence agencies, not because they did anything wrong, but because they could be used as a means to an end.”

There are two basic types of electronic or digital surveillance: passive and active. All intelligence agencies engage in extensive passive surveillance, which means they collect bulk data by intercepting communications sent over fiber-optic cables, radio waves or wireless devices.

Intelligence agencies place high-power antennas, known as “spy nests,” on the top of their countries’ embassies and consulates, which are capable of vacuuming up data sent to or from mobile phones in the surrounding area. The joint NSA/CIA Special Collection Service is the lead entity that installs and mans these nests for the United States. An embassy situated near a parliament or government agency could easily intercept the phone calls and data transfers of the mobile phones used by foreign government officials. The U.S. embassy in Berlin, for instance, is located a stone’s throw from the Bundestag. But if the wireless carriers are using stronger encryption, which is built into modern 3G, 4G and LTE networks, then intercepted calls and other data would be more difficult to crack, particularly in bulk. If the intelligence agency wants to actually listen to or read what is being transmitted, they would need to decrypt the encrypted data.

Active surveillance is another option. This would require government agencies to “jam” a 3G or 4G network, forcing nearby phones onto 2G. Once forced down to the less secure 2G technology, the phone can be tricked into connecting to a fake cell tower operated by an intelligence agency. This method of surveillance, though effective, is risky, as it leaves a digital trace that counter-surveillance experts from foreign governments could detect.

Stealing the Kis solves all of these problems. This way, intelligence agencies can safely engage in passive, bulk surveillance without having to decrypt data and without leaving any trace whatsoever.

“Key theft enables the bulk, low-risk surveillance of encrypted communications,” the ACLU’s Soghoian says. “Agencies can collect all the communications and then look through them later. With the keys, they can decrypt whatever they want, whenever they want. It’s like a time machine, enabling the surveillance of communications that occurred before someone was even a target.”

Neither the NSA nor GCHQ would comment specifically on the key theft operations. In the past, they have argued more broadly that breaking encryption is a necessary part of tracking terrorists and other criminals. “It is longstanding policy that we do not comment on intelligence matters,” a GCHQ official stated in an email, adding that the agency’s work is conducted within a “strict legal and policy framework” that ensures its activities are “authorized, necessary and proportionate,” with proper oversight, which is the standard response the agency has provided for previous stories published by The Intercept. The agency also said, “[T]he UK’s interception regime is entirely compatible with the European Convention on Human Rights.” The NSA declined to offer any comment.

It is unlikely that GCHQ’s pronouncement about the legality of its operations will be universally embraced in Europe. “It is governments massively engaging in illegal activities,” says Sophie in’t Veld, a Dutch member of the European Parliament. “If you are not a government and you are a student doing this, you will end up in jail for 30 years.” Veld, who chaired the European Parliament’s recent inquiry into mass surveillance exposed by Snowden, told The Intercept: “The secret services are just behaving like cowboys. Governments are behaving like cowboys and nobody is holding them to account.”

The Intercept’s Laura Poitras has previously reported that in 2013 Australia’s signals intelligence agency, a close partner of the NSA, stole some 1.8 million encryption keys from an Indonesian wireless carrier.

A few years ago, the FBI reportedly dismantled several transmitters set up by foreign intelligence agencies around the Washington, D.C. area, which could be used to intercept cellphone communications. Russia, China, Israel and other nations use similar technology as the NSA across the world. If those governments had the encryption keys for major U.S. cellphone companies’ customers, such as those manufactured by Gemalto, mass snooping would be simple. “It would mean that with a few antennas placed around Washington, D.C., the Chinese or Russian governments could sweep up and decrypt the communications of members of Congress, U.S. agency heads, reporters, lobbyists and everyone else involved in the policymaking process and decrypt their telephone conversations,” says Soghoian.

“Put a device in front of the U.N., record every bit you see going over the air. Steal some keys, you have all those conversations,” says Green, the Johns Hopkins cryptographer. And it’s not just spy agencies that would benefit from stealing encryption keys. “I can only imagine how much money you could make if you had access to the calls made around Wall Street,” he adds.

GCHQ slide.

The breach of Gemalto’s computer network by GCHQ has far-reaching global implications. The company, which brought in $2.7 billion in revenue in 2013, is a global leader in digital security, producing banking cards, mobile payment systems, two-factor authentication devices used for online security, hardware tokens used for securing buildings and offices, electronic passports and identification cards. It provides chips to Vodafone in Europe and France’s Orange, as well as EE, a joint venture in the U.K. between France Telecom and Deutsche Telekom. Royal KPN, the largest Dutch wireless network provider, also uses Gemalto technology.

In Asia, Gemalto’s chips are used by China Unicom, Japan’s NTT and Taiwan’s Chungwa Telecom, as well as scores of wireless network providers throughout Africa and the Middle East. The company’s security technology is used by more than 3,000 financial institutions and 80 government organizations. Among its clients are Visa, Mastercard, American Express, JP Morgan Chase and Barclays. It also provides chips for use in luxury cars, including those made by Audi and BMW.

In 2012, Gemalto won a sizable contract, worth $175 million, from the U.S. government to produce the covers for electronic U.S. passports, which contain chips and antennas that can be used to better authenticate travelers. As part of its contract, Gemalto provides the personalization and software for the microchips implanted in the passports. The U.S. represents Gemalto’s single largest market, accounting for some 15 percent of its total business. This raises the question of whether GCHQ, which was able to bypass encryption on mobile networks, has the ability to access private data protected by other Gemalto products created for banks and governments.

As smart phones become smarter, they are increasingly replacing credit cards and cash as a means of paying for goods and services. When Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile formed an alliance in 2010 to jointly build an electronic pay system to challenge Google Wallet and Apple Pay, they purchased Gemalto’s technology for their program, known as Softcard. (Until July 2014, it previously went by the unfortunate name of “ISIS Mobile Wallet.”) Whether data relating to that, and other Gemalto security products, has been compromised by GCHQ and the NSA is unclear. Both intelligence agencies declined to answer any specific questions for this story.

Signal, iMessage, WhatsApp, Silent Phone.

Privacy advocates and security experts say it would take billions of dollars, significant political pressure, and several years to fix the fundamental security flaws in the current mobile phone system that NSA, GCHQ and other intelligence agencies regularly exploit.

A current gaping hole in the protection of mobile communications is that cellphones and wireless network providers do not support the use of Perfect Forward Security (PFS), a form of encryption designed to limit the damage caused by theft or disclosure of encryption keys. PFS, which is now built into modern web browsers and used by sites like Google and Twitter, works by generating unique encryption keys for each communication or message, which are then discarded. Rather than using the same encryption key to protect years’ worth of data, as the permanent Kis on SIM cards can, a new key might be generated each minute, hour or day, and then promptly destroyed. Because cellphone communications do not utilize PFS, if an intelligence agency has been “passively” intercepting someone’s communications for a year and later acquires the permanent encryption key, it can go back and decrypt all of those communications. If mobile phone networks were using PFS, that would not be possible — even if the permanent keys were later stolen.

The only effective way for individuals to protect themselves from Ki theft-enabled surveillance is to use secure communications software, rather than relying on SIM card-based security. Secure software includes email and other apps that use Transport Layer Security (TLS), the mechanism underlying the secure HTTPS web protocol. The email clients included with Android phones and iPhones support TLS, as do large email providers like Yahoo and Google.

Apps like TextSecure and Silent Text are secure alternatives to SMS messages, while Signal, RedPhone and Silent Phone encrypt voice communications. Governments still may be able to intercept communications, but reading or listening to them would require hacking a specific handset, obtaining internal data from an email provider, or installing a bug in a room to record the conversations.

“We need to stop assuming that the phone companies will provide us with a secure method of making calls or exchanging text messages,” says Soghoian.

Documents published with this article:

Additional reporting by Andrew Fishman and Ryan Gallagher. Sheelagh McNeill, Morgan Marquis-Boire, Alleen Brown, Margot Williams, Ryan Devereaux and Andrea Jones contributed to this story. Erin O’Rourke provided additional assistance

Article Source: https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/02/19/great-sim-heist/

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Government Health Care Website Quietly Sharing Personal Data

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 01 Feb 2015 22:25:00 +0000

Associated Prewss
By Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar and Jack Gillum
Jan 20, 2015

The government's health insurance website is quietly sending consumers' personal data to private companies that specialize in advertising and analyzing Internet data for performance and marketing, The Associated Press has learned.

The scope of what is disclosed or how it might be used was not immediately clear, but it can include age, income, ZIP code, whether a person smokes, and if a person is pregnant. It can include a computer's Internet address, which can identify a person's name or address when combined with other information collected by sophisticated online marketing or advertising firms.

The Obama administration says HealthCare.gov's connections to data firms were intended to help improve the consumer experience. Officials said outside firms are barred from using the data to further their own business interests.

There is no evidence that personal information has been misused. But connections to dozens of third-party tech firms were documented by technology experts who analyzed HealthCare.gov and then confirmed by AP. A handful of the companies were also collecting highly specific information. That combination is raising concerns.

Leading lawmakers on Tuesday asked the administration to explain how it oversees the data firms to make sure no personally identifiable information is improperly used or shared.

"This new information is extremely concerning, not only because it violates the privacy of millions of Americans, but because it may potentially compromise their security," Sens. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, wrote to the administration.

Created under the president's health care law, HealthCare.gov is the online gateway to government-subsidized private insurance for people who lack coverage on the job. It serves consumers in 37 states, while the remaining states operate their own insurance markets.

A former White House chief information officer, Theresa Payton, said third-party vendors are a weak link on any website. She questioned both the number of vendors on HealthCare.gov and the specific details some of them are collecting.

"You don't need all of that data to do customer service," said Payton, who served under President George W. Bush. "We know hackers are just waiting at the door, salivating to get at this data."

The privacy concerns come against the backdrop of President Barack Obama's new initiative to protect personal data online. Separately, the administration is getting the health care website ready for the final enrollment drive of 2015, aiming to have more than 9 million people signed up by Feb. 15 for subsidized private coverage.

Administration spokesman Aaron Albright said outside vendors "are prohibited from using information from these tools on HealthCare.gov for their companies' purposes." The government uses them to measure the performance of HealthCare.gov so consumers get "a simpler, more streamlined and intuitive experience," he said.

The administration did not explain how it ensures that companies were following the government's privacy and security policies.

Albright said HealthCare.gov comports with standards set by the federal National Institute for Standards and Technology. But recent NIST guidance cautions that collecting bits of seemingly random data can be used to piece together someone's identity.

In a recent visit to the site, AP found that certain personal details - including age, income and smoking habits - were being passed along, likely without consumers' knowledge, to advertising and Web analytics sites.

Third-party outfits that track website performance are a standard part of e-commerce. HealthCare.gov's privacy policy says in boldface that "no personally identifiable information is collected" by these Web measurement tools.

Google said it doesn't allow its systems to target ads based on health or medical history information. "When we learn of possible violations of this policy, we investigate and take swift action," the company said in a statement.

Still, the outside connections surprised a tech expert who evaluated HealthCare.gov's performance for the AP.

"Personally, I look at this ... and I don't know what is going on between the government and Facebook, and Google, and Twitter," said Mehdi Daoudi, CEO of Catchpoint Systems. "Why is that there?"

Tracking consumers' Internet searches is a lucrative business, helping Google, Facebook and others tailor ads to customers' interests. Because your computer and mobile devices can be assigned an individual signature, profiles of Internet users can be pieced together, generating lists that have commercial value.

Third-party sites embedded on HealthCare.gov can't see your name, birth date or Social Security number. But they may be able to correlate the fact that your computer accessed the government website with your other Internet activities.

Have you been researching a chronic illness like coronary artery blockage? Do you shop online for smoking-cessation aids? Are you investigating genetic markers for a certain type of breast cancer? Are you seeking help for financial problems, or for an addiction?

Daoudi's company, Catchpoint Systems, came across some 50 third-party connections embedded on HealthCare.gov. They work in the background, unseen to most consumers.

The AP replicated the results. In one 10-minute visit to HealthCare.gov recently, dozens of websites were accessed behind the scenes. They included Google's data-analytics service, Twitter, Facebook and a host of online advertising providers.

"I think that this could erode ... confidentiality when dealing with medical data and medical information," said Cooper Quintin, a staff technologist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group.

Sending such personal information raises significant privacy concerns. A company like Doubleclick, for example, could match up the personal data provided by healthcare.gov with an already extensive trove of information about what you read online and what your buying preferences are to create an extremely detailed profile of exactly who you are and what your interests are. It could do all this based on a tracking cookie that it sets which would be the same across any site you visit. Based on this data, Doubleclick could start showing you smoking ads or infer your risk of cancer based on where you live, how old you are and your status as a smoker.1 Doubleclick might start to show you ads related to pregnancy, which could have embarrassing and potentially dangerous consequences such as when Target notified a woman's family that she was pregnant before she even told them.

Sources:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/01/healthcare.gov-sends-personal-data

http://m.apnews.com/ap/db_289563/contentdetail.htm?contentguid=Py6rd7WO

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noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 10 Feb 2014 12:33:00 +0000

FEBRUARY 11TH 2014 IS

The Day We Fight Back

AGAINST MASS SURVEILLANCE

Battles on streets of Kiev, everything you've read and saw in TV news reports is TOTAL CRAP.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 27 Jan 2014 03:14:00 +0000

Revolution in Kiev, Ukraine

by Ilya Varlamov
January 22, 2014

In the last days I received multiple requests to translate my posts for foreign readers, as they have very limited information about the happenings in Ukraine.

This material describes events which took place in Kyev on January 22 and 23.

Please click link below to see photos of the Battles on streets of Kiev.

Sharing and distribution is appreciated

I came to Kiev. I came to see for myself what is happening here. Of course, an hour after arriving at Maidan, you begin to understand that everything what you've read in dozens of articles, saw in TV news reports is total crap. In the upcoming reports I will try to, as objectively as possible, to sort out this new wave of Kiev revolution.

Usually reporters try to answer the question: “Who came out to Maidan and why.” Depending on the political leaning of MSM, the answers are different.

Some say it's “fascists who came out to lynch the Moscali (Ukranian derogatory for Moscovites and Russians in general).”, some say “they're bums and slackers, who've got nothing better to do” and “instigators on the government payroll.” In reality, there is no answer. Those who came out are completely different.

Remember, how a couple of years in Moscow there was a MSM buzzword “angry townspeople.” Here you see football fans, retirees, office plankton. And everyone is standing together. A sweet, ol' grandmother is pouring Molotv cocktail in a nationalists' bottles; and a manager of a large company is carrying ammunition to the student. And as it seems to me at this time, these people do not have a specific plan, nor idea of what to do next. Of course, individually, everyone has their own plan to “save Ukraine.” For some its “we need a couple of crates of AKs and grenades, we'll sort things out here quickly.” Others “need to ask the world community for help and bring in the UN troops.” At this time there is no central idea of what to do, an idea that can unite and point in one direction the people at Maidan.

The only thing that is completely clear – people came out against Yanukovich.

The burning barricades are visited by people who have come to let out anger and resentment that have accumulated over the years – for the excesses of cops; for the corruption; for the 'golden toilet'; for the stupidity of the sell-out officials.

An elderly man, 80 years of age, walks up to young guys in masks and asks them for a bottle of flaming liquid. They ask him:

“- Grandad, you wont be able to throw it far enough!
- Just give me one, I want to show these beasts that they cannot treat me like this”

Unfortunately, the Ukranians had bad luck with opposition. The street mob is not controlled by anyone. Klichko and his company met with Yanukovch yesterday.

Later they came out to the people, began to say something, but no one believes them. And no one wants to follow them. The main mass of people are completely non-political. They come out to kick Yanukovich and his company's ass.

Everyone has their own grievances and vision of the future.

There are very real battles on the streets of Kiev right now. Unfortunately, Yanukovich is far away, so the Berkut (Ukranian SWAT) and soldiers have to play the role of Yanukovich' ass. The scenery in Kiev is scary. Black smoke, burning barricades and constant explosions. Berkut's flashbangs and the protestors' fireworks explode in the streets. Each side is shooting at the other and there are already first casualties(2 to 5 based on different sources).

Let's go to the barricades?

I rented a room in the hotel "Dnepr", the very center on the European square. I come up to the main entrance, all doors are locked, lights are out. A group of men in helmets and protection, hanging nearby, greet me “Welcome to Kiev, Mister.” - they've confused me with a foreign tourist. Everyone's laughing. It turns out that the entrance to the hotel is through a local bar. The security guy opens the door and leads me through dark hallways to the lobby. The lights are off, so as not to attract attention. After all, the hotel is almost at the front line.

Back when it was all starting, there was a stage here, from which politicians pontificated their smart ideas about the future of Ukraine. Now the politicians have move on to Maidan, and the European square has become the rear base of the revolution. Cars with food arrive here; old tires for the bonfires, wood, medicine and reinforcements.

Please click link below to see photos of the Battles on streets of Kiev.

Sharing and distribution is appreciated

Source:
http://zyalt.livejournal.com/984735.html
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CSEC set up 'covert sites at the request of NSA

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 20 Jan 2014 12:46:00 +0000

Canada's spooks were NSA bagmen, established spy-posts in 20+ countries and "transnational targets"

By Greg Weston, Glenn Greenwald, Ryan Gallagher
CBC
Dec 9, 201

A top secret document retrieved by American whistleblower Edward Snowden reveals Canada has set up covert spying posts around the world and conducted espionage against trading partners at the request of the U.S. National Security Agency.

The leaked NSA document being reported exclusively by CBC News reveals Canada is involved with the huge American intelligence agency in clandestine surveillance activities in “approximately 20 high-priority countries."

Much of the document contains hyper-sensitive operational details which CBC News has chosen not to make public.

Sections of the document with the highest classification make it clear in some instances why American spymasters are particularly keen about enlisting their Canadian counterparts, the Communications Security Establishment Canada.

"CSEC shares with the NSA their unique geographic access to areas unavailable to the U.S," the document says.

The briefing paper describes a "close co-operative relationship" between the NSA and its Canadian counterpart, the Communications Security Establishment Canada, or CSEC — a relationship "both sides would like to see expanded and strengthened.

"The intelligence exchange with CSEC covers worldwide national and transnational targets."The four-page missive is stamped “Top Secret” and dated April 3, 2013. That makes it one of the freshest documents Snowden was able to walk away with before he went public in June.

The briefing notes make it clear that Canada plays a very robust role in intelligence-gathering around the world in a way that has won respect from its American equivalents.

Wesley Wark, a Canadian security and intelligence expert at the University of Ottawa, says the document makes it clear Canada can take advantage of its relatively benign image internationally to covertly amass a vast amount of information abroad.

"I think we still trade on a degree of an international brand as an innocent partner in the international sphere," Wark said. "There's not that much known about Canadian intelligence.

"In that sense, Canadian operations might escape at least the same degree of notice and surveillance that the operations of the U.S. or Britain in foreign states would be bound to attract."

The intimate Canada-U.S. electronic intelligence relationship dates back more than 60 years. Most recently, another Snowden document reported by CBC News showed the two agencies co-operated to allow the NSA to spy on the G20 summit of international leaders in Toronto in 2010.

But what the latest secret document reveals for the first time is just how expansive Canada's international espionage activities have become.

CSEC set up 'covert sites at the request of NSA'

The NSA document depicts CSEC as a sophisticated, capable and highly respected intelligence partner involved in all manner of joint spying missions, including setting up listening posts at the request of the Americans.

"CSEC offers resources for advanced collection, processing and analysis, and has opened covert sites at the request of NSA," the document states.

Thomas Drake, a former NSA executive turned whistleblower, says it's no surprise Canada would accede to the U.S. agency's requests: "That's been the case for years.

"Just think of certain foreign agreements or relationships that Canada actually enjoys that the United States doesn't, and under the cover of those relationships, guess what you can conduct? These kinds of secret surveillance or collection efforts."

Drake says he worked with CSEC on various projects while he was at the NSA, and the Canadians were "extraordinarily capable."

CSEC conducts much of its foreign cyber-spying operations from its headquarters in Ottawa, using some of the most powerful computing equipment in the country to intercept foreign phone calls and monitor internet communications in nations around the globe.

Its American counterpart does the same, but is itself currently the target of a widespread internal probe by the U.S. administration in the wake of leaked documents from Snowden showing the NSA has been collecting masses of information on millions of ordinary Americans.

Wark reviewed the leaked document at the invitation of CBC News, and says he isn't surprised CSEC would be asked by the NSA to set up covert foreign spying operations.

He says it is not uncommon for embassies and consulates to be used as listening posts when a close proximity to targets is required.

But he also points out it all comes with significant risks to Canada — namely, getting caught "can create huge diplomatic fallout."

High-level approval required

Aside from compromising the actual intelligence operation, Wark says, an exposed spy mission can imperil Canada's other diplomatic operations — "the political contacts, the trade contacts, the generation of goodwill between the countries and any sense of co-operation."

Wark says if a country feels targeted by a Canadian embassy, it can put everyone working there under a cloud of suspicion: “Are they really diplomats or are they spies?”

As a result of those risks, Wark says, approval for CSEC to establish a covert spying post at the request of the NSA would have to come from the ministerial level of the Canadian government — or even from the prime minister himself.

"It's far too politically and diplomatically sensitive, and the consequences of being discovered are far too great, for it to be simply an operational matter for an intelligence agency," he says.

"In the past, it certainly has been and it should be today, a matter of very senior political sign-off."

Canada and the U.S. have long shared security intelligence with sister agencies in the U.K., Australia and New Zealand – the so-called "Five Eyes" partnership.

But the latest secret Snowden missive shows CSEC and the NSA becoming physically intertwined.

"Co-operative efforts include the exchange of liaison officers and integrees," the document reveals, a reference to CSEC operatives working inside the NSA, and vice-versa.

It notes the NSA also supplies much of the computer hardware and software CSEC uses for encryption, decoding and other state-of-the-art essentials of electronic spying needed for "collection, processing and analytic efforts."

In return, the NSA acknowledges that its Canadian counterpart provides the partnership with its own "cryptographic products, cryptanalysis, technology and software."

Finally, the U.S. agency says CSEC has increased its investment in research and development projects "of mutual interest."

CSEC employs about 2,000 people, has an annual budget of roughly $450 million and will soon move into an architecturally spectacular new Ottawa headquarters costing Canadian taxpayers almost $1.2 billion.

By comparison, the NSA employs an estimated 40,000 people plus thousands of private contractors, and spends over $40 billion a year

NSA whistleblower Drake says the problem is that both CSEC and the NSA lack proper oversight, and without it, they have morphed into runaway surveillance.

"There is a clear and compelling danger to democracy in Canada by virtue of how far these secret surveillance operations have gone."

The office of Defence Minister Rob Nicholson, who is responsible for CSEC, issued a written statement saying CSEC’s activities are subject to review by an independent commissioner.

A spokesperson for the U.S. government said: "While we are not going to comment publicly on every specific alleged activity, we have made clear that the United States gathers foreign intelligence of the type gathered by all nations."

Source:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/snowden-document-shows-canada-set-up-spy-posts-for-nsa-1.2456886

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NSA Racing To Build Freakishly Powerful Computer

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 03 Jan 2014 02:47:00 +0000

NSA seeks to build quantum computer capable of breaking all forms of encryption

RT.com
January 2, 2014

In room-size metal boxes, secure against electromagnetic leaks, the National Security Agency is racing to build a computer that could break nearly every kind of encryption used to protect banking, medical, business and government records around the world.

According to documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, the effort to build “a cryptologically useful quantum computer” — a machine exponentially faster than classical computers — is part of a $79.7 million research program titled, “Penetrating Hard Targets.” Much of the work is hosted under classified contracts at a laboratory in College Park.

The development of a quantum computer has long been a goal of many in the scientific community, with revolutionary implications for fields like medicine as well as for the NSA’s code-breaking mission. With such technology, all current forms of public key encryption would be broken, including those used on many secure Web sites as well as the type used to protect state secrets.

Physicists and computer scientists have long speculated whether the NSA’s efforts are more advanced than those of the best civilian labs. Although the full extent of the agency’s research remains unknown, the documents provided by Snowden suggest that the NSA is no closer to success than others in the scientific community.

“It seems improbable that the NSA could be that far ahead of the open world without anybody knowing it,” said Scott Aaronson, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT.

The NSA appears to regard itself as running neck and neck with quantum computing labs sponsored by the European Union and the Swiss government, with steady progress but little prospect of an immediate breakthrough.

“The geographic scope has narrowed from a global effort to a discrete focus on the European Union and Switzerland,” one NSA document states.

Seth Lloyd, professor of quantum mechanical engineering at MIT, said the NSA’s focus is not misplaced. “The E.U. and Switzerland have made significant advances over the last decade and have caught up to the U.S. in quantum computing technology,” he said.

The NSA declined to comment for this story.

The documents, however, indicate that the agency carries out some of its research in large, shielded rooms known as Faraday cages, which are designed to prevent electromagnetic energy from coming in or out. Those, according to one brief description, are required “to keep delicate quantum computing experiments running.”

[Read a document describing classification levels related to quantum computing efforts]

The basic principle underlying quantum computing is known as “quantum superposition,” the idea that an object simultaneously exists in all states. A classical computer uses binary bits, which are either zeroes or ones. A quantum computer uses quantum bits, or qubits, which are simultaneously zero and one.

This seeming impossibility is part of the mystery that lies at the heart of quantum theory, which even theoretical physicists say no one completely understands.

“If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics,” said the late Nobel laureate Richard Feynman, who is widely regarded as the pioneer in quantum computing.

Here’s how it works, in theory: While a classical computer, however fast, must do one calculation at a time, a quantum computer can sometimes avoid having to make calculations that are unnecessary to solving a problem. That allows it to home in on the correct answer much more quickly and efficiently.

Quantum computing is so difficult to attain because of the fragile nature of such computers. In theory, the building blocks of such a computer might include individual atoms, photons or electrons. To maintain the quantum nature of the computer, these particles would need to be carefully isolated from their external environments.

“Quantum computers are extremely delicate, so if you don’t protect them from their environment, then the computation will be useless,” said Daniel Lidar, a professor of electrical engineering and the director of the Center for Quantum Information Science and Technology at the University of Southern California.

A working quantum computer would open the door to easily breaking the strongest encryption tools in use today, including a standard known as RSA, named for the initials of its creators. RSA scrambles communications, making them unreadable to anyone but the intended recipient, without requiring the use of a shared password. It is commonly used in Web browsers to secure financial transactions and in encrypted e-mails. RSA is used because of the difficulty of factoring the product of two large prime numbers. Breaking the encryption involves finding those two numbers. This cannot be done in a reasonable amount of time on a classical computer.

In 2009, computer scientists using classical methods were able to discover the primes within a 768-bit number, but it took almost two years and hundreds of computers to factor it. The scientists estimated that it would take 1,000 times longer to break a 1,024-bit encryption key, which is commonly used for online transactions.

A large-scale quantum computer, however, could theoretically break a 1,024-bit encryption much faster. Some leading Internet companies are moving to 2,048-bit keys, but even those are thought to be vulnerable to rapid decryption with a quantum computer.

Quantum computers have many applications for today’s scientific community, including the creation of artificial intelligence. But the NSA fears the implications for national security.

“The application of quantum technologies to encryption algorithms threatens to dramatically impact the US government’s ability to both protect its communications and eavesdrop on the communications of foreign governments,” according to an internal document provided by Snowden.

Experts are not sure how soon a quantum computer would be feasible. A decade ago, some experts said that developing a large quantum computer was likely 10 to 100 years in the future. Five years ago, Lloyd said the goal was at least 10 years away.

Last year, Jeff Forshaw, a professor at the University of Manchester, told Britain’s Guardian newspaper, “It is probably too soon to speculate on when the first full-scale quantum computer will be built but recent progress indicates that there is every reason to be optimistic.”

“I don’t think we’re likely to have the type of quantum computer the NSA wants within at least five years, in the absence of a significant breakthrough maybe much longer,” Lloyd told The Post in a recent interview.

However, some companies claim to already be producing small quantum computers. A Canadian company, D-Wave Systems , says it has been making quantum computers since 2009. In 2012, it sold a $10 million version to Google, NASA and the Universities Space Research Association, according to news reports.

That quantum computer, however, would never be useful for breaking public key encryption like RSA.

“Even if everything they’re claiming is correct, that computer, by its design, cannot run Shor’s algorithm,” said Matthew Green, a research professor at the Johns Hopkins Information Security Institute, referring to the algorithm that could be used to break encryption like RSA.

Experts think that one of the largest hurdles to breaking encryption with a quantum computer is building a computer with enough qubits, which is difficult given the very fragile state of quantum computers. By the end of September, the NSA expected to be able to have some basic building blocks, which it described in a document as “dynamical decoupling and complete quantum control on two semiconductor qubits.”

“That’s a great step, but it’s a pretty small step on the road to building a large-scale quantum computer,” Lloyd said.

A quantum computer capable of breaking cryptography would need hundreds or thousands more qubits than that.

The budget for the National Intelligence Program, commonly referred to as the “black budget,” details the “Penetrating Hard Targets” project and noted that this step “will enable initial scaling towards large systems in related and follow-on efforts.”

Another project, called the “Owning the Net,” is using quantum research to support the creation of new quantum-based attacks on encryptions like RSA, documents show.

“The irony of quantum computing is that if you can imagine someone building a quantum computer that can break encryption a few decades into the future, then you need to be worried right now,” Lidar said.

Source:
http://www.rt.com/usa/quantum-computer-nsa-encryption-100/
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America wants to make sure it preserves the right to spy overseas.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 29 Nov 2013 03:19:00 +0000

Inside America's Plan to Kill Online Privacy Rights Everywhere

By Colum Lynch

Foreign Policy

November 20, 2013
[Emphasis added]

The United States and its key intelligence allies are quietly working behind the scenes to kneecap a mounting movement in the United Nations to promote a universal human right to online privacy, according to diplomatic sources and an internal American government document obtained by The Cable.

The diplomatic battle is playing out in an obscure U.N. General Assembly committee that is considering a proposal by Brazil and Germany to place constraints on unchecked internet surveillance by the National Security Agency and other foreign intelligence services.

American representatives have made it clear that they won't tolerate such checks on their global surveillance network.

The stakes are high, particularly in Washington -- which is seeking to contain an internationalbacklash against NSA spying -- and in Brasilia, where Brazilian President Dilma Roussef is personally involved in monitoring the U.N. negotiations.

The Brazilian and German initiative seeks to apply the right to privacy, which is enshrined in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), to online communications. Their proposal, firstrevealed by The Cable, affirms a "right to privacy that is not to be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with their privacy, family, home, or correspondence." It notes that while public safety may "justify the gathering and protection of certain sensitive information," nations "must ensure full compliance" with international human rights laws. A final version the text is scheduled to be presented to U.N. members on Wednesday evening and the resolution is expected to be adopted next week.

A draft of the resolution, which was obtained by The Cable, calls on states to "to respect and protect the right to privacy," asserting that the "same rights that people have offline must also be protected online, including the right to privacy." It also requests the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, Navi Pillay, present the U.N. General Assembly next year with a report on the protection and promotion of the right to privacy, a provision that will ensure the issue remains on the front burner.

Publicly, U.S. representatives say they're open to an affirmation of privacy rights. "The United States takes very seriously our international legal obligations, including those under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights," Kurtis Cooper, a spokesman for the U.S. mission to the United Nations, said in an email. "We have been actively and constructively negotiating to ensure that the resolution promotes human rights and is consistent with those obligations."

But privately, American diplomats are pushing hard to kill a provision of the Brazilian and German draft which states that "extraterritorial surveillance" and mass interception of communications, personal information, and metadata may constitute a violation of human rights. The United States and its allies, according to diplomats, outside observers, and documents, contend that the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights does not apply to foreign espionage.

In recent days, the United States circulated to its allies a confidential paper highlighting American objectives in the negotiations, "Right to Privacy in the Digital Age -- U.S. Redlines." It calls for changing the Brazilian and German text so "that references to privacy rights are referring explicitly to States' obligations under ICCPR and remove suggestion that such obligations apply extraterritorially."

In other words: America wants to make sure it preserves the right to spy overseas.

The U.S. paper also calls on governments to promote amendments that would weaken Brazil's and Germany's contention that some "highly intrusive" acts of online espionage may constitute a violation of freedom of expression. Instead, the United States wants to limit the focus to illegal surveillance -- which the American government claims it never, ever does.

Collecting information on tens of millions of people around the world is perfectly acceptable, the Obama administration has repeatedly said. It's authorized by U.S. statute, overseen by Congress, and approved by American courts.

"Recall that the USG's [U.S. government's] collection activities that have been disclosed are lawful collections done in a manner protective of privacy rights," the paper states. "So a paragraph expressing concern about illegal surveillance is one with which we would agree."

The privacy resolution, like most General Assembly decisions, is neither legally binding nor enforceable by any international court.

But international lawyers say it is important because it creates the basis for an international consensus -- referred to as "soft law" -- that over time will make it harder and harder for the United States to argue that its mass collection of foreigners' data is lawful and in conformity with human rights norms.

"They want to be able to say ‘we haven't broken the law, we're not breaking the law, and we won't break the law,'" said Dinah PoKempner, the general counsel for Human Rights Watch, who has been tracking the negotiations.

The United States, she added, wants to be able to maintain that "we have the freedom to scoop up anything we want through the massive surveillance of foreigners because we have no legal obligations."

The United States negotiators have been pressing their case behind the scenes, raising concerns that the assertion of extraterritorial human rights could constrain America's effort to go after international terrorists. But Washington has remained relatively muted about their concerns in the U.N. negotiating sessions. According to one diplomat, "the United States has been very much in the backseat," leaving it to its allies, Australia, Britain, and Canada, to take the lead.

There is no extraterritorial obligation on states "to comply with human rights," explained one diplomat who supports the U.S. position. "The obligation is on states to uphold the human rights of citizens within their territory and areas of their jurisdictions."

The position, according to Jamil Dakwar, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Human Rights Program, has little international backing. The International Court of Justice, the U.N. Human Rights Committee, and the European Court have all asserted that states do have an obligation to comply with human rights laws beyond their own borders, he noted. "Governments do have obligation beyond their territories," said Dakwar, particularly in situations, like the Guantanamo Bay detention center, where the United States exercises "effective control" over the lives of the detainees.

Both PoKempner and Dakwar suggested that courts may also judge that the U.S. dominance of the Internet places special legal obligations on it to ensure the protection of users' human rights.

"It's clear that when the United States is conducting surveillance, these decisions and operations start in the United States, the servers are at NSA headquarters, and the capabilities are mainly in the United States," he said. "To argue that they have no human rights obligations overseas is dangerous because it sends a message that there is void in terms of human rights protection outside countries territory. It's going back to the idea that you can create a legal black hole where there is no applicable law." There were signs emerging on Wednesday that America may have been making ground in pressing the Brazilians and Germans to back on one of its toughest provisions. In an effort to address the concerns of the U.S. and its allies, Brazil and Germany agreed to soften the language suggesting that mass surveillance may constitute a violation of human rights. Instead, it simply deep "concern at the negative impact" that extraterritorial surveillance "may have on the exercise of and enjoyment of human rights." The U.S., however, has not yet indicated it would support the revised proposal.

The concession "is regrettable. But it’s not the end of the battle by any means," said Human Rights Watch’s PoKempner.

She added that there will soon be another opportunity to corral America's spies: a U.N. discussion on possible human rights violations as a result of extraterritorial surveillance will soon be taken up by the U.N. High commissioner.

(Access may require login)

Source:

http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/11/20/exclusive_inside_americas_plan_to_kill_online_privacy_rights_everywhere
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JFK Assasination Anniversary

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 22 Nov 2013 12:33:00 +0000

Just Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald?

By Joseph Lazzaro
International Business Times
November 18 2013

In September 1964, the Warren Commission concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone when he assassinated President John F. Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States and the only Roman Catholic elected to the office. The commission said that on Nov. 22, 1963, at about 12:30 p.m. Central Time, Oswald fired three shots from behind the presidential motorcade on the sixth floor in the Texas School Book Depository building using a Mannlicher-Carcano rifle, as the presidential motorcade passed through Dealey Plaza in Dallas.

The report concluded the following: One shot struck Kennedy in the back of the neck and exited through his throat and then hit Texas Gov. John Connally, creating five wounds in Connally’s body. A shot after the aforementioned shot struck Kennedy in the rear portion of his head, killing him. Another shot missed the motorcade, but its ricochet injured bystander James Tague in the cheek as he stood 270 feet west of the motorcade on the Stemmons Freeway Overpass; the commission did not specify whether the missed shot was the first or third shot.

Accused Assassin Arrested In 90 Minutes

Approximately 90 minutes after the assassination, Oswald was captured in the Texas Theatre in Dallas. He was arrested first for the handgun murder of Dallas police officer J.D. Tippit, whom the Warren Commission concluded Oswald had also killed after the Dealey Plaza shooting, and he was later charged with murdering President Kennedy. However, the accused Oswald did not get to stand trial because Dallas strip club/nightclub owner Jack Ruby shot and killed Oswald two days later, on Nov. 24, 1963, at 11:21 a.m. Central Time, as Oswald was being transferred by police from a Dallas police station cell to a nearby county jail.

Further, the accepted and widely published profile of Oswald in the initial months and years after the assassination was that of a “low-achievement, socially isolated, ill-educated Communist determined to kill someone of significance in the United States.” He was portrayed in the media as “a revolutionary who sought a change in the economic order from capitalism to communism by violent means,” or as a “mentally unstable/crazy person,” or some combination of the above.

A Second Commission, A Different Conclusion

Later, in 1979, a second U.S. government commission rendered a different conclusion regarding who killed President Kennedy. The House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) concluded that Kennedy was very likely assassinated as a result of a plot/conspiracy, and that scientific acoustical evidence established a high probability that at least two gunman fired at the president -- with three shots fired from the TSBD (the book depository) and one shot from the grassy knoll. However, the HSCA was unable to identify the other gunman or the extent of the conspiracy.

Also, the HSCA agreed with the Warren Commission regarding Oswald’s role, but it specified which rifle shot from the TSBD missed the motorcade. The HSCA concluded that Oswald had fired three rifle shots at Kennedy, with the first missing the motorcade and the next two hitting it, the last of which struck Kennedy in the head, killing him.

However, rather than close the JFK assassination case, the Warren Commission’s and the HSCA’s work and conclusions did just the opposite.

In particular, questions remain about the Warren Commission’s failure to: interview some Dealey Plaza witnesses; review discrepancies between the conclusions of the Parkland Hospital physicians’ examination and the evidence provided by the Bethesda [Maryland] Naval Hospital’s autopsy photos; investigate the destruction of vital forensic presidential limousine evidence; evaluate the Dallas Police Department’s interrogation of Oswald.

These and other concerns have led many assassination researchers to reject the Warren Commission's conclusions, either in whole or in part, and argue, like the HSCA, that more than one person fired gunshots at President Kennedy that day in a plot or conspiracy to kill the president.

Conversely, lone-gunman supporters stand by the Warren Commission’s report and conclusion, on the grounds that not enough hard evidence exists to undermine the commission’s conclusion that Oswald acted alone.

Hence, one can summarize the state of the research and investigation into the assassination of President Kennedy as this:

To date, there’s no “smoking gun,” or, in other words, while there’s no incontrovertible evidence of a plot or conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy, there is a pattern of suspicious activity, along with a series of anomalies and a commonality of interests among key parties, that compel additional research and the release to the public of key documents.

Researchers' Work, Released Documents Revealing More Information

Of course, lone-gunman supporters argue that as far as who assassinated President Kennedy, there’s nothing more to research: for them, it’s a settled issue. Even so, each year, new evidence becomes available -- on a variety of aspects in the case -- that tell us more than we knew previously about what really happened on that ignominious and fateful day in Dallas.

Further, one current research trend concerns the life of Lee Harvey Oswald -- in addition to research into witness evidence, forensic evidence, Parkland medical exam/Bethesda autopsy evidence, ballistic evidence, limousine evidence and interrogation evidence.

As mentioned, in the initial months and years after the assassination, the accepted and widely circulated profile of Oswald was that of a “low-achievement, socially isolated, communist” or a “radical who sought a change in the economic order from capitalism to communism by violent means” or a “mentally unstable/crazy person,” or some combination thereof.

However, the release of documents and research by historians, assassination researchers and other investigators indicates that Oswald was a much different person than the one who was initially portrayed after the assassination of President Kennedy.

Further, some of the recent, hard evidence on Oswald -- far from confirming a low-achievement individual -- reveals that he was a multiskilled individual who had a number of accomplishments. And while other pieces of hard evidence increase historians' clarity about various periods in Oswald’s life, much of it nevertheless begs other questions.

18 Questions That May Get the Nation Closer To The Truth

It’s those questions -- 18 of which are listed below -- that, when answered, will give the American people and others around the world a better understanding of who Lee Harvey Oswald was.

1) The United States Navy Base at Atsugi, Japan, to which U. S. Marine Corps member Oswald was assigned from September 1957 to November 1958, was not just a run-of-the-mill U.S. Navy-operated defense base. It was and is a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) base. Among other intelligence operations, the Atsugi base was one of two bases from which the CIA operated the top secret U-2 spy plane, which flew reconnaissance and surveillance missions over the Soviet Union and China. Why was the low-achieving, nondescript Oswald assigned to such a top secret and important base?

2) When Oswald defected to the Soviet Union in October 1959, as a former Marine, a 201 File on him containing personnel documents should have been created by the CIA, because he had been stationed at a top secret naval base. No such file was immediately opened; instead, it was delayed. Why?

Rather, a 201 File on him was created a year later, in December 1960, and that late opening compels questions regarding how the CIA interpreted Oswald’s defection.

To underscore, the CIA’s treatment of Oswald’s defection was an anomaly -- it says something about who Oswald was, or, minimally, how his file was viewed by the CIA. If a former U.S. Marine defected from the United States to the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War, and if he truly posed a risk of giving U.S. radar secrets and other sensitive information to the Russians, then why did the CIA did not immediately open a 201 File on him?

3) Oswald traveled through four nations in Europe en route to his defection to the Soviet Union, but he had virtually no money. As a person of modest means, how did Oswald finance his complicated defection trip?

4) During his trip through Europe to the Soviet Union, Oswald traveled from England to Helsinki, Finland, and initially checked in to the Hotel Torni -- which was roughly equivalent to staying at the Ritz Carlton. Where did the cash-strapped, low-resource, working-class Oswald get the money to stay at such a high-class hotel?

Perhaps Oswald underestimated the Torni’s hotel fees, because he soon checked out and sought another hotel -- but his second choice wasn’t much cheaper: the Klaus Kurki Hotel -- another four-star hotel -- which was similar in quality to the Four Seasons.

5) Upon arriving in the Soviet Union, Oswald said he was a U.S. Marine Corp. radar operator, and that he knew some “classified things” that he planned to give to the Soviets. However, Oswald was never punished by the U.S. government for making these disloyal statements. Why?

6) Oswald, despite his Marxist beliefs and defection to the Soviet Union, was later allowed to return to the United States after he decided he was wrong to defect and had become disillusioned with the form of communism practiced by the Russians. Despite his defection and all-but abandoned Soviet sympathies, and despite it being the height of the Cold War, Oswald was permitted by the U.S. government to return to the United States. Why?

7) Just before he re-defected to the United States, Oswald wrote to his mother, Marguerite Oswald, telling her that before he traveled to his home in New Orleans, “I plan to stop over in Washington for a while.” Why did Oswald stop in Washington, D.C.? What did he do there?

8) After he defected back to the United States from the Soviet Union, Oswald was de-briefed by the CIA, which the CIA initially lied about by claiming the interview did not occur. The CIA, when documents later surfaced that it had de-briefed Oswald, revised its story and called this meeting a “routine contact” for anyone who re-defected to the United States. Was this a routine contact? Or something more substantial? And why did the CIA initially lie about its contact with Oswald?

9) Some “Hands Off Cuba” leaflets, which Oswald distributed in August 1963 on the day of his arrest in New Orleans following a scuffle with anti-Castro protesters, were stamped with the address 544 Camp Street, which had no connection to any pro-Castro organization but did identify the building in which the offices of Guy Bannister, a private investigator involved in anti-Castro activities, were located. Why did they have a 544 Camp Street address?

10) The Warren Commission portrayed Oswald as a disgruntled, low-achievement loner. But the record shows that Oswald was a Civil Air Patrol cadet and a U.S. Marine Corps radar operator who was also trained in electronics, interrogation techniques and the Russian language. Oswald was also able to defect to the Soviet Union, live in Russia for two years and re-defect with a Russian wife … and gain re-admission to the United States in a matter of days after applying for re-defection. That’s a remarkable training, skills and accomplishment record for a low-achievement, low-resource citizen. How can one reconcile the Warren Commission’s profile with what the Oswald record shows?

11) The U.S. State Department extended Oswald a loan to pay for his travel expenses to return to the United States. As JFK Assassination Researcher Bob Harris points out, that’s pretty generous treatment during the height of the Cold War for someone with a Marxist past, who could have been a potential subversive and traitor to his country. Why did the State Department extend the loan?

12) After returning to the United States, Oswald contacted these three organizations within 90 days: the Fair Play For Cuba Committee, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Congress of Racial Equality -- three organizations at the top of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s subversive list. Why did Oswald contact the organizations Hoover was trying to infiltrate and undermine the most?

13) Despite being, arguably, the most important crime case in modern U.S. history, crime investigators in Dallas did not have a legal, stenographic record made of the interrogation of Oswald after his arrest, aside from memoranda written by interrogators. And the two forms of records are not remotely the same: The actual interrogation time of Oswald was about 10-12 hours -- why was there no stenographic record made that reflects that amount of time for the interrogation? And given the importance of the case, why wasn’t a professional stenographer used? And why wasn’t an audio recording of the interrogation sessions made?

14) As noted, Oswald was portrayed by the Warren Commission as being a low-achievement loner and a very ordinary person. Yet, throughout his life, Oswald was surrounded by high-achievement, extraordinary people: David Ferrie, Priscilla Johnson McMillan, George de Mohrenschildt, Ruth Hyde Paine and Michael Paine, to list a few. How can one reconcile the Warren Commission’s profile of Oswald with the relationships Oswald had with these accomplished individuals during his adult life?

15) The Warren Commission also portrays Oswald as a mentally unstable/crazy person, but Oswald was nevertheless able to attract and court -- in a foreign country, no less -- Marina Prusakova, a pharmacy employee, of Minsk, Russia (then the Soviet Union), whom he married in 1959. How can one reconcile the Warren Commission’s conclusion that Oswald was mentally unstable -- which generally is not viewed as a quality likely to attract a mate -- with Marina Prusakova’s willingness to marry Oswald?

Oswald was also able to re-defect to the United States with his Russian wife, quickly, after he requested to return to his native country. Why was he able to do so with such speed and ease?

16) CIA Operations Officer George Joannides of Miami, now deceased, guided and monitored the New Orleans chapter of an anti-Castro Cuban exile group, the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil (DRE), that Oswald had a series of encounters with in the summer of 1963, three months before Kennedy was murdered.

Later, in 1978, Joannides served as CIA liaison to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, but he did not disclose this obvious conflict-of-interest to the HSCA regarding his role in the events of 1963. Why?

HSCA Chief Counsel G. Robert Blakey said that had he known who Joannides was at that time, Joannides would have not continued as CIA liaison and instead would have become a witness who would have been interrogated under oath by the HSCA staff or by the committee.

17) Thirty-five years later, the CIA continues to oppose the release of Joannides’ files that relate to the JFK assassination. Why? (The public release of these files, among other classified JFK files, is being sought byauthor/researcher Jefferson Morley in the ongoing Morley v. CIA suit.) The CIA says the Joannides files must remain classified due to “national security.” Why?

18) The classified files of CIA officers David Atlee Philips, who was involved in pre-assassination surveillance of Oswald; Birch D O’Neal, who as counter-intelligence head of the CIA opened a file on defector Oswald; E. Howard Hunt; William King Harvey; Anne Goodpasture; and David Sanchez Morales -- when made public, these files will also help the nation determine what really happened in Dallas, who Oswald was, and how the CIA treated and handled his file. But as with Joannides’ files, the CIA said these files must remain classified until at least 2017, and perhaps longer, due to U.S. national security. Why? It has been 50 years. What event or act that occurred 50 years ago could possibly be in these files that could hurt U.S. national security?

Determining Factor On Oswald - The Record

Answers to these questions, and others, will not incontrovertibly prove that there was -- or was not -- a second gunman in Dealey Plaza during the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

But they will give the American people a better idea about whether the initial portrayal of Lee Harvey Oswald by the media and authorities was the truth. Or a lie.

Source:
http://www.ibtimes.com/jfk-assassination-just-who-was-lee-harvey-oswald-1474038
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Israel Gave Birth Control to Ethiopian Immigrants Without Their Consent

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 09 Nov 2013 01:46:00 +0000

In January 2013, Israel acknowledged that medical authorities have been giving Ethiopian immigrants long-term birth-control injections, often without their knowledge or consent. The Israeli government had previously denied the charges, which were first brought to light by investigative reporter Gal Gabbay in a December 8, 2012, broadcast of Israeli Educational Television’s news program, Vacuum. In January, the Israeli Health Ministry’s director-general, Ron Gamzu, ordered all gynecologists to stop administering the drugs.

Gabbay interviewed over thirty women from Ethiopia in an attempt to discover why birth rates in the immigrant community were so low. Israeli medical authorities had been injecting women of Ethiopian origin with a drug alleged to be Depo-Provera, a highly effective and long-lasting form of contraception. In some cases, the drugs were reportedly administered to women waiting in transit camps for permission to immigrate to Israel. Writing for the Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah makes the case that, “if the allegations are proven, this practice may fit the legal definition of genocide.”

Nearly 100,000 Ethiopian Jews have moved to Israel under the Law of Return since the 1980s, but some rabbis have questioned their Jewishness. In May 2012, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu ignited controversy when he warned that illegal immigrants from Africa “threaten our existence as a Jewish and democratic state.”

Sources:

Alistair Dawber, “Israel Gave Birth Control to Ethiopian Jews without Their Consent,”Independent, January 27, 2013, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/israel-gave-birth-control-to-ethiopian-jews-without-their-consent-8468800.html.

Ali Abunimah, “Did Israel Violate the Genocide Convention by Forcing Contraceptives on Ethiopian Women?” Electronic Intifada, January 28, 2013,http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/did-israel-violate-genocide-convention-forcing-contraceptives-ethiopian-women.

Beth Brogan, “Israel Admits Forced Birth Control For Ethiopian Immigrants,” Common Dreams, January 29, 2013, http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/01/29-0.

Student Researchers: Shanti Williams (College of Marin); Elizabeth Saechao (Sonoma State University)
Faculty Evaluator: Andy Lee Roth (College of Marin); Noel Byrne (Sonoma State University)

http://www.projectcensored.org/25-israel-gave-birth-control-ethiopian-immigrants-without-consent/
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noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 23 Oct 2013 01:11:00 +0000

Congress Considers Letting Pension Trustees Slash Benefits For Retirees: Report

The Huffington Post | By Dave Jamieson Posted: 10/22/2013 2:32 pm EDT | Updated: 10/22/2013 4:59 pm EDT

In the coming weeks, Congress will consider legislation that would reform pension laws in a way that could slash benefits already promised to retirees, In These Times reports.

The proposal, which hasn't been made public yet, would give trustees of multi-employer pension plans the discretion to cut guaranteed benefits, so long as those cuts were done as "early corrective actions" to financially troubled plans.

While corporations in the past have been able to wiggle out of guarantees for future retirees, the promises to current retirees have generally been untouchable.

That would change under the plan Congress will soon consider. "If adopted, the proposal would strike at the core" of U.S. pension law, reporter Cole Stangler writes.

The proportion of U.S. private-sector workers who enjoy defined-benefit pension plans has eroded significantly in recent years, as corporations switch to cheaper 401(k) plans to shift risks to their employees. Despite having fewer workers paying into such plans, and despite nearly being drained by the financial crisis, a lot of once-endangered multi-employer pension plans have since returned to stability.

According to Stangler, in addition to slashing benefits for many retirees, giving trustees the leeway to cut benefits in multi-employer plans could embolden corporations to argue for the same discretion in their own, smaller plans, which are subject to different rules.

"If this legislation included proposals to allow cuts to retiree benefits it would set a very bad precedent for all pension plans, large and small, public and private sector, troubled and well-funded, single-employer as well as multi-employer," Frank Larkin, of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, told In These Times.

The National Coordinating Committee for Multi-Employer Plans, which is made up of unions as well as employers, has already spent hundreds of thousands of dollars lobbying on the proposal.

Source:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/22/pension-cuts-in-these-times_n_4143938.html?utm_hp_ref=politics

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noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 14 Oct 2013 22:42:00 +0000

China Lost 14 Million People in World War II. Why Is This Forgotten?

Historian Rana Mitter believes a better understanding of China's future actions can follow a truer understanding of its World War II past.

By Michael Todd

September 17, 2013

When looking back at World War II, the victors see their own military contributions the clearest. Hence the United Kingdom spotlights the Battle of Britain and El Alamein, the Russians Stalingrad and Kursk, and the Americans D-Day and Midway. The contribution of China, whose war was the longest and among the bloodiest, tends to be forgotten in the West, and for years was little commemorated even in China.

A new book, Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945, by Oxford historian Rana Mitter, aims to sharpen this fuzzy picture by presenting the Middle Kingdom’s eight-year war against an invading Japan—a war that had been under way more than two years before the Nazis invaded Poland, which is the usual starting point for histories of World War II. “Essentially,” Mitter explained in an interview withPacific Standard, “the politics of the Cold War covered over that what is coming to be realized, I think, as one of the great missing pieces of the jigsaw puzzle of World War II.” Now, however, a combination of archives in China opening up and a new political attitude by its leaders has cracked the historical window.

For an American audience whose knowledge of China in the war might start with the 1937 Rape of Nanking and end with the volunteer American fighter pilots known as the Flying Tigers, the book offers a number of eye-openers:

• The contribution of the Soviet Union to the Chinese Nationalists, who were actively battling the Chinese Communists, was large and sustained. While it might have been ideologically unexpected, it fit in with Josef Stalin’s desire to most effectively check Japanese designs on the USSR. The two countries actually fought a sustained series of battles in Mongolia in 1939 which left thousands dead on both sides.

• While the Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek and Communist Mao Zedong are usually depicted as the titans of China’s resistance and its on-again, off-again civil war, Mitter details the rise and eclipse of a third figure, Wang Jingwei, whose stature and influence long equaled Chiang and Mao’s—until he made accommodation with the Japanese.

• The scale of China’s involvement in the war was massive. Chiang, for example, fielded four million troops at the Nationalist’s height, while China as a whole lost an estimated 14 million in the war. Had China folded, Japan’s capacity to fight the U.S. or even the Soviets would have been vastly amplified.

Why does any of this matter now? Mitter says the experience of World War II shapes Chinese attitudes today, especially between China and the United States and China and Japan, “two of the legs of a very important set of relationships in the Asiatic region. … I would argue very strongly that by looking at what happened in terms of a history in those years, you get a great deal of insight into what is important in that region now to people there and what will be important for the next decade to come.”

This has been edited for length and clarity.

The British title of the book is China’s War With Japan. In the U.S. it’sForgotten Ally. Can you tell me what was the decision-making process in choosing titles?

To some extent it has to do with the way in which some things are marketed. China’s War With Japan is not just the U.K. edition; it’s also the edition that’s being sold in East Asia, India, Australia, and a whole variety of places. And I think it’s fair to say, for instance, that if you were to buy the book in Hong Kong or Singapore, it’s probably not fair to say that China is the forgotten ally, because there, of course, the memory of the Asian war is still strong. So in that sense, it’s more of a descriptive title of what the book is about. The North American market, and the United States in particular, the titleForgotten Ally was chosen in quite an intentional way because obviously you know it’s a history of China and why it matters today in terms of that period.

But it’s also a reminder to the American public that there was this very important historical moment that has been forgotten and which is important for two reasons, one of which has to do with the very contemporary significance of understanding why Sino-American relations and Sino-Japanese relations, which are crucial to the shaping of the world, let alone the region, remain very volatile.

But the second reason actually has to do something with historical justice. Regardless of the many flaws of the Chinese government at the time, Chiang Kai-shek’s government, I think it’s fair to say that they never, neither then nor now, have been given sufficient credit for what has often been regarded as a purely American victory in Asia, and particularly the Pacific.

But the Chinese contribution up to now has generally been mostly dismissed or regarded as very minor, secondary, and not really worth bothering with. I think as we move decades and decades away from the events themselves, it’s no longer tenable to retain that position.

So why did this get lost? China was one of the Big Four at the end of the conflict, and the China lobby was very strong in the U.S. And then 14 million people who died make another fairly compelling argument. What happened?

It’s a good reason to remember that on its own. I would say that one of the single facts, which is worth remembering if you want to annoy an official in the Chinese Communist Party, is to remind them that the reason, the primary reason, that China today has a seat in the permanent five on the United Nations Security Council, the top table of global diplomacy, is not because of anything that Chairman Mao did. It was because of the wartime efforts of Chiang Kai-shek, and essentially as a direct result of China’s involvement on the Allied side in World War II.

China now finds itself—more than 65, 70 years nearly after the end of World War II—as the only non-European, non-white power to sit at that top table. So these things do have a great deal of significance today.

When were they forgotten? Put very simply, China’s wartime experience, suffering, and contribution to the Allied cause fell into a hole created by the Cold War. Neither side had an interest in recalling what China did.

On the Chinese side, after 1949 when the civil war was over, the Nationalists had been exiled to Taiwan, and Mao was victorious on the mainland, you had essentially a virgin history in the mainland of China—that the only people who had made a contribution to fighting and defeating the Japanese were the Chinese communists.

The contribution that had actually been made by the much larger Nationalist army was essentially either dismissed or wiped out of the official history that was taught in China itself. So there’s sort of an historical black hole there.

But we can’t put any of the responsibility by any means on the Chinese communists on the mainland. You have to remember that in the West, we very quickly forgot about that wartime contribution as well. The reason is that Chiang Kai-shek, the Chinese wartime leader, was essentially seen as a sort of embarrassment—this Cold War relic remaining on Taiwan, looking more and more irrelevant year by year, associated with incompetence and corruption, with a whole variety of qualities that the West didn’t find very attractive.

But what was forgotten was the leader, through a whole swath of decisions, many of them very problematic and difficult, had nonetheless kept China in the war against Japan. First of all, on his own for about four and half years, and then of course as part of the very difficult alliance with the West for another four years after that.

One thing that came out in your book that was surprising to me is the idea that China as a geographical construct, at least modern China as a geographical construct, seems to have arisen out of the war. Their west was not considered part of the main area. Is that a correct reading?

I think it’s actually one of the most important elements of the question: Why on Earth does World War II matter for China? And the answer, well one of the answers, is geography.

It happens for a variety of reasons. But at its most basic, there’s a sort of irony that China’s moment of greatest crisis in the 20th century in terms of foreign invasion, the Japanese invasion, actually forces the government, particularly the Nationalist government at the time, to centralize the authority. It has to finally eliminate one of the big problems of the era, which was the warlordism—the different military leaders who control different parts of China at that stage. Some of them have been done away with in a pretty brutal manner.

And as a result, at the end of the war, even though China was smashed beyond recognition in many ways and of course was about to launch into a civil war, the problem that existed between the late 19th century and the outbreak of World War II, which was the splitting up into different warlord regions, was mostly resolved by the fact that the government had had to retreat into the interior and consolidate its rule during that period. So yet again, one of the legacies of Chiang’s period that Mao probably ought to have been grateful for but is unlikely to have mentioned at any encomium.

The West had a blind spot that’s been addressed fairly elaborately in recent years concerning the Soviet contribution to defeating Nazi Germany. Do you see the same dynamic happening here?

Yes, and partly for the same reasons. And I’ll say one word that summarizes what that reason is, and that is archives.

After 1991, after the fall of the Soviet Union, at least for a while, it became easier for Russian and Western researchers to look for the first time at the massive amounts of documentation that were kept in the old Soviet Union in Russia about Russia’s wartime contribution.

Now we haven’t had the kind of fall-of-the-Berlin-Wall, fall-of-Gorbachev-type moment in China. But what is undeniable is that for the last 20 years or so, is that China’s archives have been opened up more and more. And the big difference is that for the first time, people are allowed to look at the Nationalist, the Guomindang [orKuomintang] side of the experience. One of the things I’ve always said about that research topic—and this often surprises people—is that it is not a case of brave Western researchers knocking on the door and demanding access to the hidden files. This is a trend that has emerged within China itself.

China’s own researchers in the mainland are rediscovering the hidden parts of their own history, including the actually very creditable, very important wartime contribution of the old ideological ally, the Nationalist party, which is one of the reasons even Chiang Kai-shek has been partly rehabilitated in the mainland in a way that was unimaginable 25 or 30 years ago.

In the Eastern bloc, the Great Patriotic War is always an important cultural touchstone. You’re suggesting to me that in China itself in World War II, their version of the "great patriotic war" was not as much a cultural touchstone.

Exactly. And that’s a big difference from the Soviet Union; you’re exactly right there. Basically, although it was distortive propaganda reasons in many ways, Stalin, Khrushchev, and his successors did use the patriotic war where the Soviets fight back against the Nazis as a key patriotic narrative. And the narrative of World War II didn’t disappear exactly in China. It was a relatively minor part of the way in which patriotism was constructed. You’ve got occasional signs of it—for example, the Japanese who turn up as sort of stage villains in some of the model operas in the cultural revolution period in the 1960s. But it’s clear that during most of Mao’s period, the real enemies were these Goumindang nationalists and not really the Japanese.

Why was that? Well, there are a variety reasons, but the Cold War is really the major one. During the Cold War period, Taiwan and Chiang kai-Shek was a clear and present danger to the Communist regime. They had to keep the population whipped up in a fever of fear against the possibility that the invaders might come back from Taiwan and essentially start World War III.

In contrast, Japan was not a near defeated enemy, but one with which the Chinese Communists actually wanted to try and get closer. They realized that for a very poor, agrarian society like post-1947 China, it was important to try and gain technological know-how. With an American boycott, the chances of that coming from the U.S. were not that great [while] the Soviet Union was a rather different sort of partner. And so their answer sort of became Japan. There was a certain amount of non-official contact between China and Japan. This meant that there was a great interest in Chinese official circles in not stressing too much Japanese war crimes, in not making Tokyo feel that there was this great atmosphere of hostility.

So again, rather bizarrely, the atrocities, which have since become better known at the Raid of Nanking and the wartime bombing at the temporary capital in Chongqing is another one…. Things simply weren’t publicized. You had to look very long and hard between the 1950s and the 1980s to find major mentions of anywhere in China of something like the Nanking Massacre of 1937. And this is essentially done to detach the Japanese from the wartime Cold War embrace of the United States in the Asia Pacific by backpedaling a bit on reminding them of what happened in the wartime years itself.

This began to change in the 1980s, but during the Cold War there was a vested interest in Beijing in not stressing Japanese war crimes too much.

Something that isn’t unknown, but was relatively new to me was the Soviet contribution to the Nationalists, particularly the air power. In the U.S., we grow up thinking the Flying Tigers won the war, as opposed to having almost no effect. But it would appear to me that the Russian air power was significantly greater until the 14th U.S. Air Force arrived.

I would say actually that the Flying Tigers, the American Volunteer Group, weren’t irrelevant at all. The contributions in terms of flying over the skies of Chongqing were not that many, but I mean in terms of psychology and in terms of morale boosting, they were important. And Claire Chennault, the leader of the AVG, actually played an important part in advising Chiang Kai-shek. So I wouldn’t underplay their role.

But the fact is, as you said, that rather oddly in ideological terms, the major contribution at the beginning of the war in terms of unofficial, but real, military assistance came from the Soviet Union. And this was essentially one of those strange pieces of ideological cross-dressings that you get during that period. Not only do you get a Nazi-Soviet pact, which is the most astounding ideological reverse of the century. But on a fuller level, the strongly anti-Communist Chiang Kai-shek finds himself essentially taking aid from the Soviet Union, the reason being that Stalin obviously was supportive of the Chinese Communists, but he was much more terrified about losing Chiang Kai-shek as China’s leader.

Had Chiang fallen and had China become pro-Japanese, then Japan would have had a perfect launch pad to attack the Soviet Union in the late 1930s, early 1940s. And he was much more worried about that. So it was a very practical, non-altruistic reason for Stalin to essentially give assistance to the Chinese nationalists during that period.

But the fact is that it was very helpful during the early campaign from battles including central China, in the Yangtze delta around Shanghai, and so forth. Although it was not able to prevent the Nationalists from having to withdraw to the interior of China, Soviet air force support and military assistance and material was important in making sure that the Nationalists at least managed to stand up against the Japanese.

One thing you mention in the book that is almost never written about were the clashes between the Japanese and the Soviets. That doesn’t ever get mentioned, and yet those were not mere border clashes.

Oh no, they were very real and very major. And they happened over many weeks and months.

This is one of the lesser known elements of the wider World War II experience, and I think the fact that we’re paying attention to it [as in Anthony Beevor’s new history of World War II] does suggest that we’re beginning to realize that the whole Asian front is a lot more important than we’ve realized. Because in a sense what we’re talking about here is the event that doesn’t happen, the fact that the Soviet Union and Japan are notin conflict with each other, are not at war, for most of the period that we think of as World War. The reason being that at Nomonhan essentially you had this confrontation between the Russians and the Japanese. The Japanese think that the Russians are weak because, of course, the purges of the Red Army are things that are going to completely eviscerate this particular army, only to find, in fact, that they are pushed back pretty steadily by the Soviets and hastily have to reach a compromise.

And this was, of course, very bad news for the Chinese who have been fighting for the better part of a year before that. Chiang Kai-shek’s desperate hope was indeed that that the Soviets and the Japanese would go to war with each other and that he would get full-blooded, full-throated Soviet assistance for the Chinese cause.

When Chiang blew up the Yellow River dikes to slow down the advancing Japanese army—that ranks among the great atrocities of the war, yet I have never heard of it.

No, that’s absolutely fair enough. And I mean this is one of the astounding things because, of course, it is also a sign of the moral ambiguities that went on in this war. At one level, as with all of the Allied and the Axis elements of World War II, we know exactly who to root for. We’re on the side of the Allies; we’re against the Axis. That’s very obvious.

But what we’ve often had to cover over is that the Allies in some cases, whether through force or choice, made some choices that were absolutely devastating and meant death for their own people. And in this case, we’re talking about Chiang Kai-shek making this particular choice for his own two tragic and appalling decisions: either to let the Japanese invade and occupy central China in the summer of 1938, or take what he regarded as the ultimate last move and breach this massive hole in the dikes, which had held back this huge force of nature, the Yellow River, for decades and decades before at that point, and in doing so, stop the Japanese from advancing.

And one has to say that in the short term it was successful in doing that. It’s a terrible thing to say, but it worked in strategic terms. The results: drowning or allowing to starve to death, and/or die of disease, some hundreds of thousands of Chinese farmers, who were given absolutely no warning of what was going to happen.

The person who did notice and this at the time and was one of the things that set him on the path of opposition, was Time magazine’s correspondent, Theodore White. And by the end of the war, he was one of the strongest critics and opponents of Chiang Kai-shek. And the breaching of the dams, if you read back into some of his sort of disillusionment with China was in retrospect I think the first moment where he began to think that Chiang Kai-shek was not a leader who he or his reports could support.

You seem to paint an almost likeable portrait of Chiang.

It’s interesting you say that. People will read it and make up their own minds. But it is nonetheless important to understand him not as either a monster or a failure, but as a flawed human being like many of the other flawed human beings of the time.

I think one of the important ways to understand is as a wartime leader who was forced to make a series of choices between one bad and another appalling choice over and over again. I tend to think that the whole China war story and Chiang’s part in it is written as a sort of melodrama or a sort of black versus white. I think it’s more like a Greek tragedy. There’s a sort of inexorability but with awful choices being made along the way. So it’s interesting you found him likeable, but I think more what I want to say is that he needs to be understood and come over as a human and flawed leader, but one who makes decisions that were rational and were able to be justified at the time.

In terms of his own primary goal, which was at all costs—it was a huge and massive cost as you see in the book—to keep China fighting in the war. Winston Churchill is praised for his speech about “never surrender” in terms of Britain—regardless of whatever else might happen, it was important to keep fighting the Nazis the whole time. It’s often that [same] sort of determination against any logic that kept Chiang going. But Chiang has never really been given any credit for that all, whereas Churchill of course lives on in legend in terms of his resistance.

One of the ironies is not only have the up-to-now unsympathetic American portraits of Chiang been revised significantly, the more heinous picture of him that you got in Mao’s China is now being reversed in his own homeland such that, as I have done, if you go to his birthplace, which is in a place called Xikou, in Zhejiang province, it’s like a shrine to the man. Even though it’s on the mainland, you would never know that he’d actually lost the civil war because as a hometown boy, he’s able to be celebrated by the locals in a way that would’ve gotten them all carted off to prison just 20 or 30 years ago.

You talk about Theodore White’s disenchantment, which brings up the larger question: Could there have been a re-enchantment between the United States and Mao at some point, even in 1949?

That’s actually called the “last chance” in China. And there are still people who speak strongly in favor of it. My inclination is to say that I don’t think so—not in the terms of actually having a genuinely friendly and cordial engagement between the two sides.

Mao and his followers did claim that they wanted this, but we also know a lot more from archives and other sources about Mao’s own motivations. And it’s very clear that his ideology was such that he had to be oriented toward Chinese indigenous revolution and toward Moscow. He did not have a genuine affinity toward the United States. So I think in terms of a genuine alliance, there is actually very little chance that actually could have happened. What I would say, and should have happened and didn’t though, was something rather different, which was a way for China and the United States to at least engage with each other diplomatically, rather unlike the way the Americans and the Soviets did.

The Cold War became very, very cold during much of that period. But there was never a period when Moscow and Washington weren’t talking to each other.

But I think the fact that for the better part of a quarter century or more, down until Nixon and Kissinger come along, the Chinese and the Americans do not have a regular, proper, and open channel of discussion, was one of the great diplomatic missed opportunities of that period—one of many messy pieces of inheritance from that whole wartime alliance.

Speaking of alliances, it seems like China/Burma/India was where the "special relationship" between the U.S. and Great Britain showed its seams most clearly.

[Laughing] Yes, if you mean a special relationship of mistrust and lack of understanding. Winston Churchill was probably one of the people who felt most strongly during that period that the war in Asia showed that the British and the Americans essentially had rather different aims in terms of what they wanted from World War II.

What the Americans wanted was a re-worked world order in which imperialism in the British and French sense would be ended and some of the non-European powers would be raised to a rather higher level. What the British wanted was the restoration of the empire. And these proved to be fundamentally incompatible goals.

And that’s why to me that was one of the most interesting things in terms of writing the book—looking at the war through Chiang Kai-shek’s eyes, through his diaries, was to see quite how strongly British imperialism, in particular, became a target for his anger. And his conversations with Nehru and to some extent with Mahatma Gandhi were an important element of that sort of anti-imperialism. But it’s one of those things that sort of meant that while he had a huge number of problems with the Americans, ultimately his orientation was toward the United States as being a dominant power in the region, rather than allowing the British any chance to come back.

And I think actually that the British realized this very well. They realized that the British and American aims in China were related but not identical. It helped create even more confusion and, I think, lack of trust between the various sides, leading to things like the tragedy in Burma, which is an example of all sides essentially doing very badly. By the time you get to 1944, although ultimately the Japanese are defeated, in some ways the fighting was even more vicious and brutal than it might have been because all of the major Allies—the Chinese, the British, and the Americans—still didn’t really trust each other.

Shanghai is such an interesting story with its international community and the international communities that were in the other coastal Chinese cities. And this was the death knell of that imperial system, clearly.

Very much so. Shanghai then was one of the most cosmopolitan cities anywhere in the world. And even though Shanghai is a great city today, and you know, lively in a whole variety of ways, it still hasn’t captured that absolute cosmopolitanism it had during imperialism back in the 1930s and ’40s. Again, of course, the war was the death knell, as you say, of that particular system, for reasons both good and bad.

The good is that, indirectly but genuinely, the war forced the end of the old imperial Shanghai—the Shanghai where the white British customers could beat Chinese rickshaw drivers around the ears if they didn’t like the fare they were being charged, the kind of brutal, everyday racism of imperialism that you certainly saw frequently in the city. That had come to an end with China’s ultimate victory in 1945. But the downside was that it led to a much narrower, much grayer vision of Shanghai for the next 40 or 50 years.

The idea that this was one of the few cities in the world where people could come, whether they were artists or refugees, or Nationalists or Communists, people from all sorts of backgrounds, and create this immense melting pot in which literature, culture, food, all these things, were coming together in a way that astounded the Chinese who lived there in the country as much as it did foreigners. All that was lost for a very long time.

The Japanese seem to have been particularly egregious violators of human rights. Is that generally accurate?

I mean, the ideas and concept and understanding of human rights we have now have been very much shaped by the experience of that war and that period around the world. But I don’t think it’s necessarily true that there is something immensely distinctive about the Japanese. What made the Japanese war effort against China so brutal were things that we saw elsewhere. For instance a very strong sense of racial superiority, which we also saw, of course, among fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and so forth.

At the same time, there is one very important, and I think it a very significant difference between the Japanese atrocities in China and the Nazi experience in Europe: The Japanese never had any program of organized genocide. That is a very significant difference than in the European case. The Japanese were brutal; they carried out all sorts of horrific acts, you know the Rape of Nanking, the bombing of Chongqing, and others, but to some extent, you can see similarities with other brutal campaigns, which took place elsewhere. And the Japanese themselves often said in terms of their tactics as imperialists and invaders that they had learned a very great deal of what they knew from Western mentors. So we have to look at what the competition was as well.

I realize you’re a historian of China and not of Japan, but every once in a while, I read pieces about textbooks in Japan that gloss over certain inconvenient facts. Is that widespread?

Some of them possibly written by me, in fact. I think the important thing to understand about Japanese public attitudes in textbooks, television, and so forth toward the wartime period is that is very ambivalent. There is a significant and very loud-mouthed right wing that essentially denies or downplays the wartime atrocities. But although this voice is loud, it is by no means the only one or the most important one in Japan.

It’s important to note that, for instance, the very first group of people who brought the Rape of Nanking to the world’s attention in the postwar period were not the Americans and not the Chinese themselves, but in fact the Japanese left wing.

Japanese school teaching unions are often pretty left wing and certainly they have agitated pretty strongly in terms of not using textbooks that deny or downplay the wartime period. You’ll find that although these textbooks are published, and many of them are very offensive in terms of trying to downplay the China war, the mainstream ones that are used in most Japanese schools in fact have a great deal more about the war than the popular newspapers sometimes let on.

So I think it’s important to remember that Japan is a pluralist democracy. There are plenty of people, not the least of which are professional historians, who spend a great deal of time working in great detail on Japan’s wartime atrocities and their significance in history. And in that sense, there is no great conspiracy of silence.

Was there ever a formal intent in Japan to attempt to take over China? It seems like in Manchuria, yes there was absolute intent. [Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931 and by 1933 had consolidated its hold via the puppet state of Manchukuo.] But was the whole Chinese misadventure beyond that something that was stumbled upon or pushed upon by militarists?

That’s a pretty sharp assessment; I think you put your finger on it. I would say this: Manchuria was planned. But oddly enough, some of the top Chinese officers who planned the Manchuria coup were furious at the thought that is was going to expand further into the mainland of China. They thought that was a very bad idea; they thought the Japanese should actually stick to Manchuria.

The actual outbreak of war, and again I hope I brought this out in the book, was not so much in 1939, Hitler invades Poland, but more 1914 Archduke Franz Ferdinand gets shot in Sarajevo. In other words, a small set of events in the Chinese case, the shootings outside in the little village of Wanping in Beijing at the Marco Polo bridge [on July 7, 1937], would trigger off in the next few days and weeks, the sequence of events that eventually bring the two countries to war with each other.

And the Japanese were not expecting the Marco Polo bridge incident would in fact trigger an all out continental war. Once it had then, they did certainly make the decision that they were going to teach China a lesson that they were really going to actually push their troops in and take over the whole thing. But the expectation in the summer of 1937 in July was not on Tokyo’s part that they were going to invade there and now.

On the other hand, I think that there is a significant amount of evidence, and this is one of the things that Chiang Kai-shek weighed when he was making the decision whether or not to expand the campaign, was that Japan would be trying, slice by slice, to get more and more of China. So first Manchuria, then the sort of part just below the Great Wall, then much of North China; then within five, 10, 15 years after that point, it would have seemed very plausible scenario by which they were lapping at the gates of central China, and then finally the south. So in terms of intent or method, you’re probably not talking about a kind of intentional all-out invasion in 1937. In terms of the end goal of domination of China, I think there was very little doubt that that was the intent of Tokyo.

It’s almost a Napoleonic mistake or as Hitlerian mistake, the idea of trying to invade this geographically gigantic place and having space destroy you.

I think that’s true. But again one of the things that must be considered is ideological conviction. The Japanese army—bizarrely, delusionally—were rational in their own minds. They genuinely thought first of all that they had this leadership role, that they were going to be able to act as the brother that was going to lead the fellow Asian countries including China to some sort of anti-Western, post-imperialist future.

And they also believed very strongly that it was their destiny to expand onto the mainland. This was, of course, a period when empires were competing against each other. They saw the British empire; they saw the French empire; they saw this sort of American domination in parts of the Pacific as well. It was supposed to be this sort of social Darwinist world, where you couldn’t stand still. Either you had to expand, or you would be conquered.

This seems like a pretty irrational way of thinking from the point of view of our own minds in the early 21st century, but in the 1930s the world the Japanese saw around them was one in which this seemed to make perfect sense to them.

If I could ask you to speculate: Did Japan have the wherewithal to defeat China? Or was it a doomed experiment from the beginning, independent of any U.S. or Soviet intervention?

I think the Japanese knew from a very early phase that this was a very, very big proposition they were taking on, and their chances of success were a very long way from being guaranteed.

Speculation: I think the answer is, had the Japanese managed to essentially conquer and tame China very early in the war, let’s say within the first year or year and a half, and bring it to surrender, then they would’ve had a chance of getting some sort of settlement that would’ve lasted for a while.

That was one of the reasons why even when they continued to push into China over and over again in the 1937-38 period, they were also sending out feelers to Chiang Kai-shek, desperately trying to get him to negotiate.

So if I flipped the question: Could China at any point have defeated imperial Japan?

I think that would have been tough because Japan was the most technologically able society in Asia. It had hugely superior industrialization. You know by the eve of war, something like 70 percent of Japan’s GDP was going toward the military state in one sense or another.

Japan was much richer than China, and it had this extremely well-trained, conscripted, and, frankly, brutalized conscript army, which was of extremely high quality. Compared to that, China had more people, but was an internally split, very poor agrarian society, with only a very partially trained army. And it had huge amounts of territory, a quagmire that’s very hard for the Japanese to conquer and hard for the Chinese government to control. The size issue went both ways.

If you ask the same question, of course, and compare it to that of the British Empire, I think it’s fair to say that Winston Churchill and the British could not have defeated Hitler without American assistance, either. But people do not, on those grounds, give Britain a hard time for continuing to resist the Germans.

So an all-out defeat of the Japanese by the Chinese would have been near impossible to manage. It’s the feat of resistance that really needs to be looked at.

Source: http://www.psmag.com/politics/china-lost-14-million-people-world-war-ii-forgotten-66482/

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noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 14 Oct 2013 01:47:00 +0000

A Federal Budget Crisis Months in the Planning

By Sheryl Gay Stolber & Mike McIntire
The New York Times
October 5, 2013

Shortly after President Obama started his second term, a loose-knit coalition of conservative activists led by former Attorney General Edwin Meese III gathered in the capital to plot strategy. Their push to repeal Mr. Obama’s health care law was going nowhere, and they desperately needed a new plan.

Out of that session, held one morning in a location the members insist on keeping secret, came a little-noticed “blueprint to defunding Obamacare,” signed by Mr. Meese and leaders of more than three dozen conservative groups.

It articulated a take-no-prisoners legislative strategy that had long percolated in conservative circles: that Republicans could derail the health care overhaul if conservative lawmakers were willing to push fellow Republicans — including their cautious leaders — into cutting off financing for the entire federal government.

“We felt very strongly at the start of this year that the House needed to use the power of the purse,” said one coalition member, Michael A. Needham, who runs Heritage Action for America, the political arm of the Heritage Foundation. “At least at Heritage Action, we felt very strongly from the start that this was a fight that we were going to pick.”

Last week the country witnessed the fallout from that strategy: a standoff that has shuttered much of the federal bureaucracy and unsettled the nation.

To many Americans, the shutdown came out of nowhere. But interviews with a wide array of conservatives show that the confrontation that precipitated the crisis was the outgrowth of a long-running effort to undo the law, the Affordable Care Act, since its passage in 2010 — waged by a galaxy of conservative groups with more money, organized tactics and interconnections than is commonly known.

With polls showing Americans deeply divided over the law, conservatives believe that the public is behind them. Although the law’s opponents say that shutting down the government was not their objective, the activists anticipated that a shutdown could occur — and worked with members of the Tea Party caucus in Congress who were excited about drawing a red line against a law they despise.

A defunding “tool kit” created in early September included talking points for the question, “What happens when you shut down the government and you are blamed for it?” The suggested answer was the one House Republicans give today: “We are simply calling to fund the entire government except for the Affordable Care Act/Obamacare.”

The current budget brinkmanship is just the latest development in a well-financed, broad-based assault on the health law, Mr. Obama’s signature legislative initiative. Groups like Tea Party Patriots, Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks are all immersed in the fight, as is Club for Growth, a business-backed nonprofit organization. Some, like Generation Opportunity and Young Americans for Liberty, both aimed at young adults, are upstarts. Heritage Action is new, too, founded in 2010 to advance the policy prescriptions of its sister group, the Heritage Foundation.

The billionaire Koch brothers, Charles and David, have been deeply involved with financing the overall effort.

A group linked to the Kochs, Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, disbursed more than $200 million last year to nonprofit organizations involved in the fight.

Included was $5 million to Generation Opportunity, which created a buzz last month with an Internet advertisement showing a menacing Uncle Sam figure popping up between a woman’s legs during a gynecological exam.

The groups have also sought to pressure vulnerable Republican members of Congress with scorecards keeping track of their health care votes; have burned faux “Obamacare cards” on college campuses; and have distributed scripts for phone calls to Congressional offices, sample letters to editors and Twitter and Facebook offerings for followers to present as their own.

One sample Twitter offering — “Obamacare is a train wreck” — is a common refrain for Speaker John A. Boehner.

As the defunding movement picked up steam among outside advocates, Republicans who sounded tepid became targets. The Senate Conservatives Fund, a political action committee dedicated to “electing true conservatives,” ran radio advertisements against three Republican incumbents.

Heritage Action ran critical Internet advertisements in the districts of 100 Republican lawmakers who had failed to sign a letter by a North Carolina freshman, Representative Mark Meadows, urging Mr. Boehner to take up the defunding cause.

“They’ve been hugely influential,” said David Wasserman, who tracks House races for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. “When else in our history has a freshman member of Congress from North Carolina been able to round up a gang of 80 that’s essentially ground the government to a halt?”

On Capitol Hill, the advocates found willing partners in Tea Party conservatives, who have repeatedly threatened to shut down the government if they do not get their way on spending issues.

This time they said they were so alarmed by the health law that they were willing to risk a shutdown over it. (“This is exactly what the public wants,” Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, founder of the House Tea Party Caucus, said on the eve of the shutdown.)

Despite Mrs. Bachmann’s comments, not all of the groups have been on board with the defunding campaign. Some, like the Koch-financed Americans for Prosperity, which spent $5.5 million on health care television advertisements over the past three months, are more focused on sowing public doubts about the law. But all have a common goal, which is to cripple a measure that Senator Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican and leader of the defunding effort, has likened to a horror movie.

“We view this as a long-term effort,” said Tim Phillips, the president of Americans for Prosperity. He said his group expected to spend “tens of millions” of dollars on a “multifront effort” that includes working to prevent states from expanding Medicaid under the law. The group’s goal is not to defund the law.

“We want to see this law repealed,” Mr. Phillips said.

A Familiar Tactic

The crowd was raucous at the Hilton Anatole, just north of downtown Dallas, when Mr. Needham’s group, Heritage Action, arrived on a Tuesday in August for the second stop on a nine-city “Defund Obamacare Town Hall Tour.” Nearly 1,000 people turned out to hear two stars of the Tea Party movement: Mr. Cruz, and Jim DeMint, a former South Carolina senator who runs the Heritage Foundation.

“You’re here because now is the single best time we have to defund Obamacare,” declared Mr. Cruz, who would go on to rail against the law on the Senate floor in September with a monologue that ran for 21 hours. “This is a fight we can win.”

Although Mr. Cruz is new to the Senate, the tactic of defunding in Washington is not. For years, Congress has banned the use of certain federal money to pay for abortions, except in the case of incest and rape, by attaching the so-called Hyde Amendment to spending bills.

After the health law passed in 2010, Todd Tiahrt, then a Republican congressman from Kansas, proposed defunding bits and pieces of it. He said he spoke to Mr. Boehner’s staff about the idea while the Supreme Court, which upheld the central provision, was weighing the law’s constitutionality.

“There just wasn’t the appetite for it at the time,” Mr. Tiahrt said in an interview. “They thought, we don’t need to worry about it because the Supreme Court will strike it down.”

But the idea of using the appropriations process to defund an entire federal program, particularly one as far-reaching as the health care overhaul, raised the stakes considerably. In an interview, Mr. DeMint, who left the Senate to join the Heritage Foundation in January, said he had been thinking about it since the law’s passage, in part because Republican leaders were not more aggressive.

“They’ve been through a series of C.R.s and debt limits,” Mr. DeMint said, referring to continuing resolutions on spending, “and all the time there was discussion of ‘O.K., we’re not going to fight the Obamacare fight, we’ll do it next time.’ The conservatives who ran in 2010 promising to repeal it kept hearing, ‘This is not the right time to fight this battle.’ ”

Mr. DeMint is hardly alone in his distaste for the health law, or his willingness to do something about it. In the three years since Mr. Obama signed the health measure, Tea Party-inspired groups have mobilized, aided by a financing network that continues to grow, both in its complexity and the sheer amount of money that flows through it.

A review of tax records, campaign finance reports and corporate filings shows that hundreds of millions of dollars have been raised and spent since 2012 by organizations, many of them loosely connected, leading opposition to the measure.

One of the biggest sources of conservative money is Freedom Partners, a tax-exempt “business league” that claims more than 200 members, each of whom pays at least $100,000 in dues. The group’s board is headed by a longtime executive of Koch Industries, the conglomerate run by the Koch brothers, who were among the original financiers of the Tea Party movement. The Kochs declined to comment.

While Freedom Partners has financed organizations that are pushing to defund the law, like Heritage Action and Tea Party Patriots, Freedom Partners has not advocated that. A spokesman for the group, James Davis, said it was more focused on “educating Americans around the country on the negative impacts of Obamacare.”

The largest recipient of Freedom Partners cash — about $115 million — was the Center to Protect Patient Rights, according to the groups’ latest tax filings. Run by a political consultant with ties to the Kochs and listing an Arizona post office box for its address, the center appears to be little more than a clearinghouse for donations to still more groups, including American Commitment and the 60 Plus Association, both ardent foes of the health care law.

American Commitment and 60 Plus were among a handful of groups calling themselves the “Repeal Coalition” that sent a letter in August urging Republican leaders in the House and the Senate to insist “at a minimum” in a one-year delay of carrying out the health care law as part of any budget deal. Another group, the Conservative 50 Plus Alliance, delivered a defunding petition with 68,700 signatures to the Senate.

In the fight to shape public opinion, conservatives face well-organized liberal foes. Enroll America, a nonprofit group allied with the Obama White House, is waging a campaign to persuade millions of the uninsured to buy coverage. The law’s supporters are also getting huge assistance from the insurance industry, which is expected to spend $1 billion on advertising to help sell its plans on the exchanges.

“It is David versus Goliath,” said Mr. Phillips of Americans for Prosperity.

But conservatives are finding that with relatively small advertising buys, they can make a splash. Generation Opportunity, the youth-oriented outfit behind the “Creepy Uncle Sam” ads, is spending $750,000 on that effort, aimed at dissuading young people — a cohort critical to the success of the health care overhaul — from signing up for insurance under the new law.

The group receives substantial backing from Freedom Partners and appears ready to expand. Recently, Generation Opportunity moved into spacious new offices in Arlington, Va., where exposed ductwork, Ikea chairs and a Ping-Pong table give off the feel of a Silicon Valley start-up.

Its executive director, Evan Feinberg, a 29-year-old former Capitol Hill aide and onetime instructor for a leadership institute founded by Charles Koch, said there would be more Uncle Sam ads, coupled with college campus visits, this fall. Two other groups, FreedomWorks, with its “Burn Your Obamacare Card” protests, and Young Americans for Liberty, are also running campus events.

“A lot of folks have asked us, ‘Are we trying to sabotage the law?’ ” Mr. Feinberg said in an interview last week. His answer echoes the Freedom Partners philosophy: “Our goal is to educate and empower young people.”

Critical Timing

But many on the Republican right wanted to do more.

Mr. Meese’s low-profile coalition, the Conservative Action Project, which seeks to find common ground among leaders of an array of fiscally and socially conservative groups, was looking ahead to last Tuesday, when the new online health insurance marketplaces, called exchanges, were set to open. If the law took full effect as planned, many conservatives feared, it would be nearly impossible to repeal — even if a Republican president were elected in 2016.

“I think people realized that with the imminent beginning of Obamacare, that this was a critical time to make every effort to stop something,” Mr. Meese said in an interview. (He has since stepped down as the coalition’s chairman and has been succeeded by David McIntosh, a former congressman from Indiana.)

The defunding idea, Mr. Meese said, was “a logical strategy.” The idea drew broad support. Fiscal conservatives like Chris Chocola, the president of the Club for Growth, signed on to the blueprint. So did social and religious conservatives, like the Rev. Lou Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition.

The document set a target date: March 27, when a continuing resolution allowing the government to function was to expire. Its message was direct: “Conservatives should not approve a C.R. unless it defunds Obamacare.”

But the March date came and went without a defunding struggle. In the Senate, Mr. Cruz and Senator Mike Lee, a Utah Republican, talked up the defunding idea, but it went nowhere in the Democratic-controlled chamber. In the House, Mr. Boehner wanted to concentrate instead on locking in the across-the-board budget cuts known as sequestration, and Tea Party lawmakers followed his lead. Outside advocates were unhappy but held their fire.

“We didn’t cause any trouble,” Mr. Chocola said.

Yet by summer, with an August recess looming and another temporary spending bill expiring at the end of September, the groups were done waiting.

“I remember talking to reporters at the end of July, and they said, ‘This didn’t go anywhere,’ ” Mr. Needham recalled. “What all of us felt at the time was, this was never going to be a strategy that was going to win inside the Beltway. It was going to be a strategy where, during August, people would go home and hear from their constituents, saying: ‘You pledged to do everything you could to stop Obamacare. Will you defund it?’ ”

Heritage Action, which has trained 6,000 people it calls sentinels around the country, sent them to open meetings and other events to confront their elected representatives. Its “Defund Obamacare Town Hall Tour,” which began in Fayetteville, Ark., on Aug. 19 and ended 10 days later in Wilmington, Del., drew hundreds at every stop.

The Senate Conservatives Fund, led by Mr. DeMint when he was in the Senate, put up a Web site in July called dontfundobamacare.com and ran television ads featuring Mr. Cruz and Mr. Lee urging people to tell their representatives not to fund the law.

When Senator Richard M. Burr, a North Carolina Republican, told a reporter that defunding the law was “the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard,” the fund bought a radio ad to attack him. Two other Republican senators up for re-election in 2014, Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, were also targeted. Both face Tea Party challengers.

In Washington, Tea Party Patriots, which created the defunding tool kit, set up a Web site, exemptamerica.com, to promote a rally last month showcasing many of the Republicans in Congress whom Democrats — and a number of fellow Republicans — say are most responsible for the shutdown.

While conservatives believe that the public will back them on defunding, a recent poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that a majority — 57 percent — disapproves of cutting off funding as a way to stop the law.

Last week, with the health care exchanges open for business and a number of prominent Republicans complaining that the “Defund Obamacare” strategy was politically damaging and pointless, Mr. Needham of Heritage Action said he felt good about what the groups had accomplished.

“It really was a groundswell,” he said, “that changed Washington from the outside in.”

Source:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/us/a-federal-budget-crisis-months-in-the-planning.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=0
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noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 25 Sep 2013 00:59:00 +0000

Spilling the NSA’s Secrets: Guardian Editor Alan Rusbridger on the Inside Story of Snowden Leaks

Democracy Now
Sept 23, 2013

Three-and-a-half months after National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden came public on the the U.S. government’s massive spying operations at home and abroad, we spend the hour with Alan Rusbridger, editor-in-chief of The Guardian, the British newspaper that first reported on Snowden’s leaked documents. The Guardian has continued releasing a series of exposés based on Snowden’s leaks coloring in the details on how the NSA has managed to collect telephone records in bulk and information on nearly everything a user does on the Internet.

The articles have ignited widespread debate about security agencies’ covert activities, digital data protection and the nature of investigative journalism. The newspaper has been directly targeted as a result — over the summer the British government forced the paper to destroy computer hard drives containing copies of Snowden’s secret files, and later detained David Miranda, the partner of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald. Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian for nearly two decades, joins us to tell the inside story of The Guardian’s publication of the NSA leaks and the crackdown it has faced from its own government as a result.

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Today, in a Democracy Now! special, we spend the hour with Alan Rusbridger, Editor in Chief with the Guardian Newspaper. Three and a half months ago, on June 5th, The Guardian revealed the National Security Agency is collecting collecting the telephone records of millions of customers of Verizon under a secret court order. The following day, the paper revealed the existence of a secret program called PRISM that gave the NSA direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other U.S. internet giants. Four days later, The Guardian revealed the source behind the leaks was a National Security Agency contractor named Edward Snowden.

EDWARD SNOWDEN: Any analyst at any time can target anyone at any select or anywhere. Where those communications will be picked up depends on the range of the sensor networks and the authorities that that analyst is empowered with. Not all analysts have the power to target everything. But, I sitting behind my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, from you, or your accountant, to a federal judge, to even the president, if I had a personal e-mail.

AMY GOODMAN: Since early June, The Guardian has continued to publish a remarkable series of exposés based on Edward Snowden’s leaks, coloring in the details on how the NSAhas managed to collect nearly everything a user does on the internet. The articles have ignited an international debate about the NSA’s activities, digital data protection and the nature of investigative journalism, and the paper has been directly targeted as a result.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: in August, David Miranda, partner of Guardian reporter, Glenn Greenwald, was detained and questioned at Heathrow Airport under Schedule 7 of Britain’s Terrorism Act. Miranda was detained for nine hours and only released after British authorities seized his mobile phone, laptop, cell phone and USB thumb drives. Soon after Miranda’s detention, The Guardian revealed the British Government threatened legal action against the newspaper unless it destroyed computer computer drives containing copies of Edward Snowden’s classified documents or handed them to British authorities.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, for more we are joined, now, by The Guardian Editor in Chief, Alan Rusbridger. He’s been editor of the newspaper since 1995. Alan Rusbridger, welcome to Democracy Now!.

ALAN RUSBRIDGER: I’m very happy to be here.

AMY GOODMAN: Did you have trouble coming into the United States?

ALAN RUSBRIDGER: No, I sort — came through very easily.

AMY GOODMAN: How about the rest of your staff?

ALAN RUSBRIDGER: There have been moments when they have been fairly comprehensively frisked, either leaving or coming in. Glenn Greenwald, who’s been doing most of the reporting, is not risking moving around at the moment, which is probably sensible.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you think he would be arrested if he came back to the U.S., Glenn, as an American citizen?

ALAN RUSBRIDGER: I hope he wouldn’t be. One of the things that I’ve tried to make a point of, is that we’ve moved our reporting to America because I think America’s rules around press freedom, First Amendment, and so forth should protect this kind of reporting. So, I very much hope, with the eyes of the world on America, that somebody who has done the reporting that has got this matter into public debate, wouldn’t be punished for it, or criminalized.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Could you take us back to the beginning of this worldwide exposé that you’ve been in the forefront of, your paper has been? How the story first came to you and your decision to begin to print it so soon after you received the initial information?

ALAN RUSBRIDGER: Well, I think it’s quite an interesting story about the old world and the new world, so there’s the fourth estate newspapers, there’s the fifth estate bloggers, and this is a union of the two. We hired Glenn Greenwald, who is a blogger, and who has written knowledgeably, and, some people might, say obsessively about the subject over the last few years. In Hawaii, a 29-year-old NSA analyst was clearly reading Greenwald and was so troubled by what he was doing in his work that he wanted to find somebody knowledgeable to give this material to. So, he came to Glenn, Glenn, by now, was working for The Guardian, and that is how it all kicked off.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about how exactly that happened. You have Edward Snowden who flies to Hong Kong, and then take it from there, with your columnist Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, the filmmaker, also another of your reporters who went to Hong Kong to meet Edward Snowden.

ALAN RUSBRIDGER: Yeah, there was about two weeks when they were all essentially closeted in the same hotel room. It was a rather unreal period for anyone who has watched a Hollywood movie about these kinds of things; agents on the run, stashes of secrets. But, they worked together and it was important for me that there was a Guardian reporter, a conventional reporter, in the room along with Glenn and Laura.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Ewen MacAskill?

ALAN RUSBRIDGER: That was Ewen MacAskill, who is a Scottish reporter who’s been on the The Guardian for years and years and years. Very experienced, not easily impressed reporter. Between them, they started to go through this stash of material that Greenwald had — that, that Snowden had with him. And we obviously had to establish Snowden was who he said he was and that the material was what he said it was. At the end of about two weeks, we started to publish material based on it.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And did the decision about what to publish first, and given the fact that it has been string of continuing revelations that have come out and — how, how was that decided on?

ALAN RUSBRIDGER: Well, to begin with, we needed some help from Snowden to point us to what he thought was important. This is not a world that is easily — these are not documents in which the stories sit up and show themselves. This is a complex world. A lot is written in acronyms, if not in actually code, and so we had to be guided to, initially, to some of the stories that Snowden felt were most newsworthy. And it was important for him, I think, that the world had some sense of what he was trying to say before he outed himself, and so, we started doing stories about this intersection between Silicon Valley, telecom companies, and the intelligence agencies. What is, I think, something new, is putting entire populations under a form of surveillance. So, that is what we did in that first week before Snowden came out and revealed himself to be the whistleblower.

AMY GOODMAN: Edward Snowden, himself, had signed up for Special Forces in the United States., broke both of his legs in a training accident and then left. How did you confirm his credibility on all of this, who he was?

ALAN RUSBRIDGER: Well, they all spoke to him for a long time, and that is where having my Scottish Presbyterian reporter in the room was important for me. I wanted him to make — to form a judgment about character. I mean, we obviously did all the tests of who he was, and that all stacked up. He obviously was who he said he was.

AMY GOODMAN: Worked for Booz Allen, was a subcontractor for the NSA.

ALAN RUSBRIDGER: All that, yeah, and had worked for the CIA. And Ewin, just talking to him for hours, I mean, he rang me up and said I think he is exactly who he says he is. He is not somebody who is in this for the personal publicity. He is rather shy. He’s not going to develop a big media profile. He has got these documents and he is giving them to a news organization hoping that after this first week we will use our judgment about what we consider significant.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And I know that you had numerous conversations with, certainly with British intelligence, subsequently, but before the first articles came out, was there any contact with American intelligence or British intelligence on your parts warned them of what was coming?

ALAN RUSBRIDGER: Well, the first four stories were all NSA rather than GCHQ and they were edited out of New York, and we were in touch with the agencies via the White House, and we warned them of what we were going to publish, and we had sometimes helpful dialogue, sometimes robust dialogue about what we were going to do, but it was important for me that we gave them the chance to respond and to make plain any concerns that they had about any particular thing.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And was there any particular effort on their part to dissuade you from publication?

ALAN RUSBRIDGER: Yeah, they were, they were, they told us why they though we shouldn’t publish some things. There were one or two things that were helpful, because we didn’t want to go into this behaving irresponsibly or to puts agent at danger or operations. So, I think it was important to have those conversations.

AMY GOODMAN: Edward Snowden also made that a requirement, isn’t that true? That people not be exposed.

ALAN RUSBRIDGER: Yes, yes, no, he said, look, you will have to form your own judgment, but I would like you to behave responsibly, and as you say not expose agents or ongoing sensitive operations, for instance, in Afghanistan or Iraq.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking with Alan Rusbridger, go to break and we’ll be back with him for the hour. He is the Editor in Chief of The Guardian for almost two decades, also author of a new book on playing the piano and his work at The Guardian, it’s called, "Play it Again: An Amateur Against the Impossible."

AMY GOODMAN: Our guest is Alan Rusbridger of The Guardian newspaper, for almost two decades. Can you talk about when the British Government called you and said they wanted your hard drives, they wanted this information.

ALAN RUSBRIDGER: We had two big conversations with the government, one at the end of June, and one about halfway through July. And it became obvious to me that their tone was heartening. I think they felt this story was out of their control. There came a point where they directly threatened legal action. Now, in the U.K., the government can move and stop publication. I don’t think that is possible since the Pentagon Papers in the U.S. And there came a point where it was obvious we only had two options. One was to return the material and the other was to destroy it. It didn’t actually matter much to me because the material was already in America, and I have already shared some of it with The New York Times so it was going to make no difference to the reporting, but I what I did not want to do was to get into a big legal action which cold potentially have frozen it all.

AMY GOODMAN: And so, what did you allow to happen?

ALAN RUSBRIDGER: So, this bizarre thing happened, the most bizarre thing that I think has happened in my journalistic career, which was that two technical people from the GCHQ, which is the Government Communications Headquarters, it’s the equivalent of the NSA, came into The Guardian, and supervised our destruction of the lap-books on which — the laptops on which we’d been working.

ALAN RUSBRIDGER: So, you said you wouldn’t give it to them but you would destroy your own hard drive?

ALAN RUSBRIDGER: I wouldn’t give it to them because, I mean, I think journalists generally don’t hand material back to governments. But, also there was always the threat hanging in the background of criminal action against The Guardian and I don’t know what these — or against Snowden — and I don’t know what these discs would have told them about who had been looking at this material, and I did not want to give them evidence that could be used against The Guardian. It is difficult in which you have this potential of criminalizing reporters who are informing the debate that everyone says they want to happen. So, I wouldn’t give it back to them, and so the compromise we agreed on was that we would smash it up. And it turns out to be harder to smash up a computer in ways that would satisfy the spooks than perhaps you would imagine.

AMY GOODMAN: How did you do it?

ALAN RUSBRIDGER: Well, first of all, you take it apart, you revealed all its guts.

AMY GOODMAN: This is what you’re doing with the GCHQ guys there.

ALAN RUSBRIDGER: With the [Unintelligible] saying, Ok, now you take this circuit board there —- I have got a bit of circuit board here. That’s what a MacBook hard drive looks like after the GCHQ have insisted that the holes go there, there and there and there. But, um -—

AMY GOODMAN: You carry this with you?

ALAN RUSBRIDGER: I carry it with me as, sort of, a little memento. I think it’s a rather sinister reminder of the intersection of states and journalism. But, it is not just the hard drive. You have to destroy the logic board, there are specific chips on the trackpad, the keyboard. And so, it was very long, dusty, rather noisy work to smash up all these computers.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: But, obviously, there were other copies of the same information in other countries. I wonder if you would comment on this world now where governments have trouble being able to snuff out information in one country because of our international information system now that makes it possible for it to crop up in another country?

ALAN RUSBRIDGER: Well, it goes back to a little of what we were saying about earlier, that here was this intersection between the fourth and the fifth estate. So, one of the copies was in Rio, where Glenn Greenwald lives and I would guess that the intelligence agencies find Glenn Greenwald a difficult customer to deal with because he’s not like a big press organization that you can march in and threaten. And as we say, there were companies in New York. But, I think this is, really, two sides of the same coin. What we are talking about is the collaboration of intelligence agencies around the world to snoop on a global intelligence network. So, that is what they are doing. But, that same global network, the internet, is used by all of us to spread information. So, the thing that makes the snooping possible is the thing, also, that makes it so hard for them to get a piece of information and snuff it out.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And I’m wondering also, the — in your own country, what has been the press coverage of the other competing media in your country like, and the reaction among the British population to the revelations of The Guardian about all of this international eavesdropping of the NSA and its allied intelligence agencies?

ALAN RUSBRIDGER: Well, it’s a story that, as you know, has sparked an incredible debate in the U.S., it has in throughout Europe, and many other parts of the world. It’s been quite quiet in the U.K., and I am not entirely sure why that is, it may be for unworthy competitive reasons, I hope not. It may just be that in America, you have , in living memory, had McCarthy, you’ve had Nixon, you’ve had Hoover, in Germany they’ve had the Stasi. Maybe in Britain we are a little bit complacent about this kind of stuff. I think actually, people who read these stories and who understand what they are saying are worried, but it has not engendered quite the debate that is has elsewhere.

AMY GOODMAN: Has The Guardian made any deal with the British Government not to publish certain information?

ALAN RUSBRIDGER: We’ve made no deals with anybody. I mean, occasionally, we have had conversations where the British Government has said, we would rather you didn’t publish anything, but if you are going to publish, there is this little bit that we would regard as endangering x, y or z. And sometimes we have agreed with that, more often we haven’t.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go to David Miranda for a minute. David Miranda, Glenn Greenwald’s partner, who was detained last month by the British Government last month as he was traveling through London’s Heathrow Airport. He was held for nine hours under a British antiterrorism law. He faced repeated interrogation, had his belongings seized, including thumb drives carrying information Glenn used in his reporting on NSAsurveillance. After his release, he appeared on Anderson Cooper’s show on CNN.

ANDERSON COOPER: Did they actually ask you anything about terrorism?

DAVID MIRANDA: No, they didn’t ask me anything about terrorism, not one question about it. And I think it is really weird because I was in there for like eight hours without talking to anybody outside. And like, they were just, like, keeping me. I have to ask them, do I have to answer this? And they just telling me, like, if you don’t answer this you’re going to go to jail. And you know, that’s a big thing, because, like, when they say, like, that I was under this law, this is terrorism law, you know what U.K. and United States do. They have all the powers in the world to do anything they want over this because, I’ve been following Glenn and his career for the past eight years and I haven’t seen many stories that many pick up in different countries, getting to this [Guantanamo] and just, like, staying in prison, and they vanish, nobody seen them. And in that moment, I was like, really afraid of what would happen to me. And I was, you understand, that I was for eight hours without talking to anybody on outside of the world. I didn’t know what’s happening, and they keep threatening me about me going to the jail without law.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Glenn Greenwald’s partner, David Miranda. Speaking to theBBC, British Home Secretary Theresa May defended the government’s actions saying Miranda may have been carrying information useful to terrorists.

THERESA MAY: I think it’s right, given that is the first duty of the government to protect the public, that if the police believe somebody has in their possession highly sensitive, stolen information which could help terrorists, which could lead to a loss of lives, then it is right that the police act and that’s what the law enables to do.

AMY GOODMAN: And the White House acknowledged the British Government had given U.S. a heads up about it’s plan to detain David Miranda, but refused to criticize Britain’s actions. White House Deputy Press Secretary Josh Earnest took questions on the issue in August.

REPORTER: You talked about the Mubarak detention as being an Egyptian legal matter, you talked about Morsi politically motivated detention, and then with regard to Mr. Greenwald’s partner, you called it a mere law enforcement action. Given that the White House has never been shy about criticizing detention policies over seas, do you have any concerns at all about the UK’s law enforcement action in this case?

JOSH EARNEST: Well, what I can say is, I don’t have a specific reaction other than to observe to you that this is a decision that was made by the British Government, and not one that was made at the request or with the involvement of the U.S. Government.

REPORTER: But, you’re not going to go as far as to say it’s wrong or with a cause for concern you’re just separating yourself entirely from it.

JOSH EARNEST: Well, I’m separating — what I’m suggesting is that this was a decision that was made by the British Government without the involvement and not at the request of the United States Government.

AMY GOODMAN: Alan Rusbridger, can you respond to what the U.S. and British Governments said? Also, it was the day after Miranda was taken that you revealed what happened to The Guardian, which was a few weeks after you actually destroyed the hard drives. Why did you choose that — why was that the key moment for you, that you decided you’d reveal what happened to The Guardian’s hard drives?

ALAN RUSBRIDGER: Well, I think it’s quite significant in that clip that — we’re talking there about British Government taking the decision, which is not actually what is suppose to happen with that law. This law is an obscure bit of The Terror Act, Section 7, which is supposed to be police acting randomly in ports and airports. And why this was wrong to use this law, is because it accords none of the rights to journalistic material that would have happened if they had picked up David Miranda and arrested him as they could have under other acts, or if they’d taken him into Heathrow car park as oppose to the transit lounge.

So, it was just a misuse of terror legislation against journalism. And that, to me, is wrong. If people are saying that it was the government took that decision, then that was even more wrong. And you are right to say that I’ve been revealed about the smashed up discs. There were logistical reasons at the time why I could not write about that. I waited to see how the British Government was going to play this, but it seemed to me at the point that they were going to misuse those kind of laws against reporting. That was the moment to share what else the government had been doing. I thought it was right that the reader should know.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Alan Rusbridger, I would like to ask you about the Edward Snowden odyssey since the initial revelations in this traveling from Hong Kong and then to Russia, and becoming an international standoff between the United States and Russia over whether he’d be handed back, whether that’s complicated your ability to continue reporting on this at all? Because obviously, the source of your information is now, not as readily — as easily available as he was, as he was in June or July.

ALAN RUSBRIDGER: Well, I think he knew, and think he told us that, in leaking this material, he knew that this going to be immensely complicating for his life, to put it mildly. Either he was going to be on the run or was going to end up like Chelsea Manning. Either way, it was going to be difficult to communicate with him. We didn’t know that he was going to end up in Russia. I don’t know if even he knew at that point if he was going to end up in Russia. Glenn is still in contact with him via encrypted e-mails. So, we still have some contact with him. But, it is a complicated story to report. We assume, this may be wrong, but we assume that our communications will be intercepted, because that is part of the story that we are writing about, which is why people have to be on planes occasionally carrying material which then get intercepted by the police. So, it is not an easy story to report.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And the impact that this has had, much like the original WikiLeaks revelations in various countries around the world, in Brazil, obviously, in Europe. Did you expect at the beginning that this would have the ramifications and the explosiveness that it has had in various countries, not just the United States and the U.K.?

ALAN RUSBRIDGER: Well, I think, the bit that is sometimes missing from the American debate, the President places great emphasis on the fact that America doesn’t spy on Americans in American territory, as if that was the only thing that mattered. And I thought it was very interesting that Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook said, the other day, well that is no use to us if we are trying to build an international business. So, I think Americans haven’t quite understood the anger of other states, of people living in Germany, you say, that Americans feel free to spy on anybody else in the world, and you just have to, sort of, reverse that and think how would Americans feel if Germans were spying on them, or the Chinese. Well, we know how people feel about the Chinese. And then you get to this further dimension that it appears that what the NSA had done is to weaken the systems under which everything is kept secret; banking transactions, medical transactions of ordinary Americans, but also the rest of the world, by building these so-called trapdoors. Now, if the cryptologists seem to say if you build a trap door that the NSA can get through, then probably the Chinese can too, and criminals. So, that, I think this last story about the weakening of the security of the Internet has international implications which are beginning to be felt.

AMY GOODMAN: Why did you choose to collaborate with The New York Times andProPublica in revealing the National Security Agency as successfully foiling much of the encryption used by people used to protect their privacy?

ALAN RUSBRIDGER: Well, we had to find American partners because it was clear that our reporting was going to be made very difficult in the U.K. And actually, if you look around America, you slightly — I mean there are not limitless options of people who could handle a very big story. I mean, it takes up a lot of resources, a lot of technical knowledge, legal backup, and The New York Times is a great paper with that kind of backup, and ProPublica is a really interesting example of a much smaller operation but has got a lot of expertise around these kind of subjects.

AMY GOODMAN: Did you also want to spread the information around in case, somehow, your access to it is jeopardized?

ALAN RUSBRIDGER: I think that is prudent and that was one of the reasons we went to both ProPublica and The New York Times. I think the more people that are involved — you don’t want a limitless number of people, have a number of people involved, it makes it much harder just to lean on one.

AMY GOODMAN: I’m just looking at the New York Times Public Editor rebuking her own paper, this is Margaret Sullivan saying many times "readers have been writing to me about a story The Guardian broke last week describing how the U.S. routinely shares with Israel intelligence information that the National Security Agency gathers on American citizens." Can you talk about what you broke and what The New York Times, well dragged its feet on?

ALAN RUSBRIDGER: Well, this is another one of those stories that describes the intersections between the American intelligence agencies and what they are paired to share with other governments. So, we obviously thought it was significant to write about what was being shared with Israel, and under what terms, and whether the terms that covered Israel’s use of that was the same as what would be covered in America. That felt a significant story to ask. But, one of the advantages of going into these kind of collaborations is that The New York Times is free to form its own opinion of the material. And so, we’re all coming to these stories from a slightly different angle, which I think is healthy. But, obviously, their own ombudsman felt that was a story they should have covered.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, raw intelligence is what the U.S. was sharing that The Guardianexposed with Israel right, actual phone calls, not only metadata, but — and then saying to Israeli intelligence, you decide what to do with it?

ALAN RUSBRIDGER: That feels to me like a significant story, but I don’t want to criticize the judgements of others.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s break and then we’ll come back to this discussion. Alan Rusbridger is Editor in Chief of The Guardian for almost two decades. The Guardian has been exposing the NSA story since they broke it in June. We’ll be back with Alan Rusbridger in a moment.

AMY GOODMAN: Chopin Ballade No. 1 in G minor, which plays prominently in our guest’s book and his life, Alan Rusbridger, Editor in Chief of The Guardian has written a book, "Play it Again: An Amateur Against the Impossible." We’re going back to talk about what you’ve exposed, but, you have just come out with this book. Talk about how your piano playing, how your interest in music, and mastering this piece, relates to what you’re doing with The Guardian.

ALAN RUSBRIDGER: This is a kind of diary we were working on, WikiLeaks phone hacking, so, it’s a diary of that period, but, but it’s also a book about creativity in midlife. I think that the choices we make about what to do with our time when we are not working, and whether the value of painting, or reading, or writing poetry, or the sources of creativity that lie within us, and I spent 18 months — I went back to playing the piano later in life. I tried playing this extraordinary difficult piece of music, this Chopin ballade. And so, it was an interweaving of this thing I was doing almost to take the stress and pressure of my life out of it, and at the same time, hold down an editing job on a big newspaper. So, I hope it is a book that will encourage those that gave up the piano or always wished they had played the piano, and to pursued them that is time — you can make time in your life to do these things if you think they’re important.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, to get back to some of that pressure that you are talking about, the stories that — I guess no country, other than the United States, has been more — felt the impact of your continuing revelations in The Guardian that has Brazil. Amazing revelations about the NSA spying on an [Unintelligible] of the President Dilma Rousseff, of the Brazilian people extensively. Your sense of how these kinds of revelations are not only affecting world perceptions of the United States, but as you alluded to earlier, the ability of American companies, internet giants and computer giants, to do business overseas. as more and more people say, why should I deal with Yahoo or why should I deal with Google, if the American Government is going to be able to spy on me?

ALAN RUSBRIDGER: Well, I mean, I know some people have a weary shrug and they say, well spies spy and, you know, what is new about that, but, I think it is surprising the degree to which apparently friendly nations are eavesdropping each other, at heads of state level, or cabinet level. We did the story about the G20 meeting in London in which the British government set up a kind of phony tent, an internet cafe, in which delegates could go in and do their emails, not knowing that the British Government or the British intelligence service was logging all their email passwords in order to carry on spying on them when they went home. Most of these were friendly allies, and there was no justification for that except the economic well-being of the U.K. So, I think these are troubling revelations; Brazil is another country. I think it gets to be a big, big story for American innovation and business, if the rest of the world comes to associate these companies with forms of surveillance. That is going to damage American companies. And I think the Silicon Valley companies know this and they are worried. And it also applies to the standards — the international standards by which the internet as a whole operates, and this sense that the Internet is, in some sense, American, or that the American should have an overall role in deciding these standards. There is going be a lot of pushback on that in future and all these things. This is a short-term gain in this kind of behavior and a long term loss.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, there has already been some pushback in terms of President Dilma Rousseff threatening to — trying to find a way to get — extricate Brazil from the U.S. — .

ALAN RUSBRIDGER: Well, you can understand it, can’t you. I mean, again, put it the other way around, if we discovered that Brazil was trying to listen to President Obama’s phone calls emails, there would be outrage. So, you can understand why other states just are offended by this kind of behavior.

AMY GOODMAN: Earlier this month, while in Sweden, when President Obama was on his way to the G20, in St. Petersburg, where he faced, you could say, a wall of bricks as in Brazil and India, China, South Africa. Obama said he’s working to reassure foreign allies following the wave of revelations surrounding U.S. spying on other governments.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: The publics in Europe and around the world, that we are not going around snooping at peoples’ emails or listening to their phone calls. What we are try to do is target very specifically areas of concern. We are consulting with the EU in this process, consulting with other countries in this process, and finding out from them what are their areas of specific concern, and trying to align what we do in a way that I think alleviates some of the public concerns that people may have.

AMY GOODMAN: That was President Obama in Sweden. I want to get your response to that, Alan. Also, Glenn Greenwald, your columnist, has a news story out in The Hindu as we’re broadcasting "Among the BRICS group of emerging nations," he writes "India is the number one target of snooping by the [NSA]. In the overall list of countries spied on by NSAprograms, India stands at fifth place, with billions of pieces of information plucked from its telephone and internet networks just in 30 days."

ALAN RUSBRIDGER: I had not read that story yet. On the president’s reaction, I love this reaction of, look, just trust us. We can’t tell you about this, it’s too secret, but you’re going to have to trust us. And by the way, we’ve got the oversight mechanisms.

AMY GOODMAN: And he says the debate would have happened anyway, without Edward Snowden.

ALAN RUSBRIDGER: Yes, well, the debate never did happen, did it? Because the instinct of these agencies is always going to be to it as secret as possible and to criminalize people who talk about it. So, that debate didn’t happen until Snowden came along. And who is overseeing this and do you trust them? Dianne Feinstein, a great public servant, but does she really understand the finer details of cryptology, and encryption, the capabilities which are expanding exponentially, and can they really match up what the law were intended to do and what engineers are now capable of doing? These are the questions. I think it is not enough just to say, take us on trust we are not doing that, because these secret courts, the FISAcourts, we’re now learning some of the things that were troubling them that they never made public. And so, it is a lot to take on trust.

AMY GOODMAN: You know, Alan Rusbridger, The Guardian has exploded onto the global scene with an exposé of News of the World and their phone hacking that forced Murdoch to close News of the World. Interestingly, it was a story about phone hacking. Can you talk about that progression of The Guardian to exposing the WikiLeaks documents, to what you’re seeing today? The Guardian has just done a remarkable series of exposés.

ALAN RUSBRIDGER: Well, The Guardian has always been something of outsider. It started in Manchester in 1820, has been owned by a family trust since 1936, so it has no owner. We make our own editorial decisions. So, we have a high degree of independence. And it seemed that after 2000, a third of our audience was in America, which is why we’ve moved to America. We now have an operation of 55 people in America, and an audience of many millions. About a third of our audience of 42 million is now in America. And I think there is just an appetite for this kind of reporting. it’s quite rare now. We don’t have shareholders saying we want our returns, and cutting budgets. It is a bit like when you’re doing, it’s keeping very much an international focus because, I think, most American citizens realize their lives cannot be understood in a purely national context. There are things to do with security, economics, technology, the environment are stories that can only be told internationally.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, I wanted to read an excerpt from a recent letter sent by the NSAto family members of its employees. The letter, dated September 13the, is signed by NSADirector Keith Alexander and Deputy Director John Inglis. It says, "some media outlets have sensationalized the leaks to the press in a way that has called into question our motives and wrongly cast doubt on the integrity and commitment of the extraordinary people that work here at the NSA/CSS — your loved ones. It has been discouraging to see how our agency frequently has been portrayed in the news as more of a rogue element than a national treasure." I’m wondering, your response to the — I mean, obviously, the allegations of sensationalized reporting allude to The Guardian as well as other press outlets.

ALAN RUSBRIDGER: Well, we obviously reject that. I think we have been very careful in our reporting, and actually, the intelligence chiefs, when they speak in private, have been graceful enough to acknowledge that we have been responsible. I can understand why you would write a letter like that. And we are not saying that the people who work inside the NSAare bad people. I imagine they have very talented engineers who are capable of doing extraordinary things. I think what we are saying that there has to be a wider debate because it’s not just about national security. There are other interests in society; privacy, civil liberties, of reporting which had to be weighed against security. And so, if you are write about this, you are not saying that the NSA is full of bad people. That would be silly. So, I perfectly understand that you write a letter to the families saying that much of what you do is good and important, which it is.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I’m wondering, since we mentioned earlier your involvement with the WikiLeaks scandal as well. Your sense of Julian Assange, he’s still in England, in basically, detention, effectively, and your sense of his role in terms of being able to bring out to the rest of the world these secrets that the U.S. Military and and the U.S. Government was preventing its own citizens from seeing?

ALAN RUSBRIDGER: Well, I think Assange had a very good and simple idea, which was about liberating material. In a sense, what we tried to do there is what we are doing here, which is to root our reporting on the American First Amendment. So, I mean, even in the U.K., a mature democracy, this reporting was impossible. And I think America should take pride in that, that you have this written constitution that encourages this kind of reporting. And I think if you thought how much we would welcome whistleblowers from Iran or China or Russia, if we could find out the kind of hinge that Assange imagined in which this material could be safely leaked and protected by the highest standards of free speech, that would be a good thing. It went a bit wrong with Assange, and he’s sort of out of action in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.

AMY GOODMAN: Although, hardly out of action, because he did helped Edward Snowden ultimately get to Russia.

ALAN RUSBRIDGER: For better or worse, yes. But, he I think he has not been able to operate as effectively as he could have done. But. that does not mean the idea was wrong. I think the idea was a good one, and that is why I think, for me as an outsider, when I see Chelsea Manning given a 60 year sentence, you think, what kind of signal does that show whistleblowers? Because, whistle-blowing, as I say, if we had a whistle-blower inside the Iranian nuclear project, or inside the corruption in some parts of the Chinese Government, we would welcome that. And so, there are kind of universal standards and that’s what civil liberties is all about, that you have universal standards of human rights, and you have to be careful to observe those, and not to bend them, and start using terror legislation against journalism just when it affects you.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you think journalism is threatened?

ALAN RUSBRIDGER: Well, I think journalism is certainly by this kind of massive surveillance, yes, because it is impossible to have confidential sources in a world in which algorithms can immediately work out who you’ve been talking to. That’s a big threat.

AMY GOODMAN: Alan Rusbridger, I want to thank you very much for being with us; Editor in Chief of The Guardian for almost two decades. He has just published a book, "Play it Again: An Amateur Against the Impossible." He will be speaking on Wednesday evening at the New York public Library. That does it for our show. Breaking news from Egypt and Egyptian court has banned the Muslim Brotherhood group and ordered its assets confiscated.

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Source:
http://www.democracynow.org/2013/9/23/spilling_the_nsas_secrets_guardian_editor
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noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 13 Sep 2013 00:27:00 +0000

A Plea for Caution From Russia

By VLADIMIR V. PUTIN
President of Russia
September 11, 2013

Recent events surrounding Syria have prompted me to speak directly to the American people and their political leaders. It is important to do so at a time of insufficient communication between our societies.

Relations between us have passed through different stages. We stood against each other during the cold war. But we were also allies once, and defeated the Nazis together. The universal international organization — the United Nations — was then established to prevent such devastation from ever happening again.

The United Nations’ founders understood that decisions affecting war and peace should happen only by consensus, and with America’s consent the veto by Security Council permanent members was enshrined in the United Nations Charter. The profound wisdom of this has underpinned the stability of international relations for decades.

No one wants the United Nations to suffer the fate of the League of Nations, which collapsed because it lacked real leverage. This is possible if influential countries bypass the United Nations and take military action without Security Council authorization.

The potential strike by the United States against Syria, despite strong opposition from many countries and major political and religious leaders, including the pope, will result in more innocent victims and escalation, potentially spreading the conflict far beyond Syria’s borders. A strike would increase violence and unleash a new wave of terrorism. It could undermine multilateral efforts to resolve the Iranian nuclear problem and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and further destabilize the Middle East and North Africa. It could throw the entire system of international law and order out of balance.

Syria is not witnessing a battle for democracy, but an armed conflict between government and opposition in a multireligious country. There are few champions of democracy in Syria. But there are more than enough al Qaeda fighters and extremists of all stripes battling the government. The United States State Department has designated Al Nusra Front and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, fighting with the opposition, as terrorist organizations. This internal conflict, fueled by foreign weapons supplied to the opposition, is one of the bloodiest in the world.

Mercenaries from Arab countries fighting there, and hundreds of militants from Western countries and even Russia, are an issue of our deep concern. Might they not return to our countries with experience acquired in Syria? After all, after fighting in Libya, extremists moved on to Mali. This threatens us all.

From the outset, Russia has advocated peaceful dialogue enabling Syrians to develop a compromise plan for their own future. We are not protecting the Syrian government, but international law. We need to use the United Nations Security Council and believe that preserving law and order in today’s complex and turbulent world is one of the few ways to keep international relations from sliding into chaos. The law is still the law, and we must follow it whether we like it or not. Under current international law, force is permitted only in self-defense or by the decision of the Security Council. Anything else is unacceptable under the United Nations Charter and would constitute an act of aggression.

No one doubts that poison gas was used in Syria. But there is every reason to believe it was used not by the Syrian Army, but by opposition forces, to provoke intervention by their powerful foreign patrons, who would be siding with the fundamentalists. Reports that militants are preparing another attack — this time against Israel — cannot be ignored.

It is alarming that military intervention in internal conflicts in foreign countries has become commonplace for the United States. Is it in America’s long-term interest? I doubt it. Millions around the world increasingly see America not as a model of democracy but as relying solely on brute force, cobbling coalitions together under the slogan “you’re either with us or against us.”

But force has proved ineffective and pointless. Afghanistan is reeling, and no one can say what will happen after international forces withdraw. Libya is divided into tribes and clans. In Iraq the civil war continues, with dozens killed each day. In the United States, many draw an analogy between Iraq and Syria, and ask why their government would want to repeat recent mistakes.

No matter how targeted the strikes or how sophisticated the weapons, civilian casualties are inevitable, including the elderly and children, whom the strikes are meant to protect.

The world reacts by asking: if you cannot count on international law, then you must find other ways to ensure your security. Thus a growing number of countries seek to acquire weapons of mass destruction. This is logical: if you have the bomb, no one will touch you. We are left with talk of the need to strengthen nonproliferation, when in reality this is being eroded.

We must stop using the language of force and return to the path of civilized diplomatic and political settlement.

A new opportunity to avoid military action has emerged in the past few days. The United States, Russia and all members of the international community must take advantage of the Syrian government’s willingness to place its chemical arsenal under international control for subsequent destruction. Judging by the statements of President Obama, the United States sees this as an alternative to military action.

I welcome the president’s interest in continuing the dialogue with Russia on Syria. We must work together to keep this hope alive, as we agreed to at the Group of 8 meeting in Lough Erne in Northern Ireland in June, and steer the discussion back toward negotiations.

If we can avoid force against Syria, this will improve the atmosphere in international affairs and strengthen mutual trust. It will be our shared success and open the door to cooperation on other critical issues.

My working and personal relationship with President Obama is marked by growing trust. I appreciate this. I carefully studied his address to the nation on Tuesday. And I would rather disagree with a case he made on American exceptionalism, stating that the United States’ policy is “what makes America different. It’s what makes us exceptional.”

It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation.

There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy. Their policies differ, too. We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal.

Vladimir V. Putin is the president of Russia.

Source:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/12/opinion/putin-plea-for-caution-from-russia-on-syria.html
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President Obama has not spelled out the possible consequences of a military attack on Syria, but U.S. military leaders are warning about the risks.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 03 Sep 2013 01:58:00 +0000

The Disastrous Consequences of a U.S. Military Attack on Syria

By Ann Wright
AlterNet
Sept. 2, 2013
[emphasis added]

Its 4am and I can’t sleep, just like 10 years ago when President Bush was telling the world that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the United States must invade and occupy Iraq to rid humanity of these weapons. I didn’t believe President Bush ten years ago and I resigned as a U.S. diplomat.

Now a decade later, President Obama is telling the world that the use of chemical weapons in Syria by the Assad government must be answered by other weapons, even though the results of the UN inspection team have not been compiled—just as the Bush administration refused to wait for the UN report by the inspectors who had been looking for WMD in Iraq.

Secretary of State John Kerry pronounced that the UN inspectors “can’t tell us anything that we don’t already know.” President Obama says that any U.S. attack on the Assad government will be as punishment, not regime change. The strike will be “limited”—but tell that to the civilians who inevitably die when military attacks take place.

President Bush and his advisors either didn’t know or didn’t care about the probable consequences of their decision to invade and occupy Iraq:

Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and over 4,000 Americans dead;
Millions of Iraqis and Americans wounded physically and psychologically;
Legions of young men of the region now experienced in warfare and for hire moving from Iraq to Libya to Syria;
And the Iraqi “democratic” government unable to control the whirlwind of sectarian violence that now is killing hundreds each week.

(Although the U.S. invaded and occupied Afghanistan under a different rationale, I also want to acknowledge the Afghan citizens who have been killed or wounded in the U.S. war in Afghanistan.)

President Obama has not spelled out the possible consequences of a military attack on Syria, but U.S. military leaders are warning about the risks. In a letter to the Senate Armed Services committee, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey wrote last month said, “As we weigh our options, we should be able to conclude with some confidence that use of force will move us toward the intended outcome.” “Once we take action, we should be prepared for what comes next. Deeper involvement is hard to avoid.”

General James Mattis, who retired recently as head of the U.S. Central Command, said last month at a security conference that the United States has “no moral obligation to do the impossible” in Syria. “If Americans take ownership of this, this is going to be a full-throated, very, very serious war.”

Possible Consequences of A U.S. Military Attack on Syria

As U.S. warships gather off the shores of Lebanon to launch Tomahawk Cruise missiles at targets in Syria, we can make some educated guesses of what the “unintended consequences” could be:

Syrian anti-aircraft batteries will fire their rockets at incoming U.S. missiles.
Many Syrians on the ground will die and both the U.S. and Syrian governments will say the deaths are the fault of the other.
The U.S. Embassy in Damascus will be attacked and burned, as may other U.S. Embassies and businesses in the Middle East.
Syria might also launch rockets toward the U.S. ally in the region—Israel.
Israel would launch bombing missions on Syria as it has three times in the past two years and perhaps take the opportunity to launch an attack on Syria’s strongest ally in the region Iran.
Iran, a country with a population of 80 million and has the largest military in the region untouched by war in the past 25 years, might retaliate with missiles aimed toward Israel and toward nearby U.S. military bases in Afghanistan, Turkey, Bahrain and Qatar.
Iran could block the Straits of Hormuz and impede the transport of oil out of the Persian Gulf.

30 Years Ago, U.S. Warships Bombed Lebanon and the U.S. Marine Barracks in Beirut Was Blown Up in Retaliation

At this time of crisis, it is worth remembering another time, 30 years ago in October, 1983 when U.S. warships bombarded Lebanon, the country located next to Syria. Within weeks, the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut was blown up by a massive truck bomb that killed 241 American servicemen: 220 Marines, 18 sailors and three soldiers.

The truck driver- suicide bomber was an Iranian national named Ismail Ascari whose truck contained explosives that were the equivalent of 21,000 pounds of TNT. Two minutes later a second suicide bomber drove a truck filled with explosives into the French military compound in Beirut killing 58 French paratroopers.

France is the only country standing with the Obama administration on a military strike on Syria.

Earlier in the year, on April 18, 1983, the U.S. Embassy in Beirut had been blown up by another suicide driver with 900 pounds of explosives that killed 63 people, 17 Americans, mostly embassy and CIA staff members, several soldiers and one Marine, 34 Lebanese employees of the US Embassy and 12 Embassy visitors. It was the deadliest attack on a U.S. diplomatic mission up to that time, and marked the beginning of anti-U.S. attacks by Islamist groups.

The U.S. and French military were in Lebanon as a part of a Multi-National force after the PLO left Lebanon following the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon ostensibly to create a 40 km buffer zone between the PLO and Syrian forces in Lebanon and Israel. The Israeli invasion was tacitly approved by the U.S., and the U.S. provided overt military support to Israel in the form of arms and material.

Colonel Timothy J. Geraghty, the commander of the U.S. 24th Marine Amphibious Unit (MAU) deployed as peacekeepers in Beirut, said that the American and the French headquarters were targeted primarily because of "who we were and what we represented…It is noteworthy that the United States provided direct naval gunfire support [which fired a total of 360 5-inch rounds between 10:04 A.M. and 3:00 PM.] -- which I strongly opposed for a week -- to the Lebanese Army at a mountain village called Suq-al-Garb on September 19 and that the French conducted an air strike on September 23 in the Bekaa Valley. American support removed any lingering doubts of our neutrality, and I stated to my staff at the time that we were going to pay in blood for this decision.”

Some of the circumstances around the incidents in Lebanon in 1983 and now thirty years later in Syria are familiar.

U.S. intelligence agencies were aware of potential trouble but did not report the problems in sufficient time for actions to be taken. President Obama said that the U.S. had intercepted signals indicating the Syrian government was moving equipment into place for an attack, but the U.S. did not warn the Syrian government that the U.S. knew what was happening and did not warn civilians that a chemical attack was imminent.

Thirty years before, on September 26, 1983, "the National Security Agency (NSA) intercepted an Iranian diplomatic communications message from the Iranian intelligence agency, the Ministry of Information and Security (MOIS)," to its ambassador, Ali Akbar Mohtashemi, in Damascus.

The message directed the ambassador to "take spectacular action against the American Marines.” The intercepted message, dated September 26, was not passed to the Marines until a month later on October 26: three days after the bombing.

Geraghty wrote 20 years later, “ The coordinated dual suicide attacks, supported, planned, organized, and financed by Iran and Syria using Shiite proxies, achieved their strategic goal: the withdrawal of the multinational force from Lebanon and a dramatic change in U.S. national policy. The synchronized attacks that morning killed 299 U.S. and French peace keepers and wounded scores more. The cost to the Iranian/Syrian-supported operation was two suicide bombers dead.”

“What is the political end state we’re trying to achieve?” said a retired senior officer involved in Middle East operational planning who said his concerns are widely shared by active-duty military leaders.

“I don’t know what it is. We say it’s not regime change. If it’s punishment, there are other ways to punish.” The former senior officer said that those who are expressing alarm at the risks inherent in the plan “are not being heard other than in a pro-forma manner.”

Letter from former U.S. government officials appealing to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Dempsey not to obey an illegal order to attack Syria

As Obama administration lawyers in the Justice and State Departments frantically write classified legal opinions to provide legal protection for whatever action the President decides on, others are calling for military officers to look to their constitutional responsibilities.

On August 31, 2013, 13 former officials of the U.S. government, including Pentagon Papers whistleblower Dan Ellsberg, retired CIA analyst Ray McGovern and retired US Army Colonel Larry Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff for Secretary of State Colin Powell, wrote an open letter to General Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, asking him to resign rather than follow an illegal order to attack Syria.

“We refer to your acknowledgment, in your letter of July 19 to Sen. Carl Levin on Syria, that a “decision to use force is not one that any of us takes lightly. It is no less than an act of war.” It appears that the President may order such an act of war without proper Congressional authorization. As seasoned intelligence and military professionals solemnly sworn to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, we have long been aware that – from private to general – it is one’s duty not to obey an illegal order. If such were given, the honorable thing would be to resign, rather than be complicit.”

Ann Wright served in the US Army/Army Reserves for 29 years and retired as a Colonel. She also was a US diplomat for 16 years and resigned in March, 2003 in opposition to the war on Iraq. She has been arrested for challenging Bush and Obama administrations’ policies of illegal wars, torture, assassin drones and curtailment of civil liberties. She was a witness for the defendants in the Oak Ridge Transform Now Plowshares trial. She is the co-author of the book “Dissent: Voices of Conscience.”

Source:
http://www.alternet.org/world/exploring-disastrous-consequences-us-military-attack-syria
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British bases in Cyprus being used for military action against Syria

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 01 Sep 2013 16:15:00 +0000

Cyprus Buildup May Point To Attack On Syria

By Eric Linton
International Business Times
August 26, 2013

Warplanes and military transports have begun arriving at Britain's Akrotiri airbase on Cyprus, less than 100 miles from the Syrian coast, in a sign of hastening preparations for a possible military strike against Syria, The Guardian reported Monday.

Two commercial pilots who regularly fly from Larnaca, Cyprus, told the Guardian that they had seen C-130 transport planes from their cockpit windows as well as small formations of fighter jets on their radar screens, which they believe had flown from Europe.

The Greek Cypriot government in Nicosia said Monday it had no official information about the possibility of British bases in Cyprus being used for military action against Syria in response to alleged poison gas attacks by President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, China’s official Xinhua agency reported.

"The government has neither been officially advised nor has any other information about the prospect of the British bases on Cyprus being used by Britain and the United States," Defense Minister Fotis Fotiou said.

The London Sunday Times and the Daily Telegraph have reported that British and American military officials were working on plans to use the British Royal Air Force base at Akrotiri, near Limassol on the south shores of Cyprus, for attacks on selected Syrian government targets.

Britain retained two sites in Cyprus totaling 156 square kilometers when it granted the island independence in 1960 following a colonial war. Britain claims sovereign rights over the bases.

The Cypriot government objects, as a matter of general policy, to the British bases being used against neighboring countries, but Britain claims that such use complies with international treaties that allow military action which serves its defense interests.

The most important of these bases is the RAF base at Akrotiri, which is currently used to provide logistic support for NATO forces in Afghanistan and also hosts extensive eavesdropping electronic installations. It was most recently used by British Tornados taking off for action against Moammar Gadhafi's forces in Libya in 2011.

Meanwhile, Russia said Monday it hoped a "war of civilizations" in Syria could be avoided, although Western powers had been moving along that path.

"I was greatly alarmed by the statements made from Paris and London that NATO may intervene to destroy chemical weapons in Syria without the consent of the U.N. Security Council. It's a very dangerous and slippery path," Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told reporters in Moscow.

He said the use of force without the Security Council's sanction would be a major violation of international law.

"Even if we leave the legal, moral and ethical aspects aside, specific consequences of external interference not authorized by the international community would only sharply exacerbate the situation in the country," Lavrov said.

Meanwhile, Russia would not start military confrontation with anyone over Syria, he added.

"We expect our Western partners to draft their policy not reactively but strategically," he said.

Lavrov described the deployment of Western naval vessels off Syrian shores as "a grave blunder" and compared the Western intimidation of Syria with the way the West started its intervention in Iraq 10 years ago.

Lavrov said foreign intervention would not lead to peace but to a new round of the civil war in Syria and he accused "certain forces" of deliberately undermining peaceful efforts.

"The moment we see a glimmer of hope appear, someone who wishes to prevent the situation from returning to the right track pops up," he said.

Source:
http://www.ibtimes.com/cyprus-buildup-may-point-attack-syria-1400013 _________________________

The top 5 reasons why we keep getting into foolish fights.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 01 Sep 2013 14:31:00 +0000

Is America Addicted to War?

By Stephen M Walt
Foreign Policy
April 4, 2011
[emphasis added]

The United States started out as 13 small and vulnerable colonies clinging to the east coast of North America. Over the next century, those original 13 states expanded all the way across the continent, subjugating or exterminating the native population and wresting Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California from Mexico. It fought a bitter civil war, acquired a modest set of overseas colonies, and came late to both world wars.

But since becoming a great power around 1900, it has fought nearly a dozen genuine wars and engaged in countless military interventions.

Yet Americans think of themselves as a peace-loving people, and we certainly don't regard our country as a "warrior nation" or "garrison state."

Teddy Roosevelt was probably the last U.S. president who seemed to view war as an activity to be welcomed (he once remarked that "A just war is in the long run far better for a man's soul than the most prosperous peace"), and subsequent presidents always portray themselves as going to war with great reluctance, and only as a last resort.

In 2008, Americans elected Barack Obama in part because they thought he would be different from his predecessor on a host of issues, but especially in his approach to the use of armed force. It was clear to nearly everyone that George W. Bush had launched a foolish and unnecessary war in Iraq, and then compounded the error by mismanaging it (and the war in Afghanistan too).

So Americans chose a candidate who had opposed Bush's war in Iraq and could bring U.S. commitments back in line with our resources.

Above all, Americans thought Obama would be a lot more thoughtful about where and how to use force, and that he understood the limits of this crudest of policy tools. The Norwegian Nobel Committee seems to have thought so too, when they awarded him the Nobel Peace Prize not for anything he had done, but for what it hoped he might do henceforth.

Yet a mere two years later, we find ourselves back in the fray once again. (In 2013 now Syria) Since taking office, Obama has escalated U.S. involvement in Afghanistan and launched a new war against Libya. As in Iraq, the real purpose of our intervention is regime change at the point of a gun.

At first we hoped that most of the guns would be in the hands of the Europeans, or the hands of the rebel forces arrayed against Muammar al-Qaddafi, but it's increasingly clear that U.S. military forces, CIA operatives and foreign weapons supplies are going to be necessary to finish the job.

Moreover, as Alan Kuperman of the University of Texas and Steve Chapman of the Chicago Tribune have now shown, the claim that the United States had to act to prevent Libyan tyrant Muammar al-Qaddafi from slaughtering tens of thousands of innocent civilians in Benghazi does not stand up to even casual scrutiny.

Although everyone recognizes that Qaddafi is a brutal ruler, his forces did not conduct deliberate, large-scale massacres in any of the cities he has recaptured, and his violent threats to wreak vengeance on Benghazi were directed at those who continued to resist his rule, not at innocent bystanders. There is no question that Qaddafi is a tyrant with few (if any) redemptive qualities, but the threat of a bloodbath that would "[stain] the conscience of the world" (as Obama put it) was slight.

It remains to be seen whether this latest lurch into war will pay off or not, and whether the United States and its allies will have saved lives or squandered them. But the real question we should be asking is: Why does this keep happening? Why do such different presidents keep doing such similar things?

How can an electorate that seemed sick of war in 2008 watch passively while one war escalates in 2009 and another one gets launched in 2011? How can two political parties that are locked in a nasty partisan fight over every nickel in the government budget sit blithely by and watch a president start running up a $100 million per day tab in this latest adventure? What is going on here?
Here are my Top 5 Reasons Why America Keeps Fighting Foolish Wars:

1. Because We Can
The most obvious reason that the United States keeps doing these things is the fact that it has a remarkably powerful military, especially when facing a minor power like Libya. As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, when you've got hundreds of planes, smart bombs, and cruise missiles, the whole world looks like a target set. So when some thorny problem arises somewhere in the world, it's hard to resist the temptation to "do something!"

It is as if the president has big red button on his desk, and then his aides come in and say, "There's something really nasty happening to some unfortunate people, Mr. President, but if you push that button, you can stop it. It might cost a few hundred million dollars, maybe even a few billion by the time we are done, but we can always float a bit more debt. As long as you don't send in ground troops, the public will probably go along, at least for awhile and there's no danger that anybody will retaliate against us -- at least not anytime soon -- because the bad guys (who are really nasty, by the way) are also very weak. Our vital interests aren't at stake, sir, so you don't have to do anything. But if you don't push the button lots of innocent people will die. The choice is yours, Mr. President."

It would take a very tough and resolute president -- or one with a clear set of national priorities and a deep understanding of the uncertainties of warfare -- to resist that siren song. (we don't have one)

Of course, like his predecessors, Obama justifies his resort to force by invoking America's special place in the world. In the usual rhetoric of "American exceptionalism," he couched it in terms of U.S. values, its commitment to freedom, etc.

But the truly exceptional thing about America today is not our values (and certainly not our dazzling infrastructure, high educational standards, rising middle-class prosperity, etc.); it is the concentration of military power in the hands of the president and the eroding political constraints on its employment. (For an elegant skewering of the "American exceptionalism" argument, see Andrew Sullivan here).

2. The U.S. Has No Serious Enemies

A second factor that permits the United States to keep waging these optional wars is the fact that the end of the Cold War left the United States in a remarkably safe position. There are no great powers in the Western hemisphere; we have no "peer competitors" anywhere (though China may become one sooner if we keep squandering our power foolishly); and there is no country anywhere that could entertain the idea of attacking America without inviting its own destruction.

We do face a vexing terrorism problem, but that danger is probably exaggerated, is partly a reaction to our tendency to meddle in other countries, and is best managed in other ways.

It's really quite ironic: Because the American homeland is safe from serious external dangers (which is a good thing), Americans have the luxury of going abroad "in search of monsters to destroy" (which is not). If Americans were really worried about having to defend our own soil against a powerful adversary, we wouldn't be wasting time and money on feel-good projects like the Libyan crusade. But our exceptionally favorable geopolitical position allows us to do these things, even when they don't make a lot of strategic sense.

3. The All-Volunteer Force

A third enabling factor behind our addiction to adventurism is the all-volunteer force. By limiting military service only to those individuals who volunteer to do it, public opposition to wars of choice is more easily contained. Could Bush or Obama have kept the Iraq and Afghanistan wars going if most young Americans had to register for a draft, and if the sons and daughters of Wall Street bankers were being sent in harm's way because they got an unlucky number in the draft? I very much doubt it.

By the way, I am not saying that the AVF is a bad idea that should be chucked, as there are a number of good arguments in its favor. Nonetheless, the AVF is one of those features of the contemporary U.S. national security order that makes the frequent resort to force politically feasible.

4. It's the Establishment, Stupid

A fourth reason we keep meddling all over the world is the fact that the foreign-policy establishment is hard-wired in favor of "doing something." Foreign-policy thinking in Washington is dominated either by neoconservatives (who openly proclaim the need to export "liberty" and never met a war they didn't like) or by "liberal interventionists" who are just as enthusiastic about using military power to solve problems, provided they can engineer some sort of multilateral cover for it.

Liberal interventionists sometimes concede that the United States can't solve every problem (at least not at the same time), but they still think that the United States is the "indispensable" nation and they want us to solve as many of the world's problems as we possibly can.

These worldviews are developed, promulgated, and defended by a network of think tanks, committees, public policy schools, and government agencies that don't always agree on what should be done (or which problems deserve most priority) but that are all committed to using U.S. power a lot.

In short, our foreign policy is shaped by a bipartisan class of foreign policy do-gooders who spend years out of power maneuvering to get in, and spend their time in office trying to advance whatever their own pet project(s) might be. Having scratched and clawed to get themselves on the inside, the people who run our foreign policy are not likely to counsel restraint, or to suggest that the United States and the rest of the world might be better off if Washington did a bit less. After all, what's the point of being a big shot in Washington if you can't use all that power to try to mold the world to your liking?

Compared with most Americans, this is a wealthy, privileged, highly educated group of people and most of them are personally insulated from the consequences of the policies they advocate (i.e., with a few exceptions, their kids don't serve in the military -- see No. 3). Advocates of intervention are unlikely to suffer severe financial reverses or face long-term career penalties if some foreign war goes badly; they'll just go back to the same think-tank sinecures when their term of service is over.

By the way, lurking underneath the Establishment consensus on foreign-policy activism is the most successful Jedi mind trick that the American right ever pulled. Since the mid-1960s, American conservatism has waged a relentless and successful campaign to convince U.S. voters that it is wasteful, foolish, and stupid to pay taxes to support domestic programs here at home, but it is our patriotic duty to pay taxes to support a military establishment that costs more than all other militaries put together and that is used not to defend American soil but to fight wars mostly on behalf of other people.

In other words, Americans became convinced that it was wrong to spend tax revenues on things that would help their fellow citizens (like good schools, health care, roads, and bridges, high-speed rail, etc.), but it was perfectly OK to tax Americans (though of course not the richest Americans) and spend the money on foreign wars.

And we bought it. Moreover, there doesn't seem to be an effective mechanism to force the president to actually face and confront the trade-offs between the money he spends on optional wars and the domestic programs that eventually have to be cut back home. Which brings me to No. 5.

5. Congress Has Checked Out

The authority to declare war is given to Congress, not the president, but that authority has been steadily usurped ever since World War II.

Although the Constitution could not be clearer on this point, modern presidents clearly feel no constraints about ordering U.S. forces to attack other countries, or even to fully inform Congress as to what we might be doing in secret.

In practice, therefore, the vaunted system of "checks and balances" supposedly enshrined in our Constitution simply doesn't operate anymore, which means that the use of America's military power has been left solely to the presidents and a handful of ambitious advisors (see No. 4 above). This is not to say that public opinion doesn't figure into their calculations (i.e., they've got pollsters and political advisors too), but it is hardly a binding constraint.

I've no doubt that one could add more items to this list (e.g., the passive press, the military-industrial complex, etc.), but the items already noted go a long way to explaining why the supposedly peace-loving United States keeps finding itself in all these small but draining wars.

Back in the 2008 campaign, Barack Obama said that his favorite movie was The Godfather. And if I recall correctly, he said his second favorite movie was The Godfather, Part II. But his presidency is starting to play out like Part III of that famed trilogy, where Michael Corleone rails against the fates that have foiled his attempt to make the Corleone family legit.

I can just hear Obama saying it: "Just when I thought I was out … they pull me back in." Precisely.

Registration may be required to access.
Source:
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/04/04/is_america_addicted_to_war?page=full
________________________

Internet giants Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and Facebook, among others, were paid millions of dollars by NSA to cover compliance costs associated with implementing the agency's vaunted "Prism" spy program - even after a federal court ruled the spying unconstitutional.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 28 Aug 2013 02:03:00 +0000

Google, Facebook, others accepted millions from NSA to turn over spy data on its users

by J.D. Heyes
Natural News
August 27, 2013
[emphasis added]

As bad as it is that the National Security Agency has been caught red-handed spying wholesale on American citizens' private electronic communications, it is even worse knowing that American taxpayers paid for the "privilege" of having their Fourth Amendment rights shredded.

According to Britain's Guardian, the very newspaper that broke the NSA spy scandal and whose reporter, Glenn Greenwald, should be awarded multiple Pulitzers, Internet giants Google, Yahoo!,Microsoft and Facebook, among others, were paid millions of dollars by NSA to cover compliance costs associated with implementing the agency's vaunted "Prism" spy program - even after a federal court ruled the spying unconstitutional.

From taxpayers, to the NSA, to the tech companies...

From the Guardian:

The technology companies...incurred the costs to meet new certification demands in the wake of the ruling from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) court. The October 2011 judgment, which was declassified [August 21] by the Obama administration, found that the NSA's inability to separate purely domestic communications from foreign traffic violated the Fourth Amendment.

The court's ruling did not directly take aim at the Prism program, the paper said. But documents provided to The Guardian by former NSA contractor-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden, now in Russia after being granted temporary political asylum, detail problems created for the agency, as well as efforts aimed at making operations compliant with the law and the Constitution.

"The material provides the first evidence of a financial relationship between the tech companies and the NSA," the paper reported.

The role of the FISA court is to sign off on annual "certifications" that provide the framework with which the NSA conducts its surveillance operations. The court doesn't actually oversee the agency as it conducts those operations, however.

In the aftermath of the court's finding that NSA operations had been illegally targeting Americans, the certifications were only signed on a temporary basis while the agency supposedly worked on ways to solve processes that were deemed unconstitutional.

Per the Guardian:

An NSA newsletter entry, marked top secret and dated December 2012, discloses the huge costs this entailed. "Last year's problems resulted in multiple extensions to the certifications' expiration dates which cost millions of dollars for Prism providers to implement each successive extension - costs covered by Special Source Operations," it says.

During his interview with Guardian reporter Greenwald, Snowden described the NSA's Special Source Operations as the agency's "crown jewel," which handles all surveillance programs like Prism which must rely on "corporate partnerships" with telecoms and Internet companies in order to data mine users' communications.

Discovering that taxpayers' money was used to cover compliance costs for telecoms raises new questions about the relationship between such firms and the NSA, as well as the veracity of claims by the telecoms that user privacy is paramount and well-protected.

An earlier, undated newsletter said all Prism providers were given new certifications within days of the FISA court's ruling. "All Prism providers, except Yahoo and Google, were successfully transitioned to the new certifications. We expect Yahoo and Google to complete transitioning by Friday 6 October," it said.

Thousands of times per year

Most of the companies involved did not even have the courage to respond to The Guardian's questions about taking taxpayer funding to allow them, in turn, to be spied upon. However, one of them, a spokesperson from Yahoo!, actually tried to justify its illegal and unconstitutional actions byciting federal law.

"Federal law requires the U.S. government to reimburse providers for costs incurred to respond to compulsory legal process imposed by the government. We have requested reimbursement consistent with this law," said the Yahoo spokesperson, who was not named.

Of course.

As to the NSA's actions, a recent Washington Post story revealed that the agency violated your rights "thousands of times each year since Congress granted the agency broad new powers in 2008."

Feel Violated? You Should!

Article Sources:
http://www.theguardian.co
http://articles.washingtonpost.com
http://www.naturalnews.com

Source:
http://www.naturalnews.com/041795_technology_companies_NSA_spy_data.html
____________

NSA leaker Edward Snowden accused the British government on Friday of leaking sensitive material to a newspaper he'd never worked with, the Independent, and attributing the material to him.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 23 Aug 2013 14:44:00 +0000

UK government now leaking documents about itself

The NSA whistleblower says: 'I have never spoken with, worked with, or provided any journalistic materials to the Independent'

By Glenn Greenwald
The Guardian
August 23, 2013

The Independent this morning published an article - which it repeatedly claims comes from "documents obtained from the NSA by Edward Snowden" - disclosing that "Britain runs a secret internet-monitoring station in the Middle East to intercept and process vast quantities of emails, telephone calls and web traffic on behalf of Western intelligence agencies." This is the first time the Independent has published any revelations purportedly from the NSA documents, and it's the type of disclosure which journalists working directly with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden have thus far avoided.

That leads to the obvious question: who is the source for this disclosure? Snowden this morning said he wants it to be clear that he was not the source for the Independent, stating:

I have never spoken with, worked with, or provided any journalistic materials to the Independent. The journalists I have worked with have, at my request, been judicious and careful in ensuring that the only things disclosed are what the public should know but that does not place any person in danger. People at all levels of society up to and including the President of the United States have recognized the contribution of these careful disclosures to a necessary public debate, and we are proud of this record.

"It appears that the UK government is now seeking to create an appearance that the Guardian and Washington Post's disclosures are harmful, and they are doing so by intentionally leaking harmful information to The Independent and attributing it to others. The UK government should explain the reasoning behind this decision to disclose information that, were it released by a private citizen, they would argue is a criminal act."

In other words: right as there is a major scandal over the UK's abusive and lawless exploitation of its Terrorism Act - with public opinion against the use of the Terrorism law to detain David Miranda - and right as the UK government is trying to tell a court that there are serious dangers to the public safety from these documents, there suddenly appears exactly the type of disclosure the UK government wants but that has never happened before. That is why Snowden is making clear: despite the Independent's attempt to make it appears that it is so, he is not their source for that disclosure. Who, then, is?

The US government itself has constantly used this tactic: aggressively targeting those who disclose embarrassing or incriminating information about the government in the name of protecting the sanctity of classified information, while simultaneously leaking classified information prolifically when doing so advances their political interests.

One other matter about the Independent article: it strongly suggests that there is some agreement in place to restrict the Guardian's ongoing reporting about the NSA documents. Speaking for myself, let me make one thing clear: I'm not aware of, nor subject to, any agreement that imposes any limitations of any kind on the reporting that I am doing on these documents. I would never agree to any such limitations. As I've made repeatedly clear, bullying tactics of the kind we saw this week will not deter my reporting or the reporting of those I'm working with in any way. I'm working hard on numerous new and significant NSA stories and intend to publish them the moment they are ready.

UPDATE

The Independent's Oliver Wright just tweeted the following:

"For the record: The Independent was not leaked or 'duped' into publishing today's front page story by the Government."

Leaving aside the fact that the Independent article quotes an anonymous "senior Whitehall source", nobody said they were "duped" into publishing anything. The question is: who provided them this document or the information in it? It clearly did not come from Snowden or any of the journalists with whom he has directly worked. The Independent provided no source information whatsoever for their rather significant disclosure of top secret information. Did they see any such documents, and if so, who, generally, provided it to them? I don't mean, obviously, that they should identify their specific source, but at least some information about their basis for these claims, given how significant they are, would be warranted. One would think that they would not have published something like this without either seeing the documents or getting confirmation from someone who has: the class of people who qualify is very small, and includes, most prominently and obviously, the UK government itself.

Source:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/23/uk-government-independent-military-base

_________________________

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The top 5 reasons why we keep getting into foolish fights.

Internet giants Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and Facebook, among others, were paid millions of dollars by NSA to cover compliance costs associated with implementing the agency's vaunted "Prism" spy program - even after a federal court ruled the spying unconstitutional.

NSA leaker Edward Snowden accused the British government on Friday of leaking sensitive material to a newspaper he'd never worked with, the Independent, and attributing the material to him.

Related question

UPDATE