Kenneth Roth, Human Rights Watch - Syria Hilarity

ꕤ Syria Human Rights Watch  ... lol Kenneth Roth is on his way to becoming a Twitter joke. ---------------------- ꕤ ---------------------- ꕤ

International Human Rights Law - Professor Eric Posner, University of Chicago Law School

ꕤ December 2014 Article SOURCE http://www.theguardian.com/news/2014/dec/04/-sp-case-against-human-rights The case against human rights Many believe that international human rights law is one of our greatest moral achievements. But there is little evidence that it is effective. A radically different approach is long overdue Eric Posner Thursday 4 December 2014 17.00 AEDT Last modified on Friday 30 January 2015 02.36 AEDT In July 2013, Amarildo de Souza, a bricklayer living in a Rio de Janeiro favela, was arrested by police in an operation to round up drug traffickers. He was never seen again. De Souza’s disappearance was taken up by protesters in street demonstrations, which were met with a ruthless police response. Normally, de Souza’s story would have ended there, but public pressure led to a police investigation, and eventually to the arrest of 10 police officers, who were charged with torturing and murdering him. Brazil, one of the largest democracies in the world, is rarely considered to be among the major human rights-violating countries. But every year more than a thousand killings by police – very likely summary executions, according to Human Rights Watch – take place in Rio de Janeiro alone. The prohibition of extrajudicial killings is central to human rights law, and it is a rule that Brazil flagrantly violates – not as a matter of official policy, but as a matter of practice. Brazil is hardly the only country where this takes place; others include India, the world’s largest democracy, South Africa, the Dominican Republic and Iran. These countries all have judicial systems, and most suspected criminals are formally charged and appear in court. But the courts are slow and underfunded, so police, under pressure to combat crime, employ extrajudicial methods, such as torture, to extract confessions. We live in an age in which most of the major human rights treaties – there are nine “core” treaties – have been ratified by the vast majority of countries. Yet it seems that the human rights agenda has fallen on hard times. In much of the Islamic world, women lack equality, religious dissenters are persecuted and political freedoms are curtailed. The Chinese model of development, which combines political repression and economic liberalism, has attracted numerous admirers in the developing world. Political authoritarianism has gained ground in Russia, Turkey, Hungary and Venezuela. Backlashes against LGBT rights have taken place in countries as diverse as Russia and Nigeria. The traditional champions of human rights – Europe and the United States – have floundered. Europe has turned inward as it has struggled with a sovereign debt crisis, xenophobia towards its Muslim communities and disillusionment with Brussels. The United States, which used torture in the years after 9/11 and continues to kill civilians with drone strikes, has lost much of its moral authority. Even age-old scourges such as slavery continue to exist. A recent report estimates that nearly 30 million people are forced against their will to work. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. At a time when human rights violations remain widespread, the discourse of human rights continues to flourish. The use of “human rights” in English-language books has increased 200-fold since 1940, and is used today 100 times more often than terms such as “constitutional rights” and “natural rights”. Although people have always criticised governments, it is only in recent decades that they have begun to do so in the distinctive idiom of human rights. The United States and Europe have recently condemned human rights violations in Syria, Russia, China and Iran. Western countries often make foreign aid conditional on human rights and have even launched military interventions based on human rights violations. Many people argue that the incorporation of the idea of human rights into international law is one of the great moral achievements of human history. Because human rights law gives rights to all people regardless of nationality, it deprives governments of their traditional riposte when foreigners criticise them for abusing their citizens – namely “sovereignty” (which is law-speak for “none of your business”). Thus, international human rights law provides people with invaluable protections against the power of the state. And yet it is hard to avoid the conclusion that governments continue to violate human rights with impunity. Why, for example, do more than 150 countries (out of 193 countries that belong to the UN) engage in torture? Why has the number of authoritarian countries increased in the last several years? Why do women remain a subordinate class in nearly all countries of the world? Why do children continue to work in mines and factories in so many countries? The truth is that human rights law has failed to accomplish its objectives. There is little evidence that human rights treaties, on the whole, have improved the wellbeing of people. The reason is that human rights were never as universal as people hoped, and the belief that they could be forced upon countries as a matter of international law was shot through with misguided assumptions from the very beginning. The human rights movement shares something in common with the hubris of development economics, which in previous decades tried (and failed) to alleviate poverty by imposing top-down solutions on developing countries. But where development economists have reformed their approach, the human rights movement has yet to acknowledge its failures. It is time for a reckoning. Although the modern notion of human rights emerged during the 18th century, it was on December 10, 1948, that the story began in earnest, with the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the UN general assembly. The declaration arose from the ashes of the second world war and aimed to launch a new, brighter era of international relations. It provided a long list of rights, most of which are the familiar “political” rights that are set down in the US constitution, or that have been constructed by American courts over the years. The declaration was not dictated by the United States, however, and showed the influence of other traditions of legal thought in its inclusion of “social” rights, such as the right to work. The weaknesses that would go on to undermine human rights law were there from the start. The universal declaration was not a treaty in the formal sense: no one at the time believed that it created legally binding obligations. It was not ratified by nations but approved by the general assembly, and the UN charter did not give the general assembly the power to make international law. Moreover, the rights were described in vague, aspirational terms, which could be interpreted in multiple ways, and national governments – even the liberal democracies – were wary of binding legal obligations. The US did not commit itself to eliminating racial segregation, and Britain and France did not commit themselves to liberating the subject populations in their colonies. Several authoritarian states – including the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Saudi Arabia – refused to vote in favour of the universal declaration and instead abstained. The words in the universal declaration may have been stirring, but no one believed at the time that they portended a major change in the way international relations would be conducted; nor did they capture the imagination of voters, politicians, intellectuals or anyone else who might have exerted political pressure on governments. Part of the problem was that a disagreement opened up early on between the US and the Soviet Union. The Americans argued that human rights consisted of political rights – the rights to vote, to speak freely, not to be arbitrarily detained, to practise a religion of one’s choice, and so on. These rights were, not coincidentally, the rights set out in the US constitution. The Soviets argued that human rights consisted of social or economic rights – the rights to work, to healthcare, and to education. As was so often the case during the cold war, the conflict was zero-sum. Either you supported political rights (that is, liberal democracy) or you supported economic rights (that is, socialism). The result was that negotiations to convert the universal declaration into a binding treaty were split into two tracks. It would take another 18 years for the United Nations to adopt a political rights treaty and an economic rights treaty. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights finally took effect in 1976. As the historian Samuel Moyn has argued in his book The Last Utopia, it was not until the late 1970s that human rights became a major force in international relations. President Jimmy Carter’s emphasis on human rights seems to have been a reaction to Vietnam and the gruesome realpolitik of the Nixon era, but Carter himself was unable to maintain a consistent line. Allies such as Iran and Saudi Arabia were just too important for American security, and seen as a crucial counterweight to Soviet influence. Still, something changed with Carter. His five successors – Republicans and Democrats alike – have invoked the term “human rights” far more frequently than any president before him. It is not that presidents have become more idealistic. Rather, it is that they have increasingly used the language of rights to express their idealistic goals (or to conceal their strategic goals). Despite the horrifying genocide in Rwanda in 1994, and the civil war in Yugoslavia, the 1990s were the high-water mark for the idea of human rights. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, economic and social rights lost their stigmatising association with communism and entered the constitutional law of many western countries, with the result that all major issues of public policy came to be seen as shaped by human rights. Human rights played an increasingly important role in the European Union and members insisted that countries hoping to join the EU to obtain economic benefits should be required to respect human rights as well. NGOs devoted to advancing human rights also grew during this period, and many countries that emerged from under the Soviet yoke adopted western constitutional systems. Even Russia itself made halting movements in that direction.  [EU human rights insistence is a joke.  European govts have no regard whatsoever for human rights:  wants to bring in rights abuser & ISIS supporter Turkey; German political prisoners and political targets are abundant; Germans guilty of thought crimes are harassed on an international basis; German government agents infiltrate political party (NPD) and attempt to entrap party members to shut down nationalist political party; violation of international laws and imprisonment of Australian journalist, Julian Assange (without charge) on basis of ludicrous Sweden police 'allegations' & conspiracy between Britain and human rights poster-child, Sweden (among others); British political policing and rape/impregnation of targeted activist women etc.  'Human rights' rhetoric is just a PR tool to manipulate the perception of gullible masses, in an effort to paper over the fact that they're subjects of corrupt, corporate serving, undemocratic, totalitarian states. ] America’s recourse to torture was a significant challenge to the international human rights regime Then came September 11, 2001 and the “war on terror”. America’s recourse to torture was a significant challenge to the international human rights regime. The United States was a traditional leader in human rights and one of the few countries that has used its power to advance human rights in other nations. Moreover, the prohibition on torture is at the core of the human rights regime; if that right is less than absolute, then surely the other rights are as well.  [lol ... as if the US gives a rat's about human rights.  The US has always promoted the interests of its corporations at the EXPENSE of human rights abroad.  Check out the South American dictators they US supported, the coups, the invasions, the CIA destabilisations and overthrows of democratic governments etc ] The rise of China has also undermined the power of human rights. In recent years, China has worked assiduously behind the scenes to weaken international human rights institutions and publicly rejected international criticism of the political repression of its citizens. It has offered diplomatic and economic support to human rights violators, such as Sudan, that western countries have tried to isolate. Along with Russia, it has used its veto in the UN security council to limit western efforts to advance human rights through economic pressure and military intervention. And it has joined with numerous other countries – major emerging powers such as Vietnam, and Islamic countries that fear western secularisation – to deny many of the core values that human rights are supposed to protect. Each of the six major human rights treaties has been ratified by more than 150 countries, yet many of them remain hostile to human rights. This raises the nagging question of how much human rights law has actually influenced the behaviour of governments. There are undoubtedly examples where countries enter into human rights treaties and change their behaviour. The political scientist Beth Simmons, for instance, has described the observable impact in Japan and Colombia of the ratification of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. The puzzle is how to reconcile this with the many examples of blatant human rights violations. Saudi Arabia ratified the treaty banning discrimination against women in 2007, and yet by law subordinates women to men in all areas of life. Child labour exists in countries that have ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child: Uzbekistan, Tanzania and India, for example. Powerful western countries, including the US, do business with grave human rights abusers. In a very rough sense, the world is a freer place than it was 50 years ago, but is it freer because of the human rights treaties or because of other events, such as economic growth or the collapse of communism?  [Freer in what way?  Some parts of the world may be more liberal than they were 50 years ago.  Probably in the West that's been indoctrinated with garbage for decades.  These are superficial 'freedoms' (along with the freedom to self destruct).  But empowerment that actually counts resides with corporate controlled government, appointed via fake elections, to exercise totalitarian control of the masses.] The central problem with human rights law is that it is hopelessly ambiguous. The ambiguity, which allows governments to rationalise almost anything they do, is not a result of sloppy draftsmanship but of the deliberate choice to overload the treaties with hundreds of poorly defined obligations. In most countries people formally have as many as 400 international human rights – rights to work and leisure, to freedom of expression and religious worship, to nondiscrimination, to privacy, to pretty much anything you might think is worth protecting. The sheer quantity and variety of rights, which protect virtually all human interests, can provide no guidance to governments. Given that all governments have limited budgets, protecting one human right might prevent a government from protecting another. Take the right not to be tortured, for example. In most countries torture is not a matter of official policy. As in Brazil, local police often use torture because they believe that it is an effective way to maintain order or to solve crimes. If the national government decided to wipe out torture, it would need to create honest, well-paid investigatory units to monitor the police. The government would also need to fire its police forces and increase the salaries of the replacements. It would probably need to overhaul the judiciary as well, possibly the entire political system. Such a government might reasonably argue that it should use its limited resources in a way more likely to help people – building schools and medical clinics, for example. If this argument is reasonable, then it is a problem for human rights law, which does not recognise any such excuse for failing to prevent torture. Or consider, as another example, the right to freedom of expression. From a global perspective, the right to freedom of expression is hotly contested. The US takes this right particularly seriously, though it makes numerous exceptions for fraud, defamation, and obscenity. In Europe, most governments believe that the right to freedom of expression does not extend to hate speech. In many Islamic countries, any kind of defamation of Islam is not protected by freedom of speech. Human rights law blandly acknowledges that the right to freedom of expression may be limited by considerations of public order and morals. But a government trying to comply with the international human right to freedom of expression is given no specific guidance whatsoever. Thus, the existence of a huge number of vaguely defined rights ends up giving governments enormous discretion. If a government advances one group of rights, while neglecting others, how does one tell whether it complies with the treaties the best it can or cynically evades them? The central problem with human rights law is that it is hopelessly ambiguous The reason these kinds of problems arise on the international but not on the national level is that within countries, the task of interpreting and defining vaguely worded rights, and making trade-offs between different rights, is delegated to trusted institutions. It was the US supreme court, for example, that decided that freedom of speech did not encompass fraudulent, defamatory, and obscene statements. The American public accepted these judgments because they coincided with their moral views and because the court enjoys a high degree of trust. In principle, international institutions could perform this same function. But the international institutions that have been established for this purpose are very weak. In truly international human rights institutions, such as the UN human rights council, there is a drastic lack of consensus between nations. To avoid being compelled by international institutions to recognise rights that they reject, countries give them little power. The multiple institutions lack a common hierarchical superior – unlike national courts – and thus provide conflicting interpretations of human rights, and cannot compel nations to pay attention to them. That is why, for instance, western countries have been able to disregard the human rights council’s endorsement of “defamation of religion”, the idea that criticism of Islam and other religions violates the human rights of those who practice those religions. The failure of the international human rights legal regime is, then, rooted in the difficulty of reducing the ideal of “good governance” to a set of clearly defined rules that can be interpreted and applied by trusted institutions. People throughout the world have different moral convictions, but the problem is not entirely one of moral pluralism. The real problem is the sheer difficulty of governance, particularly in societies in the throes of religious and ethnic strife that outsiders often fail to understand. There are many legitimate ways for governments to advance people’s wellbeing and it is extremely hard for outsiders to evaluate the quality of governance in a particular country. Many human rights advocates respond that even if human rights law does not function as a normal legal system, it does provide important moral support for oppressed people. When the Soviet Union signed the Helsinki Accords in 1975, which required it to respect human rights, various Helsinki committees sprouted in the eastern bloc, which became important focal points for agitation from dissidents. Women’s rights groups in patriarchal countries have drawn inspiration from the ratification of the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women. Advocates for children can point to the Convention on the Rights of the Child. NGOs like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International can pressure governments to improve the human rights they care about, even if they can’t get countries to comply with all their treaty obligations. The human rights legal regime, taken as a whole, has made human rights the common moral language of international relations, which has forced governments to take human rights seriously.   [Forced governments to take human rights seriously?  Got to be kidding.  Just the other day, I saw on video footage a black man (presumably shot)  crawling past a service station as US police officers were filmed pumping  a few more bullets into him.] But while governments all use the idiom of human rights, they use it to make radically different arguments about how countries should behave. China cites “the right to development” to explain why the Chinese government gives priority to economic growth over political liberalisation. Many countries cite the “right to security,” a catch-all idea that protection from crime justifies harsh enforcement methods. Vladimir Putin cited the rights of ethnic minorities in Ukraine in order to justify his military intervention there, just as the United States cited Saddam Hussein’s suppression of human rights in order to build support for the Iraq war. Certain Islamic countries cite the right to religious freedom in order to explain why women must be subordinated, arguing that women must play the role set out for them in Islamic law. The right of “self‑determination” can be invoked to convert foreign pressure against a human-rights violating country into a violation of that country’s right to determine its destiny. The language of rights, untethered to specific legal interpretations, is too spongy to prevent governments from committing abuses and can easily be used to clothe illiberal agendas in words soothing to the western ear.  [Russia has not had military intervention in Ukraine.  Russian military was already based in Crimea and Russia provided protection to the ethnic Russians of Crimea, who voted overwhelmingly to stick with Russia rather than take their chances with the CIA coup installed, violent, anti-Russian, fascist government of Ukraine.  Crimea is, in any event, historically Russian and Ukraine itself is just the outpost of the Russian empire.] And while NGOs do press countries to improve their behaviour, they cite the human rights they care about and do not try to take an impartial approach to enforcing human rights in general. Sophisticated organisations such as Human Rights Watch understand that poor countries cannot comply with all the human rights listed in the treaties, so they pick and choose, in effect telling governments around the world that they should reorder their priorities so as to coincide with what Human Rights Watch thinks is important, often fixing on practices that outrage uninformed westerners who donate the money that NGOs need to survive. But is there any reason to believe that Human Rights Watch, or its donors, knows better than the people living in Suriname, Laos or Madagascar how their governments should set priorities and implement policy? Barbed wire Westerners bear a moral responsibility to help poorer people living in foreign countries. The best that can be said about the human rights movement is that it reflects a genuine desire to do so. But if the ends are admirable, the means are faulty. Westerners should abandon their utopian aspirations and learn the lessons of development economics. Animated by the same mix of altruism and concern for geopolitical stability as the human rights movement, development economists have also largely failed to achieve their mission, which is to promote economic growth. Yet their failures have led not to denial, but to incremental improvements and (increasingly) humility. In his influential book The White Man’s Burden, William Easterly argues that much of the foreign-aid establishment is in the grip of an ideology that is a softer-edge version of the civilising mission of 19th-century imperialists. Westerners no longer believe that white people are superior to other people on racial grounds, but they do believe that regulated markets, the rule of law and liberal democracy are superior to the systems that prevail in non-western countries, and they have tried to implement those systems in the developing world. Easterly himself does not oppose regulated markets and liberal democracy, nor does he oppose foreign aid. He instead attacks the ideology of the “planners” – people who believe that the west can impose a political and economic blueprint that will advance wellbeing in other countries. Since the second world war, western countries contributed trillions of dollars of aid to developing countries. The aid has taken many different forms: unrestricted cash, loans at below-market interest rates, cash that must be used to buy western products, in-kind projects such as dams and plants, technical assistance, education and “rule-of-law” projects designed to improve the quality of legal institutions. For a while, the “Washington consensus” imposed cookie-cutter market-based prescriptions on countries that needed to borrow money. The consensus among economists is that these efforts have failed. The reasons are varied. Giving cash and loans to a government to build projects such as power plants will not help the country if government officials skim off a large share and give contracts to cronies incapable of implementing those projects. Providing experts to improve the legal infrastructure of the country will not help if local judges refuse to enforce the new laws because of corruption or tradition or incompetence. Pressuring governments to combat corruption will not help if payoffs to mob bosses, clan chiefs, or warlords are needed to maintain social order. Demanding that aid recipients use money in ways that they believe unnecessary can encourage governments to evade the conditions of the donations. The Washington consensus failed because economic reform requires the consent of the public, and populations resented the imposition by foreigners of harsh policies that were not always wise on their own terms. International human rights law reflects the same top-down mode of implementation, pursued in the same crude manner. But human rights law has its distinctive features as well. Because it is law, it requires the consent of states, creating an illusion of symmetry and even-handedness that is missing from foreign aid. Hence the insistence, wholly absent from discussions about foreign aid, that western countries are subject to international human rights law as other countries are. However, in practice, international human rights law does not require western countries to change their behaviour, while (in principle) it requires massive changes in the behaviour of most non-western countries. Both foreign aid and human rights enforcement can be corrupted or undermined because western countries have strategic interests that are not always aligned with the missions of those institutions. But the major problem, in both cases, is that the systems reflect a vision of good governance rooted in the common historical experiences of western countries and that prevails (albeit only approximately) in countries that enjoy wealth, security and order. There is no reason that this vision – the vision of institutionally enforced human rights – is appropriate for poor countries, with different traditions, and facing a range of challenges that belong, in the view of western countries, to the distant past. With hindsight, we can see that the human rights treaties were not so much an act of idealism as an act of hubris. Development economics has gone some distance to curing itself of this error. The best development scholars today, such as Esther Duflo, have been experimenting furiously with different ways of improving lives of people living in foreign countries. Rigorous statistical methods are increasingly used, and in recent years economists have implemented a range of randomised controlled trials. Much greater attention is paid to the minutiae of social context, as it has become clear that a vaccination programme that works well in one location may fail in another, for reasons relating to social order that outsiders do not understand. Expectations have been lowered; the goal is no longer to convert poor societies into rich societies, or even to create market institutions and eliminate corruption; it is to help a school encourage children to read in one village, or to simplify lending markets in another. It is time to start over with an approach to promoting wellbeing in foreign countries that is empirical rather than ideological. Human rights advocates can learn a lot from the experiences of development economists – not only about the flaws of top-down, coercive styles of forcing people living in other countries to be free, but about how one can actually help those people if one really wants to. Wealthy countries can and should provide foreign aid to developing countries, but with the understanding that helping other countries is not the same as forcing them to adopt western institutions, modes of governance, dispute-resolution systems and rights. Helping other countries means giving them cash, technical assistance and credit where there is reason to believe that these forms of aid will raise the living standards of the poorest people. Resources currently used in fruitless efforts to compel foreign countries to comply with the byzantine, amorphous treaty regime would be better used in this way. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that the human rights treaties were not so much an act of idealism as an act of hubris, with more than a passing resemblance to the civilising efforts undertaken by western governments and missionary groups in the 19th century, which did little good for native populations while entangling European powers in the affairs of countries they did not understand. A humbler approach is long overdue. • Eric Posner is a professor at the University of Chicago Law School. His latest book is The Twilight of International Human Rights Law. Follow him on Twitter: @EricAPosner http://www.theguardian.com/news/2014/dec/04/-sp-case-against-human-rights ---------------------- ꕤ ---------------------- COMMENT The 'wealthy' West isn't what it seems to be. US is in massive debt http://www.usdebtclock.org/ End of FY 2016 the gross US federal govt debt estimated @ $19.3 TRILLION http://www.usgovernmentdebt.us/ The US is in debt to bankers, as is most of Europe.  Most of Europe is broke.  Ireland and Greece are the most broke. And the entire banking thing is a huge scam of theoretical money on which profit is made many times over, enslaving the populations of entire nations for generations. In reality, countries don't even look after their own citizens' welfare, but there's supposedly some 'obligation' to see to the welfare of the world's poor? Oh, sure.  It sounds to me like this is yet another bankers' magic money trick. As if money being shifted to third world countries is an act of charity, when the West is not remotely charitable towards its own. Most Western nations would most likely be borrowing money from bankers to lend to third-world nations.  That means taxpayers (generations of them) are paying interest on money borrowed from bankers by governments, to ultimately benefit banker and corporate interests abroad. Why isn't the middle-man government cut of of this and why don't the bankers lend directly to the poor of the world, saving taxpayers of Western nations interest payments on massive third-world development loans and whatever else Western governments funnel to targeted countries abroad? Is government owned by corporate and banking interests to such an extent that the government can't tell these bankers to shove off and make their own lending arrangements directly with the third world, leaving the the nation's taxpayers out of of servicing debt? It must come down to what it is that governments want to extract from target countries. The foreign aid  warrior brigade sounds deluded.  They think they're in a 'fight against poverty.' How long has the West been sinking money into these programs without making difference, apart from maybe helping along a massive third-world population blow-out. As I don't know anything about the foreign aid scam, I've had a quick look to see if I could find something.  Anyway, it looks like it really is nothing but another banker scam. Wow, what an arrangement.  Win/win kerching! http://www.jonathanlea.net/2015/why-foreign-aid-is-harmful/ EXTRACTS ONLY The significant debt burdens of less developed countries have often been incurred as a result of the foreign aid packages pushed by wealthier countries and Western institutions and pursued by corrupt and greedy politicians and businessmen in recipient countries. ‘Foreign aid’ is quite a comprehensive and encompassing term. Most people don’t realise that loans are usually embedded in aid packages, either directly or as a condition of foreign aid donations being given in the first place. An overload of debt combined with punishing interest rates creates the condition of economic subservience to the creditor nations and institutions and ties down, in a perpetual manner, most of the Third World Countries to underdevelopment, dependency and poverty. In his seminal autobiographical book ‘Confessions of an Economic Hitman’ John Perkins describes his job as the Chief Economist for the US international consulting firm Chas T. Main as to implement policies that promoted the interests of the U.S. corporatocracy (a coalition of government, banks, and corporations) while professing to alleviate poverty.  He did this by convincing strategic countries to accept enormous loans for infrastructure development and to ensure that U.S. corporations got the projects (and the money) as a result. Upon default of the loans, the United States Government, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and other U.S. dominated aid agencies then have access to the countries’ resources (especially oil) and strategic land (and are also able to install military bases). Perkins says that international economists are in essence highly paid “Economic Hit Men” hired by international corporations to hide the U.S. government’s involvement. In an interview with Lew Rockwell, the well known US libertarian advocate of Austrian economics, Perkins says as follows: “Yeah.  To think of USAID, the Agency of International Development, as a charitable organization is, yeah, that’s certainly totally erroneous.  For the most part, our foreign aid, U.S. foreign aid, like that of most countries, is out there to serve the interest of U.S. corporations and now multi-national corporations.  There are small amounts of aid that really go to helping people, particularly when there are times of catastrophe, to send tents and food and water to help people that are, you know, destroyed — their lives have been destroyed by earthquakes or by tsunamis or something, but that’s pretty miniscule and only lasts for a very, very short time.  And then after that, the aid that we send in to help these countries is primarily there to help the corporations.  That’s the job of USAID and the Export-Import Bank and the World Bank and other similar organizations.” ... across Africa, over 70% of government income comes from foreign aid, meaning that such administrations are seriously compromised and unlikely to act in accordance with the interests of their populations. Similarly, in donor countries, for all the billions of dollars of foreign aid money appropriated from their taxpayers over the years, no clear, effective system has ever been put in place to hold aid recipients and governments accountable for how the money is spent [...] More than half of the international assistance spending related to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan is for military or security uses. For example, some of the international assistance funds sent to Pakistan have been used to train their Frontier Corp in counterinsurgency. Of the $18.4 billion appropriated for the ‘Iraq Relief and Reconstruction Fund’ in fiscal year 2004, more than $10 billion was administered by the Pentagon. Dutch author Linda Polman argues that humanitarianism has become a massive industry that, along with the global media, forms an unholy alliance with warmongers such that the most likely beneficiaries of war zone operations are the powerful and abusive, rather than the most needy. [...] ... the very idea that the purpose of aid is to alleviate poverty seems incorrect. Instead, it is actually an important function of Western imperialism. In the majority of cases, the actual function of publicised aid from Western governments and their agencies, including the World Bank and the IMF, is to subsidise and facilitate the operations of the corporations and banks of the West. [...] These aims mean that the aid agencies support only pro-Western and often repressive governments, some of them the product of US-supported military coups, while patriotic and sovereign governments who try to protect and develop their own industries and improve the well being of their people are vilified by the Western mainstream media and become the target of uprisings, coups and invasions planned and organised by the financial elite’s intelligence agencies. http://www.jonathanlea.net/2015/why-foreign-aid-is-harmful/ Not sure what this article means by $10-billion of Iraq aid was administered by Pentagon.  What, it is military spending borrowings by Iraq benefiting the Pentagon or something?  Yeah, I think it might be.  I read something about that a while back. Foreign Assistance Budget Each year since the US-led war on terror began, Congress has appropriated money for international assistance, primarily to Iraq ($61 billion), Afghanistan ($104 billion), and Pakistan. However, more than half of the international assistance spending related to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan is for military or security uses.  [So Iraq is given money it must repay and that money then goes right back to the US military industry.  Conquered Iraq basically funds the US empire military machine.] US government investigators have found widespread corruption, waste, and fraud among US agencies and private contractors implementing aid programs. Projects were often carried out at exorbitant cost, despite serving small portions of the population. For example, a USAID-funded power plant will cost an estimated $280 million per year to run – more than a third of total government tax revenues – but provide electricity to just 2 percent of Afghans. The DynCorp company was unable to account for $1 billion in US funds it was given to train the Iraqi police. The majority of US international assistance spending related to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan is for military or security purposes rather than economic and social development. Significant amounts of US international assistance money has been lost or misspent. (Page updated as of February 2015) http://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/economic/budget/foreign What a rort.  This is unbelievable. And what is wrong with the politicians that let this corrupt beast  politically persecute an Australian journalist for exposing more of their crimes and corruption?  So, if it is bankers that profit by lending the government money to (in turn) lend money to conquered and functionally/physically destroyed nations (who then handball that money back to the American military industry and wind up with holding the debt, which is more profits for the Americans), and if it is the bankers, government, the military industry, and the corporations who profit from wars (which it appears to be) -- surely the empire must provoke/start wars and continue to war, to keep 'feeding the machine' (both the 'war machinery' of the empire & the massive debts of the empire), which cannot be left to idle as that is costly. That would mean it would be profitable for these same parties to create a 'war on terror' scenario to justify and manifest 'war on terror' etc, as continued war is what keeps this empire / war machine / and debt sink-hole in viable existence? So it would stand to reason that there may well be some massive false flag events and that the machine funds terror, because funding the terror would be kind of like oiling the cogs. I think  ...  lol   I haven't slept much, so I'm not even sure this makes sense.  But it seems to make sense to me. ꕤ

Video - Syria - BARREL BOMB SONG - Featuring MC Kenneth Roth

ꕤ Video SOURCE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nV--TB6iZsQ&feature=youtu.be ❤ ❤ BARREL BOMB SONG Featuring MC Kenneth Roth Published on Aug 11, 2015 Those who follow the twitter account of Human Rights Watch director Kenneth Roth will be aware that he has in recent months become a laughing stock. His obsession with Syria and Bashar al-Assad, which has him sometimes tweeting about "barrel bombs" up to 4 times a day, is out of control. If that isn't enough, some of his tweets show him to be openly sympathetic with Jabhat al-Nusra, Al-Qaeda's branch in Syria.  Yesterday, he took things further by comparing the Syrian government's bombing of "rebel" territories with the US's atomic bomb on Hiroshima. more ...  |  HERE ---------------------- ꕤ ---------------------- ꕤ

Edward Snowden - PROGRESS 2015 CONFERENCE

TRANSCRIPTION Edward Snowden Via video-link from Russia Moderator: Progress Australia Exec Director,  Nick Moraitis with Paul Barclay on RN Tuesday 19th May AUDIO SOURCE:  here [SKIP] Moderator: ... a federal appeals court in New York ruled on Thursday that the once secret NSA program that is systematically collecting Americans’ phone records in bulk is illegal.  It’s pretty extraordinary.  I guess the question is:  do you feel vindicated? Snowden: It is amazing what this court decisions says, because this is not a court that’s considered particularly partisan in the United States.  This is one that seems very measured, very well respected and it’s probably the most well respected appeals court circuit in the United States, and for them to review a program and say that, despite the fact that it’s been operating for 10 years, it’s been violating our rights for 10 years, is significant.  Particularly, because it was kept secret, the public was not allowed to know and, in fact, in the United States, the most senior intelligence official here, the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, lied under oath about the existence of this program and the court completely and categorically rejected that; and, when we look at what the papers actually say about that, it’s particularly significant because, not only did they say that this case – ACLU vs Clapper – completely changed things in terms of was it illegal, this has implications for many other programs, not just this single program that was struck down yesterday, but the entire category of legal reasoning behind  bulk collection behind mass surveillance, so we may see more legal challenges come forward.  But moreso than that, we’ve seen something which is amazing because we’ve got what’s called Amnesty vs Clapper, which in 2013 was almost exactly the same case, but it was dismissed in 2013; they said courts could not hear these programs:  they were too secret, too sensitive and we simply had to trust the government.  Now, after these stories hit the newspaper and after a new case – ACLU vs Clapper – was given a chance to work its way through the legal system we saw something amazing change, which is that judges said we can no longer simply take the government at its word because the government has abused our trust, and that, I think, is something that will last for not just years but hopefully for decades. Moderator: The editorial in today’s New York Times – I don’t have it in front of me, unfortunately, but it makes specific reference to the fact that the key finding here really – or the key concern – is that these programs would never have been made public or this decision would never have been possible without your revelations.  I think we should take a step back, though, for our audience here in Australia and focus a bit on the earlier revelations and just talk our audience through them.  So, we have a slide up on the screen (if we can get it up for you) for our audience here, it’s actually entitled FAA702 OPERATIONS and it lists two types of collection.  It was one of the first slides made available by the media from your leaks.  Would you be able to describe the two types of collections that they’re describing here, the distinction between the two, how they work and we’ll come to what they’re specifically collecting in a moment. Snowden: Okay.  So, I can’t actually see the slide from here, but I believe this is quite a famous slide.  It regards, basically, the PRISM collection program, which is a sort of compelled cooperation between the intelligence services of the Five Eyes countries – the United States, the UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada – and then we have what’s basically called the Upstream program, which is where they collect this not directly from the companies themselves where they simply say we want everything from this citizen that we want in their data holdings; we want their e-mail; we want the times they logged in, we want the locations they logged in; but we also want to be able to collect that secretly without the knowledge of the companies as it transits across the lines that connect the internet together:  undersea cables, satellite links, fibre back-holes at telecommunications providers – and they are broadly two sections of types of interception.  There’s what’s called metadata collection, which is basically – metadata are the kind of details that a private investigator would collect if they were following around – if the government basically tasked an agent to monitor what you’re doing every day, follow you on foot; they wouldn’t be close enough to hear every word and every conversation you were saying because you would notice them, but they would see who you were meeting with; what, generally, you were discussing; how long you met with them; the places you met with them; where you went afterwards; who you were with; basically, the fact that a communication occurred. The second class is content collection where, for example, they would actually be reading through the body of your e-mails; they would actually be reading the website itself, that you had visited; your entire web history; as well as the contents of the phone calls you had made; they could literally listen to the words you had said to everyone else. Now, in Australia, this is particularly relevant because there’s a metadata retention program that was recently passed under what I believe was called the ASIO Act and this is really dangerous because it has implications - actually, I think the ASIO Act affects more of journalists, but I think there was an additional data act passed, as well -  and the challenges here were not just as the Australian intelligence services had grabbed for more power, the fact that they say:  well, if journalists are publishing things that we consider sensitive programs, intelligence programs, they will be held criminally liable for that, which I’ll point out, in that judgement in the United States just yesterday,  the court said that they could not have reached this judgement without the work of the free press; without the press publishing material which had previously been secret, which was sensitive to intelligence agencies operations but was vital and necessary for the public to know and understand in order to understand the reality of the government’s policies; but the fact that under these mandatory metadata programs that were passed in Australia, you can immediately see, who journalists are contacting from which you can derive who their sources are.  If there’s, for example, a leak that happens in ... the Australian intelligence services, that reveals to the newspapers that the services have been abusing their powers, and the government can simply go into their mass collection of everyone’s communications, regardless of whether they’re suspected of any crime or whether they’re going about their daily business, it’s all there.  They can go, well, which employees from this agency had contacted press organisations and, immediately, they have a list of suspects.  This is dangerous.  This is not things the governments have ever traditionally been empowered to claim for themselves as authorities and, to have that change recently – in the recent past, in the sort of 2013 era – is a radical departure from the traditional operations of liberal societies around the world. Moderator: If we just go back to the PRISM slide for a moment, the most recent one we were showing on screen.  This is the one titled:  ‘PRISM collection Details’; and if you can’t see it, it lists a range of current providers on the left and then on the right, it says “What will you receive in collection?”  Do you want to just talk us through how this PRISM program worked and, in fact, how Australians’ data would be treated here. Snowden: Okay.  This is particularly dangerous for people who are not US citizens relative to other countries in the world.  In the United States if the government or if any of the Five Eyes governments seeks your information under this program, they have to at least go to a judge and get a warrant.  Now, the danger here is that it’s a secret court that in 35 years has been asked to authorise warrants about 35,000 times,  and in those 35 years they’ve only said no twelve times.  Unfortunately, for everyone who is not a United States citizen they don’t require a warrant at all, there’s no involvement of any court, there’s simply a blanket order signed by the Attorney General and basically the national security services, or the spy agencies, can basically submit basically a paper process to these providers and requisition this content through them, outside of the warrant process.  It’s more akin to a subpoena, but the things that it reveals are extraordinary:  everyone you talk to on Skype; all of the messages that you ever sent back and forth; everything that you’ve ever done on your Facebook pages; who you’ve talked to; how long you’ve been on the pages; what you liked; what you didn’t like; these kind of information details.  It’s extraordinarily revealing and for the government to be able to entitle itself to these capabilities particularly in secret, as it happened, without the public’s knowledge, is incredibly empowering for them and incredibly disempowering for civil society. The danger here is the creation of what’s been referred to as ‘turnkey tyranny,’ which is where government claims to follow process and things like that – we can hope for the best – but at any given time, given that these programs operate in secret beyond the reach of public oversight and review, they could change the policies that govern it; they could change the frequency with which they use them, the intrusiveness with which they apply those authorities; and not only would we not know about it, we would have a very limited ability to meaningfully resist that assertion of authority, and that’s dangerous. Moderator: And this is content that’s being hoovered up, essentially, from these providers. Snowden: Correct.  Both content and metadata. Moderator: And does the Australian government also have access to this data on Australian citizens? Snowden: All of the Five Eyes partners can request information through the United States National Security Agency that would come from the PRISM program, for example.  But PRISM is just one of many intelligence programs.  This is one that has struck people deeply because we all recognise the service providers who were on the sly and the fact that they were sharing that information secretly without our knowledge was really upsetting.  But it’s also important to remember that this is not the only program.  It actually goes much deeper than this.  Basically, the reach is far more expansive than and alarming, I think, than just this alone. Moderator: So, a lot of the coverage of your revelations has focused on the NSA, the British Tempora program and so forth.  Can you tell us a bit more about the role of Australia as a partner in the global surveillance regime? Snowden: Right.  So, Australia’s role, in mass surveillance around the world, is similar to the United Kingdom and the Tempora program which you mentioned, which is what’s called a ‘rolling internet buffer’.  Basically, they use local authorities, such as this metadata program that’s been passed in Australia, to collect everyone’s communications in advance of criminal suspicion - this is call ‘pre-criminal investigation’ – and what this means is they’re watching everybody all the time, they’re collecting information and they’re just putting it in pockets that they can search through, not only locally, not only within Australia, but they can then share this with foreign intelligence services such as the United States National Security, the United Kingdom’s Government Communications Headquarters, and they can troll through these communications in the same way, and this often happens beyond any sort of court oversight.  The ultimate result there is the fact that regardless or not of whether you’re doing anything wrong, you’re being watched in a new way. Announcer: EDWARD SNOWDEN, THE WHISTLEBLOWER, WHO EXPOSED THE NSA MASS SURVEILLANCE PROGRAM, VIA VIDEO LINK FROM RUSSIA AT THE PROGRESS 2015 CONFERENCE ON RN OR ONLINE YOU’RE WITH ‘BIG IDEAS’.  LET’S CONTINUE THIS SESSION WITH EDWARD SNOWDEN AND RETURN TO THE MELBOURNE TOWN HALL. Moderator: So governments in Australia, the US, the UK, would say that they need these sort of systems to fight terrorism.  They argue they would be hobbled in their mission without these systems.  I guess, what’s your view on that? Snowden: So, it is important for governments to have the ability to investigate terrorist incidents, to provide for national defence, but the authorities that are typically used in pursuit of those objectives are actually quite different from what we see intelligence agencies arguing for – sort of their supporters, defenders, the apologists class, the legislators, legislatures around the world – when they say:  you know, this will help us stop terrorism.  For example, the court program that was struck down yesterday in the United States as illegal, is based on exactly the same sort of concept as this Australian bulk collection program of metadata.  And what it is, is they ingest all this metadata – who you call, when you call them – so they can create associations of people, and this was sort of argued in parliament as being necessary to prevent terrorist attacks.  Now, unfortunately, for the intelligence agencies in the United States after these programs were revealed, the President himself appointed two independent panels, with comprehensive access to classified information of all of us, with the ability to go into these intelligence services, interview the heads and working officials who use these programs, and say ‘Does this actually stop terrorist attacks?  Has it in the past?  Is it useful?  Is it necessary?’  Basically, the purpose of these reviews was to answer a question:  ‘Do these programs make us safer?’  And, unfortunately, the answer is ‘No’.   And this is not me claiming this; this is the United States government, that has every incentive to basically to let these programs off the hook and say, ‘yes, they’re very valuable,’ ‘yes, we want them to continue.’  In fact, they said, despite the fact that these programs have been operating for more than a decade in some cases, bulk collection of metadata has never prevented a single terrorist attack, nor even made a concrete difference in a single terrorism investigation in the United States.  So the question is not only, ‘Do we want these programs in the context of our values, in the context of liberal societies?’   –  but even if we were willing to sacrifice our rights in that manner – which in the United States is contrary to our constitution to begin with – but, ‘Does it make us safer?’ – and we have classified information that is now public evidence that says, in fact:  no it does not.  Metadata monitoring has never been shown to be useful and it’s never been shown to make us safer.  Moderator: One of the proposals I read about today in New York Times articles is a proposal to switch the storage of the metadata from the NSA to private telecommunications companies and I guess that mirrors in some respects the move here in Australia where the federal government has introduced a mandatory data retention regime where the telecommunications companies themselves have to store the metadata.  Would you prefer the companies to be storing the metadata or the government, if you had a choice? Snowden: So, it’s a little bit ... – the political debate happening about these authorities in the United States is a little bit more complex.  It’s difficult to address in short terms because of the amount of nuance.  But to break it down broadly, there are two possibilities.  There were three. One was that they would reauthorise this sort of intrusive capability without any changes.  That’s dead on arrival now; it’s simply no longer a possibility.  The court has said it’s illegal, it’s politically unwise, no reasonable legislator would try to do that.  There is the second option, which is what you describe, where they amend the program slightly, in that they request information from telecommunications providers rather than having the government intercept it themselves.  There’s not necessarily ... a mandate that requires the telecommunications providers to collect this type of information, in this particular way, because it gets touchy and difficult.  Rather, the general common sense perspective here is that most telecommunications providers have to hold onto some amount of metadata communications activities, some sort of, basically, call detail records for billing purposes.  So now how many SMS messages you’ve sent in a month, how many people you’ve called, how many minutes you use these type of things, the government does not have to force providers to retain that kind of information, they can simply request it through a legal process.  There are questions to be asked there – ‘How should we balance this? How intrusive should we make it?’ – but, generally, that is a lot more reasonable than what’s happened in the past, although still not optimum.  The third option - which is the one which has best the arguments at this point – is simply that they let this authority expire completely and that they go back to using subpoenas and warrants as they always have, because traditional law enforcement authorities here have been shown to work, they’ve been shown to be reliable and they’ve been shown to save lives.  Why are we changing to untested authorities which have been proven not to make us any safer, which require extraordinary amounts of investment – I believe, in the case of Australia, the new bill mandating metadata retention has been estimated to cost at least $400-million annually.  Should we really be doing this at all?  And that’s the question we should be asking. Moderator: I guess also, with the Sony and the liability of our telecommunications companies in Australia, I’m not sure I would be trusting them with my data.  Snowden: And there is a real question of once you start gathering this data.  From an attacker’s perspective – at one point I did, basically, computer network attack analysis for the National Security Agency, which meant I was trying to see what malicious hackers and so on and so forth were doing around the internet – and wherever this data is gathered, where it’s centralised, it’s exactly as you say, it becomes a target, a vector for attack and, ultimately, these things are very difficult to defend against capable actors but, also, you know, the sixteen year old in their basement.  Simply, attack is easier than defence nowadays and if you gather sensitive information, it will be misused or control of it will be lost. Moderator: So, Ed, as far as I gather, only a small percentage of the files you’ve leaked have actually been reported on.  Why is this, I guess, and do you expect there to be more revelations, including about Australia? Snowden: So, the reasoning behind this is I, as an individual, as a citizen working on behalf the government, I didn’t want to make a decision unilaterally about what should and should not be published in the case of classified information, because there’s a chance that based on my own political biases, which are quite clear, I would like to think, I could basically err too heavily on the side of disclosure, perhaps improperly, perhaps I could misunderstand some of the implications of a particular detail, even though I worked for the secret services for about 8 years and understand them quite well, so the question for me was how do I basically try to mitigate the risk of making a personal mistake if I were publishing this myself and, so what I believed was the best way to do this was to partner with institutions of the free press – you know, institutions that everybody trusts, everybody understands are working to basically hold the government to account of both the law and the public – and allow them to make the decisions about what should and should not be public, and then I would require them as a basis of receiving materials, or unlisted [?] material here, to ask the government in advance of publication to review it just to ensure that no particular detail – you know, the name of an individual officer, the name of a site which may not be fully understood, if the implications are revealed that would not be fully understood – to certify, basically, that this errrr—these stories are not going to risk life or harm—the threat of harm to any particularised individual; and in every case that’s been the process that’s been followed, the result of which is the fact that now we’re in 2015 and while in 2013 government officials are saying the sky is falling, this is going to enable terrorists, there’s going to be blood on the hands of press institutions that are publishing this material, in fact that hasn’t come to pass in even a single case.  National Security officials have been repeatedly questioned about this, under oath in front of Congress and never in a single case have they shown anyone who has come to harm or even harm that has resulted to collection capabilities and so forth as a result of this material becoming public, and on that basis, I think it’s pretty fair to say that publication will continue and the purpose of the free press in society is to do exactly this kind of thing; to champion the public interest, to act as an adversary against the government on the behalf of the public, and to really hold the most powerful officials in our society to the account of the law, which traditionally is quite difficult to do when operations have kind of been in secrecy. Moderator: And about Australia, do you think there will be more about Australia? Snowden: I think that’s fair to say. Announcer: EDWARD SNOWDEN, THE FORMER NSA CONTRACTOR RESPONSIBLE FOR THE LEAKING OF CLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS THAT EXPOSED THE MASS SURVEILLANCE PROGRAM UNDERTAKEN BY US AGENCIES ... [skip] ... JOINING EDWARD SNOWDEN ON THE PANEL ARE GREENS SENATOR SCOTT LUDLAM AND THE AUSTRALIAN DIRECTOR OF HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH, ELAINE PEARSON. Moderator: How does this sort of surveillance regime and the other Australian national security legislation that Ed alluded to affect our human rights? Elaine Pearson: (HRW Australia) Clearly, fundamentally, this is about the right to privacy.  But the right to privacy is really—you know, it has knock-on effects for every one of our civil liberties:  freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of association.  If the government is intercepting and monitoring, you know, what we say and who we’re talking to, this is going to have a chilling effect in terms of how we communicate with people, where we go and, you know, how we meet up with people.  And, you know, this is a particular concern to human rights activists because the work that we do is really about exposing the behaviour that governments are often seeking to cover up or to hide, and my organisation has done quite a bit of work on this in the United States.  We’ve looked at the harmful impact of mass surveillance on journalists and on lawyers.  Lawyers have told us they, basically, how they’ve had to resort to the tactics of drug dealers simply to get the job done:  you know, using ‘burner phones’, ensuring that they have face-to-face meetings, these sorts of things; and, you know, this is really worrying and it’s particularly worrying in Australia where, as Ed mentioned, we have this new ASIO act which was rammed through parliament with very little discussion and journalists and human rights activists and whistleblowers now face five to ten years in prison simply for making certain types of unauthorised disclosures, even if they’re in the public interest and I think ...there are certainly some editors and some journalists who are going to sort of not report on certain things, particularly in Australia where issues of asylum seekers, immigration we’ve been talking about today, are seen as a national security issue.  We don’t want to see a sort of legitimate public debate of these issues covered up because people are scared about being thrown in prison.  Moderator: Thanks, Elaine.  Scott, Ed described the role of Australia in the Five Eyes agreement.  What’s your view on Australia’s participation in this cooperative spying regime? Scott Ludlam: (Australian Greens) Well, I think it needs to be subject to comprehensive public review and thanks to Progress for getting Ed on-board and thank you Ed for being here – obviously for beaming in so we can hear from you directly, but also in a way for enabling the conversation to occur at all.  So, I guess on behalf of all of us, thank you for what you’ve done. Scott Ludlam: (Australian Greens) And in terms of Australia’s participation in the Five Eyes, I guess one of the things that’s been so valuable about these revelations and the way they’ve been reported is that at least we now know a little bit.  So the Australian agency, the Australian Signals Directory – the ASD – is one of the partner organisations of the Five Eyes and operates with the absolute bare minimum of scrutiny and I feel like we know probably less about its operations even than we do about the US NSA now or some of the partner organisations because the debate here in Australia is so stifled, we don’t have a benchmark and a bill of rights to kind of test some of these concepts against in court, and we have a really flattened political debate, you know, unlike even in the United States where it’s ferocious and fierce and very polarised, but here in Australia we’re told, you know, these people are traitors, they’re a national security threat, just trust the government everything’s going to be fine.  I think the Five Eyes agreement needs to be comprehensively reviewed by the light of day and we can’t do it without this kind of information in the public domain. Moderator: Thank you.  Ed, do you have any quick response to that? Snowden: I do, actually.  I would say that he pointed out a really critical *** basically in the management of intelligence services.  It’s not that anyone aims, working in an intelligence services organisation is—errr, you know, they’re intentionally being ***; none of these are bad guys; they’re all trying to—errr, they see themselves as—the culture of these places is that they’re good people doing bad things for good reasons:  they want to help, they want to keep us safe.  But the problem is when you reach that sort of utilitarian culture, sort of an authoritarian tint, over the operations of how you go about your business, simply saying that the ends justifies the means, and you don’t have the public involved in the oversight and the review of that, you don’t have the full body of legislature who’s able to challenge the operations of the executive branch of government, you run an almost certain risk that these services will go to far.  And we’ve seen this not just in the United States, we’ve seen this in cooperating agencies, Five Eye services around the world.  For example, in the United Kingdom they found that the intelligence sharing between UK and the US had been unlawful.  It had violated the rights of people for more than seven years.  We saw when these programs were happening in secret nobody really contested them, but when it became public, when we saw basically international law reviews, when we saw domestic law reviews, they were found to violate people’s rights on a massive comprehensive scale again and again, in country after country, and government officials, they pushed back.  They said, look, this is just metadata in some cases, because they didn’t want to talk about the content cases.  They felt that metadata was an easier win, but having worked at the NSA, I can tell you that metadata is much more valuable than content.  As someone looking at computer tech and computer communications, basically looking at your signature web track, looking at everything you do online, what you’re doing on your smart phone and so on and so forth, I would much rather troll through your metadata of your communications than the content of it, because metadata is much easier to search on machine based terms, it’s much easier to analyse algorithmically and metadata doesn’t lie.  People lie when they’re engaged in actual wrongdoing.  You know, you may tell the truth to your grandmother when you’re discussing a cookie recipe and things like that.  But when we’re talking about bad people planning bad things, they talk around it, they use code-words, they’re deceptive.  But the impact of metadata, the sensitivity of metadata, simply cannot be overstated.  They’re collecting information about everyone in every place regardless of whether or not they’ve done anything wrong, which the US Director of National Security Agency – the previous one, Michael Hayden – said:  “We use metadata to kill people.”  His general counsel, the top lawyer for the agency, said that metadata is a proxy for content.  When you have enough metadata, you don’t need content at all.  So the government’s tried to split hairs and say, you know, metadata’s not that big a deal.  You should be very sceptical about that.  And beyond that, when we talk about why they’re so concerned about the public knowing about just the bare outlines of what they’re doing because, again, what’s been published had not been granule details.  We’re not talking about the names of human agents operating behind enemy lines or anything like that, that would pose any sort of risk to life of any individual.  We’re talking about systems.  We’re talking about legal authorities.  We’re talking about the government’s secret interpretations of the law.  And when we look at this kind of thing we have seen time and time again and within classified governments within the halls of government where they said, you know they’re not actually afraid that anyone in government is going to come to harm from these programs that any public representative is going to incur a greater risk, that we’re going to be hit by attackers that we won’t be able to stop.  What they actually said – this is in the United Kingdom – they said in a top secret document amongst its lawyers, what they were really afraid of was a damaging public debate.  What they were afraid of was not that terrorists would know about this but that its citizens would know about this.  That we might begin to mount legal challenges that we might try to have a voice in the policy in a way that they simply did not want to, and that is something that I think we really need to create structures within our institutions to prevent.  It’s not about bad intentions; it’s about bad structure. It’s the fact that when you create systems that watch everyone, everywhere, all the time; when you collect it all, as the NSA motto is, you understand nothing.  And we’ve seen this time and time again.  The fact that we’re monitoring everyone’s phone calls in the United States did not stop the Boston marathon bombings.  The fact that the attackers in Charlie Hebdo in France were known to the intelligence services prior to the attack did not stop it.  The same case in Canada.  The same case in Australia.  Nine times out of ten when you see someone on the news who’s engaged in some sort of radical jihadist activity, these are people who had a long record and the reason these attacks happen is not because we didn’t have enough surveillance;  in fact, it’s because we had too much.  We didn’t prioritise the cases we had because we had wasted too many resources on watching everybody who didn’t present a threat that we couldn’t allocate the manpower, the man hours, the actual dollar resources, to watching the people who actually did represent a specific imminent threat. Moderator: And I guess the countries we’re speaking about Australia, the UK, the US, countries which we consider democracies, which have strong protections in general – for example, the US Constitution – and we’re talking about technologies that are actually, I guess, you know, at the early stages of their development.  Are you concerned—I guess my concern, really, I’m interested in your views on this, where this is going in terms of other countries and the future developments of technology as we move forward. Snowden: Yeah.  Thank you for asking because this is really important.  You know, people think about this as sort of science-fiction-like.  Only the National Security Agency can do this, only the spies in Western advanced countries have these capabilities, can achieve these capabilities and that’s categorically ***.   I mean, China has led the world for a very long time in monitoring the internet communications:  the way we firewall it, the way we censor it, the way we block it.  Russia, very little has been reported on it, but one has to assume they have very much the same capabilities; they have a program called SORM, which is assumed to be very much the same.  And we see this happening in country after country.  The problem is that even if we pass the best laws in the world in the West – you know, even if we have comprehensive reform in liberal societies, the Australian parliament says we reject mass surveillance comprehensively; metadata retention; we’re striking it down; encryption backdoors, we will never engage in that; we’re going to ensure anyone that engages with an Australian company, that buys an Australian product or service, or engages in Australian civil society, their rights and their privacy will be protected; as soon as your communications cross your borders that’s going to change – that’s no longer going to be enforceable because every other country in the world would have to have the same laws.  We have to have basically governments work in partnership with industry with academia, and civil society to basically push forward research and activism efforts to ensure that we can enforce our rights; not just through our law, but through our technology, that we demand strong, robust, reliant encryption.  That means when an Australian communicates with a web service, with a provider, with a friend through their phone, or anything like that, they know that the only person who will be able to read that communication is the intended recipient at the other end of that communication and that the government will basically work to champion and uphold that social contract, rather than undermine it.  We don’t want to move toward a world where basically we’re choosing between surveillance and security, and that’s very much the case today.  They stand on opposite ends of basically incentives and policy.  In order for governments to be able to monitor us, they have to weaken the security of the communications that we all rely upon everywhere, whether it’s through your bank, whether it’s through your private lives, your private records.  And when they do this, they don’t only make it easy for themselves to monitor the communications, they make it possible for every authoritarian, illiberal regime to do exactly the same thing. TRANSCRIPTION STOPPED AT – 38:20 of 53:58 total audio. Asterisks used to mark spaces where audio unclear to me. Question marks used to mark best guess at preceding word.   [  Q & A  Follows  ] COMMENT Thought I'd have a shot at transcribing the ABC Snowden audio for something educational to do, as the interview sounded quite interesting (and as it takes quite a bit for me to fully absorb information).  Not sure that hanging on every word is necessarily going to make me any wiser, but, I live in hope I'll remember more of this than I otherwise would. The above is just a best shot at getting the audio down and I'd say it's pretty close but not necessarily 100%, plus there's words that were unclear to me.  Also, I have not given this a final once-over to weed out any minor errors, so be warned. The portion about intelligence officers not seeing themselves as the bad guys and being people whose intentions are good was difficult to understand in two respects.  Firstly, the flow of Snowden's speech/ideas seemed a bit disjointed to me, so it was hard to get it down properly (but I'm hoping I've managed get it straight).  Secondly, intelligence services personnel may well see themselves as 'good guys' and they may well have a role in keeping nations safe.  But that isn't the full extent of what intelligence services are party to, and they have a record of being party to what is unlawful and undemocratic.  Just in terms of mass surveillance, we know governments and their intelligence agencies have broken laws and violated the rights of citizens of entire nations, as well as spying on their own allies, on various private companies, on members of the 'free' press and on lawyers (never mind legal privilege) - and they're parties to spying on and infiltrating activists exercising their political and democratic rights. And that's just the tame end of business.  Intelligence agencies are parties to: *assassination of elected leaders *coups *military invasions *support of dictator governments *carpet bombing *atomic bombing *wars for profit Oh, and there's also the rendition, torture, CIA black sites, the groovy kill list database, weekly kill list, drone bombings, hacking, blackmail, entrapment, false flag ops, arms dealing, assassinations, commercial spying, leaks, cover-ups, infiltration of the 'free' press, farming out intelligence to private contractors (who are even more 'above' the law than the the government agencies, in the sense that they're off the radar and there's not much hope of getting transparency from private companies - much like those private 'security services', ie mercenaries). These are just some of the things that come to mind.  Seeking to undermine and dominate nations around the world isn't about 'national security'; it's about commercial gains.  To change the course of a nation's history for nothing more than corporate greed is evil, I think. Mass surveillance isn't about 'good' intentions, 'help' or 'safety'; it's striving for totalitarian control of the domestic underclass and for control on global level in order to enhance existing power, in order to maintain control and, most probably, to also thwart any possibility of the ruling elites ever being challenged by the underclasses that are perhaps perceived by such elites as bound to eventually wake up to the great con job that's been perpetrated by those in power. The great con job is the notion of a benign, 'liberal' Western society, democracy and the benign 'free' press that's a pillar of this holy grail of 'democracy', supposedly giving the masses truth and transparency, and keeping those at the top accountable.  But the reality is something entirely different.  The 'free' press is the corporate press and corporate media, which is concentrated; it's controlled by corporate giants; and even when it's not in the hands of giants, that same mainstream press is part of part of the establishment that rules and in the service of that ruling establishment, churning out propaganda, lies, social engineering sermons and garbage.  The press is known to be obliging to government (think Op Mockingbird, think obliging journalists, think obliging editors, think obliging moguls etc - oh and let's not forget run of the mill chummy journalist-government relationships that evolve, eg in war reporting etc etc).  But even if this were not so, there's always government suppression notices and now gag orders, the threat of secret investigation, threat of prison sentences for publishing what the government does not want published - when the mere threat of job loss isn't enough. So we have this 'free' press that's owned and controlled by the establishment and in bed with the government.  Individual US journalists have stated that they haven't published because they're 'patriotic'.  So in addition to the omnipresent 'national security' cover all big stick, there's 'patriotism', the chummy personal relationships re government sources and the resulting willingness to please, the question of access to government sources (which can be withheld sneakily (see Obama cutting out those that aren't subservient to the White House)).  That's all I can think of for the moment, but there's probably a few more factors that keep journalists in line.  But the most effective silencer would most likely be having to produce what the editor expects you to produce - writing to order.  The mainstream press and the mainstream media circus (TV, radio) set the news agenda for consumption by the majority, so those cool, off-beat news sources that challenge what the masses are being fed might be a part of the 'free' press column that's supposed to serve as a challenge to those in power, but it isn't much of a challenge when the truth is drowned out by the garbage that's churned out for consumption by a majority that will look no further. Bearing in mind this corporate 'free' press/media scenario in the West, we have an intelligence whistleblower that, as I understand, has granted select members of such press access to intelligence material the subject of potential publication on the proviso that such material be vetted by the government ... after  the 'unbiased' bedfellows of the government determine what is worthy of public attention. While such intentions (along with editing specifics such as names and places) may sound noble, the scenario sounds either extraordinarily naive or part of a psyop to me.  I don't believe for one moment that having given over control of information to (a) the obedient press and (b) the government, that the such government will permit release of anything damaging to itself.   And without a repository of information accessible to all, there's no telling how much or what has been withheld. That's just my general feeling about mainstream press and government vetted whistleblower information. The contradiction between metadata is everything and metadata overload is useless is a bit perplexing for me: (1)   Metadata is *everything*  - easy analysis  /  relied on for kill lists. (2)   ‘When you collect everything, you understand nothing.’ If metadata is such a useful tool because it's easily searched, relationships can be mapped and so on, why would intelligence agencies wish to give up that tool?  Yes, overload conceivably means not prioritising and missing out on prioritising targets, but mass surveillance is the ultimate control tool to keep the underclass in check, to gain commercial advantage, to gain political advantage, to ruin one's rivals and so on - the possibilities are endless.  Playing with mass surveillance must be the closest thing to being god.  An omnipresent, infinite, all controlling digital god unstoppable intelligence apparatus (lol, maybe I'm getting carried away here, but that's how I picture it).  So why would those that sit at the top relinquish that kind of power over mere slaves? That leaves technology.  But what are the chances of the masses having access to privacy technology minus backdoors or exploits that render such technology pointless?  I don't really trust any encryption tool and especially not anything the government friendly tech corporations have happening.  Aiming to have a seat at the table of 'democracy' when the likes of Koch brothers own what is held out as 'democracy' is rather idealistic and, that being so, doesn't that render the fundamental values that one hopes to stand for as fanciful as notions of American democracy? The technology for warzones that trickles down to be used on an unsuspecting public and then by law enforcement is super creepy and it definitely seems worthwhile resisting before the technology becomes institutionalised, but I can't see how the public can resist anything they're subjected to when the public has no real say in government or lawmaking (look at the laws that get pushed through, look how government operates, look at the secret TPP, look at laws disregarded by government, look at mass surveillance, look at surveillance and infiltration of activists, look at deposed prime ministers who have tried to stand up to intelligence services and USA etc etc).