VIDEO - Title - Love Palestine, Love Freedom, Love justice

Title: Love Palestine, Love Freedom, Love justice  Direct YouTube Link - here. A powerful campaign music video. The music has a wonderful, strong, vibrant, positive,  up-tempo, driving, tribal feel, that's impossible to ignore. The visuals are also powerful - particularly the flag relay symbolism. As the video is pleasant, positive and has a lot of impact, it's a highly effective message because it's message much more likely to be shared than not. Whoever came up with this music video campaign for Palestine has done great job. [  Was convinced I'd posted this to the blog at some point.  Searched labels so I could delete earlier version ... but there isn't one.  Uh-oh.   Alzheimer's setting in or more sleep is needed.  ]

US Corporate Media - Big Power Serving Role in Obtaining Mass Consen By Transmission of Ideology & Propaganda As Entertainment

Beyond Manufacturing Consent By: Paul Street Thomson Reuters in Times Square, Manhattan, New York. Published 27 March 2015 The book Manufacturing Consent did not examine what is probably the biggest part of US corporate media’s contribution to the engineering of mass “consent.” I am still occasionally asked by readers and others what I think of Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky’s 1988 text Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. My answer is always the same: it is an indispensable, classic, and justly famous study of the United States corporate media’s role as propaganda organ for that nation’s imperial establishment. For many of us on the Left, Manufacturing Consent was a revelatory volume, one that significantly sharpened our grasp of how and why “mainstream” US media perform that function. The book was particularly enlightening for me on the critical role played by the (not so) “leftmost” liberal wings of that media – the New York Times especially – in setting the narrow imperial parameters of acceptable political and policy debate for the nation’s educated classes. Beyond the News Still, Herman and Chomsky did not pretend to give readers anything more than a modest and opening take on dominant US media’s inclusive power-serving role. The brilliant content analysis and “propaganda model” that Herman and Chomsky advanced in Manufacturing Consent focused on how that media reported and commented on matters of US “foreign policy” (US Empire). The same basic model and analysis can and should be adapted for and applied to US domestic policy and society as well (and indeed it has been in various writings since, including those of Herman and Chomsky). The leading capitalist US media corporations are naturally no less committed to advancing “homeland” oppression structures and ideologies than they are to hawking related imperial policies and propaganda. At the same time, Manufacturing Consent did not examine what is probably the biggest part of US corporate media’s contribution to the engineering of mass “consent.” That media’s function of transmitting ideology and propaganda in service to those atop the nation’s interrelated hierarchies of empire and inequality is hardly limited to the news. Equally if not more significant for that task are “entertainment” media. Far from restricting their hearts-and minds-influencing powers to the (Aldous) “Huxlean” tasks of mass diversion, distraction, and infantilization, US movies (like US television sit-coms and dramas and video games) are loaded with richly “Orwellian” political and ideological content. As US Court of Appeals Justice Bennett C. Clark explained in upholding the conviction of ten Hollywood screenwriters and directors who refused to “confess” current or past Communist Party membership in 1949, US motion pictures play “a critically important role” as “a potent medium of propaganda dissemination.” The same could be accurately said six-plus decades later about US television sit-coms, dramas, “reality shows,” talk shows, and even commercials, along with the movie industry, not to mention video games and much of book and magazine publishing. Manufacturing Idiocy and Cruelty But even this expansion of our understanding of the US mass media’s authoritarian role in (not-so) “democratic” America comes up short. Seen broadly its total many-sided and multiply delivered impact, that media’s mission is worse than merely the production of mass consent. The real goal is the construction of mass idiocy – the manufacture of idiots. Here I use the words “idiocy” and “idiot” in the original Greek and Athenian sense, one that refers not to stupidity but rather to childish selfishness and willful indifference to public affairs and concerns. As Wikipedia explains, “An idiot in Athenian democracy was someone who was characterized by self-centeredness and concerned almost exclusively with private – as opposed to public – affairs…Declining to take part in public life, such as democratic government of the polis (city state),…’idiots’ were seen as having bad judgment in public and political matters.” In US movies, television sit-coms, television dramas, television reality-shows, commercials, the state Lotteries, and video games, the ideal-type American is to no small degree an idiot in the classic Athenian sense: a person who cares about little more than his or her own well-being, affluence, personal consumption, individual status and accomplishments. This noble American idiot has no real concern for the fate of others. He or she is blissfully indifferent to the terrible social and environmental prices paid by fellow human and other sentient beings for the maintenance of currently reigning and interrelated oppressions structures (class, race, gender, ethnicity, nationality, anthropocentrism, Empire, and more) at home and abroad. A critical, vicious and pervasive theme in this ugly media culture is the notion that people who are poor, insecure, coerced, struggling, and otherwise pushed and kept down by those (officially invisible) oppression structures are the irresponsible, personally and culturally flawed creators of their own fate. The mass US media’s version of Athenian idiocy “can imagine,” in the words of Left cultural theorist Henry Giroux (who includes superb content analyses of US movies and non-news television shows in his prolific work on the authoritarian “culture of neoliberalism”), “public issues only as private concerns.” It works to “erase the social from the language of public life so as to reduce” questions of racial and socioeconomic disparity to “private issues of …individual character and cultural depravity. Consistent with “the central neoliberal tenet that all problems are private rather than social in nature,” it portrays the only barrier to equality and meaningful democratic participation “being a lack of principled self-help and moral responsibility” and bad personal choices. (Giroux). Government efforts to meaningfully address and ameliorate (not to mention abolish) sharp societal disparities of race, class, gender, ethnicity, nationality and the like are relentlessly portrayed as futile, counterproductive, naïve, megalomaniacal, dangerous, deluded, counter-productive, and “anti-American.” A type of public concern and engagement does, to be sure, appear and take on a favorable light in the corporate media culture. It takes the form of an often cruel, even sadistically violent response to those unworthy and evil Others who unforgivably fail to abide by the capitalist media’s malicious “neoliberal” cultural codes. The idiocy-manufacturing communications system isn’t opposed to government per se. It’s opposed to what the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called “the left hand of the state” – the parts of the public sector that serve the social and democratic needs of the non-affluent majority. It celebrates and otherwise advances the “right hand of the state” – the portions of government that serve the opulent minority, dole out punishment for the poor, and attack a shifting parade of “bad guys” those who resist or are perceived as nefariously resisting the supposedly benevolent US corporate and imperial order at home and abroad. Cops, prosecutors, and military personnel (including even a sociopathic sniper who is hailed for killing more than 150 Iraqis resisting the criminal invasion and occupation of their nation by the inherently noble US Empire) and commanders who fight and kill various “bad guys” (“anti-American” “insurgents” and “terrorists” and various crooks and radicals abroad and in the “homeland”) are the most common heroes and role models in this media; public defenders, other defense attorneys, civil libertarians, civil rights advocates, peace activists and the like are commonly presented as at best naïve and irritating “do-gooders” and at worst as nefarious coddlers and even agents of evil. Irrational Persuasion and Electronic ADDvertising This does not mean that the generation of idiocy in the contemporary sense of sheer stupidity is not also a central part of the “mainstream” media mission. Such idiocy is widely cultivated across the “homeland” media spectrum. Nowhere is this more clearly evident than in the constant barrage of rapid-fire advertisements that floods US media. As the US cultural critic Neil Postman noted thirty years ago, the modern US television commercial is the antithesis of the rational economic consideration that early Western champions of the profits system claimed to be the enlightened essence of capitalism. “Its principal theorists, even its most prominent practitioners,” Postman noted, “believed capitalism to be based on the idea that both buyer and seller are sufficiently mature, well-informed, and reasonable to engage in transactions of mutual self-interest.” Commercials make “hash” out of this faith. They are dedicated to persuading consumers with irrational claims, relying not on the serious presentation of evidence and logical argument but on suggestive emotionalism and evocative imagery The same techniques poison US electoral politics. Investment in openly deceptive and manipulative campaign commercials commonly determines success or failure in the nation’s ever more depressingly dumbed-down marketing and branding contests between business-beholden candidates. To make matters worse, the stupendous cost of this noxious commercialization of politics drives campaign expenses so high as to make candidates ever more absurdly dependent on big money corporate funders. Along the way, mass cognitive competence is assaulted by the numbing, high-speed ubiquity of commercials, which assault capacities for sustained mental focus and rational deliberation nearly sixteen minutes of every hour on cable television (with 44 percent of the individual ads now running for just fifteen seconds). A factor perhaps in the United States’ long-bemoaned epidemic of “Attention Deficit Disorder” (ADD)? Treetops and Grassroots Here is where a knowledgeable reader of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal and critical US Left literature might interject that each of these and other major corporate media outlets produce a significant amount of, informative, high-quality and often candid reporting and commentary that Left thinkers and activists commonly cite to support their cases for radical and democratic change. The observation would be correct. Does this mean that the paranoid-style Tea Party FOX News right wing is right when it claims that “mainstream” media has a liberal and even Left bias? Hardly. To understand why Left truth-seekers who oppose the power structures that media supports can commonly find useful information in establishment news and commentary outlets, it is important to realize that the dominant media crafts two different versions of US policy, politics, society, “life” and current events for two different audiences. Following the work of the brilliant Australian propaganda critic Alex Carey (whose work helped inspire Herman and Chomsky to write Manufacturing Consent), we can call the first audience the “grassroots.” It comprises the general mass of working and lower-class citizens. As far as the business elites who own and manage the mass media and the corporations that pay for that media with advertising purchases are concerned, this “rabble” cannot be trusted with serious, candid, and forthright information. Its essential role in society is to keep quiet, work hard, be entertained (in richly propagandistic and ideological ways, we should remember), buy things, and generally do what they’re told. They are to leave key societal decisions to those that the leading 20th century US public intellectual and media-as-propaganda enthusiast Walter Lippman (coiner of the phrase “manufacture of consent,” as Herman and Chomsky noted) called “the responsible men.” That “intelligent,” benevolent, “expert,” and “responsible” elite – responsible, indeed, for such glorious accomplishments as the Great Depression, the Vietnam War, the invasion of Iraq, the Great Recession, global warming, and the rise of the Islamic State – needed, in Lippman’s view, to be protected from what he called “the trampling and roar of the bewildered herd” (quoted in N.Chomsky. Power Systems [2013], 81). The deluded mob, the sub-citizenry, the dangerous working class majority (the “proles” in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four) is not the audience for elite organs like the Times, the Post, and the Journal. The second target group comprises the relevant political class of Americans from at most the upper fifth of society. This is who reads the Times, the Post, and the Journal. Call this audience (again following Carey) the “treetops”: the people who matter and who deserve and can be trusted with something more closely approximating the real story because their minds have been properly disciplined and flattered by superior salaries, significant workplace autonomy, and the advanced, “specialized” educational and professional certification. This segment includes such privileged and heavily indoctrinated persons as corporate managers, lawyers, public administrators, and (most) university professors. Since these super-citizens carry out key top-down societal tasks of supervision, discipline, training, demoralization, co-optation, and indoctrination, they cannot be too thoroughly misled about current events and policy without deleterious consequences for the smooth functioning of the dominant social and political order. They require adequate information and must not be overly influenced by the brutal and foolish propaganda generated for the multitude. At the same time, information and commentary for the relevant and respectable business and political classes and their managers and coordinators sometimes reflects a degree of reasoned debate among elites as to how best to run society in the interests of the privileged. That is why a radical thinker and activist can find much that is of use in such elite media organs as the New York, Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times and in various other treetops media. Such a thinker or activist would, indeed, be foolish not to consult these sources if they have the time and energy to do so. Paul Street’s latest book is They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy (Paradigm) http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/Beyond-Manufacturing-Consent-20150327-0024.html US corporate media’s biggest contribution to the engineering of mass “consent.” US corporate media function of transmitting ideology and propaganda in service to .. interrelated hierarchies of empire. LOOK-UPS Alexander Edward Carey (1922 –1987) Geraldton WA sheep farmer Australian writer & social psychologist lecturer UNSW research = industrial psychology, industrial relations, & psychology of nationalism & propaganda founding members of Australian Humanist Society in 1960 prominent in protest movement against Australian participation in Vietnam War Carey pioneered the study of corporate propaganda Chomsky:  real importance of Carey's work ...  to bring some of [the history of corporate propaganda] to public attention John Pilger:  has called Carey "a second Orwell in his prophesies" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Carey Paul Street American journalist, author & political commentator "Street is a Marxist whose leading influences beyond Marx include Gerrard Winstanley, Edward Palmer Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Rosa Luxembourg, Noam Chomsky, and John Pilger. Street is an outspoken critic of pseudo-populism, which is usually engineered with the help of mass media, especially as it perpetuates corporatism and imperialism." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Street_%28journalist%29 Thought I'd really enjoy this article, but I haven't for some reason.  Could just be tired.  Woke up really early.  Tired, but can't sleep.  Not really focused. Might come back to this.  Some interesting points here.  Not so much into the bits about blissful indifference to oppressions structures.  Found that rather off-putting.  Not everybody buys a ticket on his Marxist trip.

HTML TAG - METER

What I don't know about HTML 95 Result: 95 How hungry I am at the moment 33 Result: 33 How cool is this gadget?   Only problem with it is if I flip screens from compose to HTML it converts the formula to the graphic (which I don't want ATM, because I want to see the formula as well as the result). Think I forgot the percent sign at the end of the formula, but it seems to have worked. It was supposed to read: 95% ... I think. Noooooooooo! When I publish, my formula turns into graphics, even though copy formula was entered up in the compose mode.  Can still do a look up by flipping when I need it ... if I remember it's here.

UK - Privacy International - Surveillance Industry - Surveillance General

Meet the privacy activists who spy on the surveillance industry by Daniel Rivero Illustration by Shutterstock, Elena Scotti/Fusion April 6, 2015 http://fusion.net/story/112390/unveiling-secrets-of-the-international-surveillance-trade-one-fake-company-at-a-time/ LONDON– On the second floor of a narrow brick building [...] Once he’s infiltrated the trade show, he’ll pose as an industry insider, chatting up company representatives, swapping business cards, and picking up shiny brochures that advertise the invasive capabilities of bleeding-edge surveillance technology. Few of the features are ever marketed or revealed openly to the general public, and if the group didn’t go through the pains of going undercover, it wouldn’t know the lengths to which law enforcement and the intelligence community are going to keep tabs on their citizens. “I don’t know when we’ll get to use this [company], but we need a lot of these to do our research,” Omanovic tells me. (He asked Fusion not to reveal the name of the company in order to not blow its cover.) The strange tactic– hacking into an expo in order to come into close proximity with government hackers and monitors– is a regular part of operations at Privacy International, a London-based anti-surveillance advocacy group founded 25 years ago. Omanovic is one of a few activists for the group who goes undercover to collect the surveillance promotional documents. “At last count we had about 1,400 files,” Matt Rice, PI’s Scottish-born advocacy officer says while sifting through a file cabinet full of the brochures. “[The files] help us understand what these companies are capable of, and what’s being sold around the world,” he says. The brochures vary in scope and claims. Some showcase cell site simulators, commonly called Stingrays, which allow police to intercept cell phone activity within a certain area. Others provide details about Finfisher– surveillance software that is marketed exclusively to governments, which allows officials to put spyware on a target’s home computer or mobile device to watch their Skype calls, Facebook and email activity. The technology buyers at these conferences are the usual suspects — the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), and the Australian Secret Intelligence Service– but also representatives of repressive regimes —Bahrain, Sudan, pre-revolutionary Libya– as the group has revealed in attendees lists it has surfaced. At times, companies’ claims can raise eyebrows. One brochure shows a soldier, draped in fatigues, holding a portable device up to the faces of a sombre group of Arabs. “Innocent civilian or insurgent?,” the pamphlet asks. “Not certain?” “Our systems are.” The treasure trove of compiled documents was available as an online database, but PI recently took it offline, saying the website had security vulnerabilities that could have compromised information of anyone who wanted to donate to the organization online. They are building a new one. The group hopes that the exposure of what Western companies are selling to foreign governments will help the organization achieve its larger goal: ending the sale of hardware and software to governments that use it to monitor their populations in ways that violate basic privacy rights. The group acknowledges that it might seem they are taking an extremist position when it comes to privacy, but “we’re not against surveillance,” Michael Rispoli, head of PI’s communications, tells me. “Governments need to keep people safe, whether it’s from criminals or terrorists or what it may be, but surveillance needs to be done in accordance with human rights, and in accordance with the rule of law.” The group is waging its fight in courtrooms. In February of last year, it filed a criminal complaint to the UK’s National Cyber Crime Unit of the National Crime Agency, asking it to investigate British technology allegedly used repeatedly by the Ethiopian government to intercept the communications of an Ethiopian national. Even after Tadesse Kersmo applied for– and was granted– asylum in the UK on the basis of being a political refugee, the Ethiopian government kept electronically spying on him, the group says, using technology from British firm Gamma International. The group currently has six lawsuits in action, mostly taking on large, yet opaque surveillance companies and the British government. Gamma International did not respond to Fusion’s request for comment on the lawsuit, which alleges that exporting the software to Ethiopian authorities means the company assisted in illegal electronic spying. “The irony that he was given refugee status here, while a British company is facilitating intrusions into his basic right to privacy isn’t just ironic, it’s wrong,” Rispoli says. “It’s so obvious that there should be laws in place to prevent it.” PI says it has uncovered other questionable business relationships between oppressive regimes and technology companies based in other Western countries. An investigative report the group put out a few months ago on surveillance in Central Asia said that British and Swiss companies, along with Israeli and Israeli-American companies with close ties to the Israeli military, are providing surveillance infrastructure and technical support to countries like Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan– some of the worst-ranking countries in the world when it comes to freedom of speech, according to Freedom House. Only North Korea ranks lower than them. PI says it used confidential sources, whose accounts have been corroborated, to reach those conclusions. Not only are these companies complicit in human rights violations, the Central Asia report alleges, but they know they are. Fusion reached out to the companies named in the report, NICE Systems (Israel), Verint Israel (U.S./ Israel), Gamma (UK), or Dreamlab (Switzerland), and none have responded to repeated requests for comment. The report is a “blueprint” for the future of the organization’s output, says Rice, the advocacy officer. “It’s the first time we’ve done something that really looks at the infrastructure, the laws, and putting it all together to get a view on how the system actually works in a country, or even a whole region,” says Rice. “What we can do is take that [report], and have specific findings and testimonials to present to companies, to different bodies and parliamentarians, and say this is why we need these things addressed,” adds Omanovic, the researcher and fake company designer. The tactic is starting to show signs of progress, he says. One afternoon, Omanovic was huddled over a table in the back room, taking part in what looked like an intense conference call. “European Commission,” he says afterwards. The Commission has been looking at surveillance exports since it was revealed that Egypt, Tunisia, and Bahrain were using European tech to crack down on protesters during the Arab Spring, he added. Now, PI is consulting with some members, and together they “hope to bring in a regulation specifically on this subject by year’s end.” *** Privacy International has come a long way from the “sterile bar of an anonymous business hotel in Luxembourg,” where founder Simon Davies, then a lone wolf privacy campaigner, hosted its first meeting with a handful of people 25 years ago. In a blog post commemorating that anniversary, Davies (who left the organization about five years ago) described the general state of privacy advocacy when that first meeting was held:     “Those were strange times. Privacy was an arcane subject that was on very few radar screens. The Internet had barely emerged, digital telephony was just beginning, the NSA was just a conspiracy theory and email was almost non-existent (we called it electronic mail back then). We communicated by fax machines, snail mail – and through actual real face to face meetings that you travelled thousands of miles to attend.” Immediately, there were disagreements about the scope of issues the organization should focus on, as detailed in the group’s first report, filed in 1991. Some of the group’s 120-odd loosely affiliated members and advisors wanted the organization to focus on small privacy flare-ups; others wanted it to take on huge, international privacy policies, from “transborder data flows” to medical research. Disputes arose as to what “privacy” actually meant at the time. It took years for the group to narrow down the scope of its mandate to something manageable and coherent. Gus Hosein, current executive director, describes the 90’s as a time when the organization “just knew that it was fighting against something.” He became part of the loose collective in 1996, three days after moving to the UK from New Haven, Connecticut, thanks to a chance encounter with Davies at the London Economics School. For the first thirteen years he worked with PI, he says, the group’s headquarters was the school pub. They were fighting then some of the same battles that are back in the news cycle today, such as the U.S. government wanting to ban encryption, calling it a tool for criminals to hide their communications from law enforcement. “[We were] fighting against the Clinton Administration and its cryptography policy, fighting against new intersections of law, or proposals in countries X, Y and Z, and almost every day you would find something to fight around,” he says. Just as privacy issues stemming from the dot com boom were starting to stabilize, 9/11 happened. That’s when Hosein says “the shit hit the fan.” In the immediate wake of that tragedy, Washington pushed through the Patriot Act and the Aviation and Transportation Security Act, setting an international precedent of invasive pat-downs and extensive monitoring in the name of anti-terrorism. Hosein, being an American, followed the laws closely, and the group started issuing criticism of what it considered unreasonable searches. In the UK, a public debate about issuing national identification cards sprung up. PI fought it vehemently. “All of a sudden we’re being called upon to respond to core policy-making in Western governments, so whereas policy and surveillance were often left to some tech expert within the Department of Justice or whatever, now it had gone to mainstream policy,” he says. “We were overwhelmed because we were still just a ragtag bunch of people trying to fight fights without funding, and we were taking on the might of the executive arm of government.” The era was marked by a collective struggle to catch up. “I don’t think anyone had any real successes in that era,” Hosein says. But around 2008, the group’s advocacy work in India, Thailand and the Philippines started to gain the attention of donors, and the team decided it was time to organize. The three staff members then started the formal process of becoming a charity, after being registered as a corporation for ten years. By the time it got its first office in 2011 (around the time its founder, Davies, walked away to pursue other ventures) the Arab Spring was dominating international headlines. “With the Arab Spring and the rise of attention to human rights and technology, that’s when PI actually started to realize our vision, and become an organization that could grow,” Hosein says. “Four years ago we had three employees, and now we have 16 people,” he says with a hint of pride. *** “This is a real vindication for [Edward] Snowden,” Eric King, PI’s deputy director says about one of the organization’s recent legal victories over the UK’s foremost digital spy agency, known as the Government Communications Headquarters or GCHQ. PI used the documents made public by Snowden to get the British court that oversees GCHQ to determine that all intelligence sharing between GCHQ and the National Security Administration (NSA) was illegal up until December 2014. Ironically, the court went on to say that the sharing was only illegal because of lack of public disclosure of the program. Now that details of the program were made public thanks to the lawsuit, the court said, the operation is now legal and GCHQ can keep doing what it was doing. “It’s like they’re creating the law on the fly,” King says. “[The UK government] is knowingly breaking the law and then retroactively justifying themselves. Even though we got the court to admit this whole program was illegal, the things they’re saying now are wholly inadequate to protect our privacy in this country.” Nevertheless, it was a “highly significant ruling,” says Elizabeth Knight, Legal Director of fellow UK-based civil liberties organization Open Rights Group. “It was the first time the [courts have] found the UK’s intelligence services to be in breach of human rights law,” she says. “The ruling is a welcome first step towards demonstrating that the UK government’s surveillance practices breach human rights law.” In an email, a GCHQ spokesperson downplayed the significance of the ruling, saying that PI only won the case in one respect: on a “transparency issue,” rather than on the substance of the data sharing program. “The rulings re-affirm that the processes and safeguards within these regimes were fully adequate at all times, so we have not therefore needed to make any changes to policy or practice as a result of the judgement,” the spokesperson says. Before coming on board four years ago, King, a 25-year old Wales native, worked at Reprieve, a non-profit that provides legal support to prisoners. Some of its clients are at Guantanamo Bay and other off-the-grid prisons, something that made him mindful of security concerns when the group was communicating with clients. King worried that every time he made a call to his clients, they were being monitored. “No one could answer those questions, and that’s what got me going on this,” says King. Right now, he tells me, most of the group’s legal actions have to do with fighting the “Five Eyes”– the nickname given to the intertwined intelligence networks of the UK, Canada, the US, Australia and New Zealand. One of the campaigns, stemming from the lawsuit against GCHQ that established a need for transparency, is asking GCHQ to confirm if the agency illegally collected information about the people who signed a “Did the GCHQ Illegally Spy On You?” petition. So far, 10,000 people have signed up to be told whether their communications or online activity were collected by the UK spy agency when it conducted mass surveillance of the Internet. If a court actually forces GCHQ to confirm whether those individuals were spied on, PI will then ask that all retrieved data be deleted from the database. “It’s such an important campaign not only because people have the right to know, but it’s going to bring it home to people and politicians that regular, everyday people are caught up in this international scandal,” King says. “You don’t even have to be British to be caught up in it. People all over the world are being tracked in that program.” Eerke Boiten, a senior lecturer at the interdisciplinary Cyber Security Centre at the University of Kent, says that considering recent legal victories, he can’t write off the effort, even if he would have dismissed it just a year ago. “We have now finally seen some breakthroughs in transparency in response to Snowden, and the sense that intelligence oversight needs an overhaul is increasing,” he wrote in an email to me. “So although the [British government] will do its best to shore up the GCHQ legal position to ensure it doesn’t need to respond to this, their job will be harder than before.” “Privacy International have a recent record of pushing the right legal buttons,” he says. “They may win again.” A GCHQ spokesperson says that the agency will “of course comply with any direction or order” a court might give it, stemming from the campaign. King is also the head of PI’s research arm– organizing in-depth investigations into national surveillance ecosystems, in tandem with partner groups in countries around the world. The partners hail from places as disparate as Kenya and Mexico. One recently released report features testimonials from people who reported being heavily surveilled in Morocco. Another coming out of Colombia will be more of an “exposé,” with previously unreported details on surveillance in that country, he says. And then there’s the stuff that King pioneered: the method of sneaking into industry conferences by using a shadow company. He developed the technique Omanovic is using. King can’t go to the conferences undercover anymore because his face is now too well known. When asked why he started sneaking into the shows, he says: “Law enforcement doesn’t like talking about [surveillance]. Governments don’t talk about it. And for the most part our engagement with companies is limited to when we sue them,” he laughs. When it comes to the surveillance field, you would be hard pressed to find a company that does exactly what it says it does, King tells me. So when he or someone else at PI sets up a fake company, they expect to get about as much scrutiny as the next ambiguous, potentially official organization that lines up behind them. Collectively, PI has been blacklisted and been led out of a few conferences over the past four years they have been doing this, he estimates. “If we have to navigate some spooky places to get what we need, then that’s what we’ll do,” he says. Sometimes you have to walk through a dark room to turn on a light. Privacy International sees a world with a lot of dark rooms. “Being shadowy is acceptable in this world.” http://fusion.net/story/112390/unveiling-secrets-of-the-international-surveillance-trade-one-fake-company-at-a-time/ Highlights are for me.  Link to source article for an easier read. Great article.  Not sure I'll remember all of this information. Prior advocacy work: India Thailand Philippines More investigations coming: Kenya Mexico  Colombia   Completed report:  heavily surveilled in Morocco (strong USA ally, with heavy French & Spanish trade, credit and investment). StingRays are used routinely by Chicago Police Dept: Chicago PD seized drug money = first purchases 2005 incl. StingRay surveillance' digital 'hoovers' http://inthesetimes.com/article/17808/who-do-you-protect-who-do-you-surveil  Central Asia report software companies that have not responded: NICE Systems (Israel) Verint Israel (US / Israel) Gamma (UK) Dreamlab (Switzerland) Most of Privacy International legal actions have to do with fighting the “Five Eyes” - ie.  "intertwined intelligence networks of the UK, Canada, the US, Australia & New Zealand." Six court actions in progress currently. Sales to repressive governments include: Bahrain Sudan Libya (pre-revolutionary) Turkmenistan Uzbekistan Egypt, Tunisia & Bahrain - used European surveillance technology (crackdown protesters). European Commission -  has been looking at surveillance export. Expansive surveillance set down by: Patriot Act (USA) Aviation and Transportation Security Act (USA) Intelligence sharing between USA (NSA) and UK (GCHQ) ruled illegal prior 2014 because undisclosed.  However: "Now that details of the program were made public thanks to the lawsuit, the court said, the operation is now legal and GCHQ can keep doing what it was doing." That outcome sounds rather bizarre to me.

Rwandan Govt Assassins vs. Obama Kill List

Rwanda: Critics ask Canada to protect them from Kagame’s assassins By Ann Garrison Global Research, April 04, 2015 San Francisco Bayview Region: Canada, sub-Saharan Africa Theme: Police State & Civil Rights kagame02 KPFA Evening News Anchor Anthony Fest: Rwandan exiles in Canada and their Canadian allies, all of whom are well-known critics of Rwandan President Paul Kagame, held a press conference earlier this week in Montreal to call on Canadian authorities to protect them from attacks by Rwandan government agents. The dissidents said they’d been warned by allies within the Rwandan government that so-called diplomats assigned to Rwanda’s embassy in Canada were actually there to intimidate or assassinate dissidents. University of Quebec professor Emmanuel Hakizimana, left, attorney and former ICTR defense counsel John Philpot and Paul Kagame’s former Chief of Staff David Himbara hold a press conference in Montreal. Last October, the BBC, in its documentary “Rwanda’s Untold Story,” reported that 12 prominent Rwandan exiles have been assassinated or disappeared in the past 15 years. Two months after that, one of President Paul Kagame’s former bodyguards disappeared in Nairobi while on his way to France. He had planned to testify there that Kagame had ordered the assassination of the Rwandan and Burundian presidents in April 1994. Those assassinations are widely understood to have triggered the ethnic massacres that ensued in Rwanda. KPFA’s Ann Garrison filed this report on the history of assassinations and disappearances that’s causing Rwandan exiles and their Canadian allies to ask the government there to protect them. KPFA/Ann Garrison: At their press conference in Montreal, Canadians and Rwandan exiles said they had to take warnings from insiders in the Rwandan government seriously because of all the precedents, In 2011, BBC Newsnight reported that the London Metropolitan Police had warned Rwandan exiles in London that they were in danger of being assassinated by agents of the Rwandan government. BBC Newsnight: The Metropolitan Police have taken the extraordinary step of warning two British citizens from Rwanda, living in London, that they’re at risk of being assassinated by the Rwandan government. Legal notices were sent to a former Lib Dem candidate Rene Mugenzi and Jonathan Musonera. We’ve spoken with both men. University of Quebec Professor Emmanuel Hakizimana, a member of the Rwandan National Congress, is among those threatened in Montreal. Now it’s understood that a Rwandan suspected of being part of the plot against the exiles was prevented from entering Britain last week. The Embassy here has said the allegations are completely without foundation, but the story raises difficult questions for the British government, who give Rwanda 83 million pounds of aid a year. KPFA: David Himbara, a Rwandan born Canadian citizen and President Kagame’s former chief of staff, said they could not take the warnings lightly and that even in the United States, the FBI have warned his friend, Colgate University Professor Susan Thomson, that she could be in danger: David Himbara: The message to the Canadian government really is that we can’t take any of these things lightly. Even in the U.S., my friend, Professor Susan Thomson – she’s a Canadian teaching at Colgate University; she writes a lot on Rwanda – she has been warned by the FBI to be careful. KPFA: Himbara also said that danger to Rwandans in exile has become a global problem and that Sweden felt compelled to expel a Rwandan diplomat. Himbara: This is now becoming a worldwide problem. Even Sweden had to expel a Rwandan diplomat for endangering lives of Rwandan Diasporans. KPFA: In October 2012, the BBC reported on the assassination of former Rwandan Intelligence Chief Patrick Karegeya and spoke with Gen. Kayumba Nyamwasa, who has survived four assassination attempts in South Africa. BBC Producer Jane Corbin: Patrick Karegeya was buried with tight security in South Africa. Rwandan diplomats were expelled from the country, suspected of involvement in his killing. Kayumba Nyamwasa: When I talk about Patrick being a man of principle … (Kayumba funeral oration, background to BBC narrative) BBC: Gen. Nyamwasa has survived four assassination attempts and been badly wounded. Four men, two from Rwanda, have been found guilty in South Africa of trying to murder him. The judge said the attack was politically motivated. A dozen prominent Rwandan exiles have been killed or just disappeared in the last 15 years. Patrick Karegeya was assassinated in the early hours of New Year’s Day 2014 in Johannesburg. He was buried there, amid tight security, his casket draped with the banner of the opposition Rwandan National Congress party. [...] Kayumba: We have a dictator; we have a man who is a serial killer, who enjoys killing his citizens, and he thinks he can keep himself in power by killing and imprisonment. KPFA: John Philpot, a former ICTR defense attorney organized the press conference in Montreal, where he represents two of the Rwandans in danger. He said that a Belgian Canadian who had worked as a journalist and Red Cross staffer in Rwanda had been threatened and even run off the road during an ice storm in Canada in the late 1990s, but that he had remained safe after their group protested to the Canadian government and the Red Cross. Philpot also said he would not be surprised if Kagame has now dared to order the assassination of Canadian or American critics of the Rwandan government. John Philpot: They will attack, or they could attack people like us – white, middle class people. Now obviously, the very striking issue is, “Can a country like Canada or the U.S. allow a foreign commando to function on its territory and threaten or kill Canadians and residents? KPFA: Their position, Philpot said, is that this is unacceptable. In Berkeley, Pacifica, KPFA and AfrobeatRadio, I’m Ann Garrison. Oakland writer Ann Garrison writes for the San Francisco Bay View, Black Agenda Report, Black Star News,Counterpunch, Colored Opinions and her own website, Ann Garrison, and produces for AfrobeatRadio on WBAI-NYC, KPFA Evening News, KPFA Flashpoints and for her own YouTube Channel, AnnieGetYourGang. She can be reached at anniegarrison@gmail.com. In March 2014 she was awarded the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize for promoting peace in the Great Lakes Region of Africa through her reporting. SOURCE http://www.globalresearch.ca/rwanda-critics-ask-canada-to-protect-them-from-kagames-assassins/5440728 Know very little about Rwanda.  Had trouble even spelling it. Think the risk of assassination abroad might come with the territory of being an exile abroad that's in opposition to and critical of an unrestrained government, if that's what's going on. Rwandan embassy staff in Canada being fingered as potential assassins seems either (a) political agenda serving, (b) paranoid ... or (c) someone could really get bumped off in the near future. So what's the difference between this Paul Kagame guy and Obama's kill list, and why was the White House recently receiving him?     Paul Kagame President of Rwanda The Guardian refers to the White House euphemism for the kill list - 'Disposition Matrix' (a fancy database of integrated information, that spits out kill plans by the sound of it) as 'expanding' and 'blurring' legal boundaries: It is a grid, however, that both blurs and expands the boundaries that human rights law and the law of war place upon acts of abduction or targeted killing. There have been claims that people's names have been entered into it with little or no evidence. [1] Seems a rather a watered down description to me. The kill list was US Counter-Terrorism Centre created, "incorporated the existing kill lists of the CIA and the US military's special forces" [1] The Guardian article is interesting and worth a read. Seems as if the Americans do the dirty work for the British? Might come back to this, as if left it way too late to mess around checking things out some more.

Government, Power, Expansion & Keeping the Rabble in Line

Weekend Edition April 3-5, 2015 The Government's Intelligent Design When the Government Views Its Own Population as the Enemy by CHRIS WRIGHT The public debate over government surveillance that was, if not inaugurated, at least intensified by the publication of documents provided by Edward Snowden has been, in some respects, surreal and deluded. One side claims that the NSA’s mass surveillance is necessary to protect the public from terrorism, that in fact it has thwarted many “potential terrorist events.” The other side claims, with much more justification, that bulk data collection does little or nothing to protect ordinary civilians. But few commentators draw another, more subversive conclusion: government has no interest in protecting its citizens (as such) in the first place. In fact, its interest is precisely the opposite: to expose its citizens–with privileged exceptions–to harm. Sounds absurd, of course. But consider, first, the recent historical record, which certainly does not support the idea that the U.S. government cares about protecting Americans. Exhibit 1 is the attacks of 9/11. It became a commonplace long ago for leftists and liberals to cite the White House memo of August 6, 2001 that bore the heading “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.,” which was apparently ignored at the time by the Bush administration. Perhaps more damning is Lawrence Wright’s 2006 book The Looming Tower, which made it abundantly clear that the CIA and the FBI had not prioritized the fight against terrorism even after the 1993 Twin Tower bombing and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. If one were malicious enough, one might attribute competence to government institutions rather than mere criminal bungling: perhaps the ridiculously counterproductive–from the perspective of thwarting terrorism–organization and efforts of the CIA and FBI before 9/11 were, by some twisted institutional logic, designed to make possible precisely what happened, a major terrorist event. Another commonplace is the observation that George W. Bush’s Iraq war, far from mitigating terrorism, increased it substantially, perhaps sevenfold. This was predictable and predicted in 2003, a fact that, by elementary logic, means that the Bush administration at the very least was perfectly happy to expose American (and of course foreign) civilians to greater threats. The same logic applies to Obama’s global drone war, which apparently has killed 50 civilians for every 1 terrorist. Not surprisingly, it has fueled terrorism, and thus increased threats to Americans. (In fact, the drone campaign itself is terrorism, but here I am confining myself to the conventional American understanding of the word, as applying only to people that the U.S. government doesn’t like.) One could go on listing such facts indefinitely. For instance, the sordid lesson to draw from the Hurricane Katrina debacle in 2005 is that protecting Americans from a natural disaster was not a priority of government at any level, at least not of the governments involved. The wrightworkersdeplorable actions of police in the hurricane’s aftermath confirm this conclusion. The victims were treated as criminals, not people who needed and deserved protection. In addition to ample historical evidence, one can also consider simple logic. Returning to the NSA’s mass surveillance, it shouldn’t be hard for government officials to comprehend that the more time and resources they devote to monitoring ordinary civilians, the less time and resources they are devoting to monitoring plausible terrorist threats. In fact, almost every major terrorist attack in the West during the past fifteen years has been committed by people who were already known to law enforcement. Such was the case, for instance, with regard to one of the brothers accused of the 2013 Boston marathon bombings. But the government, obligingly, was too busy spying on ordinary Americans to pay much attention to him, so he was able to carry out his attack unhindered. But why, you ask, would it be in the interest of government to expose the public to harm? This question cannot be answered except in the context of specific historical circumstances, in this case the circumstances of neoliberal capitalism. In a society that is experiencing stratospheric income inequality, high unemployment and long-term economic stagnation, retrenchment of social welfare programs, the reality and threat of environmental collapse, and, in short, ever-greater social discontent and instability, institutional power-centers will want to increase their control over the population. As a proud plutocrat put it in a warning to his wealthy brethren, “the pitchforks are coming.” And the plutocrats, together with their government representatives, want to be prepared for that. The question is how to justify the expansion of government’s surveillance and police powers that is necessary to keep the rabble in line. Clearly, pretexts are needed. And pretexts are provided whenever a terrorist attack occurs, especially if it occurs on American soil. This may be a virtual truism, but rarely is the implication articulated: in this respect, it is in the interest of government and the top “1%” in income/wealth for civilians periodically to be victims of terrorism. If the terrorist threat disappears, so does the useful pretext. The “pretext” phenomenon has other dimensions. Naomi Klein discusses one of them in her famous book The Shock Doctrine, where she argues that in the last forty years, in the wake of catastrophes of whatever sort–natural, military, terrorist, economic–elites have taken advantage of popular disorientation and disorganization to force regimes of privatization upon the population. “Neoliberalism-by-blitzkrieg,” one might call it. A prime example is what happened to New Orleans after Katrina: with the public’s capacity to resist weakened, nearly all public schools were privatized. Under the pretext of education reform, “corporate profiteers and politicians have zeroed in on black communities, leaving behind devastation and destabilization,” says a spokesperson of a New Orleans community group. So, for the neoliberal state-corporate nexus, the devastation of a particular society, including a domestic region, can be eminently useful not only in smashing popular resistance to power but also in giving elites an opportunity to ram through programs they could not have otherwise. Convenient pretexts can always be thought of. On a more general level, the relevant principle has been stated concisely by Noam Chomsky: the primary enemy of any government is (the majority of) its own population. For the population always wants more power and economic security than it has, and it is willing to fight for it (as the history of the labor movement shows)–which entails, however, the relative diminution of the power of the rich and their political minions. This corollary explains, of course, the U.S. government’s continually savage treatment, through centuries, of workers, the lower classes, left-wing activists, African-Americans, protesters and dissidents and “ordinary people” of all kinds. They must be humiliated, harmed, killed, beaten down, made examples of if they step out of line, kept in a state of constant fear and obedience (however impossible it may be to fulfill that goal). Power exists but to maintain and expand itself; that is its raison d’être, and that is the key to understanding its every move (at the institutional, not the personal, level). For example, if government is not always blatantly aggressive in harming its own population, that is not because it’s too moral to do so; it is because that might threaten its power, by stirring up more dissent. Concessions have to be made to the masses if in the long run they are to tolerate subordination. The appearance, and to some small extent even the reality, of protecting the population has to be maintained in order to appease the meddlesome outsiders. None of this means that policymakers or bureaucrats or members of the “ruling class” necessarily have these intentions in mind when crafting policies or cracking down on dissent. Doubtless few are clear-headed enough. But the logic of the institutions in which they are embedded–the bureaucratic-expansionist, capitalistic, totalitarian, Panopticon-esque logic–manipulates their minds and, by some mysterious alchemy, is sublimated into rationalizations and pretexts that are usually sincerely believed in. It isn’t hard to come up with pretexts to do what is in one’s institutional self-interest. Humans are born to deceive themselves. So, why not throw off all vestiges of sentimentalism about our rulers? Why not state the truth unequivocally: when a terrorist attack occurs, this is not a failure of government. It is a success; for now power-centers have another excuse to expand themselves, and to fear-monger, and to demonize the Other, and to make more profits from selling military and surveillance technology, and to clamp down ever more on the domestic population. And when the police blindly brutalize innocent civilians or protesters, this is not a failure for government to correct. It is what the police are supposed to do, what they were designed to do and the main reason they exist in the first place. It is government acting intelligently, in its own interests and in the interests of its puppet-masters. The population has to protect itself and stand up for itself, and fight for its freedom and power and security. Because the government certainly won’t. Chris Wright is a doctoral candidate in U.S. labor history, and the author of Worker Cooperatives and Revolution: History and Possibilities in the United States. His website iswww.wrightswriting.com.”  SOUCE http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/04/03/when-the-government-views-its-own-population-as-the-enemy/ Parts of this article were interesting to me. Police brutalising civilians not being a government failure, and government acting in its own interests and the interests of its puppet masters, stood out as probably accurate. The parts about government seeking to expand control made sense. But the bit about people being willing to fight for more power and economic security didn't seem likely to me.  People tend to take whatever is dished out, probably because there is no means to resist.

Google v. War Photography & Alternative Media

Don’t See Evil: Google’s Boycott Campaign Against War Photography and Alternative Media Dan Sanchez, March 29, 2015  Google Vs. Antiwar.com This may be what Google is doing right now to Antiwar.com, a long-running and popular daily news and commentary site that is strongly critical of US foreign policy. On the morning of March 18, Eric Garris, founder and webmaster of the site, received a form email from Google AdSense informing him that all of Antiwar.com’s Google ads had been disabled. The reason given was that one of the site’s pages with ads on it displayed images that violated AdSense’s policy against “violent or disturbing content, including sites with gory text or images.” Of course the images in question were not “snuff,” or anything intended for titillation whatsoever. They were the famous images of detainee abuse at the Abu Ghraib US military prison in Iraq. Those images are important public information, especially for Americans. They are the previously secret documentation of horrific state violence inflicted in our name and funded by our tax dollars. They are also eminently newsworthy because they show the government wantonly generating insecurity for the American public. Such abuse fuels anti-American and anti-western rage that can culminate in acts of terrorism. For example, it did just that in the case of Chérif Kouachi, who took part in one of the Paris terror attacks of early this year after becoming radicalized by learning about the Abu Ghraib abuses. Indeed many apologists for such abuse fully acknowledge this blowback effect, since they expressly cite it as the main reason for blocking the release of abuse photos. Of course they ignore the fact that this danger they acknowledge is an excellent reason not to commit such abuses in the first place. And they are naïve if they really think word wouldn’t get out about such abuses among Iraqis and Muslims in general even without the photos. The dissemination of such photos chiefly serves to ultimately make terrorist attacks less likely by driving a disgusted American public to demand an end to such terrorism-inducing abuses. The newsworthy nature of the photos made no difference to Google; or it made altogether the wrong kind of difference. Either way, they were considered non-compliant, and so Antiwar.com’s AdSense account, along with its revenue, were suspended immediately. EXTRACT ONLY - FULL ARTICLE AT SOURCE http://antiwar.com/blog/2015/03/29/dont-see-evil/