News Links: Abuses of Power, Public Reactions
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2014-04-08 18:18:35 UTC
- Modified: 2014-04-08 18:18:35 UTC
Drones
An artists collective has unfurled a massive poster showing a child’s face in a heavily bombed area of Pakistan in the hopes that it will give pause to drone operators searching the area for kills.
According to #notabugsplat, named after the description given to kills on the ground when viewed through grainy video footage, the artists – with help of villagers – unfurled the giant poster in a field in the Khyber Pukhtoonkhwa region of Pakistan.
The hope is that it will increase awareness of drone operators of human cost, or ‘collateral damage’, when drones are used to attack targets on the ground.
Illegal U.S. drone strikes continue (the Long War Journal says there have been eight drones strikes in Yemen so far this year), but efforts to curb the use of killer drones have made remarkable headway this year.
Provincial security chief, Gen. Abdul Habib Syedkheli also confirmed the death of 12 Taliban militants including the two senior Taliban leaders.
Up until now, there have been only estimates of deaths from drone strikes from organizations such as Human Rights Watch and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. The lack of accurate data means that the public cannot form fully informed views on the costs and benefits of American drone policy. The availability of hard data is critical in order to legitimize American military actions for other countries and to ensure that no one branch of government monopolizes military decision making on drones.
Drones themselves are not undemocratic, but the current system of secrecy and opaque decision-making is questionable. Drones have the potential to do great harm, which is why separate branches of the U.S. government must carefully monitor their use. There are undeniable benefits of using unmanned aircraft, but the government, especially President Obama, must stay vigilant to ensure that the ends really do justify the means.
What sets us apart from other countries, however, is that our population – if not our politicians – genuinely believes in the values espoused by our constitution. I also have faith that our democracy is receptive to change. Being American means that we have a responsibility to make sure that we feed the bright light that is the American experiment while being conscious of the shadows our choices create. Our drone policy is a heck of a shadow.
Venezuela
Venezuela isn’t as divided as its right-wing opposition would have you believe.
Progressives should be less concerned about how people are protesting and more concerned about who is mobilizing and what they’re fighting for.
Ukraine
Both protests in Kiev, Ukraine and Bangkok, Thailand kicked off in late 2013.
Power Abuses and Looting
General Motors Co. is shielded from legal liability for nearly all accidents that occurred before its July 2009 exit from bankruptcy. That protection has emerged as one of the most controversial aspects of the automaker's ignition switch recall.
On December 21, 2013 Mexico’s president, Enrique Peña Nieto, posed for the cameras holding the official decree ending the 75-year history of the national oil company, PEMEX. The decree also closed the era in which Mexico’s electrical generating and distribution system had been under the control of two public institutions—Central Light and Power (LyFC), from 1960 to 2009, and the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE), from 1937 to 2013. In a literal sense, neither PEMEX nor CFE will cease to exist, but they will quickly become mere shadows of what they were: the two largest firms operating in Mexico. In response to these comprehensive changes, noted public intellectual Arnaldo Córdova has acknowledged that “the Constitution is dying,” while Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas declared: “Never, throughout our history as an independent nation, has the country seen such a dismantlement of the protections to our sovereignty and self-determination.”1 For its part, the Mexican government immediately saturated the news media with full-page ads, the most prominent of which declared: “The oil will continue to belong to the Mexicans.”
One duo now on death row embezzled roughly $25 million from the state-owned Vietnam Agribank. Their co-conspirators caught decade-plus prison sentences.
In March, a 57-year-old former regional boss from Vietnam Development Bank, another government-run bank, was sentenced to death over a $93-million swindling job.
According to Vietnam’s Tuoi Tre news outlet, several of his colluders were sentenced to life imprisonment after they confessed to securing bogus loans with a diamond ring and a BMW coupe. And last week, in an unrelated case, charges against senior employees from the same bank allege $47 million in losses from dubious loans.
None of this would impress Bernie Madoff, mastermind of America’s largest ever financial fraud scheme. The combined amount from all three Vietnamese cases adds up to less than 1 percent of his purported $18-billion haul.
But these death sentences nevertheless are high profile scandals in Vietnam.
That’s the point. Human rights watchdogs contend that splashy trials in Vietnam are acts of political theater with predetermined conclusions. The audience: a Vietnamese public weary of state corruption. But these sentences also sound loud alarm bells to dodgy bankers who are currently running scams.
London’s housing market is being turned into a billionaire’s casino...
Privacy
Not so, according to a post by Jeremy Gillula, a staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). In a blog he complains that most Web sites still don’t support HTTPS Strict Transport Security (HSTS), a standard that was approved in the fall of 2012 by the Internet Engineering Steering Group.
NSA
Supreme Court declines an early look at a challenge to the NSA's bulk collection of American's phone records -- but that doesn't mean it won't hear the case down the road.
The move isn’t surprising, as it is unusual for the Supreme Court to allow escalations straight from district courts without letting the US Court of Appeals have a go at it first.
Lawyer Larry Klayman won the first round of the case against America's top online spying agency in December, when District of Columbia Judge Richard Leon found in favor of the plaintiff, saying the NSA tactics were an "arbitrary invasion" that was "almost Orwellian."
“British intelligence agencies do not circumvent domestic oversight regimes by receiving from US agencies intercept material about British citizens which could not lawfully be acquired by intercept in the UK”.
The National Security Agency (NSA) has been flooded with thousands of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests from journalists, civil rights groups and private citizens who have asked the agency to turn over the top-secret records that former contractor Edward Snowden leaked to the media, Al Jazeera can reveal.
Sensitive government committees aimed at boosting India's cyber security and formulating its internet policy have featured intensive participation by representatives of US telecom giant AT&T, a company with a record of voluntary participation in online spying by the US, and a strong interest in ensuring rules of the internet road favour large corporations.
When the original Captain America movie came out, many wondered how well it would play in massive new Asian markets like China. Would a superhero movie with an in-your-face, pro-America message fare well? Well, the first movie in the franchise was a bit weak outside the U.S. — it grossed $194 million in all international markets combined. Fairly mediocre.
When it suits them — and when events affect their bottom line — these companies like to make a stink about democracy and free speech. After humblebragging about calling President Barack Obama to complain about NSA snooping, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg delivered a paean to the Internet's utopian spirit:
Together, we can build a space that is greater and a more important part of the world than anything we have today, but is also safe and secure. I'm committed to seeing this happen, and you can count on Facebook to do our part.
Sounds good!
But while Facebook claims to take seriously the security concerns of its billion-plus users, it's also in the business of mining and exploiting its customers' data.
When federal prosecutors charged Colorado resident Jamshid Muhtorov in 2012 with providing support to a terrorist organization in his native Uzbekistan, court records suggested the FBI had secretly tapped his phones and read his emails.
But it wasn’t just the FBI. The Justice Department acknowledged in October that the National Security Agency had gathered evidence against Muhtorov under a 2008 law that authorizes foreign intelligence surveillance without warrants, much of it on the Internet. His lawyers have not been permitted to see the classified evidence.
Snowden
No legal means exist to challenge mass surveillance, said NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, testifying to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.
On Monday, the Ridenhour Foundation announced that NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and journalist Laura Poitras will be awarded the Truth-Telling Prize for their collaborative efforts to expose the U.S. government’s massive online surveillance operations.
Hayden
It would appear that former NSA and CIA boss Michael Hayden has some anger management issues to work out. We thought he was just a little nutty in the past -- calling Snowden's supporters internet shut-ins and insisting that Snowden himself (a non-drinker) was bound to end up an alcoholic. But in the past few days, he's gone somewhat ballistic in attacking various elected officials and government employees in a manner that sounds like he's literally asking to get into a fist fight.
Michael Hayden, the former director of the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency, told a student audience Monday that missiles fired by drone aircraft were often so useful in removing enemies from the battlefield that the negative secondary effects were worth accepting.
Nearly five years after the Senate Intelligence Committee began an investigation into the CIA's detention and interrogation methods following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the panel voted, 11-3, to release a report detailing its findings.
U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden blasted former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden on Monday for his "outrageous" suggestion that Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein lacked objectivity on the CIA's "torture and coercive interrogations" of foreign terrorism suspects.
Responding to former CIA Director Michael Hayden’s loaded remarks calling a Senate committee chairwoman too “emotional,” top Democrats unleashed a broad counterattack this week panning the “condescending” comments.
Militarism
Soldiers do not go to fight the unknown enemies on their own. They are indoctrinated and pushed to war paradigm by the political monsters who use them as digits and numbers – to compile official statistic, and to support the economy of dehumanization. Consequently, the fighting soldiers - men of conscience lose unity of the human consciousness - unity of material and spiritual factors of life and balanced characteristic– fair and foul. It is a tragic conjuncture of inner revolt of human consciousness for a crime that is not part of the human nature and character and not visible to scientifically expert minds – the doctors who simply identify mental health issues of those suspected of syndrome to commit suicide. These are the net causalities of man's insanity against man. The real reasons are hardly mentioned in expert reports.
CIA
Dick Cheney, Patient Zero in this particular outbreak, and a towering public combination of inhumanity and cowardice, is out in public bragging about how deeply infected he is. (His daughter, Liz, went on TV over the weekend and suggested that we should ignore the decade of torture inspired by her father and concentrate instead on the true crime of the past 20 years...Benghazi.) Over the weekend, the inexcusable Fred Hiatt loaned the space over which he presides at The Washington Post to Jose Rodriguez, a truly monstrous figure in the events in question, so that Rodriguez could spread the infection even further through the subject population.
High-Level U.S. Officials Debunk CIA Claims About Bin Laden
The partial declassification of a report critical of interrogation and detention policies used by the CIA after 9/11 is a crucial part of confronting the abuses of our past.
New details emerged last week outlining the CIA's use of torture during the Bush Administration, after the Senate Intelligence Committee voted to declassify a comprehensive report. But don't ask the government officials behind the program to actually call it torture. As Jon Stewart explained on last night's The Daily Show, it was more along the lines of "super-aggressive, terrorist suspect spa treatments."
Every once in a while, the CIA’s “Because I said so” club lets loose with a bit of preposterous condescension that reminds us why, along with extraordinary rendition and drone strikes, we’re also a nation of transparency and checks and balances. In this case, the crowing comes from Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., former head of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service and the administrator of that agency’s post-9/11 enhanced interrogation (i.e., torture) program. We shouldn’t believe the “shocking” results of Senator Dianne Feinstein’s (D-CA) Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation, Rodriguez says, especially those that lay bare the lies and exaggerations promulgated by the CIA and the ineffectiveness of the program itself.
Why not? Because Rodriguez was there, and you weren’t. Never mind that Rodriguez hasn’t actually read the report, or the fact that CIA-sponsored torture isn’t a yoga class, so “being present” doesn’t really count as the endeavor’s ultimate objective. And never mind the findings of the “Internal Panetta Review,” conducted by the CIA, that, according to Senator Feinstein, “documented at least some of the very same troubling matters already uncovered by the committee staff—which is not surprising, in that they were looking at the same information.”
Recent Techrights' Posts
- IBM Culling Workers or Pushing Them Out (So That It's Not Framed as Layoffs), Red Hat Mentioned Repeatedly Only Hours Ago
- We all know what "reorg" means in the C-suite
-
- Jonathan Carter & Debian: fascism hiding in broad daylight
- Reprinted with permission from disguised.work
- Gunnar Wolf & Debian: fascism, anti-semitism and crucifixion
- Reprinted with permission from disguised.work
- Links 01/05/2024: Take-Two Interactive Layoffs and Post Office (Horizon System, Proprietary) Scandal Not Over
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, May 01, 2024
- IRC logs for Wednesday, May 01, 2024
- Embrace, Extend, Replace the Original (Or Just Hijack the Word 'Sudo')
- First comment? A Microsoft employee
- Gemini Links 02/05/2024: Firewall Rules Etiquette and Self Host All The Things
- Links for the day
- Red Hat/IBM Crybullies, GNOME Foundation Bankruptcy, and Microsoft Moles (Operatives) Inside Debian
- reminder of the dangers of Microsoft moles inside Debian
- PsyOps 007: Paul Tagliamonte wanted Debian Press Team to have license to kill
- Reprinted with permission from disguised.work
- IBM Raleigh Layoffs (Home of Red Hat)
- The former CEO left the company exactly a month ago
- Paul R. Tagliamonte, the Pentagon and backstabbing Jacob Appelbaum, part B
- Reprinted with permission from disguised.work
- Links 01/05/2024: Surveillance and Hadopi, Russia Clones Wikipedia
- Links for the day
- Links 01/05/2024: FCC Takes on Illegal Data Sharing, Google Layoffs Expand
- Links for the day
- Links 01/05/2024: Calendaring, Spring Idleness, and Ads
- Links for the day
- Paul Tagliamonte & Debian: White House, Pentagon, USDS and anti-RMS mob ringleader
- Reprinted with permission from disguised.work
- Jacob Appelbaum character assassination was pushed from the White House
- Reprinted with permission from disguised.work
- Why We Revisit the Jacob Appelbaum Story (Demonised and Punished Behind the Scenes by Pentagon Contractor Inside Debian)
- If people who got raped are reporting to Twitter instead of reporting to cops, then there's something deeply flawed
- Free Software Foundation Subpoenaed by Serial GPL Infringers
- These attacks on software freedom are subsidised by serial GPL infringers
- Red Hat's Official Web Site is Promoting Microsoft
- we're seeing similar things at Canonical's Ubuntu.com
- Enrico Zini & Debian: falsified harassment claims
- Reprinted with permission from disguised.work
- European Parliament Elections 2024: Daniel Pocock Running as an Independent Candidate
- I became aware that Daniel Pocock had decided to enter politics
- Publicly Posting in Social Control Media About Oneself Makes It Public Information
- sheer hypocrisy on privacy is evident in the Debian mailing lists
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, April 30, 2024
- IRC logs for Tuesday, April 30, 2024
- [Meme] Sometimes Torvalds and RMS Agree on Things
- hype around chatbots
- [Video] Linus Torvalds on 'Hilarious' AI Hype: "I Hate the Hype" and "I Don't Want to be Part of the Hype", "You Need to Be a Bit Cynical About This Whole Hype Cycle"
- Linus Torvalds on LLMs
- Colin Watson, Steve McIntyre & Debian, Ubuntu cover-up mission after Frans Pop suicide
- Reprinted with permission from disguised.work
- Links 30/04/2024: Wireless Carriers Selling Customer Location Data, Facebook Posts Causing Trouble
- Links for the day
- Frans Pop suicide and Ubuntu grievances
- Reprinted with permission from disguised.work
- Links 30/04/2024: More Google Layoffs (Wide-Ranging)
- Links for the day
- Fresh Rumours of Impending Mass Layoffs at IBM Red Hat
- "IBM filed a W.A.R.N with the state of North Carolina. That only means one thing."
- Workers' Right to Disconnect Won't Matter If Such a Right Isn't Properly Enforced
- I was always "on-call" and my main role or function was being "on-call" in case of incidents
- Mark Shuttleworth's (MS's) Canonical is Promoting Microsoft This Week (Surveillance Slanted as 'Confidential')
- Who runs Canonical these days? Why does Canonical help sell Windows?
- A Discussion About Suicides in Science and Technology (Including Debian and the European Patent Office)
- In Debian, there is a long history of deaths, suicides, and mysterious disappearances
- Federal News Network is Corrupt, It Runs Propaganda Pieces for Microsoft
- Federal News Network used to be OK some years ago
- What Mark Shuttleworth and Canonical Can to Remedy the Damage Done to Frans Pop's Family
- Mr. Shuttleworth and Canonical as a company can at the very least apologise for putting undue pressure
- Amnesty International & Debian Day suicides comparison
- Reprinted with permission from disguised.work
- [Meme] A Way to Get No Real Work Done
- Walter White looking at phone: Your changes could not be saved to device
- Modern Measures of 'Productivity' Boil Down to Time Wasting and Misguided Measurements/Yardsticks
- People are forgetting the value of nature and other human beings
- Countries That Beat the United States at RSF's World Press Freedom Index (After US Plunged Some More)
- The United States (US) was 17 when these rankings started in 2002
- Record Productivity and Preserving People's Past on the Net
- We're very productive these days, partly owing to online news slowing down (less time spent on curating Daily Links)
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Monday, April 29, 2024
- IRC logs for Monday, April 29, 2024
- Links 30/04/2024: Malaysian and Russian Governments Crack Down on Journalists
- Links for the day
- Frans Pop Debian Day suicide, Ubuntu, Google and the DEP-5 machine-readable copyright file
- Reprinted with permission from disguised.work
- Axel Beckert (ETH Zurich), the mentality of sexual violence on campus
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- [Meme] Russian Reversal
- Mark Shuttleworth: In Soviet Russia's spacecraft... Man exploits peasants
- Frans Pop & Debian suicide denial
- Reprinted with permission from disguised.work
- Hard Evidence Reinforces Suspicion That Mark Shuttleworth May Have Worked Volunteers to Death
- Today we start re-publishing articles that contain unaltered E-mails