What we’ve seen [tonight] is, I think, a scary, disproportionate and unnecessary expansion of coercive surveillance powers that will not make anybody any safer but that affect freedoms that have been quite hard fought for and won over a period of decades.
— Senator Scott Ludlam, Australian Greens, Sydney Morning Herald, September 26, 2014
Do you believe them? Or any of the big tech companies? They all lied and lied about protecting our privacy while allowing the spy agencies easy access to all our personal information and communications, as though we are all legitimate suspects in some kind of Orwellian dystopia.Apple CEO Tim Cook, is savvy enough to know how that cooperation with the worst aspects of the National Security State has damage Apple's precious, hard-earned brand, which has already been tattered around the edges.
When the House took up impeachment charges against President Clinton in the 1998 lame duck session right after the midterms-- in which the Democrats had an unlikely (and, for the GOP, ominous) net pickup of 5 seats-- a whole slew of right-wing Republicans were exposed for their own infidelities and hypocrisy, particularly Speaker Gingrich (R-GA), Speaker-designate Bob Livingstone (R-LA), Henry Hyde (R-IL), domestic terrorism supporter Helen Chenoweth (R-ID) and deranged soc
Readers with a morbid sense of curiosity can visit a web site called NukeMap that allows visitors to witness the devastation caused by nuclear weapons of varying yields on a city of their choosing.1 Herman Kahn, who was an armchair theorist from RAND during the Cold War, insisted that nuclear war was winnable.2 But a few hours with NukeMap will disprove Kahn’s folly and the baleful smiley face that h
The nuclear talks which were infused with unnecessary optimism are no longer seen by many to yield much fruit as Washington once again reveals its true colors and pernicious intentions by imposing further sanctions on Iranian companies and individuals.
As a rule, Washington has never proved to be a trustworthy and reliable dialogue partner and any idea to the contrary stems from a naïve perception of the realities on the ground.
Yesterday, when we talked about conservative assholes who voted to deny Climate Change was real, we were able to look at a roll call vote and see who voted well and who voted badly.
A few days ago Dan Geer, the chief information security officer at In-Q-Tel, gave a keynote address at Black Hat USA.1 According to the company’s web site In-Q-Tel is a non-profit, but it’s a special sort of non-profit. It offers venture capital funding on behalf of the “intelligence community” (read government spies). During his presentation Geer proposed, among other things, that the U.S. government bolster internet security by dominating the market for zero-day vulnerabilities.
Huron Historic Gaol was once a prison complex for the Huron County of Upper Canada. The prison was designed by Thomas Young and modeled after Bentham’s Panopticon. The Panopticon, named after a hundred eyed giant watchman from Greek mythology called Panoptes, is an institutional structure where a watchman can observe all inhabitants anonymously.
Even as an international drive against the data merchants is gathering force and voice (see, for instance, those “nature walks” by Germans from Griesheim to the Dagger Complex, stacked with spooks), the Australian side of the Five Eyes spy arrangement is being shored up. If there is one place in the Western world that has shown conspicuously little administrative and policy reform on the subject of bulk surveillance and whistleblowing, Australia is it.
US President Barack Obama, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Edward Snowden (Reuters/AFP Photo)
