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
A letter signed by 43 veterans of an elite Israeli military intelligence unit declaring their refusal to continue serving the occupation has sent shock waves through Israeli society. But not in the way the soldiers may have hoped.
Unusually, this small group of reservists has gone beyond justifying their act of refusal in terms of general opposition to the occupation.
On September 3, 2014 The Associated Press reported: “Secretaries of State past and present meet for rare reunion for a museum ground breaking event…a museum and education centre that will demonstrate the ways in which diplomacy matters now and has mattered throughout American history. Secretary of State John Kerry warned Wednesday against creeping American isolationism, making the case that U.S. global leadership is essential in uncertain times as he hosted a rare public reunion of five of his predecessors.”
The Justice department would like to the see the UANI lawsuit go away as it is aware that what is being described as “law enforcement” documents would include both privileged and classified Treasury Department work product relating to individuals and companies that it has investigated for sanctions busting. Passing either intelligence related or law enforcement documents to a private organization is illegal but the Justice Department’s only apparent concern is that the activity might be exposed.
The Washington Post reports that in 2008 the government threatened to fine Yahoo $250,000 a day if it failed to relinquish user data on behalf of the NSA’s PRISM program. Yahoo’s general counselor Ron Bell claims that the recently disclosed lawsuit is proof that the company fought the government “every step of the way.”1 In this sense the Post’s article depicts Yahoo as a champion of human rights, fighting courageously to protect user data from government surveillance.
This is a preview of my new Kindle e-book, America’s Oldest Professions: Warring and Spying. The preview gives the table of contents and a portion of the preface telling about the book.
The recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the most worrisome so far. Paired with data from the 2014 National Climate Assessment, there is no question that the climate crisis is here and is accelerating at a faster pace than predicted. Its effects are widespread and dangerous, yet real solutions are being suppressed.
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
Ed Snowden recently gave fellow NSA whistleblower James Bamford an “extended cut” interview in Moscow.1 While Snowden offered up a few morsels of headline-worthy information, like how he purposefully left forensic artifacts for investigators or details on the NSA’s automated cyber-attack system called MonsterMind, Bamford’s piece ends with Snowden describing what he views as the answer to the NSA’s global surveillance program:
