Three years after the 9/11 attacks, a frustrated NSA employee complained that Osama bin Laden was alive and well, and yet the surveillance agency still had no automated way to search the Arabic language PDFs it had intercepted.
The Intercept: Why Soviet weather was secret, a critical gap in Korea, and other NSA newsletter tales »
But if the US Department of Justice prosecutes Assange, as it reportedly may soon, he could become something else: the first journalist in modern history to be criminally charged by American courts for publishing classified information. WikiLeaks may not look like a traditional journalism outlet, but it shares the same ends—publishing true information from its sources. And that means legal action against Assange could threaten the freedom of the press as a whole.
The U.S. administration is raising its voice when it comes to Wikileaks and its editor in charge, Julian Assange.
According to CNN Attorney General Jeff Sessions said at a news conference Thursday that Assange’s arrest is a “priority.” (Link»)
Did Donald Trump become president because he hired the data mining firm Cambridge Analytica, which uses profiling and micro-targeting in political elections? Some say yes, many say no. But what we know is that we are subjected to extensive personalised commercial and political messaging on the basis of data, including metadata, collected and used without our awareness and consent. It can result in changes in our behaviour, at least to some extent.
In a speech Thursday at a Washington DC think tank, CIA Director Michael Pompeo called the whistleblower site WikiLeaks a “non-state hostile intelligence service” and said news organizations that reveal the government’s crimes are “enemies” of the United States. (…)
Referring to WikiLeaks’ founder, Pompeo declared that “Julian Assange has no First Amendment freedoms.” (…)
International bureaucracies are trying to convince poor nations, which already suffer from bad policy, that they can succeed by imposing additional bad fiscal policy and then magically hope that growth will materialize.
Once again, a senseless terror attack.
Once again, politicians are telling us that we must stand up for a free and open society.
Of course we must. But do they?
Western democracy is slowly being hollowed out. It’s getting ever more secretive and less transparent. Power is being centralized and is moving further away from the people. It is getting ever more difficult to participate in and to scrutinize the decision-making process. Free citizens are being reduced to subordinates.
Advocates for big government often equate expanding government with concern for the poor. But reality speaks to the contrary: Expanding government often has very harmful effects on the poor.
Basically, US citizens are paying more taxes to have a bunch of international bureaucrats urge that we get hit with even higher taxes. And to add insult to injury, OECD bureaucrats are exempt from paying taxes!
