Tag: ek Politics

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Transcript

Julian Assange to file fresh challenge in effort to escape two-year legal limbo

Ed Pilkington, The Guardian

Wednesday 18 June 2014 12.36 EDT

Jennifer Robinson, Assange’s UK-based lawyer, told reporters that the legal challenge, which is due to be lodged with Swedish courts next Tuesday, was based on “new information gathered in Sweden”. She declined to give any further details until the filing had been made.

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Assange and his legal advisers have always protested that were he to cooperate with the British and Swedish authorities, he would expose himself to an ongoing criminal investigation by the US Department of Justice. The DoJ is known to have opened a grand jury investigation into WikiLeaks’ publication of a vast tranche of secret official documents leaked by the US army private Chelsea Manning (Bradley Manning at the time).

In a telephone press conference on the eve of the second anniversary of his asylum in the embassy, Assange called on the US attorney general, Eric Holder, to put a stop to the investigation. “It is against the stated principles of the US and I believe the values supported by its people to have a four-year criminal investigation against a publisher. The on-going existence of that investigation produces a chilling effect not just to internet-based publishers but to all publishers,” he said.

WikiLeaks Reveals Global Trade Deal Kept More Secret Than the Trans-Pacific Partnership

By Mike Ludwig, Truthout

Thursday, 19 June 2014 14:29

Embattled WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange announced Wednesday from London the publication of a secret draft text of the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA), a controversial global trade agreement said to make it easier for corporations to make profits and operate with impunity across borders.

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Demonstrations erupted in Geneva in April as diplomats met in secret for the sixth round of negotiations over TISA, which would cover international trade in a wide range of service industries ranging from finance and telecommunications to transportation and even local utilities such as water. Protesters demanded that the draft text be released, but it has remained secret until now.

Public Services International (PSI), a global trade union federating public service workers in 150 countries, has reported that TISA (.pdf) threatens to allow multinational corporations to permanently privatize vital public services such as healthcare and transportation in countries across the world.

“This agreement is all about making it easier for corporations to make profits and operate with impunity across borders,” said PSI General Secretary Rosa Pavanelli in response to the leak. “The aim of public services should not be to make profits for large multinational corporations. Ensuring that failed privatizations can never be reversed is free-market ideology gone mad.”

House Overwhelmingly Votes To Slam The Backdoor Shut On The NSA!

by Mike Masnick, TechDirt

Fri, Jun 20th 2014 7:37am

A week ago, we told you that there were plans for a very important amendment to slam the backdoor shut on the NSA’s use of backdoor searches, as well as mandates for backdoors in technology. On Wednesday, we asked you to call your Representatives to support the Amendment. The story got almost no other press. And yet, last night, the amendment passed by an overwhelming majority, 293 to 123. And it was also an overwhelmingly bipartisan vote: Republicans voted for it 135 to 94, and Democrats voted for it 158 to 29. Go take a look at the vote results in the link above — and if your Representative voted Aye, please go thank them for standing up to protect your privacy and 4th Amendment rights from the NSA. You can use the Sunlight Foundation’s new Congressional email system. Separately, a huge shoutout belongs to Reps. Zoe Lofgren, Thomas Massie and James Sensenbrenner for putting together this amendment in the first place. As we noted earlier this week, Sensenbrenner’s support on the bill is perhaps the most striking, as it’s a clear rebuke to House leadership for watering down his own USA Freedom Act.

As we stated, this amendment only fixes two specific problems. It stops the very questionable use of “backdoor searches” of information collected under the Section 702 program. This is the very questionable setup by which the NSA spies on Americans while insisting that they don’t actually spy on Americans. It also blocks the NSA from mandating that any technology companies create backdoors in their software or hardware to enable wiretapping (such as the NSA forcing Skype to no longer be encrypted end-to-end).

In many ways, this is more important as a symbolic gesture than for the specifics — but it should have a much wider impact as well. This is the first time that Congress has overwhelmingly voted to defund an NSA program. Last year’s Amash Amendment came very, very close to defunding a different program (the Section 215 bulk records collection program), but by passing by an overwhelming margin, this vote is a pretty big sign that the House (on both sides of the aisle) is not happy with how the NSA has been spying on Americans. As mentioned above, it’s also a big slap in the face to the White House and certain members of the House leadership who conspired to water down the USA Freedom Act a few weeks ago, stripping it of a very similar provision to block backdoor searches.

emptywheel on the same.

Fair Taxes for All

How Tax Reform Can Save the Middle Class

It’s just a Nobel Prize.  What does he know about Economics?

Despite Protests, Canada Approves Northern Gateway Oil Pipeline

By IAN AUSTEN, New York Times

JUNE 17, 2014

The Northern Gateway project, which the government approved on Tuesday as expected, would send heavy, oil-bearing bitumen to Asia, giving Canadian producers better access to the world markets. The pipeline, being built by Enbridge, has been championed by the federal government as a way to diversify Canada’s energy industry from its current dependence on exports to the United States.

But opponents in British Columbia, who span the political spectrum, threatened to block the pipeline altogether. The fear is that the pipeline would make the province vulnerable to an oil spill, damaging the rugged and scenic coastline.

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Northern Gateway has become something of backup for Canada, as approval for the Keystone XL pipeline remains mired in Washington. If built, Northern Gateway would ship about 500,000 barrels of bitumen a day to the coast compared with the 700,000-barrel-a-day capacity of Keystone XL, which would take oil sands production to the Gulf Coast of the United States. When Northern Gateway is combined with the country’s other pipeline plans, Canada could expand shipments from the oil sands by three million barrels a day.

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The National Energy Board, which originally reviewed the proposal, attached a list of 209 conditions to the deal, although none of them are viewed as insurmountable. The government’s approval on Tuesday is also predicated on fulfilling those conditions.

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The most pressing problem is addressing the concerns of the native Canadian tribes. About a decade ago, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that such native groups must be consulted and accommodated about projects that cross their land. The definition of both terms remains fuzzy, but most legal experts say that the native groups do not have a veto.

Still, such groups are preparing for a fight. Art Sterritt, the executive director of Coastal First Nations, an alliance of nine native groups opposed to the pipeline, said his organization would take legal action and form political alliances to block the project. On Monday, the Coastal First Nations formed a group with Unifor, formerly the Canadian Auto Workers union, and several environmental groups to quash the project.

The main issue for his members, Mr. Sterritt said, was the oil industry’s inability to demonstrate that it could effectively clean up coastal oil spills. If legal and political challenges are ultimately unsuccessful, Mr. Sterritt added, “our people will be out there stopping the bulldozers.”

Transcript

Fukushima operator struggles to build ice wall to contain radioactive water

AFP

Tuesday 17 June 2014 06.01 EDT

“We have yet to form the ice stopper because we can’t make the temperature low enough to freeze water,” a Tepco spokesman said.

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The coolant being used in the operation is an aqueous solution of calcium chloride, which is cooled to -30C (-22F).

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Coping with the huge – and growing – amount of water at the tsunami-damaged plant is proving to be one of the biggest challenges for Tepco, as it tries to clean up the mess after the worst nuclear disaster in a generation, in which three reactors went into meltdown.

As well as all the water used to keep broken reactors cool, the utility must also deal with water that makes its way along subterranean watercourses from mountainsides to the sea.

I’m no expert and who believes them anyway?  Normally I support my opinions by quoting sources, these are my naked oservations.

Iraq is collapsing.  The Kurds are carving out their Kurdistan.  The Sunni are reclaiming their Assyria.  Persia is asserting its empire (not called the Persian Gulf for nothing).

In short the artificial divisions imposed by French and British Colonialism are dissolving.

Is this a good thing?  As Mao famously said of whether the invention of fire was good for the Chinese people- “Too soon to tell.”

Was this predicatble, in that nobody could have predicted except Tom Clancy kind of way?

Pfft.

Everybody predicted it.

Would a U.S. troop prescence have prevented it?  Can U.S. military action undo it?

The British ruled India for 300 years.  After they left a great civil war divided the territory along ethnic and sectarian lines.  How long should they have stayed?

No.

What?  Accountability?

Blackwater on trial over killing of 14 Iraqi civilians in 2007

Associated Press

Wednesday 11 June 2014 10.17 EDT

Blackwater founder Erik Prince declared: “I believe we acted appropriately at all times.” The Nisoor Square shootings spelled the death knell for his company. Formerly known as Blackwater Worldwide, the company is under new ownership and Prince is no longer affiliated with it. The company was sold to a group of investors who changed the name to Academi.

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In 2009, U.S. District Judge Ricardo Urbina dismissed the case against the Blackwater guards. From the Iraqi government’s perspective, the dismissal was an example of Americans acting above the law. Urbina said government lawyers ignored the advice of senior Justice Department officials by building the criminal case on sworn statements of the guards given under a grant of immunity – meaning the guards’ own statements could not be used against them.

Two years later, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit revived the prosecution, ruling that Urbina had wrongly interpreted the law. The decision gave the Justice Department another chance.

In the upcoming trial, one of the guards, Nicholas Slatten, is charged with first-degree murder. The other three guards – Paul Slough, Evan Liberty and Dustin Heard – are charged with voluntary manslaughter, attempted manslaughter and gun charges. Slatten could be sentenced to life in prison if convicted, while the other guards face a mandatory minimum penalty of 30 years in prison if a defendant is convicted of the gun charge and at least one other charge.

In conjunction with American Express of all people.

Vodafone reveals existence of secret wires that allow state surveillance

Juliette Garside, The Guardian

Thursday 5 June 2014

The company said wires had been connected directly to its network and those of other telecoms groups, allowing agencies to listen to or record live conversations and, in certain cases, track the whereabouts of a customer. Privacy campaigners said the revelations were a “nightmare scenario” that confirmed their worst fears on the extent of snooping.

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Direct-access systems do not require warrants, and companies have no information about the identity or the number of customers targeted. Mass surveillance can happen on any telecoms network without agencies having to justify their intrusion to the companies involved.

Industry sources say that in some cases, the direct-access wire, or pipe, is essentially equipment in a locked room in a network’s central data centre or in one of its local exchanges or “switches”.

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Vodafone is calling for all direct-access pipes to be disconnected, and for the laws that make them legal to be amended. It says governments should “discourage agencies and authorities from seeking direct access to an operator’s communications infrastructure without a lawful mandate”.

All states should publish annual data on the number of warrants issued, the company argues. There are two types – those for the content of calls and messages, and those for the metadata, which can cover the location of a target’s device, the times and dates of communications, and the people with whom they communicated.

For brevity, the Guardian has also used the term metadata to cover warrants for customer information such as name and address. The information published in our table covers 2013 or the most recent year available. A single warrant can target hundreds of individuals and devices, and several warrants can target just one individual. Governments count warrants in different ways and New Zealand, for example, excludes those concerning national security. While software companies like Apple and Microsoft have jumped to publish the number of warrants they receive since the activities of America’s NSA and Britain’s GCHQ came to light, telecoms companies, which need government licences to operate, have been slower to respond.

Vodafone Reveals Government Agencies Have Direct Access To Its Network Around The World, No Warrants Required

by Glyn Moody, TechDirt

Fri, Jun 6th 2014

The Guardian story has lots of new information, and is well-worth reading. It includes a table that shows the number of warrants issued last year for legal interception of content, on a country-by-country basis. There are some surprises here — for example, the fact that the Australian government issued 685,757 warrants for metadata, which is even more than the UK’s 514,608 warrants, despite the fact that Australia has well under half the population of the UK. There are other fascinating details in the Vodafone Law Enforcement Disclosure Report itself. For example, it contains this explanation about what exactly a warrant might encompass these days:

Each warrant can target any number of different subscribers. It can also target any number of different communications services used by each of those subscribers and — in a modern and complex all-IP environment — it can also target multiple devices used by each subscriber to access each communications service. Additionally, the same individual can be covered by multiple warrants: for example, more than one agency or authority may be investigating a particular individual. Furthermore, the legal framework in some countries requires agencies and authorities to obtain a new warrant for each target service or device, even if those services or devices are all used by the same individual of interest. Note that in the majority of countries, warrants have a time-limited lifespan beyond which they must either be renewed or allowed to lapse.

As people’s digital lives grow more complex and the number of communications devices and services used at home and work on a daily basis continues to increase, the ratio of target devices and services accessed to warrants issued will continue to increase. To illustrate this with a hypothetical example:

a single warrant targets 5 individuals;

each individual subscribes to an average of eight different communications services provided by up to eight different companies: a landline phone line, a mobile phone, two email accounts, two social networking accounts and two “cloud”; storage accounts; and

each individual owns, on average, two communications devices fitted with a SIM card (a smartphone and a tablet) in addition to a landline phone and a laptop.

In the hypothetical example above, that one warrant could therefore be recorded as more than 100 separate instances of agency and authority access to individual services on individual devices used by individual subscribers.

That means that the number of warrants listed in the Vodafone report, and collected in the Guardian table mentioned above, is likely to be a significant underestimate of the total number of acts of surveillance being conducted.

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Direct access, as revealed by Vodafone, not only allows governments real-time access to enormous quantities of private communications data, but does so in a way that hides the fact that the interception is taking place at all, even to the companies involved. As Vodafone notes, introducing the requirement for a warrant for all such interception would make it much easier for companies to resist, alert the public to the sheer scale of the surveillance being carried upon them, and probably act as a natural brake on governments. Direct access to the network represents a huge exacerbation of the dangers of government surveillance: it is simply too easy to “collect it all.” Vodafone’s disclosure report is an important step towards changing that; the “other telecoms groups” mentioned above should now follow suit by issuing their own.

In The Guardian piece referenced above there’s also this information-

In Albania, Egypt, Hungary, India, Malta, Qatar, Romania, South Africa and Turkey, it is unlawful to disclose any information related to wiretapping or interception of the content of phone calls and messages including whether such capabilities exist.

Which I think serves as an introduction to this from Marcy Wheeler-

Those Cable Landings Chelsea Manning Didn’t Leak

By emptywheel

Published June 4, 2014

While the BT/Vodaphone details are worth clicking through to read, I’m particularly interested in the focus on the base in Oman. (See an interactive map of the cable landings here.)

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The Brits would have you believe – and I have no reason to doubt them – that this cable landing in Oman is one of the key points in their surveillance infrastructure.

I raise this because of a cable listing the globe’s critical infrastructure – and fearmongering surrounding it – that Chelsea Manning leaked to Wikileaks. As I noted at the time, while the cable lists a slew of cable landings as critical infrastructure sites – including the Hibernia Atlantic undersea cable landing in Dublin, which gets mentioned in the Register story – it does not list a single cable landing site in the Middle East.

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Note, Bahamas’ telecom, which recent reporting has also noted is critical to NSA’s spying, also gets no mention.

That’s not surprising in the least. The cable (and the list) is classified Secret. NSA and GCHQ’s prime collection points are (as the Register notes) classified several levels above Top Secret.

And while the list provided some indication of what sites were significant by their absence, it’s likely that the sites that were listed were the relatively unimportant sites.

At trial, Manning’s lawyers repeatedly point out that she had chosen not to leak stuff from JWICS, which would be classified at a higher level. The stuff she leaked, which she got on SIPRNET, was by definition less sensitive stuff.

I don’t mean to suggest this reflects on the relative value of what either Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning leaked. I think it is a good indication, though, of how unfounded a lot of the fear mongering surrounding this particular leaked cable was.