The Killing of Osama by Seymour Hersh

The White House still maintains that the mission was an all-American affair, and that the senior generals of Pakistan’s army and Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) were not told of the raid in advance. This is false, as are many other elements of the Obama administration’s account. The White House’s story might have been written by Lewis Carroll: would bin Laden, target of a massive international manhunt, really decide that a resort town forty miles from Islamabad would be the safest place to live and command al-Qaida’s operations? He was hiding in the open. So America said.

READ FULL ARTICLE HERE....
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n10/seymour-m-hersh/the-killing-of-osama-bin-laden

US fears back-door routes into the net because it's building them too

 Hayden described the phenomenon of compromised computer hardware – namely, chips that have hidden "back doors" inserted into them at the design or manufacturing stage – as "the problem from hell". And, he went on, "frankly, it's not a problem that can be solved"

...a back door that would allow secret remote access over the internet. And – here's the really scary bit – the secret entrance couldn't even be closed by switching off the computer's hard disk or reinstalling its operating system.

The reason this is so scary is because virtually every bit of kit that runs the internet – the machine on which you compose your emails, the tablet or smartphone with which you browse the net, the routers that pass on the data packets that comprise your email or your web search, everything – is a computer. So the thought that all this stuff might covertly be compromised in ways that are impossible to detect is terrifying. It's this fear that underpins American (and British) reservations about network products made by the Chinese company Huawei – the suspicions (vehemently denied by Huawei, of course) that the kit has secret back doors installed in it to facilitate the Chinese's cyber-army's penetration of western networks."

READ MORE HERE...
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/oct/13/us-scared-back-door-routes-computers-snowden-nsa

Welcome to Post-Constitution America

What if your country begins to change and no one notices?

Excerpt:
 
Consider, for instance, the rise of the warrior cop, of increasingly up-armored police departments across the country often filled with former military personnel encouraged to use the sort of rough tactics they once wielded in combat zones. Supporting them are the kinds of weaponry that once would have been inconceivable in police departments, including armored vehicles, typically bought with Department of Homeland Security grants. 

Recently, the director of the FBI informed a Senate committee that the Bureau was deploying its first drones over the United States. Meanwhile, Customs and Border Protection, part of the Department of Homeland Security and already flying an expanding fleet of Predator drones, the very ones used in America’s war zones, is eager to arm them with “non-lethal” weaponry to “immobilize targets of interest.”

Read more...
http://www.thenation.com/article/175589/welcome-post-constitution-america#

Revealed: how Microsoft handed the NSA access to encrypted messages

• Secret files show scale of Silicon Valley co-operation on Prism
• Outlook.com encryption unlocked even before official launch
• Skype worked to enable Prism collection of video calls
• Company says it is legally compelled to comply

READ MORE HERE:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-collaboration-user-data

Statement from Edward Snowden

This guy's a hero in my books...

One week ago I left Hong Kong after it became clear that my freedom and safety were under threat for revealing the truth. My continued liberty has been owed to the efforts of friends new and old, family, and others who I have never met and probably never will. I trusted them with my life and they returned that trust with a faith in me for which I will always be thankful.

On Thursday, President Obama declared before the world that he would not permit any diplomatic "wheeling and dealing" over my case. Yet now it is being reported that after promising not to do so, the President ordered his Vice President to pressure the leaders of nations from which I have requested protection to deny my asylum petitions.

This kind of deception from a world leader is not justice, and neither is the extralegal penalty of exile. These are the old, bad tools of political aggression. Their purpose is to frighten, not me, but those who would come after me.

For decades the United States of America has been one of the strongest defenders of the human right to seek asylum. Sadly, this right, laid out and voted for by the U.S. in Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is now being rejected by the current government of my country. The Obama administration has now adopted the strategy of using citizenship as a weapon. Although I am convicted of nothing, it has unilaterally revoked my passport, leaving me a stateless person. Without any judicial order, the administration now seeks to stop me exercising a basic right. A right that belongs to everybody. The right to seek asylum.

In the end the Obama administration is not afraid of whistleblowers like me, Bradley Manning or Thomas Drake. We are stateless, imprisoned, or powerless. No, the Obama administration is afraid of you. It is afraid of an informed, angry public demanding the constitutional government it was promised — and it should be.

I am unbowed in my convictions and impressed at the efforts taken by so many.
Edward Joseph Snowden

Monday 1st July 2013

Read full article here: Wikileaks

Edward Snowden is a whistleblower, not a spy – but do our leaders care?

"...a member of the House intelligence committee, wrote that Snowden "has provided intelligence to America's adversaries".
Pompeo correctly notes in his op-ed that "facts are important". Yet when asked for the evidence justifying the claim that Snowden gave intelligence to American adversaries, his spokesman, JP Freire, cited Snowden's leak of NSA documents. Those documents, however, were provided to the Guardian and the Washington Post, not al-Qaeda or North Korea."

Read more here...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/05/edward-snowden-nsa-whistleblower-spy

The Whistleblowers

In the past week I've read about two whistleblowers... and it's made me wonder which one of them will get killed first.  Sorry state of affairs to be honest, certainly there needs to be much more protection afforded to whistleblowers.

Author of Blog del Narco, chronicle of Mexico's drug war, flees

Edward Snowden: the whistleblower behind the NSA surveillance revelations

 

Other Whistleblowers

Update:

NSA hacks China, leaker Snowden claims

 

Ecuador grants asylum to WikiLeaks' Assange

Do we live in democracies or police states?  In my view, it is certainly the latter and here's more evidence of it...

Ecuador has granted asylum to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange because it believes he will be politically persecuted if extradited, Ecuadorian Foreign Minister Ricardo Patiño announced Thursday.

The UK, meanwhile, has said it is disappointed by the decision and will not grant safe passage out of the country to Assange, who has been holed up inside Ecuador's embassy in London for nearly two months...

Read more here...

http://www.cnn.com/2012/08/16/world/americas/ecuador-assange/?hpt=hp_t2

Banking Corporations Kill Wikileaks

WikiLeaks stops publishing to make ends meet
Excerpt:
WikiLeaks announced Monday it is suspending its publication of classified files as it struggles to bring its finances under control.

"The (financial) blockade is outside of any accountable, public process. It is without democratic oversight or transparency," according to a WikiLeaks statement.

"The U.S. government itself found that there were no lawful grounds to add WikiLeaks to a U.S. financial blockade. But the blockade of WikiLeaks by politicized U.S. finance companies continues regardless."

Bank of America, Visa, Mastercard, PayPal and Western Union put a financial blockage on WikiLeaks after it published hundreds of thousands of controversial diplomatic cables and U.S. government files.
Assange has said that the financial blockage has cost the website tens of millions of dollars in lost donations, BBC reports.
"A handful of U.S. finance companies cannot be allowed to decide how the whole world votes with its pocket," he said.

Read more here...

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/europe/united-kingdom/111024/wikileaks-stops-publishing-financial-blockade

Bradley Manning's health deteriorating in jail, supporters say

You can draw many parallels between the jailed Chinese Nobel Prize winner Liu Xiaobo and the detention of whistleblower Bradley Manning--both are in jail for exposing government wrongdoing, both are denied contact and their friends and family are routinely harassed...read more here...

The intelligence analyst suspected of leaking US diplomatic cables is being held in solitary confinement.

Excerpt:

According to David House, a computer researcher from Boston who visits Manning twice a month, he is starting to deteriorate and many people were reluctant to talk about Manning's condition because of US government harassment, including surveillance, warrantless computer seizures, and even bribes. "This has had such an intimidating effect that many are afraid to speak out on his behalf," House said.

Some friends report being followed extensively. Another computer expert said the army offered him cash to – in his words – "infiltrate" the WIKILEAKS website. He said: "I turned them down. I don't want anything to do with this cloak and dagger stuff."

"If Manning is convicted, it will be because his individual dedication to human ethics far surpasses that of the US government."

Read full article here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/16/bradley-manning-health-deteriorating

Read about Liu Xiaobo here:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/8209131/China-continues-to-block-family-from-visiting-imprisoned-Nobel-laureate.html

We might not like Mark Zuckerberg or Julian Assange—but we’re going to have to learn to live in the world they’re making.

Excerpt:

"These reactions are understandable and, in some cases, warranted. But they are largely beside the point. In a digitized and networked world, Zuckerberg, Assange, and their outfits are merely avatars of the inexorable march toward a radically greater degree of transparency in our personal, cultural, and political spheres. The question about the new transparency isn’t how to thwart it—because we can’t. The question is how we live with it."

Read more here:
http://nymag.com/news/politics/powergrid/70105/