Archive for the ‘big brother’ Category
2009
“Former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds dropped a bombshell on the Mike Malloy radio show, guest-hosted by Brad Friedman (audio, partial transcript).In the interview, Sibel says that the US maintained ‘intimate relations’ with Bin Laden, and the Taliban, ‘all the way until that day of September 11.’
These ‘intimate relations’ included using Bin Laden for ‘operations’ in Central Asia, including Xinjiang, China. These ‘operations’ involved using al Qaeda and the Taliban in the same manner “as we did during the Afghan and Soviet conflict,” that is, fighting ‘enemies’ via proxies. As Sibel has previously described, and as she reiterates in this latest interview, this process involved using Turkey (with assistance from ‘actors from Pakistan, and Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia’) as a proxy, which in turn used Bin Laden and the Taliban and others as a proxy terrorist army.”
source: infowars.com
“There’s a McDonald’s on the high street, suburban houses, rats the size of dogs and 229 of the world’s most high-profile prisoners. Six months after President Obama declared that he would close it down, Naomi Wolf heads to Guantánamo Bay to see whether anything has changed.
Six months ago this week President Obama, on his second day in office, promised to close the Guantánamo detention camp within a year, and to undo the secretive and coercive detention and interrogation policies of George W. Bush. But has Obama been as good as his word…”
source: truthout.org
“The US president has extended sanctions against certain Syrian and pro-Syrian individuals due what he has called their continued interference in neighbouring Lebanon. The move by Barack Obama to keep the sanctions in place for another year comes in spite of some encouraging steps by Syria in recent months, the White House said on Friday. ‘In the past six months, the United States has used dialogue with the Syrian government to address concerns and identify areas of mutual interest, including support for Lebanese sovereignty,’ Obama said in a statement.
He said there have been ’some positive developments in the past year, including the establishment of diplomatic relations and an exchange of ambassadors between Lebanon and Syria.’ But “the actions of certain persons continue to contribute to political and economic instability in Lebanon and the region and constitute a continuing unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States,” he said.”
source: aljazeera.net
“The city of Miami and several commercial partners plan to rollout a “smart grid” citywide electrical infrastructure by the year 2011. This rollout was
announced on the heels of news that foreign agents have infiltrated our existing electrical infrastructure and that recent penetration tests have uncovered numerous vulnerabilities in the proposed technologies. Simultaneously, the National Institute for Standards in Technology (“NIST”) has recently released a roadmap for producing smart grid standards. In this whitepaper, I will discuss the flaws with the current guidelines and map them to the criticisms of similar regulatory mandates, including the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (“PCI DSS”), that rely heavily on organizations policing themselves…
As of the writing of this white paper, NIST has released a draft framework for review that includes some of the proposed standards. While there are several security standards listed in the framework, NIST appears to be making the same mistakes of previous regulatory mandate governing bodies. For example, the PCI DSS standards have been criticized for not requiring a high-level of security in environments that process cardholder data. Specifically, one of the major criticisms is the “self policing” aspect of these standards. The credit card companies (American Express, Discover
Financial Services, JCB International, MasterCard Worldwide, and Visa Inc.) are responsible for ensuring that relevant companies are compliant with the standards. If a company is deemed non-compliant, then the credit card companies issue what they consider to be the appropriate punishment…”
source: blackhat.com
“An investigation into the kidnapping of five British men in Iraq has uncovered evidence of possible collusion by Iraqi government officials in their abduction, and a possible motive – to keep secret the whereabouts of billions of dollars in embezzled funds. A former high-level Iraqi intelligence operative and a current senior government minister, who has been negotiating directly with the hostage takers, have told the Guardian that the kidnapping of IT specialist Peter Moore and his four bodyguards in 2007 was not a simple snatch by a band of militants but a sophisticated operation, almost certainly with inside help. Only Moore is thought still to be alive.
Witnesses to the extraordinary operation which led to the abductions have also told us that they have been warned by superiors to keep quiet. ‘This operation was on a state level, not al-Qaida. Only the state has the capability to carry this out,’ one of the sources said.
The Guardian can also reveal that there was a sixth westerner who was working with Moore at the time of the kidnap. The man – whose identity is known to the Guardian – managed to narrowly avoid being captured by hiding in a toilet at the Iraqi ministry of finance, where the abductions took place. Over the past 10 months the Guardian has interviewed senior Iraqi figures and eyewitnesses as well as the former British military officer who investigated the kidnap for the men’s employers. Their accounts allege that the hostage takers had contacts in the Iraqi government, and also that officials in the ministry of defence warned off witnesses to the kidnap.”
source: guardian.co.uk
“The EU is about to enter talks with the US on giving it access to banking data in its fight against terrorism. German politicians from across the political spectrum are up in arms, and members of the European Parliament say they will try to scupper any deal that violates data privacy.
US anti-terror officials want to be able to continue examining Europeans’ financial transactions, and it appears likely that the European Union is going to comply.
On Monday, foreign ministers of European Union member states gave their approval for the European Commission and Sweden, which currently holds the six-month rotating EU presidency, to negotiate an agreement with Washington that would allow it to scrutinize European citizens’ banking data. However, there is a growing wave of criticism from across the political spectrum in Germany and from the European Parliament…”
source: spiegel.de
“The Associated Press last week rolled out its brave new plan to “apply protective format to news.” The AP’s news registry will “tag and track all AP content online to assure compliance with terms of use,” and it will provide a “platform for protect, point, and pay.” That’s a lot of “p”-prefaced jargon, but it boils down to a sort of DRM for news—”enforcement,” in AP-speak…But how could that possibly work?It was good enough for music…
Turns out that it won’t, not really, not if the goal is to exercise control over AP content by those not voluntarily disposed to play by the AP’s rules. First, let’s try to make sense of what’s being proposed. According to the AP’s announcement, the news registry it plans to set up relies on a new ‘microformat’…”
source: arstechnica.com
“The Department of Homeland Security relied on a rushed, flawed study to justify its decision to locate a $700 million research facility for highly infectious pathogens in a tornado-prone section of Kansas, according to a government report.
The department’s analysis was not “scientifically defensible” in concluding that it could safely handle dangerous animal diseases in Kansas — or any other location on the U.S. mainland, according to a Government Accountability Office draft report obtained by The Washington Post. The GAO said DHS greatly underestimated the chance of accidental release and major contamination from such research, which has been conducted only on a remote island off the United States.
DHS staff members tried quietly last week to fend off a public airing of the facility’s risks, agency correspondence shows. Department officials met privately with staff members of a congressional oversight subcommittee to try to convince them that the GAO report was unfair, and to urge them to forgo or postpone a hearing. But the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s oversight and investigations subcommittee, chaired by Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), decided otherwise. It plans to hold a hearing Thursday on the risk analysis, according to two sources briefed on the plans. “
source: washingtonpost.com
“The feds are spending tens of millions of stimulus dollars to repair and build toilets across the nation, in an outflow of taxpayer funds that critics have branded ‘potty pork.’
From humble sylvan outhouses to ‘historic’ restrooms, cash from the $787 billion stimulus is going to spruce up or completely replace aging toilets, government releases show.
In New Mexico alone, the feds are spending $2.8 million for toilets in national forests. “
source: nypost.com
“A new genetic engineering technique could make it as easy to rewrite a genome as it is to read it.
Using the process, which grafts pieces of synthetic DNA into the genomes of dividing cells, researchers generated 15 billion different genomic patterns in just three days. The process would normally take years, and could eventually be used to produce industrial chemicals, drugs, fuel and anything else that comes out of bacteria.
‘Automated sequencing really advanced the way we can read genetic information. We hope automated genome engineering will advance the way we write genetic information,’ said Harris Wang, a Harvard University biophysicist.
Earlier methods of manipulating genomes involved a painstaking biological cut-and-paste process, with target genes removed, tweaked and reinserted, one at a time. Alternatively, bioengineers could use a mutagen that turned genomes to hash.
But Wang and George Church — a co-author of the study, and a pioneer in DNA synthesis, genome sequencing and all-purpose biotechnological wizardry — want to speed that process up.
Their technique, known as Multiplex Automated Genome Engineering, or MAGE, starts with single-stranded pieces of DNA, custom synthesized to fit on target sections of a genome. In a microscopic remix of the famous Dr. Frankenstein movie scene, a target cell is then jolted with energy, opening holes in its membrane. The DNA flows inside. When the cell divides, it uses the new DNA in copying itself.”
source: wired.com
“A city council said Saturday it was considering using underground burial chambers, currently a tourist attraction, to store the corpses of swine flu victims if the pandemic worsens.
Exeter City Council said the empty 19th-century catacombs could become an emergency mortuary.
A council spokesman said the plan could be put into operation if the cemeteries and the crematorium could not keep up with funeral demands.
He said: ‘We have some empty catacombs in an old cemetery in the city. These are 19th century underground burial chambers which are normally a tourist attraction,’ he said.
‘They can, however, be safely used for their original purpose and allow us to temporarily store bodies in the remote possibility that the need should arise…’”
source: AFP
“We live in an era defined by its brutality. Our challenge is whether to accept this – or to take the risks necessary to transform our world commons in beloved community.
A year ago this August, forty-four ordinary people from seventeen different countries sailed to Gaza in two, small wooden boats. We did what the world would not do – we broke through the siege of Gaza. Over the last year the Free Gaza Movement has organized seven more voyages, successfully arriving to Gaza on five separate occasions. Ours remain the only international ships to reach the Gaza Strip in over forty-two years.
In the Middle-East, the struggle for justice is an uncertain endeavour in the best of times. On all sides human rights workers are beset with difficulties and distress. The Arab states are tyrannies, their peoples subject to secret police, arbitrary arrest, torture, and oppression. Within their societies, the Arab world is equally fractured by ethnic and class tensions, poverty, and political stagnation. From the outside, from the West, the Middle-East faces both open and covert acts of intimidation, intervention, economic destabilization, and even war, invasion, and mass killings…”
source: counterpunch.org
“Britain may need to send more troops to Afghanistan despite the success of Operation Panther’s Claw, military chiefs admit.
The scale of the challenge was revealed yesterday as it emerged that British soldiers have faced nearly 1,000 roadside bombs in the past three months. Although 3,000 troops managed to drive out about 500 Taleban during the five-week offensive, they will be fully deployed holding an area in Helmand province about the size of the Isle of Wight, their commanding officer admitted.
Brigadier Tim Radford, commander of Task Force Helmand, said that the existing troops could not be expected to mount further significant operations without reinforcements. Gordon Brown hailed the offensive as an ‘heroic’ military success, saying it had made Britain safer and ‘pushed back the Taleban’. David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, however, called for renewed efforts to engage the Taleban politically…”
source timesonline.co.uk
“Israel is a democracy, we are told. We have freedom of speech to prove it. Aside from a few pesky details of a permanent state of emergency which allows the government and security forces to impose censorship of the media, we really are free to speak our minds – to an extent.
The legal limits on personal expression are draconian, but not very often invoked. It is the unspoken limits of freedom of speech which are more binding. Even as I write I hear the clinking of the chains in my mind: how much do I dare expose? What might be the repercussions of this word, or that sentence?
I, like most young Israeli Jews, went to the army at the age of 18. At the time I barely even questioned this. Going to the army here is a fact of life, merely another step in the standard ‘natural’ order: six years of grade school, six of high school, three in the army and so forth. In the army I was exposed to matters of varying levels of secrecy. Divulging them is, of course, illegal. But even that is not what I feel constrains me and so many others. What security clearance deems secret is not, as a general rule, an interesting subject for conversation other than in very specific circumstances, almost never occurring outside the army.”
source: guardian.co.uk
“A huge simulation coordinated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has begun today with no mainstream media coverage at all.
The security exercise known as National Level Exercise 09 (NLE 09) will last for five days and will involve foreign security officials working in conjunction with the US military, as well as Federal, State, Local Tribal and Private Sector representatives.
According to a factsheet in the recesses of the FEMA website, the agency will host National Level Exercise 2009 (NLE 09) on July 27 through July 31, 2009:
‘NLE 09 will be the first major exercise conducted by the United States government that will focus exclusively on terrorism prevention and protection, as opposed to incident response and recovery,’ the factsheet states. It is designated as a Tier I National Level Exercise, or TOPOFF, which are exercises conducted annually in accordance with the National Exercise Program (NEP), ‘which serves as the nation’s overarching exercise program for planning, organizing, conducting and evaluating national level exercises,’ according to FEMA.”
source: infowars.com