Archive for April 20th, 2012
NSA whistleblower: The Federal Government has your emails
Former NSA employee, and now whistleblower, Willian Binney believes domestic surveillance has become more expansive under President Obama than President George W. Bush.
He estimates the NSA has assembled 20 trillion “transactions” — phone calls, emails and other forms of data — from Americans. This likely includes copies of almost all of the emails sent and received from most people living in the United States.
Binny indicates that the federal government is not being honest to the extent that it suggests that it does not possess massive amounts of emails and phone calls made to and from Americans (min 55), in addition to records of our bank transactions and internet searches. And as I posted a few days ago, the federal government is not satisfied. It wants more of your private data, and more legal cover for spying on ordinary law-abiding Americans.
The participants to this surreal (though completely credible) discussion include Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez of Democracy Now, and their guests:
William Binney, served in the NSA for over 30 years, including a time as director of the NSA’s World Geopolitical and Military Analysis Reporting Group. Since retiring from the NSA in 2001, he has warned that the NSA’s data-mining program has become so vast that it could “create an Orwellian state.”
Jacob Appelbaum, a computer security researcher who has volunteered with WikiLeaks. He is a developer and advocate for the Tor Project, a network enabling its users to communicate anonymously on the internet.
Laura Poitras, an award-winning documentary filmmaker and producer. She is working on the third part of a trilogy of films about America post-9/11. The first film was My Country, My Country,” and the second was The Oath.
The above video is but one part of an extraordinary discussion on Democracy Now. Consider, also, the story of Laura Poitras:
The Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Laura Poitras discusses how she has been repeatedly detained and questioned by federal agents whenever she enters the United States. Poitras said the interrogations began after she began working on her documentary, “My Country, My Country,” about post-invasion Iraq. Her most recent film, “The Oath,” was about Yemen and Guantánamo and follows the lives of two past associates of Osama bin Laden. She estimates she has been detained approximately 40 times and has had her laptop, cell phone and personal belongings repeatedly searched.
And the story of Jacob Appelbaum:
a computer researcher who has faced a stream of interrogations and electronic surveillance since he volunteered with the whistleblowing website, WikiLeaks. He describes being detained more than a dozen times at the airport and interrogated by federal agents who asked about his political views and confiscated his cell phone and laptop. When asked why he cannot talk about what happened after he was questioned, Appelbaum says, “Because we don’t live in a free country. And if I did, I guess I could tell you about it.” A federal judge ordered Twitter to hand over information about Appelbaum’s account. Meanwhile, he continues to work on the Tor Project, an anonymity network that ensures every person has the right to browse the internet without restriction and the right to speak freely.
The same show also featured William Binney:
In his first television interview since he resigned from the National Security Agency over its domestic surveillance program, William Binney discusses the NSA’s massive power to spy on Americans and why the FBI raided his home after he became a whistleblower. Binney was a key source for investigative journalist James Bamford’s recent exposé in Wired Magazine about how the NSA is quietly building the largest spy center in the country in Bluffdale, Utah. The Utah spy center will contain near-bottomless databases to store all forms of communication collected by the agency, including private emails, cell phone calls, Google searches and other personal data.
More politics of peak oil
One can be forgiven for not understanding the state of our world today in terms of oil and its availability. A new article in Forbes assures us that peak oil is off, that the world is awash in oil. Meanwhile, an article from the current issue of The Economist claims the opposite: that oil supply is insufficient to keep up with demand. Meanwhile, the president is blaming high prices on those nasty speculators. So which of these competing claims is a person to believe?
For the uninitiated, peak oil is the point in time when maximum extraction of the world’s oil endowment is reached. Since oil is a finite resource, we can exploit it in increasing amounts until we can’t any longer, and flows begin to decline.
On reading misspelled words
One of my daughters recently showed me an email containing following. This is apparently making the rounds on the Internet, and for good reason:
I was quite surprised at how easy it was to read this passage. Here’s another test, though. Try to type the above passage exactly as it is above. You’ll find that your body’s motor routines strongly interfere with your ability to accurately type this. I was reminded of the Stroop Effect.
NYT launches more ad hominem attacks against Julian Assange
You need to read the NYT’s hatchet piece regarding Julian Assange to believe it. The writer, Alessandra Stanley, apparently has no idea how utterly sick the mainstream media is, including her precious employer, the NYT, which is significantly responsible for plunging the United States into a needless war in Iraq.
Instead of showing some appreciation that Assange has used his new television show to provide meaningful dialogue with a significant world figure, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, she repeatedly tries to draw attention to her own sense of superiority, ignoring the horrifically unjust treatment Assange has received on many fronts, especially from the United States. She blithely writes, citing no sources, that nowadays Assange “is most often portrayed as a nut job.” She has no idea, and offers no appreciation for the mission of Wikileaks or for the personal sacrifice experienced by Mr. Assange. She should start with this list of the many accomplishments of Wikileaks. Then she should consider this presentation at this year’s National Conference for Media Reform and this.
Glenn Greenwald forcefully and precisely puts Stanley’s piece in perspective:
Assange developed an alternative template to the corporate media — one that was far more independent of, and adversarial to, government power — and, in the process, produced more newsworthy scoops than all of them combined. As NYU Journalism Professor Jay Rosen once put it about WikiLeaks: “The Watchdog Press Died; We Have This Instead.” The mavens of that dead watchdog press then decided that they hated Assange and devoted themselves to demonizing and destroying him. That behavior makes someone a “nut job,” but it isn’t Assange.
More revealingly still: it is simply impossible to imagine The New York Times using the phrase “nut job” to describe how anyone who exercises actual power in Washington is “most often portrayed.” The same is true of the rank speculation Stanley invokes to imply — without having the slightest idea whether it’s true — that Assange “wore out his welcome” at his prior home: that sort of gossipy ignorance, designed to smear without any basis, would rarely make its way into an article about someone at the epicenter of America’s political class. That’s because American media outlets are eager to savage those who are outcasts in Washington, but unfailingly treat its most powerful figures with great reverence. Stanley may want to reflect on that the next time she seeks to portray some media outlet other than her own as a subservient tool of state propaganda.
Unlike Alessandra Stanley, Julian Assange is not beholden to a corporate master in disturbingly over-consolidated industry. And it shows. To be convinced, all you need to do is read Stanley’s mocking article, then view Assange’s focused and revealing interview of Hassan Nasrallah.
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