The media establishment’s long intense irrational hatred of Julian Assange

Glenn Greenwald, who now writes for the U.K. Guardian, sums up the media establishment's hatred of Julian Assange:

In 2008 – two years before the release of the "collateral murder" video, the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs, and the diplomatic cables – the Pentagon prepared a secret report which proclaimed WikiLeaks to be an enemy of the state and plotted ways to destroy its credibility and reputation. But in a stroke of amazing luck, Pentagon operatives never needed to do any of that, because the establishment media in the US and Britain harbor at least as much intense personal loathing for the group's founder as the US government does, and eagerly took the lead in targeting him. Many people like to posit the US national security state and western media outlets as adversarial forces, but here – as is so often the case – they have so harmoniously joined in common cause. Whatever else is true, establishment media outlets show unlimited personal animus toward the person who, as a panel of judges put it when they awarded him the the 2011 Martha Gellhorn prize for journalism, "has given the public more scoops than most journalists can imagine."

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What does your phone know about you?

Malte Spitz sued his German phone company, forcing it to produce more than 30,000 lines of code it had retained about Malte, including his locations and his use of his phone. This constitutes an extraordinary look into his life and habits, including his associations with other particular people, so much so that many Germans have protested the fact that phone companies store all of this information for at least six months, and up to two years. He points to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, asking whether this celebratory moment could have even been possible if the government of East Germany had access to such data. In the meantime, it appears that the U.S. government is spying on its own citizens through the unbridled collection and storage of this type of data.

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US claims it is illegal to challenge illegal spy statute in court

We are definitely living in Orwellian times, based on the following article from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which I am reprinting in its entirety (it is licensed by Creative Commons): EFF Challenges National Security Letter Statute in Landmark Lawsuit Since the first national security letter statute was passed in 1986, the FBI has issued hundreds of thousands of such letters seeking private telecommunications and financial records of Americans without any prior approval from courts. Indeed, for the period between 2003 and 2006 alone, almost 200,000 requests for private customer information were sought pursuant to various NSL statutes. Prior to 2011, the constitutionality of this legal authority to investigate the records of Americans without court oversight had been challenged in court -- as far as we know -- exactly one time. EFF is today releasing FBI-redacted briefing from a major new ongoing case in which it is challenging one of the NSL statutes on behalf of a telecommunications company that received an NSL in 2011. Not only does this briefing show that the Department of Justice continues to strongly protect the FBI's NSL authority, it highlights a startlingly aggressive new tactic used by the Department of Justice: suing NSL recipients who challenge the FBI's authority, arguing that court challenges to such authority themselves amount to breaking the law. National security letter statutes -- five in all -- are controversial laws that allow the FBI to easily bypass courts and issue administrative letters on their own authority to telecommunications companies and financial institutions demanding information about their customers. The NSL statutes permit the FBI to permanently gag service providers from revealing the fact that the demand was made, preventing them from notifying either their customers or the public. While the statute has many deficiencies, one of the core constitutional issues (already recognized by one federal appeals court) is that it turns the First Amendment's procedural prior restraint doctrine on its head by allowing the FBI to issue a never-ending prior restraint on its own, then requiring the recipient service provider to undertake a legal challenge. Another fundamental problem with the NSL statutes is that courts are all but written out of any part of the process: the FBI can issue demands for records and gag provisions without court authorization, and recipient telecommunications and financial companies have no way to determine whether and how the government might be overreaching or otherwise abusing its authority. Not surprisingly, given these significant structural barriers, legal challenges are extraordinarily rare. EFF brought its challenge on behalf of its client in May of 2011, raising these and other fundamental due process and First Amendment concerns about the structure of these problematic statutes. In response, the Department of Justice promptly filed a civil complaint against the recipient, alleging that by "stat[ing] its objection to compliance with the provisions of" the NSL by "exercis[ing] its rights under" the NSL statute to challenge the NSL's legality, the recipient was "interfer[ing] with the United States' vindication of its sovereign interests in law enforcement, counterintelligence, and protecting national security." While it ultimately agreed to a stay, temporarily suspending its suit against the recipient, the government has moved to compel disclosure of the subscriber information and to uphold the gag. The petition to set aside the NSL is currently pending before the United States District Court for the Northern District of California. Whether the recipient will be permitted to speak out about its specific experiences -- and whether the FBI will be permitted to issue NSLs, at least in one district -- should soon be known.

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Why you should be concerned about America’s surveillance state, even if you aren’t committing crimes

Glenn Greenwald has talked with many people who tell him that they haven't done anything wrong, so why should they be concerned about America's surveillance state? Here are the reasons: Those who wish to organize should have the right to do so away from the targets of the organization. If the government is listening in, this makes any type of activism "extremely difficult." It is exclusively in the private realm that creativity, dissent and challenges to orthodoxy. Only when you know that you can explore "without external judgment where you can experiment" and "create new paths." Psychological experiments verify this need for privacy; without it, people speak more stiffly. When you assume that you are being watched, your speech will be chilled and you will be encouraged to act in a conformist way. Third, surveillance creates a "pervasive climate of fear." It makes people afraid to speak candidly and meaningfully to other people in their same community. Greenwald (who admits that he has 11 dogs) draw on a dog example. Even when a fence is taken down, dogs are hesitant to go into a previously fenced-off area. The most insidious part of the surveillance state is that those who are being monitored are easily convinced that their limits, their conformity, is liberty and freedom. What can be done about this situation in the United States. There are things you can do to remove yourself from the "surveillance matrix." Some people have limited their economic interactions to cash transactions. There are way to communicate on the Internet that maintain anonymity (e.g., The Tor Project). It is important to educate yourself and others "beyond the prying eye of the United States government. For instance, you can educate yourself as to your rights when you have direct interactions with government officials; sources include Center for Constitutional Rights, National Coalition to Protect Civil Freedoms and the ACLU. To this list, I would add the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Forcible radical transparency is a way to take the offensive. That is why Greenwald (and I) support Wikileaks and Anonymous. Greenwald states, "I want walls to be blown in the wall of secrecy."

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