Luminous Animal
Luminous Animal's JournalEU committee of Civil Liberties: Detention of David Miranda, violation of EU Human Rights Convention
"Considers that the detention of Mr Miranda and the seizure of the material in his possession under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000 (and also the request to The Guardian to destroy or hand over the material) constitutes an interference with the right of freedom of expression as recognised by Article 10 of the ECHR and Article 11 of the EU Charter;"
Link to the pdf:
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/meetdocs/2009_2014/documents/libe/dv/moraes_1014703_/moraes_1014703_en.pdf
Rolling Stone: Barrett Brown Faces 105 Years in Jail. But no one can figure out what law he broke.
Introducing America's least likely political prisoner:http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/barrett-brown-faces-105-years-in-jail-20130905
"What is most concerning about Barrett's case is the disconnect between his conduct and the charged crime," says Ghappour. "He copy-pasted a publicly available link containing publicly available data that he was researching in his capacity as a journalist. The charges require twisting the relevant statutes beyond recognition and have serious implications for journalists as well as academics. Who's allowed to look at document dumps?"
Brown's case is a bellwether for press freedoms in the new century, where hacks and leaks provide some of our only glimpses into the technologies and policies of an increasingly privatized national security-and-surveillance state. What Brown did through his organization Project PM was attempt to expand these peepholes. He did this by leading group investigations into the world of private intelligence and cybersecurity contracting, a $56 billion industry that consumes 70 percent of the U.S. intelligence budget.
"Barrett was an investigative journalist who was merely doing his professional duty," says Christophe Deloire of Reporters Without Borders. "The sentence that he is facing is absurd and dangerous."
Snowden: A Genious Among Geniuses
http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/12/16/an-nsa-coworker-remembers-the-real-edward-snowden-a-genius-among-geniuses/But an NSA staffer who contacted me last month and asked not to be identifiedand whose claims we checked with Snowden himself via his ACLU lawyer Ben Wizneroffered me a very different, firsthand portrait of how Snowden was seen by his colleagues in the agencys Hawaii office: A principled and ultra-competent, if somewhat eccentric employee, and one who earned the access used to pull off his leak by impressing superiors with sheer talent.
The anonymous NSA staffers priority in contacting me, in fact, was to refute stories that have surfaced as the NSA and the media attempt to explain how a contractor was able to obtain and leak the tens of thousands of highly classified documents that have become the biggest public disclosure of NSA secrets in history. According to the source, Snowden didnt dupe coworkers into handing over their passwords, as one report has claimed. Nor did Snowden fabricate SSH keys to gain unauthorized access, he or she says.
Instead, theres little mystery as to how Snowden gained his access: It was given to him.
Metadata: How govt can discover your health problems, political beliefs, and religious practices
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2013/11/nsa_and_metadata_how_the_government_can_spy_on_your_health_political_beliefs.html?wpisrc=burger_barBut theres more, says Felten: By analyzing our metadata over time, the government can separate the signal from the noise and use it to identify behavioral patterns. The government can determine whether someone is making lots of late-night calls to someone who isnt his spouse, for example. When those calls cease, the government might reasonably conclude that the affair has ended. Metadata may reveal whether and how often someone calls her bookie or the American Civil Liberties Union or a defense attorney. And by analyzing the metadata of every American across a span of years, the NSA could learn almost as much about our health, our habits, our politics, and our relationships as it could by eavesdropping on our calls. Its not the same thing, but the more data the government collects, the more the distinction between metadata and actual content disappears.
70 (That is SEVENTY) rights groups warn UK government reaction to NSA leaks eroding freedom
Which side of history are you on?
The coalition, which includes organisations from 40 countries, said it had become increasingly alarmed at the way the UK government had applied pressure on media groups covering the leaks and its use of national security concerns to close down important public interest debates.
"We have joined together as an international coalition because we believe that the United Kingdom government's response to the revelations of mass surveillance of digital communications is eroding fundamental human rights in the country," the letter states. "The government's response has been to condemn, rather than celebrate investigative journalism, which plays a crucial role in a healthy democratic society."
The intervention comes five months after the Guardian, and major media organisations in other countries, including the New York Times and the Washington Post, began disclosing details of the extent and reach of secret surveillance programmes run by Britain's eavesdropping centre, GCHQ, and its US counterpart, the National Security Agency. The revelations now appearing in European media outlets have sparked a huge debate on the scale and oversight of surveillance by the US and UK intelligence agencies.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/03/uk-reaction-nsa-leaks-human-rights
Democrat Cory Booker wants to work with LIBERTARIAN Rand Paul
Interesting.
Bite on that NSA apologists...
"I want to work with him," said Mr. Booker, about Mr. Paul, during an interview Tuesday at his campaign office in the city he led as mayor for seven years. "I take everybody in the Senate as sincere people who want to make a difference."
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303902404579151922058208760?mod=WSJ_NY_MIDDLELEADNewsCollection
Kick.
The Banality of Systemic Evil (OpEd on the morality of whistleblowing)
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/the-banality-of-systemic-evil/?_r=1&Persons of conscience who step outside their assigned organizational roles are not new. There are many famous earlier examples, including Daniel Ellsberg (the Pentagon Papers), John Kiriakou (of the Central Intelligence Agency) and several former N.S.A. employees, who blew the whistle on what they saw as an unconstitutional and immoral surveillance program (William Binney, Russ Tice and Thomas Drake, for example). But it seems that we are witnessing a new generation of whistleblowers and leakers, which we might call generation W (for the generation that came of age in the era WikiLeaks, and now the war on whistleblowing).
The medias desire to psychoanalyze members of generation W is natural enough. They want to know why these people are acting in a way that they, members of the corporate media, would not. But sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander; if there are psychological motivations for whistleblowing, leaking and hacktivism, there are likewise psychological motivations for closing ranks with the power structure within a system in this case a system in which corporate media plays an important role. Similarly it is possible that the system itself is sick, even though the actors within the organization are behaving in accord with organizational etiquette and respecting the internal bonds of trust.
Just as Hannah Arendt saw that the combined action of loyal managers can give rise to unspeakable systemic evil, so too generation W has seen that complicity within the surveillance state can give rise to evil as well not the horrific evil that Eichmanns bureaucratic efficiency brought us, but still an Orwellian future that must be avoided at all costs.
The True History of #Libertarianism in America: A Phony Ideology to Promote a Corporate Agenda
Absolutely well worth reading and bookmarking.
http://www.alternet.org/visions/true-history-libertarianism-america-phony-ideology-promote-corporate-agenda
Pull up libertarianisms floorboards, look beneath the surface into the big business PR campaigns early years, and there youll start to get a sense of its purpose, its funders, and the PR hucksters who brought the peculiar political strain of American libertarianism into being beginning with the libertarian movements founding father, Milton Friedman. Back in 1950, the House of Representatives held hearings on illegal lobbying activities and exposed both Friedman and the earliest libertarian think-tank outfit as a front for business lobbyists. Those hearings have been largely forgotten, in part because were too busy arguing over the finer points of libertarian populism.
Milton Friedman. In his early days, before millions were spent on burnishing his reputation, Friedman worked as a business lobby shill, a propagandist who would say whatever he was paid to say. That's the story we need to revisit to get to the bottom of the modern American libertarian "movement," to see what it's really all about. We need to take a trip back to the post-war years, and to the largely forgotten Buchanan Committee hearings on illegal lobbying activities, led by a pro-labor Democrat from Pennsylvania, Frank Buchanan.
What the Buchanan Committee discovered was that in 1946, Milton Friedman and his U Chicago cohort George Stigler arranged an under-the-table deal with a Washington lobbying executive to pump out covert propaganda for the national real estate lobby in exchange for a hefty payout, the terms of which were never meant to be released to the public. They also discovered that a lobbying outfit which is today credited by libertarians as the movements first think-tank the Foundation for Economic Education was itself a big business PR project backed by the largest corporations and lobbying fronts in the country.
A Tribute to Chelsea Manning from Tunisia
This is a fantastic article written by Tunisian activist Sami Ben Gharbia
Chelsea Manning and the Arab Spring
For me, it all started in mid-October of 2010, with a direct message on Twitter from a good friend of mine. He belonged to a circle of digital activists with whom I worked closely with for years on many advocacy projects in the Arab World, from anti-censorship strategies and campaigns to building and training non-violent protests movements. In that DM he urgently asked me to speak over encryption with him. After one single OTR chat session, he sent me an encrypted zip file containing a trove of around 400 texts files organized in about 15 folders. All the folders were named after Arab countries: Tunisia, Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Morocco, Bahrain, etc. I didnt know what was in them. He told me just before ending the chat session: do something with them, I trust you and trust your knowledge and judgment.
At that time I was based in Berlin, after having to flee my home in Tunisia 13 years before to avoid becoming a political prisoner. I had a position as Advocacy Director at Global Voices, a non-profit that supported international citizen media. That gave me the freedom to choose where I lived; I just needed a laptop and a good Internet connection. Id also co-founded nawaat.org seven years earlier, a collective political blog focused on Tunisia, and censored in Tunisia by the government of Ben Ali.
I went out with my laptop and sat on the terrace of Morena cafe in the anti-establishment and counterculture neighborhood Kreuzberg. By then, I was one of a handful of people on the planet who had access to this sensitive dataset. I jumped into Tunisias folder, opened the first file and lit a cigarette, then the second file, the third, and the rest of the thirty files related to my country, with almost the same number of cigarettes. It was the Wikileaks U.S. State Department Cables, widely known as Cablegate, with all the political scandals, nepotism, and corruption of the disgraced Ben Ali regime. I didnt have time to read the other Arab countries files. I knew I had in front of me a valuable set of documents that could be turned into action. This is what we were looking for during the last decade of strategizing and theorizing about citizen dissent media, diaspora media, exiled media, digital activism: the ability to inform and transform. This was momentum.
https://medium.com/republic-of-tunisia/1907fec77df1
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