Category Archives: Issues

Federal judge says public has a right to know about FBI’s facial recognition database

Nextgov reports: A federal judge has ruled that the FBI’s futuristic facial-recognition database is deserving of scrutiny from open-government advocates because of the size and scope of the surveillance technology.

U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan said the bureau’s Next Generation Identification program represents a “significant public interest” due to concerns regarding its potential impact on privacy rights and should be subject to rigorous transparency oversight.

“There can be little dispute that the general public has a genuine, tangible interest in a system designed to store and manipulate significant quantities of its own biometric data, particularly given the great numbers of people from whom such data will be gathered,” Chutkan wrote in an opinion released late Wednesday.

Her ruling validated a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the Electronic Privacy Information Center that last year made a 2010 government report on the database public and awarded the group nearly $20,000 in attorneys’ fees. That government report revealed the FBI’s facial-recognition technology could fail up to 20 percent of the time. Privacy groups believe that failure rate may be even higher, as a search can be considered successful if the correct suspect is listed within the top 50 candidates. [Continue reading…]

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How the U.S. incubated ISIS in Camp Bucca

The Washington Post reports: In March 2009, in a wind-swept sliver of Iraq, a sense of uncertainty befell the southern town of Garma, home to one of the Iraq war’s most notorious prisons. The sprawling Camp Bucca detention center, which had detained some of the war’s most radical extremists along the Kuwait border, had just freed hundreds of inmates. Families rejoiced, anxiously awaiting their sons, brothers and fathers who had been lost to Bucca for years. But a local official fretted.

“These men weren’t planting flowers in a garden,” police chief Saad Abbas Mahmoud told The Washington Post’s Anthony Shadid, estimating that 90 percent of the freed prisoners would soon resume fighting. “They weren’t strolling down the street. This problem is both big and dangerous. And regrettably, the Iraqi government and the authorities don’t know how big the problem has become.”

Mahmoud’s assessment of Camp Bucca, which funneled 100,000 detainees through its barracks and closed months later, would prove prescient. The camp now represents an opening chapter in the history of the Islamic State — many of its leaders, including Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, were incarcerated and probably met there. According to former prison commanders, analysts and soldiers, Camp Bucca provided a unique setting for both prisoner radicalization and inmate collaboration — and was formative in the development of today’s most potent jihadist force. [Continue reading…]

The Soufan Group: It is likely that many of the soon-to-be leaders of what is now the Islamic State (IS) were extremists before they walked through the gates of Camp Bucca, the U.S. military prison in southern Iraq, from 2003 to 2009. But it is certain that they all were when they walked out months or years later.

In Camp Bucca, the reshaping of the future IS took place among the mixing of violent ideological extremists and former Ba’athist military officers who were also no strangers to violence. Along with other circumstances (such as the Syrian civil war and the sectarian rule of Iraq’s then-Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki), it is this Bucca bond that forms the nucleus of a cancerous cell that has taken over so much of Iraq and Syria.

Apart from IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, even a partial list of former Bucca detainees who would play major roles in reshaping IS is impressive: Abu Muslim al-Turkmani, al-Baghdadi’s number two; Abu Ayman al-Iraqi, senior military leader; Haji Bakr, instrumental in helping al-Baghdadi into power; Abu ‘Abdul Rahman al-Bilawi, responsible for the operational planning that seized Mosul, Iraq; Abu Qasim, in charge of foreign fighters and suicide bombers; Abu Lu’ay, senior military official; Abu Shema, in charge of logistics; Abu Suja, in charge of programs for families of martyrs; and on and on. Some were officers in Saddam Hussein’s military (usually air force or army), the others were teachers, imams, or bureaucrats. But all were dedicated, motivated, and organized members of a smoldering anti-Shi’a group when they left Bucca. [Continue reading…]

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Slaves of productivity

Quinn Norton writes: We dream now of making Every Moment Count, of achieving flow and never leaving, creating one project that must be better than the last, of working harder and smarter. We multitask, we update, and we conflate status with long hours worked in no paid overtime systems for the nebulous and fantastic status of being Too Important to have Time to Ourselves, time to waste. But this incarnation of the American dream is all about doing, and nothing about doing anything good, or even thinking about what one was doing beyond how to do more of it more efficiently. It was not even the surrenders to hedonism and debauchery or greed our literary dreams have recorded before. It is a surrender to nothing, to a nothingness of lived accounting.

This moment’s goal of productivity, with its all-consuming practice and unattainable horizon, is perfect for our current corporate world. Productivity never asks what it builds, just how much of it can be piled up before we leave or die. It is irrelevant to pleasure. It’s agnostic about the fate of humanity. It’s not even selfish, because production negates the self. Self can only be a denominator, holding up a dividing bar like a caryatid trying to hold up a stone roof.

I am sure this started with the Industrial Revolution, but what has swept through this generation is more recent. This idea of productivity started in the 1980s, with the lionizing of the hardworking greedy. There’s a critique of late capitalism to be had for sure, but what really devastated my generation was the spiritual malaise inherent in Taylorism’s perfectly mechanized human labor. But Taylor had never seen a robot or a computer perfect his methods of being human. By the 1980s, we had. In the age of robots we reinvented the idea of being robots ourselves. We wanted to program our minds and bodies and have them obey clocks and routines. In this age of the human robot, of the materialist mind, being efficient took the pre-eminent spot, beyond goodness or power or wisdom or even cruel greed. [Continue reading…]

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The Senate report on CIA interrogation is about to reignite debate over the killing of Osama Bin Laden

Jason Leopold writes: A few days before the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, then President George W. Bush gave a speech in the East Room of the White House where, for the first time, he acknowledged that the CIA had been holding more than a dozen “high-value” detainees who were subjected to “tough” interrogation methods at secret prisons “outside of the United States.”

Bush cited a number of terrorist plots that were thwarted after high-value captives were subjected to the CIA’s interrogation regimen. One was an attempt in 2003 by al Qaeda terrorists to attack the US consulate in Karachi, Pakistan “using car bombs and motorcycle bombs.”

In a long-awaited summary of a report on the CIA’s detention and interrogation program, the Senate Committee on Intelligence dissects Bush’s September 6, 2006 speech and reveals that the intelligence provided to Bush by the CIA about the Karachi operation was overstated. Interrogators, the summary asserts, could have obtained details about it without resorting to so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” (EITs).

That’s just one example contained in the summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report that Democrats say proves the CIA’s interrogation program was a failure and did not produce “unique” and “valuable” intelligence. That’s according to a half-dozen people familiar with the document who spoke to VICE News over the past three weeks on the condition of anonymity because the summary is still undergoing a final declassification review. [Continue reading…]

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Hamas announces ‘popular army’ after al-Aqsa clash

AFP reports: Hamas announced the creation of a “popular army” in the Gaza Strip on Friday, saying it was ready for any future conflict with Israel, particularly over the flashpoint Al-Aqsa mosque compound.

At a ceremony at the Jabaliya refugee camp in the north of the devastated Palestinian territory, a spokesman for the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades — the military arm of the Islamist Hamas movement — said 2,500 recruits would form “the first section of the popular army for the liberation of al-Aqsa and of Palestine”.

Mohammed Abu Askar, a Hamas official, said those older than 20 could sign up “to be prepared for any confrontation” with Israel.

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EU foreign chief calls for statehood on Gaza visit

AFP reports: The European Union’s new foreign affairs chief Federica Mogherini Saturday appealed for the establishment of a Palestinian state, saying the world “cannot afford” another war in Gaza.

“We need a Palestinian state – that is the ultimate goal and this is the position of all the European Union,” Mogherini said during a trip to Gaza, devastated by its third conflict in six years.

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The life cycles of flowers and bees are getting thrown out of balance by climate change

bee-pollination

The Guardian reports: Sexual deceit, pressed flowers and Victorian bee collectors are combined in new scientific research which demonstrates for the first time that climate change threatens flower pollination, which underpins much of the world’s food production.

The work used museum records stretching back to 1848 to show that the early spider orchid and the miner bee on which it depends for reproduction have become increasingly out of sync as spring temperatures rise due to global warming.

The orchid resembles a female miner bee and exudes the same sex pheromone to seduce the male bee into “pseudocopulation” with the flower, an act which also achieves pollination. The orchids have evolved to flower at the same time as the bee emerges.

But while rising temperatures cause both the orchid and the bee to flower or fly earlier in the spring, the bees are affected much more, which leads to a mismatch.

“We have shown that plants and their pollinators show different responses to climate change and that warming will widen the timeline between bees and flowers emerging,” said Dr Karen Robbirt, at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and the University of East Anglia (UEA). “If replicated in less specific systems, this could have severe implications for crop productivity.”

She said the research, published in Current Biology on Thursday, is “the first clear example, supported by long-term data, of the potential for climate change to disrupt critical [pollination] relationships between species.” [Continue reading…]

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Oil politics and the battle for Kobane

By Mika Minio-Paluello, Open Democracy, November 7, 2014

Kobane was supposed to fall. As ISIS assaulted the town, Turkish troops besieged it from the north, preventing reinforcements and arresting hundreds fleeing. US jets bombed ISIS forces elsewhere, driving them towards Rojava: the largely Kurdish region in northern Syria self-administered by the movement for a democratic society (Tev-Dem), headed politically by the PYD, and defended by the YPG and YPJ. A month into the battle, Kerry admitted that defending Kobane was still not a US strategic priority, despite growing pressure for an airdrop.

But Kobane didn’t fall. Unlike the Iraqi Army with its tanks and Humvees, the lightly-armed YPG and YPJ guerillas held firm. Kurdish activist Dilar Dirik argues that, “The people of Kobane were massively outgunned. But their will to fight kept them going. They are fighting for a fundamentally different future.”

Why was the US happy to see ISIS crush Rojava? The heavy violence in Syria is heavily influenced by oil-driven geopolitics. This goes well beyond the smuggling of crudely refined fuel from ISIS-controlled Deir Ezzor into Turkey. For decades, energy colonialism has enabled the repression of democratic movements.

Energy colonialism

Large oil fields and potential export routes contributed to Kurdistan – spread between Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria – being subjected to intense violence. For over a century, foreign policy decisions made in Washington, London and Paris aimed to control oil reserves in the region and preserve corporate profits. Borders were drawn, autocrats were supported and weapons poured in. Kurdish movements were used opportunistically and encouraged to revolt – only to be abandoned and slaughtered once short-term goals were achieved.

The 2003 war on Iraq and 1990s sanctions followed a much older pattern: where democratic forces and organised labour grew, British and US governments, corporations and local elites crushed them. When oil workers in Iraq occupied a pipeline pumping station in 1948, the company surrounded them with machine guns and armoured cars, starving them out. The next year, the Syrian parliament refused to ratify construction of the Trans-Arabian pipeline. The oil companies had the CIA organise a coup and the new military government immediately completed the agreement.

Today’s pipeline routes are the product of wars and political struggles, expensive infrastructure, mass displacement, and intensive corporate lobbying. Kurdish communities were seen as a threat, and subjected to cultural assimilation, forced emigration and brutal crackdowns. The enormous twin Kirkuk-Ceyhan pipelines from Iraq to the Mediterranean snakes its way through the Kurdish mountains, carrying 1.6 million barrels of oil every day. Its construction brought thousands of Turkish troops along its the route and into nearby villages.

Oil reserves in both Syria and Turkey – while not enormous – are heavily concentrated in Kurdish areas. 60% of Syrian oil is in and around Rojava, while 99% of crude extracted in Turkey comes from the south-east. Shell recently started fracking for shale gas around Diyarbakir. More reasons why Turkish and Syrian governments opposed any Kurdish autonomy.

The conservative-nationalist Kurdish Regional Government in Iraq managed to leverage its oil resources to attain significant autonomy, largely by making itself an ally to western energy interests and neoliberal power. In contrast, the Kurdish movements in Turkey and Syria are aiming for greater social liberation.

Who can decolonise energy?

Kurdish autonomy in Turkey or Syria could threaten western oil interests, especially with the Öcalan-inspired PKK and PYD sister parties both espousing “democratic, ecological, gender-liberated society”. The PYD is the driving force in Rojava, where popular assemblies have seen a “flourishing of a democratic culture that promotes popular participation, social emancipation, gender equality, ecological sensitivity, local self-organization, and ethnic and religious pluralism.”

Rojava’s deliberative politics has created a vision of an ecological society not subjugated to neoliberalism. Its political economy is characterised by community-based production and large-scale cooperatives. The Assad regime’s property was turned over to worker-managed co-operatives. A free Rojava is less open to exploitation for foreign interests, like Gulfsands, the London sanctions-dodging oil company that drilled for crude in Rojava.

The PKK and PYD are the most organised and democratic political forces in the region, and have the best chance to begin democratising and decolonising energy. Energy democracy in the Middle East would be transformative globally. Western elites use the control of oil overseas to weaken democratic forces at home, fearmongering about “energy security” and undermining the power of energy workers.

We need Rojava

This is one more reason why the US and Turkey are relaxed about ISIS and the YPG battling it out. No elite power wants a progressive and democratic revolution that could begin to transform our energy future. Neither the US or Russia, Turkey or Iran, the Israelis or Saudi Arabia.

By delaying meaningful airstrikes on ISIS positions around Kobane, the US ensured that the PYD became dependent on western support. The YPG needs heavy weapons – airdrops have begun and there is potential for more. The US excels at using “aid” to alter movement politics and enforce subservience. Guns come with strings attached and American military advisers to pull them. But the PYD/PKK have deep ideological roots and hopefully won’t roll over.

Whichever way the battle for Kobane ends, the longer struggle for Rojava will continue. We all need Rojava, as an inspirational model to draw on, and as an ally in dismantling energy colonialism that keeps us all weak. Rojava needs us, and we need Rojava.

This article was originally published in the independent online magazine www.opendemocracy.net

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The idea that through a ‘$13 billion settlement’ the Justice Dept cracked down on Chase was a carefully contrived fiction

Matt Taibbi reports: The average person had no way of knowing what a terrible deal the Chase settlement [reached in September, 2013] was for the country. The terms were even lighter than the slap-on-the-wrist formula that allowed Wall Street banks to “neither admit nor deny” wrongdoing – the deals that had helped spark the Occupy protests. Yet those notorious deals were like the Nuremberg hangings compared to the regulatory innovation that Holder’s Justice Department cooked up for Dimon and Co.

Instead of a detailed complaint naming names, Chase was allowed to sign a flimsy, 10-and-a-half-page “statement of facts” that was: (a) so short, a first-year law student could read it in the time it takes to eat a tuna sandwich, and (b) so vague, a halfway intelligent person could read it and not know anyone had done anything wrong.

The ink was barely dry on the deal before Chase would have the balls to insinuate its innocence. “The firm has not admitted to violations of the law,” said CFO Marianne Lake. But the deal’s most brazen innovation was the way it bypassed the judicial branch. Previously, federal regulators had had bad luck with judges when trying to dole out slap-on-the-wrist settlements to banks. In a pair of celebrated cases, an unpleasantly honest federal judge named Jed Rakoff had rejected sweetheart deals worked out between banks and slavish regulators and had commanded the state to go back to the drawing board and come up with real punishments.

Seemingly not wanting to deal with even the possibility of such a thing happening, Holder blew off the idea of showing the settlement to a judge. The settlement, says Kelleher, “was unprecedented in many ways, including being very carefully crafted to bypass the court system. . . . There can be little doubt that the DOJ and JP-Morgan were trying to avoid disclosure of their dirty deeds and prevent public scrutiny of their sweetheart deal.” Kelleher asks a rhetorical question: “Can you imagine the outcry if [Bush-era Attorney General] Alberto Gonzales had gone into the backroom and given Halliburton immunity in exchange for a billion dollars?”

The deal was widely considered a good one for both sides, but Chase emerged with barely a scratch. First, the ludicrously nonspecific language surrounding the settlement put you, me and every other American taxpayer on the hook for roughly a quarter of Chase’s check. Because most of the settlement monies were specifically not called fines or penalties, Chase was allowed to treat some $7 billion of the settlement as a tax write-off.

Couple this with the fact that the bank’s share price soared six percent on news of the settlement, adding more than $12 billion in value to shareholders, and one could argue Chase actually made money from the deal. What’s more, to defray the cost of this and other fines, Chase last year laid off 7,500 lower-level employees. Meanwhile, per-employee compensation for everyone else rose four percent, to $122,653. But no one made out better than Dimon. The board awarded a 74 percent raise to the man who oversaw the biggest regulatory penalty ever, upping his compensation package to about $20 million. [Continue reading…]

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Obama to seek new authorization for fight against ISIS

The Washington Post reports: President Obama said Wednesday that he will ask Congress for new authority to combat the Islamic State, replacing the administration’s reliance on laws passed more than a decade ago to justify its current military operations against the militants in Syria and Iraq.

“The idea is to right-size and update whatever authorization Congress provides to suit the current fight rather than previous fights,” the president said at a White House news conference.

“We now have a different type of enemy; the strategy is different,” Obama said. “It makes sense for us to make sure that the authorization . . . reflects what we perceive to be not just our strategy over the next two or three months, but our strategy going forward.”

Obama pledged nearly 18 months ago to work with lawmakers to “refine and ultimately repeal” what he said were the outdated 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force, or AUMF, against al-Qaeda and the 2002 authority against Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

Since then, White House engagement with Congress on the issue has been minimal. [Continue reading…]

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Turkish soldiers kill activist Kader Ortakaya at Kobane border

Firat News Agency reports: It came out that the woman killed in the attack by Turkish troops at Suruç-Kobanê border today is 28-year-old Kader Ortakaya, an activist from the Collective Freedom Platform and post-graduate at Marmara University.

Kader Ortakaya has lost her life after being shot on the head as Turkish troops fired real bullets and intense tear gas on artists affiliated to the Initiative for Free Art who formed a human chain at Suruç-Kobanê border today.

Soldiers also fired tear gas and real bullets on the people at the Kobanê side of the border.

The young woman’s body has been taken to the hospital in Kobanê and will reportedly be transferred to the Forensic Medicine Institution in Urfa via the Mürşitpınar border crossing.

Kader Ortakaya was from Siverek district of Urfa and doing master degree at Marmara University in Istanbul after graduating from the department of sociology. Ortakaya was joining the resistance vigil in the villages of Mehser and Miseynter for around 25 days. She had also taken part in the works of women’s academy in Amed, Gezi protests of last year, as a person known to be sensitive towards social events.

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Pope Francis: ‘The Vatican is with the Kurdish people’

Kurdish Question reports: In a gathering of the Global Meeting of Popular Movements hosted by the Vatican in Rome between the dates of 27-29 October, Pope Francis met with Kurdish activists from Kurdish Network.

The event was attended by trade unions, women’s movements and land movements from 50 countries. The discussions revolved around struggling against the structural causes of inequality and how the struggles of the people should unify in order to bring about change that transcends national, continental and religious boundaries.

Pope Francis met with several delegations from different countries. Members of the Kurdish Network based in Rome met with Pope Francis to discuss the situation in Kobane and ask for support for the Kurdish people’s resistance against ISIS. The Pope stated that he was following the situation closely and that the “Vatican is with the Kurdish people”.

The Kobane resistance was included in the final resolution of the meeting. The resolution stated that a corridor must be opened to Kobane, support for ISIS — both financial and logistical — should be ceased and the Rojava autonomous region must be recognised by the international community.

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Shamsi and Harwood: An electronic archipelago of domestic surveillance

Let me tell you my modest post-9/11 dream.  One morning, I’ll wake up and see a newspaper article that begins something like this: “The FBI is attempting to persuade an obscure regulatory body in Washington to change its rules of engagement in order to curtail the agency’s significant powers to hack into and carry out surveillance of computers.” Now, wouldn’t that be amazing? Unfortunately, as you’ve undoubtedly already guessed, that day didn’t come last week. To create that sentence I had to fiddle with the odd word or two in the lead sentence of an article about the FBI’s attempt to gain “significant new powers to hack into and carry out surveillance of computers throughout the U.S. and around the world.”

When it comes to the expansion of our national security-cum-surveillance state, last week was just another humdrum seven days of news.  There were revelations about the widespread monitoring of the snail mail of Americans.  (“[T]he United States Postal Service reported that it approved nearly 50,000 requests last year from law enforcement agencies and its own internal inspection unit to secretly monitor the mail of Americans for use in criminal and national security investigations.”)  There was the news that a “sneak and peek” provision in the Patriot Act that “allows investigators to conduct searches without informing the target of the search” was now being used remarkably regularly.  Back in 2001, supporters of the Act had sworn that the provision would only be applied in rare cases involving terrorism.  Last week we learned that it is being used thousands of times a year as a common law enforcement tool in drug cases.  Oh, and on our list should go the FBI’s new push to get access to your encrypted iPhones!

And don’t forget the reports on the Bureau’s remarkably creative attempts to cross various previously forbidden search and surveillance lines.  Last week, for instance, we learned that FBI agents impersonated a media outfit, creating a fake Associated Press article in 2007 in order to implant malware on the computer of a 15-year-old suspected of making bomb threats.  (“The AP said the plan undermined the independence of the press. The story also compromised its credibility to gather news safely and effectively, especially in parts of the world where its credibility relies on its independence.”)  Similarly, news tumbled out about a recent investigation into illegal gambling in which the FBI turned off the Internet in three Las Vegas luxury “villas” that belonged to the Caesar’s Palace Hotel and Casino and then sent in its agents without warrants as “repairmen,” in the process secretly making videos that led to arrests.

Call it just another week of ho-hum news about American intelligence and law enforcement outfits running roughshod over American rights and the Constitution.  And then, of course, there are those ever-expanding watchlists meant to keep you safe from “terrorism.”  As Hina Shamsi and Matthew Harwood of the ACLU point out, the web of watchlists on which Americans might now find their names circulating is staggeringly, redundantly vast and still expanding.  It essentially adds up to a post-9/11 secret system of identification, they write, that once would have boggled the American imagination but is now just an accepted part of the American way of life. Tom Engelhardt

Uncle Sam’s databases of suspicion
A shadow form of national ID
By Hina Shamsi and Matthew Harwood

It began with an unexpected rapping on the front door.

When Wiley Gill opened up, no one was there. Suddenly, two police officers appeared, their guns drawn, yelling, “Chico Police Department.”

“I had tunnel vision,” Gill said, “The only thing I could see was their guns.”

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The internet data miners pose a bigger threat than the NSA data buccaneers

In an interview with LA Weekly, documentary-maker Laura Poitras — who along with Glenn Greenwald introduced Edward Snowden to the world — contrasts the difference between NSA surveillance and data mining by the likes of Facebook and Google by saying:

I do think there’s cause to be concerned about what Google can do with the information it has on you. It’s frightening, but in a different way, because Google has less power than the government. The relationship with Google is consensual.

No one has to use Google, just as no one has to use the internet — at least that’s one argument that some observers want to push when painting Silicon Valley data-collection as a cause of less concern than government surveillance.

But there reaches a point where the use of a new technology becomes so ubiquitous that choosing not to use it is more difficult than using it. By default we all use electricity and have become dependent on its availability. And even among the tiny segment of the population who have chosen to live “off the grid,” most use alternative systems of electricity generation. Electricity, in the modern world, is something that most people believe they need.

After 25 years, the internet has rapidly moved in the direction of becoming a public utility — a service that most Americans not only find useful but increasingly view as a necessity. During the same period, the commercial use of the internet has come to be dominated by a handful of companies and their individual and collective power makes it debatable whether we should see ourselves as consensual technology users.

Technically, Google might not be a monopoly, but it has so much market dominance it has become synonymous with search. That means that for most people, choosing to use Google is no different from choosing to use the internet.

Even while it’s hard to argue that Google has more power than the U.S. government, the giants of the internet should really be viewed as a collective entity in that they are all focused on the same goal: maximizing the commercial value of the time people spend using the internet. In pursuit of that goal their unwavering intention is to maximize their ability to control the behavior of internet users.

While the NSA glances over everyone’s shoulder on the miniscule chance it might glimpse something interesting, Google, Facebook, and Twitter want to get inside your brain, change the way it operates, and impact the way you live.

If that impact in its minutiae — buying songs on iTunes, clicking “like” buttons on Facebook, or crafting tweets that don’t even merit retweeting — seems largely trivial and thus innocuous, we are failing to see the extent to which technology companies have become like textile mills weaving the fabric of our lives.

We choose the threads, but they make the design.

This is a totalitarian project designed to change whole societies, but since it is guided by commercial imperatives rather than state control, most Americans seem to regard this as fundamentally benign.

Adam Bain, Twitter’s President of Global Revenue, sees his company’s goal as being to “monetise emotions.” Twitter wants to be able to train its users to spend money without thinking by triggering purchasing choices “in the moment.”

The fears about what the NSA could do with your data that have been generated by the Snowden revelations, involve legitimate concerns about privacy and surveillance, but they have also had the effect of turning attention away from larger issues.

Among Americans, nothing is easier than capitalizing on fear of government, but the powers that exercise more influence over most people’s daily lives in this country are now based in Silicon Valley, not Washington DC.

Every shred of information they can gather about everyone, they are right now putting to use as they engage in the largest exercise in social engineering ever undertaken in human history.

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Government requests for Facebook user data are up 24% in six months

The Los Angeles Times reports: Government requests for Facebook data increased 24% in just six months, the social media giant said Tuesday, and nearly half of those requests came from the United States.

Between January and June, governments across the globe made 34,946 requests for data, according to the Menlo Park, Calif., company’s latest transparency report. The United States was responsible for 15,433 of those requests, spanning 23,667 accounts.

Facebook turned over data in about 80% of the cases; many of the requests were parts of search warrants or subpoenas, the report shows. The amount of content restricted or removed because of local laws increased about 19% since the end of 2013.

The world’s largest social network began releasing transparency reports in June 2013, after revelations that the company shared user data with the National Security Agency’s secret Internet surveillance program, Prism.

“We scrutinize every government request we receive for legal sufficiency under our terms and the strict letter of the law, and push back hard when we find deficiencies or are served with overly broad requests,” Facebook’s deputy general counsel, Chris Sonderby, said in a statement.

Over the same period, Twitter received 2,058 government requests, 1,257 of which were from the U.S. government, according to its September transparency report. It shared data in 73% of those cases.

Google has seen a 15% increase in requests since the second half of last year, and a 150% jump since the company began publishing such data in 2009. In the United States, requests have hiked 19% and 250%, respectively.

The PR departments inside the social media giants must love reports like this. Facebook, Twitter et al, get to play victims of government power and cast themselves as heroic defenders of public interest, dedicated to transparency and strict compliance with the law.

What gets glossed over is the fact that the data buccaneer, the NSA, that would have no data to plunder if it wasn’t being gathered by the internet companies in the first place.

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Before Mark Udall leaves the Senate he should ‘leak’ the CIA torture report

Trevor Timm writes: America’s rising civil liberties movement lost one of its strongest advocates in the US Congress on Tuesday night, as Colorado’s Mark Udall lost his Senate seat to Republican Cory Gardner. While the election was not a referendum on Udall’s support for civil liberties (Gardner expressed support for surveillance reform, and Udall spent most of his campaign almost solely concentrating on reproductive issues), the loss is undoubtedly a blow for privacy and transparency advocates, as Udall was one of the NSA and CIA’s most outspoken and consistent critics. Most importantly, he sat on the intelligence committee, the Senate’s sole oversight board of the clandestine agencies, where he was one of just a few dissenting members.

But Udall’s loss doesn’t have to be all bad. The lame-duck transparency advocate now has a rare opportunity to truly show his principles in the final two months of his Senate career and finally expose, in great detail, the secret government wrongdoing he’s been criticizing for years. On his way out the door, Udall can use congressional immunity provided to him by the Constitution’s Speech and Debate clause to read the Senate’s still-classified 6,000-page CIA torture report into the Congressional record – on the floor, on TV, for the world to see.

There’s ample precedent for this. [Continue reading…]

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Inside Kobane

Ersin Caksu reports: Kobane is imbued with a tremendous spirit of solidarity.

Travelling around the city by day is simple because the first vehicle you meet on the street will stop and the driver will offer you a lift.

Maybe that solidarity helps explain why Kobane has held out for so long.

Very few people are still living in their own houses. When necessary, the doors of empty properties are opened and needy people are relocated.

Those still in their homes share the cheese, pickles, jams and dried vegetables they have stocked for the winter with those in need.

Although people have few belongings left, they get by through sharing what they have.

For example, if a car is needed, the YPG unlock a garage, put the owner’s name and the car’s number plate on record so that they can be compensated, and the vehicle is used.

There is no commercial activity in the city. The only business still open is the bakery.

The bread produced here is distributed free among the people.

Other food, which is mainly canned food from the stocks and from the humanitarian aid sent to Kobane, is distributed on certain days of the week as equally as possible.

Water is distributed by tankers. The local administration also distributes flour once every three days. Five households share a 50kg (110lb) sack of flour.

Those civilians who can provide voluntary help behind the frontline.

They repair vehicles, guns and generators, in a city that has had no electricity for the past 18 months.

They help doctors tend to the wounded, carry arms and ammunition to the frontline, cook for fighters and repair their clothes. [Continue reading…]

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Kobane official calls for more outside help to defeat ISIS

Rudaw reports: Anwar Muslim, president of the Syrian Kurdish canton of Kobane, appealed for more international support and weapons to defeat Islamic State militants.

He thanked the United States, which has air dropped weapons, and the Iraqi Peshmerga, who crossed the Turkish border into Kobane last Friday and where they appear to have helped to halt ISIS attacks.

Muslim, who travelled from Kobane to Erbil for a conference, said the People’s Protection Units (YPG), the Syrian Kurdish militia, now considered itself part of the international coalition battling ISIS.

The town of Kobane and the surrounding canton had been under pressure from ISIS for months with no outside assistance to its defenders. Thanks to US air support and Peshmerga reinforcements, the town has now held out for more than 50 days.

Some 30 per cent of the canton was now out of the control of ISIS, Muslim told the second day of the Middle East Research Institute conference.

“ISIS is a disease just like cancer,” he said. “We acknowledge the help of all international forces and the giving of weapons in particular.”

ISIS had to be “killed” because of its savagery and opposition to humanitarian values and he hailed the YPG as “heroes”.

The co-operation between the US and Peshmerga with the YPG of recent weeks marks a significant shift in Washington’s attitude towards a group previously ostracised because of its links to the Turkish Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK), considered a terrorist organisation by Washington and Ankara.

The apparent political settlement or “marriage of convenience” between the US and the YPG could prove a model as Washington sought to create partnerships with other Syrian opposition groups, Max Hoffman of the Centre for American Progress, told the forum. [Continue reading…]

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