Glenn Greenwald writes: In the wake of Osama bin Laden’s summary execution one year ago, many predicted that the War on Terror would finally begin to recede. Here’s what has happened since then:
*With large bipartisan majorities, Congress renewed the once-controversial Patriot Act without a single reform, and it was signed into law by President Obama; Harry Reid accused those urging reforms of putting the country at risk of a Terrorist attack.
* For the first time, perhaps ever, a U.S. citizen was assassinated by the CIA, on orders from the President, without a shred of due process and far from any battlefield; two weeks later, his 16-year-old American son was also killed by his own government; the U.S. Attorney General then gave a speech claiming the President has the power to target U.S. citizens for death based on unproven, secret accusations of Terrorism.
* With large bipartisan majorities, Congress enacted, and the President signed, a new law codifying presidential powers of worldwide indefinite detention and an expanded statutory defintion of the War on Terror. [Continue reading…]
Noah Shachtman writes: Maybe the reason that the Afghan counterinsurgency has been such a flop is that the people there are too traumatized and depressed to make nation-building work.
That’s the controversial conclusion of an Air Force colonel who recently spent a year in Afghanistan as the head of a reconstruction team. In an unpublished paper, Col. Erik Goepner, currently serving as a military fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, argues that the Afghan counterinsurgency was all-but-doomed before U.S. troops ever landed there. The reason, he writes, is “the high rate of mental disorders” in Afghanistan and other fragile states. Pervasive depression and post-traumatic stress disorder leads to a sense of “learned helplessness” among the people. And that makes it next-to-impossible to build up the country’s economy and government.
Goepner’s argument has a gut-level appeal, observers of Afghanistan like Joshua Foust of the American Security Project say. But Goepner relies almost exclusively for his psychological data on a 2009 study-of-studies (.pdf) in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Foust complains. That’s not a strong enough foundation to make such broad conclusions about Afghanistan and every other insurgent battlefield.
“It’s an interesting but unsupported argument that needs a lot more support and data to be credible,” Foust says.
That JAMA paper finds that conflict-torn countries have average PTSD rates of 30% or higher — compared to just 5% in the rest of the world. That’s a six-fold difference between populations who are under the stress of war and those that are not. The results for depression were largely the same.
“If an American unit had PTSD and depression rates of 30% or higher, it would likely be declared combat ineffective,” Goepner writes. “When we conduct COIN (counterinsurgency) in weak and failed states, we are supporting a government and security force that is likewise combat, or perhaps more appropriately, mission ineffective. Mentoring and training them to a sufficient level of legitimacy and effectiveness is incredibly difficult, particularly so in the timeframes likely required by domestic political considerations at home.”
The question is how reliable those statistics about trauma and depression really are. The 181 surveys summed up in the JAMA paper largely rely on surveys of the population. That’s a legendarily imprecise way of gauging mental health. Moreover, those surveys stretch all the way back to 1980 — a time when the understanding of PTSD was quite a bit different than it is today. And there’s nothing in the paper that explicitly links all this trauma to whether governments under attack fail or succeed.
Afghan officials, however, say the figures match what they see. “Two out of four Afghans suffer from trauma, depression and anxiety — they make up some 50 percent of the population,” the director of the health ministry’s mental health department told Agence France-Presse in January. “They are in trauma mainly because of three decades of war, poverty, family disputes and migration issues.”
The traumatic effects of war on a population should not be underestimated, but in spite of this the crucial difference between an insurgency and a counterinsurgency in Afghanistan or anywhere else has to be the difference between people who know what they are fighting for and people who are being “mentored” to fight — it’s the difference between internal and external agency and the empowerment and disempowerment that flow from each of these.
In addition, the insurgents have an ideological advantage. Fighting to expel infidels and protect ones land and ones religion is a goal with much greater clarity than fighting to prevent the Taliban from regaining power. How different the story might have been had bin Laden not ordered the assassination of Ahmad Shah Massoud.
Haaretz reports: Israel’s military prosecution announced Tuesday that no legal steps will be taken against those responsible for the killing of 21 members of the Samouni family during the 2009 Operation Cast Lead in Gaza.
A letter was received by the human rights group B’Tselem from Major Dorit Tuval, Deputy Military Advocate for Operational Matters. Tuval said that the case has been closed after the investigation has found that the attack on the civilians, “who did not take part in the fighting,” and their killing were not done knowingly and directly, or out of haste and negligence “in a manner that would indicate criminal responsibility.”
B’Tselem activists condemned the decision and called for an alternative investigatory body to probe such incidents.
On the morning of January 4, Givati commanders ordered the dozens of members of the extended Samouni family to leave the three-story house (the home of Talal Samouni), which they then turned into their outpost. The soldiers told them to gather in the one-story home of Wail Samouni, on the other side of the road and about 30 meters southeast. The Samounis took the fact that the soldiers themselves concentrated the family in one building, and saw that there were infants, children, women, elderly people and unarmed men, as insurance that they would not be harmed.
Despite the intense firing heard all around them that entire evening, the family’s fears were mitigated by the proximity of the soldiers who had assembled them into the one home. Several of the Samouni men even left the house on Monday morning (January 5) to collect wood for a fire, hoping to bake pita and heat up tea.
They also called out to a relative who had remained in his home, a few meters east of them, and suggested he join them because their house was safe.
In conversations with Haaretz, the Samouni men explained how they felt safe due to the proximity of the IDF soldiers and due to the fact that the soldiers who gathered them in the house saw that they are all civilians.
According to testimonies given to Haaretz and Breaking the Silence by soldiers who took part in the attack, then-Givati Brigade commander Col. Ilan Malka concluded from UAV images of the house that armed Palestinians were inside.
He then ordered an aerial strike on the house, killing one person on the spot. When the casualties went back inside the house, another missile was shot on the house and 20 more people were killed, including three babies and six children between the ages of 5 to 16. Some 40 people were wounded.
Some of the casualties were trapped in the destroyed house, among the bodies, for three days, until the IDF allowed rescue services to arrive at the house and evacuate the bodies.
Attorney Yael Stein of B’Tselem said in response, “It cannot be that in a well-managed system no person will be found guilty of the army operation that led to the killing of 21 people who were not involved in combat, and resided in a structure on the instructions of the army – even if the attack was not done purposefully,” she said.
“The manner in which the army rids itself of responsibility in this case… again illustrates the need for an investigatory body outside of the army.”
This week, the White House will celebrate the anniversary of the assassination of Osama bin Laden as though it were the crowning achievement of its foreign policy. On Wednesday, Obama will hold a rare televised interview in the situation room to discuss the raid in Abbottabad. His campaign has released of a web video in which Bill Clinton says President Obama “took the harder and the more honorable path, and the one that produced, in my opinion, the best result”. The video then asks, “Which path would Mitt Romney have taken?”
The man who entered the White House with the message of “hope” and “change” wants to hold on to it with a record of “shoot to kill”.
Chris Hedges writes: When civilizations start to die they go insane. Let the ice sheets in the Arctic melt. Let the temperatures rise. Let the air, soil and water be poisoned. Let the forests die. Let the seas be emptied of life. Let one useless war after another be waged. Let the masses be thrust into extreme poverty and left without jobs while the elites, drunk on hedonism, accumulate vast fortunes through exploitation, speculation, fraud and theft. Reality, at the end, gets unplugged. We live in an age when news consists of Snooki’s pregnancy, Hulk Hogan’s sex tape and Kim Kardashian’s denial that she is the naked woman cooking eggs in a photo circulating on the Internet. Politicians, including presidents, appear on late night comedy shows to do gags and they campaign on issues such as creating a moon colony. “At times when the page is turning,” Louis-Ferdinand Celine wrote in “Castle to Castle,” “when History brings all the nuts together, opens its Epic Dance Halls! hats and heads in the whirlwind! Panties overboard!”
The quest by a bankrupt elite in the final days of empire to accumulate greater and greater wealth, as Karl Marx observed, is modern society’s version of primitive fetishism. This quest, as there is less and less to exploit, leads to mounting repression, increased human suffering, a collapse of infrastructure and, finally, collective death. It is the self-deluded, those on Wall Street or among the political elite, those who entertain and inform us, those who lack the capacity to question the lusts that will ensure our self-annihilation, who are held up as exemplars of intelligence, success and progress. The World Health Organization calculates that one in four people in the United States suffers from chronic anxiety, a mood disorder or depression—which seems to me to be a normal reaction to our march toward collective suicide. Welcome to the asylum.
When the most basic elements that sustain life are reduced to a cash product, life has no intrinsic value. The extinguishing of “primitive” societies, those that were defined by animism and mysticism, those that celebrated ambiguity and mystery, those that respected the centrality of the human imagination, removed the only ideological counterweight to a self-devouring capitalist ideology. Those who held on to pre-modern beliefs, such as Native Americans, who structured themselves around a communal life and self-sacrifice rather than hoarding and wage exploitation, could not be accommodated within the ethic of capitalist exploitation, the cult of the self and the lust for imperial expansion. The prosaic was pitted against the allegorical. And as we race toward the collapse of the planet’s ecosystem we must restore this older vision of life if we are to survive. [Continue reading…]
Steve Linde, editor-in-chief of the Jerusalem Post, was master of ceremonies at a conference the newspaper hosted in New York City on Sunday. There were 1,200 attendees.
Caroline B. Glick, Post senior contributing editor, drew cheers from the crowd when she called for permanent Israeli control of Judea and Samaria [the West Bank], saying it was better to keep the Palestinians inside Israel rather than allow them to establish a “terror state.”
Have no doubt: neither Glick nor those cheering her believe that keeping Palestinians permanently inside Israel should lead to them acquiring equal rights as Israeli citizens. What she is advocating is quite simply the institutionalization of Jewish fascism in a Jewish apartheid state. But that was just an uncontroversial side note in the event.
This is how Haaretz described what Linde called “most dramatic moment in the conference”:
An embarrassing confrontation broke out … when former Mossad chief Meir Dagan accused Environmental Protection Minister Gilad Erdan of lying, while Erdan replied that Dagan is sabotaging Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s efforts to put a halt to Iran’s nuclear aspirations.
At the conference … the two also exchanged harsh words after Dagan warned Erdan over the so-called “Dagan law,” forbidding former security officials to issue open statements until a certain cooling period wears off.
“As in Germany, you know where you begin but you don’t know where you end,” Dagan told the audience.
The exchange erupted after Dagan was asked about statements made by former head of the Shin Bet security service Yuval Diskin. Diskin criticized Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak on Friday over their bellicose stance on Iran, as well as what he called the premier’s unwillingness to advance peace talks with the Palestinian Authority.
Dagan said that Diskin was his friend, and added that he “spoke his own truth.” “Diskin is a very serious man, a very talented man, he has a lot of experience in countering terrorism,” he said, adding that he “talked about a matter that is close to his heart.” Dagan also dismissed criticism of Diskin for not voicing his opinion to Netanyahu and Barak earlier. According to Dagan, Diskin had done so “in close quarters and on many occasions.”
“I have no doubt that the Israeli Air Force is able to destroy the infrastructure of Iran’s nuclear program – but five minutes later, Israel would find itself involved in a regional war, involving Hezbollah and possibly Syria,” the former Mossad chief said.
Dagan also said that an attack would bolster the support for the Iranian regime as opposed to the sanctions imposed by the international community which have been eroding its public support.
He added that a regional war would lead the superpowers to impose a settlement with the Palestinians on Israel – a settlement which he vehemently opposes.
Erdan replied that “if Diskin thinks things are so dangerous, he should not have stayed in his post for five years and agree to a sixth year. He should have resigned.” Dagan intervened at this point and countered that “I may be impolite, but I prefer the truth be told.”
Erdan then said he would prefer if “Mossad chiefs do not sabotage Netanyahu’s efforts to garner the world’s support against Iran. He also referred to Diskin’s description of Barak and Netanyahu’s “messianic tendencies,” and asked, “Is this how a serious man, as you describe him, speaks?”
The exchange between Erdan and Dagan clearly made the audience and American members of the panel uncomfortable.
The ever-eloquent Alan Dershowitz garnered a standing ovation from the crowd when he appealed to Israelis not to hang their dirty laundry in public, keep internal debates in Israel and, when on American soil, refrain from criticizing standing presidents such as Obama, who was essentially a friend of Israel.
For his part, Dershowitz focused his anger at what he called the almost eroticized delegitimization of Israel among certain intellectual elites, including Jews and Israelis.
This new form of anti-Semitism, he said, was as lethal as the rhetoric before the Holocaust, and he urged Israel and world Jewry to combat it effectively.
So let’s be sure I understand this correctly. Dershowitz would presumably see this post as one small part of the delegitimization effort — whether he would discern an almost eroticized element I have no idea. At the same time he apparently does not regard Caroline Glick’s promotion of Jewish fascism as in any way undermining the legitimacy of Israel. Fascism OK. Criticism not OK.
Maybe this explains why Linde was able to wrap up the event feeling deeply satisfied.
As I took a taxi to JFK, the Russian Jewish cabbie asked what I had done in New York. When I told him, he said: “Oh, I heard it was a big success.
“I gave a few of your people a ride to and from the airport.”
And at the airport, the El Al security employee remarked, “Wow, you guys created a big buzz. I’ve seen it on the news all over the place.”
With such glowing reviews (“the Zionist dream is alive and well, and the Jewish state has many more fans than foes,” says Linde), it makes you wonder why anyone’s worried about delegitimization.
Oh right, it’s because there’s another Holocaust lurking round the corner. How could I forget?
Moira Herbst writes: The May Day tradition dates back hundreds of years to pagan celebrations of spring and the renewal of life it promises. Celts, Teutons and Romans marked the day with dancing, tree-decorating, processions and rituals involving fairies, goddesses, wreaths and flowers.
Since the late 19th century, some of the wreaths and adornments have given way to banners and flags, as 1 May has become International Workers’ Day. Workers throughout the world hold marches and parties to celebrate solidarity and the common goal of achieving better working conditions and better lives.
But American workers, for the most part, have been left out of the festivities. At the height of the cold war, May Day was considered too radical, too “Soviet” perhaps, and the American Federation of Labor itself wanted distance from it. In 1958, President Dwight Eisenhower went so far as to declare 1 May “National Loyalty Day”. Loyalty to one concept of America, that is – not worker solidarity.
That decision to rob Americans of a day of recognition of workers’ struggles worldwide was a mistake. Now, it’s time to take it back. [Continue reading…]
George Monbiot writes: The conviction of Charles Taylor, the former president of Liberia, is said to have sent an unequivocal message to current leaders: that great office confers no immunity. In fact it sent two messages: if you run a small, weak nation, you may be subject to the full force of international law; if you run a powerful nation, you have nothing to fear.
While anyone with an interest in human rights should welcome the verdict, it reminds us that no one has faced legal consequences for launching the illegal war against Iraq. This fits the Nuremberg tribunal’s definition of a “crime of aggression”, which it called “the supreme international crime”. The charges on which, in an impartial system, George Bush, Tony Blair and their associates should have been investigated are far graver than those for which Taylor was found guilty.
The foreign secretary, William Hague, claims that Taylor’s conviction “demonstrates that those who have committed the most serious of crimes can and will be held to account for their actions”. But the international criminal court, though it was established 10 years ago, and though the crime of aggression has been recognised in international law since 1945, still has no jurisdiction over “the most serious of crimes”. This is because the powerful nations, for obvious reasons, are procrastinating. Nor have the United Kingdom, the United States and other western nations incorporated the crime of aggression into their own legislation. International law remains an imperial project, in which only the crimes committed by vassal states are punished. [Continue reading…]
The Associated Press reports: News Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch must take responsibility for serious failings that caused Britain’s tabloid phone hacking scandal, lawmakers said Tuesday in a scathing report — as a narrow majority also insisted the tycoon was unfit to lead his global media empire.
In a report on the malpractice at Murdoch’s now shuttered News of The World tabloid, legislators accused Murdoch and his son James of overseeing a corporate culture that sought “to cover up rather than seek out wrongdoing.”
Parliament’s cross-party Culture, Media and Sport committee unanimously agreed that three key News International executives had misled Parliament by offering false accounts of their knowledge of the extent of phone hacking — a rare and serious censure that can see offenders hauled before Parliament to make a personal apology.
The panel said the House of Commons would decide on the punishment meted out to the three executives: New York Daily News editor Colin Myler, a former News of The World editor; the British tabloid’s longtime lawyer Tom Crone and Les Hinton, the former executive chairman of News International, former publisher of The Wall Street Journal and former board member of The Associated Press.
Members of the panel said Rupert Murdoch, 81, had insisted he was unaware that hacking was widespread at the News of The World, blaming his staff for keeping him in the dark. That explanation was not accepted.
The legislators said if that was true, “he turned a blind eye and exhibited willful blindness to what was going on in his companies.”
In a ruling opposed by 4 Conservative Party members of the 11-member committee, the panel cast serious doubt on Murdoch’s credentials as an executive.
“We conclude, therefore, that Rupert Murdoch is not a fit person to exercise the stewardship of a major international company,” the report said.
The judgment on Murdoch implies that News Corp., which he heads, is also not fit to control British Sky Broadcasting, in which the company has a controlling stake of 39 percent.
Ofcom, the broadcast regulator, said it is reading the report with interest.
“Ofcom has a duty … to be satisfied that any person holding a broadcasting license is, and remains, fit and proper to do so,” the statement read. “Ofcom is continuing to assess the evidence.”
Part One: For little Sayef, there will be no Arab Spring. He lies, just 14 months old, on a small red blanket cushioned by a cheap mattress on the floor, occasionally crying, his head twice the size it should be, blind and paralysed. Sayeffedin Abdulaziz Mohamed – his full name – has a kind face in his outsized head and they say he smiles when other children visit and when Iraqi families and neighbours come into the room.
But he will never know the history of the world around him, never enjoy the freedoms of a new Middle East. He can move only his hands and take only bottled milk because he cannot swallow. He is already almost too heavy for his father to carry. He lives in a prison whose doors will remain forever closed.
It’s as difficult to write this kind of report as it is to understand the courage of his family. Many of the Fallujah families whose children have been born with what doctors call “congenital birth anomalies” prefer to keep their doors closed to strangers, regarding their children as a mark of personal shame rather than possible proof that something terrible took place here after the two great American battles against insurgents in the city in 2004, and another conflict in 2007.
After at first denying the use of phosphorous shells during the second battle of Fallujah, US forces later admitted that they had fired the munitions against buildings in the city. Independent reports have spoken of a birth-defect rate in Fallujah far higher than other areas of Iraq, let alone other Arab countries. No one, of course, can produce cast-iron evidence that American munitions have caused the tragedy of Fallujah’s children. [Continue reading…]
Part Two: The pictures flash up on a screen on an upper floor of the Fallujah General Hospital. And all at once, Nadhem Shokr al-Hadidi’s administration office becomes a little chamber of horrors. A baby with a hugely deformed mouth. A child with a defect of the spinal cord, material from the spine outside the body. A baby with a terrible, vast Cyclopean eye. Another baby with only half a head, stillborn like the rest, date of birth 17 June, 2009. Yet another picture flicks onto the screen: date of birth 6 July 2009, it shows a tiny child with half a right arm, no left leg, no genitalia.
“We see this all the time now,” Al-Hadidi says, and a female doctor walks into the room and glances at the screen. She has delivered some of these still-born children. “I’ve never seen anything as bad as this in all my service,” she says quietly. Al-Hadidi takes phone calls, greets visitors to his office, offers tea and biscuits to us while this ghastly picture show unfolds on the screen. I asked to see these photographs, to ensure that the stillborn children, the deformities, were real. There’s always a reader or a viewer who will mutter the word “propaganda” under their breath.
But the photographs are a damning, ghastly reward for such doubts. January 7, 2010: a baby with faded, yellow skin and misshapen arms. April 26, 2010: a grey mass on the side of the baby’s head. A doctor beside me speaks of “Tetralogy of Fallot”, a transposition of the great blood vessels. May 3, 2010: a frog-like creature in which – the Fallujah doctor who came into the room says this – “all the abdominal organs are trying to get outside the body.”
This is too much. These photographs are too awful, the pain and emotion of them – for the poor parents, at least – impossible to contemplate. They simply cannot be published. [Continue reading…]
Part Three: “He needs multiple surgery outside Iraq. It’s a dysfunctional problem. He has no hearing in his left ear. They told me he has to be six before they can remove cartilage from his chest wall to put in his ear. All operations have to be outside Iraq to beautify the ear and give him his hearing.”
And all the while his father talks, five-year-old Sayef Ala’a sits obediently on the sofa beside us, doing as his father tells him, moving his head to show us the scrappy bit of flesh that constitutes his left ear, tipping his head to one side so we can take pictures of it. Compared to other children with birth deformities, Sayef Ala’a is lucky. He can see, breathe, walk, run, play and listen to his father and friends with his right ear. And he is a little boy of much courage.
“He hasn’t learnt much yet – that’s because he hasn’t been to school,” his father says. “I’m worried he would be bullied at school. He’s a child, but sometimes he comes to me and says he knows he has a deformed ear; but it doesn’t matter, he says, because he has no other problems. He is shy but he doesn’t mind seeing you.” And here the father points at us as we sit beside his son on the sofa. “But no other foreigners come to see him.”
Like others in Fallujah, Sayef Ala’a’s father, who is a businessman, hopes that NGO officials will turn up at his door one day and offer the boy a foreign visa, medical treatment abroad, education. It is a dream that will never be realised – not so long as even the Iraqi government takes no interest in the deformed children of Fallujah. [Continue reading…]
John Wonderlich describes how the new cybersecurity bill, CISPA, or HR 3523, is terrible on transparency: it dismisses the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
The FOIA is, in many ways, the fundamental safeguard for public oversight of government’s activities. CISPA dismisses it entirely, for the core activities of the newly proposed powers under the bill.
If this level of disregard for public accountability exists througout the other provisions, then CISPA is a mess. Even if it isn’t, creating a whole new FOIA exemption for information that is poorly defined and doesn’t even exist yet is irresponsible, and should be opposed.
If you’re carelessly creating whole new exemptions to FOIA without hearings on the question, that suggests that the public interest isn’t being considered in this legislation. I suspect that (again) government officials have been at the table with industry, and (again) think that the interests of the public at large can be swept aside.
When public interest gets swept aside this isn’t just a familiar story about Washington; it tells us something about the nature of modern democracy: those responsible for serving the interests of the public do not see themselves as members of the public.
The people are an amorphous and somewhat impotent other who are treated as spectators to the workings of government and commerce. They are an occasional irritant, sometimes need to be shown patronizing gestures of deference, but most of the time can be regarded with as much seriousness as a flock of penguins might be viewed — though penguins tend to get more affectionate attention than ordinary people.
Why do government officials and corporate representatives have such a weak identification with the public? Mostly because they are so deeply identified with their work. Who they are and what they do appear to them to be one and the same.
Update (4/27): The House of Representatives passed the bill on Thursday by 248-168, with 42 Democrats joining 206 Republicans in backing the measure.
Update (4/26): An earlier version of this story said a proposed amendment by Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., had helped gain support for CISPA. Schiff’s amendment, which among other things would further define what’s considered a “cyber threat,” is no longer scheduled for consideration.
The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, up for debate in the House of Representatives today, has privacy activists, tech companies, security wonks and the Obama administration all jousting about what it means 2013 not only for security but Internet privacy and intellectual property. Backers expect CISPA to pass, unlike SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act that melted down amid controversy earlier this year.
Here’s a rundown on the debate and what CISPA could mean for Internet users.
What exactly is CISPA?
The act, sponsored Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., and Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger, D-Md., would make it easier for private corporations and U.S. agencies, including military and intelligence, to share information related to “cyber threats.” In theory, this would enable the government and companies to keep up-to-date on security risks and protect themselves more efficiently. CISPA would amend the National Security Act of 1947, which currently contains no reference to cyber security. Companies wouldn’t be required to share any data. They would just be allowed to do so.
Why should I care?
CISPA could enable companies like Facebook and Twitter, as well as Internet service providers, to share your personal information with the National Security Agency and the CIA, as long as that information is deemed to pertain to a cyber threat or to national security.
How does the bill define “cyber threat”?
The bill itself defines it as information “pertaining to a vulnerability of” a system or network 2014 a definition that opponents have criticized as too broad. The bill gained support after sponsors agreed to allow votes on several amendments they said would make concessions to privacy activists; one aims to narrow the definition of “cyber threat.”
When can data be shared?
Rogers said the amended version of the bill would only enable companies and intelligence agencies to share information related to 1) cyber security purposes; 2) investigation and prosecution of cyber security crimes; 3) protection of individuals from death and bodily harm; 4) child pornography; or 5) protection of the national security of the United States.
Why are privacy activists upset about CISPA?
Privacy activists like the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation contend CISPA isn’t specific enough about just what constitutes a “cyber threat.” They say it enables Internet companies and service providers to hand over sensitive user information to intelligence agencies without enough oversight from the civilian side of government. Finally, they say it does not explicitly require Internet companies to remove identifying information about users before sharing. Opponents contend, for instance, that Facebook or Twitter could share user messages with the NSA or FBI without redacting the user’s name or personal details.
CISPA also protects the private sector from liability even if they share private user information, as long as that information is deemed to have been shared for cybersecurity or national security purposes. Even though sharing is voluntary and not required under the law, privacy activists say the legal immunity CISPA provides would make it easy for the government to pressure Internet companies to give up user data.
What kind of information can be shared?
Private companies and government agencies can share any information that pertains to a “cyber threat” or that would endanger national security. That could include user information, emails, and direct messages. Companies would be allowed to share with each other as well as the government. The government is not allowed to proactively search company-provided information for purposes unrelated to cyber security, but opponents say this would be tough to enforce. The bill does not place any explicit limit on how long that information can be kept. Several proposed amendments would limit the amount and kinds of information that can be shared, but it remains to be seen which 2014 if any 2014 will be adopted.
Is CISPA basically SOPA 2.0?
No, it’s very different.
SOPA was about intellectual property; CISPA is about cyber security, but opponents believe both bills have the potential to trample constitutional rights. The comparisons to SOPA stem from language in an earlier version of CISPA that referenced intellectual property. That wording was removed early on in response to mounting criticism. SOPA would have strengthened copyright laws, barring search engines and other websites from linking to sites that violated intellectual property regulations. That prompted a First Amendment concern from critics that it would give government the power to block websites wholesale, trampling free speech. CISPA’s liability shield, on the other hand, has sparked a concern based on the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable search and seizure. Opponents contend the law would make it too easy for private companies and the intelligence community to spy on users in the name of cyber security.
Why are some of the tech companies that protested SOPA, like Facebook and Microsoft, now supporting this bill?
CISPA gives Internet companies the ability to share threat information with intelligence agencies and receive information back from them, an ability they say would enable them to deal with cyber threats more effectively. It does not compel them to protect users’ privacy (though a variety of proposed amendments aim to add more stringent privacy protections). Companies could not be held liable for divulging a user’s identity or data to the government if the information relates to a “cyber threat.”
What’s the Obama administration’s take?
The White House is backing a Senate bill proposed by Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., and has threatened to veto CISPA. Officials cite a lack of personal privacy protections. They say CISPA would enable military and intelligence agencies to take on a policing role on the internet, which the administration points out is a civilian sphere.
What is CISPA’s path forward in Congress?
A vote is set for Friday. CISPA has accumulated more than 100 cosponsors and will most likely pass the House. “This isn’t about scrambling to meet 218 votes, we are well past that,” co-sponsor Rogers said during a conference call with reporters. But the Senate is a different story 2014 there, it must compete with the Lieberman cyber security bill and one from Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.
Would CISPA really make us more secure?
It’s unclear.
Some cyber security specialists note that neither CISPA nor other cyber security bills in Congress would compel companies to update software, hire outside specialists or take other measures to preemptively secure themselves against hackers and other threats. CISPA’s backers respond that the bill would forestall a “digital Pearl Harbor,” allowing a freer flow of information for a quicker and more effective response to hackers by both the government and the private sector.
Raja Shehadeh writes: Earlier this month, I finally watched “The Law in These Parts,” a documentary by the Israeli film director Ra’anan Alexandrowicz, at the 7th International Conference for Popular Resistance. The film describes the legal system that Israel has applied in the Palestinian Occupied Territories since 1967, and it does so exclusively through interviews with members of the Israeli military legal corps who wrote and implemented the system.
I saw the film in the Palestinian village of Bilin, just west of Ramallah. This was a fitting setting for the occasion. In 2007, a local councilor secured a rare judgment from Israel’s highest court that ordered the army to reroute the separation wall and return to the villagers hectares of land that had been taken away from them. The wall was moved only last year, and the residents of Bilin continue their struggle to reclaim more land they say is theirs and was allocated to the Jewish settlement of Modiin Illit, on the other side of the rerouted wall. Alexandrowicz’s film was screened in an open area of Bilin only recently returned.
According to the film, one of the first decisions Israel made in the aftermath of 1967 was to declare the territories under its control to be ones it “held” or “administered” rather than “occupied.” This allowed it to claim that it was not bound by the Fourth Geneva Convention — a determination with far-reaching implications. [Continue reading…]
The Guardian reports: Documents found in the house where Osama bin Laden was killed a year ago show a close working relationship between top al-Qaida leaders and Mullah Omar, the overall commander of the Taliban, including frequent discussions of joint operations against Nato forces in Afghanistan, the Afghan government and targets in Pakistan.
The communications show a three-way conversation between Bin Laden, his then deputy Ayman Zawahiri and Omar, who is believed to have been in Pakistan since fleeing Afghanistan after the collapse of his regime in 2001.
They indicate a “very considerable degree of ideological convergence”, a Washington-based source familiar with the documents told the Guardian.
The news will undermine hopes of a negotiated peace in Afghanistan, where the key debate among analysts and policymakers is whether the Taliban – seen by many as following an Afghan nationalist agenda – might once again offer a safe haven to al-Qaida or like-minded militants, or whether they can be persuaded to renounce terrorism.
One possibility, experts say, is that although Omar built a strong relationship with Bin Laden and Zawahiri, other senior Taliban commanders see close alliance or co-operation with al-Qaida as deeply problematic.
Western intelligence officials estimate that there are less than 100 al-Qaida-linked fighters in Afghanistan, and last year the United Nations split its sanctions list to separate the Taliban and al-Qaida.
