Judge deals a blow to NSA data collection program

The New York Times reports: A federal judge on Monday partly blocked the National Security Agency’s program that systematically collects Americans’ domestic phone records in bulk just weeks before the agency was scheduled to shut it down and replace it. The judge said the program was most likely unconstitutional.

In a separate case challenging the program, a federal appeals court in New York on Oct. 30 had declined to weigh in on the constitutional issues, saying it would be imprudent to interfere with an orderly transition to a replacement system after Nov. 29.

But on Monday, in a 43-page ruling, Judge Richard J. Leon of United States District Court for the District of Columbia wrote that the constitutional issues were too important to leave unanswered in the history of the program, which traces back to after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and came to light in 2013 in leaks by Edward J. Snowden, the former intelligence contractor. [Continue reading…]

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The strange persistence of first languages

Julie Sedivy writes: Like a household that welcomes a new child, a single mind can’t admit a new language without some impact on other languages already residing there. Languages can co-exist, but they tussle, as do siblings, over mental resources and attention. When a bilingual person tries to articulate a thought in one language, words and grammatical structures from the other language often clamor in the background, jostling for attention. The subconscious effort of suppressing this competition can slow the retrieval of words—and if the background language elbows its way to the forefront, the speaker may resort to code-switching, plunking down a word from one language into the sentence frame of another.

Meanwhile, the weaker language is more likely to become swamped; when resources are scarce, as they are during mental exhaustion, the disadvantaged language may become nearly impossible to summon. Over time, neglecting an earlier language makes it harder and harder for it to compete for access.

According to a 2004 survey conducted in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, fewer than half of people belonging to Generation 1.5 — immigrants who arrive before their teenage years — claimed to speak the language they were born into “very well.” A 2006 study of immigrant languages in Southern California forecast that even among Mexican Americans, the slowest group to assimilate within Southern California, new arrivals would live to hear only 5 out of every 100 of their great-grandchildren speak fluent Spanish.

When a childhood language decays, so does the ability to reach far back into your own private history. Language is memory’s receptacle. It has Proustian powers. Just as smells are known to trigger vivid memories of past experiences, language is so entangled with our experiences that inhabiting a specific language helps surface submerged events or interactions that are associated with it. [Continue reading…]

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How Sinai became a launchpad for Egypt’s deadly ISIS affiliate

The Guardian reports: Grey jeans, black trainers and a surface-to-air missile were all that could be seen of the man waiting under a tree for an Egyptian military helicopter to fly past in early January 2014. He fired and the aircraft tumbled to the ground, a moment captured on video by the group that would become Isis Sinai Province, and released in triumph soon after.

The attack served notice to the Egyptian military and the rest of the world that Sinai’s Islamist insurgents had stepped up their ambitions and their capacities, drawing weapons and inspiration from the region’s other spiralling conflicts. If last week’s explosion on board a Russian Metrojet flight from Sharm el-Sheikh proves also to have been their work, those ambitions have reached a new level.

Cairo has long struggled to control the sparsely populated expanses of the Sinai Peninsula, where Islamists have found refuge with smugglers, criminals and others keen to escape too much official scrutiny. But until little over a decade ago, it was a place militants went to hide, train and plot, not somewhere they carried out attacks.

A shift in ideology, the fallout from a government crackdown, and chaos in neighbouring states have transformed the area from dangerous haven to conflict zone. Factions have united into a group with unprecedented access to funds and weapons, and which has become the most ambitious Isis franchise outside Syria or Iraq. [Continue reading…]

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Egyptian military arrests investigative journalist who exposed recent coup plot

The New York Times reports: Egyptian military intelligence on Sunday detained an investigative journalist who is also the founder of Egypt’s premier human rights group on charges of publishing false news, raising alarms about attempts to suppress domestic dissent as the government grapples with questions about the crash of a Russian passenger jet.

The journalist, Hossam Bahgat, 36, founded the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, a highly regarded rights organization, in 2002. Since the military takeover in 2013, however, he has distinguished himself as a unique voice in the Egyptian news media by writing a series of painstakingly researched investigative reports that have called into question government statements.

Mr. Bahgat was summoned to military intelligence on Sunday and interrogated for hours before he was allowed to meet with lawyers. He was ordered to spend the night in detention, with his lawyers saying that military prosecutors would most likely decide on Monday whether to formally send him to trial. He also faces charges of insulting the military, his lawyers said.

Mr. Bahgat’s most recent report — and apparently the one that set off the ire of the military — investigated the low-key convictions of 26 military officers accused of having plotted a coup against the current government. The report raised questions about possible dissent in the ranks and about potential retribution against officers who had crossed the secret police. The article was the focus of questions by the prosecutor, according to Ragia Omran, a human rights lawyer who attended the interrogation in support of Mr. Bahgat. [Continue reading…]

Here is Bahgat speaking in Brazil two years ago:

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A strike on a vital artery of Egypt’s economy

Emad Mostaque writes: In the 14 years since 9/11, the “War on Terror” has been unsuccessful, with near $2tn spent, hundreds of thousands if not millions of civilians killed and the number of jihadists in the world up from under 1,000 to over 100,000, with these groups becoming more sophisticated and learning from their mistakes.

Unlike Algeria in the 90s, where terrorists had to hide in mountainous terrain and among underprivileged communities, new, un-decryptable communication technologies and regional chaos allow for distributed terror groups with access to powerful explosives and munitions. This presents a severe challenge when a group like Isis, whose message is designed to appeal to a limited group – primarily disillusioned Islamists, oppressed sectarians and easily malleable westerners – does not care about winning “hearts and minds”.

Even if Isis were not behind the attack (we believe it was), it has dominated the media after this event and the results of any investigation are likely to take many months, again showing its mastery of social leverage.

Just the fear of security lapses in Egypt, which are unlikely to be fixed any time soon, has led to the UK stopping flights and other airlines banning hold luggage. It is difficult to see what will reverse this. There is a key difference between this and even an attack on a hotel, a localised event that typically hits tourism for a while before it recovers, whereas hitting a key transportation mechanism is a far more profound act. [Continue reading…]

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Russian war propaganda in Syria much like America’s in Iraq

Aron Lund writes: When the United States was occupying Iraq, senior Bush administration officials like Washington Don kept blaming “terrorists” of the “Baathist dead-ender” or “al-Qaeda” variety for everything new setback. To be sure, Baathists and al-Qaeda loyalists were a prominent part of the mix, and they would later become dominant. But in the early days, Iraq’s insurgency seems to have been considerably more diverse than what we now see in Syria. In 2003-2004, it consisted of innumerable little local groups that spanned the full range of ideologies from secular nationalism to jihadism; they would even on occasion bridge the Sunni-Shia divide. And yet, U.S. President George W. Bush could get away with telling his people that the Iraqi resistance was all “al-Qaeda types, Ansar al-Islam types, terrorist groups” and conclude that it was better to “fight them there than here.”

A decade later in Syria, the roles are reversed. Russian politicians will contemptuously label any Syrian who has taken up arms to stop the depredations of Bashar al-Assad’s army a “jihadi terrorist” and in lieu of a political strategy, they smirk and puff their chests and say “bring ‘em on.” Their American counterparts sound like the anti-Iraq War tankie left in 2003-2004, eyes darting nervously around the room as they try to explain that there are good salafi insurgents and bad salafi insurgents. Give it a year more, and they’ll be complaining about Russia’s “cowboy attitude.”

Not that their respective supporters seem to notice, or care. But if you’re not a die-hard partisan of either Vladimir Putin or of the late and unlamented presidency of George W. Bush, you will by now have noticed that the Kremlin’s “anti-terrorist” discourse is essentially indistinguishable from the bullshit shoveled into the media by the American White House ten years ago, and equally self-serving, misleading, and destructive. [Continue reading…]

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Saudi support to rebels slows Assad advance, say pro-Damascus sources

Reuters reports: Offensives by the Syrian army and its allies backed by Russian air strikes are going more slowly than expected due to increased Saudi support to rebels, senior sources close to the Syrian government said, as the insurgents pressed a counter attack on Friday.

Rebels captured the village of Atshan in Hama province, the second setback for the government and its allies in that area in as many days, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and rebels said. The nearby town of Morek fell to rebels on Thursday.

Backed by Russian air strikes, the Syrian army and allies including the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps and Lebanon’s Hezbollah have launched several offensives in areas vital to President Bashar al-Assad’s control of western Syria.

But analysts say the government gains have been at best modest, one saying earlier this week the only breakthrough thus far was a minimal advance south of Aleppo.

U.S. officials have voiced a similar view, while rebels have said the Russian-backed attacks are failing and they expect more gains for their side.

In a frank assessment of the situation facing the government side, the two senior sources – neither of them Syrian – said the course of battle had been slowed by more military support to the rebels from Saudi Arabia, which is vying for influence with Iran across the Middle East and wants Assad gone from power.

They cited increased supplies of anti-tank TOW missiles to the rebels as a big factor. [Continue reading…]

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Assad regime airstrikes level ‘economic powerhouse’ in Aleppo

Syria Direct reports: A series of regime airstrikes on Saturday destroyed Syria’s largest textile factory, the “largest source of work from the Aleppo countryside to Idlib,” a local reporter told Syria Direct.

“The Dayri factory was an economic powerhouse,” said Bashar al-Halabi, the director of the news website Aleppo and Its Countryside Today, on Sunday. The plant, located near the Aleppo-Damascus international highway in the western Aleppo countryside, manufactured polyester and employed over 600 workers.

Many of the factory’s workers were trapped inside while fires burned the building down around them. Rescue workers from the Civil Defense managed to save the majority of those trapped inside. 13 workers were reported injured and it is not yet known if anyone was killed. [Continue reading…]

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Refugees helping refugees: How a Palestinian camp in Lebanon is welcoming Syrians

By Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, UCL

Established in 1955, northern Lebanon’s Baddawi refugee camp is home to between 25,000 and 40,000 “established” Palestinian refugees. Like other Palestinian camps across Lebanon, it has long been violent and lawless. This summer, I conducted fieldwork there.

Such camps are outside Lebanese jurisdiction, and have commonly been referred to as “islands of insecurity”. Nonetheless, the established residents of Baddawi camp have offered protection and assistance to tens of thousands of new arrivals from Syria since 2011.

These recent arrivals include Syrian nationals who have fled violence and persecution in their country, but also displaced Syrian-Palestinians and Iraqis. While they are new to Lebanon and Jordan when compared with “established” refugee communities, refugees from Syria are now officially categorised as “protracted” refugees. And for many hundreds of thousands of Palestinian and Iraqi refugees, this is the second, third or fourth time that they have been displaced by conflict.

Baddawi is a stark reminder of the urgent reality of this crisis. We’ve been saturated with stories and images about the refugee crisis (really a protection crisis) in Europe – and yet the vast majority of refugees from Syria are still hosted by Syria’s neighbouring countries. At the end of August 2015, there were 1,114,000 in Lebanon, 630,000 in Jordan and 1,939,000 in Turkey.

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Rouhani accuses Iranian media of ‘acting like secret police’

EA Worldview reports: President Rouhani renewed his battle against Iran’s hardliners on Sunday, accused their media outlets of persecuting people and supporting crackdowns by the security services.

Rouhani told an audience at a Tehran press fair that the media benefits from “a permanent security margin…so that not only can they say whatever they want, but they also sometimes act like the secret police”.

“You learn from some publications who will be arrested tomorrow, what is going to be closed down tomorrow, which individual’s reputation should be damaged,” the President said.

Rouhani’s speech was the latest volley in a growing fight within the regime ahead of February elections for Parliament and the Assembly of Experts. The President’s opponents — fearing a bloc including supporters of Rouhani, former President Hashemi Rafsanjani, and reformists — have used the Supreme Leader’s warnings of US “infiltration” to claim that a “fourth seditions” is being abetted by Government officials. [Continue reading…]

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America has built the equivalent of 10 Keystone pipelines since 2010 — and nobody said anything

National Post reports: While TransCanada Corp. has been cooling its heels on its Keystone XL proposal for the past six years, the oil pipeline business has been booming in the United States.

Crude oil pipeline mileage rose 9.1 per cent last year alone to reach 66,649 miles, according to data from the Washington, D.C.-based Association of Oil Pipe Lines (AOPL) set to be released soon.

Between 2009 and 2013, more than 8,000 miles of oil transmission pipelines have been built in the past five years in the U.S., AOPL spokesperson John Stoody said, compared to the 875 miles TransCanada wants to lay in the states of Montana, South Dakota and Nebraska for its 830,000-bpd project. By last year, the U.S. had built 12,000 miles of pipe since 2010. [Continue reading…]

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Our web history reveals what we think and do. Shouldn’t that remain private?

By Paul Bernal, University of East Anglia

An overlooked aspect of the draft Investigatory Powers Bill is the significance of demanding that service providers store 12 months’ internet connection records. A record of every website visited and internet service connected to, the government presents this as the online equivalent of an itemised phone bill. But this is a false analogy: internet connection records carry far more detail than a phone book, and the government’s move to claim them represents an unprecedented intrusion into our lives.

Supporters of the bill suggest that this data provides a way of checking that someone accessed Facebook at a particular time, just as phone records can reveal that a user called a particular number at a certain time. But while this is true, it misunderstands the role the internet has in our lives, and consequently underplays how much it can reveal.

The phone is a communications tool, but we have complex online lives and use the internet for many things other than “communication”. We do almost everything online: we bank online, we shop, find relationships, listen to music, watch television and films, plan our holidays, read about and indulge our interests.

Access to the websites we visit, for an entire year, is not at all comparable to having an itemised telephone bill. It’s more equivalent to tailing someone as they visit the shops, the pub, the cinema, listen to the radio, go to the park and on holiday, read books and magazines and newspapers, and much more.

It’s not just the data that’s revealing, it’s the sort of direct, logical inferences that can be made given a web browsing history. For example, from the fact that someone visits sites connected with a particular religion, one can infer that they follow that religion. If they visit sites regarding a particular health condition, it’s possible to infer that they may suffer from that condition, or are worried about their health.

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The extremists who now speak for Israel

The Daily Beast reports: A West Bank settler who insults American and Israeli leaders might not seem a likely candidate for a job promoting Israel’s image to the world, but Ron Baratz is, indeed, tapped to be Israel’s next communications director.

The controversy over his appointment marks a new era of Israeli politics that has seen what used to be considered the fringe right take center stage while Israel’s international isolation intensifies.

“Allow me to be blunt,” wrote Baratz on his Facebook wall last Tuesday. “Obama’s reference to Netanyahu’s speech—this is what modern anti-Semitism looks like in liberal Western countries. It comes, of course, with much tolerance and understanding for Islamic anti-Semitism; so much tolerance and understanding that they’d be willing to give them a nuke.”

Baratz seemed to go out of his way to make this point. It refers to a remark by Obama way back in March when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the U.S. Congress in a bid to kill the Iran nuclear deal.

Obama called the speech “theater” which “didn’t offer any viable alternatives” for preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.

Last year, Baratz targeted Secretary of State John Kerry, comparing his mental age to that of a 12-year-old child and joking on Facebook that Kerry could have a “lucrative career as a stand-up comedian.”

As communications director, Baratz would lead public relations efforts to disseminate positive information about Israel and its actions. [Continue reading…]

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Lynch mob: Majority of Jewish Israelis want terror suspects killed on the spot even if they no longer pose a threat

972mag.org reports: Over half of Jewish Israelis (53 percent) believe that a Palestinian suspected of carrying out a terrorist attack “should be killed on the spot, even if he has been apprehended and no longer poses a threat,” a new survey shows.

The poll, conducted by the Israel Democracy Institute at the end of October, quizzed Jewish Israelis and Palestinian citizens of Israel on their attitudes toward the current wave of violence sweeping the country.

Respondents were questioned on a range of topics, including their attitudes to punishing perpetrators of terrorist attacks; their level of anxiety over the current situation; and possible underlying causes for the present escalation. [Continue reading…]

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Why Aung San Suu Kyi’s ‘Mandela moment’ is a victory for Myanmar’s generals

Maung Zarni writes: Though in exile 6,000 miles away from Myanmar, I can almost taste the euphoria of my fellow dissidents. Aung San Suu Kyi’s wildly popular opposition – the National League for Democracy – has won a landslide in the multiparty elections, and 31 million voters, most apparently backing the NLD, are savouring a long-awaited moment of jubilation. The NLD leader, whom they call Amay or mother, appeared on TV, her eyes shining with tears of joy.

Even foreign journalists covering the country in the 25 years since Aung San Suu Kyi was placed under house arrest have scarcely been able to conceal their excitement at the prospect of a new era of freedom and democracy, ushered in through her non-violent, pragmatic leadership.

Myanmar’s Mandela moment has arrived. Or has it?

A sober analysis may be in order. Aside from the fact that Myanmar’s military leaders have, constitutionally, blocked any possibility of “the Woman” with her two “impure-blooded sons” and “foreign privileges” assuming the presidency, Aung San Suu Kyi’s party faces huge barriers to turn a resounding electoral mandate into a real step towards a genuinely representative government.

And this is not the first time the public has felt euphoric about the power of its votes. In May 1990 Aung San Suu Kyi and her then fledgling opposition party won a decisive mandate taking 82% of the parliamentary seats and 62% of the total votes. That landslide came despite the fact that the generals placed her and her senior colleagues under house arrest on the eve of the elections, in effect barring them from the electoral process. So the opposition knows how it feels to fail to convert this mandate a quarter-century ago into a real political gain or put the country on the path of democracy. [Continue reading…]

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Aung San Suu Kyi victory will test commitment to human rights in Myanmar

By Andrew Fagan, University of Essex

Myanmar has taken a potentially momentous step away from dictatorship and towards democracy. More than 6,000 candidates from 91 political parties competed for the votes of 33m registered voters on November 8 in the country’s first credible elections since 1960.

The precise outcome won’t be known for days, but Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) is claiming to have gained at least 70% of the votes cast. Senior figures in the ruling party are conceding defeat.

No one should underestimate the significance of power changing hands in Myanmar via the ballot box. However, this will only finally occur in March 2016, when the newly-elected MPs vote for a new president and a new government will be formed.

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Music: New Jazz Frontiers — ‘Colibri’ (Edmar Castañeda)

The group, New Jazz Frontiers — Orlando “Maraca“ Valle (flute), Edmar Castañeda (harp), Ed Simon (piano), Luques Curtis (bass), Daniel Freedman (drums) — came together for the first time just two days before performing a collection of original compositions (by each of the band members) for the first time at Lincoln Center last December.

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