Music: Hypnotic Brass Ensemble — ‘Juke Box’
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.
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.
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…]
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…]
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…]
Think helping to fight ISIS will get you off terrorist list? Think again
McClatchy reports: The role of Syrian Kurds in the U.S.-led fight against the Islamic State has prompted calls for the removal of an affiliated Kurdish guerrilla group from the U.S. blacklist, bringing fresh scrutiny to a terrorist-designation process that some critics call arbitrary and outdated.
So far, the U.S. government’s response to the fighters of the Kurdish Workers Party, the PKK, could be summed up as: Thanks for the help, but you’re staying on the list.
Shedding a U.S. foreign terrorist designation is a long and complicated undertaking – a feat accomplished by just a handful of the dozens of groups that have landed on the list since its inception in 1997. A designation means that a group has earned the dubious label – and economic sanctions – of being named a “tier-one” foreign terrorist organization. Tier-two members are banned from entry to the United States; tier-three groups are undesignated but closely monitored.
Several organizations have languished on the State Department’s tier-one list even though they’re essentially defunct, with their leaders killed, jailed or engaged in peace talks with the governments they once attacked. Others on the 59-member list have been weakened but are still considered threatening. And, of course, there are the active, high-profile groups that in American minds are synonymous with terrorism: the Islamic State, al Qaida and Hezbollah, for example.
Those three, as well as the PKK, are among a half-dozen U.S.-designated groups now involved in the conflict over the Islamic State’s cross-border fiefdom. The battle is stirring up an unprecedented soup of militants, with five tier-one terrorist groups – both Sunni and Shiite Muslim – on the same side as the United States against the Islamic State, itself a designee. The Obama administration’s unsavory de facto partners against the Islamic State include the Lebanese militants of Hezbollah and the Nusra Front, the Syrian branch of al Qaida. [Continue reading…]
Since the Nusra Front was also targeted in the series of cruise missile strikes that marked the expansion into Syria of the U.S. war on ISIS, I think both they and the administration would dispute this claim that they have become de facto partners.
Slaughter of Anbar tribesmen shows weakness in U.S. plan to beat ISIS
McClatchy reports: For four grueling months, Naim al Goud, his kinsmen and the local police fought off an Islamic State offensive against his town near Hit, a key city in Iraq’s war-torn Anbar province. In his telling, their constant pleas for Iraqi army intervention and U.S. airstrikes were ignored.
“Nobody gave us any kind of help,” said al Goud, a sheikh of the Albu Nimr, one of Anbar’s largest Sunni Muslim tribes. He said he texted target locations to Iraqi commanders to relay to their U.S counterparts, with no response. “We saw American fighters flying overhead. Maybe they hit somewhere else, but not the places we wanted them to attack.”
Exhausted, hungry and low on ammunition, al Goud and hundreds of his tribesmen ceased firing on Oct. 22 in return for a pledge from the Islamic State that civilians wouldn’t be harmed. They then set out on a 15-hour overnight drive through the desert, leaving behind families and associates and nursing another in a long list of Sunni tribal grievances that are hindering reconciliation with the Shiite-led government and threatening to derail President Barack Obama’s plan to crush the Islamic State.
“They did nothing for us,” al Goud said in an interview last week in a rented house in Baghdad. “It’s all killing and disaster.”
A week later, the Islamic State executed more than 40 Albu Nimr captives on a Hit street and drove thousands of Albu Nimr civilians into the desert, where hundreds have been slaughtered – more than 400 by Monday. Tribal leaders’ calls for help from the Iraqi army and for U.S. airstrikes again went unanswered. [Continue reading…]
Israeli forces displayed ‘callous indifference’ in deadly attacks on family homes in Gaza
Amnesty: Israeli forces have killed scores of Palestinian civilians in attacks targeting houses full of families which in some cases have amounted to war crimes, Amnesty International has disclosed in a new report on the latest Israeli operation in the Gaza Strip.
Families under the Rubble: Israeli attacks on inhabited homes details eight cases where residential family homes in Gaza were attacked by Israeli forces without warning during Operation Protective Edge in July and August 2014, causing the deaths of at least 104 civilians including 62 children. The report reveals a pattern of frequent Israeli attacks using large aerial bombs to level civilian homes, sometimes killing entire families.
“Israeli forces have brazenly flouted the laws of war by carrying out a series of attacks on civilian homes, displaying callous indifference to the carnage caused,” said Philip Luther, Director of the Middle East and North Africa Programme at Amnesty International.
“The report exposes a pattern of attacks on civilian homes by Israeli forces which have shown a shocking disregard for the lives of Palestinian civilians, who were given no warning and had no chance to flee.” [Continue reading…]
The complex, varied, ever changing and context-dependent microbiome
Ed Yong writes: In the late 17th century, the Dutch naturalist Anton van Leeuwenhoek looked at his own dental plaque through a microscope and saw a world of tiny cells “very prettily a-moving.” He could not have predicted that a few centuries later, the trillions of microbes that share our lives — collectively known as the microbiome — would rank among the hottest areas of biology.
These microscopic partners help us by digesting our food, training our immune systems and crowding out other harmful microbes that could cause disease. In return, everything from the food we eat to the medicines we take can shape our microbial communities — with important implications for our health. Studies have found that changes in our microbiome accompany medical problems from obesity to diabetes to colon cancer.
As these correlations have unfurled, so has the hope that we might fix these ailments by shunting our bugs toward healthier states. The gigantic probiotics industry certainly wants you to think that, although there is little evidence that swallowing a few billion yogurt-borne bacteria has more than a small impact on the trillions in our guts. The booming genre of microbiome diet books — self-help manuals for the bacterial self — peddles a similar line, even though our knowledge of microbe-manipulating menus is still in its infancy.
This quest for a healthy microbiome has led some people to take measures that are far more extreme than simply spooning up yogurt. [Continue reading…]
Music: Hypnotic Brass Ensemble — ‘Jupiter’
Yazidis face genocide by ISIS after U.S. turns away
The Daily Beast reports: In August, the Obama administration intervened to stop what it called a pending genocide of Yazidi minorities in Iraq. Now the U.S. is gone, but the genocide continues.
Thousands of Yazidis remain stranded and starving on Mount Sinjar while thousands more have been sold off into slavery by ISIS, according to Yazidi leaders, several of whom are in Washington to beg for urgent assistance.
When President Obama announced U.S.-led airstrikes in Iraq in early August, he said the mission was twofold: to protect U.S. personnel in Erbil and to save the ethnic Yazidis from ISIS, who had fled from their villages, chased by ISIS, and were stranded on the mountain with no food, no supplies, and no protection.
“People are starving. And children are dying of thirst. Meanwhile, ISIL forces below have called for the systematic destruction of the entire Yazidi people, which would constitute genocide,” said Obama. “And when we have the unique capabilities to help avert a massacre, then I believe the United States of America cannot turn a blind eye. We can act, carefully and responsibly, to prevent a potential act of genocide. That’s what we’re doing on that mountain.”
At first, international airstrikes and humanitarian airdrops somewhat alleviated the Yazidi crisis and opened up an escape corridor for many Yazidis to flee. But in October, the United States turned to other parts of the battle, leaving the Yazidis largely to fend for themselves. ISIS has now surrounded Mount Sinjar again, trapping approximately 10,000 Yazidis there. Meanwhile, ISIS forces are taking over Yazidi villages near the mountain one after another, killing the men and selling the women and children into the slave trade. [Continue reading…]
How Iraq’s Shia militias are turning the fight against ISIS into a campaign against Sunnis
Tirana Hassan writes: Behind the relative safety of the large concrete blast walls, a Kurdish Peshmerga commander sat behind a dark wooden desk and described the situation in the battle-scarred towns in Iraq’s northern province of Salahaddin.
“There is no one left in any of these villages, they are all empty,” he told me.
This was not entirely true. As my colleague and I drove into the village of Yengija, some 50 miles south of Peshmerga-controlled Kirkuk, in an area controlled by the Islamic State until late August, the streets were packed — but not with residents.
Men who looked like soldiers lined the main street, scores of them, standing at attention with AK-47 assault rifles slung over their shoulders. With U.S.-provided Humvees parked along the side of the street, it looked like a military parade was about to start. But there was nothing official about this army. The men bore no insignia of Iraq’s armed forces: Most had on mismatched military fatigues, while some wore black balaclavas printed with a menacing skeleton face. From their slender frames, it looked like some were no more than 16 or 17.
It was only when we saw the bright yellow flags flying from a checkpoint and burned-out buildings that we realized who these armed men were. They were part of the Saraya al-Khorasani Brigade, one of the many Shiite militias that have assumed a national military role since the Iraqi government’s security forces crumbled this summer, fleeing their positions as the Islamic State fighters swept through Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city.
The Khorasani Brigade is a relatively recent addition to the network of Shiite militias in Iraq — and despite a similar sounding name, has no connection to the Khorasan Group, the alleged al Qaeda-affiliated organization that was the target of U.S. airstrikes in Syria in September. The Khorasani Brigade is just one of dozens of similar militias that are essentially running their own show in parts of the country. These Shiite militias are supplied with weapons and equipment from the central government in Baghdad, which is now being assisted by a U.S.-led military alliance in its fight against the Islamic State. [Continue reading…]
HRW: ISIS tortured Kobane child hostages
Human Rights Watch: Kurdish children from the Syrian city of Kobani (or Ain al-`Arab in Arabic) were tortured and abused while detained by Islamic State (also known as ISIS), Human Rights Watch said today. Four children gave detailed accounts of the suffering they endured while held for four months with about 100 other children.
The children, aged 14 to 16, were among 153 Kurdish boys whom ISIS abducted on May 29, 2014, as they traveled home to Kobani. According to Syrian Kurdish officials and media reports, ISIS released the last 25 of the children on October 29. Interviewed one by one in Turkey, where they had fled to safety after ISIS released them in late September, the four boys described enduring repeated beatings with a hose and electric cable, as well as being forced to watch videos of ISIS beheadings and attacks.
“Since the beginning of the Syrian uprising, children have suffered the horrors of detention and torture, first by the Assad government and now by ISIS,” said Fred Abrahams, special advisor for children’s rights at Human Rights Watch. “This evidence of torture and abuse of children by ISIS underlines why no one should support their criminal enterprise.” [Continue reading…]
U.S. backs Kurds on arms for Kobane, exposing more cracks in Turkey ties
Rudaw reports: In a clear sign of further cracks in US-Turkish ties, the US Department of State said Monday it backs Erbil’s move to send more arms to Kobane, the same day the Turkish president railed against too much international attention to the besieged Syrian-Kurdish town.
A group of 150 Peshmerga fighters from the Kurdistan Region are fighting alongside Syrian-Kurdish defenders who have resisted an overrun by the Islamic State, the jihadi group most commonly known as ISIS or ISIL.
“We support what they’re (Kurds) – their help in fighting back against ISIL in Kobane, yes,” said the US State Department Spokesperson Jen Psaki, responding to a reporter’s question about whether the US supports the Kurdistan Regional Government’s (KRG) decision to resupply Kurdish fighters in Kobane.
Major general Karzan Shaqlawai of the Peshmerga Ministry told Rudaw that a new resupply convoy of arms was on its way to Kobane with weapons for the Peshmerga and Syrian People’s Protection Units (YPG). They said the convoy was going through Turkey.
Ajansa Nûçeyan a Firatê reports: YPG Commander Mahmud Berxwedan said after the peshmerga forces crossed into Kobanê they have acted like a single army, rather than in coordination. He added: “The peshmerga are endeavouring to carry out what is asked of them in a self-sacrificing way.” Mahmud Berxwedan said the peshmerga had carried out effective strikes against the ISIS gangs with the heavy weaponry they had brought with them.
Mahmud Berxwedan said that since the end of October the initiative had passed to the YPG forces and answered questions from the ANF regarding the arrival of the peshmerga, the situation of civilians and the latest state of the conflict. [Continue reading…]
This is how ISIS smuggles oil
Mike Giglio reports from Besaslan: This town on the Turkish-Syrian border is covered in trash. Residents refuse to let any outsiders — even garbagemen — inside. What makes Besaslan more guarded than the other grim towns lining what has become one of the world’s most dangerous borders sits at the end of a winding dirt road: oil.
The oil brings Omar to town weekly, huddling with grease-covered men to negotiate the purchase of faded, 17-gallon drums. A Syrian in his thirties, Omar was once a proud rebel in his country’s civil war. Now he’s a merchant in the trade that bankrolls the extremists who hijacked it: the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS. The militants can make more than $1 million a day selling oil from fields captured in eastern Syria. But the way this shadowy trade works on the ground remains largely unknown. [Continue reading…]
Obama administration cuts funds for investigating Bashar al-Assad’s war crimes
Foreign Policy reports: The U.S. State Department plans to cut its entire $500,000 in annual funding next year to an organization dedicated to sneaking into abandoned Syrian military bases, prisons, and government facilities to collect documents and other evidence linking Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime and its proxies to war crimes and other mass atrocities during the country’s brutal civil war, according to the recipient of the assistance and a senior U.S. official.
The move, which has not previously been reported, comes as the Obama administration is stepping up funding to collect evidence of war crimes in Iraq by the Islamic State, an extremist Islamist organization that has horrified the world with its mass killings, enslavement of women, and beheadings of ethnic minorities, foreign aid workers, and journalists, including two American reporters who were executed in recent months. The funding shift has raised concern among human rights advocates that the United States and its allies are reducing their commitment to holding the Syrian leader accountable for the majority of Syria’s atrocities because the interests of Washington and Damascus are converging over the fight against the Islamic State.
For the past two years, the U.S. State Department has channeled a total of $1 million in funds to the Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA), a group of international war crimes prosecutors that sends local researchers, lawyers, and law students into Syrian battle zones to collect and extract files and other evidence that can help map the Syrian command structure and identify the military orders authorizing illegal activities, including barrel bomb campaigns, the starvation of besieged towns, and a spate of mass murders that have pushed the conflict’s death toll past 190,000 since March 2011.
The materials are part of a growing storehouse of evidence being collected inside Syria and then transported outside the country for safekeeping in the event that a court is set up at some time in the future for war crimes trials for senior regime officials. The commission has served as a critical plank of an American strategy aimed at assembling enough evidence to hold some of Syria’s worst violators of human rights accountable for their crimes at some point in the future.
But in an abrupt reversal, Obama administration officials recently notified the commission that the State Department would be eliminating its $500,000-a-year contribution, according to the group. [Continue reading…]
New GCHQ chief spouts fiery rhetoric but spying agenda is same as before
James Ball reports: The new chief of GCHQ, Robert Hannigan, had two options when taking his post. As a relative outsider, joining the organisation from the Foreign Office, he could choose to strike a new, conciliatory tack in the post-Snowden surveillance debate – or he could defend the agency’s practices.
Barely six days into the job, Hannigan has signalled he will go with the latter. In a Financial Times opinion piece, he went much further than his predecessor’s valedictory address in pushing the traditional spy agency pro-surveillance agenda.
US technology giants, he said, have become “the command-and-control networks of choice for terrorists and criminals”. Privacy “has never been an absolute right”. Even principles of free speech are terror aids: Isis are “capitalising on western freedom of expression”, he stated.
By the usually moribund rhetorical standards of senior UK intelligence officials, this is fiery stuff. But the agenda behind it is very much business as usual. The UK’s intelligence agencies take the approach that they will get little credit for protecting civil liberties, but would be on the receiving end of huge opprobrium were they to fail prevent an attack. As a result, they lobby successive governments every year for ever-more powers, a small step at a time. [Continue reading…]