The Snowden saga heralds a radical shift in capitalism

Evgeny Morozov writes: Following his revelations this year about Washington’s spying excesses, Edward Snowden now faces a growing wave of surveillance fatigue among the public – and the reason is that the National Security Agency contractor turned whistleblower has revealed too many uncomfortable truths about how today’s world works.

Technical infrastructure and geopolitical power; rampant consumerism and ubiquitous surveillance; the lofty rhetoric of “internet freedom” and the sober reality of the ever-increasing internet control – all these are interconnected in ways most of us would rather not acknowledge or think about. Instead, we have focused on just one element in this long chain – state spying – but have mostly ignored all others.

But the spying debate has quickly turned narrow and unbearably technical; issues such as the soundness of US foreign policy, the ambivalent future of digital capitalism, the relocation of power from Washington and Brussels to Silicon Valley have not received due attention. But it is not just the NSA that is broken: the way we do – and pay for – our communicating today is broken as well. And it is broken for political and economic reasons, not just legal and technological ones: too many governments, strapped for cash and low on infrastructural imagination, have surrendered their communications networks to technology companies a tad too soon.

Mr Snowden created an opening for a much-needed global debate that could have highlighted many of these issues. Alas, it has never arrived. The revelations of the US’s surveillance addiction were met with a rather lacklustre, one-dimensional response. Much of this overheated rhetoric – tinged with anti-Americanism and channelled into unproductive forms of reform – has been useless. Many foreign leaders still cling to the fantasy that, if only the US would promise them a no-spy agreement, or at least stop monitoring their gadgets, the perversions revealed by Mr Snowden would disappear. [Continue reading…]

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Edward Snowden is wrong: His mission has not been accomplished

Andrea Peterson writes: “For me, in terms of personal satisfaction, the mission’s already accomplished,” former NSA contractor Edward Snowden told my Washington Post colleague Barton Gellman in Moscow this month. Snowden went on to explain that he had “already won” because the journalists working from the documents he secreted away from the NSA are giving the public a chance to weigh in on surveillance policies.

But while it’s not quite flight-suit level deception, calling the current state of affairs mission accomplished is a significant change in the scope of Snowden’s ambitions compared to when he first stepped forward as the source of the NSA documents. In a video interview with the Guardian released shortly after he stepped out of the shadows, he espoused many of the same hopes about the public having input on the secret machinations of intelligence agencies. But he also gave a much more lofty goal: substantive policy change.

The greatest fear that I have regarding the outcome for America of these disclosures is that nothing will change. People will see in the media all of these disclosures. They’ll know the lengths that the government is going to grant themselves powers unilaterally to create greater control over American society and global society. But they won’t be willing to take the risks necessary to stand up and fight to change things to force their representatives to actually take a stand in their interests.

And the months ahead, the years ahead it’s only going to get worse until eventually there will be a time where policies will change because the only thing that restricts the activities of the surveillance state are policy.

So far, Snowden’s “greatest fear” has come true. Public opinion over his disclosures has been divided and no significant policy changes to NSA surveillance have emerged. And the administration is standing by the status quo despite the lack of evidence that it has been effective at its stated goal of halting terrorist attacks. [Continue reading…]

As I have written previously, one of the easiest ways of measuring how effective exposure of NSA operations has been will be in terms of its budget and its size. My expectation is that by those two counts the NSA will continue to grow. Indeed, the agency will argue to Congress that this growth is necessitated by the leaks.

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Anti-Assad Lebanese ex-minister killed in Beirut bomb

Reuters reports: Former Lebanese minister Mohamad Chatah, who opposed Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, was killed in a massive bomb blast which one of his political allies blamed on Lebanon’s Shi’ite Hezbollah militia.

Friday’s attack also killed five other people and threw Lebanon, which has been drawn into neighboring Syria’s conflict, into further turmoil after a series of sectarian bombings aimed at Shi’ites and Sunnis over the past year.

Former prime minister Saad al-Hariri accused Hezbollah of involvement in the killing of Chatah, his 62-year-old political adviser, saying it was “a new message of terrorism”.

“As far as we are concerned the suspects … are those who are fleeing international justice and refusing to represent themselves before the international tribunal,” Hariri said.

Chatah’s killing occurred three weeks before the long-delayed opening of a trial of five Hezbollah suspects indicted for the 2005 bombing which killed former prime minister Rafik al-Hariri, Saad’s father, and 21 other people.

The trial is due to open in The Hague in January. The suspects are all fugitives and Hezbollah, which denies any role in the Hariri assassination, has refused to cooperate with the court, which it says is politically motivated. Preliminary U.N. investigations implicated Syrian officials.

Chatah, a Sunni Muslim, was a vocal critic of Hezbollah.

In his most recent blog post, Chatah wrote: Fact number 1: A united and peaceful Syria ruled by Assad is simply not possible anymore.It has been like that for some time.The status quo ante cannot be restored. Iran and Hezbollah realize this more than anyone else.

Fact number 2: The Assad regime is incapable of adapting to a powersharing arrangement as contemplated by the Geneva principles. The regime is brittle and fragile as it is brutal and ruthless. It can break but cannot bend. Assad knows it and Iran knows it.

Fact number 3: A free and democratic Syria would be a strategic disaster for Tehran. If given a choice, the Syrian people would be certain to sever their country’s geopolitical alliance with the Islamic Republic and stop providing a geographic corridor to Iran’s military arm in Lebanon..

Fact number 4: Iran’s second best alternative to the irretrievable status quo ante is simply a protracted war. This is now Iran’s victory strategy. A bloody and chaotic Syrian theater will still be usable by Iran and Hezbollah more flexibly and efficiently than their western enemies. Remember the civil war in Lebanon?

Fact number 5: A protracted war in Syria will help terrorism flourish even more. Both the kind manipulated used by the regime to blackmail the west and the “authentic” strain that festers and spreads in open wounds, like opportunistic parasites.

Conclusion: If Iran’s militant ideology and hegemonic ambitions and radical “Islamic” terrorism are the two strategic threats that need to be overcome, then the policy towards Syria should aim at bringing to a quick end both the devastating war and Assad’s rule. Humanitarian considerations aside, any policy that is based on the premise that a protracted conflict in Syria is costless is misguided and dangerous. It is exactly what Iran wants and it will help the scourge of terrorism to thrive.

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Syria: ‘Brutal beyond belief’ Assad better than insurgents — former U.S. ambassador

Scott Lucas writes: In early December, Ryan Crocker — former US Ambassador to Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan — provided a dramatic sound-bite for a New York Times article pointing to a possible re-think in Washington about the Syrian conflict:

We need to start talking to the Assad regime again….It will have to be done very, very quietly. But bad as Assad is, he is not as bad as the jihadis who would take over in his absence.

Crocker did not stop there. Last weekend, he wrote in the Times, “We need to come to terms with a future that includes Assad — and consider that as bad as he is, there is something worse.”

And on Tuesday, his interview with Robert Siegel of US National Public Radio drove home the point, “The simple fact is Assad is not going….We need to come to terms with it.”

Never mind that Crocker’s basic facts are wrong: “Al Qa’eda” did not carry out a raid on Free Syrian Army warehouses earlier this month. It is his dramatic call to accept Assad rather than the insurgents that will resonate. [Continue reading…]

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UK anti-Muslim hate crime soars, police figures show

The Press Association reports: Hate crimes against Muslims have soared in the UK this year, figures show.

Hundreds of anti-Muslim offences were carried out across the country in 2013, with Britain’s biggest force, the Metropolitan police, recording 500 Islamophobic crimes.

Many forces reported a surge in the number of anti-Muslim hate crimes after the murder of soldier Lee Rigby by two Islamic extremists in Woolwich, south-east London, in May.

But the figures could be much higher as nearly half of the 43 forces in England and Wales did not reveal how many hate crimes had targeted Muslims. Some forces admitted they did not always record the faith of a religious hate-crime victim.

Freedom of Information requests were sent by the Press Association to every police force in England and Wales. Of the 43 forces, 24 provided figures on the number of anti-Muslim crimes and incidents recorded.

Tell Mama, a group which monitors anti-Muslim incidents, said it had dealt with 840 cases since April, with the number expected to rise to more than 1,000 by the end of March. This compared with 582 anti-Muslim cases it dealt with from March 2012 to March 2013. [Continue reading…]

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There’s an alarming number of deaths in U.S. jails

Cara Tabachnick writes: Kyam Livingston begged for help. After seven hours of lying on the floor of a jail cell, the 38-year-old mother of two died, her calls unheeded by the correction officers providing security for the approximately 15 female inmates at Brooklyn “central booking” jail this past summer, according to witnesses and court documents.

Witnesses told the family that she had died in the cell among fetid conditions before she was taken to Brooklyn Hospital Health Center on 21 July 2013 where Livingston was pronounced dead at 6:58am, according to police reports. A witness, registered nurse Aleah Holland, told The Daily News, that police at Central Booking ignored her complaints of stomach pains and diarrhea. She said that when she and other inmates banged on the bars calling for help, officers told them Livingston was an alcoholic.

No one knows what happened, and no one wants to say. The NYPD told the family that she died of a seizure, but her family says she never suffered from seizures. This October the family sued the city, the NYPD, and the Department of Corrections in an effort to force systemic change and “responsibility” for her death.

Livingston was one of the few hundred jail deaths that happen across the country. In 2011, (the latest available numbers) 885 inmates died (pdf) in the custody of local jails, the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics reported. Notice I said jails. These are different from prisons. Prisons are for people who have been convicted of a crime and sentenced. There are roughly 3,000 jails nationwide and each facility is set up to process people that have been arrested before they are arraigned or go to trial. Some will serve a misdemeanor sentence (of under a year). The majority will be let go because the charges against them won’t stick as they move through the legal system. Others will remain in jails while waiting to go to trial too poor to make bail – yet to be convicted of anything. Regardless, they will be treated as criminals. [Continue reading…]

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Why non-believers need rituals too

Suzanne Moore writes: The last time I put my own atheism through the spin cycle rather than simply wiping it clean was when I wanted to make a ceremony after the birth of my third child. Would it be a blessing? From who? What does the common notion of a new baby as a gift mean? How would we make it meaningful to the people we invited who were from different faiths? And, importantly, what would it look like?

One of the problems I have with the New Atheism is that it fixates on ethics, ignoring aesthetics at its peril. It tends also towards atomisation, relying on abstracts such as “civic law” to conjure a collective experience. But I love ritual, because it is through ritual that we remake and strengthen our social bonds. As I write, down the road there is a memorial being held for Lou Reed, hosted by the local Unitarian church. Most people there will have no belief in God but will feel glad to be part of a shared appreciation of a man whose god was rock’n’roll.

When it came to making a ceremony, I really did not want the austerity of some humanist events I have attended, where I feel the sensual world is rejected. This is what I mean about aesthetics. Do we cede them to the religious and just look like a bunch of Calvinists? I found myself turning to flowers, flames and incense. Is there anything more beautiful than the offerings made all over the world, of tiny flames and blossom on leaves floating on water?

Already, I am revealing a kind of neo-paganism that hardcore rationalist will find unacceptable. But they find most human things unacceptable. For me, not believing in God does not mean one has to forgo poetry, magic, the chaos of ritual, the remaking of shared bonds. I fear ultra-orthodox atheism has come to resemble a rigid and patriarchal faith itself. [Continue reading…]

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Warren Weinstein appeals to Obama and Kerry to negotiate his release

Warren Weinstein, a U.S. government contractor kidnapped by al-Qaeda militants in Pakistan in 2011 has called on President Obama to negotiate with his captors and says he feels “totally abandoned and forgotten.” In a letter to the media, Weinstein wrote:

“I have appealed several times to President Obama to help me but to no avail. I am therefore writing now to the Media to ask that you help me to gain my release and rejoin my family – my wife, two daughters, two grandchildren and my son-in-law. I am hoping that you will take up my case on a human interest and humanitarian basis, and that you can help my family and me to convince President Obama to take action to negotiate my release.”

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Obama sends drones to Iraq

The New York Times reports: The United States is quietly rushing dozens of Hellfire missiles and low-tech surveillance drones to Iraq to help government forces combat an explosion of violence by a Qaeda-backed insurgency that is gaining territory in both western Iraq and neighboring Syria.

The move follows an appeal for help in battling the extremist group by the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, who met with President Obama in Washington last month.

But some military experts question whether the patchwork response will be sufficient to reverse the sharp downturn in security that already led to the deaths of more than 8,000 Iraqis this year, 952 of them Iraqi security force members, according to the United Nations, the highest level of violence since 2008.

Al Qaeda’s regional affiliate, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, has become a potent force in northern and western Iraq. Riding in armed convoys, the group has intimidated towns, assassinated local officials, and in an episode last week, used suicide bombers and hidden explosives to kill the commander of the Iraqi Army’s Seventh Division and more than a dozen of his officers and soldiers as they raided a Qaeda training camp near Rutbah.

Bombings on Christmas in Christian areas of Baghdad, which killed more than two dozen people, bore the hallmarks of a Qaeda operation.

The surge in violence stands in sharp contrast to earlier assurances from senior Obama administration officials that Iraq was on the right path, despite the failure of American and Iraqi officials in 2011 to negotiate an agreement for a limited number of United States forces to remain in Iraq. [Continue reading…]

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Departing minister calls for Erdogan’s resignation as crisis in Turkey deepens

The New York Times reports: Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey said in comments reported Thursday that he believes he is the ultimate target of a bribery and corruption investigation that has plunged his government into one of its worst crises since he came to power a decade ago.

In remarks published in Hurriyet, a Turkish daily newspaper, Mr. Erdogan said that those who tried to embroil him in the investigation would be “left empty-handed.” He made the comments to reporters on a plane as he returned from a visit to Pakistan on Tuesday.

Mr. Erdogan reshuffled his cabinet late Wednesday, replacing 10 ministers, after three top ministers whose sons had been detained as part of the investigation abruptly resigned. One of the departing ministers shook the Turkish political establishment by calling for Mr. Erdogan to step down, a defiant move that underlined the growing fissures in Mr. Erdogan’s governing Justice and Development Party.

Turkey’s opposition on Thursday accused Mr. Erdogan of trying to rule via a secretive “deep state,” following the cabinet reshuffle in which he moved to cement his control over the police by installing a key ally at the powerful Interior Ministry. The term “deep state” has a sinister connotation in Turkey, and alludes to a murky group of operatives linked to the military who operate outside democratic structures.

The government has dismissed more than a dozen high-ranking police officials as part of a purge of those it believes are driving the investigation, prompting criticism of Mr. Erdogan from people both within and outside his party who accuse him of interfering in judicial affairs.

Mr. Erdogan “is trying to put together a cabinet that will not show any opposition to him,” Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the head of the biggest opposition party, the Republican People’s Party, or C.H.P., said in remarks reported by Turkish media. “Erdogan has a deep state.”

The resignations on Wednesday, coming only hours after the ministers welcomed Mr. Erdogan at the Ankara airport as he returned from Pakistan, were enough to inspire new talk of a deepening crisis, which Mr. Erdogan has repeatedly denounced as a foreign plot.

But the call for Mr. Erdogan’s resignation by one of the departing ministers was considered stunning, coming from within a political party known for silencing dissent. That instantly raised the significance of the entire inquiry and left members of the Turkish public wondering if they were witnessing the collapse of their Islamist-rooted government of the last decade. [Continue reading…]

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Stop starvation in Syria — end the blockades

Pulse Media: Syrians are slowly dying of malnutrition – but not for lack of food. A military blockade surrounds dozens of Syrian towns. This starvation siege prevents 1.5 million Syrians from receiving food or medicine.

Qusai Zakarya is one of them. He is 28 years old. Qusai declared a hunger strike on November 26, to demand food and medicine be allowed to reach civilians across military lines in Syria. “We are all hungry here in my hometown anyway. Let me be hungry for a purpose,” Qusai says.

We are starting the first phase of a “rolling” solidarity hunger strike onFriday, December 20, where someone will do a hunger strike every day in support of the hunger strikers in Syria through the rest of December.

We are also working on putting together a list of supporters for launching a larger campaign leading up to the Geneva Conference in January. We are asking that you commit to one day of a symbolic hunger strike and that you give us permission to put your name on the materials to publicize the hunger strikes more widely. We also ask, if you are able, to send in a photo of yourself or group to stopthesiege@gmail.com, maybe with a sign illustrating your participation.

Our goals:

  • To call for food and medicine now to all besieged towns in Syria.
  • To call for a binding resolution from the UN Security Council requiring the regime in Syria and all armed parties to allow humanitarian organizations immediate unfettered access to aid the civilian population without discrimination, including cross-border access and cross-line access (from regime-controlled areas into rebel-controlled areas).
  • To alert media and political representatives to this situation.
  • To support this act of civil resistance in Syria.

Can you join us this holiday season in standing in solidarity with Syrians? People of conscience everywhere must act to break the siege that is affecting over a million people.
In Solidarity and Hope,

  • Gilbert Achcar, Professor, SOAS, University of London
  • Noam Chomsky, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • Simon Critchley, Professor of Philosophy, The New School (New York)
  • Jürgen Habermas, German philosopher
  • Adam Shatz, Senior Editor, London Review of Books
  • Keith Ellison, U.S. Representative for Minnesota’s 5th Congressional District
  • Razan Ghazzawi, Syrian blogger-activist & former political prisoner
  • Rola Hallam, Syrian Doctor and Humanitarian Worker
  • Norman Finkelstein, political scientist, professor, and author, US
  • Bill Fletcher Jr, Writer/Activist
  • Slavoj Žižek, University of Ljubljana (Slovenia)

(and others…)

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Al Nusra leader targeting UN workers in Syria

If this is indeed the leader of Jabhat al-Nusra, presumably it is not a recent photograph.

If this is indeed the leader of Jabhat al-Nusra, presumably it is not a recent photograph.

The Associated Press reports: The shadowy leader of a powerful al-Qaida group fighting in Syria sought to kidnap United Nations workers and scrawled out plans for his aides to take over in the event of his death, according to excerpts of letters obtained Wednesday by The Associated Press.

Iraqi intelligence officials offered the AP the letters, as well as the first known photograph of the Nusra Front leader, Abu Mohammed al-Golani, the head of one of the most powerful bands of radicals fighting the Syrian government in the country’s civil war.

The officials said they obtained the information about al-Golani after they captured members of another al-Qaida group in September. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak to journalists.

“I was told by a soldier that he observed some of the workers of the U.N. and he will kidnap them. I ask God for his success,” read an excerpt of a letter given by officials from Iraq’s Falcon Intelligence Cell, an anti-terrorism unit that works under Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

The officials said other letters planned the kidnapping and killing of other foreigners, and Syrian and Iraqi civilians.

One U.N. worker was kidnapped for eight months in Syria and was released in October. Another two dozen U.N. peacekeepers were briefly held this year. It’s not clear if those abductions had any relation to al-Golani’s letters. [Continue reading…]

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Israel tracks Syria’s Western jihadis, worried about their return

Reuters reports: Israel is working with allies abroad to track Westerners fighting in Syria, concerned that such militants could attack Israeli or Jewish targets once back home, a senior Israeli official said on Tuesday.

Of an estimated 10,000 foreign combatants among rebels battling Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, around 20 percent are from the West and that number is rising, the official said.

“Think of a scenario, even one of them returning and getting instructions from someone he worked with, someone he fought beside, someone like (the al Qaeda-linked) Nusra Front, to carry out an attack,” said the official, who is privy to intelligence assessments. “This has been keeping us very, very busy lately.”

The official, who declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the issue, said Israel was coordinating monitoring efforts with Western countries, whose legal options against fighters returning home were limited.

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Russia says Arafat died of natural causes

Reuters reports: Russia said on Thursday former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat died of natural causes, not radiation poisoning, but a Palestinian official called the finding “politicized” and said an investigation would continue.

Samples were taken from Arafat’s body last year by Swiss, French and Russian forensics experts after an al Jazeera documentary said his clothes showed high amounts of deadly polonium 210.

The Swiss said last month their tests were consistent with polonium poisoning but not absolute proof of the cause of death. The Russian finding was in line with that of French scientists who said earlier this month that Arafat had not been killed with polonium.

“Yasser Arafat died not from the effects of radiation but of natural causes,” Vladimir Uiba, head of Russia’s state forensics body, the Federal Medico-Biological Agency, was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency.

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UN’s Navi Pillay compares uproar over mass surveillance to fight against apartheid

The Guardian reports: The UN human rights chief, Navi Pillay, has compared the uproar in the international community caused by revelations of mass surveillance with the collective response that helped bring down the apartheid regime in South Africa.

Pillay, the first non-white woman to serve as a high-court judge in South Africa, made the comments in an interview with Sir Tim Berners-Lee on a special edition of BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, which the inventor of the world wide web was guest editing.

Pillay has been asked by the UN to prepare a report on protection of the right to privacy, in the wake of the former National Security Agency analyst Edward Snowden leaking classified documents about UK and US spying and the collection of personal data.

The former international criminal court judge said her encounters with serious human rights abuses, which included serving on the Rwanda tribunal, did not make her take online privacy less seriously. “I don’t grade human rights,” she said. “I feel I have to look after and promote the rights of all persons. I’m not put off by the lifetime experience of violations I have seen.”

She said apartheid ended in South Africa principally because the international community co-operated to denounce it, adding: “Combined and collective action by everybody can end serious violations of human rights … That experience inspires me to go on and address the issue of internet [privacy], which right now is extremely troubling because the revelations of surveillance have implications for human rights … People are really afraid that all their personal details are being used in violation of traditional national protections.” [Continue reading…]

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Outsourcing mass surveillance

The Washington Post reports: A measure that President Obama is considering as a way to curb the National Security Agency’s mass storage of phone data is already facing resistance — not only from the intelligence community but also from privacy advocates, the phone industry and some lawmakers.

Obama last week suggested that he was open to the idea of requiring phone companies to store the records and allowing the government to search them under strict guidelines. Currently, the agency stores those records itself, part of a sprawling collection program that came to light through documents shared by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

But now, industry officials, privacy advocates and congressional officials are expressing resistance to any alternatives that involve mandating phone companies to hold the data for longer periods. And other possible scenarios, including having a private third party store the records, also raise concerns, they say.

Civil libertarians consider mandated phone-company or third-party storage an unacceptable “proxy” for the NSA’s holding of the database. Last Thursday, a group of privacy advocates met with White House officials and urged them not to seek legislation to mandate data retention, among other things. [Continue reading…]

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