/government

C’est donc la NSA qui gagne !

#PegasusProject

La firme derrière Pegasus est liée au Luxembourg
▻http://www.lessentiel.lu/fr/luxembourg/story/la-firme-derriere-pegasus-est-liee-au-luxembourg-15258218

Jean Asselborn, ministre des Affaires étrangères, a confirmé l’existence au Luxembourg de deux bureaux de la firme israélienne NSO Group, qui a conçu le logiciel Pegasus, accusé d’avoir été utilisé par plusieurs États pour espionner les téléphones de journalistes et de dissidents.

Selon le ministre, les bureaux luxembourgeois servent au back office, c’est-à-dire au contrôle des opérations financières de l’entreprise. Un communiqué de l’entreprise datant de 2019 précise que le siège social se trouve au Luxembourg. « NSO développe des technologies qui aident les services de renseignements et les agences étatiques à prévenir et enquêter sur le terrorisme et le crime », indique l’entreprise, dans sa présentation. Il serait même « un leader mondial » en la matière, générant « 250 millions de dollars de revenus en 2018 ». NSO affirme aussi s’être passé de clients à cause d’un non-respect des droits de l’homme.

http://www.lessentiel.lu/dyim/841df3/B.M600,1000/images/content/1/5/2/15258218/14/topelement.jpg

Un tour politique
Mais la nature des activités au Grand-Duché reste floue. D’après Amnesty International, le logiciel Pegasus n’a pas été conçu au Grand-Duché. Aucune demande d’exportation de produit n’a d’ailleurs été formulée. « Je ne peux dire qu’une chose. S’il s’avère que le groupe NSO au Luxembourg a commis des violations des droits de l’homme, alors le Luxembourg doit réagir et réagira », a déclaré Asselborn. Ce dernier a envoyé une lettre aux dirigeants concernés pour rappeler les obligations en matière de droits de l’homme.

Le sujet n’a pas encore été évoqué en commission des Affaires étrangères à la Chambre, expliquent des députés concernés. L’affaire a cependant vite pris un tour politique, avec d’abord une question parlementaire urgente du parti Pirates, sommant le gouvernement d’indiquer si des journalistes, politiciens ou militants au Luxembourg sont concernés par le scandale d’espionnage et quels sont les liens entre NSO et le Grand-Duché. Le parti déi Lénk demande aux autorités de réagir, bien au-delà du « Pacte national entreprises et droits de l’homme », avec une « loi opposable et munie des moyens financiers et personnels permettant d’intervenir pour mettre fin au mépris envers les droits humains ».

Hilarants ces politiques et ces journalistes choqués par leur surveillance !

On n’a pas arrêté, ces dernières années, d’étendre toujours plus la surveillance du citoyen, depuis l’extension des caméras de surveillance partout sur le territoire jusqu’à la reconnaissance faciale qui ne cesse de progresser, y compris en France, jamais en retard d’une idée pour nous pister, nous surveiller, nous fliquer.

Une surveillance active, intrusive, poussée, de plus en plus vicelarde, de certaines cibles aisément identifiées par ceux qui sont pouvoir, pour le profit personnel des politiciens et de leurs amis.

Pour elles et eux, les drones qui seront sans nul doute utilisés pour mieux canaliser les mouvements de foule, les manifestations, pas de problème.
Pour elles et eux, la loi européenne « ePrivacy » qui instaure de manière dérogatoire une surveillance automatisée de masse des échanges numériques sur internet en Europe, pas de problème.
Le smartphone obligatoire, pas de problème.

Ne parlons pas des données sur nos enfants, envoyées directement chez microsoft, education nationale, santé . . .
Ne parlons pas non plus de toutes les informations possibles et imaginables que les gafam nous volent, de façon de plus en plus vicieuse.

Pegasus, ePrivacy, pass sanitaire, la société qui se dessine ces dernières semaines devient véritablement cauchemardesque.
Bon, d’après Edward Snowden la NSA n’aimait pas la concurrence pour ce qui est de nous espionner, et Julian Assange est toujours en prison, en Angleterre, sans aucun motif.

Pour le reste, l’essentiel, c’est de monter à dessein les habitants de ce pays les uns contre les autres, et c’est une réussite.

Gujarat: Another Brick in Trump’s Wall

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As the US President Donald Trump visits Ahmedabad in Gujarat this month, we hear that the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) is building half-kilometre wall on the stretch that leads to Gandhinagar from Ahmedabad.

The purpose of the wall, it is learnt, is to hide the 500 kutcha houses at the Dev Saran or Saraniyavaas slum area. The slum houses an estimated population of 2,500.

All in all, the AMC is building this wall to hide poverty, if not the poor.

We know well that Trump rose to power on an exclusive hate campaign, at the heart of which was his commitment and rhetoric to build a wall at the Mexican border. His arrogant pledge asking Mexico to even pay for such a wall, added to his deceitful masculinity and persona, traits which do matter in the elections to the highest office in the USA.

In our penchant for welcoming guests beyond their expectations, we have gone too far in pleasing Trump by offering him a spectacle of a wall on his forthcoming visit. Atithi Devo Bhava, stretched to its best!

Ironically, the wall in question is not to limit illegal migration but to hide the legal citizens of this country. In fact Trump’s good friend, Modi, has other tricks up his sleeve to contain the legality of citizens of the land but that’s a different story, for some other day.

Coming back to the wall in question, the building of walls to hide poverty is not new in this world.

In preparation for the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, the Brazilian government constructed a wall surrounding the Mare Favela complex to hide the poverty of the favela. When brought to the notice of the world, the Brazilian government came up with a bizarre explanation for the act.

It said that the wall was necessary to protect the ears of its poor! Strange that silence is still considered to be the harbinger of sanity by otherwise noisy and careless regimes.

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–-> An outer wall of an under-construction detention centre for illegal immigrants is pictured at a village in Goalpara district in the northeastern state of Assam, September 1, 2019. Photo: Reuters/Anuwar Hazarika

Even though no such explanation has been offered by the Gujarat government, it is but interesting to know why do we want to hide our poor even when we cannot hide the poverty which ails the nation like a disease? The indices of human development in Gujarat reveal a story where the necessity of such a wall to hide the poor and the poverty can be explained though not justified.

Despite the so called “Gujarat model of development,” these indices clearly show that poverty and poor human existence is the unceasing companion of the Gujarati masses, irrespective of what Modi and his ilk wants us to believe.

Gujarat stood at 22nd rank among Indian states in the Human Development Index for 2018.

This is far below than some of so called “poor performing” states of Jammu & Kashmir (at 17) Uttarakhand (at 19) and Nagaland (at 20). The Infant Mortality Rate of Gujarat in 2016 stood at 30 per 1,000 live births, far poorer than that of states like Jharkhand (29 per 1000 live births) and Jammu & Kashmir (24 per 1000 live births).

Another sensitive index of human development, namely the Maternal Mortality Rate was 91 per 1,00,000 live births in Gujarat in 2016 as compared to 66 in Tamil Nadu and 88 in Telangana in the same year.

In an interesting paper (titled Did Gujarat Switch to a Higher Growth Trajectory Relative to India under Modi?) published in the Economic and Political Weekly in May 2014, just when Modi took over as the PM of the country for the first time, authors Maitreesh Ghatak and Sanchari Roy could show through complex statistical analysis that the success story of Gujarat under Modi’s chief ministership was nothing more than what the state could have even otherwise achieved in the natural course of things.

In fact Gujarat fared worse when compared to Bihar for the same period of analysis. No wonder the ill fate of Gujarat has continued unabated till date so as to warrant the need of building the wall of shame.

The need for a wall to hide the poverty in Gujarat is even more acute it seems. According to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) report, ‘Accidental Deaths & Suicides in India’ released recently, the suicide rates in Gujarat due to poverty increased by a whopping 162% in 2018. The report also revealed that 21% more suicides happened in Gujarat due to unemployment as a reason.

Interestingly, one of the basic functions of a wall is separation.

In the very popular TV series, The Game of Thrones, a continent-spanning wall is made to keep out the “wild” people from civilisation. The Greeks had similar motives when they built walls. Those who lived beyond the city walls were called barbarians. These were the uncivilised people whom the walls kept at a safe distance from the civilised.

In fact, even the thick prison walls serve the same purpose: keeping the dangerous separated from the civil.

The mythical wall which God instructs Nehemiah to build in the Bible, separates and thus saves Jerusalem from the attack of the enemy. The separation by a wall is thus both symbolic and actual.

In fact in the words of Dostoyevsky:

“A wall, you see, is a wall … and so on, and so on. But is it? It is my thesis that, in addition to their versatile physical functions, walls possess an immense measure of signification and that these two realms-the concrete and the symbolic interact with each other.”

Walls have thus been tools of keeping the ‘wild’, the uncivilised and the barbaric separated from those who are the harbingers of civility. But to build a wall to separate the view of poverty has its own unique flavour. It becomes even more important in the context of a democracy where the people, both poor and the rich, vote to form the very government which wants to hide them from visiting leaders of affluent countries.

As residents of urban metropolises we are concerned about the aesthetics of our cities. Ugly poverty is an eyesore to the landscape we want to build.

The smart cities we promise should be without the poor. Slums, ghettos and street habitation form an obnoxious trail of existence which we earnestly want to wipe off from the streets of our cities.

Who needs to see the poor, the sick and the dying? The street children selling balloons need to be obliterated from our view not because we care for them but because we care for ourselves.

We care for the reputation that we build in front of visiting dignitaries. So what if we cannot address poverty, we can still build a wall.

I am not surprised. Walls divide, walls hide. Walls are stony deaf and heartless.

▻https://thewire.in/rights/ahmedabad-wall-trump-visit

#Ahmedabad

A Wall Is Being Built in Ahmedabad to Block a #Slum From Donald Trump’s View

https://cdn.thewire.in/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/13180055/ahmedabad-trump-wall.jpeg

A wall is being constructed by the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation to hide a slum cluster from the view of US President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The wall is over half-a-kilometre long and seven feet high.

The two have planned a roadshow in the city on February 24.

The wall is being constructed on the road leading from the Ahmedabad airport to Gandhinagar as part of a beautification plan that has been rolled out ahead of Trump’s visit. He is scheduled to address a huge gathering at the Motera Stadium in Ahmedabad at the end of the roadshow.

The ‘Kem Chho Trump’ event is being seen as Modi’s reciprocative gesture to the US president for joining him at the ‘Howdy Modi’ gathering in Houston last year.

As part of the preparations for the event, a lot of infrastructural work has been undertaken all around Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar.

The wall in question is coming up in front of the Dev Saran or Saraniyavaas slum area, which has been in existence for several decades and houses over 500 tenements. The place is home to over 2,500 people and the manner in which the wall is being constructed to mask it has posed questions around the mindset which has driven the exercise.

Earlier, when Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his wife Akie Abe had visited Gujarat for the 12th India-Japan annual summit in 2017, and then for the Vibrant Gujarat Summit the same year, a beautification drive was undertaken but attempts were not made to hide any part of the city’s life from the visiting dignitaries.

Budget session also postponed for first time in two decades

Meanwhile, the budget session of the Gujarat assembly has also been postponed by two days in view of Trump’s visit. It has now been rescheduled to convene from February 26.

The state legislative affairs minister, Pradipsinh Jadeja, told the media that it was due to Modi and Trump’s visit that the government has decided to reschedule the budget session and the presentation of the budget.

This is the first time in the last two decades that the budget session has been rescheduled in the state. The secretary of Gujarat assembly, D.M. Patel, was quoted as saying that “rescheduling of budget date has happened rarely in Gujarat’s parliamentary history”.

An official defended the action, saying the rescheduling has been done to prevent any political clashes that are usually witnessed on the first day of the budget session.

▻https://thewire.in/government/gujarat-ahmedabad-slum-wall-donald-trump