/2013

WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange Calls on Computer Hackers to Unite Against NSA Surveillance | Democracy Now!
►http://www.democracynow.org/2013/12/31/wikileaks_julian_assange_calls_on_computer?autostart=true

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JULIAN ASSANGE : Those high-tech workers, we are a particular class, and it’s time that we recognized that we are a class and looked back in history and understood that the great gains in human rights and education and so on that were gained through powerful industrial work as we formed the backbone of the economy of the 20th century, I think we have that same ability, but even more so, because of the greater interconnection that exists now, economically and politically, which is all underpinned by system administrators. And we should understand that system administrators are not just those people who administer one unique system or another; they are the people who administer systems. And the system that exists globally now is created by the interconnection of many individual systems. And we are all, or many of us, are part of administering that system, and have extraordinary power, in a way that is really an order of magnitude different to the power industrial workers had back in the 20th century.
And we can see that in the cases of the famous leaks that WikiLeaks has done or the recent Edward Snowden revelations, that it’s possible now for even a single system administrator to have a very significant change to the—or rather, apply a very significant constraint, a constructive constraint, to the behavior of these organizations, not merely wrecking or disabling them, not merely going out on strikes to change policy, but rather shifting information from an information apartheid system, which we’re developing, from those with extraordinary power and extraordinary information, into the knowledge commons, where it can be used to—not only as a disciplining force, but it can be used to construct and understand the new world that we’re entering into.
Now, Hayden, the former director of the CIA and NSA, is terrified of this. In Cypherpunks, we called for this directly last year. But to give you an interesting quote from Hayden, possibly following up on those words of mine and others: “We need to recruit from Snowden’s generation,” says Hayden. “We need to recruit from this group because they have the skills that we require. So the challenge is how to recruit this talent while also protecting ourselves from the small fraction of the population that has this romantic attachment to absolute transparency at all costs .” And that’s us, right?
So, what we need to do is spread that message and go into all those organizations—in fact, deal with them. I’m not saying don’t join the CIA. No, go and join the CIA. Go in there. Go into the ballpark and get the ball and bring it out—with the understanding, with the paranoia, that all those organizations will be infiltrated by this generation, by an ideology that is spread across the Internet. And every young person is educated on the Internet. There will be no person that has not been exposed to this ideology of transparency and understanding of wanting to keep the Internet, which we were born into, free. This is the last free generation.
The coming together of the systems of governments, the new information apartheid across the world, the linking together, is such that none of us will be able to escape it in just a decade. Our identities will be coupled to it, the information sharing such that none of us will be able to escape it. We are all becoming part of the state, whether we like it or not, so our only hope is to determine what sort of state it is that we are going to become part of. And we can do that by looking and being inspired by some of the actions that produced human rights and free education and so on, by people recognizing that they were part of the state, recognizing their own power, and taking concrete and robust action to make sure they lived in the sort of society that they wanted to, and not in a hellhole dystopia. ❞
#surveillance
#Assange
#wikileaks
#snowden

WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange Calls on Computer Hackers to Unite Against NSA Surveillance | Democracy Now!
►http://www.democracynow.org/2013/12/31/wikileaks_julian_assange_calls_on_computer?autostart=true
#surveillance
#snowden

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SARAH HARRISON : Together with the Center for Constitutional Rights, we filed a suit against the U.S. military, against the unprecedented secrecy applied to Chelsea Manning’s trial. Yet through these attacks, we have continued our publishing work. In April of this year, we launched the Public Library of US Diplomacy, the largest and most comprehensive searchable database of U.S. diplomatic cables in the world. This coincided with our release of 1.7 million U.S. cables from the Kissinger period. We launched our third Spy Files, 249 documents from 92 global intelligence contractors, exposing their technology, methods and contracts. We completed releasing the Global Intelligence Files, over five million emails from U.S. intelligence firm Stratfor, the revelations from which included documenting their spying on activists around the globe. We published the primary negotiating positions for 14 countries of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a new international legal regime that would control 40 percent of the world’s GDP.
As well as getting Snowden asylum, we set up Mr. Snowden’s defense fund, part of a broader endeavor, the Journalistic Source Protection Defence Fund, which aims to protect and fund sources in trouble. This will be an important fund for future sources, especially when we look at the U.S. crackdown on whistleblowers like Snowden and alleged WikiLeaks source Chelsea Manning, who was sentenced this year to 35 years in prison, and another alleged WikiLeaks source, Jeremy Hammond, who was sentenced to 10 years in prison this November. These men, Snowden, Manning and Hammond, are prime examples of a politicized youth who have grown up with a free Internet and want to keep it that way. It is this class of people that we are here to discuss this evening, the powers they and we all have and can have .❞

►http://seenthis.net/messages/205134 @kassem
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Seymour Hersh : Obama "Cherry-Picked" Intelligence on Syrian Chemical Attack to Justify U.S. Strike | Democracy Now !
►http://www.democracynow.org/2013/12/9/seymour_hersh_obama_cherry_picked_intelligence

AMY GOODMAN: And why this is significant today? In the end, President Obama chose not to strike Syria because the American people just overwhelmingly said no. But what this means for what’s happening in Syria today? And also, why then did the Syrian—

SEYMOUR HERSH: Let me interrupt you, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: Yes.

SEYMOUR HERSH: Amy, let me interrupt you. He didn’t—I’m telling you, he didn’t do it because the American people said no. He knew it because he didn’t have a case. And there was incredible opposition that will be, one of these days, written about, maybe in history books. There was incredible operation from some very, very strong-minded, constitutionally minded people in the Pentagon. That’s the real story. I don’t have it; I could just tell you I know it.

And so, it wasn’t just a case—you know, from the military’s point of view, this was a president who many respected in many ways. There’s many good things about Obama. There’s a lot of things—as I said, I voted for him twice. And he’s probably going to be the brightest president we’re ever going to have, and maybe the best president we’re ever going to have. The system is—doesn’t produce always the very best, our system. But the fact of the matter is that this president was going to go to a war because he felt he had to protect what he said about a red line. That’s what it was about, in the military’s point of view. And that’s not acceptable. You don’t go to war, you don’t throw missiles at a country, when there’s no immediate national security to the United States. And you don’t even talk about it in public. That’s wrong, and that was a terrible thing to do.

And that’s what this story is really about. It’s about a president choosing to make political use of a war crime and not do the right thing. And I think that’s—to me, Amy, that’s a lot more important than where it was published and who told me no and who told me yes. I know the press likes to focus on that stuff, but that’s not the story. The story is what he was going to do, and what it says maybe about him, what it says about that office, what it says about the power, that you can simply—you can create a narrative, which he did, and you know the mainstream press is going to carry out that narrative.

I mean, it’s almost impossible for some of the mainstream newspapers, who have consistently supported the administration. This is after we had the WMD scandal, when everybody wanted to be on the team. It turns out our job, as newspaper people, is not to be on the team. You know, we’ve got a world run by a lot of yahoos and wackos, and it’s our job as reporters to do the kind of work and make it hard for the nincompoops that run the world to get away with some of the stuff we’re doing. That’s what we should be doing more and more of. And that’s just—you know, I don’t think there’s any virtue in it; it’s just the job we have. And there’s heroism—you know, there’s nothing heroic about what we do. It’s heroic for some of the people, reporters in Africa, to do some of that work when they’re at personal risk. We’re not at personal risk. It’s just not so hard to hold the people in office to the highest standard. And the press should be doing it more and more.

#Seymour_Hersh

Un entretien avec l’auteur de l’ouvrage Ebony & Ivy (vidéo et transcription).

« Ebony and Ivy : The Secret History of How Slavery Helped Build America’s Elite Colleges »

▻http://www.democracynow.org/2013/11/29/ebony_and_ivy_the_secret_history

We spend the hour with the author of a new book, 10 years in the making, that examines how many major U.S. universities — Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown, Dartmouth, Rutgers, Williams and the University of North Carolina, among others — are drenched in the sweat, and sometimes the blood, of Africans brought to the United States as slaves. In “Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities,” Massachusetts Institute of Technology American history professor Craig Steven Wilder reveals how the slave economy and higher education grew up together. “When you think about the colonial world, until the American Revolution, there is only one college in the South, William & Mary ... The other eight colleges were all Northern schools, and they’re actually located in key sites, for the most part, of the merchant economy where the slave traders had come to power and rose as the financial and intellectual backers of new culture of the colonies,” Wilder says.

#US #Ivy_League #universités #esclavage #histoire

Leaked Memo Reveals U.S. Plan to Oppose Helping Poor Nations Adapt to Climate Change | Democracy Now!
▻http://www.democracynow.org/2013/11/19/leaked_memo_reveals_us_plan_to

Newly leaked documents have revealed how U.S. negotiators at the U.N. climate summit in Warsaw are opposing efforts to help developing countries adapt to climate change. According to an internal U.S. briefing memo seen by Democracy Now!, the U.S. delegation is worried the talks in Warsaw will “focus increasingly on blame and liability” and that poor nations will be “seeking redress for climate damages from sea level rise, droughts, powerful storms and other adverse impacts.” We speak with Nitin Sethi, a journalist with The Hindu newspaper who first reported on the leaked document.

“These Drones Attack Us and the Whole World is Silent”: New Film Exposes Secret U.S. War | Democracy Now!
▻http://www.democracynow.org/2013/10/31/these_drones_attack_us_and_the

A U.S. drone strike killed three people in northwest Pakistan earlier today, marking the first such attack since Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif publicly called for President Obama to end the strikes. Just last week, Amnesty International said the United States may be committing war crimes by killing innocent Pakistani civilians in drone strikes. Today we air extended clips from the new documentary, “Unmanned: America’s Drone Wars,” and speak to filmmaker Robert Greenwald. The film looks at the impact of U.S. drone strikes through more than 70 interviews with attack survivors in Pakistan, a former U.S. drone operator, military officials and more. The film opens with the story of a 16-year-old Tariq Aziz, who was killed by a drone just days after attending an anti-drone conference in Islamabad. We are also joined by human rights attorney Jennifer Gibson of Reprieve, co-author of the report, “Living Under Drones.”

#drones

“How Do You Justify Killing a Grandmother?” Amnesty Says U.S. Drone Strikes May Be War Crimes | Democracy Now!
▻http://www.democracynow.org/2013/10/23/how_do_you_justify_killing_a

Amnesty International has released a major new report on how U.S. drone strikes kill civilians in Pakistan, where it says some deaths may amount to war crimes. The group reviewed 45 drone strikes that have occurred in North Waziristan since January 2012. It found at least 19 civilians were killed in just two of those strikes, despite claims by the Obama administration it is accurately targeting militants. In a separate report, Human Rights Watch criticized U.S. drone strikes in Yemen that have killed civilians. We are joined by Mustafa Qadri, Pakistan researcher at Amnesty International and author of the report, “’Will I be Next?’ U.S. Drone Strikes in Pakistan.” Qadri asks: “How do they justify killing a grandmother if these weapons are so precise, if their standards in the policy for using them are very rigorous?” He also clarifies, “It’s not enough that a person is a militant to say that it’s okay to kill them. They have to be taking active part in hostilities to be lawfully targeted, and some other requirements as well.”

#drones

The Military-Industrial Pundits: Conflicts of Interest Exposed for TV Guests Who Urged Syrian War
▻http://www.democracynow.org/2013/10/18/the_military_industrial_pundits_conflicts_of

New research shows many so-called experts who appeared on television making the case for U.S. strikes on Syria had undisclosed ties to military contractors. A new report by the Public Accountability Initiative identifies 22 commentators with industry ties. While they appeared on television or were quoted as experts 111 times, their links to military firms were disclosed only 13 of those times. The report focuses largely on Stephen Hadley, who served as national security adviser to President George W. Bush. During the debate on Syria, he appeared on CNN, MSNBC, Fox News and Bloomberg TV. None of these stations informed viewers that Hadley currently serves as a director of the weapons manufacturer Raytheon that makes Tomahawk cruise missiles widely touted as the weapon of choice for bombing Syria. He also owns over 11,000 shares of Raytheon stock, which traded at all-time highs during the Syria debate. We speak to Kevin Connor of the Public Accountability Initiative, a co-author of the report.

Chomsky : Instead of “Illegal” Threat to Syria, U.S. Should Back Chemical Weapons Ban in All Nations | Democracy Now!
▻http://www.democracynow.org/2013/9/11/chomsky_instead_of_illegal_threat_to

NOAM CHOMSKY : He—it was kind of interesting what he didn’t say. This would be a perfect opportunity to ban chemical weapons, to impose the chemical weapons convention on the Middle East. The convention, contrary to what Obama said, does not specifically refer just to use of chemical weapons; it refers to production, storage or use of chemical weapons. That’s banned by the international norm that Obama likes to preach about. Well, there is a country which happens to be—happens to have illegally annexed part of Syrian territory, which has chemical weapons and is in violation of the chemical weapons convention and has refused even to ratify it—namely, Israel. So here’s an opportunity to eliminate chemical weapons from the region, to impose the chemical weapons convention as it’s actually formulated. But Obama was very careful not to say that he—for reasons which are too obvious to go into—he—and that gap is highly significant. Of course, chemical weapons should be eliminated everywhere, but certainly in that region.

The other things that he said were not unusual, but nevertheless kind of shocking to anyone not familiar with U.S. political discourse, at least. So he described the United—he said that for seven decades the United States has been “the anchor of global security.” Really? Seven decades? That includes, for example, just 40 years ago today, when the United States played a major role in overthrowing the parliamentary democracy of Chile and imposing a brutal dictatorship, called “the first 9/11” in Latin America. Go back earlier years, overthrowing the parliamentary system in Iran, imposing a dictatorship; same in Guatemala a year later; attacking Indochina, the worst crime in the postwar period, killing millions of people; attacking Central America; killing—involved in killing—in imposing a dictatorship in the Congo; and invading Iraq—on and on. That’s stability? I mean, that a Harvard Law School graduate can pronounce those words is pretty amazing, as is the fact that they’re accepted without comment.

Bradley Manning: “Sometimes You Have to Pay a Heavy Price to Live in a Free Society” | Democracy Now!

▻http://www.democracynow.org/2013/8/22/bradley_manning_sometimes_you_have_to

Army Private Bradley Manning was sentenced Wednesday to 35 years in prison and dishonorably discharged for leaking more than 700,000 classified files and videos to WikiLeaks about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and U.S. foreign policy. The sentence is much longer than any punishment given to previous government officials who have leaked information to the media. Manning could be released on parole in about seven years.

#wikileak #bradley_maning

Black, Gay and a Pacifist: Bayard Rustin Remembered For Role in March on Washington, Mentoring MLK
▻http://www.democracynow.org/2013/8/12/black_gay_and_a_pacifist_bayard

#histoire #usa #martin_luther_king #bayard_rustin

How The Washington Post’s New Owner Aided the CIA, Blocked WikiLeaks & Decimated the Book Industry | Democracy Now !
▻http://www.democracynow.org/2013/8/7/how_the_washington_posts_new_owner

I think one thing that’s missing is a discussion of the hallowed traditions, the hallowed journalistic traditions of The Washington Post. I mean, any media consumer who’s been looking at the bevy of articles in the last day and a half has heard about this—you know, “What’s going to happen to The Washington Post’s journalistic tradition—the paper of Watergate—or, the paper that exposed Watergate and published the Pentagon Papers?” I think any serious and very, you know, diligent news consumer is going to realize that the incidents like Watergate conspiracy and the Pentagon Papers, that was 40 years ago, and the hallowed tradition of The #Washington_Post that we’re worried Bezos is going to ruin—and, again, it may get worse, it may not; most likely it’ll continue—but that hallowed tradition, for 40 years, The Washington Post has really been a newspaper of the bipartisan consensus. And items like or invasions like Iraq could hardly have happened without the editorial pages headed by a sort of a hawk, Fred Hiatt, who’s still in power today, and Fred Hiatt’s editorial pages of The Washington Post has, in a five-month period before the Iraq invasion, more than two dozen editorials urging on that invasion. Skeptics of the invasion were mercilessly savaged in the editorial pages and the op-ed pages, but they weren’t allowed to speak for themselves. And so, when I hear people talk about The Washington Post under the Graham family, the paper of Watergate, it reminds me of people who would look at today’s Barack Obama and say he’s a community organizer embedded with the poor in Chicago. The Watergate Washington Post was decades ago. The Washington Post we should be thinking about in the last 10, 12 years has been a very important instrument of U.S. intervention, imperial foreign policy, at the hands of the editorial page editor Fred Hiatt.

Ca fait donc bien longtemps que ce journal n’est plus un contrepouvoir ; autrement, #Jeff_Bezos appartient quand même un peu à la #silicon_army même s’il ne vient pas de la bay area.

Bel effort ! La peine de prison de Bradley Manning est réduite de 46 ans.

Bradley Manning’s Maximum Sentence Reduced to 90 Years
Headlines for August 07, 2013 | Democracy Now !
▻http://www.democracynow.org/2013/8/7/headlines#872

A military judge has reduced the maximum possible prison sentence for Army whistleblower Bradley Manning to 90 years. Manning faced up to 136 years in prison following his conviction on 20 counts for leaking troves of secret documents to WikiLeaks. But on Tuesday, Col. Denise Lind granted requests by the defense to merge a number of the counts against him.

Headlines for August 01, 2013 | Democracy Now!
▻http://www.democracynow.org/2013/8/1/headlines#814

Edward Snowden’s father has revealed the FBI tried to enlist him in traveling to Russia to convince his son to return to the United States. Speaking to a Russian television network, Lonnie Snowden said he refused.

Lonnie Snowden: “To be an emotional tool for the FBI to use against my son — to say ’your father’s out on the aircraft, why don’t you come talk to him’ — I wasn’t interested in that. I wanted to make sure there was value to my son. Ed, I hope you’re watching. Your family is well, and we love you. We hope you’re healthy. We hope you’re well. I hope to see you soon. But most of all, I want you to be safe.”

Twitter / FearDept : Another precaution we took ...
▻https://twitter.com/FearDept/status/362191366786277376/photo/1

Another precaution we took was assuring the judge she’d get promoted after #Manning is convicted.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BQbDIQ6CYAAoYLM.png:large

Guantánamo Hunger Strike Enters 100th Day ; 30 Prisoners Being Force-Fed

Headlines for May 17, 2013 | Democracy Now !
▻http://www.democracynow.org/2013/5/17/headlines#5171

The hunger strike by prisoners at Guantánamo Bay has entered its 100th day. The U.S. military now says 102 out of 166 prisoners are on strike, while lawyers for the prisoners maintain the number is higher. Thirty hunger strikers are being force-fed through nasal tubes pushed into their stomachs. Three have been hospitalized. The prisoners launched their protest against indefinite detention in early February. Most have been held for more than a decade without charge or trial.

Assata Shakur in Her Own Words: Rare Recording of Activist Named to FBI Most Wanted Terrorists List

The FBI has added the former Black Panther Assata Shakur to its Most Wanted Terrorists list 40 years after the killing for which she was convicted. Born Joanne Chesimard, Shakur was found guilty of shooting dead a New Jersey state trooper during a gunfight in 1973.

▻http://www.democracynow.org/2013/5/3/assata_shakur_in_her_own_words

►http://www.assatashakur.org

▻http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/05/03/tupac-assata-shakur-fbi-most-wanted-terrorist-list-_n_3206206.html
The step-aunt and godmother of rapper Tupac Shakur has become the first woman to be added to the FBI Most Wanted Terrorist List.

#cointel_pro #usa #fbi

Israeli Journalist Amira Hass Sparks Furor at Home for Defending Palestinian Right to Resist

►http://www.democracynow.org/2013/4/10/israeli_journalist_amira_hass_sparks_furor

Amira Hass s’exprime sur Democracy NOW!

Israeli Journalist Amira Hass Sparks Furor at Home for Defending Palestinian Right to Resist | Democracy Now!
►http://www.democracynow.org/2013/4/10/israeli_journalist_amira_hass_sparks_furor

Amira Hass, the only Jewish-Israeli journalist to have spent almost 20 years living in and reporting from Gaza and the West Bank, recently suffered a torrent of hate mail and calls for her prosecution after she wrote an article defending the right of Palestinians to resist violent occupation. In the article, Hass defended the throwing of stones by Palestinian youth at Israeli soldiers, calling it “the birthright and duty of anyone subject to foreign rule.” Hass said Israelis remain in denial about “how much violence is used on a daily basis against Palestinians. They don’t like to be told that someone has the right to resist their violence.”

▻http://seenthis.net/messages/128072

Irak : impossible d’aller plus loin que la photo de ce nourrisson, arrivé dans la guerre, l’uranium et le phosphore.

Ten Years Later, U.S. Has Left Iraq with Mass Displacement & Epidemic of Birth Defects, Cancers | Democracy Now !
▻http://www.democracynow.org/2013/3/20/ten_years_later_us_has_left

In part two of our interview, Al Jazeera reporter Dahr Jamail discusses how the U.S. invasion of Iraq has left behind a legacy of cancer and birth defects suspected of being caused by the U.S. military’s extensive use of depleted uranium and white phosphorus.

#irak #guerre #armeschimiques