organization:federal bureau of investigation

Remember #Aaron_Swartz.

Génie généreux poussé au suicide il y a 5 ans.

« La différence entre Jobs, Gates et Aaron, c’est que lui voulait rendre le monde meilleur, pas gagner de l’argent »

▻https://youtu.be/jGOCQongiuI

First France, Now Brazil Unveils Plan to Empower the Government to Censor the Internet in the Name of Stopping “Fake News”
►https://theintercept.com/2018/01/10/first-france-now-brazil-unveils-plans-to-empower-the-government-to-cen

https://cdn01.theintercept.com/wp-uploads/sites/1/2018/01/AP_18010239677170-1515587860-e1515597063439-article-header.jpg

YESTERDAY AFTERNOON, THE official Twitter account of Brazil’s Federal Police (its FBI equivalent) posted an extraordinary announcement. The bureaucratically nonchalant tone it used belied its significance. The tweet, at its core, purports to vest in the federal police and the federal government that oversees it the power to regulate, control, and outright censor political content on the internet that is assessed to be “false,” and to “punish” those who disseminate it. The new power would cover both social media posts and entire websites devoted to politics.

“In the next few days, the Federal Police will begin activities in Brasília [the nation’s capital] by a specially formed group to combat false news during the [upcoming 2018 presidential] election process,” the official police tweet stated. It added: “The measures are intended to identify and punish the authors of ‘fake news’ for or against candidates.” Top police officials told media outlets that their working group would include representatives of the judiciary’s election branch and leading prosecutors, though one of the key judicial figures involved is the highly controversial right-wing Supreme Court judge, Gilmar Mendes, who has long blurred judicial authority with his political activism.

What Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury” says about Trump’s collusion with Israel
▻https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/what-michael-wolffs-fire-and-fury-says-about-trumps-collusion-is

However, the special counsel probe by Robert Mueller has indeed uncovered some collusion between the Trump team and a foreign power: Israel.

In a plea agreement last month for making false statements to the FBI, Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn admitted that he had contacted foreign governments during the final weeks of the Obama administration to try to derail a UN vote condemning Israeli settlements.

This possibly illegal effort to undermine the policy of the sitting administration was done at the direction of Kushner and at the request of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Yet mainstream pundits have shown little concern, just as they have shown little interest in any further revelations about what we might well call Israelgate coming out of the Wolff book.

As the book’s publication was brought forward amid the media frenzy, I decided to take a look.

It turns out that Fire and Fury contains evidence that Trump’s policy is not so much America First as it is Israel First.

Wolff recounts an early January 2017 dinner in New York where Bannon and disgraced former Fox News boss Roger Ailes discussed cabinet picks.

Bannon observed that they did not have a “deep bench,” but both men agreed the extremely pro-Israel neocon John Bolton would be a good pick for national security adviser. “He’s a bomb thrower,” Ailes said of Bolton, “and a strange little fucker. But you need him. Who else is good on Israel?”

“Day one we’re moving the US embassy to Jerusalem. Netanyahu’s all in,” Bannon said, adding that anti-Palestinian casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson was on board too.

“Let Jordan take the West Bank, let Egypt take Gaza. Let them deal with it. Or sink trying,” Bannon proposed. “The Saudis are on the brink, Egyptians are on brink, all scared to death of Persia.”

Asked by Ailes, “Does Donald know” the plan, Bannon reportedly just smiled.

Bannon’s idea reflected “the new Trump thinking” about the Middle East: “There are basically four players,” writes Wolff, “Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Iran. The first three can be united against the fourth.” Egypt and Saudi Arabia would be “given what they want” in respect to Iran, and in return would “pressure the Palestinians to make a deal.”

Another key foreign policy relationship for the Trump administration has been with Mohammad bin Salman, the reckless crown prince and real power in Saudi Arabia, who has been willing to go along with the plan, especially by cozying up to Israel.

According to Wolff, the lack of education of both Trump and MBS – as the Saudi prince is commonly known – put them on an “equal footing” and made them “oddly comfortable with each other.”

Trump, ignorant and constantly flattered by regional leaders, appeared to naively believe he could pull off what he called “the biggest breakthrough in Israel-Palestine negotiations ever.”

Jackson Lears · What We Don’t Talk about When We Talk about Russian Hacking : #Russiagate · LRB 4 January 2018
►https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n01/jackson-lears/what-we-dont-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-russian-hacking
La pensée unique aux États Unis de plus en plus sectaire et pesante

Jackson Lears

American politics have rarely presented a more disheartening spectacle. The repellent and dangerous antics of Donald Trump are troubling enough, but so is the Democratic Party leadership’s failure to take in the significance of the 2016 election campaign. Bernie Sanders’s challenge to Hillary Clinton, combined with Trump’s triumph, revealed the breadth of popular anger at politics as usual – the blend of neoliberal domestic policy and interventionist foreign policy that constitutes consensus in Washington. Neoliberals celebrate market utility as the sole criterion of worth; interventionists exalt military adventure abroad as a means of fighting evil in order to secure global progress. Both agendas have proved calamitous for most Americans. Many registered their disaffection in 2016. Sanders is a social democrat and Trump a demagogic mountebank, but their campaigns underscored a widespread repudiation of the Washington consensus. For about a week after the election, pundits discussed the possibility of a more capacious Democratic strategy. It appeared that the party might learn something from Clinton’s defeat. Then everything changed.

A story that had circulated during the campaign without much effect resurfaced: it involved the charge that Russian operatives had hacked into the servers of the Democratic National Committee, revealing embarrassing emails that damaged Clinton’s chances. With stunning speed, a new centrist-liberal orthodoxy came into being, enveloping the major media and the bipartisan Washington establishment. This secular religion has attracted hordes of converts in the first year of the Trump presidency. In its capacity to exclude dissent, it is like no other formation of mass opinion in my adult life, though it recalls a few dim childhood memories of anti-communist hysteria during the early 1950s.

The centrepiece of the faith, based on the hacking charge, is the belief that Vladimir Putin orchestrated an attack on American democracy by ordering his minions to interfere in the election on behalf of Trump. The story became gospel with breathtaking suddenness and completeness. Doubters are perceived as heretics and as apologists for Trump and Putin, the evil twins and co-conspirators behind this attack on American democracy. Responsibility for the absence of debate lies in large part with the major media outlets. Their uncritical embrace and endless repetition of the Russian hack story have made it seem a fait accompli in the public mind. It is hard to estimate popular belief in this new orthodoxy, but it does not seem to be merely a creed of Washington insiders. If you question the received narrative in casual conversations, you run the risk of provoking blank stares or overt hostility – even from old friends. This has all been baffling and troubling to me; there have been moments when pop-culture fantasies (body snatchers, Kool-Aid) have come to mind.

Like any orthodoxy worth its salt, the religion of the Russian hack depends not on evidence but on ex cathedra pronouncements on the part of authoritative institutions and their overlords. Its scriptural foundation is a confused and largely fact-free ‘assessment’ produced last January by a small number of ‘hand-picked’ analysts – as James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence, described them – from the CIA, the FBI and the NSA. The claims of the last were made with only ‘moderate’ confidence. The label Intelligence Community Assessment creates a misleading impression of unanimity, given that only three of the 16 US intelligence agencies contributed to the report. And indeed the assessment itself contained this crucial admission: ‘Judgments are not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact. Assessments are based on collected information, which is often incomplete or fragmentary, as well as logic, argumentation and precedents.’ Yet the assessment has passed into the media imagination as if it were unassailable fact, allowing journalists to assume what has yet to be proved. In doing so they serve as mouthpieces for the intelligence agencies, or at least for those ‘hand-picked’ analysts.

It is not the first time the intelligence agencies have played this role. When I hear the Intelligence Community Assessment cited as a reliable source, I always recall the part played by the New York Times in legitimating CIA reports of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s putative weapons of mass destruction, not to mention the long history of disinformation (a.k.a. ‘fake news’) as a tactic for advancing one administration or another’s political agenda. Once again, the established press is legitimating pronouncements made by the Church Fathers of the national security state. Clapper is among the most vigorous of these. He perjured himself before Congress in 2013, when he denied that the NSA had ‘wittingly’ spied on Americans – a lie for which he has never been held to account. In May 2017, he told NBC’s Chuck Todd that the Russians were highly likely to have colluded with Trump’s campaign because they are ‘almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favour, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique’. The current orthodoxy exempts the Church Fathers from standards imposed on ordinary people, and condemns Russians – above all Putin – as uniquely, ‘almost genetically’ diabolical.

It’s hard for me to understand how the Democratic Party, which once felt scepticism towards the intelligence agencies, can now embrace the CIA and the FBI as sources of incontrovertible truth. One possible explanation is that Trump’s election has created a permanent emergency in the liberal imagination, based on the belief that the threat he poses is unique and unprecedented. It’s true that Trump’s menace is viscerally real. But the menace posed by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney was equally real. The damage done by Bush and Cheney – who ravaged the Middle East, legitimated torture and expanded unconstitutional executive power – was truly unprecedented, and probably permanent. Trump does pose an unprecedented threat to undocumented immigrants and Muslim travellers, whose protection is urgent and necessary. But on most issues he is a standard issue Republican. He is perfectly at home with Paul Ryan’s austerity agenda, which involves enormous transfers of wealth to the most privileged Americans. He is as committed as any other Republican to repealing Obama’s Affordable Care Act. During the campaign he posed as an apostate on free trade and an opponent of overseas military intervention, but now that he is in office his free trade views are shifting unpredictably and his foreign policy team is composed of generals with impeccable interventionist credentials.

Trump is committed to continuing his predecessors’ lavish funding of the already bloated Defence Department, and his Fortress America is a blustering, undisciplined version of Madeleine Albright’s ‘indispensable nation’. Both Trump and Albright assume that the United States should be able to do as it pleases in the international arena: Trump because it’s the greatest country in the world, Albright because it’s an exceptional force for global good. Nor is there anything unprecedented about Trump’s desire for détente with Russia, which until at least 2012 was the official position of the Democratic Party. What is unprecedented about Trump is his offensive style: contemptuous, bullying, inarticulate, and yet perfectly pitched to appeal to the anger and anxiety of his target audience. His excess has licensed overt racism and proud misogyny among some of his supporters. This is cause for denunciation, but I am less persuaded that it justifies the anti-Russian mania.

Besides Trump’s supposed uniqueness, there are two other assumptions behind the furore in Washington: the first is that the Russian hack unquestionably occurred, and the second is that the Russians are our implacable enemies. The second provides the emotional charge for the first. Both seem to me problematic. With respect to the first, the hacking charges are unproved and may well remain so. Edward Snowden and others familiar with the NSA say that if long-distance hacking had taken place the agency would have monitored it and could detail its existence without compromising their secret sources and methods. In September, Snowden told Der Spiegel that the NSA ‘probably knows quite well who the invaders were’. And yet ‘it has not presented any evidence, although I suspect it exists. The question is: why not? … I suspect it discovered other attackers in the systems, maybe there were six or seven groups at work.’ He also said in July 2016 that ‘even if the attackers try to obfuscate origin, ‪#XKEYSCORE makes following exfiltrated data easy. I did this personally against Chinese ops.’ The NSA’s capacity to follow hacking to its source is a matter of public record. When the agency investigated pervasive and successful Chinese hacking into US military and defence industry installations, it was able to trace the hacks to the building where they originated, a People’s Liberation Army facility in Shanghai. That information was published in the New York Times, but, this time, the NSA’s failure to provide evidence has gone curiously unremarked. When The Intercept published a story about the NSA’s alleged discovery that Russian military intelligence had attempted to hack into US state and local election systems, the agency’s undocumented assertions about the Russian origins of the hack were allowed to stand as unchallenged fact and quickly became treated as such in the mainstream media.

Meanwhile, there has been a blizzard of ancillary accusations, including much broader and vaguer charges of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. It remains possible that Robert Mueller, a former FBI director who has been appointed to investigate these allegations, may turn up some compelling evidence of contacts between Trump’s people and various Russians. It would be surprising if an experienced prosecutor empowered to cast a dragnet came up empty-handed, and the arrests have already begun. But what is striking about them is that the charges have nothing to do with Russian interference in the election. There has been much talk about the possibility that the accused may provide damaging evidence against Trump in exchange for lighter sentences, but this is merely speculation. Paul Manafort, at one point Trump’s campaign manager, has pleaded not guilty to charges of failing to register his public relations firm as a foreign agent for the Ukrainian government and concealing his millions of dollars in fees. But all this occurred before the 2016 campaign. George Papadopolous, a foreign policy adviser, has pleaded guilty to the charge of lying to the FBI about his bungling efforts to arrange a meeting between Trump’s people and the Russian government – an opportunity the Trump campaign declined. Mueller’s most recent arrestee, Michael Flynn, the unhinged Islamophobe who was briefly Trump’s national security adviser, has pleaded guilty to charges of lying to the FBI about meeting the Russian ambassador in December – weeks after the election. This is the sort of backchannel diplomacy that routinely occurs during the interim between one administration and the next. It is not a sign of collusion.

So far, after months of ‘bombshells’ that turn out to be duds, there is still no actual evidence for the claim that the Kremlin ordered interference in the American election. Meanwhile serious doubts have surfaced about the technical basis for the hacking claims. Independent observers have argued it is more likely that the emails were leaked from inside, not hacked from outside. On this front, the most persuasive case was made by a group called Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, former employees of the US intelligence agencies who distinguished themselves in 2003 by debunking Colin Powell’s claim that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, hours after Powell had presented his pseudo-evidence at the UN. (There are members of VIPS who dissent from the VIPS report’s conclusions, but their arguments are in turn contested by the authors of the report.) The VIPS findings received no attention in major media outlets, except Fox News – which from the centre-left perspective is worse than no attention at all. Mainstream media have dismissed the VIPS report as a conspiracy theory (apparently the Russian hacking story does not count as one). The crucial issue here and elsewhere is the exclusion from public discussion of any critical perspectives on the orthodox narrative, even the perspectives of people with professional credentials and a solid track record.

Both the DNC hacking story and the one involving the emails of John Podesta, a Clinton campaign operative, involve a shadowy bunch of putatively Russian hackers called Fancy Bear – also known among the technically inclined as APT28. The name Fancy Bear was introduced by Dimitri Alperovitch, the chief technology officer of Crowdstrike, a cybersecurity firm hired by the DNC to investigate the theft of their emails. Alperovitch is also a fellow at the Atlantic Council, an anti-Russian Washington think tank. In its report Crowdstrike puts forward close to zero evidence for its claim that those responsible were Russian, let alone for its assertion that they were affiliated with Russian military intelligence. And yet, from this point on, the assumption that this was a Russian cyber operation was unquestioned. When the FBI arrived on the scene, the Bureau either did not request or was refused access to the DNC servers; instead it depended entirely on the Crowdstrike analysis. Crowdstrike, meanwhile, was being forced to retract another claim, that the Russians had successfully hacked the guidance systems of the Ukrainian artillery. The Ukrainian military and the British International Institute for Strategic Studies both contradicted this claim, and Crowdstrike backed down. But its DNC analysis was allowed to stand and even become the basis for the January Intelligence Community Assessment.

The chatter surrounding the hack would never have acquired such urgency were it not for the accompanying assumption: Russia is a uniquely dangerous adversary, with which we should avoid all contact. Without that belief, Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s meetings with Russians in September 2016 would become routine discussions between a senator and foreign officials. Flynn’s post-election conversations with the Russian ambassador would appear unremarkable. Trump’s cronies’ attempts to do business in Russia would become merely sleazy. Donald Trump Jr’s meeting at Trump Tower with the Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya would be transformed from a melodrama of shady intrigue to a comedy of errors – with the candidate’s son expecting to receive information to use against Clinton but discovering Veselnitskaya only wanted to talk about repealing sanctions and restarting the flow of Russian orphans to the United States. And Putin himself would become just another autocrat, with whom democracies could engage without endorsing.

Sceptical voices, such as those of the VIPS, have been drowned out by a din of disinformation. Flagrantly false stories, like the Washington Post report that the Russians had hacked into the Vermont electrical grid, are published, then retracted 24 hours later. Sometimes – like the stories about Russian interference in the French and German elections – they are not retracted even after they have been discredited. These stories have been thoroughly debunked by French and German intelligence services but continue to hover, poisoning the atmosphere, confusing debate. The claim that the Russians hacked local and state voting systems in the US was refuted by California and Wisconsin election officials, but their comments generated a mere whisper compared with the uproar created by the original story. The rush to publish without sufficient attention to accuracy has become the new normal in journalism. Retraction or correction is almost beside the point: the false accusation has done its work.

The consequence is a spreading confusion that envelops everything. Epistemological nihilism looms, but some people and institutions have more power than others to define what constitutes an agreed-on reality. To say this is to risk dismissal as the ultimate wing-nut in the lexicon of contemporary Washington: the conspiracy theorist. Still, the fact remains: sometimes powerful people arrange to promote ideas that benefit their common interests. Whether we call this hegemony, conspiracy or merely special privilege hardly matters. What does matter is the power to create what Gramsci called the ‘common sense’ of an entire society. Even if much of that society is indifferent to or suspicious of the official common sense, it still becomes embedded among the tacit assumptions that set the boundaries of ‘responsible opinion’. So the Democratic establishment (along with a few Republicans) and the major media outlets have made ‘Russian meddling’ the common sense of the current moment. What kind of cultural work does this common sense do? What are the consequences of the spectacle the media call (with characteristic originality) ‘Russiagate’?

The most immediate consequence is that, by finding foreign demons who can be blamed for Trump’s ascendancy, the Democratic leadership have shifted the blame for their defeat away from their own policies without questioning any of their core assumptions. Amid the general recoil from Trump, they can even style themselves dissenters – ‘#the resistance’ was the label Clintonites appropriated within a few days of the election. Mainstream Democrats have begun to use the word ‘progressive’ to apply to a platform that amounts to little more than preserving Obamacare, gesturing towards greater income equality and protecting minorities. This agenda is timid. It has nothing to say about challenging the influence of concentrated capital on policy, reducing the inflated defence budget or withdrawing from overextended foreign commitments; yet without those initiatives, even the mildest egalitarian policies face insuperable obstacles. More genuine insurgencies are in the making, which confront corporate power and connect domestic with foreign policy, but they face an uphill battle against the entrenched money and power of the Democratic leadership – the likes of Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, the Clintons and the DNC. Russiagate offers Democratic elites a way to promote party unity against Trump-Putin, while the DNC purges Sanders’s supporters.

For the DNC, the great value of the Russian hack story is that it focuses attention away from what was actually in their emails. The documents revealed a deeply corrupt organisation, whose pose of impartiality was a sham. Even the reliably pro-Clinton Washington Post has admitted that ‘many of the most damaging emails suggest the committee was actively trying to undermine Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign.’ Further evidence of collusion between the Clinton machine and the DNC surfaced recently in a memoir by Donna Brazile, who became interim chair of the DNC after Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned in the wake of the email revelations. Brazile describes discovering an agreement dated 26 August 2015, which specified (she writes)

that in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would control the party’s finances, strategy, and all the money raised. Her campaign had the right of refusal of who would be the party communications director, and it would make final decisions on all the other staff. The DNC also was required to consult with the campaign about all other staffing, budgeting, data, analytics and mailings.

Before the primaries had even begun, the supposedly neutral DNC – which had been close to insolvency – had been bought by the Clinton campaign.

Another recent revelation of DNC tactics concerns the origins of the inquiry into Trump’s supposed links to Putin. The story began in April 2016, when the DNC hired a Washington research firm called Fusion GPS to unearth any connections between Trump and Russia. The assignment involved the payment of ‘cash for trash’, as the Clinton campaign liked to say. Fusion GPS eventually produced the trash, a lurid account written by the former British MI6 intelligence agent Christopher Steele, based on hearsay purchased from anonymous Russian sources. Amid prostitutes and golden showers, a story emerged: the Russian government had been blackmailing and bribing Donald Trump for years, on the assumption that he would become president some day and serve the Kremlin’s interests. In this fantastic tale, Putin becomes a preternaturally prescient schemer. Like other accusations of collusion, this one has become vaguer over time, adding to the murky atmosphere without ever providing any evidence. The Clinton campaign tried to persuade established media outlets to publicise the Steele dossier, but with uncharacteristic circumspection, they declined to promote what was plainly political trash rather than reliable reporting. Yet the FBI apparently took the Steele dossier seriously enough to include a summary of it in a secret appendix to the Intelligence Community Assessment. Two weeks before the inauguration, James Comey, the director of the FBI, described the dossier to Trump. After Comey’s briefing was leaked to the press, the website Buzzfeed published the dossier in full, producing hilarity and hysteria in the Washington establishment.

The Steele dossier inhabits a shadowy realm where ideology and intelligence, disinformation and revelation overlap. It is the antechamber to the wider system of epistemological nihilism created by various rival factions in the intelligence community: the ‘tree of smoke’ that, for the novelist Denis Johnson, symbolised CIA operations in Vietnam. I inhaled that smoke myself in 1969-70, when I was a cryptographer with a Top Secret clearance on a US navy ship that carried missiles armed with nuclear warheads – the existence of which the navy denied. I was stripped of my clearance and later honourably discharged when I refused to join the Sealed Authenticator System, which would have authorised the launch of those allegedly non-existent nuclear weapons. The tree of smoke has only grown more complex and elusive since then. Yet the Democratic Party has now embarked on a full-scale rehabilitation of the intelligence community – or at least the part of it that supports the notion of Russian hacking. (We can be sure there is disagreement behind the scenes.) And it is not only the Democratic establishment that is embracing the deep state. Some of the party’s base, believing Trump and Putin to be joined at the hip, has taken to ranting about ‘treason’ like a reconstituted John Birch Society.

I thought of these ironies when I visited the Tate Modern exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, which featured the work of black American artists from the 1960s and 1970s, when intelligence agencies (and agents provocateurs) were spearheading a government crackdown on black militants, draft resisters, deserters and antiwar activists. Amid the paintings, collages and assemblages there was a single Confederate flag, accompanied by grim reminders of the Jim Crow past – a Klansman in full regalia, a black body dangling from a tree. There were also at least half a dozen US flags, juxtaposed in whole or in part with images of contemporary racial oppression that could have occurred anywhere in America: dead black men carted off on stretchers by skeletons in police uniform; a black prisoner tied to a chair, awaiting torture. The point was to contrast the pretensions of ‘the land of the free’ with the practices of the national security state and local police forces. The black artists of that era knew their enemy: black people were not being killed and imprisoned by some nebulous foreign adversary, but by the FBI, the CIA and the police.

The Democratic Party has now developed a new outlook on the world, a more ambitious partnership between liberal humanitarian interventionists and neoconservative militarists than existed under the cautious Obama. This may be the most disastrous consequence for the Democratic Party of the new anti-Russian orthodoxy: the loss of the opportunity to formulate a more humane and coherent foreign policy. The obsession with Putin has erased any possibility of complexity from the Democratic world picture, creating a void quickly filled by the monochrome fantasies of Hillary Clinton and her exceptionalist allies. For people like Max Boot and Robert Kagan, war is a desirable state of affairs, especially when viewed from the comfort of their keyboards, and the rest of the world – apart from a few bad guys – is filled with populations who want to build societies just like ours: pluralistic, democratic and open for business. This view is difficult to challenge when it cloaks itself in humanitarian sentiment. There is horrific suffering in the world; the US has abundant resources to help relieve it; the moral imperative is clear. There are endless forms of international engagement that do not involve military intervention. But it is the path taken by US policy often enough that one may suspect humanitarian rhetoric is nothing more than window-dressing for a more mundane geopolitics – one that defines the national interest as global and virtually limitless.

Having come of age during the Vietnam War, a calamitous consequence of that inflated definition of national interest, I have always been attracted to the realist critique of globalism. Realism is a label forever besmirched by association with Henry Kissinger, who used it as a rationale for intervening covertly and overtly in other nations’ affairs. Yet there is a more humane realist tradition, the tradition of George Kennan and William Fulbright, which emphasises the limits of military might, counselling that great power requires great restraint. This tradition challenges the doctrine of regime change under the guise of democracy promotion, which – despite its abysmal failures in Iraq and Libya – retains a baffling legitimacy in official Washington. Russiagate has extended its shelf life.

We can gauge the corrosive impact of the Democrats’ fixation on Russia by asking what they aren’t talking about when they talk about Russian hacking. For a start, they aren’t talking about interference of other sorts in the election, such as the Republican Party’s many means of disenfranchising minority voters. Nor are they talking about the trillion dollar defence budget that pre-empts the possibility of single-payer healthcare and other urgently needed social programmes; nor about the modernisation of the American nuclear arsenal which Obama began and Trump plans to accelerate, and which raises the risk of the ultimate environmental calamity, nuclear war – a threat made more serious than it has been in decades by America’s combative stance towards Russia. The prospect of impeaching Trump and removing him from office by convicting him of collusion with Russia has created an atmosphere of almost giddy anticipation among leading Democrats, allowing them to forget that the rest of the Republican Party is composed of many politicians far more skilful in Washington’s ways than their president will ever be.

It is not the Democratic Party that is leading the search for alternatives to the wreckage created by Republican policies: a tax plan that will soak the poor and middle class to benefit the rich; a heedless pursuit of fossil fuels that is already resulting in the contamination of the water supply of the Dakota people; and continued support for police policies of militarisation and mass incarceration. It is local populations that are threatened by oil spills and police beatings, and that is where humane populism survives. A multitude of insurgent groups have begun to use the outrage against Trump as a lever to move the party in egalitarian directions: Justice Democrats, Black Lives Matter, Democratic Socialists of America, as well as a host of local and regional organisations. They recognise that there are far more urgent – and genuine – reasons to oppose Trump than vague allegations of collusion with Russia. They are posing an overdue challenge to the long con of neoliberalism, and the technocratic arrogance that led to Clinton’s defeat in Rust Belt states. Recognising that the current leadership will not bring about significant change, they are seeking funding from outside the DNC. This is the real resistance, as opposed to ‘#theresistance’.

On certain important issues – such as broadening support for single-payer healthcare, promoting a higher minimum wage or protecting undocumented immigrants from the most flagrant forms of exploitation – these insurgents are winning wide support. Candidates like Paula Jean Swearengin, a coal miner’s daughter from West Virginia who is running in the Democratic primary for nomination to the US Senate, are challenging establishment Democrats who stand cheek by jowl with Republicans in their service to concentrated capital. Swearengin’s opponent is Joe Manchin, whom the Los Angeles Times has compared to Doug Jones, another ‘very conservative’ Democrat who recently won election to the US Senate in Alabama, narrowly defeating a Republican disgraced by accusations of sexual misconduct with 14-year-old girls. I can feel relieved at that result without joining in the collective Democratic ecstasy, which reveals the party’s persistent commitment to politics as usual. Democrat leaders have persuaded themselves (and much of their base) that all the republic needs is a restoration of the status quo ante Trump. They remain oblivious to popular impatience with familiar formulas. Jess King – a Mennonite woman, Bard College MBA and founder of a local non-profit who is running for Congress as a Justice Democrat in Lancaster, Pennsylvania – put it this way: ‘We see a changing political landscape right now that isn’t measured by traditional left to right politics anymore, but bottom to top. In Pennsylvania and many other places around the country we see a grassroots economic populism on the rise, pushing against the political establishment and status quo that have failed so many in our country.’

Democratic insurgents are also developing a populist critique of the imperial hubris that has sponsored multiple failed crusades, extorted disproportionate sacrifice from the working class and provoked support for Trump, who presented himself (however misleadingly) as an opponent of open-ended interventionism. On foreign policy, the insurgents face an even more entrenched opposition than on domestic policy: a bipartisan consensus aflame with outrage at the threat to democracy supposedly posed by Russian hacking. Still, they may have found a tactical way forward, by focusing on the unequal burden borne by the poor and working class in the promotion and maintenance of American empire.

This approach animates Autopsy: The Democratic Party in Crisis, a 33-page document whose authors include Norman Solomon, founder of the web-based insurgent lobby RootsAction.org. ‘The Democratic Party’s claims of fighting for “working families” have been undermined by its refusal to directly challenge corporate power, enabling Trump to masquerade as a champion of the people,’ Autopsy announces. But what sets this apart from most progressive critiques is the cogent connection it makes between domestic class politics and foreign policy. For those in the Rust Belt, military service has often seemed the only escape from the shambles created by neoliberal policies; yet the price of escape has been high. As Autopsy notes, ‘the wisdom of continual war’ – what Clinton calls ‘global leadership’ –

was far clearer to the party’s standard bearer [in 2016] than it was to people in the US communities bearing the brunt of combat deaths, injuries and psychological traumas. After a decade and a half of non-stop warfare, research data from voting patterns suggest that the Clinton campaign’s hawkish stance was a political detriment in working-class communities hard-hit by American casualties from deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Francis Shen of the University of Minnesota and Douglas Kriner of Boston University analysed election results in three key states – Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan – and found that ‘even controlling in a statistical model for many other alternative explanations, we find that there is a significant and meaningful relationship between a community’s rate of military sacrifice and its support for Trump.’ Clinton’s record of uncritical commitment to military intervention allowed Trump to have it both ways, playing to jingoist resentment while posing as an opponent of protracted and pointless war. Kriner and Shen conclude that Democrats may want to ‘re-examine their foreign policy posture if they hope to erase Trump’s electoral gains among constituencies exhausted and alienated by 15 years of war’. If the insurgent movements within the Democratic Party begin to formulate an intelligent foreign policy critique, a re-examination may finally occur. And the world may come into sharper focus as a place where American power, like American virtue, is limited. For this Democrat, that is an outcome devoutly to be wished. It’s a long shot, but there is something happening out there.

#USA #cuture #politique

Trump on Saudi Leadership Shake-up: “We’ve Put Our Man on Top!”
▻https://theintercept.com/2018/01/04/trump-saudi-arabia-fire-and-fury-michael-wolff

When Saudi Arabia’s Mohammad bin Salman effectively launched a coup and unseated his political rival in June, President Donald Trump took private credit. “We’ve put our man on top!” Trump told his friends, writes Michael Wolff in his forthcoming book, “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.”

Saudi Arabia’s King Salman had ousted his nephew Mohammad bin Nayef as crown prince and replaced him with his then-31-year-old son, bin Salman, shaking up the line of succession and turning on decades of custom within the royal family. The move was announced in the dead of night and was just another step in bin Salman’s rise to power in the kingdom in recent years. The king also removed bin Nayef, once a powerful figure in the country’s security apparatus, from his post as interior minister.

Just a month earlier, Trump had visited Saudi Arabia on his first overseas trip, meeting with leaders from across the Middle East and signing a $110 billion aspirational arms deal with the kingdom’s leaders. When bin Salman was named crown prince, Trump called and congratulated him on his “recent elevation.”

Wolff describes Trump’s Saudi trip as a “get-out-of-Dodge godsend,” as it was an escape from Washington shortly after the president fired FBI Director James Comey. “There couldn’t have been a better time to be making headlines far from Washington. A road trip could transform everything.”

The book is based on 18 months of interviews and access to Trump and his senior staff. But Wolff has a history of being an unreliable narrator, and questions have already been raised about the veracity of his claims. Trump, for his part, is outraged by the book, which contains damning passages about him and his family, attributed to the president’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon. The president’s lawyer has demanded that Wolff and his publisher cease and desist publication of the book.

#arabie_saoudite

La vente présumée d’un logiciel truffé de code « russe » au FBI met le français Safran dans l’embarras
▻http://www.numerama.com/politique/317502-la-vente-presumee-dun-logiciel-truffe-de-code-russe-au-fbi-met-le-f

Le géant industriel français Safran aurait vendu au FBI une solution biométrique qui contient du code russe. L’entreprise est aujourd’hui dans le collimateur de la justice pour avoir caché cette information. Le géant Français Safran fournit au FBI, ainsi qu’à différentes agences américaines, une solution d’analyse des empreintes biométriques. Mais selon deux anciens employés de l’entreprise française, ce logiciel contiendrait du code réalisé par une société proche du Kremlin. Pour BuzzFeed News, cette (...)

#Safran #FBI #algorithme #biométrie #surveillance #empreintes #manipulation

FBI Software For Analyzing Fingerprints Contains Russian-Made Code, Whistleblowers Say
▻https://www.buzzfeed.com/chrishamby/fbi-software-contains-russian-made-code-that-could-open-a

In a secret deal, a French company purchased code from a Kremlin-connected firm, incorporated it into its own software, and hid its existence from the FBI, according to documents and two whistleblowers. The allegations raise concerns that Russian hackers could compromise law enforcement computer systems. The fingerprint-analysis software used by the FBI and more than 18,000 other US law enforcement agencies contains code created by a Russian firm with close ties to the Kremlin, according (...)

#Safran #FBI #algorithme #manipulation #biométrie #empreintes #surveillance

Jackson Lears · What We Don’t Talk about When We Talk about Russian Hacking: #Russiagate · LRB 4 January 2018
►https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n01/jackson-lears/what-we-dont-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-russian-hacking

Like any orthodoxy worth its salt, the religion of the Russian hack depends not on evidence but on ex cathedra pronouncements on the part of authoritative institutions and their overlords. Its scriptural foundation is a confused and largely fact-free ‘assessment’ produced last January by a small number of ‘hand-picked’ analysts – as James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence, described them – from the CIA, the FBI and the NSA. The claims of the last were made with only ‘moderate’ confidence. The label Intelligence Community Assessment creates a misleading impression of unanimity, given that only three of the 16 US intelligence agencies contributed to the report. And indeed the assessment itself contained this crucial admission: ‘Judgments are not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact. Assessments are based on collected information, which is often incomplete or fragmentary, as well as logic, argumentation and precedents.’ Yet the assessment has passed into the media imagination as if it were unassailable fact, allowing journalists to assume what has yet to be proved. In doing so they serve as mouthpieces for the intelligence agencies, or at least for those ‘hand-picked’ analysts.

[...]

The consequence is a spreading confusion that envelops everything. Epistemological nihilism looms, but some people and institutions have more power than others to define what constitutes an agreed-on reality. To say this is to risk dismissal as the ultimate wing-nut in the lexicon of contemporary Washington: the conspiracy theorist. Still, the fact remains: sometimes powerful people arrange to promote ideas that benefit their common interests. Whether we call this hegemony, conspiracy or merely special privilege hardly matters. What does matter is the power to create what Gramsci called the ‘common sense’ of an entire society. Even if much of that society is indifferent to or suspicious of the official common sense, it still becomes embedded among the tacit assumptions that set the boundaries of ‘responsible opinion’. So the Democratic establishment (along with a few Republicans) and the major media outlets have made ‘Russian meddling’ the common sense of the current moment. What kind of cultural work does this common sense do? What are the consequences of the spectacle the media call (with characteristic originality) ‘Russiagate’?

The most immediate consequence is that, by finding foreign demons who can be blamed for Trump’s ascendancy, the Democratic leadership have shifted the blame for their defeat away from their own policies without questioning any of their core assumptions. Amid the general recoil from Trump, they can even style themselves dissenters – ‘the resistance’ was the label Clintonites appropriated within a few days of the election. #Mainstream Democrats have begun to use the word ‘progressive’ to apply to a platform that amounts to little more than preserving Obamacare, gesturing towards greater income equality and protecting minorities. This agenda is timid. It has nothing to say about challenging the influence of concentrated capital on policy, reducing the inflated defence budget or withdrawing from overextended foreign commitments; yet without those initiatives, even the mildest egalitarian policies face insuperable obstacles. More genuine insurgencies are in the making, which confront corporate power and connect domestic with foreign policy, but they face an uphill battle against the entrenched money and power of the Democratic leadership – the likes of Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, the Clintons and the DNC. Russiagate offers Democratic elites a way to promote party unity against Trump-Putin, while the DNC purges Sanders’s supporters.

For the DNC, the great value of the Russian hack story is that it focuses attention away from what was actually in their emails. The documents revealed a deeply corrupt organisation, whose pose of impartiality was a sham. Even the reliably pro-Clinton Washington Post has admitted that ‘many of the most damaging emails suggest the committee was actively trying to undermine Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign.’ Further evidence of collusion between the Clinton machine and the DNC surfaced recently in a memoir by Donna Brazile, who became interim chair of the DNC after Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned in the wake of the email revelations. Brazile describes discovering an agreement dated 26 August 2015, which specified (she writes)

[...]

The FBI’s Hunt for Two Missing Piglets Reveals the Federal Cover-Up of Barbaric Factory Farms
▻https://theintercept.com/2017/10/05/factory-farms-fbi-missing-piglets-animal-rights-glenn-greenwald

https://cdn01.theintercept.com/wp-uploads/sites/1/2017/10/Smithfield-Circle-Four-Farms-piglets-pigs-factory-pig-aminal-cruelty-abuse-02-1507061386.jpg

FBI agents are devoting substantial resources to a multistate hunt for two baby piglets that the bureau believes are named Lucy and Ethel. The two piglets were removed over the summer from the Circle Four Farm in Utah by animal rights activists who had entered the Smithfield Foods-owned factory farm to film the brutal, torturous conditions in which the pigs are bred in order to be slaughtered.

While filming the conditions at the Smithfield facility, activists saw the two ailing baby piglets laying on the ground, visibly ill and near death, surrounded by the rotting corpses of dead piglets. “One was swollen and barely able to stand; the other had been trampled and was covered in blood,” said Wayne Hsiung of Direct Action Everywhere (DxE), which filmed the facility and performed the rescue. Due to various illnesses, he said, the piglets were unable to eat or digest food and were thus a fraction of the normal weight for piglets their age.

Rather than leave the two piglets at Circle Four Farm to wait for an imminent and painful death, the DxE activists decided to rescue them. They carried them out of the pens where they had been suffering and took them to an animal sanctuary to be treated and nursed back to health.

A Mass Incarceration Mystery
Why are black imprisonment rates going down? Four theories.
▻https://www.themarshallproject.org/2017/12/15/a-mass-incarceration-mystery

https://s3.amazonaws.com/tmp-production-story-assets/RaceDisparityWomen121217/assets/data/app-desktop.png https://s3.amazonaws.com/tmp-production-story-assets/RaceDisparityMen121317/assets/data/app-desktop.jpg

One of the most damning features of the U.S. criminal justice system is its vast racial inequity. Black people in this country are imprisoned at more than 5 times the rate of whites; one in 10 black children has a parent behind bars, compared with about one in 60 white kids, according to the Stanford Center on Poverty & Inequality. The crisis has persisted for so long that it has nearly become an accepted norm.So it may come as a surprise to learn that for the last 15 years, racial disparities in the American prison system have actually been on the decline, according to a Marshall Project analysis of yearly reports by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics and the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting system. . At the same time, the white male rate increased slightly, the BJS numbers indicate.Among women, the trend is even more dramatic. From 2000 to 2015, the black female imprisonment rate dropped by nearly 50 percent; during the same period, the white female rate shot upward by 53 percent. As the nonprofit Sentencing Project has pointed out, the racial disparity between black and white women’s incarceration was once 6 to 1. Now it’s 2 to 1

Pierre Jovanovic : Adolf Hitler ou la revanche de la planche à billets (Partie 2)
▻https://www.crashdebug.fr/loisirss/73-livres/14283-pierre-jovanovic-adolf-hitler-ou-la-revanche-de-la-planche-a-billet

Pour ceux qui n’aurrait pas vu la 1ere partie elle est ici.

Bonne soirée, ; )

Amicalement,

f.

Source(s) : Youtube.com via Contributeur anonyme

Informations complémentaires :

Crashdebug.fr : « L’histoire ne se répète jamais exactement, par contre elle bégaie... »

Crashdebug.fr : 6 juin 1944 : ce qu’on ne vous dira pas...

Crashdebug.fr : Mille milliards de dollars

Crashdebug.fr : Le secret d’Adolf Jacob Hitler...

Crashdebug.fr : Hitler était accro à la cocaïne

Crashdebug.fr : Adolf Hitler, la Fraternité musulmane et les Palestiniens

Crashdebug.fr : Hitler n’est pas mort en Allemagne ; Il a fui en Argentine selon des documents récemment déclassifiés du FBI

Crashdebug.fr : Walter HALLSTEIN, un NAZI, 1er Président de la Commission Européenne...

Crashdebug.fr : La France choisit la (...)

#En_vedette #Livres #Loisirs

How to Launder $1 Billion of Iranian Oil - Bloomberg
▻https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-12-08/how-to-launder-1-billion-of-iranian-oil

It wasn’t until he appeared in court on Nov. 29 that the full story surfaced. The FBI had removed him from jail to protect him from threats, keeping him under guard at an undisclosed location. By then, Zarrab had secretly pleaded guilty to all the charges against him and agreed to help the U.S. government. As part of his deal, prosecutors offered him and his family witness protection.

Over more than a week on the witness stand, Zarrab spun a stunning tale of corruption and double-dealing that reached the highest levels of the Turkish government, all the way up to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The case has further soured Washington and Ankara’s already strained relationship, revealing how America’s longtime ally may have helped Iran undermine sanctions even as Turkey received millions of dollars in U.S. aid. Nine people have been charged, including Turkey’s former economy minister and past chief executive officer of Halkbank, a major Turkish bank owned by the government. Of them, only one—a senior Halkbank executive named Mehmet Hakan Atilla, Zarrab’s former co-defendant—is on trial. The others have all avoided U.S. arrest.

In court, Zarrab laid out how he paid tens of millions of dollars in bribes to Turkish government officials and banking executives to win their assistance—and cover—for the money laundering operation. He dropped a bombshell on his second day of testimony, when he implicated Erdogan as part of the scheme, saying he was told Turkey’s president gave orders that two Turkish banks be included in the plot.

#Turquie #Iran

Trump et la #Russie : l’homme du président plaide coupable
▻https://www.mediapart.fr/journal/international/021217/trump-et-la-russie-l-homme-du-president-plaide-coupable

Le général #Michael_Flynn, au cœur de l’enquête sur l’ingérence russe. Michael Flynn, qui fut l’un des artisans de la victoire de Trump puis son conseiller à la sécurité nationale, est accusé d’avoir menti au #FBI sur ses liens avec la Russie et a décidé de plaider coupable. Il annonce ainsi une collaboration avec la justice américaine.

#International #Donald_Trump #Jared_Kushner #Poutine #Robert_Mueller

Pourquoi Flynn, l’homme du président, plaide coupable
▻https://www.mediapart.fr/journal/international/021217/pourquoi-flynn-l-homme-du-president-plaide-coupable

Michael Flynn, qui fut l’un des artisans de la victoire de Trump puis son conseiller à la sécurité nationale, est accusé d’avoir menti au #FBI sur ses liens avec la #Russie et a décidé de plaider coupable. Il annonce ainsi une collaboration avec la justice américaine.

#International #Donald_Trump #Jared_Kushner #Michael_Flynn #Poutine #Robert_Mueller

On parle beaucoup des scandales américano-russes, mais israel joue un rôle énorme dans cette histoire, ce que peu de journaux « remarquent » :

Trump aide Flynn pleads guilty to lying about effort to help Israel
Ali Abunimah, Electronic Intifada, le 1er décembre 2017
▻https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/trump-aide-flynn-pleads-guilty-lying-about-effort-help-israel

#USA #Russie #israel #Palestine #Donald_Trump #Michael_Flynn #FBI

Flynn plaide coupable, l’enquête prend une nouvelle dimension
▻https://www.mediapart.fr/journal/international/011217/flynn-plaide-coupable-lenquete-prend-une-nouvelle-dimension

Donald #trump au concours Miss Univers à Moscou, en 2013. © Reuters Michael Flynn, qui fut l’un des artisans de la victoire de Trump puis son conseiller à la sécurité nationale, est accusé d’avoir menti au FBI sur ses liens avec la #Russie et a décidé de plaider coupable. Il annonce ainsi une collaboration avec le procureur.

#International #Donald_Trump #Maison_Blanche

Le détail qui risque de t’échapper, parce que c’est une petite phrase planquée au fin fond du billet : Flynn pleads guilty on Russia, reportedly ready to testify against Trump
▻https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-russia/flynn-charged-with-lying-to-fbi-plea-hearing-set-u-s-special-counsel-idUSKB

Flynn also lied about asking the envoy to help delay a vote in the U. N. Security Council that was seen as damaging to Israel.

Le FBI n’avait pas notifié de nombreuses cibles des pirates russes
▻http://www.lemonde.fr/pixels/article/2017/11/27/le-fbi-n-avait-pas-notifie-de-nombreuses-cibles-des-pirates-russes_5220902_4

Des dizaines de personnes travaillant dans des administrations américaines n’ont pas été informées par le FBI qu’elles étaient visées par le groupe de pirates #Fancy_Bear, alors que la police fédérale disposait d’informations en ce sens, révèle une enquête de l’agence de presse Associated Press (AP).

Sur 80 personnes interrogées par AP, seules deux avaient été averties par le FBI que des pirates liés au groupe Fancy Bear, considéré comme l’un des bras armés du renseignement militaire russe, tentaient de pénétrer leurs boîtes e-mail. Le FBI n’a pas souhaité répondre aux questions de l’agence de presse.

Selon des sources au sein de la police fédérale, citées anonymement par AP, les enquêteurs étaient à l’époque débordés par le nombre de tentatives de piratage. D’autres éléments recueillis par AP tendent à montrer que le FBI n’a pas pris la mesure du danger – deux sociétés dont les services ont été utilisés pour diffuser les documents volés au Parti démocrate ont affirmé à l’agence de presse qu’elles n’avaient pas été contactées par le FBI.

Le rôle du FBI après le piratage des documents internes du Parti démocrate avait déjà été très critiqué peu après la publication des documents. Les enquêteurs avaient mis du temps à entrer en contact avec la direction du parti pour prévenir qu’un piratage majeur avait eu lieu.

Mondial 2022 : une enquête ouverte sur un virement suspect provenant du Qatar
▻http://www.lemonde.fr/sport-et-societe/article/2017/11/27/mondial-2022-une-enquete-ouverte-sur-un-virement-suspect-provenant-du-qatar_

Nouveau rebondissement dans le scandale de corruption sur l’attribution de la Coupe du monde de football 2022. Dimanche 26 novembre, le site Mediapart rapporte que la justice brésilienne et le FBI enquêtent sur un virement de 22 millions de dollars, effectué par le Qatar.

Les procureurs brésilien et américain ont décortiqué les relevés bancaires de l’ancien patron de la Fédération brésilienne de football (CBF), Ricardo Teixeira, qui avait ouvert un compte chez Pasche Monaco – un établissement basé en Suisse et contrôlé par le Crédit mutuel jusqu’en 2013.

Ils ont alors remarqué qu’un versement de 22 millions de dollars, en provenance du groupe qatari Ghanim Bin Saad Al-Saad & Sons Group (CSSG), a été effectué sur ce compte bancaire en janvier 2011, peu de temps après l’attribution par vote du Mondial 2022 au Qatar. Mediapart rappelle alors que le CSSG, « dirigé par l’homme d’affaires Ghanim Bin Saad Al-Saad, est au cœur des soupçons de corruption sur [cette] attribution ».

Visé par une enquête pour blanchiment d’argent et fraude entre 2009 et 2012, Ricardo Teixeira, patron de la puissante Fédération brésilienne depuis 1989, avait démissionné de ses fonctions en 2012. Il était l’un des membres du comité exécutif de la Fédération internationale de football (FIFA) qui ont participé, en décembre 2010, au vote attribuant les Coupes du monde 2018 et 2022 à la Russie et au Qatar.

Ricardo Teixeira est alors « suspecté d’avoir pris part au système présumé visant à acheter des votes pour le Qatar parmi les 22 électeurs de la FIFA ». Mais pas seulement pour son vote : « début 2013, plusieurs virements sont, en effet, émis le même jour depuis son compte, à destination de personnes physiques désignées ainsi : “Warner Bros” [Jack Warner était alors président de la Confédération de football d’Amérique du Nord, Amérique centrale et Caraïbes], “Mohammed” [Mohamed Bin Hammam, président de la Confédération de football asiatique] et “Leoz” [Nicolas Leoz, président de la Confédération d’Amérique du Sud] », nous apprend le site d’information. L’ancien patron du foot brésilien fait l’objet d’un mandat d’arrêt international pour corruption émis par le département de la justice.

Mondial de foot au #Qatar : une filiale du #Crédit_mutuel est dans le viseur
▻https://www.mediapart.fr/journal/international/261117/mondial-de-foot-au-qatar-une-filiale-du-credit-mutuel-est-dans-le-viseur

2 décembre 2010, jour de l’attribution par la FIFA au Qatar du Mondial de foot 2022 © Reuters Selon nos informations, la justice brésilienne et le FBI américain enquêtent sur un virement de 22 millions de dollars effectué par le Qatar, via une filiale du Crédit mutuel, en lien avec le scandale de corruption sur l’attribution du Mondial de foot 2022 à l’émirat. Révélations.

#International #France #banque_Pasche #Brésil #football #Monaco #mondial_2022 #Suisse

Josiah Zayner, le biochimiste qui revendique l’accès à la technologie Crispr pour tous

▻http://www.lemonde.fr/biologie/article/2017/11/26/josiah-zayner-biohackeur-gonfle_5220549_1650740.html

Ancien de la NASA, il est devenu le biohackeur dont on parle après avoir annoncé avoir modifié son propre génome.

http://img.lemde.fr/2017/11/24/0/0/3979/1987/644/322/60/0/79ac31f_28470-1petdbk.9t9o.JPG

D’un côté, il y a la cuisine, la télévision, avec une chaîne sportive allumée en continu, et une table sur ­laquelle reposent « les meilleurs hamburgers de Californie du Nord ». De l’autre, deux ordinateurs, un microscope installé sur une vague paillasse et une centrifugeuse pour extraire l’ADN. Contre le mur, des cartons abritent les « kits », avant leur ­expédition à travers le pays. « Not to inject », avertit l’étiquette. Un simple conseil. « Hier, quelqu’un m’en a commandé trente : soit il est prof, soit il va se le coller dans les veines », s’amuse Josiah Zayner.

Attention, danger ! Le maître de ce « laboratoire » sauvage, au rez-de-chaussée d’un pavillon d’Oakland, sent le soufre. Depuis qu’en octobre, lors d’une conférence de biologie synthétique, à San Francisco, juste de l’autre côté du Bay Bridge, il s’est injecté dans l’avant-bras de quoi modifier les gènes de ses cellules musculaires, il est devenu le biohackeur dont on parle. Même dans cette communauté de ­quelques milliers de convaincus à travers le monde, avant-garde autoproclamée d’une ­révolution en cours, il divise. Héros audacieux, pour les uns ; apprenti sorcier, pour les autres. Lui s’amuse. « Certains ont dit que j’allais me tuer, je suis encore vivant. Quant au côté héros, j’ai renoncé à faire des biopsies pour voir si ça avait marché, j’ai déjà peur des piqûres. »

« Cool, mais très compétent »

Entre son look décalé et ses propos volontiers provocateurs, le biochimiste de 36 ans pourrait facilement passer pour un guignol. L’apparence est trompeuse. Le FBI, qui prend le biohacking très au sérieux, échange régulièrement avec lui. « Il est cool, mais très compétent, jure, de son côté, George Church, professeur à Harvard et figure de proue de la biologie synthétique. Il sait de quoi il parle et s’implique dans ce qu’il fait. Quand il a créé son kit Crispr, j’ai trouvé formidable cette façon de mettre cet outil d’édition du génome à la portée de tous. Je lui ai écrit pour lui dire que si je pouvais l’aider, qu’il n’hésite pas. » Josiah Zayner se souvient du mail, il y a tout juste un an : « C’était incroyable. Alors, après avoir abondamment fêté ça, je lui ai proposé de devenir conseiller scientifique de ­notre start-up, The Odin, et dit que s’il pouvait nous confier quelques-uns des échantillons d’ADN qu’il avait mis au point, ça nous permettrait d’étendre nos kits. Il a dit oui aux deux. ­Depuis, il nous aide régulièrement, notamment sur l’ingénierie génétique humaine. »

http://img.lemde.fr/2017/11/24/0/0/6016/4000/534/0/60/0/c93b8a1_29129-1ye68yt.2kvs.jpg

Un des kits de Josiah Zayner (pipette, tubes, ADN, bactérie et levures...).

Pas question, pourtant, d’écouter aveuglément les conseils du gourou. « Je ne veux suivre personne, mais tracer ma propre voie », clame le biohackeur. Un modèle, quand même ? « Ma mère. » Et Zayner de raconter une jeunesse rude, pauvre. Quatre enfants, de plusieurs ­pères. « Les deux premiers maris de ma mère étaient violents, avec elle comme avec nous. Elle a pourtant tout fait pour qu’on s’en sorte. Elle nous a tous envoyés à l’université. La dernière à y aller, ce fut elle. »

Josiah excelle en sciences. Il décroche son doctorat à l’université de Chicago, dans le laboratoire de Luciano Marraffini, un des pionniers du système Crispr d’édition du génome. « Personne n’imaginait alors l’importance du sujet. Je trouvais ça passionnant mais je ne supportais pas le monde académique. Les publications n’y sont pas jugées sur leur qualité, mais sur l’importance de votre réseau. » Josiah candidate pour un poste à la NASA. « Tous les gamins américains ont rêvé de devenir astronaute, alors quand j’ai été choisi… »

Sa mission consiste à mettre au point des bactéries capables de dégrader le plastique. « Dans l’espace, chaque personne produit 200 kilos de déchets par an. Pour aller sur Mars à cinq, ça fait une tonne. C’est énorme, vu les restrictions de carburant. J’ai utilisé Crispr pour modifier les bactéries existantes… » La recherche l’enthousiasme, les règles maison beaucoup moins. « Je ne faisais rien de top-secret, mais pour aller au moindre colloque, échanger avec un collègue extérieur, je devais remplir un formulaire et attendre la réponse. Je n’ai pas ­demandé à renouveler mon contrat. »

Autoexpérimentations

C’est qu’entre-temps Josiah Zayner a créé The Odin, dans un studio de Mountain View (Californie). En cette année 2015, la technologie Crispr a envahi les laboratoires universitaires. « Il n’y avait pas de raison que les amateurs, ceux qui aiment vraiment la science et la pratiquent par passion, en soient exclus. Mais je n’avais pas d’argent. J’ai lancé un crowdfunding en pensant lever 10 000 dollars. J’en ai récolté 75 000. » La start-up déménage dans un garage de Castro Valley avant de s’installer, en mars, avec ses quatre salariés, dans le pavillon d’Oakland.

Côté pile, Zayner peaufine son kit, ou plutôt ses kits, qui vont de 28 dollars (23 euros) pour la version basique à 159 dollars pour l’équipement complet (pipette, tubes, ADN, bactérie et levures…). Il expédie ses cartons à travers les Etats-Unis, une vingtaine chaque jour. « Des écoles nous en commandent, des clubs d’amateurs, des passionnés. On propose différentes ­expériences. » La plus courante consiste à modifier l’ADN d’une bactérie pour en changer la couleur. La plus perfectionnée permet de ­modifier une levure afin de mettre au point une bière… fluorescente.

Avec cette mousse colorée, le scientifique est sorti de l’anonymat. Mais ce sont ses auto­expérimentations qui l’ont véritablement fait connaître. En février 2016, il commence par une transplantation de matière fécale. La ­recherche sur le microbiote est en plein essor, et Zayner souffre depuis longtemps de désordres intestinaux. Après une cure d’antibiotiques poussée pour éliminer ses mauvais germes, il ingère les bactéries intestinales d’un ami en pleine santé. « Je n’ai plus jamais eu de problèmes gastriques », jure-t-il. Un documentaire a immortalisé l’aventure.

C’est que Zayner aime faire parler de lui. Pourtant, c’est assez discrètement qu’il réalise sa deuxième expérience en s’injectant un système Crispr censé doper les gènes produisant la tyrosinase, une enzyme nécessaire à la production de mélanine. « Ça aurait dû me faire bronzer. Je n’ai rien vu. Soit je n’en avais pas mis assez, soit ça n’a pas été transmis aux cellules. »

Il change de cible et s’attaque aux muscles. Les images de chiens génétiquement dopés ont fait le tour du monde. Des chercheurs ont modifié leurs gènes produisant la myostatine, sorte de signal stop dans la production musculaire. Le résultat est impressionnant : le toutou se transforme en molosse bodybuildé. Zayner montre son avant-bras gauche : « J’ai injecté 40 microgrammes ici. Pour le moment, on ne voit rien. Mais ça fait un mois : chez les chiens, il en a fallu deux pour constater quelque chose. »

Il adorerait voir son muscle gonfler. Etre le premier humain « crisperisé » avec succès. Mais il se prépare sereinement à un échec : « Je veux surtout montrer aux gens que ce n’est pas dangereux et que c’est accessible. » Ah, l’accessibilité ! Permettre à chacun de faire ce que bon lui semble avec lui-même. Josiah Zayner veut appliquer à la biologie son credo « libertarien ». « Pour la première fois de ­l’Histoire, les humains ne sont plus esclaves de leur patrimoine génétique. Doit-on limiter cette ­liberté aux laboratoires universitaires et aux grandes compagnies privées ? Je suis ­convaincu que non. »

« A condition de prendre toutes les précautions », insiste George Church, sibyllin. Sam Sternberg, biochimiste à l’université de Berkeley, est plus clair : « Ce qu’il fait avec son kit, c’est formidable. Un moyen de susciter l’intérêt du public pour la science. Mais je suis beaucoup plus réservé sur sa dernière expérience. La science doit être rigoureuse. Faire croire que l’on peut développer ses muscles sans faire de sport, c’est faux. Mais y croit-il seulement ? » A la question, Josiah Zayner montre son bras : « Je le regarde tous les jours ». Et il éclate de rire.

Uber fined $8.9 million by Colorado for allowing drivers with felony convictions, other drivers license issues
▻http://www.denverpost.com/2017/11/20/uber-colorado-fine

http://www.denverpost.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/ap17298614326814.jpg?w=1024&h=683

Colorado regulators slapped Uber with an $8.9 million penalty for allowing 57 people with past criminal or motor vehicle offenses to drive for the company, the state’s Public Utilities Commission announced Monday.

The PUC said the drivers should have been disqualified. They had issues ranging from felony convictions to driving under the influence and reckless driving. In some cases, drivers were working with revoked, suspended or canceled licenses, the state said. A similar investigation of smaller competitor Lyft found no violations.

“We have determined that Uber had background-check information that should have disqualified these drivers under the law, but they were allowed to drive anyway,” PUC director Doug Dean said in a statement. “These actions put the safety of passengers in extreme jeopardy.”

Uber spokeswoman Stephanie Sedlak provided this statement on Monday:

“We recently discovered a process error that was inconsistent with Colorado’s ridesharing regulations and proactively notified the Colorado Public Utilities Commission (CPUC). This error affected a small number of drivers and we immediately took corrective action. Per Uber safety policies and Colorado state regulations, drivers with access to the Uber app must undergo a nationally accredited third-party background screening. We will continue to work closely with the CPUC to enable access to safe, reliable transportation options for all Coloradans.”

The PUC’s investigation began after Vail police referred a case to the agency. In that case, which occurred in March, an Uber driver dragged a passenger out of the car and kicked him in the face, according the Vail police report.

In August, the PUC asked Uber and Lyft for records of all drivers who were accused, arrested or convicted of crimes that would disqualify them from driving for a transportation network company, the term given to ridesharing services under state law.

“Lyft gave us 15 to 20 (records), but we didn’t find any problems with Lyft,” Dean said.

Uber handed over 107 records and told the PUC that it had removed those people from its system.

The PUC cross-checked the Uber drivers with state crime and court databases, finding that many had aliases and other violations. While 63 were found to have issues with their driver’s licenses, the PUC focused on 57 who had additional violations, because of the impact on public safety.

“What they (Uber) calls proactively reaching out to us was after we had to threaten them with daily civil penalties to get them to provide us with the (records),” said Dean, adding that his prime investigator just told him that some penalized drivers were still on the Uber system. “This is not a data processing error. This is a public safety issue.”

Uber was welcomed to Colorado in June 2014, when Gov. John Hickenlooper signed Senate Bill 125 to authorize ridesharing services such as Uber and Lyft. The PUC was then charged with creating rules to regulate the services, which went into effect on Jan. 30, 2016.

The rules gave the companies the choice of either fingerprinting drivers or running a private background check on the potential driver’s criminal history and driving history. Drivers also must have a valid driver’s license.

Drivers are disqualified if they’ve been convicted of a felony in the past five years. But they can never be a driver if they’ve been convicted of serious felonies including felony assault, fraud, unlawful sexual behavior and violent crimes, according to the statute.

Taxi drivers, by comparison, are subject to fingerprint background checks by the FBI and Colorado Bureau of Investigation.

Elsewhere in the U.S., Uber and Lyft have threatened to leave places that force them to fingerprint drivers — including in Chicago, Maryland and Houston.

Both companies pulled out of Austin last year after the city added rules to fingerprint drivers. But the Texas house passed a bill in April removing such requirements, and Uber and Lyft returned to the city.

While Maryland caved in its requirements after Uber threatened to leave, the state banned 4,000 ridesharing drivers in April who did not meet state screening requirements despite passing Uber or Lyft’s background checks.That also happened in Massachusetts, which kicked out 8,200 drivers who had passed company checks. Among them were 51 registered sex offenders.

Uber and Lyft have pushed for private background checks because they say that fingerprints don’t provide the complete source of criminal history that some expect. In a post about its security process, Uber said that when it comes to fingerprints, there are gaps between FBI and state arrest records, which can result in an incomplete background check. Uber, instead, uses state and local criminal history checks plus court records and the U.S. Dept. of Justice’s National Sex Offender site.

Last month, California regulators nixed any fingerprinting requirement as long as Uber and Lyft conduct their own background checks.

But the Colorado PUC says that by fingerprinting drivers, the ride service would be able to identify drivers with aliases and other identities with felony convictions. The lack of fingerprinting never sat well with Dean, who mentioned his concern in 2014 before Colorado passed the law.

“They said their private background checks were superior to anything out there,” Dean said. “We can tell you their private background checks were not superior. In some cases, we could not say they even provided a background check.”

Vail police said that altercations between passengers and drivers are not uncommon. They’re not limited to Uber drivers but include taxi and limo drivers and passengers, said Vail police Detective Sgt. Luke Causey.

“We’ve had more than one,” Causey said. “Unfortunately, in our winter environment with guests and around bar closing times, we’ve had the driver go after passengers who don’t pay their tab. Sometimes it can go both ways.”

Uber drivers have made local headlines for bad behavior. In July, a Denver Uber driver pleaded guilty to disturbing the peace after rolling his car on the leg of a city parking attendant at Denver International Airport. Two years ago, a Denver UberX driver was arrested for trying to break into the home of a passenger he’d just dropped off at the airport.

Monday’s fine is a civil penalty assessment and based on a citation of $2,500 per day for each disqualified driver found to have worked. Among the findings, 12 drivers had felony convictions, 17 had major moving violations, 63 had driver’s license issues and three had interlock driver’s licenses, which is required after a recent drunken driving conviction.

Uber has 10 days to pay 50 percent of the $8.9 million penalty or request a hearing to contest the violation before an administrative law judge. Afterwards, the PUC will continue making audits to check for compliance. If more violations are found, Uber’s penalty could rise.

“Uber can fix this tomorrow. The law allows them to have fingerprint background checks. We had found a number of a.k.a.’s and aliases that these drivers were using. That’s the problem with name-based background checks,” Dean said. “We’re very concerned and we hope the company will take steps to correct this.”

#Uber #USA #Recht

#Robert_Mueller, le #procureur qui menace #Donald_Trump
▻https://www.mediapart.fr/journal/international/061117/robert-mueller-le-procureur-qui-menace-donald-trump

Robert Mueller, alors directeur du #FBI, lors d’une audition au Congrès en 2013 © Reuters L’homme qui enquête sur l’éventuelle collusion de l’équipe de Donald Trump avec la Russie pendant la présidentielle américaine est un procureur chevronné. Ancien patron du FBI après le 11-Septembre, Robert Swan Mueller III a réorganisé le renseignement intérieur. Cet ancien marine a aussi accompagné les dérives sécuritaires de la « guerre à la terreur ». Aux États-Unis, ce CV le rend presque intouchable.

#International #Barack_Obama #droit #George_W._Bush #impeachment #Justice #Surveillance

Peut-on “déclassifier” l’“Indicible” ?
▻http://www.dedefensa.org/article/peut-on-declassifier-lindicible

Peut-on “déclassifier” l’“Indicible” ?

Le président Trump a rendu public un lot de documents jusqu’ici classés “secret” par la CIA et le FBI, concernant l’assassinat du président Kennedy en novembre 1963 à Dallas. Mais la nouvelle la plus intéressante est que dans ce lot, qui avait été maintenu “secret“, la CIA et le FBI ont obtenu de Trump que plusieurs centaines de pièces soit maintenues sous ce statut six mois de plus de façon à ce que les deux services puissent mesurer l’impact au niveau de la sécurité nationale...

Comme le remarqueraient certains, on ne voit pas ce que l’on mesurerait de plus en six mois qu’on n’a pas mesuré en gros demi-siècle avec des renouvellements successifs ; par conséquent, il est avisé de faire l’hypothèse que, dans six mois, un nouveau délai sera demandé et sans doute obtenu par (...)

Un ex-agent du FBI affirme que les entreprises de technologie doivent « faire taire » les sources de « rébellion »
▻http://www.wsws.org/fr/articles/2017/nov2017/watt-n02.shtml

Les implications de ces déclarations sont stupéfiantes. Les États-Unis seraient en pleine #guerre civile et la réponse nécessaire du gouvernement serait la #censure, ainsi que l’abolition de tous les autres #droits démocratiques fondamentaux. La « rébellion » devrait être réprimée en faisant taire les #médias qui la préconisent.

Qu’une telle déclaration puisse être faite lors d’une audience du Congrès, sans aucune objection, est une expression de la décadence de la #démocratie américaine. Il n’y a aucune fraction de la classe dirigeante qui maintienne le moindre engagement envers les droits démocratiques fondamentaux.

Aucun des Démocrates dans la commission n’a soulevé aucune des questions constitutionnelles soulevées par la demandant aux sociétés de technologie massives de censurer le discours politique sur Internet. Un seul Républicain a soulevé des préoccupations sur la censure, mais seulement pour alléguer que Google aurait un parti pris libéral.