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Category: Surveillance

  • The Rise of the Security-Industrial Complex from 9/11 to COVID-19

    I tell you, freedom and human rights in America are doomed. The U.S. government will lead the American people in — and the West in general — into an unbearable hell and a choking life.

    — Osama bin Laden (October 2001), as reported by CNN

    What a strange and harrowing road we’ve walked since September 11, 2001, littered with the debris of our once-vaunted liberties. We have gone from a nation that took great pride in being a model of a representative democracy to being a model of how to persuade a freedom-loving people to march in lockstep with a police state.

    Our losses are mounting with every passing day.

    What began with the post-9/11 passage of the USA Patriot Act  has snowballed into the eradication of every vital safeguard against government overreach, corruption and abuse.

    The citizenry’s unquestioning acquiescence to anything the government wants to do in exchange for the phantom promise of safety and security has resulted in a society where the nation has been locked down into a militarized, mechanized, hypersensitive, legalistic, self-righteous, goose-stepping antithesis of every principle upon which this nation was founded.

    Set against a backdrop of government surveillance, militarized police, SWAT team raids, asset forfeiture, eminent domain, overcriminalization, armed surveillance drones, whole body scanners, stop and frisk searches, police violence and the like—all of which have been sanctioned by Congress, the White House and the courts—our constitutional freedoms have been steadily chipped away at, undermined, eroded, whittled down, and generally discarded.

    The rights embodied in the Constitution, if not already eviscerated, are on life support.

    Free speech, the right to protest, the right to challenge government wrongdoing, due process, a presumption of innocence, the right to self-defense, accountability and transparency in government, privacy, press, sovereignty, assembly, bodily integrity, representative government: all of these and more have become casualties in the government’s war on the American people, a war that has grown more pronounced since 9/11.

    Indeed, since the towers fell on 9/11, the U.S. government has posed a greater threat to our freedoms than any terrorist, extremist or foreign entity ever could.

    While nearly 3,000 people died in the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. government and its agents have easily killed at least ten times that number of civilians in the U.S. and abroad since 9/11 through its police shootings, SWAT team raids, drone strikes and profit-driven efforts to police the globe, sell weapons to foreign nations (which too often fall into the hands of terrorists), and foment civil unrest in order to keep the security industrial complex gainfully employed.

    The American people have been treated like enemy combatants, to be spied on, tracked, scanned, frisked, searched, subjected to all manner of intrusions, intimidated, invaded, raided, manhandled, censored, silenced, shot at, locked up, denied due process, and killed.

    In allowing ourselves to be distracted by terror drills, foreign wars, color-coded warnings, pandemic lockdowns and other carefully constructed exercises in propaganda, sleight of hand, and obfuscation, we failed to recognize that the U.S. government—the government that was supposed to be a “government of the people, by the people, for the people”—has become the enemy of the people.

    Consider that the government’s answer to every problem has been more government—at taxpayer expense—and less individual liberty.

    Every crisis—manufactured or otherwise—since the nation’s early beginnings has become a make-work opportunity for the government to expand its reach and its power at taxpayer expense while limiting our freedoms at every turn: The Great Depression. The World Wars. The 9/11 terror attacks. The COVID-19 pandemic.

    Viewed in this light, the history of the United States is a testament to the old adage that liberty decreases as government (and government bureaucracy) grows. Or, to put it another way, as government expands, liberty contracts.

    This is how the emergency state operates, after all, and we should know: after all, we have spent the past 20 years in a state of emergency.

    From 9/11 to COVID-19, “we the people” have acted the part of the helpless, gullible victims desperately in need of the government to save us from whatever danger threatens. In turn, the government has been all too accommodating and eager while also expanding its power and authority in the so-called name of national security.

    This is a government that has grown so corrupt, greedy, power-hungry and tyrannical over the course of the past 240-plus years that our constitutional republic has since given way to idiocracy, and representative government has given way to a kleptocracy (a government ruled by thieves) and a kakistocracy (a government run by unprincipled career politicians, corporations and thieves that panders to the worst vices in our nature and has little regard for the rights of American citizens).

    What this really amounts to is a war on the American people, fought on American soil, funded with taxpayer dollars, and waged with a single-minded determination to use national crises, manufactured or otherwise, in order to transform the American homeland into a battlefield.

    Indeed, the government’s (mis)management of various states of emergency in the past 20 years has spawned a massive security-industrial complex the likes of which have never been seen before. According to the National Priorities Project at the progressive Institute for Policy Studies, since 9/11, the United States has spent $21 trillion on “militarization, surveillance, and repression.”

    Clearly, this is not a government that is a friend to freedom.

    Rather, this is a government that, in conjunction with its corporate partners, views the citizenry as consumers and bits of data to be bought, sold and traded.

    This is a government that spies on and treats its people as if they have no right to privacy, especially in their own homes while the freedom to be human is being erased.

    This is a government that is laying the groundwork to weaponize the public’s biomedical data as a convenient means by which to penalize certain “unacceptable” social behaviors. Incredibly, a new government agency HARPA (a healthcare counterpart to the Pentagon’s research and development arm DARPA) will take the lead in identifying and targeting “signs” of mental illness or violent inclinations among the populace by using artificial intelligence to collect data from Apple Watches, Fitbits, Amazon Echo and Google Home.

    This is a government that routinely engages in taxation without representation, whose elected officials lobby for our votes only to ignore us once elected.

    This is a government comprised of petty bureaucrats, vigilantes masquerading as cops, and faceless technicians.

    This is a government that railroads taxpayers into financing government programs whose only purpose is to increase the power and wealth of the corporate elite.

    This is a government—a warring empire—that forces its taxpayers to pay for wars abroad that serve no other purpose except to expand the reach of the military industrial complex.

    This is a government that subjects its people to scans, searches, pat downs and other indignities by the TSA and VIPR raids on so-called “soft” targets like shopping malls and bus depots by black-clad, Darth Vader look-alikes.

    This is a government that uses fusion centers, which represent the combined surveillance efforts of federal, state and local law enforcement, to track the citizenry’s movements, record their conversations, and catalogue their transactions.

    This is a government whose wall-to-wall surveillance has given rise to a suspect society in which the burden of proof has been reversed such that Americans are now assumed guilty until or unless they can prove their innocence.

    This is a government that treats its people like second-class citizens who have no rights, and is working overtime to stigmatize and dehumanize any and all who do not fit with the government’s plans for this country.

    This is a government that uses free speech zones, roving bubble zones and trespass laws to silence, censor and marginalize Americans and restrict their First Amendment right to speak truth to power.

    This is a government that persists in renewing the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which allows the president and the military to arrest and detain American citizens indefinitely based on the say-so of the government.

    This is a government that saddled us with the Patriot Act, which opened the door to all manner of government abuses and intrusions on our privacy.

    This is a government that, in direct opposition to the dire warnings of those who founded our country, has allowed the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to establish a standing army by way of programs that transfer surplus military hardware to local and state police.

    This is a government that has militarized American’s domestic police, equipping them with military weapons such as “tens of thousands of machine guns; nearly 200,000 ammunition magazines; a million hollow-point bullets; thousands of pieces of camouflage and night-vision equipment; and hundreds of silencers, armored cars and aircraft,” in addition to armored vehicles, sound cannons and the like.

    This is a government that has provided cover to police when they shoot and kill unarmed individuals just for standing a certain way, or moving a certain way, or holding something—anything—that police could misinterpret to be a gun, or igniting some trigger-centric fear in a police officer’s mind that has nothing to do with an actual threat to their safety.

    This is a government that has created a Constitution-free zone within 100 miles inland of the border around the United States, paving the way for Border Patrol agents to search people’s homes, intimately probe their bodies, and rifle through their belongings, all without a warrant. Nearly 66% of Americans (2/3 of the U.S. population, 197.4 million people) now live within that 100-mile-deep, Constitution-free zone.

    This is a government that treats public school students as if they were prison inmates, enforcing zero tolerance policies that criminalize childish behavior, and indoctrinating them with teaching that emphasizes rote memorization and test-taking over learning, synthesizing and critical thinking.

    This is a government that is operating in the negative on every front: it’s spending far more than what it makes (and takes from the American taxpayers) and it is borrowing heavily (from foreign governments and Social Security) to keep the government operating and keep funding its endless wars abroad. Meanwhile, the nation’s sorely neglected infrastructure—railroads, water pipelines, ports, dams, bridges, airports and roads—is rapidly deteriorating.

    This is a government that has empowered police departments to make a profit at the expense of those they have sworn to protect through the use of asset forfeiture laws, speed traps, and red light cameras.

    This is a government whose gun violence—inflicted on unarmed individuals by battlefield-trained SWAT teams, militarized police, and bureaucratic government agents trained to shoot first and ask questions later—poses a greater threat to the safety and security of the nation than any mass shooter. There are now reportedly more bureaucratic (non-military) government agents armed with high-tech, deadly weapons than U.S. Marines.

    This is a government that has allowed the presidency to become a dictatorship operating above and beyond the law, regardless of which party is in power.

    This is a government that treats dissidents, whistleblowers and freedom fighters as enemies of the state.

    This is a government that has in recent decades unleashed untold horrors upon the world—including its own citizenry—in the name of global conquest, the acquisition of greater wealth, scientific experimentation, and technological advances, all packaged in the guise of the greater good.

    This is a government that allows its agents to break laws with immunity while average Americans get the book thrown at them.

    This is a government that speaks in a language of force. What is this language of force? Militarized police. Riot squads. Camouflage gear. Black uniforms. Armored vehicles. Mass arrests. Pepper spray. Tear gas. Batons. Strip searches. Surveillance cameras. Kevlar vests. Drones. Lethal weapons. Less-than-lethal weapons unleashed with deadly force. Rubber bullets. Water cannons. Stun grenades. Arrests of journalists. Crowd control tactics. Intimidation tactics. Brutality. Contempt of cop charges.

    This is a government that justifies all manner of government tyranny and power grabs in the so-called name of national security, national crises and national emergencies.

    This is a government that exports violence worldwide, with one of this country’s most profitable exports being weapons. Indeed, the United States, the world’s largest exporter of arms, has been selling violence to the world in order to prop up the military industrial complex and maintain its endless wars abroad.

    This is a government that is consumed with squeezing every last penny out of the population and seemingly unconcerned if essential freedoms are trampled in the process.

    This is a government that routinely undermines the Constitution and rides roughshod over the rights of the citizenry, eviscerating individual freedoms so that its own powers can be expanded.

    This is a government that believes it has the authority to search, seize, strip, scan, spy on, probe, pat down, taser, and arrest any individual at any time and for the slightest provocation, the Constitution be damned.

    In other words, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, this is not a government that believes in, let alone upholds, freedom.

     

    The post The Rise of the Security-Industrial Complex from 9/11 to COVID-19 first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Little Deaths . . . Finding Solace Inside One’s Heart

    The consensus is in — no choice, no life, no job, no nothing, without a passport. That medical, DNA scan, the retina scan, all biological systems covered, that all-encompassing passport that lists every move, every moment, every job, every purchase, every fine, penalty, tax, rental, home, significant or insignificant emotional and economic and familial event, captured in a chip. Americans are spoiled, for sure, as are Europeans, and Canadians. That mostly encompasses the Great White Hopes of those respective “countries.” The rest of us, in these “first world” environs are struggling, even with debit and credit and La-La Land accoutrements ad infinitum.

    These new times in the west are old times, bubbling up, really, from the early conquest days of razing Indian families, destroying and taking over and plowing through villages, lands, territories. Entire rooms at elite Ivy League universities and museums with drawers and boxes of Native American skulls, bones, skins, eyes, belongings, sacred objects. It is the way of the Egyptologists, and it is the way of the Crusades. Pillage, set villages on fire, and now, set states and countries on fire with fear and terror campaigns in order to exact total compliancy. Services, labor, debt, future payments, extracted from us, capitalism’s marks. Victims. Useless eaters-breeders-breathers-squatters.

    Here, from David Rovics, musician and protestor, with some great stuff on Dissident Voice over the years, just coming back from Denmark (and other countries in his gig line). He embraces progressivism and the forced jabs. He is a good fellow, who interviewed me, and we talked about other things tied to the ugly side of leftists and their canceling culture, censorship, etc., but this conversation about jab/mask/remote lockup mandates has not happened yet. I still have room in my brain to listen to what he says, though he misses so many points here:

    Despite the prevalence of disinformation platforms like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube being as popular in Denmark as anywhere else that doesn’t have the good sense to ban them, the anti-vaccine movement and anti-lockdown movement in Denmark never grew to the proportions of such movements in the US, Germany, France and elsewhere. But unlike those aforementioned countries, in Denmark most people have a well-founded reason to trust the government on matters of public health and safety.

    In Denmark, if anyone jaywalks, they’re usually either a foreigner or an antisocial type. The overwhelming majority of Danes would never do that. This is also true in Germany and some other countries. Americans and Brits and others visiting from abroad tend to make typically American and British individualistic, antisocial assumptions about this conformist behavior. They see a crowd of Germans or Danes standing at a crosswalk, waiting for the “walk” signal, even if there’s no traffic in any direction, and they see something scary, from Children of the Corn or some other horror movie, a bunch of zombies who can’t think for themselves, or are afraid of getting a ticket. (source — David Rovics)

    That’s a whole other set of discussion points from this tour he had in Denmark about what democratic socialism is, what society is, how science and government should be trusted (really?). Jaywalking and shoot, tossing banana peels on the side of the road. How dare us lazy, supercilious and egotistical North Americans! Yankees!

    The unfolding global hysteria is congealing into even more lovely by-products of Big Pharma as Dictatorship. It comes in many forms and offshoots, for sure. The main functions of Western society are broken — neoliberal and conservative values (sic) have gutted infrastructure, have thrown trillions of bucks-euros to the few, have propped up this society into a very effective kleptocracy, have imbued a dog eat dog set of beliefs into a slew of folks.

    We are at the point where billionaires and their lackeys in high places set the narrative, tone, and write the legislation, laws and force zero delimits on corporations and government in this “we the people” system we supposedly “fought” for. There is collapse, after collapse, after collapse, and it is apparent in the lack of governance over decades, and the adventures of imperial overreach, too.

    In daily lives, professional managerial class actors are hitting the middle/upper middle class stratum, economically, through the systems of pain, fines, fees, tolls, penalties, regressive taxation, permits and litigation that eat at us, the 80 percent, from the soul and the brain and the body. We are in a time of most people not being able to navigate “the system,” and that can be any system — school, medical, social security, DMV, courts, and any number of systems of oppression and subjugation. So it is a time of chaos, now Covid Chaos, moving into more Chaos.

    Teachers should be a priority for Covid vaccines, unions and others say - POLITICO

    “People are fed up,” says Winni Paul, a management consultant whose clients have included campuses and higher-education groups. “The graciousness, the compassion, the ‘we do it for the students, we do it for the work’ — that’s gone.”

    And I am with a group of teachers from many states, who are now scrambling to figure out what to do with the forced jabs, the forced proof of jabs, the forced masking, all of that, and many will not submit to the experimental mRNA, many have looked into these DNA-alternating medical devices, and they feel alone, big time. Their AFT (American Federation of Teachers) union has caved, and they see in big cities and small, all venues requiring, soon, a passport, CDC-approved vaccination card.

    Delta airlines is forcing non-vaccinated employees to pay an additional $200 a month premium, AKA fine for not being jabbed. Oh, that was yesterday (August 25), and that will not be the end of it. Fools like Thom Hartman advocate ER physicians having the right to refuse treatment to anyone coming in — motorcycle accident, heart attack, broken leg, stroke — who are not vaccinated.

    This is the Brave New World already outlined by the eugenicists of the 1920s, of the Modest Proposal of Swift’s time, of the middle passage days of tossing overboard hundreds of sick shackled slaves in one one-way crossing. Multiply that by hundreds of ships, tossing human beings for the sharks, alive, shackled in chains. It is the genocidal policies of empires and their corporate thugs (overlords) in despoiling cultures, murdering millions, and enslaving regions for their rubber, silver, gold, lithium, any number of things the capitalists call loot and booty. Pirates compared to the thieves from history and today seem like Fred McFeely Rogers in comparison.

    See the source image

    Even a saint, Fauci, he is a titan of terror in his old man’s way — “over his 50-year career with the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) to address the cause, to prevent or cure the exploding epidemics of allergies and chronic disease that Congress charged him with curtailing. The chronic disease pandemic is his enduring legacy. Those ailments now debilitate 54% of American children compared to 6% when he joined NIAD.” (source — RFK Jr.)

    See the source image

    In this group of teachers, daily there are emails announcing more and more statewide jab mandates, and the teachers that have to pay twice-a-week tests, if not jabbed, well, it is filling up those school districts; and many now in this group want out, since their email boxes are filling up. Teachers, youngish and not, with no money in the bank, really, and no place to go, since I predict all new rental agreements throughout the land (except in some Breaking Bad locales) will require proof of jab x, jab y, jab z, jab infinity.

    The playing field shifts hourly, and while I have a literary reading manana, in Portland, for this hour, at least, the restaurant and community room demands all to be masked. There is no shot record demand, YET, but that’s on the horizon, since Oregon is the first state to reinstate mandatory outside masking policies. But the venue’s other locations, well, the rock and roll and progressives, they want to see vax cards or proof of SARS-CoV2 free tests. The Crystal Ballroom

    It doesn’t matter how many millions of people worldwide are not happy with mRNA experimental chemicals forced into the bloodstream and across the blood-brain barrier;  not happy with the bioweaponry aspect of Operation Warp Speed; not happy with the therapeutics that have been disavowed and censored, which could have saved millions of lives, possibly. One size fits all, baby. This news aggregator and news maker site, well, it is almost scrubbed from all search engines:

    These stories above and below are verboten in the minds of tens of millions, hundreds of millions Westerners — even though there are robust stories on other topics, besides Fauci, jabs and mRNA, and fascism in this places.

    I am finding people fighting, for sure, against mandates. Hell, my one time with the doctor recently points to this: “While I did get the vaccination, I am against mandates. I am against forcing people against their will to get this. I am of the mind that people have the right to make up their own minds.” He’s older, maybe 70, is a DO, and I know the university where he adjunct taught and matriculated from, Touro University Nevada (TUN) (a private university in Henderson, Nevada. It is part of the Touro College and University System. Touro University Nevada is a branch campus of its sister campus Touro University California.)

    My niece is there, in her second year, and my DO stated, his one word of advice for her is, Cash. “Tell her to write notes to family and friends, and state: ‘please send cash.’” The doctor likes me, and he’s a jokester. He told me reads a lot, and that he did work in Amazonian for years, “saving one life at a time.” He is looking at my recent stress test, and alas, getting a cardiologist on board to maybe do more investigation on some electrical anomalies when I got up to 160 beats per minute, that is another example of the failed capitalist system: there are none here on Highway 101 on the central coast, and getting one to see me could take weeks, out of the cities of Salem or Corvallis. This is the state of medicine, after decades of gutting taxation of the rich and the corporations (who are getting us sick) and years turning medicine into a bizarre insurance scam, where doctors spend more time on the computer screen than with the patient.

    So, this next reset is all about pushing more and more people into fewer and fewer public spheres, pushing people away from outliers or those defiant and dissident like me and millions. It is about controlling the masses, setting forth sophisticated bandwagon forms of propaganda, and setting afire all forms of community gatherings and robust discussions of the millions of topics of the day.

    With this teachers’ group, the messages are coming in:

    • Governor Pritzker just announced mandatory vax for all IL teachers
    • Here is Dr. Peter McCullough talking about the dangers of vaccines, among other things: Basically, the vaxxed are projecting all the havoc they themselves are wreaking even as “life is pretty much back to normal among the vaccinated,” as many are bragging onto the unvaxxed. Many op-eds in publications like WaPo and the NYT are filling their pages with doctors martyring themselves and declaring they won’t treat unvaxxed anymore (to cheers from bots and humans alike in the comments section) and normalizing ending friendships based on vaccination status. But they are the super spreaders. They are the ones making children and Grandma sick. This is scapegoating at its finest.
    • Some great work is being done by Mike Williams @ Sage of Quay. Also, great Common Law shows being done by Crrow777 Radio Alfonso Faggiola and Lena Pu.
    • Want to see a man stand up to the controllers? Check out Paul Unslaved . You can also gain a little insight from some of the good First Amendment auditors like Long Island Audit.
    • California AB455 – this bill, if passed, will mandate the C19 vaccine for all CA employees and for CA citizens to enter any establishment except church and grocery stores:
    Doctor McCullough video.
    • Rally against this action set for September 8th
    • Some good news: a touching video of resistance to vaccine mandates in France (i cant verify the authenticity but hope it is real)
    • Lastly, ICYMI – Illinois’ Vax Verify – vaccination verification is tied to Experian – meaning residents will have to go through a one-time verification process through Experian to access their vaccination records. So stating the obvious – this is opening the door increasingly towards a social credit system.
    Vaccine Verification Portal.

    Then this from one of the people on this list wanting the mandates and the draconian measures stopped:

    Just a quick note: This Sunday will mark 58 years of me being active in the political sphere. Back in ’64, it was as a Goldwater volunteer. Some 6 years later, i switched sides, a consequence of the Vietnam War, the counterculture, ecological crisis,…  And became much more of an activist. I have no love whatsoever for the right.  But I’ve also seen the “left” act at critical points as a defender of the capitalist status quo, particularly as a consequence of the dominant tendency within the left to accept the state as if it were an institution acting on behalf of society as a whole, rather than the instrument of class power it has been since it emerged in history thousands of years ago. Both left and right (and “center”) are fully on board with the onrushing police state, while each proclaims itself to be defending the interests of humanity against the others. People need to look to themselves for solutions, and learn from historical movements, including anarchists and anti-statist socialists.

    Connecting the dots is easy on one hand, but to get people to see this entire terror theater as planned is another can of GMO worms. Here, this is certainly a global, or EU, story worth a million lines of digital ink: Why do the experts on Science Advice for Policy by European Academies fight for higher pesticide exposure by Rosemary Mason

    I heartily accept the motto,—”That government is best which governs least”; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe,—”That government is best which governs not at all”; and when men and women are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.

    — Henry David Thoreau, Resistance to Civil Government, 1849

    Succinctly, Communist approaches to anti-statism center on the relationship between political rule and class struggle. Karl Marx defined the state as the institution used by the ruling class of a country to maintain the conditions of its rule. To this extent, the ultimate goal of communist society was theorized as both stateless and classless.

    We are at 8 billion, and the planet is run by Blackstone and BlackRock and around 30 financial organizations, and around 140 corporations. The bottleneck is what the planned pandemic was all about — getting people to run away from sanity, common sense, and running into the various insane asylums. For anyone to question why some of us — who are way beyond just coming out from under the Capitalist-Media-Education rock — might doubt the purveyors of capital, scientism, control, policing, finance and corrupt drug companies, well, that is where I am now — “since the majority of people are in line for the jab, what’s your fucking lunatic problem?”

    Here, Chris Williams, and, yes, on ecosocialism — hmm:

    The distortions that go on under capitalism are so obscene it’s hard to wrap your head around it sometimes, on a micro level as well as a macro level. I was riding on the subway and I took a couple of trains and I was looking at the ads. The average American sees about 3,000 ads a day. One ad was for a credit card, and this is the slogan for the credit card—“Less plastic, more human—Discover it is human.” Discover is the card that they were advertising. In other words, you can actually be more human by having this type of credit card. Another ad, and this gets to the quality of life, that I pass by was about online delivery of food—how you can order online instead of having to phone somebody—and the ad read, “You’ve perfected the odds of getting to third base faster. Food delivery date night.” The obscenity and depravity of capitalism knows no depths to which it will not plumb.

    This is something that Karl Marx talked about quite a bit. He was speaking at the anniversary of the People’s Paper in 1856, and I think this resonates far more with us now than it did even in his time.

    On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces, which no epoch of the former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman Empire.

    That kind of sense of decay pervades our world as it is currently structured. He goes on:

    In our days, everything seems pregnant with its contrary: Machinery, gifted with the wonderful power of shortening and fructifying human labor, we behold starving and overworking it; The newfangled sources of wealth, by some strange weird spell, are turned into sources of want; The victories of art seem bought by the loss of character.

    At the same pace that mankind masters nature, man seems to become enslaved to other men or to his own infamy. Even the pure light of science seems unable to shine but on the dark background of ignorance. All our invention and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and in stultifying human life into a material force.

    John Bellamy Foster on ecosocialism:  “Ecological resistance in the twenty-first century has more and more been informed by the development of Marxian ecology and ecosocialism more generally. However, as ecosocialist analysis has grown, various divergent branches of thought have emerged, often in conflict with each other. Based on the conviction that clarity about capitalism’s relation to the environment is indispensable for the strategic understanding of present-day struggles, this talk will present some of the new research within Marxian ecology, bringing together the core issues of the expropriation of nature and the metabolic rift, and seeking to unite the ecosocialist movements of our time.”

    Another set of notes from another teacher on this V is for Vendetta Vaccines email group — I’m calling it that as a joke:

    • I just attended a workshop for religious exemptions, and will forward the email for any of those who wish to attend. I am also happy to share insights and notes I took to help out anyone who wishes to take this route. However, I would like to share some notes and important information discussed in this workshop.
    • First, if you are part a union or teachers union, Collective Bargaining needs to take place. Many unions did not have a seat at the table and have sent cease and desist letters that could delay the mandates. Remember the unions represent both the majority and the minority of their union members and even if there is only 15 percent against the mandates, those individuals should be represented. It was recommended to call your Labor Relations Representative or Union Rep to see  if they have sent a cease and desist letter or are planning on it. Key word is the Collective Bargaining aspect of the unions and you may be able to ask them to do so.
    • Additionally, I think if you are able to file for a religious exemption it is a good way to buy time. The common law approach may be a good option for those who do not have an option. Realistically, for Californians we are a Right to Work state, and employers have the right to fire and hire at will.  With either method there is a possibility of job termination which has to be considered, and I do not know exactly how the outcome has been going for individuals who have filed religious vs. common law approaches. That said I do know there have been many religious exemptions accepted and there is an appeals process if denied. If you are on a timetable and need to be vaccinated by a date that is closely approaching, the religious exemption is probably more likely to be one way to hold onto employment a little longer.  My understanding of the common law approach is that it can be more time consuming because legal notices have times frames for notices, responses, and actions to take place and may not work with your deadline which again can lead to termination. Because California is an At Will Work state there may be risk to filing for any unemployment as well, so all these things should be considered before deciding which route to take.
    • I am not saying one option is better than the other, I am just presenting them as Option A or  Option B, because I think we all have differences in our personal situations. One may work better for you personally than the other. That said, we should also have our plan B  in place if neither work. Helping each other is essential and it will be good to share with one another what has worked and what hasn’t, and I do not want to argue either method, just help out in any way possible. Our differences in ideology are unimportant to me at this time. I believe there is a good portion of us, who are strong personalities, opinionated and intelligence — and these may be the wonderful unifying qualities that have brought us together at this critical time to fight for our humanity.

    GoFundMe for a new novel, or old one, I am fixing up to get published!

    Take up the White Man’s Burden, send for the best ye breed,
    Go bind your sons to exile, to serve your captives need –
    new-caught, sullen peoples, Half-devil and half-child…
    Take up the White Man’s burden, the savage wars of peace.

    — Rudyard Kipling (1899)

    The post Little Deaths . . . Finding Solace Inside One’s Heart first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Preventing A Dystopian Future: New Campaign To Ban Killer And Surveillance Drones

    Drones are being used as weapons of terror and oppression throughout the world. Not only do they make it possible for the United States to colonize and occupy other countries, but police departments in the US have access to surveillance and weaponized drones to target civilians. As the technology evolves, drones have the potential to lead to greater wars, including a war between major powers. To prevent this dystopian future, anti-drone activists are organizing an international campaign to ban drones. Clearing the FOG speaks with Nick Mottern, one of the founders of the Ban Killer Drones campaign, about the impact of drones on communities and the work to end them.

    The post Preventing A Dystopian Future: New Campaign To Ban Killer And Surveillance Drones appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • The System Isn’t Broken, It’s Fixed

    Both chronic stress and manipulative abuse can lead to an impairment of cognitive functioning. Whenever humans experience ongoing anxiety, their prefrontal cortex will generate increasingly higher levels of cortisol. Cortisol is a stress hormone that helps us deal with threats and danger. If stress — real or perceived — becomes chronic, we can get stuck in this state of high alert. The brain cannot differentiate between real and fake news. It initiates and sustains the body’s stress response for as long as you feel anxious, tense, worried, or scared.

    • The projected overall 2021 poverty rate is 13.7 percent of Americans. 
    • 78 percent of American workers are living paycheck to paycheck.
    • Roughly 30 million Americans are without health insurance. 
    • Americans collectively hold about $81 billion in medical debt.
    • Approximately 325,000 Americans (age 12 or older) are sexually assaulted each year — about 1 every 93 seconds. As for those under 12, 1 in 5 girls and 1 in 20 boys is a victim of reported child sexual abuse. Keyword: reported.
    • The top three causes of death in the U.S. would be mostly preventable in a society that included economic stability, access to quality health care, protection of the environment, an emphasis on healthy eating habits, and even a modicum of humanity. Instead, each year, heart disease kills about 650,000, cancer kills 600,000, and the third leading cause of death is (wait for it) medical error — taking out at least 250,000 Americans per year. The powers-that-be test their corporate medicines and procedures on us while granting themselves immunity from liability.

    According to the American Psychological Association:

    • 63 percent of Americans reported that the future of the nation is a significant source of stress 
    • 62 percent were stressed about money
    • 61 percent were stressed about work
    • 51 percent were stressed about violence and crime
    • 43 percent were stressed about health care

    Fifty-six percent said that the mere act of staying informed by following the news causes them intense stress. Three out of four Americans reported experiencing at least one stress symptom in the last month — and this survey was taken BEFORE the pandemic and ensuing lockdowns.

    Prices go up. Rents go up. The number of billionaires goes up. Everything goes up… except wages and quality of life. I could go on but you get the idea. Everyday life in the Home of the Brave™ — by definition — keeps the vast majority of its residents in a state of deep distress and high anxiety.

    High anxiety = high cortisol. High cortisol negatively impacts our executive functioning, e.g.:

    • Inability to pay attention
    • Decrease in visual perception
    • Feeling agitated and unorganized
    • Memory loss
    • Loss of emotional regulation and rational thinking

    This explains why so many of us jammed into supermarkets to fight each other for the right to hoard inordinate amounts of toilet paper when the dangerous and unnecessary pandemic lockdowns were implemented.

    When stress is chronic and cortisol is raging, we make exponentially more mistakes. We struggle to complete tasks, we lose concentration, we forget basic information, and we repeat ourselves in conversation. Since life itself in this corrupt culture is a source of relentless anxiety, most of us live in an altered state of inefficiency and confusion. However, this reality is so normalized that it’s become invisible and we often think we’ve got it good. After all, look at all these neat gadgets we own and get to stare at all day, every day.

    Think about it: We’re alive because our ancestors were the ones who used anxiety and hyper-vigilance to survive. The more casual or reckless early humans weren’t around long enough to pass on their genes. So, here we are — hard-wired with a hair-trigger fight-or-flight response — and we’re stuck in a world in which simple acts like breathing air or visiting a doctor are unhealthy or possibly lethal. Translation: We are the ideal subjects for a grand social experiment.

    If you were a member of the elite class — or the proverbial 1% — wouldn’t you prefer that the masses were pliable, easily controlled, and happy to settle for crumbs? Why wouldn’t you rig circumstances in such a way as to keep billions of potential challengers off-balance, frightened, and divided? What better way to maintain power and control than to implement an insidious form of group manipulation? It’s what cult leaders do. It’s what domestic abusers do. It’s what dictators do. And what are those in power if not abusive and narcissistic sociopaths?

    I know, the easiest and most alluring path for you right now is to dismiss this as a “conspiracy.” I get it. Life seems far more palatable if you choose denial. It feels so much simpler if you choose to believe those on top are not abusing you. You may even tell yourself that people never do things like create an oppressive, unfair system just to keep their fellow humans subdued and passive. If that’s your premise, let’s explore it for a few minutes.

    Would the folks who run things in God’s Country™ ever coerce people through abusive behaviors? You might want to ask the detainees at the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay. As reported by the New York Times, the U.S. hired “two C.I.A. contract psychologists” to create a program that used “violence, isolation and sleep deprivation on more than 100 men in secret sites, some described as dungeons.” Tactics included waterboarding and cramming men into small confinement boxes. The idea here was to induce so much chronic stress, it would break their resistance.

    Human Rights Watch has documented other devious and abusive red-white-and-blue techniques paid for by your hard-earned tax dollars; e.g., mock execution by asphyxiation, stress positions, hooding during questioning, deprivation of light and auditory stimuli, and use of detainees’ individual phobias (such as fear of dogs) to induce debilitating stress.

    The Land of the Free™ incarcerates more people than any other nation in the world. The Center for Constitutional Rights reports that such prisoners are “repeatedly abused by their guards, fellow prisoners, and an ineffective and apathetic system. They suffer beatings, rape, prolonged solitary confinement, meager food rations, and frequently-denied medical care.” All in the name of punishment and pacification.

    Perhaps the best comparison for America’s brutal molding of its citizens is domestic abuse. The United Nations defines domestic abuse as “a pattern of behavior in any relationship that is used to gain or maintain power and control over an intimate partner.” Read that again: a pattern of behavior in any relationship that is used to gain or maintain power and control.

    Abusers, says the UN, use actions or threats of action to influence others. This includes any behaviors that frighten, intimidate, terrorize, manipulate, hurt, humiliate, blame, injure, or wound someone. Are you frightened by the lack of financial stability? Are you terrorized by the threat of sexual assault or injury by medical error? Does the possibility of eviction, homelessness, and poverty manipulate you into making choices you abhor, choices that violate your deepest values and individual freedoms?

    If you declare “the system is broken,” just about everyone will agree with you for one reason or another. But what if it’s not broken? What if it’s running exactly as it’s designed to run? A minuscule percentage of humans make the rules and thus reap virtually all the material rewards. The rest of us suppress our desires, our individuality, and our dreams in the name of survival — in its most meager sense. We’re wounded and intimidated into submission, too programmed and fearful to even think about rebellion… let alone solidarity with all the other victims.

    Pro tip: All it takes to flip the script is for each of you to change your mind. Demand more pleasure instead of less pain. It doesn’t have to be like this. In fact, it can’t be like this if we take off the blinders and see the ugliness of reality.

    “To ask serious questions about the nature and behavior of one’s own society is often difficult and unpleasant,” writes Noam Chomsky. “Difficult because the answers are generally concealed, and unpleasant because the answers are often not only ugly but also painful. To understand the truth about these matters is to be led to action that may not be easy to undertake and that may even carry a significant personal cost.”

    Truths like those discussed in this article are ugly and painful but that’s why the big lies are invented in the first place. On that note, I leave you with this from the English Romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley:

    Rise like Lions after slumber
    In unvanquishable number –
    Shake your chains to earth like dew
    Which in sleep had fallen on you
    Ye are many – they are few.

    — The Mask of Anarchy, 1819

    The post The System Isn’t Broken, It’s Fixed first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Abolish Family Policing, Too

    The child welfare system is a powerful state policing apparatus that functions to regulate poor and working-class families.

    This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.

  • CPJ testifies to US Congress on threats to press freedom in Morocco

    Today, at a hearing on “Human Rights and Freedom of Expression in Morocco” held by the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission of the U.S. Congress, CPJ Middle East and Northern Africa Program Coordinator Sherif Mansour presented testimony on the threats to press freedom and journalists’ safety in Morocco.

    Mansour’s testimony focused on Morocco’s record of retaliation against journalists using dubious legal charges, smear campaigns, and surveillance. He emphasized that this record stretches back decades, has intensified since 2015, and includes orchestrated forms of intimidation designed to threaten and silence reporters.

    Mansour also provided recommendations to U.S. policymakers to reverse the downward trend for press freedom in the country, including calling on U.S. authorities to demand the release of all jailed members of the press; to emphasize press freedom in meetings with Moroccan authorities; and to investigate authorities’ alleged use of surveillance technology to monitor reporters.

    Mansour’s testimony is available in English and Arabic.


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Abolishing Police Surveillance In NYC: Will Transparency Help Or Make It Harder?

    This article was funded by the Marvel Cooke Fellowship. Read more about this reporting project and make a contribution to fund our fellowship budget.

    TS Candii was living in a homeless shelter in the Bronx when she first encountered the New York City Police Department. Candii had stepped outside to smoke a cigarette when police officers approached her to become an informant. 

    When she refused, they threatened to arrest her on sex work-related charges unless she performed oral sex on both officers. 

    “I hate to say it like this but [afterward] I was excited that I could cross the street without being entrapped or arrested,” Candii said to New York City Council members, recalling how she felt after the rape. 

    That was a decade ago, when Candii first moved to New York City as a Black transgender woman seeking to restart her life in a so-called liberal city. These days, the New York City Police Department (NYPD) uses cutting-edge technology to surveil homeless people. This includes a dystopian network of surveillance cameras and other data collection efforts to track individuals living on the streets and target them for social service outreach and policing.

    This year, for the first time in history, the NYPD publicly disclosed its surveillance tools after the passage of the Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology (POST) Act. The law requires the NYPD to release reports on how these tools are used and allows the public 45 days to provide input that the department must consider when finalizing its policies.   

    Proponents of the POST Act argue these laws are a first step to limiting police powers. For example, they believe such laws allow advocates to understand how the city targets homeless New Yorkers. The city claims the Street Homelessness Joint Command Center allows the NYPD to track individuals living on the streets and target them for social service outreach and policing in order to ‘end homelessness.’ 

    Critics, meanwhile, question whether laws like the POST Act are simply another police reform that fails to limit police power and instead legitimizes violent surveillance practices against Black and brown communities. They argue that transparency does nothing to change these tactics, which houseless activists and outreach workers deem ineffective and cruel because police enforcement with homeless individuals often results in confiscation of their belongings, tickets, and/or arrests.

    This debate has national relevance. Cities like Seattle, Denver, Oakland, and San Francisco have increased public oversight of police surveillance. While the POST Act is weaker than other oversight laws, it follows a growing trend across cities and, in this case, impacts the nation’s largest police force.

    The POST Act passed after three years of advocacy led by a group of legal organizations including the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP), which fights to end discriminatory surveillance in New York. 

    For Albert Fox Cahn, the Executive Director of STOP, the law offers a basis for further litigation that could require the NYPD to divulge more information. 

    “The POST act was an important first step because you can’t outlaw what you can’t see and, without transparency about what systems the NYPD is using, it’s impossible to outlaw those systems,” Cahn said. 

    The Pitfalls of Transparency

    The NYPD released 36 reports outlining its use of different surveillance tools. The reports use boilerplate language, including blatantly false claims such as denying the racist applications of spy tools despite widespread documentation. 

    The reports revealed the use of tools that enable police to broadly identify the general vicinity of a WiFi-enabled device, investigate cryptocurrency transactions, and the extent to which officers use fake social media accounts to carry out investigations and arrests. 

    “When you’re not from the community, it’s easy to see this minimalist action as a win,” said Mutali Nkonde, leader of AI For The People, an organization advancing racial justice in the technology field. 

    Nkonde supported the POST Act in 2019 but changed her opinion after the 2020 uprisings demonstrated the need to ban police technology instead of asking for transparency.  “The police can come in and kill me in my own bed at any point,” she said, reflecting on how police killed Breonna Taylor. “Laws like the POST Act are not designed to address that.” 

    At the same time, such reforms can cause harm by legitimizing the police as an institution. 

    “You have this narrative that police keep us safe while police have been a threat to the public safety of Black, Latinx, and low-income communities this whole time,” said Keli Young, Civil Rights Campaign Coordinator at Voices Of Community Activists & Leaders (VOCAL), a grassroots membership organization in New York organizing to end mass incarceration. 

    In the past, organizers and advocates sought transparency around police spy tools through lengthy lawsuits and tireless public records requests. 

    “Legislating regulation or oversight are reforms that fail shrink the power of the police—they seek to fix the police use of these tools rather than completely abolishing it,” said Myaisha Hayes, director at MediaJustice which leads the fight for racial, gender, and economic equity in the digital age.  

    The POST Act passed at the height of racial justice protests, during which the NYPD violently attacked protestors on camera. Local news outlets hailed it as an “effort to overhaul the police force” despite how weak it is compared to laws in other cities giving local governments more oversight of police.  

    In contrast, New York City’s charter limits the city council’s ability to oversee police.  

    “The POST Act is not a transformative law and none of us who worked on it are fooled by that,” said Rashida Richardson, a visiting scholar at Rutgers who helped draft the law. “But we’re also realistic about the political reality we live in: we didn’t have a city government willing to do this pre-uprisings.” 

    In contrast, the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, which builds community power towards the abolition of the police state, argues the POST Act failed to meet the moment. 

    “The slogans were ‘defund the police’ and ‘fuck the police’ not ‘reform the police,’” said Shakeer Rahman, an organizer with the coalition.

    Young saw the consequences of this dissonance play out in New York City, remarking, “I don’t think anyone is surprised when politicians and lawmakers come out and say, ‘this is reform, you all got what you asked for’ but it actually makes us less safe.” 

    “That was a year ago and in the past year we’ve seen police continue to kill Black and Latinx people at alarming rates.” 

    Since then, only five officers will face penalties for attacking protestors during the 2020 uprising. The NYPD will determine those penalties, capturing the futility of police reforms. 

    Efforts to defund the NYPD last year were thwarted by cosmetic changes to the city budget that did not result in any meaningful reduction of the department’s $11 billion war chest. This year, the city increased the NYPD budget by $200 million. 

    This includes $47 million for expanding surveillance tools and ensuring more officers have tablets with access to what the NYPD describes as “one of the world’s largest networks of cameras, license plate readers, and radiological censors.” 

    From Raising Awareness to Building Power 

    TS Candii has continued to see other Black trans women bear the brunt of police enforcement and surveillance as they navigate the criminal legal system. 

    Candii is now the founder of Black Trans Nation, a non-profit organization led by and for Black trans sex workers. The group played a central role in repealing the same statute that officers used to threaten Candii with arrest. 

    The loitering for the purpose of prostitution statute was passed in 1976 at the behest of the NYPD and has been used to criminalize and surveil Black and Latinx trans women walking down the street in low-income neighborhoods.

    “The community doesn’t even know what the POST Act entails,” Candii said, “how many lives has that law saved?” 

    She compared the situation to the repeal of the loitering statute earlier this year, which led the city’s district attorneys to vacate thousands of convictions and clear arrest histories. People could now seek opportunities they were previously disqualified from due to their criminal record. 

    These differences capture how high-level advocacy organizations such as STOP often measure success in terms of media attention or policy changes whereas some grassroots organizations measure impact by building people power to create material differences in the lives of community members.

    While STOP was awarded a prestigious grant shortly after their legislative victory, Candii’s experience has been vastly different. Critics describe these trends as part of a long history of funders investing in liberal reforms instead of more radical demands thus altering the direction of social movements.

    “White people pass a law, they get money,” she said. “Black trans women pass a law and we don’t even get nothing other than press. It’s ridiculous.”

    The post Abolishing Police Surveillance In NYC: Will Transparency Help Or Make It Harder? appeared first on Shadowproof.

    This post was originally published on Shadowproof.

  • SES to Enable the Next Generation of Military Networks with O3b mPOWER

    In Asia-Pacific, the demand for airborne Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) is growing, and a wide variety of platforms from manned to unmanned are now being acquired by military operators across the region. Increasingly, this ISR data needs to be disseminated in real time among many potential groups within each sovereign nation’s defence structure so […]

    The post SES to Enable the Next Generation of Military Networks with O3b mPOWER appeared first on Asian Military Review.

    This post was originally published on Asian Military Review.

  • ‘Governments Are Spying on the People Who Bring Us the News’

     

    Janine Jackson interviewed Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Cindy Cohn about Pegasus spyware for the July 31, 2021, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

          CounterSpin210730Cohn.mp3

     

    Guardian: Pegasus Project

    Guardian (7/18/21)

    Janine Jackson: If you don’t know the story of how a consortium of journalists revealed how countries around the world have bought spyware from an Israeli surveillance firm, supposedly to track terrorists and other criminals, well, that’s understandable. Though it is a journalist-driven effort, and is leading to calls for the resignation of officials in Hungary, for example, the Pegasus Project hasn’t really gotten the pay-attention-to-this treatment from US news media. But that emphatically does not mean that the story doesn’t concern you and your right to know.

    Joining us now to help connect those dots is Cindy Cohn, executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Cindy Cohn.

    Cindy Cohn: Thank you.

    NSO GroupJJ: We’re talking about the Pegasus Project because of a leak of tens of thousands of phone numbers, believed selected as candidates for possible surveillance by clients of this company, NSO Group. The technology in question doesn’t just allow access to conversations and photos, but can also turn your cell phone into a listening device. But for those who really haven’t heard anything, what is the story here? What’s going on?

    CC: There has been a dark business that has existed for quite a while now, developing what we call malware—which is software, but designed to hurt you—and selling it to governments to use against people that governments want to secretly track.

    What happened here was that a list of 50,000 phone numbers that had been targeted by NSO Group’s client leaked, and got to a bunch of journalists. And they started analyzing it, and figuring out who some of these people were. And it turns out a tremendous number of them are journalists, all around the world. Kind of reveals how deeply governments are engaged in spying on the people who bring us the news.

    JJ: My sense is that this is being treated as suggesting a threat of potential misuse, rather than constituting a harm in its own right. And it seems to be kind of running up against the “Well, it doesn’t have to bother me because I have nothing to hide” phenomenon. I’m not asking you to scare people, but can you just illustrate the seriousness of the findings here? What are the implications?

    Cindy Cohn

    Cindy Cohn: “We all rely on journalists’ ability to find out what’s going on, especially in ways that governments don’t like, to be an informed populace.”

    CC: The NSO Group is reportedly—and this leak confirms it—deeply involved in Saudi Arabia’s spying and ultimately killing of reporter Jamal Khashoggi, as well as a Mexican journalist. This isn’t just about spying; this is about murder, at the end of the day.

    And we all rely on journalists’ ability to find out what’s going on, especially in ways that governments don’t like, to be an informed populace. I think it’s not an overstatement to say the question of self-governance turns on whether the current people in power can hide from us the truth about what’s going on in the world.

    How  do we elect the right people if the people in power right now are making sure we don’t find out the whole story? So I think it’s tremendously important for, fundamentally, are we governing ourselves?

    JJ: To be clear: This Israeli company, NSO Group, they’re not the only source of concern here, right?

    CC: No, no, no. They’re one of the more notorious and, of course, they were the subject of this leak, and the list of countries is pretty bad here. But, yeah, they’re not the only one.

    As I said,  this is a business, and it’s a dark business that I think some people—including the UN special rapporteur for freedom of expression—ultimately, we reached the point where we’re calling for a moratorium on governmental use of these malware technologies, because it’s clear that governments can’t use them responsibly. And we don’t have real mechanisms for accountability when they misuse it, either. And so, whether it’s stopping governments from getting this in the first place, or making sure that when governments misuse this information, we have real remedies—we aren’t doing any of that right now.

    Kiefer Sutherland portrays a torturer on 24

    Kiefer Sutherland on 24

    JJ: I’m going to bring you back to what accountability might look like. But if I can just take a question on media: I’m thinking back to the show 24 that suggested that there might be a time when you need to torture someone, you know, because they have information that would prevent the deaths of many people. We get into a lot of trolley problems and, “Don’t you think the state should be allowed to surveil cell phones in case terrorists something something something?”

    The Justice minister in Hungary says, “Every country needs such tools.” How do you talk about what’s being lost here? How do we bring folks back to valuing privacy, in this moment where people—some people, anyway—just seem to have given up, and the idea that, “Well, if I’m not committing a crime, I shouldn’t care about my privacy”?

    CC: I think there’s a few things. The first thing I would say is that we shouldn’t take policy advice from a fictional TV show. The reality is, the US Senate did a big report on this, the torture done under the Bush administration. The times in which we need Kiefer Sutherland to torture people, it’s a fiction most of the time; 99.99% of the time, it’s a fiction. And I think if we’re not grounded in that, and if we’re stuck in TV, we’re not going to be able to look at this fairly. So that’s the first thing I would do, is I would push back on this TV show as a basis for us deciding our laws.

    The second thing I would argue is that the American Constitution is all about limits on what the government can do, right? It’s not the case that the founders of this country… and for good reason, of course, because we wouldn’t have gotten independence if the founders of this country hadn’t decided that letting the cops just randomly break into people’s houses to find out whether people were paying their taxes or not—remember, the Boston Tea Party was about taxes, and the Fourth Amendment was written because the colonists didn’t think it was OK for the cops to just break into anybody’s house because they might be breaking the law—and that’s what the Fourth Amendment is based on.

    And that’s not the only thing. Certainly there’s international law, something called the necessary and proportionate principle that’s built into international law, that reflects some of the same values of the Fourth Amendment. They’re not exactly the same, but both of them recognize that you can’t just “never say no” to government because they might be able to dream up a scenario in which they need power. The whole idea of a society that’s governed by laws and not by men is based upon limiting what the government can do.

    So I guess, sure, if we want to just go back to a feudal society where rulers have all the power, we’re certainly capable of doing that. But I would argue that that  really undoes hundreds of years of trying to find the balance between governmental power and the rest of us.

    I’m sorry, I don’t mean to get historical about it. But I really do think this idea that, you know, because the government can dream up some reason why it might need a power, we should give it to them, really flies in the face of the whole history of this country, and I would argue even longer. So that’s the second thing.

    The third thing is, you can’t always predict who’s going to be in power in the future. We just came out of four years of an administration that felt very differently about who its enemies were than the administration before that. And whether you’re a fan of the previous administration or the one before that, you have to recognize that who’s in charge of those levers of power can change, and can change in very dramatic ways.

    And again, if you look at the list of people who are on the 50,000 phone numbers that were leaked here, you see the kinds of people who, really, the rest of us rely on. And central to that is journalists; there were over 180 journalists on the list that they were able to confirm, but I suspect there are many be more. Human rights defenders, political activists, opposition parties, even President Macron of France was on the list. So even currently powerful political people were on the list, because they’re being watched by others.

    So I think that it’s not realistic to think that we always and forever will have governmental powers who will only use these powers for good and never use them for evil. Instead, we have to put systems and structures in place to cabin those situations, so that we limit the times in which they happen, and we have accountability when they do. To be able to sue if these malware companies are pretending to be them; they have deep pockets, they can do this.

    But also the people who are harmed should be able to, and EFF brought a case a few years ago, on behalf of an American guy who was spied on by the government of Ethiopia; he was an immigrant. And we were unable to get a remedy for this guy, because of the doctrine of sovereign immunity. We need those doctrines to get out of the way so that people can have real accountability.

    And then the companies that actually built this software need to be accountable when that software is used to hurt somebody. If you have a tool that is designed to hurt people and then it hurts people, you should be held accountable for those harms, and you shouldn’t be able to basically wash your hands of it.

    And then, finally, NSO Group claimed that it had a set of rules about who it sold to, and wouldn’t sell to repressive governments. But it seems that they were completely toothless. And we need to hold companies to those kinds of standards. And we need to make them accountable when they violate them.

    JJ: And make them transparent, so that folks know what’s going on, because it’s often being told that it’s in our name.

    CC: Yeah, totally. That’s the stepping stone, right? Without transparency, you can’t have accountability. We have lived for 200 years in the United States with the idea of warrant, where the government has to go to a judge and make its case, and then it gets a warrant to be able to turn on surveillance against you. The country has not fallen because we have basic accountability in this area. Now, I would argue we probably need more accountability in the context of domestic warrants, but we at least have some. In these international situations right now, we have almost none, and we really need to bring the level up, so that we can stop these kinds of travesties.

    JJ: We’ve been speaking with Cindy Cohn; she’s executive director of Electronic Frontier Foundation. You can find their work online at EFF.org. Cindy Cohn, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

    CC: Thank you so much for giving us some attention.

    The post ‘Governments Are Spying on the People Who Bring Us the News’ appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • We Are Many:  the Oppressors are not

    I remember chatting with a man from Iraq in 2016.  He was driving a taxi in Germany.  I wrote about him in one of my essays:

    “Last month, I was chatting with an Iraqi taxi driver in Berlin. My 12 year old son and I took a cab from the Museum for Contemporary Art to our hotel. I couldn’t help but ask the cab driver why he ended up in Berlin. He said it was something to do with the availability of the visa. He stressed that he had to leave because he didn’t like Islam. He said Muslims were killing each other.

    I felt very slightly sad because he sounded like he had to say that to prove that he wasn’t a “terrorist”. I told him that it was the US that supported Saddam when it was convenient. Then, the US flipped, changing its policy, as doing so became more convenient. I asked him, Taliban, al Qaeda, ISIS, same old story, no?

    Then he said something unexpected. He said it was a “people’s revolution”. “We stood against Saddam”.  He was referring to the first gulf war in 1991. He went on to describe how it didn’t go as people wished, and it brought about the devastating trade embargo, more war, ISIS and so on.  His voice was passionate.  I felt the anger and frustration against war and imperialism that I also feel myself, in his voice.”

    The imperial war against countries that defy the US hegemonic imperatives involves a few steps.  The target population is deprived of their basic necessities by economic embargo, trade sanctions, travel restrictions and demonization of its leader.  The society is destabilized by the lack of resources and economic activities.  The opposing forces in the country are generously funded by the empire to build a momentum against the defying “regime” in the name of “revolution,” “democracy,” “freedom”, etc. The communities are divided. The institutions are compromised to serve capital, adding more confusions and predicaments to the population.

    Quite often this is sufficient enough to silence those who defy such interventions and it results in an overthrow of the existing order.  The society is transformed to suit the colonial policies concocted by western industries, which result in resource extraction, privatization, financialization, exploitation of cheap labor, construction of US military bases and so on.

    Quite a few middle eastern countries have defied such interventions resulting in proxy wars and western military interventions.

    That was the war on terror which continues to this day as the US forces are freely employed against the world according to its “war on terror legal framework,” while its measures are still in place as restrictions against our legal rights as well as restrictions at airports and so on.

    Many of us raised our voices against the obvious crime of invading other countries, colonizing them and subjugating them.  To my surprise there were people who objected to our assertion saying that if we didn’t invade them, they would have invaded us, they were “terrorists,” and so on.

    Enormous profits were generated by this huge public project, war, at the expense of the people in the war torn countries as well as oppressed people in some of the richest countries of the world. No one was held accountable for deaths and destruction.  The war to save people from terrorists was a huge capitalist project to expand the power and wealth of hardened criminals who call themselves politicians, philanthropists, businessmen, intellectuals, patriots, academics, and so on.

    The underlining mentality of neo-colonial violence is based on prejudice against the peoples of the targeted countries.  Those peoples, who reside within countries governed by “leaders” who have sworn to obey imperial policies, are subjected to tighter measures of exploitation and subjugation in order to serve the interests of the imperial institutions. The predicaments of the subject population—poverty, social unrest, and corruption, which stem from the economic subjugation, justify the mental superiority among westerners, falsely proving the inferiority of the “barbaric” population which must be “assisted” by westerners.  If the leader of a colonized country attempts to amend the unfair situation by implementing policies that serve that country’s own people, the western authority would mobilize policies to remove such an element.  The policies are firmly backed by the prejudice amongst the imperial population. Simple slogans and key words such as “he is killing his own people,” “save the children,” “regime,” “dictatorship” and “genocide” can trigger the colonial mentality as well as the white savior mentality in the imperial population.

    Fast forward to 2021 — the era of war on virus. We are experiencing a massive wealth transfer to the rich and powerful, which can be best described by Jeff Bezos thanking his workers and customers for his rocket ride. The cynical exploitative violence inflicted against workers is found in all sectors across the country, creating destruction of small community businesses, massive homelessness, suicide surge, spike in drug related deaths.  Lockdown measures are wreaking havoc in vital social relations, which must now be reorganized.

    The virus event has turned the dwindling healthcare system into mask wearing, social distancing and getting injected with extremely lucrative experimental GMO drugs—which are surrounded by  unprecedented numbers of injuries and deaths, far surpassing all combined prior vaccine injury and death reports to the CDC reporting system VAERS.  The lockdown measures and profit oriented measures against the virus further narrowed the capacity of the general healthcare system, resolution in huge numbers of patients without vital care for their urgent conditions. Destroying the healthcare system for the sake of saving lives is only an aspect of the current mobilization.  The education system, which has been under attack for generations by corporate forces, has received a blank check to fire faculties, turn classes into online tutorials, and pursue a new mission to create obedient workers for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The financial institution has accelerated its herding of the population into the digital realm where people are conditioned, commodified, and exploited as data.  In every industry, a massive restructuring process for profit is occurring in the name of Covid measures.

    Now, I understand that respiratory illnesses can be very dangerous.  If you look up articles from pre-Covid time, you find desperate calls from healthcare professionals screaming about the risk of flu epidemics due to the lack of facilities and resources. This has become reality after Covid, as massive death tolls have resulted from nursing home lockdowns.  Profit oriented treatment options have been promoted while effective options were restricted, resulting in yet even more deaths and hospitalizations.  But statistically, all these deaths in the US had not exceeded the range of year to year variation in death rate.  This crucial fact has been observed in various countries.  The Covid situation, if anything, is very much a manmade event. It can not be described as a deadly pandemic comparable to the bubonic plague. This should shatter virus event narratives propped up by “cases“ concocted by unreliable PCR tests—its inaccuracy has been highly criticized by many scientists—including the inventor of the PCR test himself–due to its arbitrary results depending on the degree of amplification in search of the targeted DNA fragments.

    The above observation is strictly based on the opinions of numerous healthcare professionals, doctors, and scientists across the globe. At the very least, it must be recognized that there are significant disagreements within the field of science on every aspect of Covid-19, its treatments, and lockdown measures.

    However, none of those are examined in a serious manner by the establishment.  In fact, there are many instances of healthcare professionals being disciplined for reporting cases of vaccine injury, speaking against the treatment policies, and questioning the prevalent assumptions regarding the virus.  Healthcare professionals are actively forced to play along with the official Covid narrative.

    For the general public the mixed emotions over the contradictions have turned to frustration, and the frustration has turned to anger as if we are stuck in a pressure cooker made with official narratives and structural impediments of lockdowns and forced vaccine injection. The heat and pressure have broken down the social fabric as our daily routines are dictated by “new normal.”

    So many things have happened since last year.  But somehow things don’t seem to fit in right places in our heads.

    We mark our sense of time and space with traditional events, daily routines and our common knowledge.  When we lose those, we are left with a series of elements and dynamics without those markers.But alternate markers have been provided by those who have deprived us of the markers.  Our lives are marked with lockdowns, masks and social distancing — the “new normal”.

    Now we mark our lives with it.

    We are told that there is a deadly disease out there and the only solution is to vaccinate.  Our life and death are determined by one of the largest corporate entities, the medical industrial complex.

    Just as the war on terror was described as a “crusade”—legitimizing the twisted religious and cultural superiority of the colonizers, disguising white man’s burden as humanitarian obligation — the war on virus crowns “science” as its guiding force.  However, needless to say, the credibility of the “science” is proportional to the accompanying might of wealth and power—just as the facts of war are bought and sold as “journalism”. Propaganda lies fill the air as those who oppose are marked as “others” who  deserve to be castigated as being outside of the protection of the gated community.

    This way of framing—the medical industrial complex—is useful in understanding the dynamics within the capitalist hegemony. However, such an entity is also a part of the media industrial complex, non profit industrial complex, political industrial complex, and, of course, military industrial complex.  In short, our lives are dictated by multiple dynamic forces of oligarchs, orchestrating a “reality” which firmly manifests as a capitalist framework—a cage to condition our lives based on its imperatives.

    As the current virus mobilization reframes our society, obliterating existing values, norms and beliefs, the corporate institutions and their owners are consecrated as absolute beings which determine our life and death. This is why decrees legitimated by the “emergency”  are acceptable political means now.  This is why large corporations have gained enormous wealth.  This is why our lives are herded into the digital realm where we are commodified, conditioned to be exploited, and truncated to be stripped of the mystery of life and the unknown.

    But where do the anger and frustration go?

    The US establishment is well aware of the boiling anger and frustration over the situation.  The momentum of anger is cultivated and it is being shaped to put the people against each other—an old corporate duopoly trick, which has grown steadily as a dynamic tool of social engineering in the US.  The ghosts of the Civil War still determine the means of enslavement, while allowing the ruling class to preside over the theater of “democracy,” “freedom” and “humanity”—a manufactured “reality.”  Individualism, self-determination and a sense of freedom based on the sacrifices of many oppressed people are a privilege only allowed to people with economic security.  This is a part of the reason why the resistance against the Covid lockdown measures encompasses a reactionary element.  In particular, erroneously defining the trajectory as “socialism” or “communism”.  This ironic twist, the capitalist oppression being blamed on the enemy of capitalists, once again reveals the mechanism of the imperial duopoly as well as the expansion of the exploitative violence against a formerly economically secure segment of the population, which will require tighter measures of draconian restrictions.

    It is not a coincidence that the red states have embraced the opposing positions while the blue states firmly adhere to the official narratives on vaccines and lockdown measures.  The subject populations are allowed to choose the mode of enslavement, but the slight differences in the choice are big enough to activate colonial hatred toward each other.  The unresolved historical pain, emotion and grudge have found urgent expression against “enemies” among us.  A fight between teeth baring wolves and cunning foxes, as Malcom X would call it, channels the anger and frustration safely within the capitalist framework.  The media, politicians and major institutions carefully instigate conflicts among the people by demonizing opponents over vaccines and lockdown measures, while protecting “pandemic” narratives one way or the other.

    Some people might think that things must get worse before it gets better. Things can certainly get worse but it looks like it only means more fragmentation of communities and destabilization of institutions, which allows further erosion of people’s interests by the capitalist domination along with justifications for its draconian measures.  This probably gives a comfortable feeling for those privileged ones in gated communities. This also accompanies the exacerbation of fascist momentum, which always justifies the forces of western imperial hegemony—remember how the Trump phenomenon pushed neoliberal policies, which are embraced by both corporate parties, while justifying anything else to oppose Donald Trump, who was largely perceived as an obvious caricature of the narcissistic failing empire?  The US capitalism moves forward while oscillating left and right within the acceptable spectrum of imperialism.

    In short, everything is under control according to those who destroyed the middle eastern countries.  The only difference is that now the target is us.  We are under attack.  Some of us are demonized by the establishment to play the role of scapegoats.  Some of us are praised as heroes saving lives and sacrificing themselves. Our communities are being destroyed to be further consumed by the colonizers of humanity and nature.

    The war on virus is meant as a crucial background of destabilization and fear which helps extract huge amount of public spending in the name of saving lives, saving environment and saving people’s livelihoods—which are all under attack by the savagery of the very capitalist domination.   Since the war on virus is largely targeting the public money, we are bombarded with an unprecedented amount of wholesale propaganda narratives, as if we are thrown into the process of corporate electoral process—we are supposed to vote yes to those lucrative capitalist fixes for the capitalist problems by going along with the narratives.  Public outcries against the policies are safely consumed among the populations as people are forced to fight among themselves.

    Moreover, the war on virus is meant to be a perpetual war.  Inconceivable “mistakes” will be made, victories would be declared here and there, facts will be revealed when convenient, while much of the facts are distorted to prop up the pretense of this vast protection racket scheme by the oligarchs.  One step forward, and one step backward, our lives swirl within the torturous theater of the “medical crisis,” but the real solution is never to be found within it.  The empire can not lose the war but the empire has no intention of winning the war either, for the winning can destroy the domesticated momentum of the in-fighting among the people, as well as an assortment of “activism” backed by the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, which effectively drives capitalist agendas in the name of “our democracy”. After all, we are many. The oppressors are not.  The mechanism of the domestication must be kept in place to tame the masses within the feudal hierarchy of money and violence.  Meanwhile, fear, doubt and real threat against our livelihood in the form of economic strangulation continue to force us to swallow the protection racket deal with the criminal enterprise.

    Ultimately, the trajectory points to a complete domestication of our species through management of all means of production, its products, and the distribution system.  As the peoples become products themselves with biotech procedures, the social relations within the digital realm seamlessly merge with the fabricated reality, virtually cementing the feudal hierarchy of the absolute power.

    As we operate within social media outlets, as we present our identities within their frameworks, and as we are injected with GMO drugs to modify our physical response to the natural world, we have already stepped into a dangerous stage which might very well spell the end of our species as we know it.

    What could Iraqis do as they suffered the deadly embargo and invasions?  The question is ours now.  Unfortunately, many of those who stood with the empire are still insisting on fighting the imperial war as we have become the targets of the war, demonizing our community members as enemies, repeating slogans and talking points to justify the imperial restructuring, as our communities fall apart to be devoured by the colonizers.  It is no coincidence that those who oppose the current mobilization are accused of being racists, conspiracy theorists, or fascist worshippers—just as not agreeing with bombing brown people would be accused of letting brown children die by the hand of a “dictator.”

    Our real enemy is not the “antivaxxers,” or the gullible people swallowing the corporate propaganda.  The real enemy is the imperial oligarchs who are shaping our society in order to continue their ways of exploitation and subjugation.  They are shaping the capitalist cage to squeeze the last remnants of our imagination and our connection to humanity and nature.  How can we defy the colonization of humanity and nature?  How can we be a part of the resistance against the criminal pyramid scheme which is bound to implode with its destructive nature?  How can we build our ways to be in harmony with ourselves, with each other and with nature?  We are a part of the countless people who have held the dream of such a harmony.  We stand strong with them in solidarity.  We are many. The oppressors are not.

    The post We Are Many:  the Oppressors are not first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Sha’Carri Richardson’s Story Shows Us Drug Testing Is a Harmful Drug War Tactic

    Sha'Carrie Richardson looks perfect and unbothered as she destroys her competition during a race

    Right now, Sha’Carri Richardson should be running toward her Olympic dream, but she’s not because of a harmful drug war practice: drug testing.

    In June 2021, Richardson made headlines as one of the fastest women in the United States with her 100-meter sprint performance in the U.S. Olympic Trials. Less than two weeks later, she tested positive for THC, received a one-month suspension from competition, and was later excluded from the U.S. Olympic Team.

    While many racial justice and policy advocates were outraged by how Richardson’s positive marijuana test was handled, her experience was just the most visible instance of a deeply rooted practice that has harmed countless people for decades.

    For the past 35 years, drug testing has been an essential, yet largely under-examined, pillar of the “war on drugs.” Drug testing was widely adopted following the Drug-Free Workplace Act in 1988 under the false pretense of making workplaces safer and “drug-free.” In reality, these tests do nothing to show current impairment and are used as grounds for termination. They are disproportionately used to deny care and to target, surveil and criminalize Black people.

    Richardson’s case reveals a deeper truth — drug testing has become far too pervasive and normalized, even in situations where it is clear that it is not tied to performance or safety. For example, the USADA (United States Anti-Doping Agency) has claimed that marijuana is banned primarily due to pressure from the White House, not because of concerns for athletes’ well-being or integrity in sports. But drug testing wasn’t always a part of our lives and we don’t have to continue to accept it now.

    People should never be drug tested for any drug, for any reason, that can lead to punitive consequences, regardless of which drugs they use and why they use them. Even drug testing for safety-sensitive positions, like those involving machine operating or medical procedures, cannot detect on-the-job impairment. Workplace accidents are often associated with stress, fatigue and illness rather than with drug use, and alternative assessment methods, including ongoing performance evaluations or performance-based tests, would more accurately and ethically measure current impairment.

    We should channel the outrage we feel about Richardson’s punitive treatment toward the institutions that subject many people to this kind of draconian surveillance every day.

    Take the public benefits system, for example. Applicants to the federally established Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program are targeted by testing, whether they use drugs or not. Thirteen states authorize drug testing of TANF recipients. In most of those states, a positive drug test means sanctions and losing benefits altogether. These drug testing policies most acutely target Black people, who are disproportionately likely to be sanctioned and disproportionately poor. The impact of these sanctions? Increased risk of hunger, eviction and homelessness, utility shut-off and inadequate health care.

    Within the family regulation system (commonly referred to as the “child welfare system”), many doctors routinely drug test pregnant people and newborns, often without verbal or written consent. Although a drug test cannot indicate how much of a drug someone has used, whether someone is currently impaired or under the influence, or whether any harm has stemmed from that use, a positive drug test can lead to a newborn child being ripped from their parents’ arms despite no evidence of harm to the child. Who are the primary targets of pre- and post-natal drug testing? Black women and their newborns, who by one estimate are 1.5 times more likely to be drug tested than non-Black women. Meanwhile, favorable media representations abound of white middle-class and wealthy parents using marijuana.

    The selective use of drug testing in contexts that disproportionately target Black people, particularly poor Black people, while white people openly admit to using marijuana and sing its many benefits, highlights the extreme double standard around drugs, where some of us are trusted to use responsibly and others are portrayed as deviant rulebreakers. People of all races use drugs at similar rates, but enforcement in these areas parallels all tools of the drug war — it’s never about the drug. It’s about the perceived user.

    Has drug testing achieved any of the purported goals of reducing drug-related accidents and harm? No, because, as noted earlier, drug testing only detects past use and not current impairment.

    Has it decreased overdose deaths? No, criminalization and drug prohibition haven’t made us safer and have instead produced generational trauma and devastation and have fueled an overdose crisis.

    Has it connected people with services? No, surveillance and the threat of punishment deter people from seeking care and block people from much-needed nutritional, financial and medical support.

    People don’t “fail” drug tests. Drug testing fails us.

    We should not accept that the systems that are meant to provide support — like health care and public benefits — are denying care based on drug use and dictating what we can and cannot put into our bodies. This is how insidious the drug war is: It can be used to deny jobs, tear apart families and block public benefits in a time of need.

    A different world is possible, and people who use drugs are already envisioning it. Ending drug testing would disrupt the broader web of drug war surveillance, getting us closer to that future: one where we can all be open about our drug use; where people can choose to use drugs for a multitude of reasons, including pleasure; where Black people, people of color and other marginalized people aren’t targeted and punished for real or suspected drug use; where people can access the supports they desire without fear; and where the drug war, in all its forms, is abolished.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Authoritarians Drunk on Power: It Is Time to Recalibrate the Government

    The executive power in our government is not the only, perhaps not even the principal, object of my solicitude. The tyranny of the legislature is really the danger most to be feared, and will continue to be so for many years to come. The tyranny of the executive power will come in its turn, but at a more distant period.

    ― Thomas Jefferson, (Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville(

    It is time to recalibrate the government.

    For years now, we have suffered the injustices, cruelties, corruption and abuse of an entrenched government bureaucracy that has no regard for the Constitution or the rights of the citizenry.

    By “government,” I’m not referring to the highly partisan, two-party bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats. Rather, I’m referring to “government” with a capital “G,” the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law.

    We are overdue for a systemic check on the government’s overreaches and power grabs.

    We have lingered too long in this strange twilight zone where ego trumps justice, propaganda perverts truth, and imperial presidents—empowered to indulge their authoritarian tendencies by legalistic courts, corrupt legislatures and a disinterested, distracted populace—rule by fiat rather than by the rule of law.

    This COVID-19 pandemic has provided the government with the perfect excuse to lay claim to a long laundry list of terrifying lockdown powers (at both the federal and state level) that override the Constitution: the ability to suspend the Constitution, indefinitely detain American citizens, bypass the courts, quarantine whole communities or segments of the population, override the First Amendment by outlawing religious gatherings and assemblies of more than a few people, shut down entire industries and manipulate the economy, muzzle dissidents, reshape financial markets, create a digital currency (and thus further restrict the use of cash), determine who should live or die, and impose health mandates on large segments of the population.

    These kinds of crises tend to bring out the authoritarian tendencies in government.

    That’s no surprise: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

    Where we find ourselves now is in the unenviable position of needing to rein in all three branches of government—the Executive, the Judicial, and the Legislative—that have exceeded their authority and grown drunk on power.

    This is exactly the kind of concentrated, absolute power the founders attempted to guard against by establishing a system of checks of balances that separate and shares power between three co-equal branches: the executive, the legislative and the judiciary.

    “The system of checks and balances that the Framers envisioned now lacks effective checks and is no longer in balance,” concludes law professor William P. Marshall. “The implications of this are serious. The Framers designed a system of separation of powers to combat government excess and abuse and to curb incompetence. They also believed that, in the absence of an effective separation-of-powers structure, such ills would inevitably follow. Unfortunately, however, power once taken is not easily surrendered.”

    Unadulterated power in any branch of government is a menace to freedom.

    There’s no point debating which political party would be more dangerous with these powers.

    The fact that any individual—or branch of government—of any political persuasion is empowered to act like a dictator is danger enough.

    So what can we do to wrest back control over a runaway government and an imperial presidency?

    It won’t be easy.

    We are the unwitting victims of a system so corrupt that those who stand up for the rule of law and aspire to transparency in government are in the minority.

    This corruption is so vast it spans all branches of government: from the power-hungry agencies under the executive branch and the corporate puppets within the legislative branch to a judiciary that is, more often than not, elitist and biased towards government entities and corporations.

    We are ruled by an elite class of individuals who are completely out of touch with the travails of the average American.

    We are viewed as relatively expendable in the eyes of government: faceless numbers of individuals who serve one purpose, which is to keep the government machine running through our labor and our tax dollars. Those in power aren’t losing any sleep over the indignities we are being made to suffer or the possible risks to our health. All they seem to care about are power and control.

    We are being made to suffer countless abuses at the government’s hands.

    We have little protection against standing armies (domestic and military), invasive surveillance, marauding SWAT teams, an overwhelming government arsenal of assault vehicles and firepower, and a barrage of laws that criminalize everything from vegetable gardens to lemonade stands.

    In the name of national security, we’re being subjected to government agencies such as the NSA, FBI and others listening in on our phone calls, reading our mail, monitoring our emails, and carrying out warrantless “black bag” searches of our homes. Adding to the abuse, we have to deal with surveillance cameras mounted on street corners and in traffic lights, weather satellites co-opted for use as spy cameras from space, and thermal sensory imaging devices that can detect heat and movement through the walls of our homes.

    That doesn’t even begin to touch on the many ways in which our Fourth Amendment rights are trampled upon by militarized police and SWAT teams empowered to act as laws unto themselves.

    In other words, freedom—or what’s left of it—is threatened from every direction.

    The predators of the police state are wreaking havoc on our freedoms, our communities, and our lives. The government doesn’t listen to the citizenry, it refuses to abide by the Constitution, which is our rule of law, and it treats the citizenry as a source of funding and little else. Police officers are shooting unarmed citizens and their household pets. Government agents—including local police—are being armed to the teeth and encouraged to act like soldiers on a battlefield. Bloated government agencies are fleecing taxpayers. Government technicians are spying on our emails and phone calls. Government contractors are making a killing by waging endless wars abroad.

    In other words, the American police state is alive and well and flourishing.

    Nothing has changed, and nothing will change unless we insist on it.

    We have arrived at the dystopian future depicted in the 2005 film V for Vendetta, which is no future at all.

    Set in the year 2020, V for Vendetta (written and produced by the Wachowskis) provides an eerie glimpse into a parallel universe in which a government-engineered virus wreaks havoc on the world. Capitalizing on the people’s fear, a totalitarian government comes to power that knows all, sees all, controls everything and promises safety and security above all.

    Concentration camps (jails, private prisons and detention facilities) have been established to house political prisoners and others deemed to be enemies of the state. Executions of undesirables (extremists, troublemakers and the like) are common, while other enemies of the state are made to “disappear.” Populist uprisings and protests are met with extreme force. The television networks are controlled by the government with the purpose of perpetuating the regime. And most of the population is hooked into an entertainment mode and are clueless.

    Sounds painfully familiar, doesn’t it?

    As director James McTeighe observed about the tyrannical regime in V for Vendetta, “It really showed what can happen when society is ruled by government, rather than the government being run as a voice of the people. I don’t think it’s such a big leap to say things like that can happen when leaders stop listening to the people.”

    Clearly, our leaders have stopped listening to the American people.

    We are—and have been for some time—the unwitting victims of a system so corrupt that those who stand up for the rule of law and aspire to transparency in government are in the minority. This corruption is so vast it spans all branches of government—from the power-hungry agencies under the executive branch and the corporate puppets within the legislative branch to a judiciary that is, more often than not, elitist and biased towards government entities and corporations.

    We are ruled by an elite class of individuals who are completely out of touch with the travails of the average American. We are relatively expendable in the eyes of government—faceless numbers of individuals who serve one purpose, which is to keep the government machine running through our labor and our tax dollars.

    What will it take for the government to start listening to the people again?

    In V for Vendetta, as in my new novel The Erik Blair Diaries, it takes an act of terrorism for the people to finally mobilize and stand up to the government’s tyranny: in Vendetta, V the film’s masked crusader blows up the seat of government, while in Erik Blair, freedom fighters plot to unmask the Deep State.

    These acts of desperation and outright anarchy are what happens when a parasitical government muzzles the citizenry, fences them in, herds them, brands them, whips them into submission, forces them to ante up the sweat of their brows while giving them little in return, and then provides them with little to no outlet for voicing their discontent: people get desperate, citizens lose hope, and lawful, nonviolent resistance gives way to unlawful, violent resistance.

    This way lies madness.

    Then again, this madness may be unavoidable unless we can wrest back control over our runaway government starting at the local level.

    How to do this? It’s not rocket science.

    There is no 10-step plan. If there were a 10-step plan, however, the first step would be as follows: turn off the televisions, tune out the politicians, and do your part to stand up for freedom principles in your own communities.

    Stand up for your own rights, of course, but more importantly, stand up for the rights of those with whom you might disagree. Defend freedom at all costs. Defend justice at all costs. Make no exceptions based on race, religion, creed, politics, immigration status, sexual orientation, etc. Vote like Americans, for a change, not Republicans or Democrats.

    Most of all, use your power—and there is power in our numbers—to nullify anything and everything the government does that undermines the freedom principles on which this nation was founded.

    Don’t play semantics. Don’t justify. Don’t politicize it. If it carries even a whiff of tyranny, oppose it. Demand that your representatives in government cut you a better deal, one that abides by the Constitution and doesn’t just attempt to sidestep it.

    That’s their job: make them do it.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, all freedoms hang together. They fall together, as well.

    The police state does not discriminate. Eventually, we will all suffer the same fate.

    The post Authoritarians Drunk on Power: It Is Time to Recalibrate the Government first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Luke Harris on Critical Race Theory, Cindy Cohn on Pegasus Spyware

     

    Elizabeth Eckford tries to attend Little Rock Central High, September 4, 1957

    Little Rock, 1957

    This week on CounterSpin: You’ve almost certainly seen the documentary photographs; they’re emblematic: African Americans trying to walk to school or sit at a drugstore soda fountain, while white people yell and spit and scream at them. Should no one see those pictures or learn those stories—because some of them have skin the same color as those doing the screaming and the spitting? The most recent attack on anti-racist education is labeled as protective, as avoiding “division,” and as a specific assessment of critical race theory. To the extent that corporate media have bought into that labeling, they’ve misinformed the public—not just about critical race theory, but about a campaign whose own architects say is about disinforming, confusing and inflaming people into resisting any actual effort to understand or respond to persistent racial inequity. Luke Charles Harris is co-founder and deputy director of the African American Policy Forum. He joins us to talk about what’s at issue.

          CounterSpin210730Harris.mp3

     

    Mobile Surveillance

    (image: EFF)

    Also on the show: Democracy & technology and digital rights groups around the world signed on to a letter in support of encryption: the ability of journalists, human rights defenders and everyone else to have private communication—to talk to one another without being spied on by governments, including their own. You’d think it’d be a big deal, but judging by US corporate media, it’s evidently a yawn. We talk about what’s going on and why it matters with Cindy Cohn, executive director at Electronic Frontier Foundation.

          CounterSpin210730Cohn.mp3

    The post Luke Harris on Critical Race Theory, Cindy Cohn on Pegasus Spyware appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on CounterSpin.

  • The Same FBI

    What the FBI didn’t say at the time was that at least a dozen participants in the “plot” were FBI informants, while one of the plot’s “planners” was an active-duty FBI agent.  The accused are now arguing in court that they were entrapped.  They likely were. While the courts already have ruled in similar cases that that is not a defense, it is the way the FBI does business.  The FBI entraps hapless people all the time, arrests them, charges them with domestic terrorism offenses or other serious felonies, claims victory in the “war on domestic terrorism,” and then asks Congress for more money to entrap more people.

    The post The Same FBI appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • WhatsApp Head Will Cathcart: The spyware industry is undermining freedom

    Will Cathcart is the chief executive of WhatsApp, the downloadable messaging app used by millions around the world as a primary means of communication. WhatsApp offers end-to-end encryption, meaning messages shared via the platform are, under normal circumstances, highly secure—a feature that has made it attractive for journalists, human rights defenders, and other vulnerable users, particularly in repressive environments.

    Cathcart has been outspoken about threats to security, including so-called backdoors, which governments argue would give law enforcement much-needed access to encrypted communications, but which would also be vulnerable to malicious hacking. Cathcart has also been highly critical of the NSO Group, the Israeli firm that has marketed Pegasus spyware to governments around the world. Pegasus can be surreptitiously implanted on smartphones, giving governments unfettered access to all communications on the phone—and bypassing the encryption that WhatsApp and other secure apps like Signal apply to messages in transit.

    NSO group says Pegasus is a critical tool that governments use to combat crime and terror. But a recent report dubbed the Pegasus Project—published jointly by 17 media organizations and based on a leaked list of 50,000 phone numbers allegedly selected by NSO clients—revealed that possible targets included hundreds of journalists and human rights defenders, not to mention senior political leaders such as French President Emmanuel Macron.

    NSO has told CPJ it has no connection to the list of phone numbers, that it vets all clients and investigates credible allegations of abuse, and that it cannot access customer data except in the course of an investigation. In a statement to the Guardian, the company denied that Macron had been targeted by any of its customers.

    CPJ spoke with Cathcart via Zoom on July 23. The interview has been edited for clarity and length. NSO’s responses relating to some of his comments appear at the end.

    Right after the Pegasus Project was published, you put out a tweet storm. You posted a thread with your own reaction and you retweeted some interesting folks, everyone from David Kaye to Edward Snowden. Tell me why you responded the way you did.

    The issue of spyware, especially unaccountable spyware, is a huge problem. And it’s being used to undermine freedom. We detected and defeated an attack from NSO Group in 2019. And we worked with Citizen Lab who helped us analyze the 1,400 or so victims we saw then, and discovered over 100 cases of clear abuse, including journalists and human rights defenders. The new reporting shows the much, much larger scale of the problem. This should be a wake-up call for security on the internet.

    You mentioned the 2019 attack, which resulted in WhatsApp filing a lawsuit [in U.S. federal court] against the NSO Group. Your Washington Post op-ed in which you lay out the rationale is pinned to the top of your Twitter feed. What made you decide to take on the NSO Group?

    When we saw the attack and defeated it in 2019, we decided we needed to get to the bottom of what had happened. These were not, as has been claimed, clear law enforcement operations. This was out-of-control abuse.

    We felt we needed to be very loud about what we saw, because we knew that even if we had fixed the issue, there still exist vulnerabilities in people’s mobile phones. The operating systems have bugs that are still being exploited. So even though we’d stopped the attack from our perspective, it’s still a problem. If you’re a journalist, if you’re a human rights defender, if you’re a political dissident, you still have to be worried. So yeah, absolutely, we sued the NSO Group. They broke the law. We want to hold them accountable. We think their behavior needs to be stopped.

    There’s clearly a business interest here. One of the selling points of end-to-end encryption is the security that it provides. If there’s spyware out there that’s seeking to subvert that security, it’s a threat to the business model. But do you see this as a matter of principle as well? How do those two things relate to each other?

    This is a threat to end democracy. What we offer is a service for having private, secure communication. The reason everyone at WhatsApp gets up every day excited about working on that and fighting to defend it, is we believe it enables really important things. We believe journalists being able to talk to each other, and [to] sources, [to] bring out critical stories on governments or companies is a fundamental element of a democracy. We believe, in democracy, you need to have opposition. We believe human rights defenders all around the world do really, really important work. WhatsApp is popular in a lot of countries around the world that don’t have as robust traditions of freedom and liberal democracy. We’re popular in a lot of places where the ability to communicate securely is critical to someone’s safety.

    You’ve been very outspoken about your concerns. What would you like to see from the tech community at large?

    I would love to see all the other tech companies stand up, talk about this problem, talk about the victims, talk about the principles at stake, and do everything they can to put a stop to it. I was really excited to see Microsoft, when they discovered some spyware from a different company a few weeks ago, they were loud about it. They worked with Citizen Lab to understand the victims. I think that needs to be the model. I don’t think it is okay, when you find these vulnerabilities and you find these attacks to say, “Well, it’s disappointing, but it only affected a few people.” An attack on journalists, an attack on human rights defenders, an attack on political figures in democracies, that affects us all.

    You’ve recognized the communications needs of journalists and human rights defenders, particularly those working in high-risk environments. But some security experts believe that phones just aren’t secure anymore. Do you still feel confident that WhatsApp is a secure form of communication for vulnerable individuals, given this emerging security threat of spyware?

    Well, the mobile phone is the computer for most people. It’s the only computer most people have ever experienced. We need to make it secure. We need mobile operating systems to invest a lot more in security to fix these vulnerabilities. That’s why we defend end-to-end encryption [and] privacy. This is a moment where governments should stop asking us to weaken end-to-end encryption. That is a horrible idea. We have seen the damage that comes from this spyware with the security we have today. We should be having conversations about increasing security.

    Within WhatsApp, your messages are extremely secure when they’re being delivered from you to the person you’re talking to. What other forms of security can we add? I’m not sure it’s good for everyone to keep a copy of every conversation on their phone forever. Because what if your phone gets stolen? What if someone forces you to open the phone for them? So we added, late last year, the ability for you to have messages disappear after a week. If someone gets your phone, all you have is the last week’s worth of messages.

    We haven’t added this yet, but we’re working on the ability for you to send a photo that the recipient can only see once. We’re working on the ability for you to change a setting in your WhatsApp account to say, “I want every thread that I create, or that someone creates with me, to disappear by default.” I think there’s a lot more we can do to help protect people – but it takes the whole industry saying, “We need to make the phone secure.”

    You’ve called for import controls and other kinds of regulations to rein in a spyware industry that’s out of control. But if you look at the way technology develops, things get cheaper and easier over time. What makes you think that even if the current generation of spyware purveyors are somehow put out of business, they won’t be replaced by others who are even more ruthless? Or by state level technology from Russia, China, the U.S. for that matter? Can the spyware threat be defeated through regulation or import controls?

    Well, I think all of it helps. If you think about people breaking into our homes, obviously that’s still a problem. But we have locks on the doors. We have burglar alarms. We also have accountability. If someone breaks into my home, hopefully I can go to the police, I can go to the government, they’ll hold them accountable. If governments were actually holding people accountable when [spyware attacks] happen – that makes a huge difference. There will always be bad people out there. There will always be hostile governments out there. You’ve got to have as much security as possible in defense.

    You’ve emphasized WhatsApp’s commitment to privacy, to operating within the human rights framework. But WhatsApp is owned by Facebook. You worked at Facebook for many years. Facebook is involved in a huge public controversy, and was recently accused by President Biden of “killing people [in relation to COVID-19 vaccine disinformation].” Their business model is based on monetizing data. And there’s a huge amount of concern about misinformation circulating on the platform. Of course, people raise those concerns about WhatsApp as well. Does the relationship with Facebook complicate your messaging about privacy and human rights?

    We added end-to-end encryption to WhatsApp as part of Facebook. We’ve been very consistent on that and very supportive across the whole company – about the importance of that, why that’s the right thing, why that protects people’s fundamental rights, including journalists. Obviously, there are a lot of issues. But they’re different products. Take misinformation, for example. The question of what you do about misinformation on a large public social network is very different from how you should approach it on a private communication service. We think on a private communications service, you should have the right to talk to someone else privately, securely without a government listening in, and without a company looking at it. That’s different than if you’re broadcasting something out to every single person on a public social network.

    We’ve talked today about spyware. But are backdoors an even greater threat to secure online communication?

    Absolutely. Security experts who’ve looked at this agree. If you look at the threat from spyware, they’re having to go to each phone individually and compromise it. If you talk about holding a backdoor into any encryption, you are creating a centralized vulnerability in the whole communications network. And the scenario you need to be worried about is: what if a spyware company, what if a hostile government, what if a hacker, accessed all of the communications? It’s why, honestly, the proposals from some governments to weaken end-to-end corruption are just terrifying. They aren’t grappling with the nightmare scenario of everyone’s communications in a country being compromised.

    If this was a big wake up call, what are you planning to do next? What should the industry do next? What can people who are concerned about this do to fight back?

    We’re continuing to add security and privacy to WhatsApp, continuing our lawsuit in our push against NSO Group. We’re hoping more of the industry joins, and that more of the industry is loud about the problem. But what’s most important is governments. Governments need to step in and say this was not okay. Who was behind it? Who were the victims? What’s the accountability? Governments need to step in and have a complete moratorium on the spyware industry. It’s got to stop.

    [Editor’s note: CPJ emailed NSO with a request for comment on the WhatsApp lawsuit and the attack Cathcart attributed to NSO, but did not hear back before publication. The company denied the WhatsApp allegations when the lawsuit was announced, as CPJ noted at the time, and is challenging the suit in court, arguing it should be immune on grounds that its clients are foreign governments, according to the Guardian.]


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Joel Simon.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Scheer Intelligence: Why The Israeli Spy Export Pegasus Is A Danger To Freedom

    In recent days, Pegasus, the name of Israeli spyware implicated in everything from the murder of journalists to the surveillance of world leaders, has been splashed across headlines around the globe. Reports in the Washington Post, The Guardian, and 15 other media outlets, as well as Amnesty International, which uncovered the spyware’s reach, revealed that Pegasus, sold by the Israeli company NSO, was used in attempts to track the most intimate details of thousands of people, including French President Emmanuel Macron and Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan, as well as hundreds of human rights activists, journalists and lawyers around the globe. The revelations have prompted Haaretz columnist Eitay Mack to declare in no uncertain terms that “Israel’s NSO and Pegasus are a real and present danger to democracy all over the world.”

    The post Scheer Intelligence: Why The Israeli Spy Export Pegasus Is A Danger To Freedom appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • RSF, Moroccan-French journalists file complaint over Pegasus spy saga

    Pacific Media Watch newsdesk

    In the wake of this week’s revelations about the Pegasus spyware, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and two journalists with French and Moroccan dual nationality, Omar Brouksy and Maati Monjib, have filed a joint complaint with prosecutors in Paris.

    They are calling on them to “identify those responsible, and their accomplices” for targeted harassment of the journalists.

    The complaint does not name NSO Group, the Israeli company that makes Pegasus, but it targets the company and was filed in response to the revelations that Pegasus has been used to spy on at least 180 journalists in 20 countries, including 30 in France.

    Drafted by RSF lawyers William Bourdon and Vincent Brengarth, the complaint cites invasion of privacy (article 216-1 of the French penal code), violation of the secrecy of correspondence (article 226-15), fraudulent collection of personal data (article 226- 18), fraudulent data introduction and extraction and access to automated data systems (articles 323-1 and 3, and 462-2), and undue interference with the freedom of expression and breach of the confidentiality of sources (article 431-1).

    This complaint is the first in a series that RSF intends to file in several countries together with journalists who were directly targeted.

    The complaint makes it clear that NSO Group’s spyware was used to target Brouksy and Monjib and other journalists the Moroccan authorities wanted to silence.

    The author of two books on the Moroccan monarchy and a former AFP correspondent, Brouksy is an active RSF ally in Morocco.

    20-day hunger strike
    Monjib, who was recently defended by RSF, was released by the Moroccan authorities on March 23 after a 20-day hunger strike, and continues to await trial.

    “We will do everything to ensure that NSO Group is convicted for the crimes it has committed and for the tragedies it has made possible,” RSF secretary-general Christophe Deloire said.

    “We have filed a complaint in France first because this country appears to be a prime target for NSO Group customers, and because RSF’s international’s headquarters are located here. Other complaints will follow in other countries. The scale of the violations that have been revealed calls for a major legal response.”

    After revelations by the Financial Times in 2019 about attacks on the smartphones of around 100 journalists, human rights activists and political dissidents, several lawsuits were filed against NSO Group, including one by the WhatsApp messaging service in California.

    The amicus brief that RSF and other NGOs filed in this case said: “The intrusions into the private communications of activists and journalists cannot be justified on grounds of security or defence, but are carried out solely with the aim of enabling government opponents to be tracked down and gagged.

    “NSO Group nonetheless continues to provide surveillance technology to its state clients, knowing that they are using it to violate international law and thereby failing in its responsibility to respect human rights.”

    RSF included NSO Group in its list of “digital predators” in 2020.

    Pacific Media Watch collaborates with Reporters Without Borders.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Pegasus Rides Again: The NSO Group, Spyware and Human Rights

    They keep insisting they don’t do it. But companies such as the Israeli NSO Group are global vendors for regimes, whatever stripe or colour, for surveillance tools to spy on those they deem of interest.  The 2013 revelations by Edward Snowden that exposed the warrantless world of mass surveillance by entities such as the US National Security Agency and Britain’s GCHQ caused a global rush towards encryption.  Governments, left groping in the dark, sought out private providers of surveillance devices in an unregulated market.  Not only could they get effective spyware; they could do so at very affordable prices.

    The NSO Group was one such provider.  It sees its mission was a noble thing, marketing itself as a creator of “technology that helps government agencies prevent and investigate terrorism and crime to save thousands of lives around the globe.”

    The company also emphasises their mission to target those “terrorists” and “criminals” who have gone dark.  “The world’s most dangerous offenders communicate using technology designed to shield their communications, while government intelligence and law-enforcement agencies struggle to collect evidence and intelligence on their activities.”  The group insists that its “products help government intelligence and law-enforcement agencies use technology to meet the challenges of encryption to prevent and investigate terror and crime.”

    Forbidden Stories, a network of journalists with a mission “to protect, pursue and publish the work of other journalists facing threats, prison, or murder”, sees things differently.  One of the topics that figures prominently in the ranks is the Pegasus project, a collective journalism effort of global proportion coordinated by Forbidden Stories and Amnesty International’s Security Lab.  Its primary purpose: to expose the depredations of the Pegasus spyware, the golden child of the NSO Group.

    Pegasus is a rather vicious thing, enabling those deploying it to access a phone’s contents and remotely access its microphone and camera functions, turning into a surveillance device.  It was given a gloss of notoriety in 2018 when it was revealed that Saudi dissident Omar Abdulaziz had been one of its victims.  Abdulaziz claimed that communications with journalist Jamal Khashoggi, butchered by a Saudi squad of assassins in Istanbul in October 2018, were intercepted by the Saudi authorities because of the spyware.  His lawyers argued that the hacking “contributed in a significant manner to the decision to murder Mr. Khashoggi.”

    On July 18, Phineas Rueckert of Forbidden Stories revealed that some 180 journalists had been selected as targets by some 10 NSO customers across 20 countries.  He begins with the Azerbaijani investigative journalist Khadija Ismayilova, whose phone was “regularly infected with Pegasus” for almost three years.  Ismayilova was baffled on realising how the security of her phone had been compromised.  “I feel guilty for the messages I’ve sent.  I feel guilty for the sources who sent me [information] thinking that some encrypted messaging ways are secure and they didn’t know that my phone is infected.”

    Details are then supplied.  Both Forbidden Stories and Amnesty International were given access to a leak of more than 50,000 records of phone numbers selected by NSO clients for surveillance reasons.  The clients are a varied bunch, from those of the autocratic flavour – Bahrain, Morocco and Saudi Arabia – to the more democratic ones, such as India and Mexico.  The NSO Group, in a letter to Forbidden Stories, claimed it could not “confirm or deny the identity of our government customers” for “contractual and national security considerations”.  Rueckert admits that identifying instances where the specific phone number was compromised would be difficult short of actually analysing the device.  But, with the assistance of Amnesty International’s Security Lab, “forensics analyses on the phones of more than a dozen of these journalists – and 67 phones in total – [revealed] successful infections through a security flaw in iPhones as recently as this month.”

    The Pegasus project is significant for revealing the sheer scale of espionage.  The Guardian, a participating media outlet, promises to reveal more details about targets that “include lawyers, human rights defenders, religious figures, academics, businesspeople, diplomats, senior government officials and heads of state.”  At this writing, a rather juicy detail has come to light: the potential targeting of French President Emmanuel Macron by Morocco using Pegasus.

    The NSO response to the Forbidden Stories report was snootily dismissive. The account was “full of wrong assumptions and uncorroborated theories that raise serious doubts about the reliability and interests of the sources.”  The company ducks the issue by suggesting that the information gathered on the individuals in question could have been obtained via other services.  “The claims that the data was leaked from our servers, is a complete lie and ridiculous since such data never existed on our servers.”

    As for the murder of Khashoggi, old defences are resurrected.  “We can confirm that our technology was not used to listen, monitor, track, or collect information regarding him or his family members mentioned in the inquiry.  We previously investigated this claim, which again, is being made without validation.”

    For an outfit such as the NSO Group, such rebuttals have proven to be meaningless.  Twin lawsuits against NSO filed in Israel and Cyprus by a Qatari citizen and by Mexican journalists in 2018 revealed extensive evidence of the company’s complicity in illegal surveillance.  NSO also failed to get the lawsuit by Abdulaziz dismissed, and was ordered to pay his legal costs, with the judge Guy Hyman calling the case “broad, especially in matters of the roots of constitutional values and fundamental rights”.  In 2019, WhatsApp brought an action against the company, claiming that Pegasus had been used to target 1400 user accounts.  For WhatsApp’s chief Will Cathcart, the Pegasus project reporting revealed “what we and others have been saying for years; NSO’s dangerous spyware is used to commit horrible human rights abuses all around the world and must be stopped.”

    The Pegasus project has shed more light on the government revolt against encryption, one facilitated by private enterprise.  Left unregulated, the NSO Group and its competitors can operate with vigilante disdain and amoral proficiency.  David Kaye, former UN special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, has wisely called for a moratorium on the sale of such spyware, describing an industry “out of control, unaccountable and unconstrained in providing governments with relatively low-cost access to the sort of spying tools that only the most advanced state intelligence services were previously able to use”.  Control, accountability and constraint have never quite featured in the NSO Group operations manual.

    The post Pegasus Rides Again: The NSO Group, Spyware and Human Rights first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Calls Grow for Moratorium on Private Spyware After Pegasus Revelations

    Amnesty Int’l Calls for Moratorium on Private Spyware After Pegasus Revelations

    Calls are growing for stricter regulations on the use of surveillance technology after revelations that countries have used the powerful Pegasus spyware against politicians, journalists and activists around the world. The Pegasus software, sold by the Israeli cybersecurity company NSO Group, can secretly infect a mobile phone and harvest its information. While the company touts Pegasus as intended for criminals and terrorists, leaked data suggests the tool is widely abused by governments to go after political opponents and dissidents, according to reporting from The Pegasus Project, an international consortium of 17 media organizations. We feature a PBS “Frontline” report on the shocking findings that the Israeli government allowed NSO to continue to do business with Saudi Arabia even after the Saudi journalist and dissident Jamal Khashoggi was assassinated in 2018 in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, and allegedly used Pegasus to surveil Khashoggi’s fiancée. “Contrary to what NSO is claiming, the spyware Pegasus is used to target people absolutely unrelated to criminal activities or terrorism,” says Agnès Callamard, secretary general of Amnesty International. She adds that The Pegasus Project has exposed that abuse of powerful surveillance technology “is systematic, and it is global.”

    TRANSCRIPT

    This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

    AMY GOODMAN: We begin today’s show with the shocking findings of The Pegasus Project, an international collaboration of 17 media organizations that investigated the Israeli cybersurveillance company NSO Group. The NSO Group manufactures and sells advanced spyware to governments called Pegasus that can secretly infect a mobile phone and harvest its information. The company claims its spyware is meant to target terrorists and criminals, but data leaked to The Pegasus Project suggests several countries use the powerful cyberespionage tool to spy on activists, politicians, dissidents and journalists.

    The consortium analyzed a leaked data set of 50,000 phone numbers that allegedly belong to persons of interest to NSO’s customers. A sample showed dozens of cases of successful and attempted Pegasus infections. The reporting also revealed a massive wave of attacks by NSO Group’s customers on iPhones, potentially affecting thousands of Apple users worldwide. In one of the most shocking findings, The Pegasus Project reported the Israeli government allowed NSO to continue to do business with Saudi Arabia, even after the Saudi journalist and dissident Jamal Khashoggi was assassinated in 2018 in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul.

    In a minute, we’ll speak with the secretary general of Amnesty International and one of the lead reporters on The Pegasus Project. But first, this is a PBS Frontline report that follows Washington Post reporter Dana Priest, one of the more than 80 journalists working on The Pegasus Project, as she traveled to Turkey and verify if Pegasus had been used to surveil Khashoggi’s fiancée, Hatice Cengiz. The report was coordinated by the journalism nonprofit Forbidden Stories, with technical support from Amnesty International’s Security Lab.

    NARRATOR: On October 2nd, 2018, journalist Jamal Khashoggi walked into the Saudi Consulate in Turkey and never came back out. Around the time of his murder, a powerful spyware may have been used to surveil his family.

    REPORTER: Activists, journalists, all are said to have been hacked by spyware developed by the Israeli company called the NSO Group.

    NARRATOR: A consortium of news outlets from around the world, including Frontline, have been investigating the use of the spyware called Pegasus and the Israeli company NSO Group that sells it to foreign governments.

    BILL MARCZAK: The government can see anything on the phone, including pictures, contacts, listening in to calls.

    NARRATOR: As part of the investigation into Pegasus, Washington Post reporter Dana Priest traveled to Istanbul. Working with the journalism nonprofit Forbidden Stories, the reporters were given access to 50,000 phone numbers concentrated in countries known to be NSO clients. They included journalists, politicians, human rights activists and Jamal Khashoggi’s fiancée, Hatice Cengiz. Dana Priest and a producer working for Frontline and Forbidden Stories met with Hatice to verify if her phone had in fact been hacked.

    PRODUCER: What I’m doing is basically a backup. And then, based on this backup, we will look if there is any trace of infection past occurred. What we’re looking for is traces of a software called Pegasus.

    HATICE CENGIZ: I remember the first days after the murder, a lot of times they tried to hack my email. Hmm. And then Gmail was sending to me emails all the time: “Someone tried to open your account,” or something like that.

    DANA PRIEST: The simple ones are like that message. The really sophisticated ones, they don’t need a message. They don’t need you to do anything.

    HATICE CENGIZ: Really?

    DANA PRIEST: Yeah.

    HATICE CENGIZ: But why do people say the iPhone, they’re more safe to — no one can hack or —

    DANA PRIEST: That’s what the iPhone says, the company. But it’s not true. So, the Pegasus software can, if it gets inside — I don’t know if it gets inside every time it tries, but if it gets inside, it can turn your microphone on, so that it can — whoever is doing it can listen to what you’re saying and what other people are saying. But it also can go into your email, your WhatsApp, your contacts, your pictures, your videos, and it can just steal them all, make a copy of everything. And then, you know, our thought is, if it’s doing that against people like you, who are not terrorists or criminals, then why? Part of what we want to show, and what we think we know, what we are discovering and what we’re researching, is, no, they use it against civilians. And why would they want to know what you’re doing?

    HATICE CENGIZ: Yes, it’s my personal life. It’s my secret life. It is not enough to say, “Please, stop, after this murder. Please.” Yeah, it is — it’s horror.

    NARRATOR: After getting backups of both Hatice’s new phone and the one she was using at the time of Khashoggi’s murder, Dana Priest sent them to Amnesty International’s Security Lab for analysis. A few hours later, while on the way back to the airport, she received a call with the results.

    TECHNOLOGY EXPERT: I guess just pretty bad news is never-ending. So, I checked both the uploads. The new one seems clean to me. The old one, however, has some traces. It’s consistent with what we have seen.

    DANA PRIEST: Oh.

    TECHNOLOGY EXPERT: So, on the 6th of October of 2018 seems to have been a first — a first compromise, which was followed by some additional traces on the 9th and then on the 12th, which is obviously, as you know, pretty timely, within the context, obviously.

    DANA PRIEST: Yeah. Wow. She has already been infected, so it’s already happened.

    TECHNOLOGY EXPERT: Yeah.

    DANA PRIEST: So it’s great that you’re finding it.

    TECHNOLOGY EXPERT: Yeah, I don’t think the…

    NARRATOR: There was now proof that Pegasus had been used to target one of the people closest to Jamal Khashoggi around the time of his death. In a statement, NSO Group said its technology was not associated in any way with Khashoggi’s murder. The company said it was on a lifesaving mission, preventing terror attacks and serious crimes. But in addition to Hatice, Frontline, Forbidden Stories and the partner news outlets are investigating the cases of journalists, human rights activists, politicians and others in more than 50 countries who may have been targeted for surveillance.

    AMY GOODMAN: That video report part of an upcoming Frontline documentary, produced with Forbidden Stories, to air on PBS. And that last reporter voice, Dana Priest of The Washington Post, who went to visit Khashoggi’s fiancée in Turkey and found her phone infected.

    For more, we go to London to speak with Dr. Agnès Callamard, the new secretary general of Amnesty International, previously the United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions. As U.N. special rapporteur, she led an investigation into the murder of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. She was also director of the Global Freedom of Expression Project at Columbia University.

    Dr. Callamard, welcome to Democracy Now! Congratulations on your new position at Amnesty International. This is explosive information you are releasing right now, Amnesty working with the Forbidden Stories project. Let’s start with the example of Jamal Khashoggi and what this says about what to many may be the first time they’re hearing about this spyware produced by Israel.

    AGNÈS CALLAMARD: Well, what it first shows is what you have highlighted, that contrary to what NSO is claiming, the spyware Pegasus is used to target people absolutely unrelated to criminal activities or terrorism. It is used to target individuals like Hatice, the family or friends of human rights defenders and journalists. It is used to target journalists and human rights defenders. In fact, according to Amnesty International, at least 180 journalists have been targeted.

    I think what the project is showing is the breadth and the scale of the abuse. We already had an element of anecdotal evidence that the spyware had been used to target human rights defenders. What we have with Pegasus Project is actually the demonstration that the misuse of the spyware is systematic, and it is global.

    JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Dr. Callamard, what do we know about the NSO Group, its relationship to the Israeli government? And does it just sell this software and then no longer has connection with it, or does it somehow maintain an ability to monitor what its clients are doing with the software?

    AGNÈS CALLAMARD: OK. So, with regard to the first question, the intelligence industry is, for the government of Israel, a very important industry. It’s a strategic industry. It is also an industry that is supposedly regulated, in that every export by NSO is being licensed by the state of Israel. So, that’s the relationship. There is a relationship at the strategic level, and there is relationship at the regulatory level. So, I think the nature of the relationship is pretty close and pretty deep. So, when we talk about NSO’s failure to act with due diligence, we are also talking about the failure of the government of Israel to abide by its obligation under international law. That is the first issue.

    With regard to NSO relationship to its client, it is actually a pretty close relationship, in that NSO has the capacity to close down, to shut down the spyware and any kind of system it is providing to the client. NSO is claiming that it does not have any oversight over the use of the spyware. And, you know, we don’t know that for sure, but that’s what they are claiming. But they do have a sufficient relationship that they can shut down the system, which is why we are calling on them now, given the evidence being provided, that they shut down every single system in place with all of the clients that have been listed by Amnesty and others over the last few days.

    AMY GOODMAN: This is NSA whistleblower Ed Snowden speaking to The Guardian about spyware sales, he says, needing to be stopped.

    EDWARD SNOWDEN: If you don’t do anything to stop the sale of this technology, it’s not just going to be 50,000 targets. It’s going to be 50 million targets, and it’s going to happen much more quickly than any of us expect. The way we do that is to halt the trade around this technology.

    AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Agnès Callamard, would you go that far?

    AGNÈS CALLAMARD: Absolutely, absolutely. So, Amnesty International, as well as, in fact, when I was a special rapporteur, I did the same, are calling for a moratorium over the use and the export of that intelligence spywares and that industry, more generally, that needs to be more heavily regulated. We are calling for a moratorium because we believe that in the current conditions and environment, it is impossible to properly monitor how it is going to be used, therefore the only option is for a moratorium over its sale and its export.

    The other point I want to make, following on the journalist that you just interviewed, is that, indeed, that spyware is a weapon. This is the only way we need to look at it. It is a weapon against democracy. It is a weapon against human rights. It is a weapon against freedom of the press, against scrutiny of government. It is a weapon against the justice and fair trial, as we are seeing in Turkey. And it is used extraterritorially, meaning that the government of a country, such as Morocco, can use that spyware to target people on the territory of another country. That goes against every dimension of international law, and certainly against the U.N. Charter. So we are talking here about a pretty bad thing.

    AMY GOODMAN: So, you mentioned Morocco, and I wanted to talk about the Moroccan court yesterday sentencing the independent journalist Omar Radi to six years in prison, arrested last year on what press freedom advocates called “retaliatory charges.” For years Omar has been targeted by Moroccan authorities for his reporting on corruption and human rights. And last year, your organization, Dr. Callamard, Amnesty International, revealed Moroccan authorities had hacked his phone using Pegasus spyware from the Israeli company NSO Group. I spoke to Radi last year, just weeks before he was arrested.

    OMAR RADI: Pegasus is a quite silent program. You don’t feel it, actually. And it’s not a persistent program. It doesn’t stay in your phone or in your computer. It works using a network injection, so people need to be near you to make themselves pass as a relay antenna. And your phone is connected to a fake relay antenna, and then the network injection works, and then the program works, and they get — I don’t know. It has a lot of features. It can use your microphone, it can use your keyboard, it can use your screen, and get any information that is stored in your phone.

    So, I don’t know the amount of information they’ve stolen from my phone. But I’m sure, in this pro-medias — pro-state medias, they published many information that I have exchanged even in Signal, which is known that is a very safe program. So I have evidence that my own conversations have been leaked to pro-state media, the same that are leaking also my bank information.

    AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s Moroccan journalist Omar Radi, again, just yesterday, sentenced to six years in prison. Soon after we spoke last year, he was imprisoned. Dr. Agnès Callamard, if you can comment on this case?

    AGNÈS CALLAMARD: You know, I mean, of course, what we are — what you are describing right now is an incredible miscarriage of justice. But it is also demonstrating how harmful — if we needed to, how harmful that spyware is. It is of course a violation of, let’s say, the right to privacy. But when it is being used, it is the beginning to — it has a domino effect on a range of other violations.

    In the case of Omar Radi, that spying, through the spyware, led to his imprisonment, led to his arbitrary detention. In other cases, even though the causal relationship is of course difficult to establish — in other cases, there are someone such as the Mexican journalist Cecilio Pineda being compromised with his phone, and a couple of days later, he is being murdered. We cannot make the causal relationship between the compromise and the murder, but surely the suspicion is there, as it is in the case of Omar, that the spying and the use of the spyware led to his arbitrary detention, and that led to this unlawful imprisonment.

    It is an extremely harmful tool at the hand of governments that will do anything to protect themselves — and not just, by the way, of the usual suspect. In the list of countries that have used the spyware, we found Hungary. We found India. Of course, we found Morocco, but we also found Azerbaijan, Mexico. Mexico, more than 20 journalists have been targeted through the spyware. India, more than 40 journalists have been targeted.

    JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Dr. Callamard, I wanted to ask you about a remarkable coincidence, it seems. The very day that these revelations come forward from this international consortium, the United States government suddenly announces that it has found that China was hacking into Microsoft email, and they marshaled condemnation from other governments around the world — an investigation that was going on for months. And also, they suddenly unsealed indictments that occurred back in May of some Chinese hackers. As a result, last night in the national news, a lot of the attention was on China’s hacking, not so much on the revelations that your consortium has unearthed here. Your sense — how does this compare to some of the stuff that supposedly is happening that China is involved in?

    AGNÈS CALLAMARD: Look, we have focused on the privatization of spying and intelligence through a focus on NSO. We know that the surveillance industry is very powerful, and it is completely unregulated. So, that is something that must remain on the international agenda. It does not mean that spying by government is not as crucially important. Of course it is. It may fall under a different form of regulation. I have not followed closely enough the allegations against China and Microsoft. I will say that the overall surveillance world is one that is out of control. It is the Far West. Whether it is powered by a government or powered by a private company, it is equally dangerous for — frankly, for global peace and for democracy. And it must be — it must be scrutinized, and it must be regulated. You know, I can’t comment really on the motivation of the U.S. government and whether they were trying to derail a little bit the focus on NSO. I don’t know whether they did it. My point is that there is an overall world here that we need to control and need to really regulate.

    AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Agnès Callamard is our guest, secretary general of Amnesty International. We’re going to break, come back with her, and we’ll be joined by Nina Lakhani, senior reporter at The Guardian, one of the 17 media organizations who are part of The Pegasus Project. She specifically looked at the Mexican journalist Dr. Callamard just mentioned who was murdered, and also looks at others who are surveilled as targets for potential hacking by NSO’s clients. Stay with us.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Massive Data Leak Shows Israeli Spyware Targeted Journalists Around the World

    A woman talks on her cell phone in front of the headquarters of an international surveillance service

    NSO Group, a private Israeli firm that sells surveillance technology to governments worldwide, insists that its Pegasus spyware is used only to “investigate terrorism and crime.” Leaked data, however, reveals that the company’s hacking tool “has been used to facilitate human rights violations around the world on a massive scale.”

    That’s according to an investigative report published Sunday by the Pegasus Project, a media consortium of more than 80 journalists from 17 news outlets in 10 countries. The collaborative endeavor was coordinated by Forbidden Stories, a Paris-based media nonprofit, with technical assistance from Amnesty International, which conducted “cutting-edge forensic tests” on smartphones to identify traces of the military-grade spyware.

    The Guardian, one of the newspapers involved in the analysis, reported that “Pegasus is a malware that infects iPhones and Android devices to enable operators of the tool to extract messages, photos and emails, record calls, and secretly activate microphones.” The Washington Post, another partner in the investigation, noted that the tool “can infect phones without a click.”

    A massive data leak turned up a list of more than 50,000 phone numbers that, according to the Post, “are concentrated in countries known to engage in surveillance of their citizens and also known to have been clients of… NSO Group, a worldwide leader in the growing and largely unregulated private spyware industry.”

    More phone numbers were based in Mexico than any other country, with over 15,000 on the list, “including those belonging to politicians, union representatives, journalists, and other government critics,” the Post noted.

    As The Guardian reported: “The phone number of a freelance Mexican reporter, Cecilio Pineda Birto, was found in the list, apparently of interest to a Mexican client in the weeks leading up to his murder, when his killers were able to locate him at a carwash. His phone has never been found so no forensic analysis has been possible to establish whether it was infected.”

    Other nations that either had large shares of numbers on the list or were deemed to be potential government clients of NSO include: France, Hungary, Turkey, Morocco, Togo, Algeria, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Dubai, Qatar, Bahrain, Yemen, India, Pakistan, Azerbaijan, and Kazakhstan.

    While “the presence of a phone number in the data does not reveal whether a device was infected with Pegasus or subject to an attempted hack,” The Guardian noted, the consortium believes that “the data is indicative of the potential targets NSO’s government clients identified in advance of possible surveillance attempts.”

    Amnesty’s Security Lab analyzed a small sample of phones belonging to activists, journalists, and lawyers whose numbers appeared on the leaked list. Of the 67 phones examined, traces of Pegasus spyware were found on 37 devices, including 23 that had been successfully infected and 14 with signs of attempted hacking.

    “NSO claims its spyware is undetectable and only used for legitimate criminal investigations,” Etienne Maynier, a technologist at Amnesty’s Security Lab, said in a statement. “We have now provided irrefutable evidence of this ludicrous falsehood.”

    According to the Post:

    The list does not identify who put the numbers on it, or why, and it is unknown how many of the phones were targeted or surveilled. But forensic analysis of the 37 smartphones shows that many display a tight correlation between time stamps associated with a number on the list and the initiation of surveillance, in some cases as brief as a few seconds.

    The numbers on the list are unattributed, but reporters were able to identify more than 1,000 people spanning more than 50 countries through research and interviews on four continents: several Arab royal family members, at least 65 business executives, 85 human rights activists, 189 journalists, and more than 600 politicians and government officials—including cabinet ministers, diplomats, and military and security officers. The numbers of several heads of state and prime ministers also appeared on the list.

    Among the journalists whose numbers appear on the list, which dates to 2016, are reporters working overseas for several leading news organizations, including a small number from CNN, the Associated Press, Voice of America, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, Le Monde in France, the Financial Times in London, and Al Jazeera in Qatar.

    The newspaper added that Amnesty found evidence of NSO’s spyware being used by Saudi Arabia and UAE to target the phones of close associates of Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi before and after he was brutally murdered by Saudi operatives in 2018.

    “The Pegasus Project lays bare how NSO’s spyware is a weapon of choice for repressive governments seeking to silence journalists, attack activists, and crush dissent, placing countless lives in peril,” Agnès Callamard, Secretary General of Amnesty International, said in a statement.

    “These revelations,” Callamard continued, “blow apart any claims by NSO that such attacks are rare and down to rogue use of their technology. While the company claims its spyware is only used for legitimate criminal and terror investigations, it’s clear its technology facilitates systemic abuse. They paint a picture of legitimacy, while profiting from widespread human rights violations.”

    Callamard emphasized that “[NSO’s] actions pose larger questions about the wholesale lack of regulation that has created a wild west of rampant abusive targeting of activists and journalists.”

    “Until this company and the industry as a whole can show it is capable of respecting human rights,” she added, “there must be an immediate moratorium on the export, sale, transfer, and use of surveillance technology.”

    NSO, for its part, issued a statement denying “false claims” in the report, including those related to Khashoggi. Attorneys for the company argued that the Pegasus Project’s investigation was based on “wrong assumptions” and “uncorroborated theories.” The company claimed that it is pursuing a “life-saving mission” to stamp out crime.

    The Guardian noted that while the consortium “found numbers in the data belonging to suspected criminals… the broad array of numbers in the list belonging to people who seemingly have no connection to criminality suggests some NSO clients are breaching their contracts with the company, spying on pro-democracy activists and journalists investigating corruption, as well as political opponents and government critics.”

    According to the Post, “After the investigation began, several reporters in the consortium learned that they or their family members had been successfully attacked with Pegasus spyware.”

    In response, Callamard stressed that “the number of journalists identified as targets vividly illustrates how Pegasus is used as a tool to intimidate critical media. It is about controlling [the] public narrative, resisting scrutiny, and suppressing any dissenting voice.”

    “These revelations must act as a catalyst for change,” said Callamard. “The surveillance industry must no longer be afforded a laissez-faire approach from governments with a vested interest in using this technology to commit human rights violations.”

    The human rights expert demanded that NSO “immediately shut down clients’ systems where there is credible evidence of misuse.” She added that “the Pegasus Project provides this in abundance.”

    NSO stated that it “will continue to investigate all credible claims of misuse and take appropriate action based on the results of these investigations.”

    Timothy Summers, a former cyber security engineer at a U.S. intelligence agency and now director of IT at Arizona State University, told the Post that Pegasus “is nasty software.” One could use the technology, said Summers, to “spy on almost the entire world population.”

    The Guardian noted that the Pegasus Project “will be revealing the identities of people whose number appeared on the list in the coming days.”

    Amnesty’s Maynier said that “our hope is the damning evidence published over the next week will lead governments to overhaul a surveillance industry that is out of control.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Spyware reform critical as at least 180 journalists revealed as potential Pegasus targets

    New York, July 19, 2021 – In response to reports that at least 180 journalists were identified by investigative reporters as possible targets of Pegasus spyware, produced by the Israeli company NSO Group, the Committee to Protect Journalists reaffirmed its call for immediate action by governments and companies around the world to stem abuse of powerful technology that can be used to spy on the press.

    “This report shows how governments and companies must act now to stop the abuse of this spyware which is evidently being used to undermine civil liberties, not just counter terrorism and crime,” said Robert Mahoney, CPJ’s deputy executive director. “No one should have unfettered power to spy on the press, least of all governments known to target journalists with physical abuse and legal reprisals.”

    The reporting, known as the Pegasus Project, was conducted by a consortium including investigative journalism nonprofit Forbidden Stories and global media outlets such as The Washington Post. Amnesty International, which performed technical analysis, reported that more than 180 journalists had been identified by the consortium on a list of 50,000 phone numbers allegedly linked to clients of NSO Group technology. In a statement emailed to CPJ, an NSO spokesperson said there was nothing to link the 50,000 numbers to NSO Group or Pegasus. In a rebuttal published online, the company said the consortium’s allegations were false.

    NSO has repeatedly told CPJ in the past that it licenses Pegasus to fight crime and terrorism. The July 19 statement said its products were “sold to vetted foreign governments.”

    “NSO Group will continue to investigate all credible claims of misuse and take appropriate action based on the results of these investigations,” it said. “This includes shutting down of a customers’ system, something NSO has proven its ability and willingness to do, due to confirmed misuse, has done multiple times in the past, and will not hesitate to do again if a situation warrants.”

    CPJ has issued recommendations to policymakers and companies to combat spyware abuse against the media.


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • UK financier loses latest round in fight over future of NSO Group

    British investor Stephen Peel in ongoing dispute with partners over Luxembourg company linked to spyware firm

    A British financier’s voting rights at a Luxembourg company linked to Novalpina Capital, whose fund owns a majority stake in the spyware firm NSO Group, will remain suspended, a Luxembourg court has ruled.

    Though this may not be permanent, the decision appears to mark a setback for the financier, Stephen Peel, a former Olympic rower, in a bitter legal dispute that has erupted between him and his two longtime business partners, Stefan Kowski and Bastian Lueken.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Maya Schenwar Says Defunding the Police Might Have Saved Her Sister’s Life

    As the U.S. marks 50 years since President Richard Nixon declared a war on drugs on June 17, 1971, we speak with journalist Maya Schenwar, editor-in-chief of the news website Truthout, whose sister Keeley died of a drug overdose in February 2020 at the age of 29. Schenwar says her sister’s death came after “a long cycle of criminalization” that made her chances of recovery much harder. “She became so afraid of being rearrested,” says Schenwar, who notes that many drug users avoid seeking medical help because of the fear of police involvement and incarceration. “Why are we supporting criminalization at the expense of people’s actual survival?” she asks. Drug overdoses have soared during the pandemic, causing over 92,000 deaths in the United States in the 12-month period ending in November — the most since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began keeping track over two decades ago. Experts say the pandemic and the increasing availability of synthetic opioids such as fentanyl have contributed to the death toll.

    TRANSCRIPT

    This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

    AMY GOODMAN: We begin today with a deadly scourge striking down people at an alarming rate. No, it’s not COVID; it’s drug overdoses. Over 92,000 people died from overdoses in the United States in the 12-month period ending in November — the most since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began keeping track over two decades ago. Many experts cite two factors for the surge in deaths: the pandemic and the increasing availability of fentanyl and other synthetic opioids. This all comes as the nation marks 50 years since President Richard Nixon declared a war on drugs June 17th, 1971.

    We begin today’s show with someone who lost her sister to an overdose just as the pandemic was starting. Maya Schenwar joins us from Chicago, where she works as editor-in-chief of the news website Truthout. Her sister Keeley died of a drug overdose in February 2020 at the age of 29. Maya’s piece about her death is just out; it’s headlined “My Sister Died of an Overdose. Defunding the Police Might Have Saved Her.” Maya is the co-author of Prison by Any Other Name and author of Locked Down, Locked Out: Why Prison Doesn’t Work and How We Can Do Better.

    Maya, welcome to Democracy Now! Our condolences on the death of your sister. The story you tell is heartrending. Tell us the story of Keeley, how she lived — she is also a mother — and how she died.

    MAYA SCHENWAR: Absolutely. Thank you for having me.

    You know, my sister Keeley was, as you said, a wonderful mother, a writer, an animal lover and a friend. And she died last year, thanks to a long cycle of criminalization. Keeley was incarcerated for the first time when she was 15. And for the next 14 years, she was just cycling in and out of jail and prison, as well as alternatives, like electronic monitoring and drug treatment. And the things that she was arrested for were always related to her addiction, even when they weren’t drug charges. So, she would go to prison. She would become even more deeply traumatized, because that’s what prison does — it traumatizes people. And she would emerge with even fewer opportunities and options. And then she would just go back to heavily using heroin to help deal with that pain.

    And I want to point out real quick: So, heroin, in a vacuum, just like any other drug, is not the problem. People, I think, can use most stigmatized drugs and be OK, you know, even the most stigmatized drugs like heroin. But people are not supported in using drugs and being OK, because they’re criminalized.

    So, while Keeley was incarcerated, horrible things happened to her, like anyone who’s locked up. She experienced violence that was perpetrated by guards. She experienced the daily violence that everyone experiences of strip searches and medical neglect, and really just being called by a number instead of by your name. And also she experienced giving birth to her baby while she was incarcerated, and a prison guard was just sitting there watching her give birth.

    And when Keeley returned to using heroin after her time in prison or a mandated treatment program, each time, she was at a much greater risk of overdose. And this is something I really want to emphasize. This is true for so many people who use drugs who are released from prison. So, within the first couple of weeks after being released, someone’s risk of overdose is almost 13 times higher than it is for the rest of the population. And that’s partly because your tolerance for the drug is lower, because you haven’t been using.

    So, last year, my sister was in a drug treatment program, a drug court program, so a mandatory treatment, and it was based around abstinence, not using the drug, and so her tolerance was reduced. And she was also very scared of being rearrested, because she knew that that would mean returning to prison and being separated from her daughter again. And so she was avoiding seeking any kind of medical help, because it could mean police involvement. So, at that point [inaudible] —

    JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Maya, I wanted to ask you, in terms of —

    MAYA SCHENWAR: Yeah.

    JUAN GONZÁLEZ: When she was out of prison, what kind of medical or therapeutic help did she receive during those periods of time? And also, you’ve said that her interactions with police made her situation worse, not better. If you could talk about that, as well?

    MAYA SCHENWAR: Yeah, absolutely. So, while she was out of prison, she would occasionally receive some support. She tried to be engaged in medication-assisted treatment, which has proven to support people with heroin addictions. But so much of the treatment that she experienced was based around surveillance and policing. And this is something that we see with many, many people who are criminalized and also use drugs, because it’s inside of the criminal legal system, so we see substance use as a problem that is within the criminal system even if we’re not sending people to jail.

    And so, when people are sent to a mandated drug treatment center, when treatment is mandated, the research shows that that’s not actually effective in helping people recover. And also we have to think about, ethically, you know, whether we should be putting people in a position where they’re mandated to do certain things with their bodies and their minds.

    And so, Keeley was always surveilled. And she was not able to do the things that many of us are able to do to create a meaningful life. You know, she wasn’t given opportunities to pursue her interests, to be with her family in a sustained way. Many of these treatments actually separated her from her family and confined her, just like prison.

    And then, the thing I mention often about policing and the role that it played in her death was she became so afraid of being rearrested. And this is a very common fear among people who use drugs, and particularly among marginalized people who use drugs — Black people, Indigenous people, trans people, people with disabilities and mental health diagnoses. You know, police are targeting them very, very heavily, so it’s a warranted fear. And so, seeking any kind of medical attention, particularly calling 911, can put you at risk for police contact, and that can lead to a return to incarceration. So, even when, in theory, there are options available and people say, “Well, why didn’t you seek help?” it’s like, “Well, you know, why would you seek help if the threat of punishment and torture and trauma is just hanging over your head every single second of the day?”

    JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And I wanted to ask you — in 2019, Keeley was sentenced to two years in drug court. Explain what that means. And what happened to her after that?

    MAYA SCHENWAR: Yeah. So, drug court is a diversion. So, the idea is that someone will be diverted either pretrial or sentenced to treatment instead of prison. And this option has grown substantially in popularity over the past few years. And it’s something that Biden has heavily promoted. It’s often a thing that generates bipartisan enthusiasm.

    But what people aren’t acknowledging is it’s still criminalization. So it still involves arresting people. Just arrest is a trauma. It’s within the criminal legal system, which is built on foundations of white supremacy, and so it’s still targeting people of color, targeting Black people. It’s still operating within a mindset of surveillance, so drug testing people constantly. It’s still operating within a model of abstinence, which we know is not actually the best way to help people survive.

    And so, even though we know all these things, we’re endorsing this program, I think, because — partly, because it’s so hard to break out of this punishment mindset. And we need to challenge ourselves and say, “What are we doing? Why are we supporting criminalization at the expense of people’s actual survival and ability to find support and ability to find resources?”

    You know, I think one really sad thing about all the money that is going into drug policing and drug courts and all of these resources, not only are harming and killing people, but, like the defund police movement has brought up again and again, what could we have if we diverted those resources and spent even more resources, as well, on things like housing and education and noncoercive healthcare and mental healthcare and more recreational opportunities and the arts and ways for people to live meaningful and livable lives and have all kinds of options to support their survival? That’s where we should be directing our energy.

    AMY GOODMAN: Maya, I’d like to go back to June 2014, when your sister, Keeley Schenwar, participated in a panel discussion in Chicago on breastfeeding and incarceration. Keeley read a poem she wrote for her baby daughter while she was incarcerated. Keeley gave birth while she was in prison, was taken away from her newborn daughter only after 24 hours with her.

    KEELEY SCHENWAR: It took me over a month to start writing. It’s so hard for me to think about all I’ve already put you through. Nurses give me updates when the counselors here let me call. They say you’re almost 10 pounds, starting to feel better, and that you love your baths.

    I’m not the one that holds you when you cry or the one that you look at when you open your eyes. It kills me to know that the reality is I’m not a part of your life. I brought you into a world full of great things that are surrounded with pain, that which you already know too well, and I have no choice but to let you handle it all on your own and without a mother.

    I guess you’re not alone. It doesn’t make sense — or, it doesn’t matter, nothing about this feels right. Although I know you won’t remember this, I can’t help but wonder if you feel the emptiness I carry day and night without you close or anywhere in sight.

    I know my handwriting is sometimes sloppy, but it’s late, and I’m writing in the background of the dim prison hallway lights. I’m about to miss your first Halloween, just as I’ve missed these last two months. I wish none of this was — I wish none of this was true, but deep inside, really underneath a whole lot, I know I need to tell you nothing but the truth, which also includes that I love you. I’ll spend the rest of my life making this up to you.

    AMY GOODMAN: That’s Keeley Schenwar back in 2014. I am so sorry, Maya, how difficult this is for you, which makes it all the more brave for you to have written this piece in Truthout and to tell your sister’s stories and her truths. As we talk about her baby being taken away from her so quickly, can you talk about her terror to get help because she was always afraid she’d lose her baby, that they’d take her baby from her, and what you think needs to happen now, and if Cori Bush’s new resolution, that she just introduced into Congress, the People’s Response Act, which would send unarmed, trained professionals to respond to mental health and substance abuse crises instead of police, would make a difference?

    MAYA SCHENWAR: Yes. Thank you, Amy. Thank you for playing that poem. I am overwhelmed. The poem is so beautiful. But it shouldn’t have had to be written.

    Tearing a mother away from her newborn baby is one of the most violent acts in the universe. And it’s perpetrated by our legal system. And I think when we think about the terror of Keeley and so many mothers and parents who use drugs and, more generally, who are criminalized, we have to think about this double punishment, the fact that not only are they under threat of being put into torture chambers — prisons — but also they’re under threat of this deep, deep, wrenching punishment of being torn away. And, of course, for Keeley, that was also the trauma of actually being pregnant and giving birth behind bars.

    And when we look forward and think about, “Well, what can be done?” I think the number one thing we need to be thinking about is end criminalization and policing. And, you know, this might sound like something we’re doing away with instead of introducing, but I think it’s generative, because criminalization and incarceration are traumatizing and torturing people, and they’re also putting us in the mindset that this is all we can do, that this is our go-to solution. Well, you can’t actually administer “treatment” through a system like that. And as we’ve discussed, police are actually making it less likely that people are going to seek emergency help when they really need it.

    And so, I think that, within that, we also need to look at some of the other demands that are being made by organizers working to defund the police and to defend Black lives. And I think that Cori Bush’s legislation does encompass some of that. We need to be fueling resources toward priorities that affirm life, and that includes housing, education, food, healthcare. These things would absolutely reduce overdoses, in addition to all the other many benefits they would have and the ways in which they would build toward creating a more flourishing and meaningful and equitable society. And I think creating nonpolice emergency responses is definitely something we should be funding and fueling. I believe Cori Bush’s bill actually puts funding into existing programs, which is good, and we also need to be lifting up and funding and supporting all of the mutual aid efforts and the efforts that have actually been created by people who use drugs to support people in their survival, come up with creative harm reduction techniques and actually bring those to the community.

    And I think that, in addition — I just want to say real quickly — that actually legalizing drugs, and doing that in a way that’s informed by racial justice, that grants reparations to people most impacted by the drug war, that also has to happen, too, as we’re talking about all these issues with people dealing with contaminated drugs, people dealing with overdoses when they didn’t even realize what amount they were taking. So I think it’s all of these things together, with a mindset of freedom and supporting people in their survival, a mindset of healing and liberation, instead of the idea that you can confine and surveil and police people into so-called recovery.

    AMY GOODMAN: Maya Schenwar, I want to thank you so much for being with us. Again, this is a conversation we will continue. Maya is editor-in-chief of Truthout. Her sister Keeley died of a drug overdose in February 2020 at the age of 29. Maya’s piece about her death is just out. We’ll link to it. It’s headlined “My Sister Died of an Overdose. Defunding the Police Might Have Saved Her.” Maya Schenwar is co-author of Prison by Any Other Name and author of Locked Down, Locked Out: Why Prison Doesn’t Work and How We Can Do Better.

    Next up, we’ll speak with Democratic Congressmember Nikema Williams of Georgia about her Abolition Amendment to end forced prison labor. We’ll also talk with her about voting rights and infrastructure spending. Stay with us.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • UK introducing three laws that threaten human rights, says UN expert

    Proposed changes to policing, surveillance and judicial review will jeopardise right to peaceful protest, says special rapporteur

    Boris Johnson’s government is introducing three pieces of legislation that will make human rights violations more likely to occur and less likely to be sanctioned even as averting climate catastrophe depends on these rights, the UN special rapporteur for human rights and the environment has said.

    “These three pieces of legislation are shrinking civic space at a time when the global environment crisis demands that people’s voices be heard,” said David Boyd.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Coalition Demands Federal Ban on Amazon’s Punitive Worker Surveillance

    A worker prepares amazon packages in a warehouse

    A coalition of worker advocacy and racial justice organizations marked the start of Prime Day on Monday with an open letter demanding that state and federal lawmakers take action to end Amazon’s systems of employee surveillance, which critics say are at the heart of the company’s devastating injury crisis.

    “Amazon’s business model is a calculated exploitation of workers, the majority of whom are Black and brown,” reads the letter, which was signed by the Athena Coalition, Fight for the Future, and 33 other groups.

    “Amazon’s punishing system monitors workers’ speed or rate, tracks their movements each second with a metric called time off task, and imposes a constant threat of termination,” the letter continues. “Amazon claims to simply monitor workflow — but in reality, rate and time off task is used to control physical movements and discipline workers, dictate when or if they can use the bathroom, and has been used to retaliate against worker organizing.”

    According to a report released earlier this month by the Strategic Organizing Center, Amazon workers sustained more than 24,000 serious injuries last year, an injury rate far higher than at Walmart and other major U.S. employers.

    As the anti-surveillance coalition emphasized in its letter, Prime Day tends to heighten warehouse injury risks as workers face intense pressure to accommodate the influx of orders associated with Amazon’s largest shopping event of the year. Internal Amazon data obtained by Reveal News last year showed that “injury rates have spiked during the weeks of Prime Day and Cyber Monday, contrary to Amazon’s public claims.”

    “Those two weeks had the highest rate of serious injuries for all of 2019,” Reveal reported.

    As Fight for the Future director Evan Greer put it in a statement, “Amazon’s workplace surveillance system is brutal every day, and even worse on Prime Day.”

    “Workers’ bodies are being injured, in some cases permanently, just so boxes can be delivered the same day. It’s absurd,” Greer added. “Amazon knows their system physically harms workers and ruins lives, but refuses to roll back the system that injures workers at such a despicable rate: workplace surveillance… Congress needs to take immediate action to rein in one of our country’s largest and most abusive employers by passing legislation to end workplace surveillance.”

    In their letter on Monday, the 35 groups called on lawmakers and regulators at the state and federal levels to take several specific steps, including:

    • End rate and time off task tracking: State and federal electeds should enact laws that ban surveillance-driven discipline and control to ensure that workers are protected from abusive conditions.
    • Update OSHA standards and enforcement to end rate and time off task: As evidence mounts that Amazon’s model creates an unsafe workplace, state and federal OSHA programs should enforce existing standards and create new rules that address practices like rate and time off task that monitor workers and increase the pace of work.
    • Investigate Amazon’s abuses: Agencies tasked with safeguarding workers should investigate Amazon for these widespread and long-standing abuses, including: injuries, retaliation, and discrimination.

    “Amazon will soon be the largest private employer in the United States, and if lawmakers and regulators fail to take action, its dangerous and extractive model will become the standard in warehousing, logistics, and retail,” the letter warns. “As other retailers implement similarly exploitative strategies, this dangerous trend will further degrade working conditions for tens of millions of people across the country.”

    Read the full letter:

    Amazon injures and discards warehouse workers and delivery drivers at double the industry average. There were a record 24,000 serious injuries at Amazon facilities last year. It is time for lawmakers and regulators to step-in and end the punitive system of constant surveillance that drives the dangerous pace of work at Amazon.

    Amazon’s business model is a calculated exploitation of workers, the majority of whom are Black and brown. Amazon’s punishing system monitors workers’ speed or rate, tracks their movements each second with a metric called time off task, and imposes a constant threat of termination. Amazon claims to simply monitor workflow — but in reality, rate and time off task is used to control physical movements and discipline workers, dictate when or if they can use the bathroom, and has been used to retaliate against worker organizing. A recent investigation in Washington State concluded that this high-pressure system violates the law.

    Discarding workers after they are injured or too exhausted, Amazon churned through over half a million workers in 2019. Amazon’s model breaks people’s bodies, taking their health and sometimes livelihoods. The cumulative costs of this exploitative business model are offloaded onto workers, their families, and the public.

    Black workers disproportionately bear the brunt of Amazon’s model. At one of Amazon’s largest warehouses in New York, Black workers were fifty percent more likely to be fired than their white peers. And during the pandemic, Amazon fired several Black workers who spoke out about unsafe conditions. This mirrors findings that Black people are more likely to have dangerous jobs, less likely to have their concerns heard, and more likely to be retaliated against. Further, Amazon actively discourages the promotion of hourly workers in warehouses, the majority of whom are Black and brown.

    Warehouse workers and delivery drivers cannot wait for Amazon to fix its broken system. To ensure Amazon’s model does not become the standard for our entire economy, regulators and lawmakers must intervene:

    • End rate and time off task tracking: State and federal electeds should enact laws that ban surveillance-driven discipline and control to ensure that workers are protected from abusive conditions.
    • Update OSHA standards and enforcement to end rate and time off task: As evidence mounts that Amazon’s model creates an unsafe workplace, state and federal OSHA programs should enforce existing standards and create new rules that address practices like rate and time off task that monitor workers and increase the pace of work.
    • Investigate Amazon’s abuses: Agencies tasked with safeguarding workers should investigate Amazon for these widespread and long-standing abuses, including: injuries, retaliation, and discrimination.

    For years, workers have spoken out and protested against these conditions. Most recently, in Bessemer, Alabama, Black warehouse workers led a unionization effort, citing the punishing conditions created by Amazon’s system of surveillance, control, and threat of termination.

    Last year, civil society organizations stood with workers and called upon Congress to ban this type of punitive worker surveillance, citing the dangerous impacts on workers’ physical and mental health, potential to undermine workers’ right to organize, and long-term deskilling and wage decline of these jobs.

    Finally forced to admit to ongoing injury problems, Amazon is nevertheless doubling down on its extractive model. In his final letter to shareholders, Jeff Bezos stated that Amazon would begin to use artificial intelligence to direct workers from one task to the next. But using technology to maintain absolute control over workers’ tasks and workflow, it will only escalate Amazon’s injury crisis. Decades of research show that when workers do not have autonomy and control at work, they are more likely to be injured and experience mental strain and depression. Later, Amazon announced wellness programs and funding for injury research, but it refuses to do the one thing that would stop widespread injuries: eliminate rate and time off task.

    Amazon will soon be the largest private employer in the United States, and if lawmakers and regulators fail to take action, its dangerous and extractive model will become the standard in warehousing, logistics, and retail. As other retailers implement similarly exploitative strategies, this dangerous trend will further degrade working conditions for tens of millions of people across the country. The result will be a punishing, untenable reality for all working people, and Black and brown people will pay the highest cost.

    We demand lawmakers and regulators do everything in their power to end rate and time off task, ensuring Amazon cannot use this punitive system of surveillance to cycle through entire workforces in communities throughout the country.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Wither Encryption: What Operation Trojan Shield Reveals

    My, were they delighted!  Politicians across several international jurisdictions beamed with pride that police and security forces had gotten one up on criminals spanning the globe.  It all involved a sting by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, led in conjunction with a number of law enforcement agencies in 16 countries, resulting in more than 800 arrests.  The European Union police agency Europol described it as the “biggest ever law enforcement operation against encrypted communication”.

    The haul was certainly more than the usual: over 32 tonnes of an assortment of drugs including cocaine, cannabis, amphetamines and methamphetamines; 250 firearms, 55 luxury cars, and some $48 million in cash, both tangible and digital.

    Operation Trojan Shield arose because of a grand dupe.  It involved recruiting an FBI informant who had developed an adulterated version of the encryption technology platform Anom, to be used on modified cell phones for distribution through a range of organised crime networks.  The platform included a calculator app that relayed all communications sent on the platform back to the FBI.   “You had to know a criminal to get hold of one of these customised phones,” the Australian Federal Police explained. “The phones couldn’t ring or email.   You could only communicate with someone on the same platform.”

    The users were none the wiser.  For three years, material was gathered and examined, comprising 27 million intercepted messages drawn from 12,000 devices.  This month, the authorities could no longer contain their excitement.

    While the criminals in question might well have been mocked for their gullibility, the trumpeting of law enforcement did not seem much better.  A relentless campaign has been waged on end-to-end encryption communication platforms, a war against what policing types call “going dark”.  To add some light to the situation, the agencies pine for the creation of tailored back doors to such communications apps as WhatsApp, iMessage and Signal.

    Few could forget the indignant efforts of the FBI to badger Apple in 2016 to crack the iPhone of Syed Farook, the San Bernardino shooting suspect.  Apple refused.  The battle moved to the courts.  In what has become something of a pattern, the DOJ subsequently dropped the case by revealing that it had “successfully accessed the data stored on Farook’s iPhone and therefore no longer requires the assistance of Apple Inc.”  The DOJ then requested that a court order of February 16 demanding Apple create software with weakened iPhone security settings be vacated.  By refusing to reveal how it had obtained access to the phone, government authorities had thrown down the gauntlet to Apple to identify any glitches.

    In 2020, a number of international politicians with an interest in the home security portfolio released a joint statement claiming to support “strong encryption, which plays a crucial role in protecting personal data, privacy, intellectual property, trade secrets and cyber security.”  A casual glance at the undersigned would suggest this to be markedly disingenuous.  Among them were: Priti Patel, UK Home Secretary; William P. Barr, US Attorney General; Peter Dutton, Australian Minister for Home Affairs.

    Having given nods of approval for encryption as “an existential anchor of trust in the digital world”, the ministers took aim at the various platforms using it.  On this occasion, it was the “challenges to public safety” posed by the use of encryption technology, “including to highly vulnerable members of our societies like sexually exploited children.”  (The battle against solid encryption is often waged over the bodies and minds of abused children.)  Industry was urged “to address our concerns where encryption is applied in a way that wholly precludes any legal access.” This would involve companies having to police illegal content and permit “law enforcement to access content in a readable and usable format where an authorisation is lawfully issued, is necessary and proportionate, and is subject to strong safeguards and oversight”.

    Cases like Anom demonstrate that there is seemingly no need for such intrusions, bells of alarm, and warnings about safety.  The police have sufficient powers and means, and more besides.  As with such matters, the danger tends to be closer to home: police zeal; prosecutor’s glee; a hatred of privacy.  Joseph Lorenzo Hall, senior vice president at the non-profit Internet Society, is convinced of that fact.  “When law enforcement agencies claim they need companies to build in backdoors to help them gain access to the end-to-end encrypted communications of criminals, examples like Anom show that it’s not the case.”

    John Scott-Railton of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy makes the same point.  “What this case shows is that global law enforcement is perfectly capable of mobilising a multiyear caper to get around exactly the kinds of problems about encryptions that they’ve been talking about without breaking the encryption of the apps that keep you and [me] private.”

    The Australian wing of the operation had even greater extant powers of access to encrypted messages.  The Telecommunications and Other Legislation Amendment (Assistance and Access) Act 2018 is one of those beastly instruments many law enforcement agencies dream about.  It might also suggest why Australia, a nominally small partner, might have been asked by the FBI to be involved in the first place.  When asked if this was the case, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison suggested that the question be put to US authorities.  For him, the AFP’s hardly impressive technical efforts were to be praised.

    None of this is enough for the Morrison government, which is intent on further pushing the surveillance cart in such proposed laws as the Surveillance Legislation Amendment (Identify and Disrupt) Bill 2020, and the Telecommunications Legislation Amendment (International Production Orders) Bill 2020 (IPO Bill).  The former would permit the AFP and the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission to issue a new range of warrants for combating online crime; the latter would create a system by which Australian agencies would be able to access stored telecommunications from identified foreign communication providers in cases where Australia has a bilateral agreement.

    Operation Trojan Shield has again shown that calls for weakened encryption are to be treated with due alarm.  Almost silly in all of this was the fact that the FBI and fellow agencies made it a demonstrable fact, undercutting their very own arguments for a more invasive surveillance system. The next play is bound to come from the criminal networks themselves, who, wounded by this deception, will move towards more conventional encryption technologies. The battle will then come full circle.  In countries such as Australia, where privacy is a withering tree, the encryption debate is a dead letter.

    The post Wither Encryption: What Operation Trojan Shield Reveals first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Israeli lawyer Eitay Mack on bringing transparency to surveillance exports that threaten press freedom

    “Many countries are using these technologies to put people in jail,” Israeli lawyer Eitay Mack told CPJ in a recent video interview. He was describing advanced surveillance capabilities, such as those that CPJ has documented being used to target journalists like Omar Radi and Maati Monjib, who were both jailed in Morocco in 2020. 

    Israeli companies like NSO Group and Cellebrite market equipment to government and law enforcement agencies to fight crime, yet as CPJ has noted, journalists are vulnerable to the same sophisticated tools if they fall into the hands of repressive governments. NSO’s Pegasus spyware can remotely control a cell phone and its contents, while police say they use Cellebrite’s forensics products to extract the contents of devices seized during interrogation, potentially exposing journalists’ colleagues, family members, and sources to monitoring or reprisals.   

    When Mack learns that such technology is being used to commit abuses — against journalists or others — he tries to stop its export by petitioning the Israeli Ministry of Defense. The ministry is essentially in control of the industry, he said, through its marketing and license export regime; Mack petitions the ministry to withdraw the relevant license. 

    His work has had an impact, according to the Israeli daily Haaretz: following Mack’s petitions, Cellebrite said that it would stop sales to Russia and Belarus in March 2021, and in September 2020, said it would not supply the government of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro despite previous sales to defense and police clients in the country. An Israeli High Court ruling on Mack’s petition to halt the trade of arms to Myanmar in September 2017 was subject to a gag order and hasn’t been disclosed, according to Haaretz.

    CPJ spoke with Mack about his efforts to stop exports of the equipment and bring transparency to an otherwise secretive industry. His answers below have been edited for length and clarity. 

    CPJ sought response to Mack’s remarks from the Defense Ministry, NSO, Cellebrite, and other entities named in the interview. Their replies are detailed below. 

    How often do you come across journalists affected by surveillance technologies? 

    There’s a lot of public interest if it can be proved [that the equipment was used] against a journalist or an activist. But journalists [often] rely on people on the ground with a Twitter or Facebook account, and these kinds of technologies are enabling mass surveillance. If you’re talking about NSO, their system targets [a specific] person each time. According to the company, the list of targets is a few hundred. If you’re talking about Cellebrite, Alexander Bastrykin, the head of Russia’s Investigative Committee said in 2020 that in the previous year the system was used more than 26,000 times in Russia. You connect 26,000 phones, take the information – you control the population. 

    When you figure out where the technology is going, how do you try and stop it? 

    I file a petition to an Israeli court. My goal is to cancel the export license given by the Ministry of Defense. 

    The international media say a lot about the companies themselves, which is very comfortable for the Ministry of Defense. But companies are like subcontractors. The agreements are made between governments and the Ministry of Defense decides which company [gets] the deal. 

    Even if an Israeli surveillance company wants to cancel services because it got information that the system was being used against journalists or to violate human rights, it wouldn’t be able to, because it would cause a crisis [with a] foreign government. 

    The Ministry of Defense has an information security unit called MALMAB that terrorizes the companies to warn them against leaking, and there are very few people [internally] with security clearance to access the client list. If NSO or another company says, “We are like a normal international company, we have an ethics board with the greatest minds in human rights that can check our work,” [that board doesn’t] have information about what the company is doing. 

    How many companies in Israel export surveillance technology? 

    There’s no way to know, because we only know about the companies you see in the headlines. There is digital forensics, like the company Cellebrite; UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles]; then the classic surveillance stories like the NSO Group’s Pegasus or PicSix in Bangladesh or the unknown Israeli company in Vietnam. 

    In 2013 I petitioned the Ministry of Defense to disclose the companies in the defense export register. They [only] gave a few numbers in 2014: there were about 80,000 export licenses and 320,000 marketing licenses. In Israel, there’s a unique marketing license [that companies need to negotiate with] potential clients, then a separate export license… [Through the] marketing license, you are exposing your potential client [to the ministry] which can choose to give this client to another company.

    I can identify rifles in pictures on social media, and depending on the model, I can estimate when it was exported, but surveillance systems aren’t physical. With NSO, we don’t know names of their clients, it’s hard to prove. Even with Cellebrite, [which] physically connects to the mobile phone, I only got to know that it [was being used] in Russia and Venezuela and Belarus because [local] authorities announced it. 

    How is the industry regulated in Israel? 

    They keep changing the bureaucracy to make people like me waste time. In the case of Cellebrite, the Ministry of Economy should approve [civilian clients]. But they told me [its sales to Hong Kong] came under the Ministry of Defense, according to the [Defense Export Control Law] of 2007 governing defense equipment. That law is very problematic, because the only limit is in case of a U.N. Security Council arms embargo, which is very rare. It’s why we are seeing Israeli defense exports around the world.  

    [In February 2021] the Ministry of Defense told me they had transferred approval from the unit for defense exports to the director of the Ministry of Defense, because digital forensics [systems like Cellebrite’s] fell under a 1974 order for encrypted items. That order is much worse than the 2007 law, because it allows the director to award licenses as he sees fit. 

    If two laws apply, why choose the older one? In my opinion, they wanted to widen the discretion [to approve] a company like Cellebrite for political and economic [reasons]. 

    This is what I’m trying to change, to introduce a consideration of human rights and democracy. I don’t think Israeli authorities will do it on their own, and they are used to foreign criticism in international forums. It will only happen with pressure from the Israeli public.

    Why are cases you’re involved in often subject to a gag order? 

    In all petitions on defense exports, the Ministry of Defense asks [the court] for a gag order so that only people who are part of the proceedings are able to know the ruling. [Their] representative is not even ashamed to argue that they want the gag order because they don’t have control of the media. 

    It’s annoying, in 2021, that they need to keep asking. But [a gag order] has no meaning, it’s like a child putting a blanket over its head and saying it’s night. Under defamation law in Israel you can publish information that is part of the legal process, so journalists [can report on the petitions even if they can’t report on the verdict]. And I’m allowed to say whatever I want, just not what happened inside the court. 

    What should be happening internationally to improve regulation of this industry?

    The global framework is already there. We should think about surveillance [the same way we] think about rifles and classic defense exports. Every time we’re talking about sanctions or an arms embargo, we should be talking about surveillance systems.

    There should be more demands about the technology and how it is being used, a lot of details are still unknown. Because of NSO Group’s contradictory responses to the media, we don’t know if they are technically able to dismantle [spyware] if they have knowledge of abuse. 

    With Cellebrite, the problem in a legal scenario – as far as I can tell – is that the system sucks up everything, you can’t [request one] WhatsApp message. Then are [law enforcement] violating a search order, and what do [they] do with all the information? 

    It seems that companies – and this is also problem with the Israeli government – they don’t see anything as a human rights crisis, but when they have a huge PR crisis, they are ready to be more transparent. 

    [Editor’s note: NSO Group has told CPJ that it has used a “kill switch” to shut down its systems in cases of serious misuse, but as CPJ and other groups noted in a public letter to the company in April 2021, the company has been vague about how it terminates relationships with clients. Cellebrite told CPJ that its platform “enables selective extraction of major types of digital sources, preservation, analysis and reporting of evidence to accelerate criminal cases” and that its tools are “designed to limit the analysis to only data that might be relevant to the case.”]

    Cellebrite has attracted scrutiny because it is preparing to go public on the New York stock exchange. Could that trigger a PR crisis?  

    It’s an interesting development [when that happens] because it can bring more normalization to the companies. That could push companies to be more transparent, but I don’t think investors outside Israel understand the risk of being 100% dependent on the Israeli government. If the company can’t get an export license, it’s finished. And investors won’t know what the company is doing. They will read [about] it in the newspaper.     

    Editor’s note: In response to CPJ’s questions about Mark’s remarks, Betty Ilovici, the foreign press advisor of the ministry of defense, said in a statement via email on behalf of the ministry that the Defense Export Controls Agency supervises exports of dual use cyber defense products in line with Israel’s Defense Export Control Law and international regulatory regimes, and with oversight from Israeli courts and the Knesset. “Human rights, policy and security issues are all taken into consideration,” she said, but declined to comment on specific licenses citing ministry policy. The statement did not explicitly address CPJ’s questions about MALMAB or Mack’s characterization of companies as ministry subcontractors.

    The statement also said that Israel “is one of the few countries in the world that require a two-stage licensing process by law. In accordance with the two-stage process, the exporter is required to hold a defense marketing license ahead of any marketing or promotional activity and a defense export license, for the export of any product.”

    NSO Group characterized Mack’s statements as “a complete misunderstanding of how NSO operates,” in a statement emailed to CPJ via the Mercury Public Affairs group, but refused to respond on specific points because CPJ declined to identify the interviewee in advance of publication, per CPJ’s editorial policy. The statement added that NSO investigates credible claims of misuse and shuts down a customer’s system if warranted; its Governance, Risk and Compliance Committee reviews human rights and compliance issues, and “takes every possible step to ensure NSO’s technology is sold only to those who use it as intended — to prevent and investigate terror and serious crime.”

    Cellebrite said its products “can only be used lawfully — either pursuant to a court order or warrant” and “we do not enter into business with customers whose positions or actions we consider inconsistent with our mission to support law enforcement acting in a legal manner,” noting several layers of oversight, including a board. The company could terminate license agreements and block software updates in cases where the technology is used in a manner that does not comply with the company’s values, it said in an emailed statement via the Fusion PR firm.    

    Al-Jazeera reported that in 2018 Bangladesh’s army secretly purchased equipment from the Israeli company PicSix to capture communications from mobile phones. Bangladesh’s foreign minister has denied purchasing interception equipment from Israel, according to that report. PicSix did not respond to CPJ’s request for comment submitted via its website. 

    Haaretz reported in 2018 that Vietnam had purchased an Israeli communications interception system. CPJ called Vietnam’s Ministry of Public Security for comment but the line rang unanswered.


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Madeline Earp/CPJ Consultant Technology Editor.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • In His Wild Bid to Stop Leaks to the Press, Trump Even Spied on His Own Lawyer

    The sun sets behind Donald Trump

    From the “Nothing New Under the Sun” files, I bring you a former president whose concern over leaks to the press eventually blew his entire administration straight to hell.

    “President Nixon’s staffers formed the ‘White House Plumbers,’” explains Time, “a secret unit tasked with digging up dirt on Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg. The Plumbers went on to commit crimes for the Committee for the Re-Election of the President, including the Watergate burglaries. Although Nixon denied knowledge of the Plumbers activities, tapes subpoenaed during the Watergate investigation revealed years of political espionage and illegal surveillance. The ‘Smoking Gun’ tape revealed that Nixon was involved in the cover up. On August 8, 1974, Nixon became the only American president to resign the office.’”

    Nothing so dramatic as that is in the offing today; Donald Trump — whose own surveillance program against journalists, Democratic politicians and their families, and even his own lawyer, is roiling Washington, D.C., once again — is already out of office. He has been quacking about getting “reinstated” as president from his funnel hole in New Jersey. Sure, put him back in, and then impeach him a third time. Maybe this one will stick.

    The first reports of Trump’s administration running its own ham-fisted Plumbers operation landed late last week with a rolling boom. “As the Justice Department investigated who was behind leaks of classified information early in the Trump administration, it took a highly unusual step: Prosecutors subpoenaed Apple for data from the accounts of at least two Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee, aides and family members,” reported The New York Times. “One was a minor.”

    The roll call of people affected is a perfect match to another Nixonian throwback, the enemies list. Atop Trump’s effective corollary to Nixon’s list was House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, who was a regular target of Trump’s tirades. All told, Apple received subpoenas that covered 73 phone numbers and 36 email addresses. A number of the people swept up in this metadata search were not in government, including the aforementioned minor.

    Along with the subpoena came a nondisclosure order which barred Apple from informing its customers that the Justice Department was digging into their data. “The nondisclosure order was extended three times,” reports CNN, “each time for a year, Apple said. When it was not extended for a fourth time, Apple said it informed the affected customers on May 5, 2021.”

    Concurrently, the Trump administration also seized communications data from CNN, The New York Times and The Washington Post. This revelation landed more than a week ago, tangling the Biden administration up in the mess, because his Justice Department apparently continued this surveillance after Trump left office. The Biden White House has disavowed these activities, and the policy regarding leak investigations over at Justice has been changed.

    The wildest revelation came this weekend, when it was revealed that one of Trump’s targets was his own White House counsel, Doug McGahn. “Apple told Mr. McGahn about the subpoena last month, said one of the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the matter. Mr. McGahn’s wife also received a similar notice from Apple,” reports the Times.

    The time frame for this is easy enough to recall. Not long after Trump took office, his administration sprang more leaks than a badly wrapped diaper. Nobody in the administration’s lower echelons had the courage to resign in protest over the terrifying things they were seeing — “Anonymous,” your table is ready — but they were more than happy to spray that cheese into the wind for the news media to collect, and collect it they did.

    There were weeks when one could not walk around the block without tripping over 10 heavily sourced news reports about White House shenanigans regarding the southern border, the ceaseless infighting within the administration that was usually inspired by Trump himself, and the administration’s dealings with Russia both before and after the election. The Russia questions, it appears, hit a tender spot with Trump, initially prompting the broad and surreptitious data harvest.

    Fallout from these revelations is just beginning. House Democrats intend to hold hearings on the matter and will subpoena any witnesses who don’t come voluntarily. This includes former Attorney General William Barr, who was running Justice when all of this went down. Barr is trying to put as much daylight as he can between himself and these subpoenas, but that will be challenging.

    In May of 2019, then-Sen. Kamala Harris asked Barr directly if “the president or anyone at the White House ever asked or suggested you open an investigation into anyone?” Barr’s reply was a tap-dancing clinic, but if and when he appears at a hearing on this matter, he will not have many places to hide besides an invocation of his Fifth Amendment rights.

    The House will not be the only entity involved in this investigation. “The Justice Department’s internal watchdog announced Friday that he would review how officials sought the data of reporters, lawmakers and others as part of an aggressive crackdown on leaks during the Trump administration,” reports the Post, “a day after it was revealed the department years ago had secretly obtained the data of two congressmen well known for their criticism of President Donald Trump.”

    For their part, congressional Republicans are putting on their best “What, me worry?” faces as these revelations continue to roll in, and why not? Few of them have paid a price for loyalty to Trump, even now that he is out of office. As far as the public stance of the GOP goes, it’s all blue skies.

    … but I do wonder. At present, the Republican Party has tasked itself to defeat several wildly popular pieces of Democratic legislation, bury the sacking of the Capitol by Trump supporters under a compost pile of “They were just tourists” excuses even as they block an investigation into the incident, and now this, a scandal straight out of central casting with an eerily familiar historical hook to boot. There are only so many running chainsaws a person can juggle before limbs start getting lopped off.

    “The reason this latest issue is so important is that it appears to show the executive branch of the government wielding presidential power to target the legislative branch,” report’s CNN’s Stephen Collinson, “and the President’s personal political enemies. It would be hard to find a more clear and flagrant abuse of presidential power. This behavior would not only be a perversion of the DOJ’s critical role in ensuring the neutral and apolitical application of justice — a key requirement for a democratic society. It would also mirror the actions of autocrats across the world, many of whom Trump openly admired.”

    The GOP’s worst enemy in this? Trump himself, of course. Does anyone think he will sit quietly while this investigation unfolds daily on the television he watches relentlessly? I would be not at all surprised if at some point he winds up pulling a Colonel Jessup from A Few Good Men: Did you order the Code Red? YOU’RE GOD DAMNED RIGHT I DID!

    One of these days — not today or tomorrow, but someday — I have to believe the GOP will be forced to wise up and toss this hot potato back into the pot. They are whistling past the political graveyard now because Trump’s base still has the back of the loyal, but there are not enough voters in that base to make a winning national coalition. As these treacherous stories about the former president continue to pile up, that loyalty may come only to be worth the price of a bus ticket home.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Home Office condemned for forcing migrants on bail to wear GPS tags

    Round-the-clock tracking condemned as ‘Trojan horse’ giving government vast surveillance powers that violate human rights

    More than 40 human rights organisations have condemned the Home Office’s introduction of 24-hour GPS monitoring of people on immigration bail in an expansion of surveillance powers that has involved no consultation process or parliamentary debate.

    The new policy marks a shift from using radio frequency monitors (which alert authorities if the wearer leaves an assigned area) to round-the-clock GPS trackers (which track a person’s every move), while also giving the Home Office new powers to collect, store and access this data indefinitely via a private contractor.

    Related: ‘Help and you are a criminal’: the fight to defend refugee rights at Europe’s borders

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Home Office condemned for forcing migrants on bail to wear GPS tags

    Round-the-clock tracking condemned as ‘Trojan horse’ giving government vast surveillance powers that violate human rights

    More than 40 human rights organisations have condemned the Home Office’s introduction of 24-hour GPS monitoring of people on immigration bail in an expansion of surveillance powers that has involved no consultation process or parliamentary debate.

    The new policy marks a shift from using radio frequency monitors (which alert authorities if the wearer leaves an assigned area) to round-the-clock GPS trackers (which track a person’s every move), while also giving the Home Office new powers to collect, store and access this data indefinitely via a private contractor.

    Related: ‘Help and you are a criminal’: the fight to defend refugee rights at Europe’s borders

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.