This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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Findings suggest Jordan is relying on cyberweapon to quash dissent and its use is ‘staggeringly widespread’
About three dozen journalists, lawyers and human rights workers in Jordan have been targeted by authorities using powerful spyware made by Israel’s NSO Group amid a broad crackdown on press freedoms and political participation, according to a report by the lobbying group Access Now.
The information suggests the Jordanian government has used the Israeli cyberweapon against members of civil society, including at least one American citizen living in Jordan, between 2019 and September 2023.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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Papua New Guinea’s Police Commissioner David Manning has been reinstated after being stood down following riots and looting on January 10.
That rioting — branded as Black Wednesday — was sparked by a police protest after unannounced deductions from their wages, which the government blamed on a glitch.
The protest led to a riot causing the deaths of more than 20 people, widespread looting and hundreds of millions of dollars of damage to businesses.
Reinstated Police Commissioner David Manning . . . commission of inquiry pledged to study the police force. Image: Andrew Kutan/RNZ Pacific Amnesty International called on authorities to protect human rights in response to the riots.
The 14-day state of emergency following the violence has now ended.
The National newspaper reported Prime Minister James Marape announced Manning’s reinstatement, and that of Taies Sansan as the Department of Personnel Management Secretary, after administrative preliminary investigations concluded.
However, Treasury Secretary Andrew Oake and Finance Secretary Samuel Penias remained suspended “due to their failure to update the salary system, which led to the events of Jan 10”, Marape said.
Marape also said Deputy Police Commissioner Dr Philip Mina was being suspended.
A commission of inquiry will be appointed to look into the police force.
“The commission of inquiry will be headed by a judge from the Supreme Court and National Court, and will be concluded as soon as possible, to look into the structure, the operation, and their ethics of conduct,” Marape said.
“The country deserves to have a police force that is effective and efficient. We will leave no stone unturned as we recover, reboot and restore.”
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
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Vietnamese prisoner Huynh Minh Tam, who is serving an eight-year prison sentence for “anti-state propaganda,” has claimed he has been kept in solitary confinement for four years, with a camera monitoring his every move.
Tam told his sister Huynh Thi To Nga about the surveillance when she visited him at Gia Trung Prison on Sunday.
Tam and Nga were both arrested in Jan. 2019 and sentenced in November of the same year. Nga received a two-year sentence and was freed in March last year.
Speaking to Radio Free Asia on Wednesday, Nga said her brother was in a 12 meter square cell with a usable area of only about 9 square meters.
“Tam has been locked alone in a room since he arrived at the camp for nearly four years and the room has a surveillance camera installed,” she said.
“There is no way to cover up personal activities, from eating and sleeping to bathing and personal hygiene.”
Former criminal justice lawyer Le Quoc Quan called the move unacceptable.
“The Vietnamese Constitution, the Penal Code, and the Law on Execution of Criminal Judgments all recognize the human rights and personal rights of prisoners,” he told RFA Vietnamese.
“Cells for national security prisoners are very small and all activities are in one room, so cameras can monitor all activities even when the door is locked [such as] going to the bathroom or changing clothes. It is an insult to the prisoner’s dignity.”
He said while putting cameras in common areas was acceptable, putting them in cells violated the prisoner’s rights under Article 32 of the Civil Code.
Tam’s sister Nga said that the political prisoner’s detention area has dozens of cells but only two rooms have cameras installed. One is Tam’s cell, the other is empty.
Tam told his sister he was being held alone in a room with a camera because he opposed the forced labor of prisoners and spoke out about problems receiving parcels from families.
To protest the prison’s monitoring of his activities, he said he covered the camera with paper but a guard came to remove it.
RFA tried to contact Gia Trung Prison to ask about the camera but no one answered.
Installing cameras in political prisoners’ cells is not uncommon in Vietnam according to former inmates.
Activist Le Quy Loc said his cell in An Phuoc Prison was fitted with a camera which even captured him using the toilet.
Nguyen Viet Dung, who left Nam Ha Prison at the end of September 2023, said his cell was equipped with cameras and recording equipment and the prisoner’s bathing area was also under surveillance.
Translated by RFA Vietnamese. Edited by Mike Firn and Taejun Kang.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Radio Free Asia.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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In a closed society where everybody’s guilty, the only crime is getting caught.
— Hunter S. Thompson
According to the FBI, you may be an anti-government extremist if you’ve:
a) purchased a Bible or other religious materials,
b) used terms like “MAGA” and “Trump,”
c) shopped at Dick’s Sporting Goods, Cabela’s, or Bass Pro Shops,
d) purchased tickets to travel by bus, cars, or plane,
e) all of the above.
In fact, if you selected any of those options in recent years, you’re probably already on a government watchlist.
That’s how broadly the government’s net is being cast in its pursuit of domestic extremists.
We’re all fair game now, easy targets for inclusion on some FBI watch list or another.
When the FBI is asking banks and other financial institutions to carry out dragnet searches of customer transactions—warrantlessly and without probable cause—for “extremism” indicators broadly based on where you shop, what you read, and how you travel, we’re all in trouble.
Clearly, you don’t have to do anything illegal.
You don’t even have to challenge the government’s authority.
Frankly, you don’t even have to care about politics or know anything about your rights.
All you really need to do in order to be tagged as a suspicious character, flagged for surveillance, and eventually placed on a government watch list is live in the United States.
This is how easy it is to run afoul of the government’s many red flags.
In fact, all you need to do these days to end up on a government watch list or be subjected to heightened scrutiny is use certain trigger words (like cloud, pork and pirates), surf the internet, communicate using a cell phone, limp or stutter, drive a car, stay at a hotel, attend a political rally, express yourself on social media, appear mentally ill, serve in the military, disagree with a law enforcement official, call in sick to work, purchase materials at a hardware store, take flying or boating lessons, appear suspicious, appear confused or nervous, fidget or whistle or smell bad, be seen in public waving a toy gun or anything remotely resembling a gun (such as a water nozzle or a remote control or a walking cane), stare at a police officer, question government authority, or appear to be pro-gun or pro-freedom.
We’re all presumed guilty until proven innocent now.
It’s just a matter of time before you find yourself wrongly accused, investigated and confronted by police based on a data-driven algorithm or risk assessment culled together by a computer program run by artificial intelligence.
For instance, a so-called typo in a geofence search warrant, which allows police to capture location data for a particular geographic area, resulted in government officials being given access to information about who went where and with whom within a two-mile long stretch of San Francisco that included churches, businesses, private homes, hotels, and restaurants.
Thanks to the 24/7 surveillance being carried out by the government’s sprawling spy network of fusion centers, we are all just sitting ducks, waiting to be tagged, flagged, targeted, monitored, manipulated, investigated, interrogated, heckled and generally harassed by agents of the American police state.
Without having ever knowingly committed a crime or been convicted of one, you and your fellow citizens have likely been assessed for behaviors the government might consider devious, dangerous or concerning; assigned a threat score based on your associations, activities and viewpoints; and catalogued in a government database according to how you should be approached by police and other government agencies based on your particular threat level.
Before long, every household in America will be flagged as a threat and assigned a threat score.
Nationwide, there are upwards of 123 real-time crime centers (a.k.a. fusion centers), which allow local police agencies to upload and share massive amounts of surveillance data and intelligence with state and federal agencies culled from surveillance cameras, facial recognition technology, gunshot sensors, social media monitoring, drones and body cameras, and artificial intelligence-driven predictive policing algorithms.
These data fusion centers, which effectively create an electronic prison—a digital police state—from which there is no escape.
Yet this crime prevention campaign is not so much about making America safer as it is about ensuring that the government has the wherewithal to muzzle anti-government discontent, penalize anyone expressing anti-government sentiments, and preemptively nip in the bud any attempts by the populace to challenge the government’s authority or question its propaganda.
As J.D. Tuccille writes for Reason, “[A]t a time when government officials rage against ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ that is often just disagreement with whatever opinions are currently popular among the political class, fusion centers frequently scrutinize peaceful dissenting speech.”
These fusion centers are the unacknowledged powerhouses behind the government’s campaign to censors and retaliate against those who vocalize their disagreement and discontent with government policies.
It’s a setup ripe for abuse.
For instance, an investigative report by the Brennan Center found that “Over the last two decades, leaked materials have shown fusion centers tracking protestors and casting peaceful activities as potential threats. Their targets have included racial justice and environmental advocates, right-wing activists, and third-party political candidates.”
One fusion center in Maine was found to have been “illegally collecting and sharing information about Maine residents who weren’t suspected of criminal activity. They included gun purchasers, people protesting the construction of a new power transmission line, the employees of a peacebuilding summer camp for teenagers, and even people who travelled to New York City frequently.”
This is how the burden of proof has been reversed.
Although the Constitution requires the government to provide solid proof of criminal activity before it can deprive a citizen of life or liberty, the government has turned that fundamental assurance of due process on its head.
Each and every one of us is now seen as a potential suspect, terrorist and lawbreaker in the eyes of the government.
Consider some of the many ways in which “we the people” are now treated as criminals, found guilty of violating the police state’s abundance of laws, and preemptively stripped of basic due process rights.
Red flag gun confiscation laws: Gun control legislation, especially in the form of red flag gun laws, allow the police to remove guns from people “suspected” of being threats. These laws, growing in popularity as a legislative means by which to seize guns from individuals viewed as a danger to themselves or others, will put a target on the back of every American whether or not they own a weapon.
Disinformation eradication campaigns. In recent years, the government has used the phrase “domestic terrorist” interchangeably with “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” to describe anyone who might fall somewhere on a very broad spectrum of viewpoints that could be considered “dangerous.” The ramifications are so far-reaching as to render almost every American an extremist in word, deed, thought or by association.
Government watch lists. The FBI, CIA, NSA and other government agencies have increasingly invested in corporate surveillance technologies that can mine constitutionally protected speech on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in order to identify potential extremists and predict who might engage in future acts of anti-government behavior. Where many Americans go wrong is in naively assuming that you have to be doing something illegal or harmful in order to be flagged and targeted for some form of intervention or detention.
Thought crimes programs. For years now, the government has used all of the weapons in its vast arsenal—surveillance, threat assessments, fusion centers, pre-crime programs, hate crime laws, militarized police, lockdowns, martial law, etc.—to target potential enemies of the state based on their ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that might be deemed suspicious or dangerous. It’s not just what you say or do that is being monitored, but how you think that is being tracked and targeted. There’s a whole spectrum of behaviors ranging from thought crimes and hate speech to whistleblowing that qualifies for persecution (and prosecution) by the Deep State. It’s a slippery slope from censoring so-called illegitimate ideas to silencing truth.
Security checkpoints. By treating an entire populace as suspect, the government has justified wide-ranging security checkpoints that subject travelers 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.
Surveillance and precrime programs. Facial recognition software aims to create a society in which every individual who steps out into public is tracked and recorded as they go about their daily business. Coupled with surveillance cameras that blanket the country, facial recognition technology allows the government and its corporate partners to warrantlessly identify and track someone’s movements in real-time, whether or not they have committed a crime.
Mail surveillance. Just about every branch of the government—from the Postal Service to the Treasury Department and every agency in between—now has its own surveillance sector, authorized to spy on the American people. For instance, the U.S. Postal Service, which has been photographing the exterior of every piece of paper mail for the past 20 years, is also spying on Americans’ texts, emails and social media posts.
Constitution-free zones. Merely living within 100 miles inland of the border around the United States is now enough to make you a suspect, 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.
Vehicle kill switches. Sold to the public as a safety measure aimed at keeping drunk drivers off the roads, “vehicle kill switches” could quickly become a convenient tool in the hands of government agents to put the government in the driver’s seat while rendering null and void the Constitution’s requirements of privacy and its prohibitions against unreasonable searches and seizures. As such, it presumes every driver potentially guilty of breaking some law that would require the government to intervene and take over operation of the vehicle or shut it off altogether.
Biometric databases. “Guilt by association” has taken on new connotations in the technological age. The government’s presumptions about our so-called guilt or innocence have extended down to our very cellular level with a diabolical campaign to create a nation of suspects predicated on a massive national DNA database.
Limitations on our right to move about freely. At every turn, we’re tracked in by surveillance cameras that monitor our movements. For instance, license plate readers are mass surveillance tools that can photograph over 1,800 license tag numbers per minute, take a picture of every passing license tag number and store the tag number and the date, time, and location of the picture in a searchable database, then share the data with law enforcement, fusion centers and private companies to track the movements of persons in their cars. With tens of thousands of these license plate readers now in operation throughout the country, police can track vehicles in real time.
The war on cash. Digital currency provides the government and its corporate partners with a mode of commerce that can easily be monitored, tracked, tabulated, mined for data, hacked, hijacked and confiscated when convenient. This push for a digital currency dovetails with the government’s war on cash, which it has been subtly waging for some time now. In recent years, just the mere possession of significant amounts of cash could implicate you in suspicious activity and label you a criminal. Americans are having their bank accounts, homes, cars electronics and cash seized by police under the assumption that they have been associated with some criminal scheme.
These programs push us that much closer towards a suspect society where everyone is potentially guilty of some crime or another and must be preemptively rendered harmless.
In this way, the groundwork is being laid for a new kind of government where it won’t matter if you’re innocent or guilty, whether you’re a threat to the nation, or even if you’re a citizen.
What will matter is what the government—or whoever happens to be calling the shots at the time—thinks. And if the powers-that-be think you’re a threat to the nation and should be locked up, then you’ll be locked up with no access to the protections our Constitution provides.
In effect, you will disappear.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, our freedoms are already being made to disappear.
The post Watchlisted: You’re Probably Already on a Government Extremism List first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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By Gideon Levy of Haaretz
Three and a half hours. Three and a half hours from Jenin to Tul Karm. In three and a half hours you can fly to Rome, or drive to Eilat. But in the occupied West Bank today you’re barely able to drive between two nearby cities.
That’s the time it took us this week to travel from Jenin to Tul Karm, 35 kilometers. At the end of every Palestinian road on the West Bank there is a locked iron gate since the war in Gaza started. Waze instructs you to travel on these roads, but even this clever app doesn’t know there’s a locked gate at the end of every one.
If there isn’t a locked gate, there’s a “breathing” roadblock. If there isn’t a breathing roadblock, there’s a strangling roadblock.
- READ MORE: When Yemen does it it’s ‘terrorism’, when the US does it it’s ‘the rules-based order’
- Other War on Gaza and Palestine reports
Near the Ottoman railway station in Sebastia, reserve soldiers stop Palestinians from taking even that remote gravel path. Near Shavei Shomron, soldiers permit traveling from south to north, but not in the opposite direction.
Why? Because.
The soldiers at the next roadblock are taking selfies, and all the cars wait for them to finish photographing themselves so they can receive the dismissive, patronising hand gesture that will allow them to pass, while the traffic jam backs up on the road.
The Einav roadblock we passed through in the morning was closed to traffic in the afternoon by soldiers. It’s impossible to know anything. The Hawara roadblock is shut.
Like drugged coackroaches in bottle
The exit from Shufa is closed. So are most of the exit routes from the villages to the main roads. That’s how we traveled this week, like drugged cockroaches in a bottle, three and a half hours from Jenin to Tul Karm, to reach Road 557 and return to Israel.And this is the Palestinians’ life in the West Bank these days.
When evening fell, thousands of cars whose drivers simply stopped by the wayside in abjection lined the roads in the West Bank. They stood helpless and silent. You have to see the fear in their eyes when they manage to approach the roadblock; any wrong move could lead to their death. It can make you explode.
It can make you explode that Israel is now doing everything to drive the West Bank to another intifada. It won’t be easy. The West Bank has neither the leadership nor the fighting spirit of the second intifada, but how can one not explode?
Some 150,000 laborers who worked in Israel have been out of work for three months. You can also explode from the army’s hypocrisy. Its commanders are warning that we must enable laborers to go to work, but the IDF will be the main culprit for the Palestinian uprising if it breaks out.
The problem is not merely economic. Under the guise of the war and with the extreme rightist government’s assistance, the IDF has changed its conduct in the occupied territories in a dangerous way — it wants Gaza in the West Bank.
The settlers want Gaza in the West Bank so they can drive out as many Palestinians as possible, and the army backs them up.
344 Palestinians killed
According to UN figures, since October 7, 344 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank, 88 of them children. Eight or nine of them were killed by settlers. At the same time, five Israelis were killed in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, four of them by security forces.The reason is that the IDF has in recent months started firing from the air to kill in the West Bank, like in Gaza.
On January 7, for example, the army killed seven youngsters who were standing on a traffic island near Jenin, after one of them apparently threw an explosive charge at a jeep and missed.
It was a massacre. The seven youngsters were members of one family, four brothers, two more brothers and a cousin. That doesn’t interest Israel.
Now the IDF is moving forces from Gaza to the West Bank. The Duvdevan undercover unit is already there, the Kfir Brigade is on its way. They’ll return to the West Bank stoked with the indiscriminate killing in Gaza and will want to continue the great work there as well.
Israel wants an intifada. Maybe it will even get one. It should just not feign surprise when this happens.
Gideon Levy is an Israeli journalist and author who writes for Hareetz on human rights and the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
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What’s to stop the U.S. government from throwing the kill switch and shutting down phone and internet communications in a time of so-called crisis?
After all, it’s happening all over the world.
Communications kill switches have become tyrannical tools of domination and oppression to stifle political dissent, shut down resistance, forestall election losses, reinforce military coups, and keep the populace isolated, disconnected and in the dark, literally and figuratively.
In an internet-connected age, killing the internet is tantamount to bringing everything—communications, commerce, travel, the power grid—to a standstill.
In Myanmar, for example, the internet shutdown came on the day a newly elected government was to have been sworn in. That’s when the military staged a digital coup and seized power. Under cover of a communications blackout that cut off the populace from the outside world and each other, the junta “carried out nightly raids, smashing down doors to drag out high-profile politicians, activists and celebrities.”
These government-imposed communications shutdowns serve to not only isolate, terrorize and control the populace, but also underscore the citizenry’s lack of freedom in the face of the government’s limitless power.
Yet as University of California Irvine law professor David Kaye explains, these kill switches are no longer exclusive to despotic regimes. They have “migrated into a toolbox for governments that actually do have the rule of law.”
This is what digital authoritarianism looks like in a technological age.
Digital authoritarianism, as the Center for Strategic and International Studies cautions, involves the use of information technology to surveil, repress, and manipulate the populace, endangering human rights and civil liberties, and co-opting and corrupting the foundational principles of democratic and open societies, “including freedom of movement, the right to speak freely and express political dissent, and the right to personal privacy, online and off.”
For those who insist that it can’t happen here, it can and it has.
In 2005, cell service was disabled in four major New York tunnels, reportedly to avert potential bomb detonations via cell phone.
In 2009, those attending President Obama’s inauguration had their cell signals blocked—again, same rationale.
And in 2011, San Francisco commuters had their cell phone signals shut down, this time, to thwart any possible protests over a police shooting of a homeless man.
With shutdowns becoming harder to detect, who’s to say it’s not still happening?
Although an internet kill switch is broadly understood to be a complete internet shutdown, it can also include a broad range of restrictions such as content blocking, throttling, filtering, complete shutdowns, and cable cutting.
As Global Risk Intel explains:
Content blocking is a relatively moderate method that blocks access to a list of selected websites or applications. When users access these sites and apps, they receive notifications that the server could not be found or that access was denied by the network administrator. A more subtle method is throttling. Authorities decrease the bandwidth to slow down the speed at which specific websites can be accessed. A slow internet connection discourages users to connect to certain websites and does not arouse immediate suspicion. Users may assume that connection service is slow but may not conclude that this circumstance was authorized by the government. Filtering is another tool to censor targeted content and erases specific messages and terms that the government does not approve of.
How often do most people, experiencing server errors and slow internet speeds, chalk it up to poor service? Who would suspect the government of being behind server errors and slow internet speeds?
Then again, this is the same government that has subjected us to all manner of encroachments on our freedoms (lockdowns, mandates, restrictions, contact tracing programs, heightened surveillance, censorship, over-criminalization, shadow banning, etc.) in order to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, preserve the integrity of elections, and combat disinformation.
These tactics have become the tools of domination and oppression in an internet-dependent age.
It really doesn’t matter what the justifications are for such lockdowns. No matter the rationale, the end result is the same: an expansion of government power in direct proportion to the government’s oppression of the citizenry.
In this age of manufactured crises, emergency powers and technofascism, the government already has the know-how, the technology and the authority.
Now all it needs is the “right” crisis to flip the kill switch.
This particular kill switch can be traced back to the Communications Act of 1934. Signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Act empowers the president to suspend wireless radio and phone services “if he deems it necessary in the interest of national security or defense” during a time of “war or a threat of war, or a state of public peril or disaster or other national emergency, or in order to preserve the neutrality of the United States.”
That national emergency can take any form, can be manipulated for any purpose and can be used to justify any end goal—all on the say so of the president.
Given the government’s penchant for weaponizing one national crisis after another in order to expand its powers and justify all manner of government tyranny in the so-called name of national security, it’s only a matter of time before this particular emergency power to shut down the internet is activated.
Then again, an all-out communications blackout is just a more extreme version of the technocensorship that we’ve already been experiencing at the hands of the government and its corporate allies.
In fact, these tactics are at the heart of several critical cases before the U.S. Supreme Court over who gets to control, regulate or remove what content is shared on the internet: the individual, corporate censors or the police state.
Nothing good can come from techno-censorship.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, these censors are laying the groundwork to preempt any “dangerous” ideas that might challenge the power elite’s stranglehold over our lives.
Whatever powers you allow the government and its corporate operatives to claim now, whatever the reason might be, will at some point in the future be abused and used against you by tyrants of your own making.
By the time you add AI technologies, social credit systems, and wall-to-wall surveillance into the mix, you don’t even have to be a critic of the government to get snared in the web of digital censorship.
Eventually, as George Orwell predicted, telling the truth will become a revolutionary act.
The post Digital Kill Switches: How Tyrannical Governments Stifle Political Dissent first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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With every escalation of United States wars — whether the post-9/11 war of terror or Genocide Joe Biden’s current war on Palestine — we witness an escalation in policing and the militarization of the U.S. border. It is no coincidence that the Senate is currently discussing changes to the U.S. migration system as part of a military aid package related to Israel and Ukraine, in the name of “national…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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Finance analysts free of moral scruple can point to Palantir with relish and note that 2023 was a fairly rewarding year for it. The company, which bills itself as a “category-leading software” builder “that empowers organizations to create and govern artificial intelligence”, launched its initial public offering in 2020. But the milky confidence curdled, as with much else with tech assets, leading to the company stock falling by as much as 87% of value. But this is the sort of language that delights the economy boffins no end, a bloodless exercise that ignores what Palantir really does.
The surveillance company initially cut its teeth on agendas related to national security and law enforcement through Gotham. A rather dry summation of its services is offered by Adrew Iliadis and Amelia Acker: “The company supplies information technology solutions for data integration and tracking to police and government agencies, humanitarian organizations, and corporations.”
Founded in 2003 and unimaginatively named after the magical stones in The Lord of the Rings known as “Seeing Stones” or palantíri, its ambition was to remake the national security scape, a true fetishist project envisaging technology as deliverer and saviour. While most of its work remains painfully clandestine, it does let the occasional salivating observer, such as Portugal’s former Secretary of State or European Affairs Bruno Maçães, into its citadel to receive the appropriate indoctrination.
It’s impossible to take any commentary arising from these proselytised sorts seriously, but what follows can be intriguing. “The target coordination cycle: find, track, target, and prosecute,” Maçães writes for Time, reflecting on the technology on show at the company’s London headquarters. “As we enter the algorithmic age, time is compressed. From the moment the algorithms set to work detecting their targets until these targets are prosecuted – a term of art in the field – no more than two or three minutes elapse.” Such commentary takes the edge of the cruelty, the lethality, the sheer destruction of life that such prosecution entails.
While its stable of government clients remain important, the company also sought to further expand its base with Foundry, the commercial version of the software. “Foundry helps businesses make better decisions and solve problems, and Forrester estimated Foundry delivers a 315% return on investment (ROI) for its users,” writes Will Healy, whose commentary is, given his association with Palantir, bound to be cherubically crawling while oddly flat.
This tech beast is also claiming to march to a more moral tune, with Palantir Technologies UK Ltd announcing in April that it had formed a partnership with the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine (OPG) to “enable investigators on the ground and across Europe to share, integrate, and process all key data relating to more than 78,000 registered war crimes.”
The company’s co-founder and chief executive officer, Alexander C. Karp, nails his colours to the mast with a schoolboy’s binary simplicity. “The invasion of Ukraine represents one of the most significant challenges to the global balance of power. To that end, the crimes that are being committed in Ukraine must be prosecuted.”
Having picked the Ukrainian cause as a beneficial one, Palantir revealed that it was “already helping Ukraine militarily, and supporting the resettlement of refugees in the UK, Poland and in Lithuania.” For Karp, “Software is a product of the legal and moral order in which it is created, and plays a role in defending it.”
Such gnomic statements are best kept in the spittoon of history, mere meaningless splutter, but if they are taken seriously, Karp is in trouble. He is one who has admitted with sissy’s glee that the “core mission of our company always was to make the West, especially America, the strongest in the world, the strongest it’s ever been, for the sake of global peace and prosperity”. Typically, such money-minded megalomaniacs tend to confuse personal wealth and a robber baron’s acquisitiveness with the more collective goals of peace and security. Murdering thieves can be most moral, even as they carry out their sordid tasks with silver tongs.
When Google dropped Project Maven, the US Department of Defense program that riled employees within the company, Palantir was happy to offer its services. It did not matter one jot that the project, known in Palantir circles as “Tron”, was designed to train AI to analyse aerial drone footage to enable the identification of objects and human beings (again bloodless, chilling, instrumental). “It’s commonly known that our software is used in an operational context at war,” Karp is reported as saying. “Do you really think a war fighter is going to trust a software company that pulls the plug because something becomes controversial with their life? Currently, when you’re a war fighter your life depends on your software.”
War is merely one context where Palantir dirties the terrain of policy. In 2020, Amnesty International published a report outlining the various human rights risks arising from Palantir’s contracts with the US Department of Homeland Security. Of particular concern were associated products and services stemming from its Homeland Security Investigations (HIS) division of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Human rights groups such as Mijente, along with a number of investors, have also noted that such contracts enable ICE to prosecute such activities as surveillance, detentions, raids, de facto family separations and deportations.
In 2023, protests by hundreds of UK health workers managed to shut down the central London headquarters of the tech behemoth. The workers in question were protesting the award of a £330 million contract to Palantir by the National Health Service (NHS) England. Many felt particularly riled at the company, given its role in furnishing the Israeli government with such military and surveillance technology, including predictive policing services. The latter are used to analyse social media posts by Palestinians that might reveal threats to public order or praise for “hostile” entities.
As Gaza is being flattened and gradually exterminated by Israeli arms, Palantir remains loyal, even stubbornly so. “We are one of the few companies in the world to stand and announce our support for Israel, which remains steadfast,” the company stated in a letter to shareholders. With a record now well washed in blood, the company deserves a global protest movement that blocks its appeal and encourages a shareholder exodus.
The post Amoral Compass: Palantir and its Quest to Remake the World first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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In the past 15 years, policing has grown its reach, largely through an array of technologies that record and store our personal details and daily activities. Using algorithms and other formulae, authorities are able to repurpose data to meet the emerging demands of the criminal legal and immigration systems. From predictive policing to GPS-enabled ankle monitors to gunshot trackers to massive…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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In the wake of the Trump-inspired siege on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, many liberals have called for wide-ranging investigations and prosecutions of the “insurrectionists” as a way of condemning political extremism and restoring public respect for the “rule of law.” On its face, this appears to be a progressive intervention aimed at reducing the power of growing right-wing nationalist…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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The House passed this year’s National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) on Thursday, with only a few dozen Democrats and progressives voting against the package that authorizes a record-setting $886 billion in military spending for 2024 and the extension of a mass surveillance measure that has raised alarm over the trampling of civil liberties in the U.S. The bill passed 310 to 118…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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It is hard for those who have not lived through the shattering political assassinations of the 1960s to grasp their significance for today. Many might assume that that was then and long before their time, so let’s move on to what we must deal with today. Let some old folks, the obsessive ones, live in the past. It is an understandable but mistaken attitude that this documentary will quickly shatter, visually and audibly. The echoes of those guns that killed President John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Senator Robert F. Kennedy in rapid succession repeat and repeat and repeat down through the years, and their echoes bang off the walls of all today’s news that springs from the cells of all the little digital dinguses that provide a constant stream of distractions and fear porn meant to titillate but not illuminate the connections between then and now, nor those between the four subjects of this illuminating film.
Today we are living the consequences of the CIA/national security state’s 1960s takeover of the country. Their message then and now: We, the national security state, rule, we have the guns, the media, and the power to dominate you. We control the stories you are meant to hear. If you get uppity, well-known, and dare challenge us, we will buy you off, denigrate you, or, if neither works, we will kill you. You are helpless, they reiterate endlessly. Bang. Bang. Bang.
But they lie, and this series, beginning with its first installment (see sneak peek here), will tell you why. It will show why understanding the past is essential for transforming the present. It will profoundly inspire you to see and hear these four bold and courageous men refuse to back down to the evil forces that shot them down. It will open your eyes to the parallel spiritual paths they walked and the similarity of the messages they talked about – peace, justice, racism, human rights, and the need for economic equality – not just in the U.S.A. but across the world, for the fate of all people was then, and is now, linked to the need to transform the U.S. warfare state into a country of peace and human reconciliation, just as these four men radically underwent deep transformations in the last year of their brief lives.
Four Died Trying, directed by John Kirby, the wonderful filmmaker who made The American Ruling Class with and about Lewis Lapham, and produced by Libby Handros, his partner in exposing the criminals that run the country, has just begun streaming.
As I watched the first twenty minutes of this opening episode, I was inwardly screaming, feeling deep in my soul how powerfully the film was capturing the essence of the dynamic, prophetic, and charismatic voices of JFK, Malcolm X, MLK, Jr., and RFK. All shot down – we hear the gun shots – by deep state forces, even as the film artfully juxtaposes this brutality against video clips of new reports, images of advertisements for silly products, and television shows that kept most of the public entertained and distracted during the 1960s carnage. Doing the Hokey Pokey, as the soundtrack plays it, but not turning around in a profound sense, as did the four who died trying to radically change the country and the world for the better. Simply as film art, this documentary is ingenious. And its use of music is great.
I was transported back to the time of my youth. I was startled again by the powerful courage, passion, and eloquent intelligence of those four compelling voices that once lifted my spirits to the heavens, and I felt the despair as well as each assassination followed the other and my spirits sank. It is not nostalgic, I am sure, to say that one is hard pressed to find those qualities in many leaders today. Like others of my generation, I am still trying to grasp the depths of what their assassinations did to me. Bob Dylan, who came to prominence in the midst of it all, referring ironically to his own life and work, has said that his first girlfriend was named Echo. I think I know her, for she echoed down the canyons of my mind as I watched this prologue and continues as I now reflect upon it.
So it does get hard to be objective, if that is what you want. I don’t. This not-to-be-missed film is truthful, for it uses vintage footage of what these men said and what was said against them by a government/media intent of distorting their messages and their assassinations. Listen and then research if you have any doubts. See if the film is truthful or manipulative, As one who has deeply studied these matters, I can attest to the former.
And I can tell you that if you are young and never knew about these four guys and what men they were – not in any macho sense, but as true lovers of human beings, men with chests, as C.S. Lewis described those who were true and brave and undaunted by the then current vibes that sucked the soul out of you, not pseudo-men in the “pumping iron” sense, not men who tried to appeal to your grossest stereotypes – you are in for a great surprise. You will yearn to see them resurrected in others today. In yourselves. As Malcolm X said hopefully, “The dead are arising.”
This 58 minute prologue touches on many themes that will follow in the months ahead. Season One will be divided into chapters that cover the four assassinations together with background material covering “the world as it was” in the 1950s with its Cold War propaganda, McCarthyism, the rise of the military-industrial complex, the CIA, red-baiting, and the ever present fear of nuclear war. Season Two will be devoted to the government and media cover-ups, citizen investigations, and the intelligence agencies’ and their media mouthpieces’ mind control operations aimed at the American people that continue today.
One important aspect of this documentary series – never before done in film – is the way it shows the linkages between these four great leaders. Beside their own words, we hear from their families and associates throughout. Based on over 120 interviews conducted over many years, we hear from the four men’s children, Vince Salandria, James W. Douglass, Mort Sahl, Harry Belafonte, Khaleed Sayyed, Earl Caldwell, Clarence Jones, James Galbraith, John Hunt, Stephen Schlesinger, Andrew Young, Oliver Stone, David Talbot, Adam Walinsky, et al. It is an amazing list of thoughtful commentators who tell the story for the dead men whose living tongues have been silenced, although we are privileged for their fatidic cinematic ghosts to speak to us through archival footage.
In this opening Prologue, I was especially impressed with the words of Vince Salandria, one of the earliest critics of the Warren Commission’s absurd claims, and Adam Walinsky, a former aide and speechwriter for RFK, who made it clear that we are free, no matter what the propagandists tell us. That freedom to think and act, to make connections between then and now, to see the linkages between the four men’s messages and today, is crucial to carry on their legacy. That message ends the Prologue. It is a message of hope in a dark time.
This opening prologue is divided into four parts, each devoted to what each man tried to accomplish. That is followed by a section on how they died and the ways it was buried, ending with an Epilogue on why they died and why it matters today.
All four died fighting the international power structure, the CIA and FBI, the military-industrial complex, the racist ideology central to the capitalist elites’ economic injustice and warfare state – those deep structures of power that have come to be called the deep state. They were brothers in arms, their only weapons being their linked arms in a spiritual war against evil forces. They were men of compassionate conscience, warriors for peace and justice for all. That is why they were killed.
Four Died Trying is a profound documentary. It is good that each episode will be a stand-alone short film – that gives the viewer time to absorb its lessons rather than bringing on too much too soon. Once you watch this prologue, with its overview of all to come, you will be hooked. It is not just revelatory history, but is artistically made, and, dare I say, entertaining. Kirby and Handros are astute to realize that young people demand more than lectures, and it is to the next generations that these voices must be addressed. For although the times have changed, in so many ways we are today faced with all the same problems. The deep wounds of the 1960s were never given careful treatment; they are now suppurating and the infection is spreading.
Then and now. There is a powerful clip in the film of Senator Robert Kennedy giving a speech in Chicago when he has decided to enter the race for the presidency right after the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, a massive breakout surprise to U.S. authorities who thought they could contain and defeat the Vietnamese struggle for independence; that they had them trapped. Kennedy has decided to enter the race for President and realizes that supporting a corrupt South Vietnamese government and their ruthless policies aimed at exterminating the Vietcong and North Vietnamese is morally wrong and runs counter to American attestations of the belief in democracy and justice for all. He says about such an impossible military victory:
. . . and that the effort to win such a victory will only result in the further slaughter of thousands of innocent and helpless people—a slaughter which will forever rest on all our consciences and the national conscience of the country.
His was a powerful moral voice. Who is standing with the innocent and helpless people today? And who is standing with the killers? As Martin Luther King, Jr., put it, “A time comes when silence is betrayal.” And procrastination is still the thief of time and conscience whispers those pathetic words: Too Late.
Don’t miss Four Died Trying. I am sure it will affect you deeply and force you to think twice over about what is going on today.
Yes, then and now. To slightly alter the song, As Time Goes By:
The post Hideous Times of High Hope first appeared on Dissident Voice.It’s still the same old story.
A fight for love and glory.
A case of do and die.
The world will always welcome lovers
As time goes by.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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Once a dictator, always a dictator.
Power-hungry, lawless and steadfast in its pursuit of authoritarian powers, the government does not voluntarily relinquish those powers once it acquires, uses and inevitably abuses them.
Likewise, any presidential candidate who promises to be a dictator on day one, if elected, will be a dictator-in-chief for life.
Then again, the president is already a dictator with permanent powers: imperial, unaccountable and unconstitutional thanks to a relatively obscure directive (National Security Presidential Directive 51 and Homeland Security Presidential Directive 20), part of the country’s Continuity of Government (COG) plan, which gives unchecked executive, legislative and judicial power to the president in the event of a “national emergency.”
That national emergency can take any form, can be manipulated for any purpose and can be used to justify any end goal—all on the say so of the president.
It doesn’t even matter what the nature of the crisis might be—civil unrest, the national emergencies, “unforeseen economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order, purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters”—as long as it allows the government to justify all manner of government tyranny in the name of so-called national security.
The country would then be subjected to martial law by default, and the Constitution and the Bill of Rights would be suspended.
For all intents and purposes, the Constitution has long been suspended, and we’ve been operating in a state of martial law for some time now.
The emergency powers that we know about which presidents might claim during such states of emergency are vast, ranging from imposing martial law and suspending habeas corpus to shutting down all forms of communications, including implementing an internet kill switch, and restricting travel.
Yet according to documents obtained by the Brennan Center, there may be many more secret powers that presidents may institute in times of so-called crisis without oversight from Congress, the courts, or the public.
Deploying the same strategy it used with 9/11 to acquire greater powers under the USA Patriot Act, the police state—a.k.a. the shadow government, a.k.a. the Deep State—has been planning and preparing for such crises for years now, quietly assembling a wish list of presidential lockdown powers that could be trotted out and approved at a moment’s notice.
We’re talking about lockdown powers (at both the federal and state level): 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, “stop and seize any plane, train or automobile to stymie the spread of contagious disease,” reshape financial markets, create a digital currency (and thus further restrict the use of cash), determine who should live or die.
Mind you, the police state with the president at its helm has been riding roughshod over the rule of law for years now without any pretense of being reined in or restricted in its power grabs by Congress, the courts or the citizenry.
Although the Constitution invests the President with very specific, limited powers, in recent years, American presidents have claimed the power to completely and almost unilaterally alter the landscape of this country for good or for ill.
The powers amassed by each successive president through the negligence of Congress and the courts—powers which add up to a toolbox of terror for an imperial ruler—empower whoever occupies the Oval Office to act as a dictator, above the law and beyond any real accountability.
All of the imperial powers amassed by past presidents—to kill American citizens without due process, to detain suspects indefinitely, to strip Americans of their citizenship rights, to carry out mass surveillance on Americans without probable cause, to suspend laws during wartime, to disregard laws with which he might disagree, to conduct secret wars and convene secret courts, to sanction torture, to sidestep the legislatures and courts with executive orders and signing statements, to direct the military to operate beyond the reach of the law, to operate a shadow government, and to act as a dictator and a tyrant, above the law and beyond any real accountability—were passed from Clinton to Bush to Obama to Trump to Biden and will be passed along to the next president.
These presidential powers—acquired through the use of executive orders, decrees, memorandums, proclamations, national security directives and legislative signing statements and which can be activated by any sitting president—enable past, president and future presidents to operate above the law and beyond the reach of the Constitution.
These are the powers that continue to be passed along to each successive heir to the Oval Office, the Constitution be damned.
The war on disinformation, the war on electoral corruption, the war on CO
VID-19, the war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on illegal immigration: all of these countermeasures have become weapons of compliance and control in the police state’s hands.
This is what you might call a stealthy, creeping, silent, slow-motion coup d’état.
If we continue down this road, there can be no surprise about what awaits us at the end.
After all, it is a tale that has been told time and again throughout history about how easy it is for freedom to fall and tyranny to rise.
What we desperately need is a concerted, collective commitment to the Constitution’s principles of limited government, a system of checks and balances, and a recognition that they—the president, Congress, the courts, the military, the police, the technocrats and plutocrats and bureaucrats—answer to and are accountable to “we the people.”
We must recalibrate the balance of power.
Congress must also put an end to the use of presidential executive orders, decrees, memorandums, proclamations, national security directives and legislative signing statements as a means of getting around Congress and the courts.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely—no matter which party holds office.
The process of unseating a dictator and limiting the powers of the presidency is far from simple but at a minimum, it must start with “we the people.”
Make the government play by the rules of the Constitution.
The post We’ve Already Got a Dictator-in-Chief: How Absolute Power Corrupted the President first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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Privacy advocates on Saturday said the AI Act, a sweeping proposed law to regulate artificial intelligence in the European Union whose language was finalized Friday, appeared likely to fail at protecting the public from one of AI’s greatest threats: live facial recognition. Representatives of the European Commission spent 37 hours this week negotiating provisions in the AI Act with the European…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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The commercial world is proving not only that it can provide critical intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance to nation states, but also that it has the ability to rapidly develop and adapt its technology to a wide variety of missions. The war in Ukraine has illustrated from the outset, quite publicly, the role that satellites are […]
The post Commercial Satellites Take the Secrecy Out of ISR appeared first on Asian Military Review.
This post was originally published on Asian Military Review.
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The commercial world is proving not only that it can provide critical intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance to nation states, but also that it has the ability to rapidly develop and adapt its technology to a wide variety of missions. The war in Ukraine has illustrated from the outset, quite publicly, the role that satellites are […]
The post Commercial Satellites Take the Secrecy Out of ISR appeared first on Asian Military Review.
This post was originally published on Asian Military Review.
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The commercial world is proving not only that it can provide critical intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance to nation states, but also that it has the ability to rapidly develop and adapt its technology to a wide variety of missions. The war in Ukraine has illustrated from the outset, quite publicly, the role that satellites are […]
The post Commercial Satellites Take the Secrecy Out of ISR appeared first on Asian Military Review.
This post was originally published on Asian Military Review.
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The government wants us to believe that we have nothing to fear from its mass spying programs as long as we’ve done nothing wrong.
Don’t believe it.
It doesn’t matter whether you obey every law. The government’s definition of a “bad” guy is extraordinarily broad, and it results in the warrantless surveillance of innocent, law-abiding Americans on a staggering scale.
For instance, it was recently revealed that the White House, relying on a set of privacy loopholes, has been sidestepping the Fourth Amendment by paying AT&T to allow federal, state, and local law enforcement to access—without a warrant—the phone records of Americans who are not suspected of a crime.
This goes way beyond the NSA’s metadata collection program.
Operated during the Obama, Trump and now the Biden presidencies, this secret dragnet surveillance program (formerly known as Hemisphere and now dubbed Data Analytical Services) uses its association with the White House to sidestep a vast array of privacy and transparency laws.
According to Senator Ron Wyden, Hemisphere has been operating without any oversight for more than a decade under the guise of cracking down on drug traffickers.
This is how the government routinely breaks the law and gets away with it: in the so-called name of national security.
More than a trillion domestic phone records are mined through this mass surveillance program every year, warrantlessly targeting not only those suspected of criminal activity but anyone with whom they might have contact, including spouses, children, parents, and friends.
It’s not just law enforcement agencies investigating drug crimes who are using Hemisphere to sidestep the Fourth Amendment, either. Those who have received training on the program reportedly include postal workers, prison officials, highway patrol officers, border cops, and the National Guard.
It’s a program ripe for abuse, and you can bet it’s getting abused.
Surveillance, digital stalking and the data mining of the American people—weapons of compliance and control in the government’s hands—haven’t made America any safer, and they certainly aren’t helping to preserve our freedoms.
Indeed, America will never be safe as long as the U.S. government is allowed to shred the Constitution.
The Fourth Amendment was intended to serve as a protective forcefield around our persons, our property, our activities, our communications and our movements. It keeps the government out of our private business except in certain, extenuating circumstances.
Those extenuating circumstances are spelled out clearly: government officials must have probable cause that criminal activity is afoot (a higher legal standard than “reasonable suspicion”), which is required by the Constitution before any government official can search an individual or his property.
Unfortunately, all three branches of government—the legislatures, courts and executive offices—have given the police state all kinds of leeway when it comes to sidestepping the Fourth Amendment.
As a result, on a daily basis, Americans are already being made to relinquish the most intimate details of who we are—our biological makeup, our genetic blueprints, and our biometrics (facial characteristics and structure, fingerprints, iris scans, etc.)—in order to clear the nearly insurmountable hurdle that increasingly defines life in the United States: we are now guilty until proven innocent.
Warrantless, dragnet surveillance is the manifestation of a lawless government that has gone rogue in its determination to do whatever it wants, whenever it wants, the Constitution be damned.
This creepy new era of government/corporate spying—in which we’re being listened to, watched, tracked, followed, mapped, bought, sold and targeted every second of every day—has been made possible by a global army of techno-tyrants, electronic eavesdroppers, robotic snoops and digital Peeping Toms.
The government has a veritable arsenal of surveillance tools to track our movements, monitor our spending, and sniff out all the ways in which our thoughts, actions and social circles might land us on the government’s naughty list, whether or not you’ve done anything wrong.
Rounding out the list of ways in which the Techno-Corporate State and the U.S. government are colluding to nullify the privacy rights of the individual is the Biden Administration’s latest drive to harness the power of artificial intelligence technologies while claiming to protect the citizenry from harm.
In his executive order on artificial intelligence, President Biden is calling for guidelines on how the government will use AI while simultaneously insisting that corporations protect consumer privacy.
Talk about ironic that the very government that has been covertly invading our privacy rights wants to appoint itself the guardian of those rights.
Tell me this: how do you trust a government that continuously sidesteps the Constitution and undermines our rights? You can’t.
A government that repeatedly lies, cheats, steals, spies, kills, maims, enslaves, breaks the laws, overreaches its authority, and abuses its power at almost every turn can’t be trusted.
At a minimum, you shouldn’t trust the government with your privacy, property or freedoms.
Whatever else it may be—a danger, a menace, a threat—the U.S. government is certainly not looking out for our best interests.
Remember the purpose of a good government is to protect the lives and liberties of its people.
Unfortunately, what we have been saddled with is, in almost every regard, the exact opposite of an institution dedicated to protecting the lives and liberties of its people.
All of those freedoms we cherish—the ones enshrined in the Constitution, the ones that affirm our right to free speech and assembly, due process, privacy, bodily integrity, the right to not have police seize our property without a warrant, or search and detain us without probable cause—amount to nothing when the government and its agents are allowed to disregard those prohibitions on government overreach at will.
This is the grim reality of life in the American police state: our so-called rights have been reduced to technicalities in the face of the government’s ongoing power grabs.
With every court ruling that allows the government to operate above the rule of law, every piece of legislation that limits our freedoms, and every act of government wrongdoing that goes unpunished, we’re slowly being conditioned to a society in which the Constitution means nothing.
What we need is a digital “No Trespassing” sign that protects our privacy rights and affirms our right to be left alone.
Then again, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, what we really need is a government that respects the rights of the citizenry and obeys the law.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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REVIEW: By David Robie
Just months before the outbreak of the genocidal Israeli war on Gaza after the deadly assault on southern Israel by Hamas resistance fighters, Australian investigative journalist and researcher Anthony Loewenstein published an extraordinarily timely book, The Palestine Laboratory.
In it he warned that a worst-case scenario — “long feared but never realised, is ethnic cleansing against occupied Palestinians or population transfer, forcible expulsion under the guise of national security”.
Or the claimed fig leaf of “self defence”, the obscene justification offered by beleaguered Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for his two-month war of vengeance, death and destruction unleashed upon the people of Palestine, both in the Gaza Strip and the Occupied West Bank that has killed at least 14,850 Gazans — the majority of them women and children — and more than 218 West Bank Palestinians.
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As Loewenstein had warned in his 265-page exposé on the Israeli armaments and surveillance industry and how the Zionist nation “exports the technology of occupation around the world”, a catastrophic war could trigger an overwhelming argument within Israel that Palestinians were “undermining the state’s integrity”.
That catastrophe has indeed arrived. But in the process as part of growing worldwide protests in support of an immediate ceasefire and calls for a “free Palestine” long-term solution, Israel has exposed itself as a cruel, ruthless and morally corrupt state prepared to slaughter women and children, attack hospital and medical workers, kill journalists and shun international norms of military conflict to achieve its goal of destroying Hamas, the elected government of Gaza.
Author Antony Loewenstein . . . Gaza is the most most devastating conflict in eight decades since the Second World War. Image: AJ screenshot APR Interviewed by Al Jazeera today after a four-day temporary truce between Israel and Hamas took effect, author Loewenstein described the conflict as “apocalyptic” and the most devastating in almost 80 years since the Second World War.
He also blamed the death and destruction on Western countries that had allowed the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) to “get away with things that no other country could because of total global impunity”.
‘Genocide Joe’
The United States, led by a feeble and increasingly lame duck President Joe Biden – “genocide Joe”, as some US protesters have branded him — and several Western countries have lost credibility over any debate about global human rights.As Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan says, the US and the West have enabled the ethnic cleansing and displayed a double standard by condemning Hamas for its atrocities on October 7 while giving Israel a blank cheque for its crimes against humanity and war crimes in both Gaza and the Occupied West Bank.
The Israeli-Palestinian captives exchange deal mediated by Qatar. Image: AJ screenshot APR In fact, as Erdoğan has increasingly condemned the Zionists, he has branded Israel as a “terror state” and says that Israeli leaders should be tried for war crimes at the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
It has also been disturbing that President Biden has publicly repeated Israeli lies in the conflict and Western media has often disseminated these falsehoods.
Media analysts say there is systemic “bias in favour of Israel” which is “irreparably damaging” the credibility of some news agencies and outlets considered “mainstream” in the eyes of Arabs and others.
Loewenstein warned in his book before the conflict began that “an Israeli operation might be undertaken to ensure a mass exodus, with the prospect of Palestinians returning to their homes a remote possibility” (p. 211).Many critics fear the bottom line for Israel’s war on Palestine, is not just the elimination of Hamas — which was elected the government of Gaza in 2006 — but the destruction of the enclave’s infrastructure, hence the savage assault on 25 of the Strip’s 32 hospitals (including the Indonesian Hospital) and bombing of 49 percent of the housing for 2.3 million people.
Loewenstein reports:
“In a 2016 poll conducted by [the] Pew Research Centre, nearly half of Israeli Jews supported the transfer or expulsion of Arabs. And some 60 percent of Israeli Jews backed complete separation from Arabs, according to a study in 2022 by the Israeli Democracy Institute. The majority of Israeli Jews polled online in 2022 supported the expulsion of people accused of disloyalty to the state, a policy advocated by popular far-right politician Itamar Ben-Gvir (p. 211).
Dangerous escalation
Loewenstein saw the reelection in November 2022 of Netanyahu as Prime Minister and as head of the most right-wing coalition in the Israel’s history as ushering in a dangerous escalation of existential threats facing Palestinians.The author cites liberal Israeli columnist and journalist Gideon Levy in Haaretz reminding his readers of “an uncomfortable truth” after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Levy wrote that the long-held Israeli belief that military power “was all that matters to stay alive , was a lie” (p. 206). Levy wrote”
“The lesson Israel should be learning from Ukraine is the opposite. Military power is not enough, it is impossible to survive alone, we need true international support, which can’t be bought just be developing drones and drop bombs.”
Levy argued that the “age of the Jewish state paralysing the world when it cries “anti-semitism” was coming to a close.
The daily television scenes — especially on Al Jazeera and TRT World News, arguably offering the most balanced, comprehensive and nuanced coverage of the massacres — have borne witness to the rogue status of Israel.
Nizar Sadawi of Turkey’s TRT World News, one of the few Arabic speaking and courageous journalists working at great risk for a world news service. Image: TRT screenshot APR Turkey’s President Erdoğan has been one of the strongest critics of Netanyahu’s war machine, warning that Israel’s leaders will be made accountable for their war crimes.
His condemnation has been paralleled by multiple petitions and actions seeking International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutions against Israeli leaders, including an arrest warrant for Netanyahu himself.
Toxic laboratory
According to Loewenstein, Israel’s “Palestine laboratory” and its toxic ideology thrives on global disruption and violence. As he says:“The worsening climate crisis will benefit Israel’s defence sector in a future where nation-states do not respond with active measures to reduce the impacts of surging temperatures but instead ghetto-ise themselves, Israeli-style. What this means in practice is higher walls and tighter borders, greater surveillance of refugees, facial recognition, drones, smart fences, and biometric databases (p. 207).”
By 2025, Loewenstein points out, the border surveillance industrial complex is estimated to become worth US$68 billion, and Israeli companies such as Elbeit Systems are “guaranteed to be among the main beneficiaries.”
Three years ago Israel spent $US22 billion on its military and was is 12th biggest military supplier in the world with sales of more than $US345 million.
The potency of Palestine as a laboratory for methods of controlling “unwanted people” and a separation of populations is the primary focus of Loewenstein’s book. The many case studies of Israeli apartheid with corporations showcasing and profiting from the suppression and persecution of Palestinians are featured.
The book is divided into seven chapters, with a conclusion, headed “Selling weapons to anybody who wants them,” “September 11 was good for business,” “Preventing an outbreak of peace,” “Selling Israeli occupation to the world,” “The enduring appeal of Israeli domination,” “Israel mass surveillance in the brain of your phone,” and “Social media companies don’t like Palestinians.”
How Israel has such influence over Silicon Valley — along with many Western governments — is “both obvious and ominous for the future of marginalised groups, because it is not just the Jewish state that has discovered the Achilles heel of big tech”.
‘Real harm’ against minorities
Examples cited by Loewenstein include India under Prime Minister Narendra Modi successfully demanding that Facebook remove posts critical of his government’s handling of the covid pandemic of 2020, and evidence of Facebook posts causing “real harm against minorities” in Myanmar and Russia as well as India and Palestine.The company’s global policy team argued that they risked having the platform shutdown completely if they did not comply with government requests. Profits before human rights.
Loewenstein refers to social media calls for genocide against the Muslim minority having “moved from the fringes to the mainstream”. Condemning this, Loewenstein remarks: “Leaving these comments up, which routinely happens, is deeply irresponsible” (p. 197).
He argues that his book is a warning that “despotism has never been so easily shareable with compact technology”. He explains:
“The ethnonationalist ideas behind it are appealing to millions of people because democratic leaders have failed to deliver. A Pew Research Centre survey across 34 countries in 2020 found only 44 percent of those polled were content with democracy, while 52 percent were not. Ethnonationalist ideology grows when accountable democracy withers, Israel is the ultimate model and goal” (p. 16).
The September 11, 2001, terror attacks on New York and Washington “turbocharged Israel’s defence sector and internationalised the war on terror that the Jewish state had been fighting for decades” (p. 49).
Grief for one of the 48 journalists killed by Israel during the seven weeks of bombardment. Image: RSF screenshot War against journalists
Along with health workers (200 killed and the total climbing), journalists have suffering a heavy price for reporting Israel’s relentless bombardment with at least 48 dead (including media workers in Lebanon, the death toll has topped 60).The Paris-based media freedom watchdog Reporters without Borders has accused Israel of seeking to “eradicate journalism in Gaza” by refusing to heed calls to protect media workers.
“The situation is dire for Palestinian journalists trapped in the enclave, where ten have been killed in the past three days, bringing the total media death toll in Gaza since the start of the war to 48. The past weekend was the deadliest for the media since the war between Israel and Hamas began.”
RSF also said Gaza from north to south had “become a cemetery for journalists”.
Of the 10 journalists killed between November 18-20, at least three were killed in the course of their work or because of it. They were: Hassouna Sleem, director of the Palestinian online news agency Quds News, and freelance photo-journalist Sary Mansour who were killed during an Israeli assault on the Bureij refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip on November 18.
According to RSF, they had received an online death threat in connection with their work 24 hours prior to them being killed.
Journalist Bilal Jadallah was killed by an Israeli strike that hit his car directly as he was trying to evacuate from Gaza City via the district of Zeitoun on the morning of November 19.
He was a prominent figure within the Palestinian media community and held several positions including chair of the board of Press House-Palestine, an organisation supporting independent media and journalists in Gaza.
Global protests have been growing with demands in many countries for a complete ceasefire to the attack on Gaza. Image: TRT screenshot APR Killed with family members
Most of the journalists were killed with family members when Israeli strikes hit their homes, reports RSF.It is offensive that British and US news media should refer to Hamas “terrorists” in their news bulletins, regardless of the fact that the US and UK governments have declared them as such.
As a former journalist with British and French news agencies for several years, I wonder what has happened to the maxim that had applied since the post-Second World War anticolonialism struggles — one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter. Thus “neutral” descriptions were generally used.
As President Erdoğan, has already pointed out, Hamas are nationalists fighting against 75 years of Zionist Israeli colonialism and apartheid. Palestine is the occupied territory; Israel is the illegal occupier.
Loewenstein argues in his book that Israel has sold so much defence equipment and surveillance technologies, such as the phone-hacking tool Pegasus, that it had hoped to “insulate itself” from any political backlash to its endless occupation.
However, the tide has turned with several countries such as South Africa and Turkey closing Israeli embassies and recalling their diplomats and as demonstrated by the UN General Assembly’s overwhelming vote last month for an immediate humanitarian truce.
There is a shift in global opinion in response to the massive price that the Palestinian people have been paying for Israeli apartheid and repression for 75 years. While Iran has long been portrayed by the West as a threat to regional peace, the relentless and ruthless bombardment of the Gaza Strip for seven weeks has demonstrated to the world that Israel is actually the threat.
However, Israel is on the wrong side of history. Whatever it does, the Palestinians will remain defiant and resilient.
Palestine will become a free, sovereign state. It is essential that international community pressure ensures that this happens for a just and lasting peace.
• The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel exports the technology of occupation around the world, by Antony Loewenstein. Scribe Publications, 2023. Reviewer Dr David Robie is editor and publisher of Asia Pacific Report.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
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Federal police were issued three warrants to secretly assume control of a person’s online account last financial year to gather evidence about death threats and child abuse material, according to mandatory disclosures. The ‘account takeover warrants’ are part of controversial powers introduced in 2021 that have been utilised each year since by law enforcement agencies….
The post Federal police report covert online monitoring with new ‘takeover’ powers appeared first on InnovationAus.com.
This post was originally published on InnovationAus.com.
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Americans have become easy prey for hackers, scammers, snitches, spies, and con artists.
But don’t be fooled into thinking the government is protecting you.
To the contrary, the U.S. government is selling us (or rather, our data) to the highest bidders.
By the way, those highest bidders also include America’s political class and the politicians aspiring to get elected or re-elected. As the Los Angeles Times reports, “If you have been to a political rally, a town hall, or just fit a demographic a campaign is after, chances are good your movements are being tracked with unnerving accuracy by data vendors on the payroll of campaigns.”
Your phones, televisions and digital devices are selling you out to politicians who want your vote.
“Welcome to the new frontier of campaign tech — a loosely regulated world in which simply downloading a weather app or game, connecting to Wi-Fi at a coffee shop or powering up a home router can allow a data broker to monitor your movements with ease, then compile the location information and sell it to a political candidate who can use it to surround you with messages,” writes journalist Evan Halper.
In this way, “we the people” have been reduced to economic units to be bought, bartered and sold by all and sundry.
On a daily basis, Americans have been made to relinquish the most intimate details of who we are—our biological makeup, our genetic blueprints, and our biometrics (facial characteristics and structure, fingerprints, iris scans, etc.)—in order to navigate an increasingly technologically-enabled world.
Those intimate details, in turn, have become the building blocks of massive databases accessed by the government and its corporate partners in crime, vulnerable to data breaches by hackers, cyberattacks and espionage.
For years now, and with little real oversight or restrictions, the government has been compiling massive databases comprised of all manner of sensitive information on the citizenry.
Biographical information. Biometric information. Criminal backgrounds. Travel records.
There is not a single person in the U.S. who is not in some government database or another, and these databases are increasingly being shared between agencies, fusion centers, and the police.
The government has also, with little oversight and few guidelines, been adding to its massive trove of data on Americans by buying commercially available information (CAI) from third-party sources. As a report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence revealed:
“[Commercially purchased data] can reveal sensitive and intimate information about the personal attributes, private behavior, social connections, and speech of U.S. persons and non-U.S. persons. It can be misused to pry into private lives, ruin reputations, and cause emotional distress and threaten the safety of individuals. Even subject to appropriate controls, CAI can increase the power of the government’s ability to peer into private lives to levels that may exceed our constitutional traditions or other social expectations.”
In other words, this is the diabolically sneaky way in which the government is attempting to sidestep the Fourth Amendment, which requires that government agents have probable cause and a warrant before spying on Americans or searching and seizing their private property.
It’s bad enough that the government is building massive databases comprised of our personal information without our knowledge or consent, but then they get hacked and we suffer for it.
Earlier this year, for instance, several federal agencies, state governments and universities were targeted in a global cyberattack that compromised the sensitive data of millions of Americans.
Did that stop the government’s quest to keep building these databases which compromise our privacy and security? Of course not.
In fact, the government has also been selling our private information. According to Vice, Departments of Motor Vehicles in states around the country have been selling drivers’ personal information “to thousands of businesses, including private investigators who spy on people for a profit.”
Where there’s a will, there’s a way, and the government has become a master at finding loopholes that allow it to exploit the citizenry.
Thus, although Congress passed the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act (DPPA) in 1994 to prevent the disclosure of personal information, it hasn’t stopped state DMVs from raking in millions by selling driver data (names, dates of birth, addresses, and the cars they own) to third parties.
This is just a small part of how the government buys and sells its citizens to the highest bidders.
The why is always the same: for profit and power, of course.
Welcome to the age of surveillance capitalism.
Have you shopped at Whole Foods? Tested out target practice at a gun range? Sipped coffee at Starbucks while surfing the web? Visited an abortion clinic? Watched FOX News or MSNBC? Played Candy Crush on your phone? Walked through a mall? Walked past a government building?
That’s all it takes for your data to be hoovered up, sold and used to target you.
Incredibly, once you’ve been identified and tracked, data brokers can travel back in time, digitally speaking, to discover where you’ve been, who you’ve been with, what you’ve been doing, and what you’ve been reading, viewing, buying, etc.
Once you’ve been identified in this way, you can be tracked endlessly.
No one is spared.
In this regard, we are all equals: equally suffering the indignity of having every shred of privacy stripped away and the most intimate details of one’s life turned into fodder for marketers and data profiteers.
This creepy new era of for-profit surveillance capitalism—in which we’re being listened to, watched, tracked, followed, mapped, bought, sold and targeted—is made possible with our cooperation.
All those disclaimers you scroll though without reading them, the ones written in minute font, only to quickly click on the “Agree” button at the end so you can get to the next step—downloading software, opening up a social media account, adding a new app to your phone or computer—those signify your written consent to having your activities monitored, recorded and shared.
Think about it.
Every move you make is being monitored, mined for data, crunched, and tabulated in order to form a picture of who you are, what makes you tick, and how best to influence and/or control you.
With every smartphone we buy, every GPS device we install, every Twitter, Facebook, and Google account we open, every frequent buyer card we use for purchases—whether at the grocer’s, the yogurt shop, the airlines or the department store—and every credit and debit card we use to pay for our transactions, we’re helping Corporate America build a dossier for its government counterparts on who we know, what we think, how we spend our money, and how we spend our time.
The technology has advanced so far that marketers (political campaigns are among the worst offenders) can actually build “digital fences” around your homes, workplaces, friends and family’s homes and other places you visit in order to bombard you with specially crafted messages aimed at achieving a particular outcome.
If anyone else stalked us in this way—tailing us wherever we go, tapping into our calls, reading our correspondence, ferreting out our secrets, profiling and targeting us based on our interests and activities—we’d call the cops.
Unfortunately, the cops (equipped with Stingray devices and other Peeping Tom technologies) are also in on this particular scam.
It’s not just the surveillance and the buying and selling of your data that is worrisome.
The ramifications of a government—any government—having this much unregulated, unaccountable power to target, track, round up and detain its citizens is beyond chilling.
Imagine what a totalitarian regime such as Nazi Germany could have done with this kind of unadulterated power.
Imagine what the next police state to follow in Germany’s footsteps will do with this kind of power. Society is definitely rapidly moving in that direction.
We’ve made it so easy for the government to stalk us.
Government eyes see your every move: what you read, how much you spend, where you go, with whom you interact, when you wake up in the morning, what you’re watching on television and reading on the internet.
Every move you make is being monitored, mined for data, crunched, and tabulated in order to form a picture of who you are, what makes you tick, and how best to control you when and if it becomes necessary to bring you in line.
Chances are, as the Washington Post has reported, you have already been assigned a color-coded threat assessment score—green, yellow or red—so police are forewarned about your potential inclination to be a troublemaker depending on whether you’ve had a career in the military, posted a comment perceived as threatening on Facebook, suffer from a particular medical condition, or know someone who knows someone who might have committed a crime.
In other words, you might already be flagged as potentially anti-government in a government database somewhere—Main Core, for example—that identifies and tracks individuals (so they can be rounded up and detained in times of distress) who aren’t inclined to march in lockstep to the police state’s dictates.
The government has the know-how.
As The Intercept reported, the FBI, CIA, NSA and other government agencies are increasingly investing in and relying on corporate surveillance technologies that can mine constitutionally protected speech on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in order to identify potential extremists and predict who might engage in future acts of anti-government behavior.
Surveillance, digital stalking and the data mining of the American people—weapons of compliance and control in the government’s hands, especially when the government can listen in on your phone calls, monitor your driving habits, track your movements, scrutinize your purchases and peer through the walls of your home—add up to a society in which there’s little room for indiscretions, imperfections, or acts of independence.
This is the creepy, calculating yet diabolical genius of the American police state: the very technology we hailed as revolutionary and liberating has become our prison, jailer, probation officer, stalker, Big Brother and Father Knows Best all rolled into one.
It turns out that we are Soylent Green.
The 1973 film of the same name, starring Charlton Heston and Edward G. Robinson, is set in 2022 in an overpopulated, polluted, starving New York City whose inhabitants depend on synthetic foods manufactured by the Soylent Corporation for survival.
Heston plays a policeman investigating a murder, who discovers the grisly truth about the primary ingredient in the wafer, soylent green, which is the principal source of nourishment for a starved population. “It’s people. Soylent Green is made out of people,” declares Heston’s character. “They’re making our food out of people. Next thing they’ll be breeding us like cattle for food.”
Oh, how right he was.
Soylent Green is indeed people or, in our case, Soylent Green is our own personal data, repossessed, repackaged and used by corporations and the government to entrap us.
We, too, are being bred like cattle but not for food.
Rather, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we’re being bred, branded, bought and sold for our data.
As the insidious partnership between the U.S. government and Corporate America grows more invasive and more subtle with every passing day, there’s virtually no way to opt out of these assaults on your digital privacy short of being a modern-day Luddite, completely disconnected from all technology.
What we desperately lack and urgently need is an Electronic Bill of Rights that protects “we the people” from predatory surveillance and data-mining business practices.
Without constitutional protections in place to guard against encroachments on our rights in the electronic realm, it won’t be long before we find ourselves, much like Edward G. Robinson’s character in Soylent Green, looking back on the past with longing, back to an age where we could speak to whom we wanted, buy what we wanted, think what we wanted without those thoughts, words and activities being tracked, processed and stored by corporate giants such as Google, sold to government agencies such as the NSA and CIA, and used against us by militarized police with their army of futuristic technologies.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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Americans have become easy prey for hackers, scammers, snitches, spies, and con artists.
But don’t be fooled into thinking the government is protecting you.
To the contrary, the U.S. government is selling us (or rather, our data) to the highest bidders.
By the way, those highest bidders also include America’s political class and the politicians aspiring to get elected or re-elected. As the Los Angeles Times reports, “If you have been to a political rally, a town hall, or just fit a demographic a campaign is after, chances are good your movements are being tracked with unnerving accuracy by data vendors on the payroll of campaigns.”
Your phones, televisions and digital devices are selling you out to politicians who want your vote.
“Welcome to the new frontier of campaign tech — a loosely regulated world in which simply downloading a weather app or game, connecting to Wi-Fi at a coffee shop or powering up a home router can allow a data broker to monitor your movements with ease, then compile the location information and sell it to a political candidate who can use it to surround you with messages,” writes journalist Evan Halper.
In this way, “we the people” have been reduced to economic units to be bought, bartered and sold by all and sundry.
On a daily basis, Americans have been made to relinquish the most intimate details of who we are—our biological makeup, our genetic blueprints, and our biometrics (facial characteristics and structure, fingerprints, iris scans, etc.)—in order to navigate an increasingly technologically-enabled world.
Those intimate details, in turn, have become the building blocks of massive databases accessed by the government and its corporate partners in crime, vulnerable to data breaches by hackers, cyberattacks and espionage.
For years now, and with little real oversight or restrictions, the government has been compiling massive databases comprised of all manner of sensitive information on the citizenry.
Biographical information. Biometric information. Criminal backgrounds. Travel records.
There is not a single person in the U.S. who is not in some government database or another, and these databases are increasingly being shared between agencies, fusion centers, and the police.
The government has also, with little oversight and few guidelines, been adding to its massive trove of data on Americans by buying commercially available information (CAI) from third-party sources. As a report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence revealed:
“[Commercially purchased data] can reveal sensitive and intimate information about the personal attributes, private behavior, social connections, and speech of U.S. persons and non-U.S. persons. It can be misused to pry into private lives, ruin reputations, and cause emotional distress and threaten the safety of individuals. Even subject to appropriate controls, CAI can increase the power of the government’s ability to peer into private lives to levels that may exceed our constitutional traditions or other social expectations.”
In other words, this is the diabolically sneaky way in which the government is attempting to sidestep the Fourth Amendment, which requires that government agents have probable cause and a warrant before spying on Americans or searching and seizing their private property.
It’s bad enough that the government is building massive databases comprised of our personal information without our knowledge or consent, but then they get hacked and we suffer for it.
Earlier this year, for instance, several federal agencies, state governments and universities were targeted in a global cyberattack that compromised the sensitive data of millions of Americans.
Did that stop the government’s quest to keep building these databases which compromise our privacy and security? Of course not.
In fact, the government has also been selling our private information. According to Vice, Departments of Motor Vehicles in states around the country have been selling drivers’ personal information “to thousands of businesses, including private investigators who spy on people for a profit.”
Where there’s a will, there’s a way, and the government has become a master at finding loopholes that allow it to exploit the citizenry.
Thus, although Congress passed the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act (DPPA) in 1994 to prevent the disclosure of personal information, it hasn’t stopped state DMVs from raking in millions by selling driver data (names, dates of birth, addresses, and the cars they own) to third parties.
This is just a small part of how the government buys and sells its citizens to the highest bidders.
The why is always the same: for profit and power, of course.
Welcome to the age of surveillance capitalism.
Have you shopped at Whole Foods? Tested out target practice at a gun range? Sipped coffee at Starbucks while surfing the web? Visited an abortion clinic? Watched FOX News or MSNBC? Played Candy Crush on your phone? Walked through a mall? Walked past a government building?
That’s all it takes for your data to be hoovered up, sold and used to target you.
Incredibly, once you’ve been identified and tracked, data brokers can travel back in time, digitally speaking, to discover where you’ve been, who you’ve been with, what you’ve been doing, and what you’ve been reading, viewing, buying, etc.
Once you’ve been identified in this way, you can be tracked endlessly.
No one is spared.
In this regard, we are all equals: equally suffering the indignity of having every shred of privacy stripped away and the most intimate details of one’s life turned into fodder for marketers and data profiteers.
This creepy new era of for-profit surveillance capitalism—in which we’re being listened to, watched, tracked, followed, mapped, bought, sold and targeted—is made possible with our cooperation.
All those disclaimers you scroll though without reading them, the ones written in minute font, only to quickly click on the “Agree” button at the end so you can get to the next step—downloading software, opening up a social media account, adding a new app to your phone or computer—those signify your written consent to having your activities monitored, recorded and shared.
Think about it.
Every move you make is being monitored, mined for data, crunched, and tabulated in order to form a picture of who you are, what makes you tick, and how best to influence and/or control you.
With every smartphone we buy, every GPS device we install, every Twitter, Facebook, and Google account we open, every frequent buyer card we use for purchases—whether at the grocer’s, the yogurt shop, the airlines or the department store—and every credit and debit card we use to pay for our transactions, we’re helping Corporate America build a dossier for its government counterparts on who we know, what we think, how we spend our money, and how we spend our time.
The technology has advanced so far that marketers (political campaigns are among the worst offenders) can actually build “digital fences” around your homes, workplaces, friends and family’s homes and other places you visit in order to bombard you with specially crafted messages aimed at achieving a particular outcome.
If anyone else stalked us in this way—tailing us wherever we go, tapping into our calls, reading our correspondence, ferreting out our secrets, profiling and targeting us based on our interests and activities—we’d call the cops.
Unfortunately, the cops (equipped with Stingray devices and other Peeping Tom technologies) are also in on this particular scam.
It’s not just the surveillance and the buying and selling of your data that is worrisome.
The ramifications of a government—any government—having this much unregulated, unaccountable power to target, track, round up and detain its citizens is beyond chilling.
Imagine what a totalitarian regime such as Nazi Germany could have done with this kind of unadulterated power.
Imagine what the next police state to follow in Germany’s footsteps will do with this kind of power. Society is definitely rapidly moving in that direction.
We’ve made it so easy for the government to stalk us.
Government eyes see your every move: what you read, how much you spend, where you go, with whom you interact, when you wake up in the morning, what you’re watching on television and reading on the internet.
Every move you make is being monitored, mined for data, crunched, and tabulated in order to form a picture of who you are, what makes you tick, and how best to control you when and if it becomes necessary to bring you in line.
Chances are, as the Washington Post has reported, you have already been assigned a color-coded threat assessment score—green, yellow or red—so police are forewarned about your potential inclination to be a troublemaker depending on whether you’ve had a career in the military, posted a comment perceived as threatening on Facebook, suffer from a particular medical condition, or know someone who knows someone who might have committed a crime.
In other words, you might already be flagged as potentially anti-government in a government database somewhere—Main Core, for example—that identifies and tracks individuals (so they can be rounded up and detained in times of distress) who aren’t inclined to march in lockstep to the police state’s dictates.
The government has the know-how.
As The Intercept reported, the FBI, CIA, NSA and other government agencies are increasingly investing in and relying on corporate surveillance technologies that can mine constitutionally protected speech on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in order to identify potential extremists and predict who might engage in future acts of anti-government behavior.
Surveillance, digital stalking and the data mining of the American people—weapons of compliance and control in the government’s hands, especially when the government can listen in on your phone calls, monitor your driving habits, track your movements, scrutinize your purchases and peer through the walls of your home—add up to a society in which there’s little room for indiscretions, imperfections, or acts of independence.
This is the creepy, calculating yet diabolical genius of the American police state: the very technology we hailed as revolutionary and liberating has become our prison, jailer, probation officer, stalker, Big Brother and Father Knows Best all rolled into one.
It turns out that we are Soylent Green.
The 1973 film of the same name, starring Charlton Heston and Edward G. Robinson, is set in 2022 in an overpopulated, polluted, starving New York City whose inhabitants depend on synthetic foods manufactured by the Soylent Corporation for survival.
Heston plays a policeman investigating a murder, who discovers the grisly truth about the primary ingredient in the wafer, soylent green, which is the principal source of nourishment for a starved population. “It’s people. Soylent Green is made out of people,” declares Heston’s character. “They’re making our food out of people. Next thing they’ll be breeding us like cattle for food.”
Oh, how right he was.
Soylent Green is indeed people or, in our case, Soylent Green is our own personal data, repossessed, repackaged and used by corporations and the government to entrap us.
We, too, are being bred like cattle but not for food.
Rather, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we’re being bred, branded, bought and sold for our data.
As the insidious partnership between the U.S. government and Corporate America grows more invasive and more subtle with every passing day, there’s virtually no way to opt out of these assaults on your digital privacy short of being a modern-day Luddite, completely disconnected from all technology.
What we desperately lack and urgently need is an Electronic Bill of Rights that protects “we the people” from predatory surveillance and data-mining business practices.
Without constitutional protections in place to guard against encroachments on our rights in the electronic realm, it won’t be long before we find ourselves, much like Edward G. Robinson’s character in Soylent Green, looking back on the past with longing, back to an age where we could speak to whom we wanted, buy what we wanted, think what we wanted without those thoughts, words and activities being tracked, processed and stored by corporate giants such as Google, sold to government agencies such as the NSA and CIA, and used against us by militarized police with their army of futuristic technologies.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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Viettel High Technology Industries, a division of the Vietnamese government-owned Viettel Group, appeared at Defense & Security 2023 for the very first time. In fact, this is the first time that Asian Military Review has witnessed the technology and telecom company at any Asian defence show. Prior to the Bangkok show, Viettel had exhibited at […]
The post Viettel Makes Maiden Visit to D&S in Thailand appeared first on Asian Military Review.
This post was originally published on Asian Military Review.
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The Royal Thai Air Force (RTAF) released a request for proposals (RFP) in October for new fighters. Two of the frontrunners are Saab’s Gripen and Lockheed Martin’s F-16. Although the latter was unwilling to speak to media at Defense & Security 2023 in Bangkok, Saab executives were able to highlight the suitability of the latest […]
The post Saab Positions Gripen E for Thailand’s New Fighter Acquisition appeared first on Asian Military Review.
This post was originally published on Asian Military Review.
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Exclusive: Fraser Sampson says law is not keeping up with AI advances as police retain 3m images of innocent people
Britain is an “omni-surveillance” society with police forces in the “extraordinary” position of holding more than 3m custody photographs of innocent people more than a decade after being told to destroy them, the independent surveillance watchdog has said.
Fraser Sampson, who will end his term as the Home Office’s biometrics and surveillance commissioner this month, said there “isn’t much not being watched by somebody” in the UK and that the regulatory framework was “inconsistent, incomplete and in some areas incoherent”.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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Human rights campaigners say the Pegasus initiative wrongly criminalises people of colour, women and LGBTQ+ people
Some of Britain’s biggest retailers, including Tesco, John Lewis and Sainsbury’s, have been urged to pull out of a new policing strategy amid warnings it risks wrongly criminalising people of colour, women and LGBTQ+ people.
A coalition of 14 human rights groups has written to the main retailers – also including Marks & Spencer, the Co-op, Next, Boots and Primark – saying that their participation in a new government-backed scheme that relies heavily on facial recognition technology to combat shoplifting will “amplify existing inequalities in the criminal justice system”.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.
— Hermann Goering, German military commander and Hitler’s designated successor
For those who remember the days and months that followed 9/11, there is an unnerving feeling of déjà vu about the Hamas attacks on Israel.
The same shocking images of carnage and grief dominating the news. The same disbelief that anyone could be so hateful, so monstrous, so evil as to do this to another human being. The same outpourings of support and unity from around the world. The same shared fear that this could easily have happened to us or our loved ones.
Now once again the drums of war are sounding on the world stage, not that they ever really stopped. Israel is preparing to invade Gaza, the Palestinians are nearing a humanitarian crisis, and the rest of the world is bracing for whatever blowback comes next.
Here in the United States, as we approach the 22nd anniversary of the USA Patriot Act on October 26, we’re still grappling with the blowback that arises from allowing one’s freedoms to be eviscerated in exchange for the phantom promise of security.
Here are a few lessons that we never learned or learned too late.
Mammoth legislation that expands the government’s powers at the citizenry’s expense will not make anyone safer. Rushed through Congress a mere 45 days after the 9/11 attacks, the USA Patriot Act drove a stake through the heart of the Bill of Rights, undermined civil liberties, expanded the government’s powers and opened the door to far-reaching surveillance by the government on American citizens.
Pre-emptive strikes will only lead to further blowback. Not content to wage war against Afghanistan, which served as the base for Osama bin Laden, the U.S. embarked on a pre-emptive war against Iraq in order to “stop any adversary challenging America’s military superiority and adopt a strike-first policy against terrorist threats ‘before they’re fully formed.’” We are still suffering the consequences of this failed policy, which resulted in lives lost, taxpayer dollars wasted, the fomenting of hatred against the U.S. and the further radicalization of terrorist cells.
War is costly. There are many reasons to go to war, but those who have advocated that the U.S. remain at war, year after year, are the very entities that have profited most from these endless military occupations and exercises. Thus far, the U.S. taxpayer has been made to shell out more than $8 trillion to wage wars abroad, including the lifetime price of health care for disabled veterans and interest on the national debt. That also does not include the more than hundreds of thousands of civilians killed, or the millions displaced from their homes as a result of endless drone strikes and violence.
The tactics and weapons of war, once deployed abroad, will eventually be used against the citizenry at home. The horrors that took place at Abu Ghraib, the American-run prison in Iraq, involved “US military personnel humiliating, hurting and abusing Iraqi prisoners in a myriad of perverse ways. While American servicemen and women smiled and gave thumbs up, naked men were threatened by dogs, or were hooded, forced into sexual positions, placed standing with wires attached to their bodies, or left bleeding on prison floors.” Adding to the descent into moral depravity, the United States government legalized the use of torture, including waterboarding, in violation of international law and in the so-called pursuit of national security. The ramifications have been far-reaching, with domestic police mirroring a battlefield mindset in their encounters with American citizens, including the use of torture tactics at secret locations such as Homan Square in Chicago.
Allowing the government to spy on the citizenry will not reduce acts of terrorism, but it will result in a watched, submissive, surveillance society. Not only did the USA Patriot Act normalize the government’s mass surveillance powers, but it also dramatically expanded the government’s authority to spy on its own citizens without much of any oversight. Thus, a byproduct of this post 9/11-age in which we live, whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency is listening in and tracking your behavior. This doesn’t even begin to touch on the corporate trackers that monitor your purchases, web browsing, Facebook posts and other activities taking place in the cyber sphere. We have all become data collected in government files.
News cycle distractions are calibrated to ensure that you lose sight of what the government is doing. The average American has a hard time keeping up with and remembering all of the “events,” manufactured or otherwise, which occur like clockwork and keep us distracted, deluded, amused, and insulated from the reality of the American police state. Whether these events are critical or unimportant, when we’re being bombarded with wall-to-wall news coverage and news cycles that change every few days, it’s difficult to stay focused on one thing—namely, holding the government accountable to abiding by the rule of law—and the powers-that-be understand this. In this way, regularly scheduled trivia and/or distractions that keep the citizenry tuned into the various breaking news headlines and entertainment spectacles also keep them tuned out to the government’s steady encroachments on their freedoms.
If you stop holding the government accountable to the rule of law, the only laws it abides by will be the ones used to clamp down on the citizenry. Having failed to hold government officials accountable to abiding by the rule of law, the American people have found themselves saddled with a government that skirts, flouts and violates the Constitution with little consequence. Overcriminalization, asset forfeiture schemes, police brutality, profit-driven prisons, warrantless surveillance, SWAT team raids, indefinite detentions, covert agencies, and secret courts are just a few of the egregious practices carried out by a government that operates beyond the reach of the law.
Do not turn your country into a battlefield, your citizens into enemy combatants, and your law enforcement officers into extensions of the military. A standing army—something that propelled the early colonists into revolution—strips the citizenry of any vestige of freedom. How can there be any semblance of freedom when there are tanks in the streets, military encampments in cities, Blackhawk helicopters and armed drones patrolling overhead? It was for this reason that those who established America vested control of the military in a civilian government, with a civilian commander-in-chief. They did not want a military government, ruled by force. Rather, they opted for a republic bound by the rule of law: the U.S. Constitution. Unfortunately, we in America now find ourselves struggling to retain some semblance of freedom in the face of police and law enforcement agencies that look and act like the military and have just as little regard for the Fourth Amendment, laws such as the NDAA that allow the military to arrest and indefinitely detain American citizens, and military drills that acclimate the American people to the sight of armored tanks in the streets, military encampments in cities, and combat aircraft patrolling overhead.
As long as you remain fearful and distrustful of each other, you will be incapable of standing united against any threats posed by a power-hungry government. Early on, U.S. officials solved the problem of how to implement their authoritarian policies without incurring a citizen uprising: fear. The powers-that-be want us to feel threatened by forces beyond our control (terrorists, shooters, bombers). They want us afraid and dependent on the government and its militarized armies for our safety and well-being. Most of all, they want us distrustful of each other, divided by our prejudices, and at each other’s throats.
Once you trade your freedom for security, the terrorists win. We’ve walked a strange and harrowing road 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. And in so doing, we have proven Osama Bin Laden right. He warned that “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.”
It took a long time to clear away the rubble from the 9/11 attacks.
Yet as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, 22 years after the USA Patriot Act was unleashed on a vulnerable nation, we are still reeling from the destruction it has wrought on our freedoms.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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Photo Credit: The CradleHamas’ Operation Al-Aqsa Flood was meticulously planned. The launch date was conditioned by two triggering factors.
First was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu flaunting his ‘New Middle East’ map at the UN General Assembly in September, in which he completely erased Palestine and made a mockery of every single UN resolution on the subject.
Second are the serial provocations at the holy Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, including the straw that broke the camel’s back: two days before Al-Aqsa Flood, on 5 October, at least 800 Israeli settlers launched an assault around the mosque, beating pilgrims, destroying Palestinian shops, all under the observation of Israeli security forces.
Everyone with a functioning brain knows Al-Aqsa is a definitive red line, not just for Palestinians, but for the entire Arab and Muslim worlds.
It gets worse. The Israelis have now invoked the rhetoric of a “Pearl Harbor.” This is as threatening as it gets. The original Pearl Harbor was the American excuse to enter a world war and nuke Japan, and this “Pearl Harbor” may be Tel Aviv’s justification to launch a Gaza genocide.
Sections of the west applauding the upcoming ethnic cleansing – including Zionists posing as “analysts” saying out loud that the “population transfers” that began in 1948 “must be completed” – believe that with massive weaponry and massive media coverage, they can turn things around in short shrift, annihilate the Palestinian resistance, and leave Hamas allies like Hezbollah and Iran weakened.
Their Ukraine Project has sputtered, leaving not just egg on powerful faces, but entire European economies in ruin. Yet as one door closes, another one opens: Jump from ally Ukraine to ally Israel, and hone your sights on adversary Iran instead of adversary Russia.
There are other good reasons to go all guns blazing. A peaceful West Asia means Syria reconstruction – in which China is now officially involved; active redevelopment for Iraq and Lebanon; Iran and Saudi Arabia as part of BRICS 11; the Russia-China strategic partnership fully respected and interacting with all regional players, including key US allies in the Persian Gulf.
Incompetence. Willful strategy. Or both.
That brings us to the cost of launching this new “war on terror.” The propaganda is in full swing. For Netanyahu in Tel Aviv, Hamas is ISIS. For Volodymyr Zelensky in Kiev, Hamas is Russia. Over one October weekend, the war in Ukraine was completely forgotten by western mainstream media. Brandenburg Gate, the Eiffel tower, the Brazilian Senate are all Israeli now.
Egyptian intel claims it warned Tel Aviv about an imminent attack from Hamas. The Israelis chose to ignore it, as they did the Hamas training drills they observed in the weeks prior, smug in their superior knowledge that Palestinians would never have the audacity to launch a liberation operation.
Whatever happens next, Al-Aqsa Flood has already, irretrievably, shattered the hefty pop mythology around the invincibility of Tsahal, Mossad, Shin Bet, Merkava tank, Iron Dome, and the Israel Defense Forces.
Even as it ditched electronic communications, Hamas profited from the glaring collapse of Israel’s multi-billion-dollar electronic systems monitoring the most surveilled border on the planet.
Cheap Palestinian drones hit multiple sensor towers, facilitated the advance of a paragliding infantry, and cleared the way for T-shirted, AK-47-wielding assault teams to inflict breaks in the wall and cross a border that even stray cats dared not.
Israel, inevitably, turned to battering the Gaza Strip, an encircled cage of 365 square kilometers packed with 2.3 million people. The indiscriminate bombing of refugee camps, schools, civilian apartment blocks, mosques, and slums has begun. Palestinians have no navy, no air force, no artillery units, no armored fighting vehicles, and no professional army. They have little to no high-tech surveillance access, while Israel can call up NATO data if they want it.
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant proclaimed “a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we will act accordingly.”
The Israelis can merrily engage in collective punishment because, with three guaranteed UNSC vetoes in their back pocket, they know they can get away with it.
It doesn’t matter that Haaretz, Israel’s most respected newspaper, straight out concedes that “actually the Israeli government is solely responsible for what happened (Al-Aqsa Flood) for denying the rights of Palestinians.”
The Israelis are nothing if not consistent. Back in 2007, then-Israeli Defense Intelligence Chief Amos Yadlin said, “Israel would be happy if Hamas took over Gaza because IDF could then deal with Gaza as a hostile state.”
Ukraine funnels weapons to Palestinians
Only one year ago, the sweaty sweatshirt comedian in Kiev was talking about turning Ukraine into a “big Israel,” and was duly applauded by a bunch of Atlantic Council bots.
Well, it turned out quite differently. As an old-school Deep State source just informed me:
“Ukraine-earmarked weapons are ending up in the hands of the Palestinians. The question is which country is paying for it. Iran just made a deal with the US for six billion dollars and it is unlikely Iran would jeopardize that. I have a source who gave me the name of the country but I cannot reveal it. The fact is that Ukrainian weapons are going to the Gaza Strip and they are being paid for but not by Iran.”
After its stunning raid last weekend, a savvy Hamas has already secured more negotiating leverage than Palestinians have wielded in decades. Significantly, while peace talks are supported by China, Russia, Turkiye, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt – Tel Aviv refuses. Netanyahu is obsessed with razing Gaza to the ground, but if that happens, a wider regional war is nearly inevitable.
Lebanon’s Hezbollah – a staunch Resistance Axis ally of the Palestinian resistance – would rather not be dragged into a war that can be devastating on its side of the border, but that could change if Israel perpetrates a de facto Gaza genocide.
Hezbollah holds at least 100,000 ballistic missiles and rockets, from Katyusha (range: 40 km) to Fajr-5 (75 km), Khaibar-1 (100 km), Zelzal 2 (210 km), Fateh-110 (300 km), and Scud B-C (500 km). Tel Aviv knows what that means, and shudders at the frequent warnings by Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah that its next war with Israel will be conducted inside that country.
Which brings us to Iran.
Geopolitical plausible deniability
The key immediate consequence of Al-Aqsa Flood is that the Washington neocon wet dream of “normalization” between Israel and the Arab world will simply vanish if this turns into a Long War.
Large swathes of the Arab world in fact are already normalizing their ties with Tehran – and not only inside the newly expanded BRICS 11.
In the drive towards a multipolar world, represented by BRICS 11, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), and China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), among other groundbreaking Eurasian and Global South institutions, there’s simply no place for an ethnocentric Apartheid state fond of collective punishment.
Just this year, Israel found itself disinvited from the African Union summit. An Israeli delegation showed up anyway, and was unceremoniously ejected from the big hall, a visual that went viral. At the UN plenary sessions last month, a lone Israeli diplomat sought to disrupt Iranian President Ibrahim Raisi’s speech. No western ally stood by his side, and he too, was ejected from the premises.
As Chinese President Xi Jinping diplomatically put it in December 2022, Beijing “firmly supports the establishment of an independent state of Palestine that enjoys full sovereignty based on 1967 borders and with East Jerusalem as its capital. China supports Palestine in becoming a full member of the United Nations.”
Tehran’s strategy is way more ambitious – offering strategic advice to West Asian resistance movements from the Levant to the Persian Gulf: Hezbollah, Ansarallah, Hashd al-Shaabi, Kataib Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and countless others. It’s as if they are all part of a new Grand Chessboard de facto supervised by Grandmaster Iran.
The pieces in the chessboard were carefully positioned by none other than the late Quds Force Commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps General Qassem Soleimani, a once-in-a-lifetime military genius. He was instrumental in creating the foundations for the cumulative successes of Iranian allies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Palestine, as well as creating the conditions for a complex operation such as Al-Aqsa Flood.
Elsewhere in the region, the Atlanticist drive of opening strategic corridors across the Five Seas – the Caspian, the Black Sea, the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, and the Eastern Mediterranean – is floundering badly.
Russia and Iran are already smashing US designs in the Caspian – via the International North-South Transportation Corridor (INSTC) – and the Black Sea, which is on the way to becoming a Russian lake. Tehran is paying very close attention to Moscow’s strategy in Ukraine, even as it refines its own strategy on how to debilitate the Hegemon without direct involvement: call it geopolitical plausible deniability.
Bye bye EU-Israel-Saudi-India corridor
The Russia-China-Iran alliance has been demonized as the new “axis of evil” by western neocons. That infantile rage betrays cosmic impotence. These are Real Sovereigns that can’t be messed with, and if they are, the price to pay is unthinkable.
A key example: if Iran under attack by a US-Israeli axis decided to block the Strait of Hormuz, the global energy crisis would skyrocket, and the collapse of the western economy under the weight of quadrillions of derivatives would be inevitable.
What this means, in the immediate future, is that he American Dream of interfering across the Five Seas does not even qualify as a mirage. Al-Aqsa Flood has also just buried the recently-announced and much-ballyhooed EU-Israel-Saudi Arabia-India transportation corridor.
China is keenly aware of all this incandescence taking place only a week before its 3rd Belt and Road Forum in Beijing. At stake are the BRI connectivity corridors that matter – across the Heartland, across Russia, plus the Maritime Silk Road and the Arctic Silk Road.
Then there’s the INSTC linking Russia, Iran and India – and by ancillary extension, the Gulf monarchies.
The geopolitical repercussions of Al-Aqsa Flood will speed up Russia, China and Iran’s interconnected geoeconomic and logistical connections, bypassing the Hegemon and its Empire of Bases. Increased trade and non-stop cargo movement are all about (good) business. On equal terms, with mutual respect – not exactly the War Party’s scenario for a destabilized West Asia.
Oh, the things that a slow-moving paragliding infantry overflying a wall can accelerate.
- First published at The Cradle.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.