Wading through the Clinton book, What Happened, is an unpleasant experience, like a stomach upset. Smears and tears. Threats and enemies. “They” (voters) were brainwashed and herded against her by the odious Donald Trump in cahoots with sinister Slavs sent from the great darkness known as Russia, assisted by an Australian “nihilist”, Julian Assange
Thanks largely to whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013, most Americans now realize that the intelligence community monitors and archives all sorts of online behaviors of both foreign nationals and US citizens. But did you know that the very fact that you know this could have subliminally stopped you from speaking out online on issues you care about? Now research […]
Yesterday’s UN ruling (February 5) that deemed the deprivation of liberty of Julian Assange to be unlawful is a legally binding vindication of all those activists who have supported the quest of the Wikileaks founder to bring into the public domain the illegalities of Western power under the guise of democracy and freedom. Of course, establishment figures who represent the gatekeepers of the said powers, like Phillip Hammond, invariably attempt to undermine the findings of the UN body – of which the UK government is a signatory – when their conclusions fail to go in their favour and thus deny any wrongdoing on the part of the imperial powers that they represent.
Earlier this week, Milo Yiannapolous, an editor at the right-wing news platform Breitbart.com, had his widely coveted ‘blue tick’ removed from his Twitter account by the social media company, for violating ‘terms of service’ (ToS).
Among other things, the attack took down the French mobile data network and blinded police surveillance The attack was not a straightforward DDOS attack but a sophisticated attack that targeted a weakness in infrastructure hardware.
Such an attack is beyond the capability of most organizations and requires capability that is unlikely to be in ISIL’s arsenal. An attack on this scale is difficult to pull off without authorities getting wind of it. The coordination required suggests state involvement.
The surveillance is underpinned by an opaque legal regime that has authorized GCHQ to sift through huge archives of metadata about the private phone calls, emails and Internet browsing logs of Brits, Americans, and any other citizens — all without a court order or judicial warrant.
The siege of Knightsbridge is both an emblem of gross injustice and a gruelling farce. For three years, a police cordon around the Ecuadorean embassy in London has served no purpose other than to flaunt the power of the state. It has cost £12 million. The quarry is an Australian charged with no crime, a refugee whose only security is the room given him by a brave South American country. His “crime” is to have initiated a wave of truth-telling in an era of lies, cynicism and war.
HJS has turned to demonising Edward Snowden supporters and privacy advocates as accomplices with al-Qaeda and the ‘Islamic State’ (IS) — as is also being done by Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday Times, with its hole-ridden story claiming Snowden’s revelations’ had allowed Russia and China to identify active MI6 agents.
Every time you email someone overseas, the NSA copies and searches your message. It makes no difference if you or the person you’re communicating with has done anything wrong.
The tribunal has almost never sided against the government, so today’s decision did not come as a surprise to those following the proceedings, much of which happened behind closed doors. The matter isn’t entirely over, however: The judges said they would still consider specific instances where data collection on the groups may have violated their rights.
Australia briefly became an independent state during the Whitlam years, 1972-75. An American commentator wrote that no country had “reversed its posture in international affairs so totally without going through a domestic revolution”. Whitlam ended his nation’s colonial servility. He abolished Royal patronage, moved Australia towards the Non-Aligned Movement, supported “zones of peace” and opposed nuclear weapons testing.
For the first time, the founder of an encrypted email startup that was supposed to insure privacy for all reveals how the FBI and the US legal system made sure we don’t have the right to much privacy in the first place
