Government

Lawmakers Ok With Spying On Citizens Not OK With Being Spied On

March 10, 2014 Lauren McCauley, www.commondreams.org Educate! Government, NSA, Surveillance

"In an ironic turn, the congressional authorities who have staunchly defended the National Security Agency's widespread spying operations are now crying foul after having been spied on by another branch of U.S. intelligence. News reporting on Tuesday revealed that the Inspector General's office, the agency tasked with CIA oversight, has asked the Department of Justice to investigate claims that the spy agency monitored computers used by Senate aides preparing what is believed to be a "searing indictment" on the CIA's secret detention and interrogation program. In what McClatchy news characterized as an "unprecedented breakdown in relations between the CIA and its congressional overseers," members of the Senate Intelligence Committee are saying the alleged CIA spying violates provisions of the Federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act."

Citizen Blocks Road to Yellowstone Bison Trap

March 10, 2014 Staff, protectmustangs.org Resist! Bison, Environment, Government, Indigenous Rights

This morning, Comfrey Jacobs, a twenty-year old citizen concerned for wild bison, placed life, limb and freedom on the line by blocking the access road to Yellowstone National Park’s Stephens Creek bison trap in hopes of preventing more of America’s last wild, migratory bison — the most important bison populations in the world — from being shipped to slaughter. To date, approximately 450 wild buffalo have been captured in Yellowstone National Park’s Stephens Creek bison trap, located in the Gardiner Basin. Most of the buffalo have been and will be shipped to slaughter, while some are going to government research facilities. To date, more than 200 bison have been shipped to slaughter and 250 more have been killed by hunters. Mr. Jacobs spent a number of week’s in the Gardiner Basin, where bison capture and slaughter operations and intense hunting have been taking place.

Repo Workers Are Moonlighting as Datamining Spies

March 7, 2014 Shawn Musgrave betaboston.com Educate! CIA, FBI, Government, Surveillance

An automated reader attached to the spotter car takes a picture of every license plate it passes and sends it to a company in Texas that already has more than 1.8 billion plate scans from vehicles across the country. These scans mean big money for Sousa — typically $200 to $400 every time the spotter finds a vehicle that’s stolen or in default — so he runs his spotter around the clock, typically adding 8,000 plate scans to the database in Texas each day. “Honestly, we’ve found random apartment complexes and shopping plazas that are sweet spots” where the company can impound multiple vehicles, explains Sousa, the president of New England Associates Inc. in Bridgewater. But the most significant impact of Sousa’s business is far bigger than locating cars whose owners have defaulted on loans: It is the growing database of snapshots showing where Americans were at specific times, information that everyone from private detectives to insurers are willing to pay for.

Dow Chemical Backed Anti-Union Nonprofit With $2 Million

March 7, 2014 Michael Beckel, www.occupy.com Educate! Corporatism, Government

"Dow Chemical Co. steered $2 million to a Michigan “dark money” nonprofit in 2012 whose ads helped defeat a union-backed ballot measure aimed at protecting collective bargaining rights, the Center for Public Integrity has learned. The giant chemical maker was one of several corporations that helped finance a web of so-called “social welfare” nonprofits and trade associations that are active in politics but not legally obligated to publicly identify their funders[…]Ahead of the 2012 election, unions pushed for a ballot measure that would have enshrined collective bargaining rights in the state constitution. The top underwriters of the ballot measure’s opposition were the Michigan Chamber of Commerce and the Michigan Alliance for Business Growth."

Feds Drop Most Charges Against Former Anon Spokesman

March 7, 2014 Joe Mullin, arstechnica.com Educate! FBI, Government, Human Rights, Surveillance

Federal prosecutors filed papers today indicating that they want to drop all but one of the 12 charges in their original indictment, including all the counts related to hyperlinking. Brown no longer faces 10 charges of "aggravated identity theft," but he is left to deal with a charge of possessing stolen credit card numbers. The government's backing down comes a day after Brown's defense lawyers filed a motion to dismiss all the charges against him. Brown's lawyers say that all he did was post a hyperlink, which can't amount to the "transfer" of stolen information. The charges against him violate First Amendment free speech protections, the motion argues. The information that Brown's link pointed to all stemmed from an Anonymous hack against Strategic Forcasting, Inc., also known as Stratfor. In addition to information related to thousands of credit cards, e-mail addresses of hundreds of thousands of Stratfor subscribers were stolen.

Did Maidan Protesters Kill Their Own Ranks With Snipers?

March 6, 2014 Staff, www.rt.com Educate! CIA, Government, Ukraine, Venezuela

The Estonian FM has described the whole sniper issue as “disturbing” and added, “it already discredits from the very beginning” the new Ukrainian power. His overall impressions of what he saw during his one-day trip to Kiev are “sad,” Paet said during the conversation. He stressed that the Ukrainian people don’t trust the Maidan leaders, with all the opposition politicians slated to join the new government “having dirty past.” The file was reportedly uploaded to the web by officers of Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) loyal to ousted President Viktor Yanukovich who hacked Paet’s and Ashton’s phones. 94 people were killed and another 900 injured during the standoff between police and protesters at Maidan Saquare in Kiev last month.

Chronology of the Ukrainian Coup

March 6, 2014 Renee Parsons www.commondreams.org Educate! Foreign Relations, Government, Ukraine

Listening to the US media, even the most diligent news junkie would find it difficult to know that the U.S. State Department played not only a vital role in the violence and chaosunderway in Ukraine but was also complicit in creating the coup that ousted democratically elected President Viktor Yanuyovch. Given the Russian Parliament’s approval of Putin’s request for military troops to be moved into Crimea, Americans uninformed about the historyof that region might also be persuaded that Russia is the aggressor and the sole perpetrator of the violence. Let’s be clear about what is at stake here: NATO missiles on the adjacent Ukraine border aimed directly at Russia would make that country extremely vulnerable to Western goals and destabilization efforts while threatening Russia’s only water access to its naval fleet in Crimean peninsula, the Balkans, the Mediterranean Sea and the Middle East – and not the least of which would allow world economic dominance by the US, the European Union, the IMF, World Bank and international financiers all of whom had already brought staggering suffering to millions around the globe.

Deadline: Take Action Now To Oppose The KXL Pipeline

March 6, 2014 Occupy Network Team, occupynetwork.com Resist! Government, Keystone XL, Occupy, Tar Sands

The evidence is in: if the Keystone XL pipeline proceeds it will be “game over for the climate” as NASA scientist James Hansen says. If we want a livable climate, an ‘all of the above’ strategy is not an option. The notion of Occupy The Pipeline has never been more important. The Occupy Network is standing in solidarity with our friends at 350.org and all those who are now engaged in the middle of the last official public comment period for the State Department’s Final Environmental Impact Statement on the Keystone XL. This is one of the very last steps before President Obama makes his decision on the pipeline, and the final opportunity to give your input in an official way.

Netanyahu Freaks Out About BDS Movement At AIPAC

March 6, 2014 Ali Abunimah, electronicintifada.net Resist! AIPAC, Foreign Relations, Government, Palestine

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu today launched a frontal assault on the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement. “One movement that’s definitely on the wrong side of the moral divide is the movement to boycott Israel, the so-called BDS,” Netanyahu told the cheering delegates, in his keynote speech to the annual gathering of the powerful Israel lobby group AIPAC in Washington, DC. “That movement will fail,” Netanyahu predicted. While claiming that people were “flocking to Israel” for its technology from all over the world, Netanyahu warned, “I don’t want you to get complacent – because the fact that they’re going to fail doesn’t mean that the BDS movement shouldn’t be vigorously opposed.”

Venezuela: Some Realities On What Is Happening

March 6, 2014 Miguel Tinker Salas, www.commondreams.org Educate! Freedom of Speech and Assembly, Government, Protest, Venezuela

On February 12th, (Venezuelan Youth Day and the commemoration of the independence battle of La Victoria) some university students and traditional conservative opposition groups took to the streets in Venezuela. In Caracas students and others attacked a government building, burned cars and damaged the entrance to a metro station. The demonstrations extended for several days, as it quickly became obvious that the principal purpose of the protests was to destabilize the government and seek the ouster of the democratically elected president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro. Maduro faced a hotly contested presidential election shortly after the death of Hugo Chávez, in which he narrowly defeated Henrique Capriles. To gain support, Capriles promised to continue social programs initiated by the late president becoming what some called a “Chávez lite” candidate. The hard line elements of the opposition, including Capriles refused to accept the results of the elections and street violence generated by conservative forces left close to a dozen people dead.

Venezuela One Year After Chavez’s Passing

March 6, 2014 Jessica DesvarieuxTheRealNews.com Educate! Chavez, Government, Indigenous Rights, Venezuela

Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Jessica Desvarieux in Baltimore. Wednesday, March 5, is the death anniversary of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. As the founder of the United Socialist Party, Chávez's legacy has now continued on with Venezuela's current president, Nicolás Maduro. But with thousands still protesting in the streets of Caracas, it begs to ask the question, what kind of country did Cházez leave behind? And ultimately what is his legacy? Now joining us by phone from Venezuela are our two guests. Miguel Tinker Salas is a professor of Latin American history at Pomona College. His forthcoming book is titled Venezuela: What Everyone Needs to Know. Also joining us by phone is Ewan Robertson. He is a staff writer with the news websiteVenezuelanalysis.com. He has written in-depth on labor issues, health policy, and foreign policy in Venezuela.

CIA spied on Senate Committee Writing Damning Torture Report

March 6, 2014 Cory Doctorow, boingboing.net Educate! Barack Obama, CIA, Government, NSA

The report that caused some CIA agents to spy on their bosses was about how the CIA was wasting time, getting nowhere and doing something illegal and cruel when it kidnapped terror suspects and tortured them. McClatchy and the New York Times reported Wednesday that the CIA had secretly monitored computers used by committee staffers preparing the inquiry report, which is said to be scathing not only about the brutality and ineffectiveness of the agency’s interrogation techniques but deception by the CIA to Congress and policymakers about it. The CIA sharply disputes the committee’s findings. Udall, a Colorado Democrat and one of the CIA’s leading pursuers on the committee, appeared to reference that surreptitious spying on Congress, which Udall said undermined democratic principles.

Probe: Did the CIA spy on the U.S. Senate?

March 6, 2014 Jonathan S. Landay, Ali Watkins & Marisa Taylor www.mcclatchydc.com Educate! CIA, Government, NSA

The committee determined earlier this year that the CIA monitored computers – in possible violation of an agreement against doing so – that the agency had provided to intelligence committee staff in a secure room at CIA headquarters that the agency insisted they use to review millions of pages of top-secret reports, cables and other documents, according to people with knowledge. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, a panel member, apparently was referring to the monitoring when he asked CIA Director John Brennan at a Jan. 29 hearing if provisions of the Federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act “apply to the CIA? Seems to me that’s a yes or no answer.” Brennan replied that he’d have to get back to Wyden after looking into “what the act actually calls for and it’s applicability to CIA’s authorities.” The law makes it a criminal act for someone to intentionally access a computer without authorization or to go beyond what they’re allowed to access.

Avoid Eating Genetically Engineered Foods

March 5, 2014 Jeffrey Smith, www.HuffingtonPost.com Educate! Environment, Food and Agriculture, Government

Why are thousands of physicians advising patients to avoid eating GMOs (Genetically Modified Organisms) [1] and how did these high-risk foods get onto the market in the first place? The answers are disturbing, even shocking, but may help you get healthy and stay healthy. Foods with added bacterial or viral genes were quietly slipped into your diet two decades ago. Using the excuse that GMOs weren't that much different, the FDA didn't require labels or even a single safety study from GMO makers like Monsanto. But a lawsuit forced the agency to release their files and the truth finally came out.

Venezuela is not Ukraine

March 5, 2014 Mark Weisbrot, www.theguardian.com Educate! Democracy, Government, Poverty, Venezuela

Although there are abuses of power and problems with the rule of law in Venezuela – as there are throughout the hemisphere – it is far from the authoritarian state that most consumers of western media are led to believe. Opposition leaders currently aim to topple the democratically elected government – their stated goal – by portraying it as a repressive dictatorship that is cracking down on peaceful protest. This is a standard "regime change" strategy, which often includes violent demonstrations in order to provoke state violence. The latest official numbers have eight confirmed deaths of opposition protesters, but no evidence that these were a result of efforts by the government to crush dissent. At least two pro-government people have also been killed, and two people on motorcycles were killed (one beheaded) by wires allegedly set up by protesters. Eleven of the 55 people currently detained for alleged crimes during protests are security officers.

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