Would he be able to stay in the embassy until the statute of limitations of his alleged crimes has expired and then walk out a free man?

Edited by Joffa: 18/6/2013 06:58:35 PM

Given that the US want to charge him with crimes that don't have a statute of limitation...

Yes but the comparable English laws may....

It's not english laws that matter, they're just arresting him because Sweden want to charge him with Rape, remember?

The statute of limitation for Rape in sweden is 10 years.

Syria and Iran are looking good.

There's a lot of talk in america at the moment about the use of drones on american soil/airspace. The government is putting pressure on the Aviation Authority to facilitate widespread drone use by October 2015.

Was Flight 800 shot down?
Date
June 20, 2013 - 9:51AM

WASHINGTON: Former investigators are pushing to reopen the probe into the 1996 crash of TWA Flight 800 off the coast of New York, saying new evidence points to the often-discounted theory that a missile strike may have downed the jumbo jet.

The New York-to-Paris flight crashed on July 17, 1996, just minutes after the jetliner took off from John F. Kennedy Airport, killing all 230 people aboard.

The effort to reopen the probe is being made in tandem with the release next month of a documentary that features the testimony of former investigators who raise doubts about the National Transportation Safety Board's conclusion that the crash was caused by a centre fuel tank explosion, probably caused by a spark from a short-circuit in the wiring.


US Army National Guard soldiers look on as the cockpit from TWA Flight 800 is recovered at Hampton Bays, New York, in 1996. All 230 people aboard the Paris-bound 747 died when the jet exploded shortly after take-off.
"We don't know who fired the missile," said Jim Speer, an accident investigator for the Air Line Pilots Association, one of those seeking a new review of the probe. "But we have a lot more confidence that it was a missile."

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In a petition filed on Wednesday seeking to reopen the probe, they say they have "reviewed the FAA radar evidence along with new evidence not available to the NTSB during the official investigation and contend that the NTSB's probable cause determination is erroneous and should be reconsidered and modified accordingly".

Those calling for a review of the investigation include former NTSB accident investigator Hank Hughes and Bob Young, a former senior accident investigator for the now-defunct TWA. Tom Stalcup, a physicist and co-founder of a group called Flight 800 Independent Researchers Organisation, also questions the NTSB's original findings and is featured prominently in the documentary, which is slated to air on the 17th anniversary of the crash next month.

The NTSB issued a statement on Wednesday morning saying it is aware of the upcoming documentary.

"All petitions for reconsideration are thoroughly reviewed, and a determination is usually made within about 60 days," spokeswoman Kelly Nantel said. "While the NTSB rarely re-investigates issues that have already been examined, our investigations are never closed and we can review any new information not previously considered by the board."

She noted the TWA Flight 800 investigation lasted four years.

"Investigators took great care reviewing, documenting and analysing facts and data and held a five-day hearing to gather additional facts before determining the probable cause of the accident during a two-day board meeting."

Robert Francis, the former vice chairman of the NTSB who headed the investigation, declined to comment.

The former investigators calling for a new probe say new evidence that a missile may have taken down the jet includes analysis of radar of the jetliner.

Speculation of a missile strike began almost immediately after the crash. Theories that an errant missile may have been fired from a US military vessel were widely refuted, but conjecture about a shoulder-fired missile launched by terrorists in a small boat has never completely gone away.

The petitioners contend that the testimony of more than 200 witnesses who reported seeing streaks of light headed toward the plane should be reconsidered. The NTSB said after the first investigation that it found no evidence of a missile strike. It explained that what witnesses likely saw was the jetliner pitching upward in the first few moments after the explosion, but some witnesses still maintain that the streak of light they saw emanated from the waterline and zoomed upward toward the plane.

The petition filed with the NTSB to reopen the probe claims "new analyses of the FAA radar evidence demonstrate that the explosion that caused the crash did not result from a low-velocity fuel-air explosion as the NTSB has determined. Rather, it was caused by a detonation or high-velocity explosion."

John Seaman, the longtime leader of an organisation of TWA 800 victims' families, noted there have been several attempts over the years to reopen the investigation.

"Unless something was to develop that would be very clear and compelling, then a lot of these interested parties are not really helpful," said Seaman, whose niece died on the flight. He spoke to The Associated Press in a telephone interview from upstate New York on Tuesday, ahead of the formal filing of the petition.

"They reopen wounds," he said of the petitioners. "Personally I can't keep going over it again and again. I think most families feel that way."

The documentary airs on the EPIX premium television channel. An EPIX spokeswoman declined to say how much the filmmakers were paid for the documentary.


Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/world/was-flight-800-shot-down-20130620-2ok00.html#ixzz2WlDCoVkf

Snowden files 'show massive UK spying op'

June 22, 2013 - 10:11AM

London: British spies are running an online eavesdropping operation so vast that internal documents say it even outstrips the United States' international internet surveillance effort, The Guardian newspaper says.

The paper cited UK intelligence memos leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden to claim that UK spies were tapping into the world's network of fibre optic cables to deliver the "biggest internet access" of any member of the Five Eyes - the name given to the espionage alliance composed of the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

That access could in theory expose a huge chunk of the world's everyday communications - including the content of people's emails, calls, and more - to scrutiny from British spies and their US allies. How much data the British are copying off the fibre optic network isn't clear, but it's likely to be enormous.

The Guardian said the information flowing across more than 200 cables was being monitored by more than 500 analysts from the NSA and its UK counterpart, GCHQ.

"This is a massive amount of data!" The Guardian quoted a leaked slide as boasting.

The newspaper, whose revelations about America and Britain's globe-spanning surveillance programs have reignited an international debate over the ethics of espionage, said GCHQ was using probes to capture and copy data as it crisscrossed the Atlantic between western Europe and North America.

It said that, by last year, GCHQ was in some way handling 600 million telecommunications every day - although it did not go into any further detail and it was not clear whether that meant that GCHQ could systematically record or even track all the electronic movement at once.

GCHQ declined to comment on Friday, although in an emailed statement it repeated past assurances about the legality of its actions.

"Our work is carried out in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework which ensures that our activities are authorised, necessary, and proportionate," the statement said.

Fibre optic cables - thin strands of glass bundled together and strung out underground or across the oceans - play a critical role in keeping the world connected. A 2010 estimate suggested that such cables are responsible for 95 per cent of the world's international voice and data traffic, and The Guard-ian said Britain's geographic position on Europe's western fringe gave it natural access to many of the trans-Atlantic cables as they emerged from the sea.

The Guardian said GCHQ's probes did more than just monitor the data live; British eavesdroppers can store content for three days and metadata - information about who was talking to whom, for how long, from where, and through what medium - for 30 days.

AP

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/it-pro/government-it/snowden-files-show-massive-uk-spying-op-20130622-2ooyr.html#ixzz2WvnS9g1I

The killing of legal abortion
Date
June 23, 2013

Clutching a Bible and a crucifix, Christal Hutchison kneels on the footpath in warm soft rain before the Red River Women's Clinic in Fargo, the only abortion clinic in all of North Dakota, and quietly recites the Lord's Prayer.

Hutchison, who is 58, does not interrupt her incantation as a young couple stride to the door, heads down, his right arm firm over her hunched back as though they are battling a blizzard together.

Standing in the doorway is Caitlin O'Connell, one of the clinic's escorts. It is her job to aid patients should they be harassed as they make for the entrance. She casts an eye over Hutchison and a handful of other protesters bearing anti-abortion placards and holds the door open, welcoming the couple in a warm but businesslike manner.

It is all over in a few seconds, but it is not always this way. Sometimes convoys of protesters arrive from out of state and in the past others have tried to intercept the women as they enter to hand them prayer cards or images of dismembered foetuses.

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Legislation passed by Bill Clinton that makes it a federal offence to block the women's path has made O'Connell's job easier, but occasionally the crowd has turned ugly and in another location a clinic has been firebombed.

Today the puddled pavement between Hutchison and O'Connell is in a very real sense the front line in the escalating war against legal abortion in the United States.

Opponents of abortion are energised and many believe they are closer to a ban today than at any other time since the Supreme Court recognised the constitutional right to abortion with its Roe v Wade decision 40 years ago.

''It is axiomatic, it is the story of our times, it is the thing every pro-lifer knows: we're winning this battle,'' Tom Hoopes, a professor of communications at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas, wrote on the blog CatholicVote.org earlier this year.

On Wednesday, the Republican-controlled US House of Representatives passed an anti-abortion bill largely along party lines. Should it become law, it would ban abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy, which some have argued is when foetuses are capable of pain. (The science on this is murky at best.) The law contravenes Roe v Wade, which specifies that abortion is legal until a doctor determines that a baby is viable outside the womb, normally between 22 and 24 weeks.

Until a last-minute change, the bill would have made no exceptions for potential impacts on women's health, nor for victims of rape or incest, and most of the Republicans who voted against it did so because they did not think it was tough enough.

Proponents of the bill said it was a response to the recent trial of Kermit Gosnell, a doctor who ran an abortion clinic in which he was found to have killed live babies after birth. He has since been found guilty of murder and has begun a life sentence. Pro-choice activists argue it is disingenuous to conflate Gosnell's crimes with legal abortion.

Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, an anti-abortion political action committee, called the vote ''historic''.

In the end, though, the passing of the Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act was political theatre. The bill has no chance of clearing the Democratic majority in the Senate. Even if it scraped through, the President would veto it.

But the charade serves political purposes. Voting for such a law allows House Republicans who face midterm primaries and elections next year to say they remain in lockstep with Tea Party orthodoxy. This is the same reason House Republicans have pointlessly voted to repeal Obamacare 36.

But problematically for Republicans, votes like this also give ample opportunity for the party's outliers to make comments that alienate it further from moderate voters. During the presidential election last year, such comments included the observations from Republican candidates that in the event of ''legitimate'' rape the ''female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing [pregnancy] down'', and that if a child was conceived in rape ''that it is something that God intended to happen''.

This sentiment was faintly echoed earlier this month when the bill's author, Republican Trent Franks from Arizona, said, ''incidents of rape resulting in pregnancy are very low''.

His cause was not assisted by his colleague from Texas, Michael Burgess - a former obstetrician and gynaecologist - who argued during a hearing on the bill that abortion should be banned even earlier, at 15 or 16 weeks because viewed via a sonogram male foetuses appeared to masturbate. ''If they feel pleasure, why is it so hard to believe that they could feel pain?'' he reasoned.

In truth, the real battle against abortion is being fought - and in many jurisdictions being won - in the states.

State governments are passing laws restricting access to abortion at a historic rate. Many of the laws are designed to abide by the letter of Roe v Wade while undermining its spirit. To do so, these laws use the protection of another Supreme Court decision, Planned Parenthood v Casey, the first significant post-Roe legal victory by abortion opponents. In this 1992 decision, the Supreme Court found that while states may not prohibit abortion, they may regulate it.

As the campaign against legal abortion has picked up steam, conservative politicians have become increasingly adept at regulating abortion clinics to death.

As soon as one state develops a law that succeeds in restricting abortions, similar laws quickly pop up elsewhere.

One popular regulation makes it compulsory for doctors working in clinics to secure ''admitting privileges'' in local hospitals. Because many doctors travel long distances to work in clinics, they are often ineligible to get rights to admit patients at local hospitals. Last year, the Volunteer Women's Medical Clinic in Knoxville, Tennessee, closed down after 38 years for this reason.

Another law forces clinics to abide by increasingly tough architectural and zoning regulations. Clinics that administer only medicinal abortifacients have been required to establish themselves as full surgical centres; others have been ordered to knock down and rebuild corridors and fire escapes.

Laws like this have proved particularly effective because they can be described as measures to protect women while they whittle away at the availability of abortion and they do not tend to attract headlines that might prompt a backlash.

''Is that the kind of thing that will rally voters?'' Cristina Page, author of the book How the Pro-Choice Movement Saved America, told Time magazine earlier this year. '''We're not going to expand these hallways to be 5 ft. wide!' is not a compelling message. The villain is now in the fine print.''

Other impediments include bans on juveniles receiving abortions without parental consent, bans on the use of telemedicine to prescribe abortifacients, bans on public funding for abortion, introducing mandatory waiting periods and the development of detailed information packs to be given to those seeking abortions.

(In North Dakota, for example, patients must be told, ''North Dakota law defines abortion as terminating the life of a whole, separate, unique living human being.'')

Another law that has appeared in 16 states dictates that women must have an ultrasound before they have an abortion. When Virginia Governor Bob McDonald sought to introduce a regulation last year that would have made women undergo the procedure with a vaginal probe in the early weeks of their pregnancy, a public outcry saw that law softened but passed.

The compounded impact of the restrictions is difficult to accurately gauge, though the figures that do exist are startling.

The most recent surge in the pro-life movement began with the 2010 mid-term elections, when Tea Party-affiliated conservatives won power in local, state and federal elections.

While the Tea Party movement was considered to be primarily concerned with shrinking taxes and cutting debt when it first erupted, it was always a movement of social conservatives, says Professor Scott Lemieux, a political scientist at the College of Saint Rose.

Sure enough, no sooner had the Tea Party politicians moved into their new offices than they began drafting laws to restrict abortions. According to the Guttmacher Institute, a non-profit institute that tracks access to abortion around the world, in 2011 92 various restrictions against abortion made law in 24 states, shattering the previous record of 34 in 2005.

The following year another 43 restrictions were imposed in 19 states and so far this year 32 provisions have been adopted by 14 states. The number of abortion providers fell from 2908 in 1982 to 1793 in 2008.

According to a recent Washington Post analysis, the wave of restrictions has seen abortion effectively banned in 15 states.

To many this would appear to be a considerable success, but as Lemieux explains, the forces opposing abortion are not co-ordinated, and some pro-life politicians and activists now appear to be growing frustrated with ''incrementalism'' and are gunning for the holy grail, the effective repeal of Roe v Wade.

This brings us back to North Dakota. In March this year, the state government introduced the most restrictive abortion laws in the nation, one banning abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, the earliest that foetal heartbeat can be detected, the other prohibiting the procedure because a foetus has a genetic defect, such as Down syndrome.

Doctors performing an abortion under these circumstances after August 1 could face a felony charge punishable by up to five years in prison and a $5000 fine. The laws were among seven abortion restrictions passed in North Dakota.

What was so significant about the six-week ban was that it was transparently designed to fall foul of Roe v Wade and provoke a challenge that its backers hope will eventually find its way back to the Supreme Court.

''It's a good day for babies,'' said Bette Grande, a Republican from Fargo who introduced both bills. ''Whether this is challenged in court is entirely up to the abortion industry. Given the lucrative nature of abortion, it is likely that any statute that reduces the number of customers will be challenged by the industry.''

Professor Lemieux says this direct challenge to Roe is strategically risky, and he has detected a split in the pro-life movement caused by it.

Because the US Supreme Court has discretion over the cases it considers, he believes the current bench would simply decline to hear such a case, while lower courts would simply overturn the law. Each time such laws are killed off, the precedent becomes further entrenched, he says.

And even if the Supreme Court was eventually provoked into taking on such a case, it would likely back its earlier decisions under its current make-up.

But should the make-up of the court change under a new Republican president after 2016, ''all bets are off'', says Lemieux. Roe could be scrapped.

Back on the street in Fargo, Christal Hutchison says she does not follow politics. She comes each Wednesday, the day the clinic performs abortions, to pray for the dead babies, their mothers and the staff.

''God has been asking me to do this,'' she explains. ''You, not somebody else, you need to do something,'' was the message she heard.

Nearby Ron and Dorothy Koester stand with a placard, as they have each week since Ron retired from the sugar plant.

''Two people enter that door, but only one leaves,'' says Ron of the patients.

Each week the Koesters arrive early in the morning and head upstairs into a small office block where local Catholic parishes have established a chapel. There is a little office, facilities for tea and coffee, and in a spare room the regular protesters store their placards. After Mass they head downstairs to wait for the patients.

''We try to tell them there are better options, that they don't have to do this,'' says Ron. ''We don't condemn them, we are just trying to give them that one last chance.''

Sitting in the foyer at the end of the day, the clinic escort, Caitlin O'Connell, and its director, Tammi Kromenaker, roll their eyes in unison at the suggestion that the protesters are present out of concern for the women. Kromenaker says they have no effect but to add to the anxiety of her patients.

Kromenaker, who is 41 years old, was born within a year of Roe v Wade and she has worked with the clinic since she graduated from college 20 years ago. In that time, public support for the Roe v Wade decision has remained nearly constant. Last year a poll by Pew Research Centre found more than six in 10 people say they would not like to see it completely overturned, a finding that has changed little from surveys conducted 10 and 20 years ago.

But Kromenaker says over the years she has seen the energy of the pro-life movement rise and fall and, after Obama's election, rise again.

''You can see how that threatened a lot of social conservatives, people who wish they could go back to the father-knows-best 1950s.'' She believes a generation of people have forgotten what life was like before abortion was made legal.

Asked if she feels threatened being the public face of abortion in a small conservative town, Kromenaker says she takes sensible precautions - her children use their stepfather's surname, her phone number is silent, she varies her route to work.

But thinking of George Tiller, the doctor murdered in 2009, she says in a matter-of-fact tone, ''You never know. You can take all the right precautions and still get shot in the head at church.''



Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/world/the-killing-of-legal-abortion-20130622-2opc7.html#ixzz2X0cdtmen

Edited by Joffa: 23/6/2013 02:10:44 PM

Seriously? What in your Facebook inbox is so important that you would leave the country juts to stop the cops looking at if they suspected you of being a terrorist?

Am I the only one who really isn't that bothered by it?

The only reason you'd care about it is if you're doing something you shouldn't be. But they're searching for Terrorists, they don't really give a fuck about you asking Tweedle Dee if you can score a quarter ounce of pot.

Exactly, I don't get why people have such big issues with authority.

To play the devil's advocate; I guess because they're asking "where does it stop?" Now it might just be in the name of stopping terrorism, but then it becomes about stopping crime, and suddenly they're going Orwellian and watching every little thing you're doing.

I've worked (legitimately) for some people who liked to flout the law regarding certain substances and subsequently been under surveillance. It's a pretty unsettling feeling knowing that you're being watched.

NSA chief says agency eavesdropping helped foil 54 plots

June 28, 2013

The director of the US National Security Agency on Thursday offered a more detailed breakdown of 54 schemes by militants that he said were disrupted by phone and internet surveillance, even as a British newspaper offered evidence of more extensive spying.

In a speech in Baltimore, NSA chief General Keith Alexander said the list of cases turned over recently to Congress included 42 that involved disrupted plots and 12 in which surveillance targets provided material support to terrorism.

Alexander's assertions about the effectiveness of NSA surveillance came as Britain's Guardian newspaper reported that the NSA for years collected masses of raw data on the email and Internet traffic of US citizens and residents.

Citing a top-secret draft report prepared in 2009 by NSA's inspector general, the Guardian said that the collection of what it described as "bulk internet metadata" began shortly after the attacks of September 11, 2001.

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Initially the program collected only information in which one party was outside the United States or communications between known foreigners. But the program expanded in 2007.

The paper said the Internet "metadata" comprised the addresses to and from which messages were sent, including IP addresses which could show a person's physical location. It quoted officials saying this particular collection effort ended in 2011.

In his speech to a communications and electronics industry group, Alexander said the NSA case list was provided late last week to several congressional committees. He said that 50 of the 54 cases cited had resulted in arrests or detentions.

He also said that 25 of the arrests or detentions occurred in Europe, 11 in Asia, and 5 in Africa. Thirteen of the plots occurred inside the United States, he added.

The latest Guardian revelations appear to show that NSA collected the same kind of raw Internet traffic data among people inside the United States as it collects on telephone users.

The Guardian also previously published secret documents about an NSA program called Prism, which gave NSA the capability to search the content of traffic sent through US Internet companies by foreign intelligence subjects. The paper's latest revelations do not discuss the searching or examination of email content.

In his speech, Alexander said that 12 foiled plots involved using material gathered under the agency's raw telephone data collection program.

He said that in 53 of the 54 cases, the agency also had used its authority to eavesdrop on internet traffic of foreign intelligence targets. The actions allowed the US to collect data which "played a critical role."

Alexander said that almost half of NSA's counter-terrorism reporting came from internet monitoring.

The Guardian report said that NSA collection of internet metadata initially began under a controversial warrantless wiretapping program authorized by the administration of President George W Bush, but was later authorized by the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

The Guardian quoted Shawn Turner, chief spokesman for the US Director of National Intelligence, saying that the collection program, which continued after Barack Obama became president, was terminated in 2011 "for operational and resource reasons and has not been re-started."

Now shut down

In his comments, which apparently responded to the latest Guardian story, Alexander acknowledged that NSA's email metadata collection program had been "analogous" to its telephone call data collection. He said the program had ceased because "it didn't have the operation impact that we needed."

"Because it wasn't meeting what we needed and we thought we could better protect civil liberties and privacy by doing away with it, Alexander said. He added: "And all that data was purged at that time."

However, the Guardian said that it had seen other secret NSA papers suggesting that some online data collection continued today.

Previously, citing documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, the Guardian published a secret court order authorizing NSA to collect masses of similar "metadata" charting traffic between phone numbers. The order, covering calls both within the United States and between the United States and foreign countries, had been re-issued as recently as April 2013.

The Guardian's latest story said that when NSA began collecting Internet metadata in 2001, the agency was limited to only cases where "at least one communicant" was located outside the United States "or for which no communicant was known to be a citizen of the United States."

However, the Guardian printed what it said was a 2007 secret US Justice Department memo. It said the memo indicated that NSA later got authority to "analyse communications metadata associated with United States persons and persons believed to be in the United States."

A top secret draft report on the email program prepared by NSA's inspector general, and posted on the Guardian's website, makes clear the key role played by private companies, who partner with NSA. In the report's words, they help the US government "obtain access to information that would not otherwise be available."

The report describes how, in early October 2001, NSA officials approached three major US-based communication service providers - identified in the report as COMPANY A, COMPANY B, and COMPANY C - to seek cooperation with the new surveillance program. "Each company agreed to cooperate," the report says.



Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/it-pro/security-it/nsa-chief-says-agency-eavesdropping-helped-foil-54-plots-20130628-hv0kj.html#ixzz2Xaw73hpH

John Kerry says US surveillance 'not unusual'

Nearly all national governments use "lots of activities" to safeguard their interests and security, US Secretary of State John Kerry has said, addressing allegations that Washington spied on the European Union and other allies.

By Reuters11:50AM BST 01 Jul 2013
The EU has strongly demanded that the United States explain a report in a German magazine that Washington is spying on the group, saying that, if true, the alleged surveillance was "shocking".

Mr Kerry confirmed on Monday that EU High Representative Catherine Ashton had raised the issue with him in a meeting with him in Brunei, where they are both attending a security conference, but gave no further details of their exchange. He said he had yet to see details of the newspaper allegations.

"I will say that every country in the world that is engaged in international affairs and national security undertakes lots of activities to protect its national security and all kinds of information contributes to that. All I know is that is not unusual for lots of nations," Mr Kerry told a news conference.
Some EU policymakers said talks for a free trade agreement between Washington and the EU should be put on ice until further clarification from the United States.
Martin Schulz, president of the EU Parliament, told French radio the United States had crossed a line.
"I was always sure that dictatorships, some authoritarian systems, tried to listen ... but that measures like that are now practiced by an ally, by a friend, that is shocking, in the case that it is true," Mr Schulz said in an interview with France 2.
Der Spiegel reported on Saturday that the National Security Agency (NSA) bugged EU offices and gained access to EU internal computer networks, the latest revelation of alleged U.S. spying that has prompted outrage from EU politicians.
The magazine followed up on Sunday with a report that the U.S. agency taps half a billion phone calls, emails and text messages in Germany in a typical month, much more than any other European peer and similar to the data tapped in China or Iraq.
"If the media reports are correct, this brings to memory actions among enemies during the Cold War. It goes beyond any imagination that our friends in the United States view the Europeans as enemies," German Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger said.
"If it is true that EU representations in Brussels and Washington were indeed tapped by the American Secret Service, it can hardly be explained with the argument of fighting terrorism," she said in a statement.
Meanwhile the Guardian newspaper said in an article late on Sunday that the United States had also targeted non-European allies including Japan, South Korea and India for spying - an awkward development for Mr Kerry as he arrived for the Asian security conference.
"I'm aware of the article, but we still haven't confirmed the contents of the story. Obviously we're interested in this matter and we'll seek an appropriate confirmation on this," said Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga at a regular news conference.
Revelations about the U.S. surveillance programme, which was made public by fugitive former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, have raised a furore in the United States and abroad over the balance between privacy rights and national security.
Mr Kerry said the Obama administration believes that China could have aided the United States in its efforts to arrest Snowden while he was in Hong Kong. Mr Snowden is currently holed up at an international airport in Russia, from where he has applied for asylum in Ecuador.
"It is safe to say that the Obama administration believes that our friends in China could in fact have made a difference here, but we have a lot of issues that we are dealing with right now," Mr Kerry said.
He said he and the Chinese foreign minister had discussed Snowden during their one-on-one meetings on the sidelines of the summit.
Edited by Hannah Strange for telegraph.co.uk

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/10152478/John-Kerry-says-US-surveillance-not-unusual.html

Japan seeks answers on US bugging claims
Date
July 2, 2013
Japan sought answers from the United States over claims it had bugged its key Asian ally, as the list of embarrassing revelations from fugitive intelligence specialist Edward Snowden grows longer.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said Tokyo was waiting to hear from the US if the allegations of a bug in its Washington embassy were true.

"I refrain from commenting on details of diplomatic dialogue, but obviously we have a great interest in this matter," Suga told reporters "We are currently asking for appropriate confirmation."

The demand comes as anger continues to grow in Europe over claims that the US had been spying on several European countries, including Germany, and the European Union.

They also come as Snowden, who is still holed up in a Moscow airport, broke his 10-day silence and accused Washington of pressuring foreign capitals to reject his asylum applications.

He has asked a total of 21 countries to consider his request, it was revealed Tuesday.

Britain's Guardian newspaper at the weekend reported top-secret US National Security Agency documents leaked by Snowden show that US intelligence services were spying on 38 embassies and diplomatic missions of its allies including the European Union and Japan.

The revelation sparked fury in European capitals, with French President Francois Hollande warning the row threatened to jeopardise talks on a free trade deal between the EU and the US.

The German government expressed its "astonishment" and "great displeasure" at the claims.

US Secretary of State John Kerry's insistence Monday that information-gathering was "not unusual" did little to stem the anger.

Japan's more moderate response may reflect its greater dependence on the US, which is treaty-bound to protect it from military attack.

Under the administration of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Japan is trying to re-heat a relationship that had gone slightly cold under the three-year stewardship of the now-opposition Democratic Party of Japan.

AFP

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/world/japan-seeks-answers-on-us-bugging-claims-20130702-2p9q3.html#ixzz2XsnGoXDQ

It's ok Japan, we're only bugging the Whales.

Bolivians bitter as Snowden stand-off triggers 'hostile act'

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/world/bolivians-bitter-as-snowden-standoff-triggers-hostile-act-20130703-2paih.html#ixzz2XyJEuUhr

Snowden's asylum requests spurned
Former US spy agency contractor Edward Snowden remains in limbo at a Moscow airport as country after country denies his asylum bid.

Just days after the US President’s claim that he would not ‘‘be scrambling jets to get a 29-year-old hacker’’, the Obama administration was accused of doing precisely that.

Bolivian leader Evo Morales had his presidential aircraft hounded through different sectors of European airspace on Tuesday – in the apparent belief that Mr Morales was smuggling US mega-leaker Edward Snowden to asylum.

We want to express our displeasure because this has put the president's life at risk

Furious Bolivian officials, backed by their equally voluble Venezuelan counterparts, accused France and Portugal of ‘‘putting at risk the life of the [Bolivian] president’’ in what Bolivian Defence Minister Ruben Saavedra described as a ‘‘hostile act by the US State Department which has used various European governments’’.

The leaders of the two South American countries had been attending a conference on natural gas in Moscow, which was completely overshadowed by the Snowden affair.

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There had been speculation at press conferences in Moscow that either Mr Morales or his Venezuelan counterpart Nicolas Maduro might invite the marooned Snowden to fly back to their homelands with them – and though Lisbon, Paris and Washington were refusing to comment on Tuesday’s diplomatic air scramble, it appears that the Americans might have taken a South American bait.

Running low on fuel, Mr Morales’ flight was diverted to Vienna after France and Portugal withdrew pro forma permission for it to travel in their airspace.


Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro speaks in Moscow. Photo: AP
Even before the flight had taken off, Portugal had mysteriously withdrawn pre-issued permission for it to refuel at Lisbon ahead of the long haul across the Atlantic.

In-flight drama

The aircraft was in the air and within minutes of its scheduled entry into French airspace when Paris followed suit.

‘‘We don’t know who invented this lie,’’ said Bolivian Foreign Minister David Choquehuanca. ‘‘We want to denounce to the international community this injustice with the plane of President Evo Morales.

‘‘They say it was due to technical issues, but after getting explanations from some authorities we found there appeared to be some unfounded suspicion that Mr Snowden was on the plane.’’

As Mr Morales cooled his heels at a Vienna airport, Austrian officials told reporters that indeed Snowden was not on the presidential aircraft.

Meanwhile, Mr Morales’ flight crew faced challenges in finding a route home to Bolivia – Italy was now denying permission for the flight to transit its airspace.

In recent days it has been President Vladimir Putin who had been having fun at the expense of the furious Americans. But as the Russian leader became more serious, setting conditions that would make it impossible for Snowden to remain in Russia, the two South Americans started acting up.

Cheeky note

At the end of a Russian TV appearance in which he said he would consider any request from Snowden, Mr Maduro wrapped up the interview on a cheeky note – ‘‘It’s time for me to go – Snowden is waiting for me.’’

Likewise, Mr Morales said Bolivia wanted to ‘‘shield the denounced’’.

In keeping with the absurd tenor of much of this saga, Snowden’s father Lon Snowden responded to a message from his son that he should keep quiet – reportedly relayed by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange through Snowden snr’s lawyer – by publishing an open letter in which he praises his son and defends him as a modern day Paul Revere, ‘‘summoning the American people to confront the growing danger of tyranny and one-branch government’’.

But Snowden jnr (who turned 30 during the recent week of transit turmoil) had more pressing issues to deal with – it emerged that the more countries in which he seeks refuge, the more knockbacks he gets.

Throughout Tuesday, the rejections came thick and fast. All but two out of 21 capitals to which Snowden had applied hung him out to dry – only Venezuela and Bolivia seemed to offer him a chance to break free from the limbo of a Moscow transit lounge.

Russian block

At the same time, the Russians keep repeating two things – one of which seems to be believed more than the other. First, they will not go into the transit lounge and snatch Snowden for the Americans; and second, their intelligence services are not trying to bleed Snowden or his four laptops of all they know and/or contain.

The language of some US reporting on the Snowden case is intriguing. Tuesday’s edition of The New York Times reports: ‘‘The US has engaged an array of countries that have considered granting [Snowden] asylum, making clear that doing so would carry big costs.’’

Oddly, the word ‘‘threat’’ does not appear in such reports.

On Tuesday, a State Department spokeswoman responded to the bullying allegations thus: ‘‘I’m not sure what the basis for those claims are.’’

Doesn’t quite amount to a denial, does it?



Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/world/bolivians-bitter-as-snowden-standoff-triggers-hostile-act-20130703-2paih.html#ixzz2XyILQB3x

WHY EUROPEAN NATIONS MUST PROTECT EDWARD SNOWDEN
PUBLISHED ON WEDNESDAY 3 JULY 2013.

The general secretary of Reporters Without Borders Christophe Deloire, and Wikileaks foundator Julian Assange co-sign today an Op-Ed in Le Monde to call out the states of the European Union to protect Edward Snowden.

On October 12, 2012, the European Union won the Nobel Peace Prize for contributing to the “advancement of peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights in Europe.” The EU should show itself worthy of this honor and show its will to defend freedom of information, regardless of fears of political pressure from its so-called closest ally, the United States.

Now that Edward Snowden, the young American who revealed the global monitoring system known as Prism, has requested asylum from 20 countries, the EU nations should extend a welcome, under whatever law or status seems most appropriate.

Although the United States remains a world leader in upholding the ideal of freedom of expression, the American attitude toward whistleblowers sullies the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

In 2004, the UN special rapporteur for freedom of expression, as well as his counterparts in the Organization of American States and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe issued a joint call to all governments to protect whistleblowers from all “legal, administrative or employment-related sanctions if they act in ‘good faith.’” Whistleblowers were defined as “individuals releasing confidential or secret information although they are under an official or other obligation to maintain confidentiality or secrecy.”

More recently, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe resolved in 2010 that, “the definition of protected disclosures shall include all bona fide warnings against various types of unlawful acts.” The Assembly’s Resolution 1729 concluded that member countries’ laws “should therefore cover both public and private sector whistle-blowers, including members of the armed forces and special services.”

Some are calling for a manhunt for Snowden on the grounds that he is a traitor, and others are trying to cloak the issues he raised in legalistic complexities. But what serious person can deny that Edward Snowden is a whistleblower?

The digital communications specialist’s revelations have enabled the international press, including the Washington Post, The Guardian, and Der Spiegel, to shine a light on a surveillance system that tracks tens of millions of citizens, Europeans among them.

Targeted by an apparatus that threatens their sovereignty as well as their principles, the EU countries owe Snowden a debt of gratitude for his revelations, which were clearly in the public interest.

This young man will remain abandoned in the transit zone of the Moscow airport only if the European countries abandon their principles, as well as a major part of the raison d’être of the EU. Expressions of diplomatic outrage will be empty gestures if the person responsible for the revelations is left isolated and abandoned.

Beyond the necessity of providing a legal shield for whistleblowers, the protection of privacy is a matter of clear public interest, especially in the realm of freedom of information. Frank La Rue, the UN special rapporteur on freedom of expression, noted in a report last June that “arbitrary and unlawful infringements of the right to privacy...threaten the protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression.”

The confidentiality of written and oral exchanges is essential to ensuring the exercise of freedom of information. But when journalists’ sources are compromised, as happened in the case of The Associated Press; when the United States abuses the Espionage Act, a 1917 law that has been invoked a total of nine times against whistleblowers, six of these cases under the Obama administration; when the government tries to silence WikiLeaks by imposing a financial embargo on the organization and by subjecting associates and friends of Julian Assange to abusive searches when they enter the United States, when the site’s founder and his colleagues are threatened with U.S. prosecution, more than American democracy is threatened.

Indeed, the very model of democracy that the heirs of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin are responsible for upholding has been robbed of its essence.

By what right is the United States exempt from principles that it demands be applied elsewhere?

In January, 2010, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave a historic speech in which she defined freedom of expression as a cornerstone of American diplomacy. She reiterated that position in February, 2011, in another speech in which she said that “on the spectrum of internet freedom, we place ourselves on the side of openness.”

Eloquent words. They may have brought encouragement to dissidents in Tehran, Beijing, Havana, Asmara, Ashgabat, Moscow and so many other capitals. But how disappointing to find that the skyscrapers of American surveillance have reached a size to match China’s technological Great Wall.

The White House and State Department message of democracy and defence of human rights has lost considerable credibility. One sign of widespread concern – Amazon has reported a 6,000% increase in sales of the George Orwell classic, 1984.

Now, with Big Brother watching us from a Washington suburb, the key institutions of American democracy must play their assigned roles of counterweight to the executive branch and its abuses. The system of checks and balances is more than a slogan for avid readers of Tocqueville and Montesquieu.

American leaders should realize the glaring contradiction between their soaring odes to freedom and the realities of official actions, which damage the image of their country.

Members of Congress must be capable of holding back the tide of security provisions of the Patriot Act by recognizing the legitimate rights of men and women who sound the alarm. The Whistleblower Protection Act must be amended to ensure effective protection for whistleblowers who act in the public interest – an interest completely separate from immediate national concerns as intelligence services interpret them.

http://en.rsf.org/why-european-nations-must-protect-03-07-2013,44886.html?

Hidden microphone found in London embassy: Ecuador
Published July 03, 2013

QUITO (AFP) – A hidden microphone was found in Ecuador's embassy in London, where WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is holed up, Ecuador's foreign minister said.
Ricardo Patino said the origin of the bug would be revealed Wednesday and explanations demanded of the country involved. He did not elaborate.
The bug was found in a routine search ahead of his visit to London on June 16, he told reporters.
The microphone was found in the office of the ambassador Ana Alban.
Patino said he was not insinuating that the bug was linked to the saga surrounding fugitive US intelligence leaker Edward Snowden, who has applied for asylum in Ecuador.
Snowden is wanted by the United States on charges of espionage for revealing a massive phone and Internet surveillance programme.
Assange, whose organization leaked a vast trove of diplomatic cables and Iraq and Afghanistan war logs a few years ago, has been staying in the Ecuadoran embassy in London for a year.
He faces questioning over sexual assault allegations in Sweden, and fears the Swedes will hand him over to the Americans.
During his visit to London, Patino met with his British counterpart William Hague but no agreement on the Assange case was reached.
Britain is refusing to grant Assange safe passage out of the embassy so he can travel to Ecuador.


Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2013/07/03/hidden-microphone-found-in-london-embassy-ecuador/?#ixzz2XypbW5To

France 'runs vast electronic spying operation using NSA-style methods'
Intelligence agency has spied on French public's phone calls, emails and internet activity, says Le Monde newspaper

Angelique Chrisafis in Paris
The Guardian, Friday 5 July 2013 03.13 AEST

France runs a vast electronic surveillance operation, intercepting and stocking data from citizens' phone and internet activity, using similar methods to the US National Security Agency's Prism programme exposed by Edward Snowden, Le Monde has reported.

An investigation by the French daily found that the DGSE, France's external intelligence agency, had spied on the French public's phone calls, emails and internet activity. The agency intercepted signals from computers and phones in France as well as between France and other countries, looking not so much at content but to create a map of "who is talking to whom", the paper said.

Le Monde said data from emails, text messages, phone records, accessing of Facebook and Twitter, and internet activity going through sites such as Google, Microsoft or Yahoo! was stocked for years on vast servers on three different floors in the basement of the DGSE headquarters.

The paper described the vast spying programme as secret, "outside any serious control" and illegal.

The metadata from phone and internet use was stocked in a "gigantic database" which could be consulted by six French intelligence and security agencies as well as the police.

The paper said Bernard Barbier, technical director of the DGSE, had previously described the system as "probably the biggest information centre in Europe after the English".

Referring to the system as a "French Big Brother", Le Monde said the French state was able to use the surveillance "to spy on anybody at any time". The paper wrote: "All of our communications are spied on."

Le Monde said that after Snowden's revelations about the NSA's Prism surveillance programme prompted indignation in Europe, France "only weakly protested, for two excellent reasons: Paris already knew about it, and it was doing the same thing".

When revelations about the Prism programme harvesting citizens' data emerged, the French government did not immediately comment. But after fresh allegations about the US spying on the European Union and foreign embassies, including the French embassy in Washington, the president, François Hollande, said these practices must "cease immediately". France demanded the suspension of talks on the EU-US free trade pact until it had received full explanations about surveillance.

The foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, said this week that France did not spy on the US embassy in Paris because "between partner countries" these "were not the sorts of things that should happen". Asked about the US spying, Fleur Pellerin, the junior minister for the digital economy, told BFMTV this week that she found the "generalised surveillance of citizens" was "particularly shocking".

The Guardian revealed last month that Britain's spy agency GCHQ had secretly gained access to the network of cables which carry the world's phone calls and internet traffic and had started to process vast streams of sensitive personal information which it was sharing with its American partner, the NSA.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/04/france-electronic-spying-operation-nsa?

US government scanning, storing billions of pieces of mail per year

By Thomas Gaist
5 July 2013

The US government is monitoring and permanently storing information on regular mail, in a vast and previously secret program known as the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking (MICT) program.

According to an article in the New York Times on Thursday, images captured from over 160 billion pieces of mail per year are fed into a massive database, from which the government can construct in depth profiles of individuals, tracking their personal and political connections.
The MICT program parallels the National Security Agency spy programs revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden. While these programs store phone records and collect email and other Internet activity, the MICT gathers this information on all mail senders, without any individualized suspicion of criminal activity. While a warrant is technically necessary to inspect the actual contents of the mail, in 2007 President George Bush authorized law enforcement to open mail without a warrant in exceptional cases.
In previous decades, under the “mail cover surveillance” program, the Postal Service granted law enforcement agencies access to mail items for 30 days based on individual requests relating to suspected criminal activity. Since 2001, this program has evolved into the MICT, which collects information indiscriminately on every piece of mail.
“In the past, mail covers were used when you had a reason to suspect someone of a crime,” Mark Rasch, who has worked on computer crimes for the Justice Department, told the Times. “Now it seems to be, ‘Let’s record everyone's mail so in the future we might go back and see who you were communicating with.’ Essentially you've added mail covers on millions of Americans”
Bruce Schneier, a computer and security expert, added, “They are doing the same thing as the other programs, collecting the information on the outside of your mail, the metadata, if you will, of names, addresses, return addresses and postmark locations, which gives the government a pretty good map of your contacts, even if they aren't reading the content,” he said.
Former FBI agent James Wedick told the Times that the mail snooping yields “a treasure trove of information,” and that “looking at just the outside of letters and other mail, I can see who you bank with, who you communicate with—all kinds of useful information that gives investigators leads that they can then follow up on with a subpoena.”
Wedick affirmed, “It can be easily abused because it's so easy to use, and you don't have to go through a judge to get the information. You just fill out a form.” The Postal Service has power to authorize law enforcement agencies to surveil mail, without judicial review, and the Times reported that these requests are rarely denied.
The Times reported that the program is used by numerous government agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Internal Revenue Service, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Department of Health and Human Services.
The MICT program was instituted and had been operating secretly for over a decade, since its was implemented after the 2001 anthrax attacks. The FBI quietly revealed its existence in a June 7 criminal complaint related to alleged ricin attacks directed at President Barack Obama.
The revelation of the MICT program adds to a long list of the information that is being systematically gathered by government agencies—from the NSA phone record and Internet data programs, to the accumulation of vast databases of photographs to be used for facial recognition. All of this is being done in violation of basic democratic rights and behind the backs of the American people.

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/07/05/mail-j05.html?

Friday, Jul 05 2013 9AM 7°C 12PM
By MICHAEL ZENNIE and ALEX GREIG

PUBLISHED: 05:59 GMT, 5 July 2013 | UPDATED: 06:00 GMT, 5 July 2013

The two women who are suing after they were subjected to a humiliating and invasive cavity search on a Texas roadside on Memorial Day last year have spoken out about their ordeal.

Brandy Hamilton, 26, and Alexandria Randle, 24, told reporters how they were ordered out of their vehicle, not permitted to put on clothes to cover the bikinis they'd been wearing at the beach that day, and given cavity searches right by the side of the road.

The disturbing video of the event, which was caught on the dashcam, captures one of the women asking in disbelief, 'Are you serious?' when the officers tell her they're going to give her a cavity search.

Trooper Nathaniel Turner is one of three officers involved in the traffic stop being sued. He is accused of ordering the invasive body cavity search

The women are sharing new details about what happened to them that day.

Alexandria Randle still can't believe what happened to her and her friend. She felt 'violated' and 'embarrassed' by the body cavity search on the side of a Texas highway after they were stopped returning from a weekend at the beach.

'I couldn't even imagine if this were to happen to... one of my little cousins... I just want this to be the last time this happens here,' she told KHOU11.

Speaking about police searching people for drugs, Brandy Hamilton said, 'If it comes to that, then take the person into jail, you don't have to do it on the side of the road.'

'It's been traumatizing,' she said. 'I don't know if I can trust the cops anymore, it's just been very - a very horrific situation to me.'

The women are suing the Texas Department of Public Safety and the sheriff of Brazoria County, Texas, where the stop occurred. Their lawyer alleges that the search was meant to humiliate them and was conducted without probable cause.

The female officer who performed the invasive search, which included inserting a finger into the women's vaginas, is accused of using the same pair of gloves to search both women. The entire 40-minute traffic stop was caught on the trooper's dashboard camera.

Attorney Allie R. Booker told MailOnline her client's case is startling similar to a July 2012 case in Dallas in which DPS trooper Kelly Helleson aggressively searched Angel Dobbs and her niece, Ashley Dobbs - including giving them a body cavity search and not changing gloves between searching the two women.

Booker said a third case, that has yet to become public, bears the same hallmarks, as well.

'How are these people behaving in the same manner, hundreds of miles away from each other. There's got to be some factor at the DPS that makes these officers think they can do this,' she said.


Trooper Turner has been suspended as part of an internal investigation by the Department of Public Safety

Miss Hamilton and Miss Randle were on their way home to Houston from Surfside Beach on May 28, 2012, when they were stopped for speeding by DPS trooper Nathaniel Turner.

Turner immediately asks both women to step out of their car. Both were wearing only their two-piece swimsuits from their time at the beach.

Ms Hamilton, the driver, asks if she can put her dress on to cover up.

'Don't worry about it. Come out here,' the trooper tells her.

Turner says he can smell marijuana in the car and accuses the women of smoking and driving. He later claimed that he found a piece of a smoked marijuana blunt under the back seat of the car.

He then makes the two women sand on the side of a busy highway in their swimsuits while he calls for backup.

'One of them has got her zipper open on her pants of her daisy dukes shorts - whatever they are,' the trooper says on the radio.

Two more troopers show up - including Jennie Bui.

Bui, as trooper Turner explains, 'is going to search you.'

'I ain't, because I ain’t about to get up-close and personal with your woman areas… she is going to put some gloves on,' he says.

'You're going to go up my private parts?' asks Hamilton, sounding bewildered.

Despite numerous pleas from the two women not to perform a body cavity search, Bui ignores them.

Both women can be seen with pained looks on their faces as the trooper probes their genitals.

Both Miss Hamilton (left) and Miss Randel (right) allege their civil rights were violated and they suffered pain and humiliation in the searches

Miss Randle sobs uncontrollably as she is probed.

At one point Turner says: 'Don’t smoke weed in your car and you won’t have to go through this.'

Booker, the lawyer for the two women, said the behavior of the troopers was outrageous.

'If the cavity search alone isn't enough and say it's their fault that you basically just sexually assaulted them - that's humiliating,' she said.

Turner later released both women and issued Miss Hamilton a citation fro possession of drug paraphernalia. She is still fighting the charges in court, though she contends the marijuana wasn't hers.

Trooper Bui was fired last week by the DPS. Trooper Turner has been suspended, Booker said.

'These police officers are here to protect and serve,' Brandy Hamilton told KHOU11.

'And they did not protect me at all. Not one of them.'

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2356618/Pictured-The-women-suing-police-unconstitutional-roadside-cavity-search.html#ixzz2Y9XCxAkh
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook

That's an awful lot of junk mail. They must have a buttload of gutter repair and discount pizza coupons.

State Department spent over half a million to boost Facebook page “likes”

Brittany Hillen, Jul 5th 2013   

According to an inspector general’s report, the government spent approximately $630,000 from 2011 through 2012 to increase the number of “likes” the State Department’s Facebook page received. While the initiative was successful, having increased the numbers on the page dramatically, many critics are speaking out against the action, calling it a waste of money.

Before the campaign was started, the total number of Facebook fans on four Bureau of International Information Program Facebook pages totaled about 100,000, a number the State Department considered too low for its intentions. In order to boost the number of likes, the bureau initiated an advertisement and social media program with the intention of increasing the number of likes its accounts collectively had.

As a result, the numbers increased to over 2 million “likes” per Facebook page held by the bureau, with the total cost exceeding half a million over a two-year period. Beyond that, the effort also drew a smaller amount of attention to the company’s non-English Facebook pages, having increased the collective numbers from approximately 68,000 to in excess of 450,000.

Such likes were achieved via advertising, which is where the funds were used, with the inspector general’s report also indicating the use of photos to garner additional followers. Said the report, which was released in May: “Many in the bureau criticize the advertising campaigns as “buying fans” who may have once clicked on an ad or “liked” a photo but have no real interest in the topic and have never engaged further. Defenders of advertising point to the difficulty of finding a page on Facebook with a general search and the need to use ads to increase visibility.”

While there are arguments on both sides, at the end of the day the numbers speak for themselves: the number of “fans” engaging with the four Facebook pages is reported as considerably lower than how many likes each page has. According to the report, the combination of numbers between fan commenting, sharing, and liking amounts to about 2-percent of the page’s total followers. The average status has less than 100 comments, and the average interaction with the pages come in the form of “likes”.

http://www.slashgear.com/state-department-spent-over-half-a-million-to-boost-facebook-page-likes-05289297/?

I had a conversation with a group of patrons tonight where it was universally agreed that Snowden is an asshole and that while we're all for governments being more transparent this kind of "information leak" is for the worst because your average Joe is a moron and ill-equipped for such concepts. I was kind of surprised by how unanimous the consensus was.

Venezuela and Nicaragua Offer Snowden Asylum

PUBLISHED ON JULY 6, 2013

Nicaragua and Venezuela have indicated that they could offer political asylum to NSA whistleblower and US fugitive Edward Snowden.

President of Venezuela Nicolas Maduro said that his country would offer Snowden political asylum, the first country to make such an offer.

The presidents of both Nicaragua and Venezuela have indicated their countries could offer political asylum to US fugitive Edward Snowden. Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega has said that his country would also do so "if circumstances permit".

These offers come after Snowden applied to a further six countries for asylum on Friday, after failing to find any firm offers from his the previous 21 locations to which he applied.

With a firm offer on the table, the problem for Snowden may now be reaching the country, with the US applying significant pressure on all other nations around the world not to offer him passage through their airspace. European countries have already shown that any plane he would be carried on would not be allowed to fly over European airspace, after rerouting the aeroplane of the Bolivian president earlier this week on suspicion he may be harbouring Snowden.

Snowden currently remains in the transit area of Moscow airport.

http://descrier.co.uk/world/2013/07/venezuela-and-nicaragua-offer-snowden-asylum/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=venezuela-and-nicaragua-offer-snowden-asylum

Lack of transparency means tainted justice for Bradley Manning

06 JUL 2013 15:28 ALEXA O'BRIEN


Military obfuscation and compliant media make for an Orwellian trial of managed misinformation against the WikiLeaks source.

The lack of contemporaneous access to court documents has caused irreparable harm to the American public's right to scrutinize the conduct of military prosecutors and the rulings of the presiding military judge. This will surely taint the final outcome of Bradley Manning's trial.

"Military confinement. That's like a term of art," said the spokesperson for the military district of Washington (MDW) – which is responsible for convening a fair and impartial trial for the accused – to an American TV reporter last summer. The reporter was known for investigating infotainment websites during pre-trial sessions. "The practical effect?" commented the spokesman to the reporter. "He's in jail."

As we wait for the second circuit to rule on the Department of Justice's midnight appeal of Judge Katherine Forrest's permanent injunction on indefinite military detention of American citizens without trial or charges, Jennifer Elsea, a legislative attorney who provides policy and legal analysis to the US Congress, reminds us that aiding the enemy (pdf) is "one of two offenses under the Uniform Code of Military Justice that apply to 'any person', rather than just members of the military, like Manning."

Despite Manning having been held longer than any accused awaiting court martial in US military law, Judge Lind ruled in February that the government had not violated his speedy trial rights. Moreover, in a case where the first amendment is vulnerable to chill and prohibition – namely, because the accused is charged with aiding the enemy and espionage for disclosing government information to the public – the public was denied access to not only the court's speedy trial ruling, but also over 30 000 pages of court documents until the third day of Manning's trial, which was 1 103 days into his pretrial confinement and 18 months into the legal proceeding.

It was unfounded allegations by a confidential government informant that Manning had leaked top-secret material (he had not) that was used as the basis of his pre-trial confinement in May 2010. That misinformation was amplified in the mainstream media, spoon-fed into a feeding frenzy by prominent government officials, calling for the death penalty for Manning; the designation of WikiLeaks as a terrorist organization; and the criminal prosecution of Julian Assange.

At Fort George "Orwell" Meade, home of the NSA and the US Defense Information School, managing the message for a "docketless" pre-trial was facilitated by the spokesperson for the military district of Washington. He was tasked with explaining the proceedings to a press pool, forced to compare notes after mile-a-minute recitations into the court record by the presiding military judge, Colonel Denise Lind.

"You would say, 'He's in a jail'?" asked the American TV reporter of her de facto MDW editor. The same reporter also inquired later whether I found George Clooney handsome. "I think 'military confinement' is the most accurate," replied the spokesperson. "Luckily, I have nothing to do with that."

A newfangled offense
For five and a half months, the former spokesperson for the MDW did not disclose to the anemic press that he was a former member of the prosecution. In fact, his emails with the Quantico Brig commander about Manning's underwear removal are part of the evidentiary record concerning Manning's unlawful pretrial punishment at the Quantico Brig, where he was stripped of his clothing against the recommendation of the Brig mental health providers. In light of this revelation, the military district of Washington recently required credentialed media to sign "ground rules" prohibiting them from naming staff without written approval.

On the first day of his trial, the public did not have a transcript of Manning's formal plea to ten lesser included offenses (LIOs), which included substituted dates for the offenses charged against him. The public did not know that this earnest young soldier volunteered to plea to the LIO for an April transmission of the Garani video three weeks after Judge Lind "cut his defense off at the knees", in his attorney David Coombs' words, by precluding evidence of the actual lack of harm from his disclosures.

Manning made his plea knowing the prosecution lacked forensic evidence for a transmission in November 2009. The November transmission fits into the US government's theory of the case that ties it to the grand jury investigation of WikiLeaks.

The public also did not know that military prosecutors not only rejected Manning's proposed plea, but even threatened to charge him with an additional ten-year offense on top of the life sentence plus 149 years he already faces if convicted on their case.

Moreover, the public did not know that Manning is charged with a newfangled offense, which is not tied to any existing US federal criminal violation or punitive article of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, called "wanton publication". All that military prosecutors have to prove to convict him is that he had knew that terrorists use the internet.

Transparency is vital to the public's perception of the legitimacy of the criminal proceedings. The obscurity managed by Denise Lind, the military district of Washington, and the US army has discredited the imminent outcome. - © Guardian News and Media 2013

http://mg.co.za/article/2013-07-06-lack-of-transparency-means-tainted-justice-for-bradley-manning?

Up to six million CCTV cameras are operating in Britain in places ranging from trains and shops to catteries, sewage plants and stud farms, a new study revealed today.

The research, conducted for the British Security Industry Association, says that cameras monitoring railway and Tube stations, roads, schools and universities are among those controlled by police or other public authorities.

But it says that there are 70 times more cameras operated privately by businesses and others using the devices for reasons including the protection of property, crime detection, or safety.

It says the findings, which represent one of the most comprehensive attempts to assess the extent of CCTV use, indicate that notions of a “Big Brother” state are misplaced because relatively few of the country’s cameras are in the authorities’ control.

It warns that a bigger concern is the lack of regulation governing privately run cameras and says that new rules are needed to enforce better standards.

The conclusions, unveiled today in London, will revive the debate about the so-called “surveillance society” and follow the introduction last year of new government guidelines to control the use of state cameras in the Home Office’s Protection of Freedoms Act.

The study, which uses complex calcuations based on the number of different types of property, average floor areas and other data, says that a precise total is impossible, but estimates that there are between 4.1 million and just over 5.9 million cameras nationwide.

It says there are probably only 70,255 cameras in public control — defined as local authorities and police — which is “perhaps only 1.2 to 1.7 per cent” of the overall number in use.

Local authority cameras are given as 59,753 across Britain, although this figure dates from 2009, while police are reported to have 10,502 cameras.

Transport for London has 13,000 cameras on the Tube network, double the 2003 figure — an average of 52 cameras for each of the 250 stations.

State schools are estimated to have between 290,000 to 370,000 cameras.

By contrast, today’s study says that there are 2.7 million cameras in shops, offices and warehouses and lists a range of other establishments where the CCTV is used — including universities, kennels, catteries, sewage works, stud farms, go kart tracks, zoos and safari parks, auction rooms, landfill sites and golf driving ranges.


http://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/spy-britain-six-million-cctv-cameras--and-most-are-in-private-hands-8699934.html

Edited by Joffa: 10/7/2013 08:50:48 PM

Australian company agreed to allow US government to store information on communications between US and other countries

guardian.co.uk, Friday 12 July 2013 19.08 AEST

Telstra agreed to store information on communications between America and other countries in a contract with the US government which meant it could potentially spy on the contents.

The agreement was signed in 2001 between the telecommunications company – which was at the time half-owned by the Australian government – and its subsidiary Reach, as well as the FBI and the US Department of Justice (DOJ).

The agreement, first reported by Crikey who obtained the documents, gave the US government permission to store "domestic communications" – with the possibility of using them for spying – using the underwater cables owned by Reach.

Domestic communications were defined in the agreement as communications within the US but could also extend to communications which "originate or terminate" in America, meaning Australian communications with America could have potentially been subject to the agreement.

Telstra also agreed to report to the US government every three months on whether any foreign non-government entities had asked for access to their communications, and complete a compliance report every year which could not be accessed using freedom of information laws.

"Domestic communications companies shall designate points of contact within the United States with the authority and responsibility for accepting and overseeing the carrying out of lawful US process to conduct electronic surveillance of or relating to domestic communications carried by or through domestic communications infrastructure; or relating to customers or subscribers of domestic communications companies," the agreement says.

The points of contact were to be American citizens and the agreement also stopped Telstra and Reach, which is based in Hong Kong, from complying with any country's laws that certain data should be destroyed.

"Reach, Tesltra and PCCW agree that the United States would suffer irreparable injury if for any reason a domestic communications company failed to perform any of its significant responsibilities under this agreement and that monetary relief would not be an adequate remedy," the agreement said.

"The FBI and the DOJ shall be entitled, in addition to any other remedy available at law or equity, to specific performance and injunctive or other equitable relief."

The agreement meant all communications within America using the cables was stored in a facility on US soil which was staffed solely by Americans who passed security clearances.

A spokesperson for Telstra said the agreement was complying with American law.

"This agreement, at that time 12 years ago, reflected Reach's operating obligations in the US that require carriers to comply with US domestic law," he said.

The revelations are the latest in a series about government spying which began with the Guardian reporting a secret agreement between various companies and the US National Security Agency.

Earlier this week the Washington Post reported on the existence of agreements with the US and telecommunications companies which gave the government access to cables for spying.

Many of the agreements have since been published on the website Public Intelligence.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/12/telstra-deal-america-government-spying?