Mano Singham
Just another Freethought Blogs site
I was surprised that the leaks from within the CIA of nearly 9,000 documents that WikiLeaks has labeled ‘Vault 7’ that revealed information about its spying methods on Americans and how they lost control of the systems it was using have not received much greater prominence in the news, though it is now receiving more scrutiny as both the FBI and CIA launch criminal investigations into the leaks.
[Read more…]
Fortunately for us, Conan O’Brien has recordings of the conversations.
It was disgusting to see how the media fawned over Donald Trump’s speech to the joint session of Congress. Simply for acting like a normal human being for a brief time, they gushed that he had suddenly become presidential. But as Trevor Noah astutely pointed out, Trump knows exactly how to fake the media into thinking he is presidential and has mocked them in the past about how easy it was to fool them. In the speech, he did exactly what he said he would do and they still fell for it.
[Read more…]
WikiLeaks has issued a blockbuster press release today along with a tranche of documents that were leaked to it that describe the CIA’s efforts to infiltrate people’s communications systems. The documents reveal that the CIA targeted smartphones and computers and turned so-called Smart TVs into eavesdropping devices. The documents allege that the CIA then lost control of this spying arsenal which means that others may now possess these same capabilities, which would constitute a massive breach in its security systems.
[Read more…]
In the groundbreaking book Manufacturing Consent published in 1988 by Noam Chomsky and Edward Hermann, they proposed a model of how the media in the US is used by the establishment as a means of control of the population. This works less overtly than in openly authoritarian countries where state dominance over the media is obvious. In the US, control of the media is not by the state but by an establishment elite. This control is hidden and achieves its effects more subtly and this feature actually makes the propaganda more effective because people do not realize that their opinions are being manipulated.
[Read more…]
I missed this clip of actor Hugh Laurie appearing on Stephen Colbert’s show just before the election but thought it was still worth seeing.
The administration of Donald Trump careens all over the place and his behavior continues to be erratic, leading to an explosion of palace intrigue and gossip. Take this story:
With the White House struggling to gain its footing almost two months into Donald Trump’s presidency, administration officials are increasingly putting the blame on one person: Reince Priebus.
In interviews, over a dozen Trump aides, allies, and others close to the White House said that Priebus, the 44-year-old chief of staff, was becoming a singular target of criticism within the White House.
So now Donald Trump is charging that last year his phones were illegally tapped by Barack Obama. It is now clear, thanks to the Edward Snowden revelations, that the Obama administration presided over a vast intelligence gathering operation that vacuumed up the communications of pretty much everyone, and it is undoubtedly the case that Trump’s communications are somewhere in the NSA computers storage facilities.
[Read more…]
It was not that long ago that using the word ‘apartheid’ to describe the conditions of Palestinians in the Israeli occupied territories would arouse indignant responses and charges of anti-Semitism would be leveled against the speaker. But those days are long gone as the state of affairs has become more widely known and the realization has sunk in that the label accurately captures it. Even people like former president Jimmy Carter and South African archbishop Desmond Tutu and many others use the term.
[Read more…]