Soon after taking office, President Obama pledged to open a new inquiry into the deaths of perhaps thousands of Taliban prisoners of war at the hands of U.S.-allied Afghan fighters in late 2001.
Last month, the White House told ProPublica it was still “looking into” the apparent massacre.
Now it says it has concluded its investigation – but won’t make it public. [Read more…]
As promised, today’s Guardian has a front page story by Glenn Greenwald about yet another NSA program, this one called XKeyscore, an NSA tool that collects “nearly everything a user does on the internet”.
A top secret National Security Agency program allows analysts to search with no prior authorization through vast databases containing emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals, according to documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden.
…
The purpose of XKeyscore is to allow analysts to search the metadata as well as the content of emails and other internet activity, such as browser history, even when there is no known email account (a “selector” in NSA parlance) associated with the individual being targeted.
Today starting at 9:30 am there was to have been an interesting informal Congressional hearing convened by Congressman Alan Grayson (D-Florida) in which critics of the NSA program, including reporter Glenn Greenwald and the ACLU, were to testify. But practically at the last minute, the hearings had to be canceled because president Obama suddenly expressed an interest in having a chat with the Democrats in the House of Representatives at that same time. What an unfortunate coincidence! [Read more…]
Jon Oliver of The Daily Show interviews Mark Leibovich on his new book This Town about the total corruption of Washington. I have not read the book and likely wont but it apparently just confirms with names and stories what most careful observers have long realized: that people in government and the media and the lobbying industry exist solely to serve each other and make money, and all the so-called partisan animosity is just a show put on for the rubes. [Read more…]
It is almost certain that Samantha Power will be confirmed as the US ambassador to the UN. Philip Giraldi examines carefully her record and the evolution of her views and statements and arrives at pretty much the same conclusions that I did. [Read more…]
Bradley Manning has been found guilty of 19 charges including espionage but NOT of the most serious one of ‘aiding the enemy’.
Adam Gabbatt of the Guardian has a live blog of the verdict and reactions. [Read more…]
British prime minister David Cameron has begun a campaign against access to pornography on the internet. He wants all new computers to block pornography as the default. People wanting to view it have to explicitly request that they be allowed to do so and show that they are above a certain age before being granted permission. [Read more…]
Many people in the US do not realize the extent to which the government has gone to instill fear in journalists. One way they have done this by threatening to cut off access to them. This should not be a serious problem if journalists were doing their jobs the proper way, which is to investigate those things that governments want to keep secret. But so many of them have become dependent on insider gossip provided by anonymous high level sources that being cut off can be a career-ender. They have become content with becoming part of the government propaganda machine. [Read more…]
Joseph Bonneau, a software engineer at Google, was the first recipient of a new prize awarded beginning in 2012 by the NSA for the Best Scientific Cybersecurity Paper for his paper The science of guessing: analyzing an anonymized corpus of 70 million passwords. The day after receiving the award he wrote a blog post that contained the following: [Read more…]
Via Juan Cole, I came across this clip from 1990 in which Noam Chomsky talks about how in the propaganda model, words have technical meanings in addition to their normal meanings. In the US media it is the technical meanings that are used because they provide justification for anything that the US government does. What Chomsky said then still holds up, including the examples he gives of this practice, especially as it pertains to the Middle East ‘peace process’ that is back in the news. [Read more…]