As the police and intelligence agencies continue to collect more and more information, it’s all OK because they’re good custodians of that information: they keep it secure where hackers can’t get at it and publish it, and you need clearances to get at it.
Yeah, right.
Military ‘exercises’ are a form of imperial messaging. Right now, the US has troops in Poland in what is being described with Orwellian irony as “anti-Russian aggression NATO exercises”[1]
The troops will rotate training in Bulgaria, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Slovakia for the next nine months. The regional training exercises are also designed to test how U.S. forces respond on short notice to a possible conflict with Russia.
Mississippi lawmakers are advancing a bill to bring back firing squads in the event that they continue to be unable to get lethal injection drugs.[1]
The NSA’s data-pile represents a retro-scope that can be used to investigate anyone backward in time. In an earlier posting, I described how it can be useful in political hit-jobs against anyone with even a ghost of a skeleton in their closet. Guess what?
Korean grandmother, 83, is ‘punched in the head by woman, 27, screaming “white power” in downtown LA [Daily Mail]
Talleyrand, Napoleon Bonaparte’s chief diplomat, could have taught Trump’s team of motley fools a thing or two thousand. One of his famous observations: “Never interrupt your opponent when they are making a mistake.” Sun Tzu would have nodded.
It’s unsure whether the Trump administration was or was not thinking about expanding black sites and rendition, so I was doing a bit of research about them – mostly out of my own interest. What is known about these sites?
Apparently the Trump administration is drafting an order to review the usage of “black sites” abroad.
In plain English that’s called “conspiracy to commit torture” which is a crime under Section 18 of the US Code, chapter 113c.
According to the Washington Post[1], most of the State Department’s mid/senior management has resigned en masse.
Yesterday I discussed the retro-scope of information-gathering[1] and I probably should have mentioned that President Obama – along with commuting Chelsea Manning’s sentence – handed the citizens of the US a great big “F.U.” Just before leaving office he quietly changed how the NSA is allowed to share information, considerably expanding the power of the intelligence apparatus.