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thinkahol *

The due-process-free assassination of U.S. citizens is now reality - Salon.com - 0 views

www.salon.com/...singleton

The due-process-free assassination of U.S. citizens is now reality - Salon.com

shared by thinkahol * on 09 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 09 Nov 11
     
    What amazes me most whenever I write about this topic is recalling how terribly upset so many Democrats pretended to be when Bush claimed the power merely to detain or even just eavesdrop on American citizens without due process.  Remember all that?  Yet now, here's Obama claiming the power not to detain or eavesdrop on citizens without due process, but to kill them; marvel at how the hardest-core White House loyalists now celebrate this and uncritically accept the same justifying rationale used by Bush/Cheney (this is war! the President says he was a Terrorist!) without even a moment of acknowledgment of the profound inconsistency or the deeply troubling implications of having a President - even Barack Obama - vested with the power to target U.S. citizens for murder with no due process. Also, during the Bush years, civil libertarians who tried to convince conservatives to oppose that administration's radical excesses would often ask things like this: would you be comfortable having Hillary Clinton wield the power to spy on your calls or imprison you with no judicial reivew or oversight?  So for you good progressives out there justifying this, I would ask this:  how would the power to assassinate U.S. citizens without due process look to you in the hands of, say, Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann?
thinkahol *

Things That Make Me Angry | Thinkahol's Blog - 0 views

thinkahol.wordpress.com/...things-that-make-me-angry

Things That Make Me Angry | Thinkahol's Blog

shared by thinkahol * on 12 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 12 Nov 11
     
    Wall Street Isn't Winning - It's Cheating The two-tiered justice system: an illustration 9/10/2001: Rumsfeld says $2.3 TRILLION Missing from Pentagon  The due-process-free assassination of U.S. citizens is now reality The Quiet Coup "the finance industry has effectively captured our government" What OWS is about + data behind the movement Data privacy is now extinct in the U.S. "The problem that confronts us is that every living system in the biosphere is in decline and the rate of decline is accelerating. There isn't one peer-reviewed scientific article that's been published in the last 20 years that contradicts that statement. Living systems are coral reefs. They're our climatic stability, forest cover, the oceans themselves, aquifers, water, the conditions of the soil, biodiversity. They go on and on as they get more specific. But the fact is, there isn't one living system that is stable or is improving. And those living systems provide the basis for all life." The 1% are the very best destroyers of wealth the world has ever seen The prison industry in the United States: big business or a new form of slavery? How the GOP Became the Party of the Rich: The inside story of how the Republicans abandoned the poor and the middle class to pursue their relentless agenda of tax cuts for the wealthiest one percent
thinkahol *

Criminalizing free speech - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com - 0 views

www.salon.com/...index.html

Criminalizing free speech - Glenn Greenwald Salon.com

shared by thinkahol * on 02 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 02 Jun 11
     
    Alex Seitz-Wald of Think Progress rightly takes Sen. Rand Paul to task for going on Sean Hannity's radio program -- one week after commendably leading opposition to the Patriot Act on civil liberties grounds -- and advocating the arrest of people who "attend radical political speeches."  After claiming to be against racial and religious profiling, Paul said:  "But if someone is attending speeches from someone who is promoting the violent overthrow of our government, that's really an offense that we should be going after -- they should be deported or put in prison."  Seitz-Wald correctly notes the obvious:  "Paul's suggestion that people be imprisoned or deported for merely attending a political speech would be a fairly egregious violation on the First Amendment, not to mention due process." 
thinkahol *

Newly leaked documents show the ongoing travesty of Guantanamo - Glenn Greenwald - Salo... - 0 views

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Newly leaked documents show the ongoing travesty of Guantanamo - Glenn Greenwald Salon.com

shared by thinkahol * on 27 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 27 Apr 11
     
    Numerous media outlets -- The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Telegraph, and NPR, among others - last night published classified files on more than 700 past and present Guantanamo detainees. The leak was originally provided to WikiLeaks, which then gave them to the Post, NPR and others; the NYT and The Guardian claim to have received them from "another source" (WikiLeaks suggested the "other source" was Daniel Domscheit-Berg, a former WikiLeaks associate who WikiLeaks claims took, without authorization, many WikiLeaks files when he left). The documents reveal vast new information about these detainees and, in particular, the shoddy and unreliable nature of the "evidence" used (both before and now) to justify their due-process-free detentions. There are several points worth noting about all this:
Skeptical Debunker

Big Content condemns foreign governments that endorse FOSS - 0 views

arstechnica.com/...ernments-that-endorse-foss.ars

open source Special 301 USTR IIPA absurd recommendations self-serving

shared by Skeptical Debunker on 25 Feb 10 - Cached
  • University of Edinburgh law lecturer Andres Guadamuz wrote a blog entry this week highlighting some particularly troubling aspects of the IIPA's 301 recommendations. The organization has condemned Indonesia and several other countries for encouraging government adoption of open source software. According to the IIPA, official government endorsements of open source software create "trade barriers" and restrict "equitable market access" for software companies. The profound absurdity of this accusation is exacerbated by the fact that Indonesia's move towards open source software was almost entirely motivated by a desire to eliminate the use of pirated software within the government IT infrastructure. It's important to understand that Indonesia has not mandated the adoption of open source software or barred government agencies from purchasing proprietary commercial software. The Indonesian government issued a statement in 2009 informing municipal governments that they had to stop using pirated software. The statement said that government agencies must either purchase legally licensed commercial software or switch to free and open source alternatives in order to comply with copyright law. This attempt by Indonesia to promote legal software procurement processes by endorsing the viability of open source software has apparently angered the IIPA. In its 301 recommendations for Indonesia, the IIPA demands that the government rescind its 2009 statement. According to the IIPA, Indonesia's policy "weakens the software industry and undermines its long-term competitiveness" because open source software "encourages a mindset that does not give due consideration to the value to intellectual creations [and] fails to build respect for intellectual property rights." The number of ways in which the IIPA's statements regarding open source software are egregiously misleading and dishonest are too numerous to count. The IIPA seems to have completely missed the fact that there is a very robust ecosystem of commercial software vendors in the open source software market and that open source software is at the heart of some of the most popular consumer electronics products that are sold in the United States. It has clearly become an important part of the US software economy and increasingly serves as an enabler of innovation and technological progress. In light of the profitability of Red Hat and other open source leaders, it seems absurd to contend that open source software adoption will weaken the software industry or reduce its competitiveness. In fact, the emergence of open source software has contributed to creating a more competitive landscape in the software industry by offering alternative business models that enable smaller companies to gain traction against the dominant incumbent players. The IIPA's position is profoundly hypocritical, because many parts of the US government, including the Department of Defense, have issued their own memos endorsing open source software adoption. The IIPA's disingenuous move to equate open source software with piracy reeks of desperation. The BSA and other IIPA members are likely losing sleep over open source software because that development model and approach to licensing will empower developing countries to build their own domestic IT industries, eliminating the need for them to tithe to American software giants. It's another failing of the 301 review, which Big Content wants used to coerce other countries into adopting ever-more-stringent copyright laws.
  • Skeptical Debunker on 25 Feb 10
     
    In accordance with US trade law, the Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR) is required to conduct an annual review of the status of foreign intellectual property laws. This review, which is referred to as Special 301, is typically used to denounce countries that have less restrictive copyright policies than the United States. The review process is increasingly dominated by content industry lobbyists who want to subvert US trade policy and make it more favorable to their own interests. We have already noted the targeting of Canada for its supposedly lax copyright laws, but that is not the only nation drawing the ire of Big Content. One of the organizations that plays a key role in influencing the Special 301 review is the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA), a powerful coalition that includes the RIAA, the MPAA, and the Business Software Alliance (BSA). The IIPA, which recently published its official recommendations to the USTR for the 2010 edition of the 301 review, has managed to achieve a whole new level of absurdity.
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