Skip to main content

Home/ Socialism and the End of the American Dream/ Group items tagged london

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
2More

Ecuador breaks US trade pact to thwart 'blackmail' over Snowden asylum | World news | g... - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...r-us-trade-pact-edward-snowden surveillance state NSA Snowden Ecuador refugees
shared by Paul Merrell on 27 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Ecuador has ramped up its defiance of the US over Edward Snowden by waiving preferential trade rights with Washington even as the whistleblower's prospect of reaching Quito dimmed.President Rafael Correa's government said on Thursday it was renouncing the Andean Trade Preference Act to thwart US "blackmail" of Ecuador in the former NSA contractor's asylum request.Officials, speaking at an early morning press conference, also offered a $23m donation for human rights training in the US, a brash riposte to recent US criticism of Ecuador's own human rights record.Betty Tola, the minister of political coordination, said the asylum request had not been processed because Snowden, who is believed to be at Moscow airport, was neither in Ecuador nor at an Ecuadorean embassy or consulate. "The petitioner is not in Ecuadorean territory as the law requires."
  • The renunciation underlined divisions within Ecuador's government between leftists who have embraced Snowden as an anti-imperialist symbol and centrists who fear diplomatic and economic damage.Some in the government are believed to be annoyed that Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder who has sheltered at Ecuador's London embassy to avoid extradition, has seized the limelight in the Snowden saga. Assange caught Quito by surprise last week when he announced Snowden had been given a safe conduct pass. Quito replaced its ambassador to London earlier this month in hope of better managing its famous guest.The waiving of preferential trade rights followed threats from members of the US congress to drop the ATPA in July, when it is due for renewal, unless Ecuador toed the line on Snowden."Ecuador does not accept pressure or threats from anyone, nor does it trade with principles or submit them to mercantile interests, however important those may be," said Fernando Alvarado, the communications secretary. "Ecuador gives up, unilaterally and irrevocably, the said customs benefits."
3More

Lifting the 24 Hour Siege: Julian Assange, London's Metropolitan Police and Continued D... - 0 views

www.globalresearch.ca/...5482225 surveillance state war & peace Assange Ecuador asylum police
shared by Paul Merrell on 17 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • While things tend to get murky, sometimes by design, regarding the police presence outside the Ecuadorean embassy in London, the announcement that the city’s Metropolitan Police would be lifting their twenty-four hour surveillance did surprise some. This was hardly to suggest that the police forces had lost interest in capturing Julian Assange.  What mattered here was that the costs in guarding Assange from a literal flight of fancy had simply become disproportionate, requiring a change of tact.  Over £12m in costs had been incurred since he skipped bail to avoid his Swedish sojourn, and irrespective of which side of the Assange side one was on, anger was mounting at a very conspicuously bloated project. The statement from the Metropolitan Police was cool in its language.  “Like all public services, MPS resources are finite.  With so many different criminal, and other, threats to the city it protects, the current deployment of officers is no longer believed proportionate” (The Guardian, Oct 12). The siege, according to WikiLeaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson, had not been lifted so much as reconstituted.  “My interpretation is that it has not been lifted. They are calling off the uniformed presence but escalating the covert operation and will arrest him if he steps outside off the embassy.”  Costs, in other words, were going to be moved off the books to un-uniformed personnel.
  • Having been granted political asylum for fears that he might be carted off to the US via Sweden to face the findings of an empanelled grand jury, he remains confined to the cramped quarters of the embassy.  Nor can he rely on new laws in the form of the Anti Social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014 that make an “accusation” – in this case, claims of sexual assault on two Swedish nationals in Sweden – insufficient to require extradition.  As the laws were passed after the fact, precisely motivated by the Assange imbroglio, the foreign and commonwealth office has deemed it inapplicable retrospectively.  Assange, as ever, continues to be the legal exception, a singular target of juridical manipulation. In the meantime, the UN working group on arbitrary detention (WGAD) has been considering Assange’s case, and it likely to find in his favour given its previous rulings of a deprivation of liberty when a person is forced to choose between confinement or the forfeiture of a fundamental right such as asylum.[1] It is also a principle that holds for the European Court of Human Rights and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).  The latter defines detention as confinement “within a narrowly bounded or restricted location, including prisons, closed camps, detention facilities or airport transit zones, where freedom of movement is substantially curtailed, and where the only opportunity to leave this limited area is to leave the territory.”
  • [2] Submission to the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention by Mr. Julian Assange, available at: https://justice4assange.com/IMG/pdf/assange-wgad.pdf
6More

Under Intense Pressure to Silence Wikileaks, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton Propose... - 0 views

truepundit.com/drone-strike-on-julian-assange war & peace Wikileaks Assange assassination-plot Hillary
shared by Paul Merrell on 04 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • Clinton’s State Department was getting pressure from President Obama and his White House inner circle, as well as heads of state internationally, to try and cutoff Assange’s delivery of the cables and if that effort failed, then to forge a strategy to minimize the administration’s public embarrassment over the contents of the cables. Hence, Clinton’s early morning November meeting of State’s top brass who floated various proposals to stop, slow or spin the Wikileaks contamination. That is when a frustrated Clinton, sources said, at some point blurted out a controversial query. “Can’t we just drone this guy?” Clinton openly inquired, offering a simple remedy to silence Assange and smother Wikileaks via a planned military drone strike, according to State Department sources. The statement drew laughter from the room which quickly died off when the Secretary kept talking in a terse manner, sources said. Clinton said Assange, after all, was a relatively soft target, “walking around” freely and thumbing his nose without any fear of reprisals from the United States. Clinton was upset about Assange’s previous 2010 records releases, divulging secret U.S. documents about the war in Afghanistan in July and the war in Iraq just a month earlier in October, sources said. At that time in 2010, Assange was relatively free and not living cloistered in in the embassy of Ecuador in London. Prior to 2010, Assange focused Wikileaks’ efforts on countries outside the United States but now under Clinton and Obama, Assange was hammering America with an unparalleled third sweeping Wikileaks document dump in five months. Clinton was fuming, sources said, as each State Department cable dispatched during the Obama administration was signed by her.
  • Following Clinton’s alleged drone proposal, another controversial remedy was floated in the State Department to place a reward or bounty for Assange’s capture and extradition to the United States, sources said. Numbers were discussed in the realm of a $10 million bounty. A State Department source described that staff meeting as bizarre. One minute staffers were inquiring about the Secretary’s blue and black checkered knit sweater and the next minute, the room was discussing the legalities of a drone strike on Assange and financial bounties, sources said. Immediately following the conclusion of the wild brainstorming session, one of Clinton’s top aides, State Department Director of Policy Planning Ann-Marie Slaughter, penned an email to Clinton, Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills, and aides Huma Abebin and Jacob Sullivan at 10:29 a.m. entitled “an SP memo on possible legal and nonlegal strategies re Wikileaks.” “Nonlegal strategies.” How did that phrasing make it into an official State Department email subject line dealing with solving Wikileaks and Assange? Why would the secretary of state and her inner circle be discussing any “nonlegal strategies” for anything whatsoever? Against anyone? Shouldn’t all the strategies discussed by the country’s top diplomat be strictly legal only? And is the email a smoking gun to confirm Clinton was actually serious about pursuing an obvious “nonlegal strategy” proposal to allegedly assassinate Assange? Numerous attempts were made to try and interview and decipher Slaughter’s choice of email wording, however, she could not be reached for comment.
  • Slaughter’s cryptic email also contained an attached document called “SP Wikileaks doc final11.23.10.docx.” That attachment portion of Slaughter’s “nonlegal strategies” email has yet to be recovered by federal investigators and House committee investigators probing Clinton’s email practices while at State. Even Wikileaks does not have the document. Slaughter, however, shed some light on the attachment: “The result is the attached memo, which has one interesting legal approach and I think some very good suggestions about how to handle our public diplomacy.” But did it also include details on the “nonlegal strategies” teased in the subject line? Sources confirm Clinton took the email and attachment with her to the White House for an afternoon meeting with Secretary of Defense Bob Gates and National Security Advisor Tom Donilon prior to an additional evening meeting at the White House. President Obama, sources said, did not attend the early meeting with Gates as he was traveling with Vice President Joe Biden. President Obama did attend the second meeting, however, and Wikileaks and Assange’s planned release of secret cables were discussed at length, sources said. Attending this meeting were President Obama, Clinton, Gates, Donilon, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Michele Flournoy, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral “Mike” Mullen, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. James Cartwright as well as a half dozen or more various policy aides, sources confirmed. Did Clinton also share her alleged morning query of droning Assange with the members of the National Security Council and the President? Was it discussed among the top secret subjects in the meeting? Or was Clinton planning to conduct or hatch her own secret foreign policy in defiance of the President, a likely violation of the Logan Act?
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The FBI’s 302 report from Clinton’s email investigation interview, again, specified that Clinton had “many discussions” related to “nominating” drone strikes on individuals: “Clinton could not recall a specific process for nominating a target for a drone strike and recalled much debate pertaining to the concurrence process. Clinton knew there was a role for DOD, State and the CIA but could not provide specifics as to what it was. Due to a disagreement between these agencies, Clinton recalled having many discussions related to nominating an individual for a drone strike. When Clinton exchanged classified information pertaining to the drone program internally at State, it was in her office or on a secure call. When Clinton exchanged classified information pertaining to the drone program externally it was at the White House. Clinton never had a concern with how classified information pertaining to the drone program was handled.” Sources said Clinton’s comments on neutralizing Assange fits a pattern of callousness when combined with the FBI testimony that she often considered droning individuals and then coupled with her reaction to Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi’s death in Oct. 2011.
  • Unable to legally counter or stop Wikileaks, and likely abandoning any and all legal and “nonlegal strategies,” Clinton and her staff were forced to weather the collateral damage of CableGate. In fact, just five days after Clinton’s meetings on Mahogany Row in the State Department and the White House, Wikileaks began releasing cables to news outlets globally on Sunday November 28, 2010. Shortly after CableGate, the WikiLeaks founder sought refuge from authorities and threats by hiding at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Now 45, Assange is in his fifth year living quarantined inside the embassy. Clinton remains the Democratic nominee for the presidency of the United States.
  • Perhaps Democratic political operative Bob Beckel wasn’t a party outlier during this controversial Fox broadcast. Likely, Beckel was projecting what others, including Clinton, had already privately proposed.
8More

M of A - The "Salafist Principality" - ISIS Paid Off To Leave Mosul, Take Deir Ezzor? - 0 views

www.moonofalabama.org/...ul-and-to-take-deir-ezzor.html war & peace U.S.-foreign-policy ISIL Mosul Deir-Ezzor U.S. Saudis deal
shared by Paul Merrell on 17 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • On September 20 I wrote about the likely reason for the willful U.S. bombing attack on a critical Syrian army position in Deir Ezzor: Two recent attacks against the Syrian Arab Army in east-Syria point to a U.S. plan to eliminate all Syrian government presence east of Palmyra. This would enable the U.S. and its allies to create a "Sunni entity" in east-Syria and west-Iraq which would be a permanent thorn in side of Syria and its allies. ... The U.S. plan is to eventually take Raqqa by using Turkish or Kurdish proxies. It also plans to let the Iraqi army retake Mosul in Iraq. The only major city in Islamic State territory left between those two is Deir Ezzor. Should IS be able to take it away from the isolated Syrian army garrison it has at least a decent base to survive. (Conveniently there are also rich oil wells nearby.) No one, but the hampered Syrian state, would have an immediate interest to remove it from there. There are new signs that this analysis was correct.
  • Yesterday the Turkish President Erdogan made a remark that points into that direction. As the British journalist Elijah Magnier summarized it: Elijah J. Magnier @EjmAlrai Erdogan: #Turkey will participate in #Mosul just like it did in #Jarablus.Army doesn't take orders from #Iraq PM who should know his limits. 4:06 AM - 11 Oct 2016 "Like Jarablus" was an interesting comparison. The Turks and their proxies took Jarablus in center-north Syria from the Islamic State without any fight and without any casualties from fighting. ISIS had moved away from the city before the Turks walked in. There obviously had been a deal made. That's why I replied this to Magnier's tweet above: Moon of Alabama @MoonofA The Turks will pay off ISIS in Mosul to leave early just like they did in Jarablus? 5:58 AM - 12 Oct 2016
  • Three hours later this rumor from a well connected Syrian historian and journalist in London answered that question: Nizar Nayouf @nizarnayouf Breaking news:Sources in #London say:“#US& #Saudi_Arabia concluded an agreement to let #ISIS leave #Mosul secretly& safely to #Syria"! 9:28 AM - 12 Oct 2016 Erdogan predicts that his troops and proxy forces will march into Mosul just like they marched into Jarablus: In a peaceful walk, without any fight, into a city free of Jihadis. The Saudis and the U.S. arranged for that. The U.S. bombed the most important SAA position in Deir Ezzor so that ISIS, now with the help of its cadres from Mosul, can take over the city. A nice place to keep it holed up in east-Syria until it can further be used in this or that imperial enterprise.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • A good plan when your overall aim is to create an obedient mercenary statelet in the center of the Middle East. As the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency wrote in 2012: THERE IS THE POSSIBILITY OF ESTABLISHING A DECLARED OR UNDECLARED SALAFIST PRINCIPALITY IN EASTERN SYRIA (HASAKA AND DER ZOR), AND THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT THE SUPPORTING POWERS TO THE OPPOSITION WANT, IN ORDER TO ISOLATE THE SYRIAN REGIME. But this plan requires to fight the Syrian and Russian air-forces which will do their utmost to defend the SAA group and the 100-200,000 ISIS besieged Syrian civilians in Deir Ezzor. The the U.S. and its allies may be willing to do that. A well known British Tory member of parliament already made noise that British fighter jets should be free to shoot down Russian planes in Syria. The U.S. had claimed that British planes took part in the Deir Ezzor ambush. The defenders of Deir Ezzor lack their own air defenses. The Russian systems at the Syrian west-coast can not reach that far east. The Syrian system are mostly positioned to defend Damascus and other cities from attacks by Israel. Russia recently talked about delivering 10 new Pantsyr-S1 short-to-medium range air defense systems to Syria. At least two of those should be airlifted to Deir Ezzor as soon as possible.
  • UPDATE: I was just made aware of a recent speech by Hizbullah leader Nasrallah who smells the same stinking plot: Sayyed Nasrallah said that the Americans intend to repeat Fallujah plot when they opened a way for ISIL to escape towards eastern Syria before the Iraqi warplanes targeted the terrorists’ convoy, warning that the same deceptive scheme is possible to be carried out in Mosul.
  • All the .mil conspiracy theory folks (me) knew why those ships were sent into the straits. The only thing we couldn't figure out was what kind of false flag the U.S. would use to Tomahawk Yemen because nobody would believe the Houthis would be dumb enough to fire on a U.S. missile cruiser. They hate the U.S., but have no reason to rattle our cage THAT much. They fired on the UAE-contracted Swift because it was bringing armor and weapons to Saudi puppet Hadi's forces in Yemen. Attacking a U.S. missile destroyer accomplishes absolutely nothing for them. When the Houthis heard the USS Mason and Nitze were attacked, they thought it was a joke. They denied any such attack as preposterous, asking the obvious question: "Why the hell would we ever do that? But it gets a little better for us in tinfoil hat land. This post by someone looking for images of deleted Tweets sums it up nicely: https://twitter.com/teddy_cat1/status/786333929309556736 Few hours before Reuter's announcement of a U.S. Navy destroyer came under missile attack off Yemen on Sunday, Saudi official accounts on tweeter like Journalist Fahd Kamely and Saudi-24 News had tweeted that the Royal Saudi Naval Forces targeted what they thought to be an Iranian ship for suspicion of supplying Houthis with weapons! They immediately deleted their tweets following this announcement, but many people have saved a picture for those tweets before being deleted and since then are circulating them on tweeter...
  • So we know the U.S. Navy lied when they said the missiles came from Yemen. The RSNF most likely did launch the missiles and used the 'Iranian arms smuggling' as a cover story in case anyone noticed. The U.S. destroyers were never targeted or in danger, but probably did use the occasion to test their anti-missile defenses. All this set up the false flag, providing Obama and excuse to order the U.S. Navy to Tomahawk the Yemeni coastal radars at the behest of some pissed-off UAE emir (likely a Clinton Foundation donor).
  • Paul Merrell on 17 Oct 16
     
    There are other signs that the U.S. made this slimy deal with the Saudis and that it is being implemented. I'll post other links. And I've seen other confirmation that the UK has authorized its pilots to down Russian aiircraft. Meanwhile, Turkey's Erdogan has commanded that Mosul is to become a Sunni Arab city and has forbidden Shi'ite Militia form participating in the "battle" for Mosul. Today, MSM is full of news about the launch of the Iraqi attack on Mosul. But no mention of the deal to allow ISIL to escape into Syria, of course. Make no mistake: this is the U.S. launching ISIL against Russia, Syria, Iran, and Hezbollah in Syria. With the added bonus of being able to claim that this time, they trained the Iraqi Army correctly, as it walks into Mosul against only token resistance. Smoke and mirrors. This is U.S. war against Russia.
1More

London ke arkaan ka bhi mustafa kamal se rabita | Samaa Urdu News - 0 views

goo.gl/GXN8Jj urdu news Karachi MQM MustafaKamal rabtacommittee london razaharoon
shared by latesturdunews on 17 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • latesturdunews on 17 Mar 16
     
    گزشتہ روزمصطفیٰ کمال کی بے نام پارٹی میں رضا ہارون کی شمولیت کی صورت میں ایم کیو ایم کی پانچویں وکٹ گرنے کے بعد رابطہ کمیٹی لندن کے ارکان نے بھی مصطفیٰ کمال گروپ سے رابطے کرلیے ۔...
1More

The Biggest Financial Scam In World History           : Information Clearing ... - 0 views

www.informationclearinghouse.info/article31768.htm banksters LiBOR
shared by Gary Edwards on 08 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 08 Jul 12
     
    Marbux sent me this link to series of videos explaining the LiBOR bankster crisis.  The awesome Bill Black is featured in two of the video interviews.  Others include Matt Taibi of the Rolling Stone Magazine.  Matt's work on bankster criminals is legendary.  This is incredible stuff.  Very heated.  Clearly we are at the heart of the largest criminal fraud ever perpetrated, and it involves the worlds largest banksters.  Including the Queen of England (Bank of England).  $800 Trillion in fraud.  Incredible. Yes, the Libor Scandal Affects You By Jack Hough July 06, 2012 "Smart Money" - -A liger is a cross between a lion and a tiger. Libor, on the other hand, is a daily approximation of what banks charge each other for loans. It turns out only one of these things is real. Awkwardly, it's not the one used to set prices on an estimated $800 trillion in global financial instruments, or $116,000 worth for each person on earth, ranging from complex derivatives to student loans. That's a problem for holders of bank stocks - which includes just about anyone who owns a mutual fund or 401(k). Barclays (BCS) agreed last week to pay $453 million to settle allegations that it manipulated Libor, which stands for London interbank offered rate. As The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday, it's likely only the first: More than a dozen banks on three continents are under investigation. Libor is compiled by asking 18 banks what they think they would pay if they needed money. Some banks may have submitted artificially low responses during the global financial crisis to give the appearance of high creditworthiness. Others may have tinkered with the reading to profit from trades, or avoid losses. The Barclays settlement is affordable, at less than 7% of the company's projected profits this year, but the size of legal claims it and other banks face is difficult to imagine. Trial lawyers will do their best to work out the sums, of course. Libor may have been subject
2More

'I don't want to be complicit' in an Israeli strike on Iran, says US army chief | The T... - 0 views

www.timesofisrael.com/ike-on-iran-says-us-army-chief war & peace Iran Iranian nukes Israel
shared by Paul Merrell on 05 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • The US should not become embroiled in an Israeli military strike on Iran that would not only fail to destroy Iran’s nuclear program, but could also undo international diplomatic pressure on Tehran, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey said Thursday in London. Such an attack by Israel would “clearly delay but probably not destroy Iran’s nuclear program,” Dempsey said, adding: ”I don’t want to be complicit if they [Israel] choose to do it.”
  • Thursday’s comments from Dempsey, who was in London for the Paralympic Games, come amid mounting chatter over a possible Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear program. The US has been working to keep Israel from launching a unilateral strike, maintaining that sanctions should be given more time to work. Last week, the former American ambassador to Israel, Martin Indyk, termed Israel’s talk of attacking Iran “a classic case of crying wolf.”
3More

The Hows and Whys of Gold Price Manipulation - PaulCraigRoberts.org - 0 views

www.paulcraigroberts.org/...s-whys-gold-price-manipulation financial-collapse gold Federal-Reserve-Bankster-Cartel banksters market-manipulation
shared by Paul Merrell on 21 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • The deregulation of the financial system during the Clinton and George W. Bush regimes had the predictable result: financial concentration and reckless behavior. A handful of banks grew so large that financial authorities declared them “too big to fail.” Removed from market discipline, the banks became wards of the government requiring massive creation of new money by the Federal Reserve in order to support through the policy of Quantitative Easing the prices of financial instruments on the banks’ balance sheets and in order to finance at low interest rates trillion dollar federal budget deficits associated with the long recession caused by the financial crisis.
  • The Fed’s policy of monetizing one trillion dollars of bonds annually put pressure on the US dollar, the value of which declined in terms of gold. When gold hit $1,900 per ounce in 2011, the Federal Reserve realized that $2,000 per ounce could have a psychological impact that would spread into the dollar’s exchange rate with other currencies, resulting in a run on the dollar as both foreign and domestic holders sold dollars to avoid the fall in value. Once this realization hit, the manipulation of the gold price moved beyond central bank leasing of gold to bullion dealers in order to create an artificial market supply to absorb demand that otherwise would have pushed gold prices higher. The manipulation consists of the Fed using bullion banks as its agents to sell naked gold shorts in the New York Comex futures market. Short selling drives down the gold price, triggers stop-loss orders and margin calls, and scares participants out of the gold trusts. The bullion banks purchase the deserted shares and present them to the trusts for redemption in bullion. The bullion can then be sold in the London physical gold market, where the sales both ratify the lower price that short-selling achieved on the Comex floor and provide a supply of bullion to meet Asian demands for physical gold as opposed to paper claims on gold.
  • The evidence of gold price manipulation is clear. In this article we present evidence and describe the process. We conclude that ability to manipulate the gold price is disappearing as physical gold moves from New York and London to Asia, leaving the West with paper claims to gold that greatly exceed the available supply.
4More

Goldman Sachs Sued for Selling Libya Billions in "Worthless" Options | Global Research - 0 views

www.globalresearch.ca/...5367509 banksters fraud litigation Libya Taiwan Greece Goldman Sachs
shared by Paul Merrell on 09 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street investment bank, is being sued in London for selling Libya “worthless” derivatives trades in 2008 that the country’s financial managers did not understand. Libya says it lost approximately $1.2 billion on the deals, while Goldman made $350 million.
  • “We think the claims are without merit, and will defend them,” Fiona Laffan, a Goldman Sachs spokeswoman in London, told Bloomberg news service. However, the bank recently claimed that it had retrained its staff to ensure that customers are no longer blind sided by sales pitches for complex products. “For all of our employees, the experience of initiating, approving and executing a transaction for a client at Goldman Sachs is now fundamentally different,” Goldman claimed at its annual meeting last year. Goldman Sachs is not the first Wall Street bank to be accused of taking advantage of naive foreign investors. Morgan Stanley was sued for selling bundled sub-prime mortgages to China Development Industrial Bank (CDIB) from Taiwan that they knew would fail. Even Standard & Poors (S&P), Wall Street’s top ratings agency, has been accused of helping banks to sell “collateralized debt obligations” that they knew were likely to go sour.
  • But this is not the first time that Goldman Sachs has been happy to help governments carry out dodgy deals. Back in 2001, Goldman reportedly charged Greece $300 million to engage on “‘blatant balance sheet cosmetics” to help the country join the European Monetary Union.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Members of the union were required to have government debt under 60 percent of gross domestic product and a budget deficit to gross domestic product ratio of under 3 percent. Unfortunately, Greece debt exceeded 100 percent and deficits were at 3.7 percent Goldman Sachs took advantage of a loophole that allowed countries to enter the EMU if they could demonstrate that they were lowering their debt and their budget deficit. To do this, Goldman Sachs sold Greece a “cross-currency swap” that gave the government cash up front in return for a big payment at the end of the loan period. The beauty of the arrangement was that since such currency swaps were permitted by the European Statistical Agency (Eurostat), the debt and deficit appeared to shrink. 
6More

Snowden Documents Reveal Covert Surveillance and Pressure Tactics Aimed at WikiLeaks an... - 0 views

firstlook.org/...t-wikileaks-and-its-supporters surveillance state NSA GCHQ Wikileaks Assange anti-spying-deal lies Obama
shared by Paul Merrell on 21 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • Top-secret documents from the National Security Agency and its British counterpart reveal for the first time how the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom targeted WikiLeaks and other activist groups with tactics ranging from covert surveillance to prosecution. The efforts – detailed in documents provided previously by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden – included a broad campaign of international pressure aimed not only at WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, but at what the U.S. government calls “the human network that supports WikiLeaks.” The documents also contain internal discussions about targeting the file-sharing site Pirate Bay and hacktivist collectives such as Anonymous. One classified document from Government Communications Headquarters, Britain’s top spy agency, shows that GCHQ used its surveillance system to secretly monitor visitors to a WikiLeaks site. By exploiting its ability to tap into the fiber-optic cables that make up the backbone of the Internet, the agency confided to allies in 2012, it was able to collect the IP addresses of visitors in real time, as well as the search terms that visitors used to reach the site from search engines like Google.
  • Another classified document from the U.S. intelligence community, dated August 2010, recounts how the Obama administration urged foreign allies to file criminal charges against Assange over the group’s publication of the Afghanistan war logs. A third document, from July 2011, contains a summary of an internal discussion in which officials from two NSA offices – including the agency’s general counsel and an arm of its Threat Operations Center – considered designating WikiLeaks as “a ‘malicious foreign actor’ for the purpose of targeting.” Such a designation would have allowed the group to be targeted with extensive electronic surveillance – without the need to exclude U.S. persons from the surveillance searches.
  • In a statement to The Intercept, Assange condemned what he called “the reckless and unlawful behavior of the National Security Agency” and GCHQ’s “extensive hostile monitoring of a popular publisher’s website and its readers.” “News that the NSA planned these operations at the level of its Office of the General Counsel is especially troubling,” Assange said. “Today, we call on the White House to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the extent of the NSA’s criminal activity against the media, including WikiLeaks, its staff, its associates and its supporters.” Illustrating how far afield the NSA deviates from its self-proclaimed focus on terrorism and national security, the documents reveal that the agency considered using its sweeping surveillance system against Pirate Bay, which has been accused of facilitating copyright violations. The agency also approved surveillance of the foreign “branches” of hacktivist groups, mentioning Anonymous by name. The documents call into question the Obama administration’s repeated insistence that U.S. citizens are not being caught up in the sweeping surveillance dragnet being cast by the NSA. Under the broad rationale considered by the agency, for example, any communication with a group designated as a “malicious foreign actor,” such as WikiLeaks and Anonymous, would be considered fair game for surveillance.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The system used by GCHQ to monitor the WikiLeaks website – codenamed ANTICRISIS GIRL – is described in a classified PowerPoint presentation prepared by the British agency and distributed at the 2012 “SIGDEV Conference.” At the annual gathering, each member of the “Five Eyes” alliance – the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand – describes the prior year’s surveillance successes and challenges. In a top-secret presentation at the conference, two GCHQ spies outlined how ANTICRISIS GIRL was used to enable “targeted website monitoring” of WikiLeaks (See slides 33 and 34). The agency logged data showing hundreds of users from around the world, including the United States, as they were visiting a WikiLeaks site –contradicting claims by American officials that a deal between the U.K. and the U.S. prevents each country from spying on the other’s citizens. The IP addresses collected by GCHQ are used to identify individual computers that connect to the Internet, and can be traced back to specific people if the IP address has not been masked using an anonymity service. If WikiLeaks or other news organizations were receiving submissions from sources through a public dropbox on their website, a system like ANTICRISIS GIRL could potentially be used to help track them down. (WikiLeaks has not operated a public dropbox since 2010, when it shut down its system in part due to security concerns over surveillance.)
  • It is unclear from the PowerPoint presentation whether GCHQ monitored the WikiLeaks site as part of a pilot program designed to demonstrate its capability, using only a small set of covertly collected data, or whether the agency continues to actively deploy its surveillance system to monitor visitors to WikiLeaks. It was previously reported in The Guardian that X-KEYSCORE, a comprehensive surveillance weapon used by both NSA and GCHQ, allows “an analyst to learn the IP addresses of every person who visits any website the analyst specifies.”
  • Paul Merrell on 21 Feb 14
     
    "... the Obama administration urged foreign allies to file criminal charges against Assange over the group's publication of the Afghanistan war logs." Sweden promptly launches an alleged rape investigation and Assange is forced by the UK courts to take refuge in the London embassy of Ecuador. Because of urging by the Obama administration aimed at chilling the the First Amendment rights of journalists. That should be grounds for impeachment.  
5More

Exclusive - West signals to Syrian opposition Assad may stay - Yahoo News India - 0 views

in.news.yahoo.com/-assad-may-stay-193919109.html war & peace Syria Obama-flips Assad
shared by Paul Merrell on 19 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • (Reuters) - Western nations have indicated to the Syrian opposition that peace next month talks may not lead to the removal of President Bashar al-Assad and that his Alawite minority will remain key in any transitional administration, opposition sources said. The message, delivered to senior members of the Syrian National Coalition at a meeting of the anti-Assad Friends of Syria alliance in London last week, was prompted by rise of al Qaeda and other militant groups, and their takeover of a border crossing and arms depots near Turkey belonging to the moderate Free Syrian Army, the sources told Reuters. "Our Western friends made it clear in London that Assad cannot be allowed to go now because they think chaos and an Islamist militant takeover would ensue," said one senior member of the Coalition who is close to officials from Saudi Arabia.
  • The shift in Western priorities, particularly the United States and Britain, from removing Assad towards combating Islamist militants is causing divisions within international powers backing the nearly three-year-old revolt, according to diplomats and senior members of the coalition. Like U.S. President Barack Obama's rejection of air strikes against Syria in September after he accused Assad's forces of using poison gas, such a diplomatic compromise on a transition could narrow Western differences with Russia, which has blocked United Nations action against Assad, but also widen a gap in approach with the rebels' allies in the Middle East. The civil war pits Assad and many Alawites, backed by Iran and its Shi'ite Muslim allies, against Sunni Muslim rebels supported by Turkey, Libya and Sunni Gulf Arab states. Unlike in Libya in 2011, the West has ruled out military intervention, leaving militant Islamists including al Qaeda affiliates to emerge as the most formidable rebel force, raising alarm among Washington and its allies that Syria, which borders Israel and Iraq, has become a centre for global jihad.
  • Also signalling differences with Washington, opposition activists in Syria have said that Turkey has let a weapons consignment cross into Syria to the Islamic Front, the rebel group that overran the Bab al-Hawa border crossing last week, seizing arms and Western equipment supplied to non-Islamists.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • A second member of the Syrian opposition, who is in touch with U.S. officials, said Washington and Russia appeared to be working in tandem on a transitional framework in which Alawites would retain their dominant role in the army and security apparatus to assure their community against retribution and to rally a unified fight against al Qaeda with moderate rebel brigades, who would be invited to join a restructured military. He criticised U.S. and European officials for continuing to indulge in rhetoric that Assad has no future role to play in Syria, without spelling out how his rule will come to an end. "Even if Assad is sidelined and a Sunni heads a transitional authority, he would have no power because neither Washington nor Moscow appears to want to end the Alawite control over the military and security apparatus," he said. A senior Western official said that Russia and the United States have discussed which government officials - and up to what level of seniority - could be retained in a transitional phase but that they had not agreed any fixed blueprint.
  • Paul Merrell on 19 Dec 13
     
    First Obama told the world that Assad's resignation was non-negotiable. The number killed should now be somewhere around 120-130 thousand, with millions of refugees and winter descending on them, producing a humanitarian crisis. Obama got caught trying to pull of a false flag chemical attack with the Saudis' Jihadists so the missile strikes didn't happen. Hillary's Army reacted by defecting to the Jihadists. Now Obama decides that Assad should stay in power after all that. Are we dizzy yet? This is what a military defeat looks like from the loser's side.Obama with his tail between his legs in full retreat. No doubt the Russians will come up with some face-saving way for Obama to try to spin his defeat as a victory.
3More

US sues 16 banks for rigging Libor rate - Americas - Al Jazeera English - 0 views

www.aljazeera.com/...r-rate-201431544528243637.html banksters libor fraud litigation
shared by Paul Merrell on 16 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • The US Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) has sued 16 big banks that set a key global interest rate, accusing them of fraud and conspiring to keep the rate low to enrich themselves. The banks, which include Bank of America, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase in the US, are among the world's largest. The FDIC says it is seeking to recover losses suffered from the rate manipulation by 10 US banks that failed during the financial crisis and were taken over by the agency. The civil lawsuit was filed on Friday in federal court in Manhattan, the Associated Press reported. The banks rigged the London interbank offered rate, or Libor, from August 2007 to at least mid-2011, the FDIC alleged. The Libor affects trillions of dollars in contracts around the world, including mortgages, bonds and consumer loans. A British banking trade group sets the Libor every morning after the 16 international banks submit estimates of what it costs them to borrow. The FDIC also sued that trade group, the British Bankers' Association.
  • By submitting false estimates of their borrowing costs used to calculate Libor, the 16 banks "fraudulently and collusively suppressed [the Libor rate], and they did so to their advantage," the FDIC said in the suit.
  • Four of the banks - Britain's Barclays and Royal Bank of Scotland, Switzerland's biggest bank UBS and Rabobank of the Netherlands - have previously paid a total of about $3.6bn to settle US and European regulators' charges of rigging the Libor. The banks signed agreements with the US Justice Department that allow them to avoid criminal prosecution if they meet certain conditions. Under a change announced last July, the London-based company that owns the New York Stock Exchange, NYSE Euronext, will take over supervising the setting of Libor from the British Bankers' Association. The changeover is scheduled to be completed by early next year.
6More

Bank of England Drops a Bombshell on Parliament: It Shredded Its Crisis Era Records - 0 views

wallstreetonparade.com/...hredded-its-crisis-era-records financial-collapse banksters Bank-of-England shredded-records
shared by Paul Merrell on 16 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Mark Carney, the head of the Bank of England, and other officials from the BOE were put through a five hour marathon of questioning yesterday by Parliament’s Treasury Select Committee covering everything from how long the BOE plans to continue Quantitative Easing (QE), to the potential for Scotland to vote for its independence, to what it knew and when it knew it about the rigging of the Foreign Exchange market by colluding global banks. The bombshell of the day, however, did not occur during the session on the Foreign Exchange scandal, which is stacking up to be a more serious matter than the rigging of the Libor interest rate benchmark which occurred under the nose of the Bank of England and the British Bankers Association. (London now seems to be in competition with itself for the prize of the century for overseeing the rigging of the greatest number of markets.)
  • The bombshell came in the following exchange between the Chair of the Treasury Select Committee, Andrew Tyrie, and a very frightened appearing Paul Fisher, the Executive Director of Markets at the BOE, who has served in that position since 2009. Apparently neither Parliament nor the public knew prior to this exchange that the records of the pre-crisis year of 2007, the financial collapse in 2008, and the monetary policy maneuvers in subsequent years to prevent another Great Depression had been destroyed in one of the world’s most important financial centers; not to mention the fact that critical recordings potentially relevant to the Foreign Exchange probe are also gone.
  • Chairman Tyrie: “The MPC [Monetary Policy Committee] records might be of interest one day to historians about the inception of QE. MPC records used to be recorded and transcribed when the MPC was created. Is that still the case Mr. Fisher?” Paul Fisher: “They are not transcribed. They are still recorded so that the secretariat can go back to check any discrepancies between the minutes and what people may have said. But as far as I know they are not transcribed.” Chairman Tyrie: “And they’re stored?” Paul Fisher: “The recordings are not kept. Once the minutes are published…” Chairman Tyrie: [In a booming, outraged voice] “The recordings are destroyed! Why? Paul Fisher: “Because we have one copy of the minutes; that’s the one that’s published and there are not alternative versions.”
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Chairman Tyrie: “There are more than one purpose for these. There’s the minutes after a fortnight and there’s the historical value. The Fed Open Market Committee publishes full transcripts of its meetings with a five year delay. Whether it’s a five or ten year delay, certainly these are of huge historical significance. Why aren’t you putting something similar in place?” Paul Fisher: “This goes back to when the Committee first started. They initially did try to make transcripts, unsuccessfully.” Chairman Tyrie: “What do you mean unsuccessfully?” Paul Fisher: “It was very hard to actually physically transcribe the tapes in any way which made any sense in terms of the written material.” Chairman Tyrie: “Is that because you’re shouting and throwing things about. Most organizations manage to transcribe a record. Even the House of Commons manages to do it on a good day.” Paul Fisher: “I’m trying to explain what I know of it. My understanding is that people talking, very free flowing discussion, and they couldn’t make a sensible transcript.”
  • Carney is a former Goldman Sachs banker who went on to become the head of the Bank of Canada, serving in that post during the financial crisis. He is the first non Briton to head the Bank of England in its more than 300-year history. That reality, and his non-British accent, seemed to invite an intensely interrogative style at times during the five hours of questioning yesterday by members of the Treasury Select Committee. Carney remained calm, courteous and professional throughout. It’s clear to anyone paying attention that the BOE is attempting to clone itself into the Fed – as questionable as that idea might be given that the full transcripts that have been released by the Fed for the crisis years show it had blinders on in terms of the depth of the crisis.
  • Now Carney has announced that he is going to create what looks like a clone of the President of the New York Fed (William “Bill” Dudley) through a new Deputy Governor position at the BOE to oversee markets and banking. Good luck with that. As Wall Street On Parade has repeatedly chronicled, avoiding regulatory capture will likely prove as elusive at the BOE as it has at the New York Fed. And given the seismic nature of the market rigging that has gone on in London, this is like putting a Disney-themed band aide on a compound fracture.
1More

Google News - 0 views

news.google.com/?ar=1375391426 Libertarians freedom-liberty freedom-tyranny authoritarianism-individual-liberty
shared by Gary Edwards on 01 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 01 Aug 13
     
    WOW!!! Incredible presentation concerning the history of Freedom vs. Tyranny. WOW!! If ever there's a MUST Watch, this is it. Very impressive and sweeping comparison of how authoritarian collectivist seize power in a free society and establish their tyrannies. My notes are listed below: How to recognize potential tyrants and keep them from seizing power. The urge to save humanity is always used to justify those who want to rule humanity. - ML Menken Daniel Webster on the Constitution Obstacles to Tyranny : Limited powers of government .... Due Process .... Presumption of Innocence .... Freedom to Dissent .... Armed Populace: The right to be Armed! Due Process .... 5th Amendment .... Emergency powers. there is no authorization in the US Constitution to suspend Due Process or any aspect of the Bill of Rights .... Asset Seizure Laws for criminal activities (alleged - without warrant or court order) .... Eminent Domain: seizure of private property for government uses: 2005 Kelo vs New London seizure based on jobs (economy) and tax revenue possibilities. .... 6th Amendment - right to trial by jury : plea bargaining admonition based on facing the awesome power of the government to prosecute no matter what - intimidation and threat of personal destruction. .... Forced confessions through plea bargaining. .... Indefinite detention without trial or charges: President has power to kill or issue orders without warrant, charges or trial .... Presumption of Innocence: Probable Cause .... Random stops at Border check points. 5th Amendment protections violated .... Sobriety Check Points: 4th and 5th Amendments violated - no presumption of innocence .... Random detention and questioning: airport security pat downs, housing projects, bus transportation .... The Right to Privacy: financial transactions and the IRS audit (without warrant or accusation) .... Warrant-less Spying .... Agents writing their own search warrants .... Snatch and Peek Freedom to Disse
4More

UK Cryptographers Call For Publication of Deliberately Weakened Protocols, Products | T... - 0 views

threatpost.com/...102301 surveillance state NSA GCHQ cryptography surveillance-reform
shared by Paul Merrell on 17 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • A group of cryptographers in the UK has published a letter that calls on authorities in that country and the United States to conduct an investigation to determine which security products, protocols and standards have been deliberately weakened by the countries’ intelligence services. The letter, signed by a number of researchers from the University of Bristol and other universities, said that the NSA and British GCHQ “have been acting against the interests of the public that they are meant to serve.” The appeal comes a couple of weeks after leaked documents from the NSA and its UK counterpart, Government Communications Headquarters, showed that the two agencies have been collaborating on projects that give them the ability to subvert encryption protocols and also have been working with unnamed security vendors to insert backdoors into hardware and software products. Security experts have been debating in recent weeks which products, standards and protocols may have been deliberately weakened, but so far no information has been forthcoming.
  • “By weakening cryptographic standards, in as yet undisclosed ways, and by inserting weaknesses into products which we all rely on to secure critical infrastructure, we believe that the agencies have been acting against the interests of the public that they are meant to serve. We find it shocking that agencies of both the US and UK governments now stand accused of undermining the systems which protect us. By weakening all our security so that they can listen in to the communications of our enemies, they also weaken our security against our potential enemies,” the letter says.
  • Published on Monday, the letter is signed by cryptographers from the University of Bristol, University of London, University of Birmingham, University of Luxembourg, University of Southampton, University of Surrey, University of Kent, Newcastle University and University College London. In it, the researchers call on the relevant authorities to publicly name the products and standards that have been weakened in order to inform users which systems they should avoid. “We call on the relevant parties to reveal what systems have been weakened so that they can be repaired, and to create a proper system of oversight with well-defined public rules that clearly forbid weakening the security of civilian systems and infrastructures. The statutory Intelligence and Security Committee of the House of Commons needs to investigate this issue as a matter of urgency. In the modern information age we all need to have complete trust in the basic infrastructure that we all use,” the letter says.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • In the weeks since the documents detailing the NSA’s cryptographic capabilities emerged, further details about exactly which protocols the agency can attack successfully and which standards it may have influenced have been scarce. NIST, the U.S. agency that develops technical standards for cryptography, among other things, as denied accusations that the NSA was able to weaken some of the NIST standards. However, at the same time, NIST officials have issued a recommendation that people no longer use one of the encryption standards it previously published.
6More

Private firms selling mass surveillance systems around world, documents show | World ne... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...mass-surveillance-technologies surveillance state surveillance-industry capabilities
shared by Paul Merrell on 20 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Private firms are selling spying tools and mass surveillance technologies to developing countries with promises that "off the shelf" equipment will allow them to snoop on millions of emails, text messages and phone calls, according to a cache of documents published on Monday.The papers show how firms, including dozens from Britain, tout the capabilities at private trade fairs aimed at offering nations in Africa, Asia and the Middle East the kind of powerful capabilities that are usually associated with government agencies such as GCHQ and its US counterpart, the National Security Agency.The market has raised concerns among human rights groups and ministers, who are poised to announce new rules about the sale of such equipment from Britain.
  • The documents are included in an online database compiled by the research watchdog Privacy International, which has spent four years gathering 1,203 brochures and sales pitches used at conventions in Dubai, Prague, Brasilia, Washington, Kuala Lumpur, Paris and London. Analysts posed as potential buyers to gain access to the private fairs.The database, called the Surveillance Industry Index, shows how firms from the UK, Israel, Germany, France and the US offer governments a range of systems that allow them to secretly hack into internet cables carrying email and phone traffic.The index has details from 338 companies, including 77 from the UK, offering a total of 97 different technologies.
  • The documents include a brochure from a company called Advanced Middle East Systems (AMES), based in Dubai. It has been offering a device called Cerebro – a DIY system similar to the Tempora programme run by GCHQ – that taps information from fibre-optic cables carrying internet traffic.AMES describes Cerebro as a "core technology designed to monitor and analyse in real time communications … including SMS (texting), GSM (mobile calls), billing data, emails, conversations, webmail, chat sessions and social networks."The company brochure makes clear this is done by attaching probes to internet cables. "No co-operation with the providers is required," it adds."Cerebro is designed to store several billions of records – metadata and/or communication contents. At any time the investigators can follow the live activity of their target with advanced targeting criteria (email addresses, phone numbers, key words)," says the brochure.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Another firm selling similar equipment is VASTech, based in South Africa, which has a system called Zebra. Potential buyers are told it has been designed to help "government security agencies face huge challenges in their combat against crime and terrorism".VASTech says Zebra offers "access to high volumes of information generated via telecommunication services for the purposes of analysis and investigation".It has been designed to "intercept all content and metadata of voice, SMS, email and fax communications on the connected network, creating a rich repository of information".
  • It is now possible, from a single laptop computer, to locate where a mobile phone is calling from anywhere in the world, with an accuracy of between 200 metres and a mile. This is not done by attaching probes, and it is not limited to the area where the laptop is working from. The "cross border" system means it is now theoretically possible to locate a mobile phone call from a town abroad from a laptop in London.
  • Paul Merrell on 20 Nov 13
8More

New Snowden docs show U.S. spied during G20 in Toronto - Politics - CBC News - 0 views

www.cbc.ca/...uring-g20-in-toronto-1.2442448 surveillance state NSA Canada CSEC G8 G20
shared by Paul Merrell on 29 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Top secret documents retrieved by U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden show that Prime Minister Stephen Harper's government allowed the largest American spy agency to conduct widespread surveillance in Canada during the 2010 G8 and G20 summits.
  • The briefing notes, stamped "Top Secret," show the U.S. turned its Ottawa embassy into a security command post during a six-day spying operation by the National Security Agency while U.S. President Barack Obama and 25 other foreign heads of government were on Canadian soil in June of 2010. The covert U.S. operation was no secret to Canadian authorities.
  • Notably, the secret NSA briefing document describes part of the U.S. eavesdropping agency's mandate at the Toronto summit as "providing support to policymakers." Documents previously released by Snowden, a former NSA contractor who has sought and received asylum in Russia, suggested that support at other international gatherings included spying on the foreign delegations to get an unfair advantage in any negotiations or policy debates at the summit. It was those documents that first exposed the spying on world leaders at the London summit. More recently, Snowden's trove of classified information revealed Canada's eavesdropping agency had hacked into phones and computers in the Brazilian government's department of mines, a story that touched off a political firestorm both in that country and in Ottawa.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The secret documents do not reveal the precise targets of so much espionage by the NSA — and possibly its Canadian partner — during the Toronto summit. But both the U.S. and Canadian intelligence agencies have been implicated with their British counterpart in hacking the phone calls and emails of foreign politicians and diplomats attending the G20 summit in London in 2009 — a scant few months before the Toronto gathering of the same world leaders.
  • The spying at the Toronto summit in 2010 fits a pattern of economic and political espionage by the powerful U.S. intelligence agency and its partners such as Canada. That espionage was conducted to secure meeting sites and protect leaders against terrorist threats posed by al-Qaeda but also to forward the policy goals of the United States and Canada. The G20 summit in Toronto had a lot on its agenda that would have been of acute interest to the NSA and Canada.
  • The world was still struggling to climb out of the great recession of 2008. Leaders were debating a wide array of possible measures including a global tax on banks, an idea strongly opposed by both the U.S. and Canadian governments. That notion was eventually scotched. The secret NSA documents list all the main agenda items for the G20 in Toronto — international development, banking reform, countering trade protectionism, and so on — with the U.S. snooping agency promising to support "U.S. policy goals." Whatever the intelligence goals of the NSA during the Toronto summit, international security experts question whether the NSA spying operation at the G20 in Toronto was even legal.
  • "If CSEC tasked NSA to conduct spying activities on Canadians within Canada that CSEC itself was not authorized to take, then I am comfortable saying that would be an unlawful undertaking by CSEC," says Craig Forcese, an expert in national security at University of Ottawa's faculty of law. By law, CSEC cannot target anyone in Canada without a warrant, including world leaders and foreign diplomats at a G20 summit. But, the Canadian eavesdropping agency is also prohibited by international agreement from getting the NSA to do the spying or anything that would be illegal for CSEC.
  • The NSA warns the more likely security threat would come from "issue-based extremists" conducting acts of vandalism. They got that right. Protest marches by about 10,000 turned the Toronto G20 into an historic melee of arrests by more than 20,000 police in what would become one of the largest and most expensive security operations in Canadian history. By the time the tear gas had cleared and the investigations were complete, law enforcement agencies stood accused of mass-violations of civil rights. Add to that dubious legacy illegal spying by an American intelligence agency with the blessing of the Canadian government.
3More

EU high court strikes down metadata collection law | Ars Technica - 0 views

arstechnica.com/...s-down-metadata-collection-law surveillance state E.U. law data-retention digital-privacy litigation
shared by Paul Merrell on 09 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • While the United States continues to debate metadata collection conducted in secret by the National Security Agency, the European Union has been openly collecting the same sort of data for eight years. In the wake of terrorist attacks in Madrid (2004) and London (2005), the European Union passed a directive in 2006 requiring that all telecommunications providers retain all kinds of telephone and Internet metadata for at least six months and provide it to law enforcement upon request. According to a ruling handed down Tuesday by the European Court of Justice, that directive is now invalid. The case was brought by activists at Digital Rights Ireland and the Austrian Working Group on Data Retention. The two organizations had challenged the law as it had been imposed in their respective countries.
  • While the United States continues to debate metadata collection conducted in secret by the National Security Agency, the European Union has been openly collecting the same sort of data for eight years. In the wake of terrorist attacks in Madrid (2004) and London (2005), the European Union passed a directive in 2006 requiring that all telecommunications providers retain all kinds of telephone and Internet metadata for at least six months and provide it to law enforcement upon request. According to a ruling handed down Tuesday by the European Court of Justice, that directive is now invalid. The case was brought by activists at Digital Rights Ireland and the Austrian Working Group on Data Retention. The two organizations had challenged the law as it had been imposed in their respective countries.
  • The European judges concluded: The Court takes the view that, by requiring the retention of those data and by allowing the competent national authorities to access those data, the directive interferes in a particularly serious manner with the fundamental rights to respect for private life and to the protection of personal data. Furthermore, the fact that data are retained and subsequently used without the subscriber or registered user being informed is likely to generate in the persons concerned a feeling that their private lives are the subject of constant surveillance. . . . Although the retention of data required by the directive may be considered to be appropriate for attaining the objective pursued by it, the wide-ranging and particularly serious interference of the directive with the fundamental rights at issue is not sufficiently circumscribed to ensure that that interference is actually limited to what is strictly necessary.
4More

The US/NATO Enlargement Project » CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names - 0 views

www.counterpunch.org/...rtmentnato-enlargement-project war & peace Russia NATO U.S.-foreign-policy Ukraine
shared by Paul Merrell on 14 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • In February, 1990, US Secretary of State James Baker (1989-1992), representing President George HW Bush, traveled to Moscow to meet with Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev regarding the possible reunification of Germany and the removal of 300,000 Soviet troops. There is little serious dispute that as the Berlin Wall teetered, Baker promised Gorbachev “there would be no extension of NATO’s jurisdiction for forces of NATO one inch to the east.” Gorbachev is reported to have taken the US at its word and responded “any extension of the zone of NATO is unacceptable.” “I agree,” replied Baker.” Unfortunately, Gorbachev never got it in writing and most historians, at the time, agreed that NATO expansion was “ill conceived, ill-timed, and above all ill-suited to the realities of the post-Cold War world.”
  • President Bush’s National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft and Bill Clinton’s Defense Secretary were also in agreement. But by 1994, that verbal contract had not deterred the concerted efforts of a handful of State Department policy professionals to subdue the overwhelming bureaucratic opposition according to James Goldgeier in his classic “Not Whether but When: The US Decision to Enlarge NATO.” By 1997, the Gorbachev-Baker-Bush agreement was a forgotten policy trinket as Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic were accepted into NATO. In 2004, former Soviet satellite countries Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia were admitted and in 2009, Croatia and Albania joined NATO. Currently, the former Soviet republics of Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, Kazakhstan, Armenia, and Azerbaijan are pending membership and all five former Soviet republics in Central Asia (Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan) provide NATO with logistical support for the US war in Afghanistan. As the US-led NATO alliance tightens its grip on the Caucasus countries, the American public has not been informed about the Ukrainian Parliament’s approval for a series of NATO military exercises that would put US troops on Russia’s border, even though the Ukraine is not yet a member of NATO. Rapid Trident is a 12-nation military ‘interoperability’ exercise led by the US who will commit the majority of participating troops and Sea Breeze is a naval exercise that will take place on the Black Sea adjacent to Russian ports. The NATO buildup includes joint ground operations with Moldova and Romania.
  • Most recently, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen announced that the military alliance has cut Russia off from civilian and military cooperation and that there would be the deployment and reinforcement of military assets including increased air patrols over the Baltic Sea and AWACS surveillance flights over Poland and Romania. It goes without saying that the NATO build up is in addition to the deployment of US troops and F-16 warplanes to Poland, F-15C warplanes to Lithuania and aircraft carriers to the Black and Mediterranean Seas. All this raises the question about whether a promise and handshake in the world of international diplomacy is a real commitment and what is a 1991 international promise made by a Republican Administration worth in 1994 to a Democratic Administration? Apparently zilch.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • What all this means is that, behind the diplomatic landscape of verbal jujitsu and summit meetings, there had been a concerted effort at the US State Department with the creation of a NATO Enlargement Office to establish what has become a Russian Wall – an impenetrable US – defined barrier of estrangement along the Russian border meant to cut the country off from land and sea access – as NATO, itching for war, continues to bait Russia with isolation and threats.
6More

Scottish independence: Forget Yes and No - what about a United Kingdom of Independent S... - 0 views

cms-ind.prod.indes.firstclarity.com/...ndependent-states-9735702.html UK Scottish-independence
shared by Paul Merrell on 17 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • Let’s face up to the facts – the majority of Scots want to be independent. They really do – whatever way they vote come Thursday. And this is dead clear from the poll of polls: which shows the Unionists winning to keep us together by only one per cent. Let’s be honest: that one per cent lead is not really a majority for the Union. That one per cent lead is all the No Campaign could muster for the Union, despite throwing the entire arsenal of City of London financial fear at Scotland. Those terrifying threats of collapsing banks and mystery currencies and runaway businessmen – well, they have only convinced a mere one per cent of Scots we are better together.It's clear that without fear, there would be a Scottish majority ready to go. And that means the current Union 1.0 looks illegitimate. That works the other way too: any sudden surge for the No Campaign  would hardly be lead to a legitimate Union either.
  • Now what do they want down South? The real English thinking about why Scotland leaving is bad for England – though people seem unwilling to say it outright – is that severing the Union is a huge blow for our stature in the world.  This is something to take very seriously. The wars happening right now in Eastern Europe and the Middle East are every bit as geopolitically significant as the collapse of the Soviet Union. And a weak, wounded Britain is exactly what Vladimir Putin and the Islamic State would want. Do Scots want that? I think no.
  • From what I can see, both options currently on the table look set to make millions angry. So what options are there that would work out in a way that made the most Scotsmen and Englishmen happy? The main argument coming out of Scotland is they want to be a nation again – they want the symbolic side of independence – and they want complete freedom to build the more social Scotland the way they have always wanted. They hate neo-liberalism. And I’m convinced the majority of Scottish voters would choose to go if they knew there was a safe way to maintain a currency Union with England. And it’s fair to say: England doesn’t want to pay for this socialism
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • So are there ways we could give the Scots  and English what they both want? This seems contradictory. The Scots want to be independent but what to keep the pound; the English want to keep the Foreign Office and the British Army but don’t want to pay for any of Scotland’s wasteful social welfare.  And everyone, somehow, wants to keep being British.I think there is a third way for Scotland and England. The funny thing about the whole referendum on Scottish independence and the breathless debate about the Union is that it appears to be taking place without any reference to what being independent actually means these days in the Europe of the European Union.
  • Were both Edinburgh and London to be interested in working something out that would make the maximum number of happy Englishmen and Scotsmen they would probably do something like this. Whatever the result on Thursday they would declare a constitutional convention to dissolve Union 1.0 and set about creating a Union 2.0. But what might that United Kingdom look like?
  • Paul Merrell on 17 Sep 14
     
    Scots vote on Thursday, September 18. The polls have it neck-and-neck, with independence within the margin of error. If the vote goes for independence, that begins a disengagement process is scheduled to see an independent Scotland in May of 2016.
« First ‹ Previous 41 - 60 of 201 Next › Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page