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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.

The editor of the New York Times, Jill Abramson, has confirmed that senior British officials attempted to persuade her to hand over secret documents leaked by the former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.Giving the newspaper's first official comments on the incident, Abramson said that she was approached by the UK embassy in Washington after it was announced that the New York Times was collaborating with the Guardian to explore some of the files disclosed by Snowden. Among the files are several relating to the activities of GCHQ, the agency responsible for signals interception in the UK."They were hopeful that we would relinquish any material that we might be reporting on, relating to Edward Snowden. Needless to say I considered what they told me, and said no," Abramson told the Guardian in an interview to mark the International Herald Tribune's relaunch as the International New York Times.The incident shows the lengths to which the UK government has gone to try to discourage press coverage of the Snowden leaks. In July, the government threatened to take legal action against the Guardian that could have prevented publication, culminating in the destruction of computer hard drives containing some of Snowden's files.

Abramson said the spectacle of angle grinders and drills being used to destroy evidence in a newspaper basement was hard to conceive in the US, where the First Amendment offers free speech guarantees. "I can't imagine that. The only equivalent I can think of is years ago when the New York Times was enjoined by a lower court from publishing the Pentagon papers, but the supreme court came in and overruled that decision. Prior restraint is pretty much unthinkable to me in this country."Abramson has been executive editor of the New York Times, America's largest and most influential newspaper, since 2011. She said that the conversation with the UK's Washington embassy was the extent so far of British attempts to influence the paper's editorial decisions in relation to Snowden.

Six NUJ members have discovered that their lawful journalistic and union activities are being monitored and recorded by the Metropolitan Police. They are now taking legal action against the Metropolitan Police Commissioner and the Home Secretary to challenge this ongoing police surveillance. The NUJ members involved in the legal challenge include Jules Mattsson, Mark Thomas, Jason Parkinson, Jess Hurd, David Hoffman and Adrian Arbib. All of them have worked on media reports that have exposed corporate and state misconduct and they have each also previously pursued litigation or complaints arising from police misconduct. In many of those cases, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner has been forced to pay damages, apologise and admit liability to them after their journalistic rights were curtailed by his officers at public events.

The surveillance was revealed as part of an ongoing campaign, which began in 2008, during which NUJ members have been encouraged to obtain data held about them by the authorities including the Metropolitan Police 'National Domestic Extremism and Disorder Intelligence Unit' (NDEDIU). The supposed purpose of the unit is to monitor and police so called 'domestic extremism'. In the course of the campaign, a number of NUJ members have obtained data held about them and the union fears there are many more journalists and union members being monitored.

The NUJ has instructed Bhatt Murphy Solicitors to pursue the case. The cases raise significant and wide-ranging concerns about: the impact on privacy, the chilling effect on the ability of NUJ members and journalists to do their jobs, and their ability to take part in legitimate trade union activity. The claim challenges the surveillance and retention of data on the basis that it is unnecessary, disproportionate and not in accordance with the law. Journalists and union members have no way of knowing the circumstances in which their activities are monitored, retained, disclosed and systematically stored on secret police 'domestic extremism' databases. The NUJ continues to offer support and assistance to the members involved and extends its support to other media workers who may be affected. The union is extremely concerned by the lack of legal safeguards to protect the press and trade unions from state interference, and believes the actions of the authorities do not abide by domestic law and the European Convention on Human Rights, including Article 8 on privacy, Article 10 on freedom of expression and Article 11 on freedom of assembly and association.

France today advised its citizens and companies against doing business with Israeli settlements in occupied territories. The government warned that firms could face legal action tied to “land, water, mineral and other natural resources” as well as “reputational risks.” The step could have implications for the Israeli economy far beyond activities limited to Israeli settlements themselves. The Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee (BNC) welcomed the move.

Spain, Germany, Italy, Sweden and Luxembourg are expected to publish similar guidance in coming days in what appears to be a coordinated move by European states. The French warning follows similar steps by the UK and Netherlands, prompted by an advocacy effort by civil society groups and members of the European Parliament.

The new guidance published by the French foreign ministry states that “The West Bank, including East Jerusalem, Gaza and the Golan Heights are territories occupied by Israeli since 1967. The settlements are illegal under international law.”

Israel has banned Norwegian doctor and human rights activist Mads Gilbert from entering Gaza for life. Gilbert, a professor at the University Hospital of North Norway, where he has worked since 1976, earned international renown for his philanthropic work in late 2008, during Israel’s Operation Cast Lead, an attack that, according to Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, killed roughly 1,400 Gazans, including almost 800 civilians, 350 of whom were children. The aid worker, along with fellow Norwegian doctor Erik Fosse, decided to volunteer in Gaza as soon as he heard that bombing had started, on 27 December 2008. Thanks to diplomatic and economic support (in the sum of $1 million dollar of emergency funding from the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs), the two physicians managed to arrive in the strip by 30 December.

The Israeli government prevented all international press from entering Gaza during Cast Lead (a documentary, The War Around Us, was made about the only two foreign reporters in the strip at the time), in what Gilbert called Israel’s insidious “PR plan.” The doctor, as one of the only international aid workers in Gaza, thus devoted considerable time to speaking with local Palestinian news outlets, some of whom were reporting on behalf of foreign networks including BBC, CNN, ABC, and Al Jazeera. BBC aired an interview with Gilbert, conducted in the hospital. The questions asked, and the answers garnered, were eerily similar to those he would give just five years later, during Operation Protective Edge. The interviewer began asking him to respond to Israel’s claims that it was not targeting civilians, that it was only attacking Hamas militants. Gilbert called the claim “an absolutely stupid statement” and explained that, among the hundreds of patients he had seen at that point, only two had been fighters. The “large majority” were women, children, and men civilians. “These numbers are contradictory to everything Israel says,” he reported.

The doctor directed one heart-wrenching passage to President Obama, writing “Mr Obama – do you have a heart? I invite you – spend one night – just one night – with us in Shifa. I am convinced, 100 per cent, it would change history. Nobody with a heart and power could ever walk away from a night in Shifa without being determined to end the slaughter of the Palestinian people.” Israel later attacked Shifa hospital. Doctors Without Borders (MSF) “strongly condemn[ed]” the incursion, saying it “demonstrate[d] how civilians in Gaza have nowhere safe to go.” MSF director Marie-Noëlle Rodrigue stated, in an official statement, “When the Israeli army orders civilians to evacuate their houses and their neighborhoods, where is there for them to go? Gazans have no freedom of movement and cannot take refuge outside Gaza. They are effectively trapped.” Shifa was one of the over 10 medical facilities Israel bombed in its 50-day offensive.

This article originally published by Global Research in 2005 sheds light on the nature of Al Qaeda, an intelligence construct used by Washington to destabilize and destroy sovereign countries, while sustaining the illusion of  an outside enemy, which threatens the security of the Western World.

Shortly before his untimely death, former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook told the House of Commons that “Al Qaeda” is not really a terrorist group but a database of international mujaheddin and arms smugglers used by the CIA and Saudis to funnel guerrillas, arms, and money into Soviet-occupied Afghanistan. Courtesy of World Affairs, a journal based in New Delhi, WMR can bring you an important excerpt from an Apr.-Jun. 2004 article by Pierre-Henry Bunel, a former agent for French military intelligence. “I first heard about Al-Qaida while I was attending the Command and Staff course in Jordan. I was a French officer at that time and the French Armed Forces had close contacts and cooperation with Jordan . . .

“In the early 1980s the Islamic Bank for Development, which is located in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, like the Permanent Secretariat of the Islamic Conference Organization, bought a new computerized system to cope with its accounting and communication requirements. At the time the system was more sophisticated than necessary for their actual needs. “It was decided to use a part of the system’s memory to host the Islamic Conference’s database. It was possible for the countries attending to access the database by telephone: an Intranet, in modern language. The governments of the member-countries as well as some of their embassies in the world were connected to that network. “[According to a Pakistani major] the database was divided into two parts, the information file where the participants in the meetings could pick up and send information they needed, and the decision file where the decisions made during the previous sessions were recorded and stored. In Arabic, the files were called, ‘Q eidat il-Maaloomaat’ and ‘Q eidat i-Taaleemaat.’ Those two files were kept in one file called in Arabic ‘Q eidat ilmu’ti’aat’ which is the exact translation of the English word database. But the Arabs commonly used the short word Al Qaida which is the Arabic word for “base.” The military air base of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia is called ‘q eidat ‘riyadh al ‘askariya.’ Q eida means “a base” and “Al Qaida” means “the base.” “In the mid-1980s, Al Qaida was a database located in computer and dedicated to the communications of the Islamic Conference’s secretariat.

Shortly before his untimely death, former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook told the House of Commons that “Al Qaeda” is not really a terrorist group but a database of international mujaheddin and arms smugglers used by the CIA and Saudis to funnel guerrillas, arms, and money into Soviet-occupied Afghanistan. Courtesy of World Affairs, a journal based in New Delhi, WMR can bring you an important excerpt from an Apr.-Jun. 2004 article by Pierre-Henry Bunel, a former agent for French military intelligence. “I first heard about Al-Qaida while I was attending the Command and Staff course in Jordan. I was a French officer at that time and the French Armed Forces had close contacts and cooperation with Jordan . . . “Two of my Jordanian colleagues were experts in computers. They were air defense officers. Using computer science slang, they introduced a series of jokes about students’ punishment. “For example, when one of us was late at the bus stop to leave the Staff College, the two officers used to tell us: ‘You’ll be noted in ‘Q eidat il-Maaloomaat’ which meant ‘You’ll be logged in the information database.’ Meaning ‘You will receive a warning . . .’ If the case was more severe, they would used to talk about ‘Q eidat i-Taaleemaat.’ Meaning ‘the decision database.’ It meant ‘you will be punished.’ For the worst cases they used to speak of logging in ‘Al Qaida.’

“In the early 1980s the Islamic Bank for Development, which is located in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, like the Permanent Secretariat of the Islamic Conference Organization, bought a new computerized system to cope with its accounting and communication requirements. At the time the system was more sophisticated than necessary for their actual needs. “It was decided to use a part of the system’s memory to host the Islamic Conference’s database. It was possible for the countries attending to access the database by telephone: an Intranet, in modern language. The governments of the member-countries as well as some of their embassies in the world were connected to that network. “[According to a Pakistani major] the database was divided into two parts, the information file where the participants in the meetings could pick up and send information they needed, and the decision file where the decisions made during the previous sessions were recorded and stored. In Arabic, the files were called, ‘Q eidat il-Maaloomaat’ and ‘Q eidat i-Taaleemaat.’ Those two files were kept in one file called in Arabic ‘Q eidat ilmu’ti’aat’ which is the exact translation of the English word database. But the Arabs commonly used the short word Al Qaida which is the Arabic word for “base.” The military air base of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia is called ‘q eidat ‘riyadh al ‘askariya.’ Q eida means “a base” and “Al Qaida” means “the base.”

“In the mid-1980s, Al Qaida was a database located in computer and dedicated to the communications of the Islamic Conference’s secretariat. “In the early 1990s, I was a military intelligence officer in the Headquarters of the French Rapid Action Force. Because of my skills in Arabic my job was also to translate a lot of faxes and letters seized or intercepted by our intelligence services . . . We often got intercepted material sent by Islamic networks operating from the UK or from Belgium. “These documents contained directions sent to Islamic armed groups in Algeria or in France. The messages quoted the sources of statements to be exploited in the redaction of the tracts or leaflets, or to be introduced in video or tapes to be sent to the media. The most commonly quoted sources were the United Nations, the non-aligned countries, the UNHCR and . . . Al Qaida. “Al Qaida remained the data base of the Islamic Conference. Not all member countries of the Islamic Conference are ‘rogue states’ and many Islamic groups could pick up information from the databases. It was but natural for Osama Bin Laden to be connected to this network. He is a member of an important family in the banking and business world.

What is happening in European parliaments? In the last month and a half, the UK House of Commons, the Spanish, French, Portuguese and Irish parliaments have all recognized Israel’s eternal “right” to be a racist state via a much-touted recognition of an alleged Palestinian state within the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the areas of Palestine Israel occupied in 1967. These moves followed the lead of Sweden’s new center-left government which decided shortly after taking office to “recognize the State of Palestine” as part of the “two-state solution.” As there is no Palestinian state to recognize within the 1967, or any other, borders, these political moves are engineered to undo the death of the two-state solution, the illusion of which had guaranteed Israel’s survival as a Jewish racist state for decades. These parliamentary resolutions in fact aim to impose a de facto arrangement that prevents Israel’s collapse and replacement with a state that grants equal rights to all its citizens and is not based on colonial and racial privileges.

Unlike Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who believes he can force the world to recognize a greater racist Israel that annexes the territories Israel occupied in 1967 de jure, the European parliaments are insisting that they will only guarantee Israel’s survival as a racist state within Israel’s 1948 borders and on whatever extra lands within the 1967 territories the Palestinian Authority (PA) — collaborating with Israel — agrees to concede in the form of “land swaps.” Denmark’s parliament and the European Parliament itself are the latest bodies set to consider votes guaranteeing Israel’s survival in its present form within the 1948 boundaries only. Even neutral Switzerland agreed, upon a request from the PA, to host a meeting of signatories of the Fourth Geneva Convention to discuss the 1967 Israeli occupation only. Expectedly, in addition to the Jewish settler-colony, the world’s major settler colonies — the United States, Canada, and Australia — are opposed to the meeting and will not attend.

The context of these steps has to do with the recent conduct of the Netanyahu government whose impatience is exposing Israel’s liberal racist politicians — those who prefer a more patient approach to achieving the very same racist political goals — to embarrassment. The situation has become so untenable that ardent American liberal Zionists led by none other than Michael Walzer, emeritus professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, have felt compelled to act. Walzer, notorious for justifying all of Israel’s conquests as “just wars,” and a group of like-minded figures calling themselves “Scholars for Israel and Palestine,” recently called on the US government to impose a travel ban on right-wing Israeli politicians who support annexation of what remains of the West Bank. Whereas successive Israeli governments have shown an unyielding determination to strengthen Israel’s right to be a racist state over all of historic Palestine, they have done so through the ruse of the “peace process,” which they were committed to maintaining for decades to come without any resolution.

Everyone has noticed the contradiction of those who recently characterized the Islamic Emirate as "freedom fighters" in Syria and who are indignant today faced with its abuses in Iraq. But if that speech is incoherent in itself, it makes perfect sense in the strategic plan: the same individuals were to be presented as allies yesterday and must be as enemies today, even if they are still on orders from Washington. Thierry Meyssan reveals below US policy through the particular case of Senator John McCain, conductor of the "Arab Spring" and longtime partner of Caliph Ibrahim.

ohn McCain is known as the leader of the Republicans and unhappy 2008 US presidential candidate. This is, we will see, only the real part of his biography, which serves as a cover to conduct covert actions on behalf of his government. When I was in Libya during the "Western"attack, I was able to view a report of the foreign intelligence services. It stated that, on February 4, 2011 in Cairo, NATO organized a meeting to launch the "Arab Spring" in Libya and Syria. According to this document, the meeting was chaired by John McCain. The report detailed the list of Libyan participants, whose delegation was led by the No. 2 man of the government of the day, Mahmoud Jibril, who abruptly switched sides at the entrance of the meeting to become the opposition leader in exile. I remember that, among the French delegates present, the report quoted Bernard-Henry Lévy, although officially he had never exercised functions within the French government. Many other personalities attended the symposium, including a large delegation of Syrians living abroad.

Emerging from the meeting, the mysterious Syrian Revolution 2011 Facebook account called for demonstrations outside the People’s Council (National Assembly) in Damascus on February 11. Although this Facebook account at the time claimed to have more than 40,000 followers, only a dozen people responded to its call before the flashes of photographers and hundreds of police. The demonstration dispersed peacefully and clashes only began more than a month later in Deraa. [1] On February 16, 2011, a demonstration underway in Benghazi, in memory of members of the Islamic Fighting Group in Libya [2] massacred in 1996 in the Abu Selim prison, degenerated into shooting. The next day, a second event, this time in memory of those who died by attacking the Danish consulate during the Muhammad cartoons affair, also degenerated into shooting. At the same time, members of the Islamic Fighting Group in Libya ,coming from Egypt and coordinated by unidentified, hooded individuals, simultaneously attacked four military bases in four different cities. After three days of fighting and atrocities, the rebels launched the uprising of Cyrenaica against Tripolitania [3]; a terrorist attack that the western press falsely presented as a "democratic revolution" against "the regime" of Muammar el-Qaddafi.

Vladimir Putin is facing a multi-million-pound legal action for his alleged role in the shooting down of a Malaysia Airlines passenger jet over eastern Ukraine, The Sunday Telegraph can disclose. British lawyers are preparing a class action against the Russian president through the American courts. Senior Russian military commanders and politicians close to Mr Putin are also likely to become embroiled in the legal claim

The case would further damage relations between Mr Putin and the West, but politicians would be powerless to prevent it. Last week, lawyers from McCue & Partners, the London law firm, flew to Ukraine for discussions about how to bring the case and where it should be filed. Victims’ families will be invited to join the action. The case will inevitably highlight the role allegedly played by Russia in stoking conflict in eastern Ukraine.

Under new guidelines, the FBI is instructing high schools across the country to report students who criticize government policies and “western corruption” as potential future terrorists, warning that “anarchist extremists” are in the same category as ISIS and young people who are poor, immigrants or travel to “suspicious” countries are more likely to commit horrific violence.Based on the widely unpopular British “anti-terror” mass surveillance program, the FBI’s "Preventing Violent Extremism in Schools" guidelines, released in January, are almost certainly designed to single out and target Muslim-American communities. However, in its caution to avoid the appearance of discrimination, the agency identifies risk factors that are so broad and vague that virtually any young person could be deemed dangerous and worthy of surveillance, especially if she is socio-economically marginalized or politically outspoken.

This overwhelming threat is then used to justify a massive surveillance apparatus, wherein educators and pupils function as extensions of the FBI by watching and informing on each other.The FBI’s justification for such surveillance is based on McCarthy-era theories of radicalization, in which authorities monitor thoughts and behaviors that they claim to lead to acts of violent subversion, even if those people being watched have not committed any wrongdoing. This model has been widely discredited as a violence prevention method, including by the U.S. government, but it is now being imported to schools nationwide as official federal policy.

Under the category of domestic terrorists, the educational materials warn of the threat posed by “anarchist extremists.” The FBI states, “Anarchist extremists believe that society should have no government, laws, or police, and they are loosely organized, with no central leadership… Violent anarchist extremists usually target symbols of capitalism they believe to be the cause of all problems in society—such as large corporations, government organizations, and police agencies.”Similarly, “Animal Rights Extremists and Environmental Extremists” are placed alongside “white supremacy extremists”, ISIS and Al Qaeda as terrorists out to recruit high school students. The materials also instruct students to watch out for  extremist propaganda messages that communicate criticisms of "corrupt western nations" and express "government mistrust.”If you "see suspicious behavior that might lead to violent extremism," the resource states, consider reporting it to "someone you trust," including local law enforcement officials like police officers and FBI agents.

And, keep in mind, Kerry didn’t drag his case before the UN Security Council because he’s serious about a negotiated settlement or peace. That’s baloney. What Kerry wants is a resolution that will protect the groups of US-backed jihadis on the ground from the Russian-led offensive. That’s what’s really going on. The Obama administration sees the handwriting on the wall. They know that Russia is going to win the war, so they’ve settled on a plan for protecting their agents in the field. That’s why the emphasis is on a ceasefire; it’s because Kerry wants a  “Timeout” so his Sunni militants can either regroup or retreat.  Just take a look at this short excerpt from the UN’s summary of last Friday’s confab and you’ll see Kerry’s really up-to:

The truth is the Obama administration is just as committed to toppling Assad as ever. Kerry was just misleading Putin to get his approval for his ridiculous resolution at the UN.  As a result, Assad’s name was never mentioned in the resolution which,  Kerry seems to think, is a big victory for the US. But it’s not a victory, in fact, all of Russia’s demands were met in full through the passing of UN Resolution  2254 (three resolutions were passed on Friday) which reiterates all Putin’s demands dating back to the Geneva Communique’ of 2012.  Assad was never mentioned in 2254 either, because naming the president wasn’t necessary to establish the conditions for 1–a transitional government, 2–outlining the terms for a new constitution and  a non-Islamist Syrian state, and 3—free and fair elections to ensure the Syrian people control their own future. In 2012, the US rejected these three provisions saying that the would not agree unless Assad was excluded from participating in the transitional government. Now the US has reversed its position on Assad which means that 100 percent of Moscow’s demands have been met.  UN Resolution  2254 is complete capitulation on the part of the US. It is a humiliating diplomatic defeat which no one in the media is even willing to acknowledge.

Microsoft's new plan to keep the US government's hands off its customers' data: Germany will be a safe harbor in the digital privacy storm. Microsoft on Wednesday announced that beginning in the second half of 2016, it will give foreign customers the option of keeping data in new European facilities that, at least in theory, should shield customers from US government surveillance. It will cost more, according to the Financial Times, though pricing details weren't forthcoming. Microsoft Cloud - including Azure, Office 365 and Dynamics CRM Online - will be hosted from new datacenters in the German regions of Magdeburg and Frankfurt am Main. Access to data will be controlled by what the company called a German data trustee: T-Systems, a subsidiary of the independent German company Deutsche Telekom. Without the permission of Deutsche Telekom or customers, Microsoft won't be able to get its hands on the data. If it does get permission, the trustee will still control and oversee Microsoft's access.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella dropped the word "trust" into the company's statement: Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every individual on the planet to achieve more. Our new datacenter regions in Germany, operated in partnership with Deutsche Telekom, will not only spur local innovation and growth, but offer customers choice and trust in how their data is handled and where it is stored.

On Tuesday, at the Future Decoded conference in London, Nadella also announced that Microsoft would, for the first time, be opening two UK datacenters next year. The company's also expanding its existing operations in Ireland and the Netherlands. Officially, none of this has anything to do with the long-drawn-out squabbling over the transatlantic Safe Harbor agreement, which the EU's highest court struck down last month, calling the agreement "invalid" because it didn't protect data from US surveillance. No, Nadella said, the new datacenters and expansions are all about giving local businesses and organizations "transformative technology they need to seize new global growth." But as Diginomica reports, Microsoft EVP of Cloud and Enterprise Scott Guthrie followed up his boss’s comments by saying that yes, the driver behind the new datacenters is to let customers keep data close: We can guarantee customers that their data will always stay in the UK. Being able to very concretely tell that story is something that I think will accelerate cloud adoption further in the UK.

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.

The UN's newly appointed special rapporteur on privacy, Joseph Cannataci, has described digital surveillance in the UK as "worse" than anything imagined in George Orwell's totalitarian dystopia 1984.Speaking to the Guardian, Cannataci -- who doesn't own a Facebook account or use Twitter -- lambasted the oversight of British digital surveillance as "a rather bad joke at its citizens' expense".Warning against the steady erosion of privacy and increasing levels of government intrusion, he also drew sinister parallels with Orwell's vision of a mass-surveilled society, adding that today's reality was far worse than the fiction: "At least Winston [a character in Orwell's 1984] was able to go out in the countryside and go under a tree and expect there wouldn't be any screen, as it was called. Whereas today there are many parts of the English countryside where there are more cameras than George Orwell could ever have imagined."

Cannataci, who holds posts as a professor of technology of law at the University of Groningen, and as head of the department of Information Policy and Governance at the University of Malta, also called for a "Geneva convention-style law" for the internet. "Some people may not want to buy into it. But you know, if one takes the attitude that some countries will not play ball, then, for example, the chemical weapons agreement would never have come about."

As part of his new role -- which elevates digital privacy to the same level of importance as other human rights -- Cannataci has vowed to begin systematically reviewing government policies and the business models of large corporations, which he accuses of "very often taking the data that you never even knew they were taking". Although the privacy chief admits that his mandate is more than likely "impossible to achieve in the next three years", he stressed the importance of a "longer-term view" in an effort to help protect people's data and safeguard their digital rights.

In a seminal decision updating and consolidating its previous jurisprudence on surveillance, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights took a sideways swing at mass surveillance programs last week, reiterating the centrality of “reasonable suspicion” to the authorization process and the need to ensure interception warrants are targeted to an individual or premises. The decision in Zakharov v. Russia — coming on the heels of the European Court of Justice’s strongly-worded condemnation in Schrems of interception systems that provide States with “generalised access” to the content of communications — is another blow to governments across Europe and the United States that continue to argue for the legitimacy and lawfulness of bulk collection programs. It also provoked the ire of the Russian government, prompting an immediate legislative move to give the Russian constitution precedence over Strasbourg judgments. The Grand Chamber’s judgment in Zakharov is especially notable because its subject matter — the Russian SORM system of interception, which includes the installation of equipment on telecommunications networks that subsequently enables the State direct access to the communications transiting through those networks — is similar in many ways to the interception systems currently enjoying public and judicial scrutiny in the United States, France, and the United Kingdom. Zakharov also provides a timely opportunity to compare the differences between UK and Russian law: Namely, Russian law requires prior independent authorization of interception measures, whereas neither the proposed UK law nor the existing legislative framework do.

The decision is lengthy and comprises a useful restatement and harmonization of the Court’s approach to standing (which it calls “victim status”) in surveillance cases, which is markedly different from that taken by the US Supreme Court. (Indeed, Judge Dedov’s separate but concurring opinion notes the contrast with Clapper v. Amnesty International.) It also addresses at length issues of supervision and oversight, as well as the role played by notification in ensuring the effectiveness of remedies. (Marko Milanovic discusses many of these issues here.) For the purpose of the ongoing debate around the legitimacy of bulk surveillance regimes under international human rights law, however, three particular conclusions of the Court are critical.

The Court took issue with legislation permitting the interception of communications for broad national, military, or economic security purposes (as well as for “ecological security” in the Russian case), absent any indication of the particular circumstances under which an individual’s communications may be intercepted. It said that such broadly worded statutes confer an “almost unlimited degree of discretion in determining which events or acts constitute such a threat and whether that threat is serious enough to justify secret surveillance” (para. 248). Such discretion cannot be unbounded. It can be limited through the requirement for prior judicial authorization of interception measures (para. 249). Non-judicial authorities may also be competent to authorize interception, provided they are sufficiently independent from the executive (para. 258). What is important, the Court said, is that the entity authorizing interception must be “capable of verifying the existence of a reasonable suspicion against the person concerned, in particular, whether there are factual indications for suspecting that person of planning, committing or having committed criminal acts or other acts that may give rise to secret surveillance measures, such as, for example, acts endangering national security” (para. 260). This finding clearly constitutes a significant threshold which a number of existing and pending European surveillance laws would not meet. For example, the existence of individualized reasonable suspicion runs contrary to the premise of signals intelligence programs where communications are intercepted in bulk; by definition, those programs collect information without any consideration of individualized suspicion. Yet the Court was clearly articulating the principle with national security-driven surveillance in mind, and with the knowledge that interception of communications in Russia is conducted by Russian intelligence on behalf of law enforcement agencies.

Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Page both issued blustery statements over recent media reports they gave the National Security Agency officials access to their troves of user informationNow sources say both tech giants were in discussion about specific ways to give U.S. officials access to their data using virtual classified information reading roomsCompanies are all compelled by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to hand over any information requested under the law, but they're not required to make access easier

PRISM data-mining program was launched in 2007 with approval from special federal judgesApple, Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, YouTube, Skype, AOL and PalTalk are involved in spying program The UK has had access to the PRISM data since at least 2010Details of data collection were outlined in classified 41-slide PowerPoint presentation that was leaked by intelligence officer 

Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Larry Page of Google both strongly denied giving unfettered access to user data to U.S. officials, but it turns out both companies have, in fact, cooperated with governments requests.Zuckerberg denied his company's link to secret government data-sharing scheme PRISM on Friday in a blustery posted message that described allegations that Facebook gave 'US or any other government direct access to our servers' as 'outrageous.'Now, sources tell the New York Times that both Facebook and Google discussed plans to create secure portals for the government 'like a digital version of the secure physical rooms that have long existed for classified information' with U.S. officials.

(Reuters) - The United States urged countries on Tuesday to think twice about signing up to a new China-led Asian development bank that Washington sees as a rival to the World Bank, after Germany, France and Italy followed Britain in saying they would join. The concerted move by U.S. allies to participate in Beijing's flagship economic outreach project is a diplomatic blow to the United States and its efforts to counter the fast-growing economic and diplomatic influence of China. Europe's participation reflects the eagerness to partner with China's economy, the world's second largest, and comes amid prickly trade negotiations between Brussels and Washington.

European Union and Asian governments are frustrated that the U.S. Congress has held up a reform of voting rights in the International Monetary Fund that would give China and other emerging powers more say in global economic governance.

Washington insists it has not actively discouraged countries from joining the new bank, but it has questioned whether the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) will have sufficient standards of governance and environmental and social safeguards. "I hope before the final commitments are made anyone who lends their name to this organization will make sure that the governance is appropriate," Treasury Secretary Jack Lew told U.S. lawmakers. Lew warned the Republican-dominated Congress that China and other rising powers were challenging American leadership in global financial institutions, and he urged lawmakers to swiftly ratify stalled reform of the IMF.

On Monday of last week, June 30, Reuters ran a story that began:Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused Hamas on Monday of involvement, for the first time since a Gaza war in [November] 2012, in rocket attacks on Israel and threatened to step up military action to stop the strikes. So even by Israel’s own reckoning, Hamas had not fired any rockets in the year-and-a-half since “Operation Pillar of Defense” ended in a ceasefire. (Hamas denied firing even those mentioned by Netanyahu last week; it wasn’t until Monday of this week that it acknowledged launching any rockets at Israel since the 2012 ceasefire.) So how did we get from there to here, here being Operation Protective Edge, which officially began Tuesday with 20 Gazans dead, both militants and civilians, scores of others badly  wounded and much destruction, alongside about 150 rockets flying all over Israel (but no serious injuries or property damage by Wednesday afternoon)? We got here because Benjamin Netanyahu brought us here. He’s being credited in Israel for showing great restraint in the days leading up to the big op, answering Gaza’s rockets with nothing more than warning shots and offering “quiet for quiet.” But in fact it was his antagonism toward all Palestinians – toward Mahmoud Abbas’ Palestinian Authority no less than toward Hamas – that started and steadily provoked the chain reaction that led to the current misery.

And nobody knows this, or should know it, better than the Obama administration, which is now standing up for Israel’s “right to defend itself.” It was Netanyahu and his government that killed the peace talks with Abbas that were shepherded by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry; the Americans won’t exactly spell this out on-the-record, but they will off-the record. So a week before those negotiations’ April 29 deadline, Abbas, seeing he wasn’t getting anywhere playing ball with Israel and the United States, decided to shore things up at home, to end the split between the West Bank and Gaza, and he signed the Fatah-Hamas unity deal – with himself as president and Fatah clearly the senior partner. The world – even Washington – welcomed the deal, if warily so, saying unity between the West Bank and Gaza was a good thing for the peace process, and holding out the hope that the deal would compel Hamas to moderate its political stance. Netanyahu, however, saw red. Warning that the unity government would “strengthen terror,” he broke off talks with Abbas and tried to convince the West to refuse to recognize the emerging new Palestinian government – but he failed. He didn’t stop trying, though. At a time when Hamas was seen to be weak, broke, throttled by the new-old Egyptian regime, unpopular with Gazans, and acting as Israel’s cop in the Strip by not only holding its own fire but curbing that of Islamic Jihad and others, Netanyahu became obsessed with Hamas – and obsessed with tying it around Abbas’ neck. Netanyahu’s purpose, clearly enough, was to shift the blame for the failure of the U.S.-sponsored peace talks from himself and his government to Abbas and the Palestinians.

But Netanyahu used the kidnappings to go after Hamas in the West Bank. The target, as one Israeli security official said, was “anything green.” The army raided, destroyed, confiscated and arrested anybody and anything having to do with Hamas, killed some Palestinian protesters and rearrested some 60 Hamasniks who had been freed in the Gilad Shalit deal, throwing them back in prison. Meanwhile, in Gaza, Israel had already escalated matters on June 11, the day before the kidnappings, by killing not only a wanted man riding on a bicycle, but a 10-year-old child riding with him. Between that, the kidnappings a day later and the crackdown on Hamas in the West Bank that immediately followed, Gaza and Israel started going at it pretty fierce – with all the casualties and destruction, once again, on Gaza’s side only.

Last week, the UK Guardian newspaper published the results of a 15-month investigation by the Guardian and BBC Arabic. Euphemistically titled ‘James Steele: America’s mystery man in Iraq‘, the video report presents fairly damning evidence that, in the immediate aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq, the US Government and military began to assemble a 10,000 strong ‘Shia militia’ that, under US command, would be used to do three things: Kidnap, torture, murder and maim members of the Iraq resistance and those members of the Iraqi population that supported them. Plants bombs that targeted predominantly Sunni and Shia areas in an effort to divide the population and thereby any unified resistance to the US occupation. Create the impression of a ‘civil war’ in Iraq that could be used by the US and European governments and militaries to justify the continued occupation of Iraq for ‘peace-keeping’ purposes. While the 50 minute documentary is proof enough that Rumsfeld, Cheney, General Petraeus, and all the other NeoCon warhawks and CIA monsters consciously employed the services of former US Army Colonel James Steele in the organisation of death squads against the Iraqi grass-roots resistance (a tactic that he, Steele, had used against resistance movements in South America in the 1970s and 90′s), it panders to the official narrative that ‘sectarianism’ in Iraq was the root cause of the carnage that unfolded.

The so-called ‘Shia militia’ used by the American government (with the help and advice of British and Israeli counter-insurgency ‘experts’) were recruited directly by the CIA and people like James Steele to carry out extra-judicial murders of anyone they could loosely identify as ‘resistance’. In order to cloak this strategy, indiscriminate attacks on Iraqi civilians, Shia and Sunni alike, were carried out on a massive scale. Some of these individuals, in another setting, would be called ‘al-Qaeda’. Their usefulness in the employ of US warhawks in the Pentagon was doubly valuable because they both justified continued US occupation and provided ‘proof’ for the American War on Terror mythology, ex post facto, that the US was at war with the perpetrators of 9/11. Whereas before the invasion in 2003 there was absolutely nothing to link 9/11 to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, the creation of death squads (real) labelled ‘al Qaeda in Iraq’ (fictitious) ‘made real’ the lie that America and all Western civilization was at war against hordes of irrational and violent Muslims, and became the template for instigating terrorism to suppress popular uprisings in Yemen, Mali and elsewhere. Once they have people violent, they can wear down and manage the national popular resistance, ensuring no opposition to the real strategic objectives (namely the control of Middle Eastern oil). The US forces of occupation, along with their British counterparts, had long experience in what actually happens when you militarily invade and occupy a sovereign nation: the people resist, and not just one ethnic or religious group, but more or less the whole population. There is nothing quite like a foreign occupation for uniting a country.

In Iraq, these US-controlled ‘Shia’ death squads have been operating in much the same way, and while the media is content to portray them as ordinary Shias motivated by religious bias, they are in fact hired thugs who value only the money they are paid by their US masters and the promise of positions of power in a future Iraqi government. Like the rank and file of the ‘Libyan rebels’ and the ‘Free Syrian Army’, these people form the dregs of Arab and Middle Eastern societies. Led by spellbinders who veil their barbaric actions with religious prose, secular leaders in the region, like Ghaddafi and Assad, and Nasser and Arafat before them, struggled in vain to keep them at bay. The reason for this is because the US, Britain, France and Israel have consistently supported – in the form of weapons, money, training and blatant lies – the extremists against the rational voices. Throughout the US occupation of Iraq, the main representative of Shias in Iraq, Muqtada al-Sadr, has repeatedly called for unity among Shia and Sunni Iraqis in the face of foreign occupation and deception in the form of efforts to divide the resistance. These efforts included the bombing of bridges in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities in an effort to prevent communication between Iraqis, the use of widespread terror tactics to force Sunni and Shia Iraqis to flee their homes, and the bombing of religious shrines, either Shia or Sunni, in an effort to create the reality of ‘sectarian strife’. Iraq today is in ruins. The country has been ripped apart socially, mainly by way of the literal ripping apart of tens of thousands of civilians, with many being first brutally and systematically tortured by US-sponsored death squads. Hundreds of thousands more have been summarily murdered, either by the bombs of US aircraft, the bullets of US soldiers, or those ubiquitous and very effective ‘car bombs‘ planted by US and British operatives and their hired thugs.