THE ROMANIAN DIRECTOR Corneliu Porumboiu may be the most epistemologically preoccupied filmmaker this side of Errol Morris, but, having spent his first fourteen years living under the dictator Nicolae Ceauescus Pre Ubuist regime, his sense of the absurd is second nature.

12:08 East of Bucharest (2006), Porumboius first feature, is predicated on a ridiculous controversy as to whether an actual revolution did or did not occur in the directors hometown. (The Romanian title translates as a question that might be the prelude to an Eastern European folktale: Was There or Not?) Police, Adjective (2009), the movie that confirmed Porumboius international reputation, is an investigation of an investigation, hinging on the use of the word police as a noun, verb, or adjective. The wildly self-reflexive When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism (2013) concerns the making of a never-made movie that uses footage of an actual endoscopy as fake evidence of the filmmakers supposed authenticity.

Porumboius fondness for metaphysical farce and for the shifting rules of Wittgensteinian language games is equaled by his passion for soccer. The sport has provided him with material for two analytic documentaries: The Second Game (2014), wherein the filmmaker and his father, a retired soccer referee, annotate an ancient VHS tape of a disputed match between teams representing the Romanian army and the state secret police, and the similarly discursive Infinite Football (2018), in which the laws governing the game are called into question.

As demonstrated by these perversely intellectualized sports dramas and by Police, Adjective, Porumboiu enjoys working against genre. The critic Michael Atkinson described The Treasure (2015), a deadpan account of an idiotic get-rich-quick scheme entailing a hunt for the buried booty of pre-Communist Romania, as the quietest heist movie ever made. Consequently, there has been something of a critical reaction against Porumboius relatively showy and superficially conventional thriller La Gomera, named for the second smallest of the Canary Islands and released in the United States as The Whistlers.

Heralded by a blast of Iggy Pops insouciant anthem The Passenger, and nearly three times as expensive as any previous Porumboiu film, The Whistlers suggests an updated, if still scaled down, version of glitzy mid-1960s international caper films like Topkapi (1964) or Charade (1963), complete with Pop-art color coordination. Bucharest scenes aside, the locations are exotica paradisal Spanish isle off the coast of Africa, with a surprise detour for a rhapsodic light show in Singapores Garden by the Bay. The characters are standard-issue noir types, with a rogue cop-cum-patsy called Cristi (Vlad Ivanov) falling hard for a glamorous femme fatale with the archetypal name Gilda (Catrinel Marlon). The register, however, is comic. While some gags, such as those involving a stray filmmaker scouting locations on La Gomera, get laughs, The Whistlers is primarily stocked with low-key jokes that dont provoke guffaws so much as sustained bemusement.

In its offhand way, the new movie brings back two characters (and their actors) from Police, Adjective. The pedantic provincial inspector Cristi has been relocated to Bucharest and apparently demotedhis tough-minded boss is another femme fatalewhile one of the delinquents he arrested in the earlier film (Sabin Tambrea) has grown into the shady businessman with whom he becomes entangled and who lures him to the Canaries. The Whistlers also elaborates on, and perhaps parodies, the earlier films linguistic concerns. The most Porumboiuvian element is La Gomeras indigenous whistling language, which transposes Spanish phonemes into shrill chirrups and warbles that can be heard for miles. Used by the islanders to exchange messages from hilltop to hilltop, it functions for the stoic Cristi and the crooks he serves as a coded alternative to cell phones or email.

The Whistlers second-most characteristic element is the ubiquity of surveillance. Eavesdroppers monitor other eavesdroppers. Characters deploy spy cams and also playact for them. One elaborate bust takes place on an abandoned movie set that is in fact a trap with hidden police secretly documenting the scene before moving in to decimate the crooks. Given the sense of a global panopticon, The Whistlers feels like it might have been dreamed by someone falling asleep during a screening of Laura Poitrass 2014 Edward Snowden doc, Citizenfourwhich, like Porumboius, is a gadabout movie dealing with mass surveillance and featuring frequent discussion of whistleblowers.

As the viewer ponders the various double (or triple) games that Cristi and Gilda play, the story unfolds in discontinuous sections, somewhat like an origami cube. When two characters rendezvous at a movie theater showing The Searchers, its obvious that Porumboiu references the 1956 classic because he cant resist referencing another genre flick that features a whistling language (in this case, that of the Comanche). The screen within the screen speaks. But why is Jacques Offenbachs soothing, dreamy Barcarolle, often employed to evoke Venice, heard throughout? Could Porumboiu really be alluding to the melodys use in the 1931 Disney Silly Symphony Birds of a Feather (the subject of a lengthy footnote in Theodor Adorno and Hanns Eislers Composing for the Films)? Lapping in our ears throughout Porumboius droll vision of totaland thus naturalizedspycraft, these pensive strains seem an appropriate theme for that vast invisible network in which virtually everyone is a willing participant, packing their own personal tracking device.

J. Hobermanwas a Village Voicefilm critic for thirty years and has been contributing toArtforumfor even longer. His new book isMake My Day: Movie Culture in the Age of Reagan(The New Press, 2019).

Originally posted here:
J. Hoberman on Corneliu Porumboiu's The Whistlers - Artforum

Privacy advocates were right all along: The costs of one of the most controversial spy programs revealed by Edward Snowden far outweighed its benefits. Thats obvious from a 103-page study of recent efforts to log, store, and search phone metadatae.g., the time a call was made, its duration, and the phone numbers involvedabout most calls that Americans made or received.

Researchers at the congressionally created Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board found that from 2015 to 2019, the NSAs call-metadata program cost taxpayers $100 million. Only twice during that four-year period did the program generate unique information that the F.B.I. did not already possess,reportedCharlie Savage ofThe New York Times, who read a copy of the findings and went on to quote a passage characterizing those two pieces of unique information: Based on one report, F.B.I. vetted an individual, but, after vetting, determined that no further action was warranted. The second report provided unique information about a telephone number, previously known to U.S. authorities, which led to the opening of a foreign intelligence investigation.

The NSA shuttered the program in 2019, due in part to the fact that it repeatedlycollected more data than was legally permissible. The law that allows the NSA to search the data trove, moreover, expires next month, on March 15. But the Trump administration wants Congress to reauthorize the metadata program permanently, giving the NSA the discretion to restart it at any time and run it indefinitely.

Thats a bad idea for reasons beyond its dismal return on investment. Fundamentally, the program is impossible to responsibly overseeeven after a 2015 reform that required judges to sign off on spy-agency queries.

Savage explained that in 2018, the N.S.A. obtained 14 court orders, but gathered 434 million call detail records involving 19 million phone numbers. At that scale, the need to get a judges okay doesnt offer much protection to citizens.

Had Donald Trump supporters understood this program in 2016, many would not have trusted the Obama administration to refrain from abusing it. Same goes for Bernie Sanders supporters and the Trump administration today.

And one neednt even mistrust American politicians to object.

A centralized, searchable database of this sort is in itself a security risk. A foreign state that gains access to that data could map the social networks of high-ranking administration officials and their families, members of Congress, nuclear scientists, business leaders in industries with foreign competition, and more. National security would arguably be better protected if the U.S. government was forcing telecom companies to destroy its troves of data.

If ever there were a case for letting authorization of a national-security program expire, this is it: The expense to taxpayers is great, the benefits meager, and the potential for abuses tremendous. But once an authority is given to the executive branch, presidents are loathe to let it lapse.

Congress should ignore the Trump administrations preference and return the country to a place where the private communications of Americans are not stored for the federal government and its spies.

Read more from the original source:
The Costs of Spying - GovExec.com

Facebook: The Inside Story by Steven Levy

Review by Emily Nicolle

In the past four years, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerbergs world has been turned upside down. From a simple social media platform he created while studying at Harvard university first blossomed a networking supersite, that later became a regulatory and ethical data minefield which holds a terrifying amount of power over the way we communicate and form decisions.

At the centre of this, Zuckerberg maintains a significant amount of influence that has most certainly dictated Facebooks trajectory owning around 60 per cent of the companys voting shares, despite having raised billions of dollars in private and public investment.

Steven Levys Facebook: The Inside Story aims to chart one mans rise from a coder with a voracious appetite for challenging computer projects to the head of a global empire. Levy, having previously written one of the most definitive books on Google, was given unprecedented levels of access to Zuckerberg and senior company executives over three years to achieve this goal.

We follow Zuckerberg and the team as he almost gets expelled from Harvard for stripping its servers for college student data to create Facebooks earlier brother, Facemash. Later, we see a more human side to Zuckerberg as he gets upset at having to turn down a favoured investor.

Read more: Facebook and Google ad revenue to surpass TV for first time

But the narrative that runs through the entire work is one of a tech founders lust for control, having fallen in love with strategic computer games such as Civilisation as a teenager and developed an awe of the (questionable) empire tactics of Roman leader Augustus.

The young entrepreneur regularly shouted out Domination! at the end of company meetings at Facebook, as the company absorbed smaller rivals such as Instagram and ignored the warning signs of misusing the personal data of billions.

Facebook: The Inside Story provides unparalleled insight into one of the worlds most prominent tech companies, and is required reading for anyone seeking to understand Facebook or its infamous founder.

But the access given to Levy in the writing of this book has ultimately forged a saccharine view of Facebooks transformation into a company for which scandals have become the norm. Attempts to remind the reader of the consequences of Facebooks power are briefly passed over, in favour of depicting Zuckerberg as a teenager with good intentions who was awarded too much power at an early age.

Be careful not to come away from Levys writing with a sense of pity for the man for whom it all seemingly accidentally happened to, rather than techs next calculating megamind.

Review by Poppy Wood

As a disillusioned twenty-something, Anna Wiener abandoned her publishing job in New York and swapped her silk blouses for hoodies and high-tops as she headed for the rapidly mobilising oasis of Silicon Valley.

With little experience of tech culture beyond hours of endless scrolling on the social media network that everyone hated, Wiener managed to land jobs at a string of startups and gently wing her way into a world of coding and customer support. The result is a wry and intelligent reality check for startup culture written from the perspective of a rank outsider.

As much a critique of millenial consumerism as the tech world, Uncanny Valley paints the San Francisco startup scene as the male version of green smoothies and yoga. Both swear by self-help books; both dabble in veganism and semi-spiritualism but both are not treated equally.

With a fine balance of comedy and caution, Wiener prises open a world where sexism is rife, like wallpaper, like air. Though this is mainly handled with the same casualness with which it is dished out, at some points her anecdotes of workplace sexism hit some rather alarming decibels this is a world where women are discouraged from asking for a raise and encouraged to trust karma; where CEOs create lists of the most bangable women in the office; and where one woman is raped by an engineer and then pushed out of the company when reporting it to HR.

Read more: Reality is finally catching up with overblown Silicon Valley rhetoric

The book is consistently sharp and incisive, and scattered with thinly-veiled allusions to the brightest stars on the tech walk of fame. At one point, Wiener splurges her whopping new salary by attending hypnotherapy to stop her from biting her nails, during which I accidentally fell asleep and had an unerotic dream about the founder of the social media network everyone hated.

But Uncanny Valley is also a fable for the digital age. Wiener nonchalantly dismantles the jargon of Siliconese, as if trialling a new Dualingo feature but in doing so undergoes the slow dawning that her many perky office jobs filled with pool tables and trailer mix might have been up to slightly more sinister things. My throat felt like acid, she says, as the shadow of Edward Snowden seeps into the cracks of each chapter and she slowly realises what a data collection startup might entail.

As a result, Wiener is forced to tackle the big bad wolf of surveillance one of the moral quandaries of our time and wryly illustrates how the perceived monolith actually boils down to a bunch of software firms run by 25-year-old tech bros who genuinely believe they are splitting the atom.

Though well-written and brilliantly sardonic, Wieners experience ultimately serves as an interrogation of a world teetering on the edge of illegality a world whose uncanny consequences we are only just starting to feel.

Review by Jess Clark

Most of Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists plays out online.

Assuming a variety of identities, Julia Ebner reports from the frontline of far right messageboards, jihadi forums and anti-feminist communities, in a thorough and shocking exploration of how the internet has facilitated the spread of extremism.

Read more: We must not let fear of terror attacks compromise our human rights

However, the book is the most unsettling when Ebner shows the physical manifestation of online extremism. Ebner, who by day is a senior research fellow at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, visits a neo Nazi music festival and goes undercover at a far right meeting in a London pub.

If those events are unsettling, then more harrowing is when Ebners research demonstrates how online extremism can transform into real world violence that readers will recognise from recent news headlines. Ebner depicts the vast and rapid spread of online extremism, and the challenge we face in fighting it.

Read the rest here:
City Pages: Behind the scenes at Facebook, the secret lives of extremists and a Silicon Valley memoir - City A.M.

Lisbons Judiciary Police prison is situated just down the road from Eduardo VII Park, one of the Portuguese capitals most popular tourist attractions that is famed for its spectacular views of the city and the River Tagus. With only around 25 tiny cells and based in the depths of the giant white building which is the headquarters of the countrys antiterrorist and serious crime authorities, the high-security facility is usually reserved for only the most dangerous criminals. For almost the past year, however, it has also been home to Rui Pinto.

The 31-year-old, who created the Football Leaks website which provided some of the evidence that led to Manchester Citys Champions League ban and numerous other investigations into tax evasion and corruption in football and beyond, is still awaiting trial for alleged extortion, violation of secrecy and illegally accessing information despite being extradited to his homeland from Hungary in March 2019. Last week, his lawyers filed a complaint to the European Commission over inconsistencies in the original arrest warrant that accused Pinto of only six offences before that was increased to 147 while he was in custody.

That was reduced to 90 at the start of February, meaning Pinto still faces the prospect of up to 30 years in prison if found guilty. Yet rather than contemplating spending most of his life behind bars, the former student who dropped out of his history degree is determined not to give up hope.

We met him for the first time in about seven or eight months in December, says Rafael Buschmann, a reporter for the German magazine Der Spiegel who co-authored the book Football Leaks having worked closely with Pinto for more than four years. He had just finished six months in isolation and I expected to find someone who was in a very bad mental situation but he wasnt at all. Rui was very focused and said it was important for him not to lose his mind because all of the passwords for the hard drives are in his head. He knows all of the authorities in Portugal are afraid because he is still in a position to release whatever other evidence he has.

Pinto has already supplied around 70 million documents and 3.4 terabytes of information including tax returns and personal emails from some of the sports most influential figures to Der Spiegel and other members of the media network known as the European Investigative Collaborators (EIC group) and was recently unveiled as the source of the Luanda Leaks, which exposed the inner workings of the business empire of Africas richest woman, Isabel dos Santos.

It was from this original cache during an intense seven-month investigation that the Der Spiegel reporter Christoph Winterbach first discovered the emails that appeared to indicate Manchester City were flouting Uefas financial fair play rules, not to mention the infamous 1 down, 6 to go message allegedly sent by the City lawyer Simon Cliff after he was informed that one of Uefas seven investigators, Jean-Luc Dehaene, had died.

I talked with Ruis family a few days ago after City were banned and they told me that the first thing he said was: Why only two years? says Buschmann. The second question he had was: Why didnt Uefa call me? It seems strange that they wouldnt make some contact with the person who provided their strongest evidence.

Theres a clear correlation between the publication of our article and the investigation, adds Winterbach. Three weeks later, they wrote the first letter to City asking about our revelations and they started the formal investigation when we published another piece online which showed excerpts from the emails. I dont think that would have happened without Ruis evidence.

Ever since the first of four articles about City appeared in Der Spiegel in November 2018, the Premier League champions have denied wrongdoing and denounced their coverage as based on hacked or stolen materials that have been taken out of context despite Pintos insistence that he never hacked computers to gain access to the emails.

City are set to appeal to the court of arbitration of sport but even if Cas rule the emails were obtained illegally, there have been precedents where crucial evidence has been permitted despite it being illicitly acquired, including one case involving the infringement of the code of ethics by a Fifa official who was implicated by a secret recording.

A few weeks after the articles on City were published and two months before his extradition, Pinto was heard as a witness by the Parquet National Financier (PNF) which is responsible for law enforcement against serious financial crime in France as part of its investigation into tax evasion and money laundering. He handed over 26 terabytes of new data around nine times bigger than the original cache provided to the EIC group which is still under evaluation, while Pinto has also been contacted by German and Belgian tax authorities keen to access the encrypted information.

It remains to be seen what emerges from those investigations, although the revelations from Pintos first round of data have continued to send shockwaves through the world of football. On 6 February two days before Portos top of the table showdown with Benfica the Portuguese magazine Sabado claimed that authorities were investigating the Porto president, Jorge Nuno de Lima Pinto da Costa, and the club for alleged tax fraud and money laundering relating to the transfers of players including Radamel Falcao, James Rodrguez and Iker Casillas.

The presidents of Benfica and Braga and the agent Jorge Mendes were also said to be part of the investigation which has reportedly relied heavily on evidence provided by Football Leaks. Porto said in a statement: Neither FC Porto nor its president have been questioned about any judicial investigation.

Meanwhile, the offices of the Albania-born agent Fali Ramadani whose Lian Sports company represents Real Madrids Luka Jovic, Citys Leroy San and Napolis Kalidou Koulibaly among several other high-profile clients were searched by tax authorities in Mallorca last week in connection with a 100m money-laundering investigation.

Details of Ramadanis alleged misconduct was first exposed by Buschmann and Winterbachs second book, Football Leaks 2, which was published in Germany last year but has yet to be translated into English due to the number of delicate legal issues raised by their allegations.

Its crazy in the football industry, every week you have some more news about authorities investigations that are based on Football Leaks but Rui is the only one in front of a judge, says Buschmann. When I met him for the first time at the start of 2016 he told me that he wanted to work as a whistleblower for Uefa and show them documents which would show the accounts clubs are hiding from FFP. Its a shame that they never made contact with him, even after his public unveiling.

Pintos lawyer, William Bourdon, said last week that he is planning to call his former client Edward Snowden as an endorsement witness via videolink from Russia where he has been granted asylum when the trial finally begins. That is expected to be next month, although Pinto is prepared to wait as long as it takes.

There is a huge discrepancy between the way he is treated by the authorities and those he sees every day in the prison, says Winterbach. The guards were all very friendly with him and he told us they were all getting along just fine. Yet throughout this whole process, the attitude of the prosecutors and the judge has been almost hostile. He is being treated like he is a danger to society when he is actually a hero.

Continue reading here:
Football Leaks' Rui Pinto in prison with hard-drive passwords in his head - The Guardian

The cost of being a whistle-blower is going up.

When Daniel Ellsberg stole and published the Pentagon Papers in 1971, revealing the monstrous lies the U.S. government was telling the American public about the Vietnam War, he was arrested and tried, but the court set him free.

When Edward Snowden released a vast trove of documents in 2013 about the global electronic surveillance activities of U.S. intelligence agencies, he was already abroad, knowing civil liberties had taken a turn for the worse in the United States since 1971.

Snowden is still abroad seven years later, living in Moscow, because hardly anywhere else would be safe.

And Julian Assange, whose court hearing on a U.S. extradition request began this past Monday at Woolwich crown court in east London, is facing 175 years in jail if Britain delivers him into American hands.

The American authorities are really cross about his WikiLeaks dump of confidential material in 2010 that detailed U.S. misbehaviour in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Everybody knew or at least suspected that terrible things were happening there, but without documentation, there was really nothing they could do about it.

What Assange did was give them the evidence.

The most striking piece of evidence was a video and audio clip from an Apache helicopter gunship attacking civilians in Baghdad in 2007.

The crew sprays its targets with machine-gun fire, making comments like, Its their fault for bringing their kids into battle and Oh yeah, look at those dead bastards. They even target people in a vehicle that stops to help the wounded.

As for the claims of the U.S. authorities that Assange has blood on his hands, that his 2010 data dump endangered the lives of some of those who were mentioned in the documents, there is not a shred of evidence that is so.

If anyone had come to harm over the past nine years as a result of his actions, dont you think the U.S. government would have trumpeted it to the skies?

The whistle-blowers are among our last remaining checks on the contemptuous ease with which those who control the information seek to manipulate the rest of us.

We dont always respond to the whistle-blowers revelations as fast and as strongly as they would hope, but they are indispensable in keeping a check on the lying.

They should be praised, not punished.

So, what are the chances that Assange will escape extradition to the United States and a lifetime in prison?

His lawyers will doubtless argue nobody was harmed as a result of his revelations (except, perhaps, in their reputations for truthfulness) and that nobody profited by them.

A British court might look unfavourably on an extradition request that is brought out of sheer vindictiveness.

The story that U.S. President Donald Trump contacted Assange through an intermediary, former congressman Dana Rohrabacher, might also help.

Trump was allegedly offering to pardon Assange if the Australian would confirm it wasnt the Russians who gave him the Hilary Clinton campaign emails he released during the 2016 election campaign.

This has all been denied by both Rohrabacher and the Trump White House, but in carefully phrased ways that leave room for suspicion.

Trumps recent denial that he doesnt know Rohrabacher and never spoke to him is especially suspect, since he invited the man to the White House for a one-on-one meeting in April 2017. British courts will not extradite if the request is politically motivated.

But Assanges best chance probably lies elsewhere.

During the seven years that he lived in Ecuadors embassy in London as a political asylum-seeker, a Spanish security company called UC Global installed cameras in every corner of Assanges space in the embassy and live-streamed every contact and conversation he had, including with his lawyers, directly to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.

I dont know how a British court will respond to that information, but I think I know how an American court would respond.

Thats how Ellsberg got off in 1971 the government tapped his phone conversations and sent burglars to break into his psychiatrists office and steal his file, so the judge dismissed the case because the governments behaviour was outrageous and a fair trial was not possible.

There will be many appeals, both in the United Kingdom and perhaps later in the United States, and Assange will not draw a free breath for a long time, if ever.

But in the meantime, heres one happy ending: Snowden couldnt tell his girlfriend his plans before he left the U.S. and released his documents because that would have made her his accomplice.

She was angry at first, but she forgave him, married him in 2017 and lives with him today in Russia.

Gwynne Dyer will be speaking in Kamloops on Thursday, March 12, as part of Thompson Rivers Universitys International Days. He will be speaking in the Grand Hall in the Campus Activity Centre at 7 p.m. Admission is free, but those attending are asked to register online at eventbrite.com.

See more here:
Dyer: The perils of whistle-blowing in the 21st century - Kamloops This Week

The U.S. government spent $100 million collecting all our phone and text records for four years and got next to nothing out of it.

Try to contain your surprise. (I'm actually shocked it's only $100 million.) This info comes from a newly declassified report from the federal Privacy and Civil Liberties Board. The report analyzes the call records program implemented by the USA Freedom Act in 2015, which formalized but also restrained the National Security Agency's secret collection of Americans' communications metadata.

Prior to the USA Freedom Act, the NSA had used the PATRIOT Act to justify collecting this data with neither the knowledge nor the consent of Americans, or even of Congress. Once Edward Snowden blew the whistle on this secret surveillance, the USA Freedom Act was hammered out as a compromise that gave the NSA much more limited access to collected metadata in order to pursue investigations using specific terms.

The USA Freedom Act sunsets in mid-March. We already know these searches haven't been all that helpful, because the NSA has abandoned them. Part of the problem was repeated situations where attempts to collect records went awry and brought in far more private information than they were allowed to look at under the law.

This new report shows that the mass collection of Americans' phone records turned out not to be a particularly good tool for tracking down terrorism. Its authors determined that the NSA wrote only 15 intelligence reports based on information from call records accessed through the law. Of those, 11 duplicated information that was already in FBI records. Two contained information that the FBI had received through other means. One led the FBI to vet an individual, but it ultimately decided not to open an investigation. So that just leaves just one case where the bureau received unique info that it decided to use to open a foreign intelligence investigation.

All that for $100 million!

A logical person would assume that letting these powers sunset would be the smartest choice. Why violate Americans' privacy rights if even the government itself acknowledges the intrusions aren't actually accomplishing anything? But logic means nothing next to institutional inertia. The government doesn't like to give up any power or program, even when it's not useful.

So now there's a big congressional fight about renewing the USA Freedom Act. In January, a bipartisan pack of privacy-minded lawmakers introduced a bill that would formally end the bulk collection of Americans' records and introduce other reforms to the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendment (FISA) Court to provide some more transparency and better protect Americans from unwarranted surveillance. Their bill has support of both the left-leaning tech activist group Demand Progress and the more conservative FreedomWorks.

But congressional leaders just want to push through a quick temporary renewal with some less modest fixes. Reps. Jerrold Nadler (DN.Y.) and Adam Schiff (DCalif.), chairs of the House Intelligence and Judiciary Committees, put together a reform bill of their own that would extend the USA Freedom Act until 2023. Nadler and Schiff's bill would end the bulk data collection program but would extend the part of Section 215 of the Patriot Act that lets the FBI secretly collect business records it deems relevant to terrorism investigations. So the feds will be able to easily collect your data when it's in the hands of a third partyand these days, that means most of your data.

Rep. Zoe Logren (DCalif.), a strong privacy supporter who has previously teamed up with the likes of Reps. Justin Amash (IMich.) and Thomas Massie (RKy.) to try to limit the NSA and FBI's warrantless snooping powers, was not happy about this weaker bill. She has announced plans to introduce amendments. Yesterday, rather than debating the merits of the proposal, Democratic leaders cancelled the hearing, apparently worried that stronger privacy protections could kill the Schiff-Nadlerbill's chances. Both FreedomWorks and Demand Progress have put out statements criticizing Schiff and Nadler for dodging the debate.

As Charlie Savage and Nicholas Fandos note at The New York Times, President Donald Trump is a wild card in this fight. Trump has railed against the FISA court and the surveillance state, due to the investigation of his presidential campaign. And some of his complaints were justified: Independent analysis have showed serious problems with how the FBI pursued its warrants to wiretap former Trump aide Carter Page, as well as a lack of openness and thoroughness with the FISA Court.

But the language the FBI used to justify snooping on Page is a completely different section of the law. And when Trump has been given opportunities to rein in federal surveillance of Americans not linked to Donald Trump, he did the exact opposite. Meanwhile, Attorney General William Barr has said he wants a "clean" reauthorization of the USA Freedom Act without any reforms at all, telling House Republicans that he can make administrative reforms to procedures. That's the worst possible outcome, because it would give Barr the power to decidein secretwhose privacy rights are protected and whose are not. It's Congress' job, not Barr's, to put limits on the Justice Department's surveillance authorities.

Trump, this morning, showed some support for FISA reforms, but again apparently connected to the belief that changes to the USA Freedom Act have any relevance to the investigation of his campaign. They don't, but hey, if that's what helps push through changes that better protect all our privacy, I'm not going to complain.

Read more:
The Feds' Bulk Collection of Our Data Records Has Been Expensive and Useless. But That Doesn't Mean It's Going to Stop. - Reason

The EUs European Commission has told all staff that they should switch to the Signal messaging app instead of using messaging apps such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Apples Messages due to increasing cybersecurity fears, Politico reports.The dictum came in early February when the European Commission sent a message to all staff on its internal messaging boards saying, Signal has been selected as the recommended application for public instant messaging.

Signal has long been praised as the most secure messaging app out there by security and privacy advocates, including Edward Snowden. Thats thanks to the apps strong end-to-end encryption. But other messaging apps like WhatsApp and Apples Messages are also end-to-end encrypted (Facebook Messenger is not), so why is the EC recommending its staff switch to Signal instead of those apps?

Part of the reason is that hacking attempts have increased on high-profile individuals, including Jeff Bezos, by using messages sent via popular messaging apps, including WhatsApp, as a vector. However, the biggest single differentiator between Signal and other end-to-end encrypted message apps is Signal is open source, while Facebooks WhatsApp and Apples Messages are not.

An open-source secure messaging app means anyone can view the source code of the app and check to see that the app is really doing all it claims, such as keeping your messages safe from prying eyes, including the app maker itself. While its unlikely Facebook or Apples secure messaging apps are being less than honest about their capabilities, Signals open-source nature provides peace of mind for those who want to confirm an app is doing what it says on the tin. Thats very appealing to a large governmental organization like the European Commission.

Thinking of switching to Signal yourself? Here are all the reasons why you may want to.

See original here:
EU tells staff to ditch WhatsApp and other secure messaging apps and use Signal instead - Fast Company

National Security Cinema: The Shocking New Evidence of Government Control in HollywoodHow the US military and CIA go about their propaganda operations By Charles Bogle 27 February 2020

In National Security Cinema: The Shocking New Evidence of Government Control in Hollywood (2017), Dr. Matthew Alford and Tom Secker offer convincing proof that the US Department of Defense, CIA and FBI have for decades used various means to manipulate content and even deny production of certain Hollywood projects, often using national security as a pretext to censor film and television. The real aim of these operations, according to the authors, is to advance violent, American-centric solutions to international problems based on twisted readings of history.

Alford is a Teaching Fellow at the University of Bath in England. He is also the author of Reel Power: Hollywood Cinema and American Supremacy (2010). Secker is a private researcher who runs spyculture.coman online archive about government involvement in the entertainment industry.

Their book argues that the US military has had an influential relationship with Hollywood products since its earliest days. Alford and Secker point out that the Home Guard (reserve forces outside the National Guard) provided tanks for the infamous feature film [D.W. Griffiths] Birth of a Nation (1915), in which black slaves revolt against their masters, before the Ku Klux Klan ride in on horseback to save the day.

Using the Freedom of Information Act, the authors gained access to files that exposed the extent of government censorship in films between 1911 and 2017. The DOD (Department of Defense, or Pentagon) provided military equipment and advice, and even allowed members of the military to make appearances, in exchange for some degree of control over the content of 814 films.

The authors continue, If we include the 1,133 TV titles in our count, the number of screen entertainment products supported by the DOD leaps to 1,947. If we are to include the individual episodes for each title on long-running shows like 24, Homeland, and NCIS, as well as the influence of other major organisations like the FBI, CIA and White House then it becomes clear that the national security state has supported thousands of products.

Alford and Secker offer theTransformermovie franchise (2007-2018 so far, most of it directed by Michael Bay) as an example of how the DOD reinforces its national security interests by using different under the table methods of influencing the making of what was (and still is) considered to be pure entertainment.

Normally, filmmakers have to send drafts of the script to the DOD along with their request for material support. Not so with the makers ofTransformers.The DOD paid the filmmakers to gain very early influence over the scripts by giving them the most military assistance in filmmaking history, e.g., twelve types of Air Force aircraft and troops from four different bases. The secondTransformersfilm was provided with $150m F-22 fighters.

The authors rightly conclude that the Transformers franchise is anything but apolitical, and is, in fact, an example of whats come to be known as war pornography. The unstated but intentional message to the audience is to trust in officialdom to bring em home from foreign wars and invasions, no matter the number of human beings, American or otherwise, soldier or civilian, who are killed in the process.

When the authors turn to investigating the CIAs influences on movies, they work from available facts and information in regard to three different eras: 1943-1965, 1966-1986 and 1986 to the present. While the CIA has censored or interfered with far fewer movies, its repressive methods and means, fittingly, are even more insidious.

During the immediate postwar period, officials of the newly formed CIA worked, according to Alford and Secker, to ensure that Hollywood films did not depict them in any form. Meanwhile, the agency, from its establishment, was busy recruiting assets within the highest levels of the film industry and using them to spy on Hollywood and to add and remove material from movie scripts.

The film versions of George Orwells Animal Farm (1954, John Halas and Joy Batchelor) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1956, Michael Anderson) exemplify the kind of movies that the CIA would be expected to censor. Indeed, film scholars, our authors point out, have long been aware that both adaptations were directly affected by the CIA. In the case of Animal Farm, the changes to the films ending were designed to encourage revolts against communist dictatorships, i.e., the various Stalinist regimes in the USSR and Eastern Europe, ironically just as, in the real world, Alford and Secker point out, the CIA was overthrowing the democratically elected governments in Iran and Guatemala and launching operations against Sukarnos independence government in Indonesia.

The CIA discovered the effectiveness of working through agentsor Hollywood figures who would act as agentsduring the Cold War period. As an example, the authors reveal that Luigi Luraschi, the head of censorship at Paramount Studios, regularly contacted an anonymous individual at the CIA to inform him of Paramounts ability and willingness to alter films to conform to US government interests.

Among the many Paramount movies from which scenes were added or deletedintended to improve the image of American societyinclude the apparently innocuous Sangaree (Edward Ludwig), The Caddy (Norman Taurog) and Houdini (George Marshall), all released in 1953, and Strategic Air Command (Anthony Mann), from 1955. The latter was changed to ensure that America did not appear as a lot of trigger-happy warmongering people.

In 1961 the CIA suffered its first high profile failure during the attempted invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, an operation aimed at overthrowing the Castro government. One of the CIAs responses to the debacle was to turn to movies to improve its image. Nowhere was this more apparent than in Thunderball (Terence Young, 1965), the James Bond film based on the novel by Ian Fleming (a friend of CIA director Allen Dulles), featuring a number of positive references to the agency, and the first movie with a likable CIA character, Felix Leiter (Rik Van Nutter).

1966-1986: Richard Helms, who began working in intelligence in 1943 and who served as CIA director from 1966-1973, presided over what appeared to be a less intrusive relationship with Hollywood. Alford and Secker ask, But was all as it seemed?

Two films from this periodTopaz (Alfred Hitchcock, 1969) and Three Days of the Condor (Sydney Pollack, 1975)portrayed the CIA as a ruthless intelligence agency that sent murderous villains, i.e., CIA agents, out into the public. The authors hypothesize that the agency may have welcomed the more menacing image that these and other films presented. They write that if there really was tacit CIA approval for the Condor script, it would suggest that the CIA was actually at ease with being represented in such threatening terms. The final scene of the film rationalises the CIAs criminal activity, as ultimately it is only the Agency that appears able to protect the flow of oil that is vital to the nations survival.

Alford and Secker point out that Helms, who was dismissed as CIA chief by President Richard Nixon in early 1973 (due in part to Helmss refusal to help cover up the developing Watergate scandal), spoke with star Robert Redford for hours on the set of Condor in 1975.

The authors notion that the CIA was deliberately cultivating a tough-guy image is probably correct, but providing at least a brief history of Nixons firing of Helms and the surrounding developments, including the state of the flow of oil, would have strengthened their arguments and enlightened the reader.

1986-present: Top Gun (Tony Scott, 1986) proved to be a successful promotional film for the US Navyin the year following the movies release, Navy recruitment figures saw a spike of 16,000, and enlistment for naval aviators jumped 500 percent. This success, according to Alford and Secker, caused the CIA to change its means of manipulating Hollywood. In fact, the CIA was taking advantage of a reactionary political and cultural atmosphere, one of whose central events was the collapse of the Eastern European Stalinist regimes and the dissolution of the Soviet Union between 1989 and 1991.

After building a relationship with author espionage-thriller writer Tom Clancy, the CIA allowed adaptations of two Clancy products, Patriot Games (1992) and Mission Impossible (1996), to be the first movies filmed at the CIAs Langley headquarters in two decades.

Other celebrity links quickly followed, giving the CIA control over the development of a number of films. In his capacity as CIAs Entertainment Liaison Officer (ELO), Chase Brandon, a 25-year veteran of CIA operations and cousin of Hollywood star Tommy Lee Jones, helped give the spy agency influence over the production of a number of films, such as The Bourne Identity (Doug Liman, 2002) , The Sum of All Fears (Phil Alden Robinson, 2002also based on a Clancy Cold War potboiler) and The Recruit (Roger Donaldson, 2003). Brandons role as ghostwriter of the last film has been verified. The Recruit, as the authors note, is intended to counter political concerns, such as the CIAs apparent failure to predict the 9/11 attacks, and to promote the Agencys number one priority, terrorism.

Perhaps the most surprising and disgraceful of the authors findings is the number of Hollywood performers who have, in one way or another, shilled for the CIA and the US military. Robert De Niro (who had left-wing parents and should know better), Tom Cruise, Dan Aykroyd, Dean Cain, Will Smith, Claire Danes, Kevin Bacon, Patrick Stewart and Mike Myers are among those who have publicly visited Langley headquarters. George Clooney and Angelina Jolie have worked on films with the CIA. Ben Affleck, a friend of Rwandan dictator Paul Kagame, and star in the aforementioned CIA and DOD-assisted The Sum of All Fears, told an interviewer that Hollywood is probably full of CIA agents.

A Case Studies section allows the authors to scrutinize more closely the influence of the military-intelligence apparatus on 14 contemporary films in different genres, including James Camerons Avatar (2009); Mike Nicholss Charlie Wilsons War (2007); Robert Zemeckiss Contact (1997); Terry Georges Hotel Rwanda (2004); Seth Rogen-Evan Goldbergs The Interview (2014); The Kingdom (2007) and Lone Survivor (2013), both directed by Peter Berg; William Friedkins Rules of Engagement (2000); and Paul Greengrasss United 93 (2006).

(The WSWS, without of course knowing the specific role of the military and CIA in every case, sharply criticized each of the films on this list that we reviewed.)

A detailed examination of these films brings to light the fact that most of them promote a common underlying ideology, that American military supremacy is fundamentally benevolent.

In the case of Charlie Wilsons War, the CIA advanced this ideology by deleting scenes from the script that portrayed Soviet goodwill during their occupation of Afghanistan, e.g., in one of several scenes removed from the script, a maverick CIA operative described Russian soldiers gathering Afghan refugees together in a semi-circle and teaching them how to read and write. Iron Man (2008) follows a familiar Hollywood plot line to prove the benevolence of American domination. Initially, Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) is a stereotypically rich playboy, but his capture and imprisonment change him almost instantaneously into a heroic figure who, as Iron Man, uses sophisticated equipment to kill generic Muslim terrorists, just as the Pentagon was doing. The US Air Force rewarded the filmmakers by providing aircraft and airmen as extras, along with script and technical advice. Alford and Secker observe that Air Force Captain Christian Hodge, the Defense Departments project officer for the production, commented that the Air Force is going to come off looking like rock stars. The Case Studies section concludes with a consideration of the relationship between various government departments and agencies, especially the CIA, and the work of Clancy and directors Oliver Stone and Paul Verhoeven.

While the authors note that Clancy is hardly a laudable figure politically, the Hollywood versions of his novels removed whatever anti-establishment elements they contained, and shifted them in the direction of misleading people about real events and political dynamics while portraying the security state as the only answer to a dangerous and hostile world.

Alford and Secker rather generously refer to Verhoevens politically subversive trio of moviesthe sci-fi trilogy of Robocop, Total Recall, and Starship Troopers. The latter film, according to Verhoeven, got past the censors because nobody [at Sony Pictures] ever saw it, due to the fact that Sony was turning over management every three or four months.

Veteran filmmaker Oliver Stone had no such luck. After the release of Snowden, about whistleblower Edward Snowden, Stone spoke of his inability to find American financing for the movie, according to the authors, his first major political movie in 21 years. Stone commented, Its a very strange thing to do [a story about] an American man, and not be able to finance this movie in America.

Stone faced censorship from multiple US government departments and agencies as well as a dry well when looking for American financing of any movie that was not sympathetic to US imperialist policies.

At times, the authors fail to bring enough historical background to their statements and assertions, although a valuable Endnotes concludes the book. The critical subject matter, about which the American public knows next to nothing, deserves an even larger study.

Overall, National Security Cinema: The Shocking New Evidence of Government Control in Hollywood offers a clearly written presentation of a Hollywood industry and government departments and agencies that are, indeed, intent on delivering more and more war propaganda. Until they are stopped, we will, to quote the authors, continue to live and die in a military-industrial nightmare.

2019 has been a year of mass social upheaval. We need you to help the WSWS and ICFI make 2020 the year of international socialist revival. We must expand our work and our influence in the international working class. If you agree, donate today. Thank you.

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National Security Cinema: The Shocking New Evidence of Government Control in HollywoodHow the US military and CIA go about their propaganda operations...

Bernie Sanders has a problem. On a few occasions he has given qualified praise to dastardly Communist regimes in the Soviet Union and Cuba, thus proving his sympathy with the Red menace. So says both the army of Never Trump conservatives (numbering in my count at maybe two dozen, every one of which has a newspaper column somewhere), and various Democratic elites, including some of Sanders' presidential opponents.

But this is just the latest flailing attempt of a political establishment desperate to stop Sanders from securing the Democratic presidential nomination. Bernie Sanders is not a Communist and this kind of knee-jerk red-baiting is as childish as it is outdated.

So what are we talking about? In a press conference after visiting the Soviet Union back in 1988, Sanders spoke positively about the Moscow metro, Soviet youth culture programs, and expressed hope at the potential reforms that appeared to be unfolding there. In a recent 60 Minutes interview, when asked by Anderson Cooper about Cuba and Fidel Castro, Sanders explained Castro's literacy program was one reason why the population hadn't helped the U.S. overthrow him.

The first thing to note here is that Sanders does not deny the worst things about Communist rule in either the USSR or Cuba. In the press conference, he noted that Soviet reformers he spoke with were "absolutely open in acknowledging that they are not a democratic society." He noted that while health care and housing were cheap, they were outdated and low-quality. On Cuba, Sanders said, "We're very opposed to the authoritarian nature of Cuba." When Cooper noted that Castro had imprisoned a lot of dissidents, Sanders responded: "That's right, and we condemn that."

Secondly, Sanders' comments about the Moscow metro, the high quality of Soviet arts programs, and Cuban social programs are basically correct. The Moscow subway system is a shockingly beautiful and functional system even to this day especially if you compare it to the grimy, broken-down, ridiculously expensive rat warrens of the few subways that even exist in the United States. Soviet culture programs in singing, theater, ballet, and so on were famously world-class.

Castro, meanwhile, really did create an excellent literacy program, and Cuba's health care system is astoundingly good considering how dirt-poor the country is (in part a result of the decades-long U.S. embargo, mind). Cuba has more than three times the number of doctors per capita as the United States, its infant mortality rate is a third lower than the U.S., and its life expectancy for men is slightly higher (though not for women). In his film Sicko, Michael Moore famously took several ill 9/11 first responders to Cuba, where they got decent care they could not get in America. One woman on a meager disability pension found her asthma medicine cost 0.0005 percent what it did in the U.S.

On the other hand, it's not like the United States is some beacon of democracy and humane behavior. Another reason most Cubans did not support President Kennedy's attempt to overthrow Castro is that we almost certainly would have helped install a brutal right-wing dictatorship just like we did in Nicaragua, Guatemala, Iran, Argentina, and elsewhere. Anderson Cooper may also be interested to learn that the U.S. imprisons its population at levels approaching the Soviet gulag system at its height, or the names of Chelsea Manning, Reality Winner, Edward Snowden, John Kiriakou, or Thomas Drake. Every president of both parties going back to the 1940s has supported reprehensible dictators in places like Saudi Arabia, Romania, the Philippines, and elsewhere. And Trump has obviously buddied up with authoritarians the world over he's currently in India making nice with Narendra Modi, an anti-democratic strongman implicated in violent crackdowns against his country's Muslim minority.

It is of course true that Communist countries often imposed horrible conditions on their populations to build their trains and welfare states. Cuban doctors are poorly paid and sometimes forced to serve overseas as part of Cuban diplomatic efforts. Communism is a failed model of human development indeed, the only real lesson here is how humiliating it is for the United States that a rattletrap country like Cuba can manage a health care system somewhat competitive with ours in terms of outcomes on a tiny fraction of the resource base.

But that is why Sanders does not point to those nations when talking about what he actually wants to do. When he is delivering his stump speech, he always refers to Denmark, Norway, France, or other European social democracies as his actual lodestar. Rich countries can have quality services and infrastructure without slave labor camps or abolishing democracy.

At bottom, this attack on Sanders is classic red-baiting. Point to something positive somebody said about a Communist country taken out of context and hysterically accuse them of guilt by association. But taken to its logical endpoint, the move is simply silly. Are we supposed to automatically forgo something if the dread Communists happened to do it? I guess we must tear down all American public schools, the Social Security and Medicare programs, all roads and highways, and all our public transit systems. Cuba has 5-cent asthma inhalers? Well ours will have to cost $1,000, otherwise Lenin will make capitalist baby Jesus cry.

Back in the heyday of the Soviet Union in the '50s and '60s, Sanders' comments would no doubt have been disqualifying for most Americans, gripped as they were by Cold War paranoia. But where international Communism was then a formidable globe-spanning behemoth, today it is almost completely dead. The USSR collapsed almost 30 years ago, and most Americans have a dim at best memory of it as a dysfunctional basket case.

To any even slightly good-faith interlocutor, what Sanders said about the USSR or Cuba is anodyne or even boring. These countries have a few good aspects but are generally pretty wretched. That's why we should aim at the Norway example, which proves we can have a dramatically more equal and comfortable society without sacrificing democracy. Attempting to whip up a McCarthyite frenzy over gentle social-democratic reforms is transparently ridiculous and smacks of desperation.

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Is Bernie Sanders a deep cover Communist revolutionary? Uh, no. - The Week

Since the Cold War, more than 120 countries reportedly trusted a Swiss company Crypto AG to safeguard their most secret messages. However, few of them knew that, according to a leaked report published last week by the Washington Post, the encrypted communications device maker was actually controlled by the CIA and its German counterpart.

The two intelligence agencies reportedly rigged the devices to let them listen in on political and military leaders, other spies, and even private companies and make millions of dollars in profit along the way. Crypto AG helped them spy on uprisings in Latin American countries, Middle Eastern dictators, the Vatican and even the United Nations.

While the CIA report called the operation "the intelligence coup of the century," other major leaks over the past decade have shed light on some closely held state secrets.

Whistleblowers like Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning, by sharing confidential documents with journalists and organizations like WikiLeaks, have helped expose everything from the NSA's surveillance of millions of American citizens to offshore tax havens used by world leaders and the ultra wealthy.

Here are just some of the most significant things we've learned as a result of recent leaks.

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From Snowden to Crypto AG: the biggest leaks since 2010 - Business Insider - Business Insider