Comparing Howard Zinn and Yogi Berra in the same sentence probably leaves most on the left with their mouths wide open. But not so with baby boomers still on the left, and others who cling to sanity near the ninth circle of hell. Historian and Professor Howard Zinn and the great Yankees catcher Yogi Berra knew something not only about how history often irregularly repeats itself, but also how consistent that repetition is in general. Howard Zinn said that governments lie and Yogi said, Its like dj vu all over again.

It grieves me greatly that in just over a month the tenth anniversary of Howard Zinns death arrives. How can that be? Time does not wait for the great, even great historians and catchers.

Yesterday, December 9, 2019, newspapers (Afghanistan papers reveal US public were misled about unwindable war) reported that the war in Afghanistan has been a lost cause from its beginning in 2001, and for anyone with a historical perspective, since the Soviet invasion there in the 1980s and the US support of warlords, many of whom would soon become the Taliban. Well over a trillion dollars of wasted money, over 2,000 US lives, and who knows how many deaths of Afghani civilians. The newspaper of record, that has supported the vast majority of US wars without question, publishedDocuments Reveal U.S. Officials Misled Public on War in Afghanistan,(December 9, 2019). Recall that newspapers lies about going to war in Iraq in 2002-2003? That paper seems to love to occasionally collude with those in power with the expected outcomes.

Heres a quote from the article that could have come out of General William Westmorelands mouth during the Vietnam War. The words short-term may have given way to long-term for Westmoreland:

The United States military achieved a quick but short-term victory over the Taliban and Al Qaeda in early 2002, and the Pentagons focus then shifted toward Iraq. The Afghan conflict became a secondary effort, a hazy spectacle of nation building, with intermittent troop increases to conduct high-intensity counterinsurgency offensives but, over all, with a small number of troops carrying out an unclear mission.

Even as the Taliban returned in greater numbers and troops on the ground voiced concerns about the American strategys growing shortcomings, senior American officials almost always said that progress was being made.

Its amazing that US leaders are so consistent. Recall General Colin Powell making the case for war against Iraq at the UN?

Daniel Ellsberg has been in the news lately as the noose grows tighter around Chelsea Mannings and Julian Assanges necks. Those in power already have banished Edward Snowden for telling the simple truth that the government of the US knows every single move we make, what that move is, and where we made it!

Ellsberg could have been jailed for life just like so many members of minority groups in the so-called land of the free have been for decades. But Richard Nixon and his cronies were so stupid they broke into Ellsbergs physicians office to get dirt on him and so the Pentagon Papers case went down the governments drain.

Dj vu, readers? The fools in the government lied about Vietnam from its inception until the last US helicopter flew away from the roof of the US embassy in Saigon in 1975. That gave some solace to the war resisters among us from the Vietnam era, but probably little to the memory of over 58,000 US dead and those who cared about them, the masses of the wounded, and the millions who died in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.

And so we arrive on the stage of history present for those who enjoy this holiday season. Andhistorypresent in Afghanistan has been a completely bipartisan effort from Bush II to Obama, and now Trump! The government lied about Afghanistan again and again and that may be why the court jester Donald Trump is trying to negotiate a way out of that debacle. Who will negotiate a way out of the lethal mess that the Middle East is now?

Continue reading here:
The One Thing That US Leaders Seem to Do Well is Lie - CounterPunch

The rollout of 5G mobile communications as an upgrade to existing 4G networks promises to deliver a new era in data throughput and bandwidth, enabling new capabilities that will improve economic production, drive job growth, increase prosperity, and enable new, immersive entertainment possibilities. And thats just a few of the many benefits that may be derived from 5G. But just like any technology, 5G can drive negative outcomes in addition to positive ones.

One of the best pro-freedom writers working today recently fielded a question about 5G from one of his readers. Eric Peters reviews cars from a staunchly pro-freedom viewpoint, and he often has useful perspective to share with his readers. Asked what he thought about the dangers of 5G, he replied that his chief concern was its potential impact on our freedoms.

Were told 5G is harmless in terms of health and maybe so, he wrote. But will it be harmless in terms of our liberty? Our privacy? Our right to be free from ubiquitous monitoring and control? I have grave doubts about that.

There is already a tremendous, interconnected surveillance regime in place, erected largely on the back of the 9/11 attacks, and revealed most disturbingly by whistleblowers such as William Binney and Edward Snowden. These surveillance regimes, which Binney argues conduct illegal surveillance on all Americans, were built with previous-generation telecommunications and computing technology. With 5G, with advances in solid-state storage, and with continuous advances in cloud computing, algorithmic analysis, and software, near-future surveillance capabilities will dwarf those revealed by the post-9/11 whistleblowers.

When it comes to the surveillance implications of 5G, consider the Internet of Things (IoT), the tech industrys long-desired utopia consisting of every device one owns connected to the Internet and continuously monitored. The world of IoT is one in which every house and car is equipped (i.e., monitored) by an Alexa-like system and in which every possible operational device from door bells (Ring, for example), to televisions, refrigerators, washing machines, door locks, furnaces, air conditioners, and much, much more are wirelessly connected, always sending data back to the cloud reporting on usage, location, viewing habits, and even words spoken in their proximity. Much of this is in place now, but 4G bandwidth limitations are a problem that the increased bandwidth and speed of 5G will eliminate. The all-seeing Eye of Sauron, the surveillance state, will, through this technology, gain the ability to know where everyone is, what everyone is doing, and what everyone is saying at all times, in all places, and in real time.

Span and Depth of Surveillance

Keep in mind, too, that this very near-term future includes an IoT surveillance kit installed in all public places as well on light poles, at intersections, on public buildings, and more. These will include motion detectors, video cameras, and microphones, capable of transmitting high-definition and even 4K ultra-high-definition imagery, high quality audio and even thermal imagery to the surveillance state. Again, with 5G, this will happen in real time.

This is not speculation it is something the surveillance state has desired and been working toward for a number of years. As far back as 2012, as Wired reported at the time, then-CIA director David Petraeus openly admitted that the government wanted to watch people through their Internet-connected appliances.

Items of interest will be located, identified, monitored, and remotely controlled through technologies such as radio-frequency identification, sensor networks, tiny embedded servers, and energy harvesters all connected to the next-generation internet using abundant, low-cost, and high-power computing, Petraeus said, the latter now going to cloud computing, in many areas greater and greater supercomputing, and, ultimately, heading to quantum computing.

5G is the next-generation internet envisioned by Petraeus. As for quantum computing, its real and its here. Google, for example, has announced its achievement of quantum supremacy, the point at which a quantum computer can vastly outperform a classical supercomputer, solving problems that classical computers cannot solve in any practical sense.

In October 2019, Google announced in the journal Nature that it had used a processor with programmable superconducting qubits to create quantum states on 53 qubits, corresponding to a computational state-space of dimension 253 (about 1016). This processor, dubbed Sycamore, takes about 200 seconds to sample one instance of a quantum circuit a million times our benchmarks currently indicate that the equivalent task for a state-of-the-art classical supercomputer would take approximately 10,000 years.

Quantum computing breakthroughs matter for a number of reasons, but in a world of ubiquitous snooping, the most important implication of quantum computing is that it threatens to challenge existing public key encryption systems. These are one of the last remaining defenses against an all-powerful surveillance state, which goes a long way to explaining why the surveillance state is so bent on eradicating the publics use of encryption.

Security expert Bruce Schneier offers a great description of the power of current encryption technology. To encrypt a message, we combine it with a key to form ciphertext, he notes on his website. Without the key, reversing the process is more difficult. Not just a little more difficult, but astronomically more difficult. Modern encryption algorithms are so fast that they can secure your entire hard drive without any noticeable slowdown, but that encryption cant be broken before the heat death of the universe.

Except, possibly, by quantum computers. These, Schneier says, promise to upend a lot of this. Nonetheless, Schneier indicated that he remained optimistic about the potential of hardening encryption against quantum computation. Cryptographers are putting considerable effort into designing ... quantum-resistant algorithms, he noted. Of course, by the same token, Google and others are putting considerable effort into developing quantum computing.

Quantum computing is neither the greatest threat nor the most near-term threat to encryption. That is represented by the surveillance state itself and its ongoing effort to legislatively and otherwise create backdoors in communications systems.

In a recent column, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden called attention to efforts made by the United States, the U.K., and Australia to do away with end-to-end encryption, or E2EE. Increasingly used, Snowden noted, by the likes of Facebook, Google, and Apple, E2EE works with keys held on the specific devices at the end-points of a communication such as smart phones. In short, Snowden points out, E2EE enables companies ... to protect their users from their scrutiny: by ensuring they no longer hold the keys to our most private conversations, these corporations become less of an all-seeing eye than a blindfolded courier.

Note that this is in keeping with the spirit of the Fourth Amendment that asserts that the government shall not pry into the personal papers of citizens without a search warrant. Without encryption, bulk data collection means that government snoops (and corporate ones, too) can review private-citizen communications at their leisure. This, they frequently take pains to assure us, is because they need to protect us from bad actors and criminals such as terrorists, organized crime, drug dealers, and money launderers, along with assorted other nebulous threats.

Snowden, however, thinks the motivation to undermine encryption protocols is motivated by other, darker considerations:

The true explanation for why the US, UK and Australian governments want to do away with end-to-end encryption is less about public safety than it is about power: E2EE gives control to individuals and the devices they use to send, receive and encrypt communications, not to the companies and carriers that route them. This, then, would require government surveillance to become more targeted and methodical, rather than indiscriminate and universal.

Interestingly, while the surveillance state wants to undermine privacy protections for individuals, in the rapidly forthcoming 5G world, it remains concerned about its own privacy and security from other nation states, principally China.

This is because China is neck and neck with the West, and arguably even ahead of the West, in developing and deploying 5G infrastructure, both at home in China and in much of the rest of the world.

The chief corporate lever of this advantage is Chinese electronics giant Huawei. Concerns about the company being a non-official part of the Chinese communist government start with company founder Ren Zhengfei, who served nine years in the Peoples Liberation Army starting in 1974. The company says this is no big deal. His military service, they say, is just like many other business leaders in the US and elsewhere who also served in national military organizations.

But the situation with Huawei is murkier than just the relationship, whatever it might be, of Ren Zhengfei with Beijing. There is also the rather mysterious situation with the companys ownership. In a report dated April 17, 2019, Professors Christopher Balding of Fulbright University Vietnam and David Weaver of George Washington University Law School point out that Huawei is 100% owned by a holding company, which is in turn approximately 1% owned by Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei and 99% owned by an entity called a trade union committee for the holding company.

While Huawei claims that it is an employee-owned company, Balding and Weaver find that doubtful. Given the public nature of trade unions in China, if the ownership stake of the trade union committee is genuine, they write, and if the trade union and its committee function as trade unions generally function in China, then Huawei may be deemed effectively state-owned.

If thats true, then Huawei can be expected to conduct operations in conjunction with Beijings geo-strategic aims. And since Huawei is one of the top developers and manufacturers of 5G equipment, that means the company could, in fact, build in the backdoors that would allow the communist government of China to spy on anyone and any nation that allows Huawei equipment to form part of the 5G system.

Even in our era of extreme political polarization, there seems to be some bipartisan agreement about the threat potentially posed by Huawei.

Republican Senator Marco Rubio (Fla.), for one, is convinced that Huawei is a significant threat via the potential for it to conduct espionage through its 5G technology. Huawei is a Chinese state-directed telecom company with a singular goal: undermine foreign competition by stealing trade secrets and intellectual property, and through artificially low prices backed by the Chinese government, he told tech news website The Verge. The US must be vigilant in preventing Chinese state-directed telecoms companies ... from undermining and endangering Americas 5G networks, he continued. Future, cutting edge industries like driverless vehicles and the Internet of Things will depend on this critical technology, and an action that threatens our 21st century industries from developing and deploying 5G undoubtedly undermines both our national and economic security.

Across the aisle, Democrat Senator Mark Warner (Va.) indicated to The Verge that he also thought Huawei a security threat. There is ample evidence to suggest that no major Chinese company is independent of the Chinese government and Communist Party and Huawei, which Chinas government and military tout as a national champion, is no exception, Warner said. Allowing Huaweis inclusion in our 5G infrastructure could seriously jeopardize our national security and put critical supply chains at risk.

In a report published on June 12, 2019, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) also pointed to the national security risk presented by all Chinese telecom firms, including Huawei.

The CRS report pointed out that experts have noted that vulnerabilities in Chinese 5G equipment could be intentionally introduced for malicious purposes. According to the report, Chinas National Intelligence Law, enacted in June 2017, declares that any organization and citizen shall, in accordance with the law, support, provide assistance, and cooperate in national intelligence work, and guard the secrecy of any national intelligence work that they are aware of. Some analysts interpret this law as requiring Chinese telecommunications companies to cooperate with intelligence services to include being compelled to install backdoors or provide private data to the government.

Many Opportunities, Many Challenges

It is inevitable that as technology becomes more powerful, more advanced, and more widely dispersed, it will have ever-greater potential benefits and ever-greater potential for disaster. In this, 5G mobile communications technology is in keeping with other technical advances made beginning at the start of the 20th century. Chemistry gave us the ability to make fertilizer out of thin air, allowing for the rapid growth of population without starvation (except for those starvations that were engineered by socialist governments), but it also introduced new dangers. Nuclear power provided vast amounts of energy both for economic gain and military destruction. The development of computers has allowed the rapid expansion of many industries and spawned entirely new ones that drive the economy, while also enabling increasingly disturbing social trends and the surveillance state. 5G will be no different. It offers to accelerate innovation, speed production, and allow faster and more sophisticated communications while, simultaneously, it supercharges all the bad aspects of the electronics and telecommunications innovations that it builds on.

Photo credit: AP Images

This article originally appeared in the December 9, 2019 print edition of The New American. The New American publishes a print magazine twice a month, covering issues such as politics, money, foreign policy, environment, culture, and technology. To subscribe, click here.

The rest is here:
Security and Surveillance in a 5G World - The New American

At the heart of Daily Mavericks newsroom, a State Security Agency fly on the wall might be surprised to hear the following statement:

I dont care who taps my phone, I dont have anything on there.

That is not to say that Daily Maverick has a blas approach to sensitive information, quite the opposite. The journalists who worked on the Gupta Leaks were all given air-gapped machines that had never touched the internet, as well as strict instructions to immediately toss said machines out the window if SSA agents came knocking.

While the organisation itself is committed to protecting information by any means necessary, as journalists we can also be a pessimistic bunch. We know with relative certainty that the NSA is still monitoring Americans, that the GCHQ is watching over the British, and that Facebook and Google are keeping tabs on everyone.

And so, I dont have anything on there is more of an understanding that we, as everyday citizens of the world wide web, do not have the capacity to prevent governments and corporations from mining our data, than a flippant lack of regard for the privacy of our sources as journalists. It is an acknowledgement that to keep anything valuable on ones phone is to give everyone access to it.

In his biography, Permanent Record, both loved and hated NSA mass surveillance whistle-blower Edward Snowden explains exactly why the fear of ones information being collected is completely rational.

Snowden reveals the workings behind his decision to equip Americans, and the rest of the world, with the knowledge that they were being watched. In so doing, he gave citizens the power to start challenging governments and corporations control of their data.

Snowden details how he transitioned from growing up in a military household and joining the NSA as a consultant, to blowing the whistle on one of the USs biggest secrets.

Growing up in a military household, Snowden describes his familys first computer as his second sibling and his first love. He set back his family clocks so he could spend more time online, and gamed the school system by figuring out he could pass a class without handing in any homework.

Living in the shadow of NSA headquarters in Maryland, Snowden felt the shock of September 11 2001 intimately. His response was to join the army, but he was invalided out of service following a bad fall. He then became a consultant for the NSA, being granted top-level clearance.

As Snowden describes it, The geek inherited the world.

Through Permanent Record we see he had hoped to serve his country, but found himself working for it instead. This, he says, was not a trivial distinction.

In the preface to his 340-page biography, Snowden aptly explains his experience after being granted unlimited access to the USs secret service.

Deep in a tunnel under a pineapple field a subterranean Pearl Harbor-era former airplane factory I sat at a terminal from which I had practically unlimited access to the communications of nearly every man, woman and child on earth whod ever dialed a phone or touched a computer. Among those were about 320 million of my fellow American citizens, who in the regular conduct of their everyday lives were surveilled in a gross contravention of not just the Constitution of the United States, but the basic values of any free society.

Permanent Record appears to be Snowdens attempt to absolve himself not only of his involvement in the agencies that created the USs mass surveillance economy, but also for his revelation of state secrets to the public.

Immediately after the release of the biography, the Justice Department sued Snowden for violating a non-disclosure agreement he signed with both the CIA and NSA. Snowden is still in exile in Moscow, Russia. Should he return to the US he will face two counts of violating the Espionage Act, as well as stealing government property.

Following 9/11, the US intelligence services jumped to comply with the order of never again. Snowden revealed to the world what never again truly meant for the US public. Whether he should be prosecuted for what he did is up to the reader, although if Donald Trump would have his way Snowden would be executed.

But did his revelation change anything? In 2016/17 the European Union implemented its General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), giving citizens more power over their data, while the Investigatory Powers Act in the UK grants a commissioner the power of oversight of the British intelligence agencies.

Our data is still not safe, but we are more aware of the fact that somewhere, in some deep dark recess filled with government hard drives, there is likely to be a video of you using your phone camera to pick food out of your teeth. DM

Please note you must be a Maverick Insider to comment. Sign up here or if you are already an Insider.

Go here to see the original:
Permanent Record: Snowden reveals why he blew the whistle on Big Brother - Daily Maverick

Bonjour! Today we did a very comprehensive analysis of Edward Snowdens Twitter activity. Lets jump right into it. The main metrics are as follows as of 2019-12-10, Edward Snowden (@Snowden) has 4186110 Twitter followers, is following 1 people, has tweeted 4547 times, has liked 444 tweets, has uploaded 373 photos and videos and has been on Twitter since December 2014.

Going from the top of the page to the bottom, their latest tweet, at the time of writing, has 11 replies, 131 retweets and 375 likes, their second latest tweet has 100 replies, 2,233 reweets and 5,052 likes, their third latest tweet has 19 replies, 471 retweets and 1,570 likes, their fourth latest tweet has 2 replies, 206 retweets and 417 likes and their fifth latest tweet has 61 replies, 565 retweets and 1,198 likes. That gives you an idea of how much activity they usually get.

MOST POPULAR:

Going through Edward Snowdens last couple pages of tweets (including retweets), the one we consider the most popular, having let to a very nice 214 direct replies at the time of writing, is this:

That happens to to have caused quite a ruckus, having also had 1288 retweets and 3329 likes.

LEAST POPULAR:

Now what about Edward Snowdens least popular tweet as of late (including stuff they retweeted)? We have concluded that its this one:

That only had 2 direct replies, 206 retweets and 417 likes.

THE VERDICT:

We did a lot of of research into Edward Snowdens Twitter activity, looking through what people keep saying in response to them, their likes/retweet numbers compared to what they were before, the amount of positive/negative responses and so on. We wont bore you with the details, so our verdict is this: we believe the online sentiment for Edward Snowden on Twitter right now is all good.

Thats it for now. Thanks for reading, and leave a comment if you disagree or agree with me. However, we wont publish anything overly rude.

Read more:
Edward Snowden & Twitter What On Earth? (2019-12-10) - Global Real News

Today, theguardian.org has announced new appointments to its board. Founding Board Member Asha Curran, CEO of Giving Tuesday, has been appointed as board chair.

Other new board appointments include Vivian Schiller, media and technology lead at the Aspen Institute, who has held multiple high-profile media roles including head of news at Twitter, general manager of NYTimes.com and President and CEO of National Public Radio.; Lois Quam, President and CEO of Pathfinder International, a global NGO that champions sexual and reproductive health and rights; and Alice Rhee, Managing Director of Strategic Partnerships and Growth at American Journalism Project, the first venture philanthropy organization focused on local civic news in the U.S.

With these new appointments, theguardian.org further cements its commitment to innovate new models of support for journalism, and to expand generosity and contributions from philanthropic institutions and individuals alike. These appointments also bring fresh board expertise to vital topics like global development and womens health, and affirm commitment to strengthen local and regional news.

Publicly launched in August 2017 and led by Rachel White, theguardian.orgs aim is to advance and inform public discourse around the most pressing issues of our time through the support of independent journalism and journalistic projects at the Guardian. To date, theguardian.org has worked with 12 philanthropic partners to support 20 editorially independent projects most recently The Fight to Vote, a one-year reporting project about voting rights in America, and a global reporting project called The Age of Extinction that focuses on biodiversity and species extinction.

Asha Curran, said:

Its a privilege and honor to become board chair of theguardian.org. High quality, independent journalism has never been more important, nor the need to find new and creative ways to support it.

Vivian Schiller, said:

Im delighted to join the board of theguardian.org, an organization that is leading the news industry in innovating new models to support essential reporting as a pillar of our democracy.

-ends-

For more information please contact:

media.enquiries@theguardian.com

About Guardian News & Media

The Guardian US, with newsrooms in New York, Washington DC and Oakland, California, brings a global perspective to America on issues including inequality, race & immigration, the environment, the role of technology in our lives, national security, womens rights, the rise of the far right, gun control and more.

Guardian News & Media (GNM), publisher of theguardian.com, is one of the largest English-speaking newspaper websites in the world. Since launching its US and Australia digital editions in 2011 and 2013 respectively, traffic from outside of the UK now represents over two-thirds of The Guardians total digital audience.

First published in 1821, The Guardian is renowned for its award-winning investigation, The Counted, which exposed and documented lethal police force across America, its agenda-setting NSA surveillance revelations following disclosures by whistleblower Edward Snowden, its globally acclaimed investigation into phone hacking and most recently the Panama Papers and Paradise Papers investigations.

Read more:
Asha Curran, CEO of Giving Tuesday, appointed new board chair of theguardian.org; Vivian Schiller, Alice Rhee, and Lois Quam appointed to the board -...

Documentary filmmaker Alex Gibneys latest entry takes on the transition from the USSR to shock capitalism, the bargain basement selloff of the Soviet peoples hard-earned material infrastructure to insider cronies who in short time became billionaires, and the way those nouveaux riches became firmly entrenched in an authoritarian oligarchy led by Vladimir Putin.

One of those men, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, no better nor worse than the others, started asking impertinent questions; he was prosecuted on phony embezzlement and tax charges, sent to prison in Siberia for ten years, and is now, from his exile in London, one of Russias most prominent agitators for democratic governance.

The film title Citizen K inevitably recalls such other films about transparency in government, or the lack thereof, as Citizen Kane, a fictionalized life of newspaper titan William Randolph Hearst, and Citizenfour, a documentary about the exploits of the conscientious IT analyst Edward Snowden, still trapped in Russia for fear of severe punishment if and when he ever returns to the U.S.

The film takes us from the Boris Yeltsin years to the present, with Khodorkovsky himself serving as guide and interpreter of the tumultuous events of the past thirty years of cataclysm in Russia as the country jumped off a cliff into the void. Interspersed with interviews with the Great Man himself are numerous business partners, academics, activists and journalists, as well as historical footage illuminating the inflection points in this corrupt saga.

From his start in commercial banking, the brilliant and ruthless young upstart soon joined an elite group of oligarchs who came to control half of the Russian economy. Khodorkovsky got heavily into fossil fuel development, taking over Yukos, the oil empire that was a former state-owned enterprise.

Anyone who rose to such dizzying heights in those years was surely complicit in any number of serious lapses of discretion, not to say lethal crimes. If getting filthy rich was but a rollercoaster game to men like him, well, the sport could get deadly as uncooperative players soon found out. Khodorkovsky could legally return to Russia but he would be subject to a new trial on a murder charge.

For a period in the 1990s Russia became the murder capital of the capitalist world. The legal structure fell far behind the bitter and fast-moving realities on the ground as Wild West capitalism attracted a host of shady personalities.

Power, Khodorkovsky says, in an epigram that seems to sum up the whole socialist collapse as much as the present-day situation, is a question of how much people are willing to defend it.

The social compact, consolidated under Vladimir Putin, came to be defined as an agreement that the oligarchs not interfere with politics, in exchange for which they would be given free rein to do as they pleased without consequence. In one demonstration of his authority, when privately owned TV channels raised criticisms of the government at the time the submarine Kursk sank, an embarrassed Putin simply ordered a government takeover of the stations.

By such measures, Putin appealed to the mass public that had taken a serious hit with the fall of socialism, in lost jobs, security, housing, healthcare, etc., and saw in the autocrat a kind of new Stalin who would restore Russias rightful place in the world.

When Khodorkovsky started taking an interest in politics, Putin did not hesitate to make life difficult for him. Yukos was taken over and eventually became the re-nationalized Rosneft, which is today a leading player in the energy market. The former oil magnate served nine years at a prison camp near the Chinese border, and when the end of his sentence was coming near, he was put on trial again, now on charges of stealing oil. (Where did he put it? curious minds want to know.)

The show trial was patently staged in order to produce a new verdict that would keep Khodorkovsky in prison for 13 more years, But by now a new generation of sympathizers had arisen, fed up with a country not one of laws but of dictatorship. Protesters could begin to imagine a Russia without Putin.

By the time of the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, Putin had been pressured to ease up on the persecution of his enemies, and he set a sizable number of prisoners free, including Khodorkovsky, who heard about it on TV. In his case, the condition was that he go abroad, thus becoming an international symbol of the strength of civil society.

Citizen K is totally riveting from beginning to end, assuming a viewer has some interest in the subject. Its documentary filmmaking at its best, without judgment as to the causes of the Soviet collapse in the first place. One need not accept Mikhail Khodorkovsky as Russias savior to appreciate the strange course of his life that has led him to where he is today.

Yet even the institution of bourgeois democratic rights, which Russia has never enjoyed at any time in its history, would be a historic advance, and to that extent Khodorkovsky has to be considered as a leader of the forces for good. In the meantime, Vladimir Putin shows few signs of surrendering the reins of power. This story is still playing out and is nowhere near the end.

The trailer can be viewed here. Journalist Christine Amanpour interviews Alex Gibney and Mikhail Khodorkovsky here.

Read more from the original source:
'Citizen K': Mikhail Khodorkovsky and the birthing of the new Russia - People's World

Welcome! Today we did a very comprehensive analysis of Edward Snowdens Twitter activity. Lets dive in. These are the main things: as of 2019-12-08, Edward Snowden (@Snowden) has 4185310 Twitter followers, is following 1 people, has tweeted 4548 times, has liked 445 tweets, has uploaded 373 photos and videos and has been on Twitter since December 2014.

Going from the top of the page to the bottom, their latest tweet, at the time of writing, has 5 replies, 92 retweets and 251 likes, their second latest tweet has 64 replies, 1,754 reweets and 3,952 likes, their third latest tweet has 18 replies, 386 retweets and 1,315 likes, their fourth latest tweet has 2 replies, 190 retweets and 382 likes and their fifth latest tweet has 58 replies, 556 retweets and 1,180 likes. But thats enough numbers for now

MOST POPULAR:

Going through Edward Snowdens last couple pages of tweets (and retweets), the one we consider the most popular, having let to a very nice 215 direct replies at the time of writing, is this:

That seems to have caused quite a lot of discussion, having also had 1285 retweets and 3323 likes.

LEAST POPULAR:

And what about Edward Snowdens least popular tweet in the recent past (again, including retweets)? We believe its this one:

That only had 2 direct replies, 190 retweets and 382 likes.

THE VERDICT:

We did a ton of research into Edward Snowdens Twitter activity, looking through what people are saying in response to them, their likes/retweet numbers compared to the past, the amount of positive/negative responses and so on. We wont bore you with the details, so our verdict is this: we believe the online sentiment for Edward Snowden on Twitter right now is great.

Well leave it there for today. Thanks for coming, and drop a comment if you disagree with me. Dont be afraid to speak your mind.

View post:
Edward Snowden & Twitter The Verdict (2019-12-08) - Global Real News

The Right Livelihood Awards celebrated their 40th anniversary Wednesday at the historic Cirkus Arena in Stockholm, Sweden, where more than a thousand people gathered to celebrate this years four laureates:

Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg; Chinese womens rights lawyer Guo Jianmei, Brazilian indigenous leader Davi Kopenawa and the organization he co-founded, the Yanomami Hutukara Association; and Sahrawi human rights leader Aminatou Haidar, who has challenged the Moroccan occupation of Western Sahara for decades. The Right Livelihood Award is known as the Alternative Nobel Prize.

Over the past four decades, its been given to grassroots leaders and activists around the globe among them the world-famous NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

At Wednesdays gala, Amy Goodman interviewed Snowden in front of the award ceremonys live audience via video link from Moscow, where he has lived in exile since leaking a trove of secret documents revealing the U.S. governments had built an unprecedented mass surveillance system to spy on Americans and people around the world.

After sharing the documents with reporters in 2013, Snowden was charged in the U.S. for violating the Espionage Act and other laws.

As he attempted to flee from Hong Kong to Latin America, Snowden was stranded in Russia after the U.S. revoked his passport, and he has lived there ever since.

Edward Snowden won the Right Livelihood Award in 2014. He accepted the award from Moscow, Russia.

Amy Goodman CIA Democracy Now! Edward Snowden Espionage Act Free Speech TV NSA Right Livelihood Awards United States Whstleblower

View post:
Edward Snowden Says Why He Will Never Return to the United States - Free Speech TV

Americas torturers and their co-conspirators must be prosecuted 9 December 2019

I was in such an indescribable state of pain I could hear sounds coming from the brothers, not only one but more than one brother; one was moaning, another one vomiting and another one screaming: my back, my back!

He started banging my head against the wall with both his hands. The banging was so strong that I felt at some point my skull was in pieces Then he dragged me to another very tiny squared box. With the help of the guards he shoved me inside the box

Denbeaux, Mark et al., How America Tortures (2019), Appendix I: Abu Zubaydahs Notes

**

Last month, the Seton Hall University School of Laws Center for Policy and Research published a paper titled How America Tortures, which contains eight significant drawings by torture victim Abu Zubaydah.

The drawings by themselves are a powerful indictment of the entire political establishment in the United States, which has failed to hold anyone accountable for the crimes that are depicted.

The paper represents the work of a team led by Professor Mark Denbeaux, who is serving as an attorney for a number of Guantanamo Bay detainees, including Abu Zubaydah. The paper brings together material from numerous sources, including Central Intelligence Agency cables and other government documents, and Abu Zubaydahs own account of what occurred, to provide a chronology not only from the CIAs perspective, but also from the perspective of the tortured. The result is damning.

The CIAs torture techniques are cataloged in comprehensive detail in the report. They include cramped confinement in small boxes, in some cases adding insects to the dark box as another way to scare the detainee locked inside. The paper documents the use of female soldiers to sexually abuse and humiliate detainees, with female military personnel going shirtless during interrogations, giving forced lap dances, and rubbing red liquids on the detainees which they identified as menstrual blood.

One FBI agent described finding detainees chained hand and foot in a fetal position on the floor, with no chair, food, or water. Most times they had urinated or defacated [sic] on themselves, and had been left there for [eighteen, twenty-four] hours or more.

Loud rap music was played around the clock. The now-infamous practice of involuntary rectal feeding involved pumping pureed food into the victims rectum for no medical reason.

How have the perpetrators of these bestial crimes managed to avoid prosecution? It is not for lack of evidence.

Today is the fifth anniversary of the release of the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligences executive summary of its findings regarding the CIA torture program. This executive summary, which runs in the hundreds of pages, is itself merely an outline of the full 6,700-page report, including 38,000 footnotes, which has been suppressed.

The World Socialist Web Site wrote at the time of the release of the summary: From a legal standpoint, the war crimes and crimes against humanity that are documented in the report warrant the immediate arrest, indictment, and prosecution of every individual involved in the program, from the torturers themselves and their outside contractors all the way up to senior officials in the Bush and Obama administrations who presided over the program and subsequently attempted to cover it up.

The crimes perpetrated by the American military and intelligence agencies in the course of the so-called war on terror were heinous, premeditated, and involved extreme depravity. These crimes were further aggravated by protracted efforts to cover them up, destroy evidence and obstruct investigations.

The crimes cannot be written off as the overzealous conduct of low-level rogue agents. On the contrary, they were organized in cold blood and at the highest levels. The Seton Hall Law School paper states as a matter of fact that top officials in the West Wing of the White House and the Office of Legal Counsel of the Department of Justice orchestrated and poorly oversaw a horrific torture program that was responsible for the detention and interrogation of countless detainees.

A New York Times editorial dated December 5, titled Dont Look Away, is an attempt at damage control following the release of the Abu Zubaydah illustrations. While denouncing torture as barbaric and illegal, the article seeks to blame the torture program on the Republicans, denouncing President Trump and those who think like him.

The Times concludes: The United States has by far the greatest security establishment on earth, with the greatest reach. When the United States commits or abets war crimes, it erodes the honor, effectiveness, and value of that force.

The Times does not attempt to explain how it came to pass that nobody was ever prosecuted for conduct that it admits was barbaric and illegal and constituted war crimes.

In reality, the CIA torture program was entirely bipartisan. Jay Rockefeller, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, as well as then-House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi were briefed on the program in 2002.

The Obama administration played a key role in legitimizing torture and shielding war criminals from prosecution. Under the slogan of looking forward not backward, the Democrats refused to prosecute anyone involved in the program or cover-up. The only CIA employee who was ever prosecuted by the Obama administration in connection with torture was analyst John Kiriakou, who was jailed for publicly acknowledging that the CIA was engaged in waterboarding.

Obama refused for years to release the Senate torture report and assisted the CIAs efforts to suppress it. In 2015, the Obama administration successfully sued to prevent the American Civil Liberties Union from obtaining it under the Freedom of Information Act.

What did the New York Times have to say about these barbaric and illegal practices at the time? On April 6, 2002, a Times headline gloated, A Master Terrorist is Nabbed. Describing the abduction of Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan, without charges or legal proceedings of any kind, the Times wrote, His seizure demonstrates that the painstaking international detective work of the current phase of the war on terror is paying off.

On June 12, 2002, in an article titled Traces of Terror, the Times continued its role as a CIA stenographer: After nearly 100 sessions with CIA and FBI interrogators at a heavily guarded, undisclosed location, the captured terrorist Abu Zubaydah has provided information that American officials say is central to the Bush administrations efforts to pre-empt a new wave of attacks against the United States.

This version of events was, as is now universally acknowledged, a pack of lies. Abu Zubaydah was not a high-level operative in Al Qaeda, and he may not have even been a member. He has never been charged with a crime, let alone tried and convicted. Yet to this day, he continues to rot in a cell in the Guantanamo Bay torture camp, with no prospect of being released.

Five years after the publication of the Senate report, where are the torturers and their co-conspirators now? Gina Haspel, who presided over a CIA torture compound in Thailand and was implicated in the destruction of tapes of Abu Zubaydahs torture in 2005, was promoted by Trump to become the new director of the agency.

The previous director, John Brennan, who was a high-level CIA official during the Bush administration and under Obama ordered agents to break into Senate staffers computers in an effort to search for incriminating information relating to torture, is now serving as a well-paid senior national security and intelligence analyst for NBC News and MSNBC. He makes regular appearances on news programs to agitate in favor of the Democrats impeachment drive.

James Mitchell, whose company, Mitchell Jessen and Associates, received a $81 million contract from the CIA to develop and implement the enhanced interrogation techniques that were used on Abu Zubaydah and others, remains at large. According to a Bloomberg News article in 2014, he is now retired and spends his free time kayaking, rafting and climbing.

And what has been the fate of those who have exposed official criminality? Julian Assange is imprisoned in Belmarsh Prison in London, where his life is endangered by conditions amounting to torture. Chelsea Manning was imprisoned and tortured, released, and then imprisoned again for refusing to testify against Assange before a grand jury. Edward Snowden was forced to flee the country and seek refuge in Russia.

The torturers and their co-conspirators have not been prosecuted, not because of lack of evidence or insufficient legal grounds, but because the entire political establishment is implicated at the highest levels, including the Democrats, the Republicans, the military and intelligence agencies, the establishment media, and all of those who perpetrated the reactionary fraud of the war on terror.

The failure to prosecute the torturers has served to embolden the most fascistic layers in the state apparatus, opening the way for Trump to boast of his support for torture in broad daylight. Trump and his fascistic advisers, frightened by the growth of social opposition, believe that the Gestapo-style methods that have been implemented in the course of the war on terror are necessary to terrify and suppress opposition both abroad and internally. While Trump brags that he is in favor of implementing torture practices at Guantanamo Bay that are a hell of a lot worse, he tells police officers within the US: Dont be too nice.

The Democrats and their allies are concerned that public discussion of the crimes of the state would serve to fuel popular hostility towards the institutions the New York Times describes as the greatest security establishment on earth. It would cut across the Democrats ongoing efforts to ingratiate and align themselves with the CIA as part of the impeachment drive against Trump. Moreover, the revelations of CIA torture underscore the hypocrisy of their efforts to justify American imperialist aggression and subversion all over the world in the name of human rights.

For these reasons, the demand to bring the torturers to justice must be taken up by the international working class. Every individual who participated in the CIA torture program or the cover-up in any capacity, including those who failed to intervene when they had an opportunity to do so, should face arrest, indictment and prosecution.

The fight to end torture once and for all must be connected to the mounting struggles of the international working class to defend and expand its democratic and social rights and halt the drive of the ruling class toward dictatorship. The entire existing social order is implicated in torture and must be overthrown.

Tom Carter

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.

Read more from the original source:
America's torturers and their co-conspirators must be prosecuted - World Socialist Web Site

Joe Rogan has released 434 podcasts in the two short years since he last performed in Phoenix.

In an apt illustration of the shows flexibility, this sample starts with Krystyna Hutchinson and Corinne Fisher, the hosts of the Guys We Fucked podcast and ends with presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard. The conversations with Andrew Yang and Elon Musk provided an exponential bump to the formers donor pool and sank Tesla stock by nine percent overnight. This period also saw his already massive audience expand.

It's not inconceivable that professors of the future will study The Joe Rogan Experience and will struggle to explain to their undergrads how a man who had built a public profile by forcing people to drink horse semen on Fear Factor was influencing presidential primaries and major companys stock prices. The podcast offers a rare insight into the everyday demeanor of the worlds most important people and an unhurried platform for them to dive into the topics that concern them.

You (probably) dont have time for 1,000 hours of podcast listening, so heres a selection of the seven best episodes of the past two years in time for Rogan's appearance at Comerica Theatre on Friday, December 6, and Saturday, December 7.

This journalist is a fascinating caricature of modern health fads. Each of his descriptions of the experimental supplements and treatments he tries is packed with so much jargon, they seem feasible. In a moment of self-awareness, he tells Rogan, I do a lot of a guinea pig stuff, and Im not dead yet.

Highlight:At 17:53, when prompted by a description of what he happened to do that day, Greenfield describes the elliptical machine of the future having an outrageous array of benefits.

Whether you think of Alex Jones as a virtuosic performance artist or a belligerent conspiracy theorist, this is him at his Alex Jones-iest. Delivered over four hours of inhuman intensity, he spins an intricate web of alternative world history, touching on (among many other things) the sixth dimension, Planned Parenthoods baby part harvesting operation, and the connection between Nazis and aliens.

Highlight: At 33:54, enjoy what happens after Jones says, The worlds not imitating Blade Runner. Blade Runner is a preparation for whats coming.

A lot of people smoke joints and talk about robots, the AI-induced apocalypse, and flamethrowers but most of them dont do it with Elon Musk.

Highlight: At2:10:27, Musk succumbs to Rogans peer pressuring and smokes weed in front of the world.

For whistleblower Edward Snowden, Rogan made an exception to his policy of having his guests physically in the studio. Rogan is mostly silent for this nearly three-hour conversation.

Highlight: A mesmerizing, 40-minute answer to the question: When did you realize the government went too far?

A healthy portion of episodes are unsophisticated comic relief. Comedian Theo Von fits the bill perfectly.

Highlight: At 50:30, Von discusses his relationship with pornography with a hilarious diversion through an enlightening period in his life where he lived with rich people. Eventually, Von flatters and aptly summarizes Rogans message by saying, I feel like you lead a lot of men in their aspirations to control their beings and be on top of themselves.

Rogan and Neil deGrasse Tyson are a match made in the stars. The podcast host isn't afraid to ask smart people dumb questions. The astrophysicist is an unpretentiously explains otherworldly concepts.

Highlight: At the top of the show, deGrasse Tyson beautifully articulates his love for Vincent van Goghs Starry Night.

Rogan is an outspoken critic of Twitters habit of blocking people, so when he was a little easy on the website's CEO Jack Dorsey a while back, fans freaked out. In response, he arranged for Round Two with an interesting panel of Dorsey, journalist Tim Pool, and lawyer Vijaya Gadde.

Highlight: In this clip, Cook and Gadde address ifTwitter has a bias against conservatives in who and what they ban.

Joe Rogan is scheduled to perform at Comerica Theatre on Friday, December 6, and Saturday, December 7. Tickets are $35 to $95 via Ticketmaster.

See more here:
The Best of the Last Two Years of The Joe Rogan Experience - Phoenix New Times