The FBI, taking a page from our friends at the NSA, has expanded its domestic snooping to include monitoring and recording huge amounts of Internet traffic without specific warrants. The technique, known as "full pipe recording," is an expansion of a program called Carnivore that was discontinued as a result of its constitutionally questionable techniques.
Apparently, rather than abandoning the illegal approach embodied in the old program, the FBI has chosen a new more innocuous name (DCS1000) and expanded its capture of non-criminal Internet traffic. The creation of its new database - and the network analysis and data mining it allows - may enable "lawmen" to go after people who discuss drug use, for instance, after they get done investigating the ostensible target of the original wiretap.
I have also recently learned that the FBI submitted as evidence recordings made from the cellular phones of mobsters while the phones were NOT IN USE. Combined with the GPS and triangulation capabilities of the cell network, this means that law enforcement can precisely determine your location and then listen to any conversations within a 15 foot radius of the cell phone sitting in your pocket. There is no way to tell if somebody is listening and no way to stop it short of removing the batteries. Experts believe that this technique can be employed even when the phone is turned off, and the government may even have access to images in view of the phone's camera lens.
Your own personal telescreen!
Tuesday
The Long History of Allied Torture
To follow up on the "Letter from Gitmo," I just thought I'd take a moment to point out some resources for people interested in the illustrious history of Allied torture. Leaving aside the alleged war crimes of our troops in the field, there are many examples of systematic and deliberate torture to obtain intelligence or simply to intimidate would be adversaries.
In the aftermath of World War II, the British operated their own concentration camps for German POWs and later for Communists captured on the continent or trying to enter Britain. Torture methods included starvation, beatings, exposure to extreme cold, sleep deprivation, and the use of torture implements captured from old German prisons.
In 1946, the US established a school in Panama dedicated to training military and secret police forces in Latin America. Among its graduates, you will find an infamous list of strong men and dictators who operated death squads, detention centers, and torture chambers across the continent. They were known for "disappearing," torturing, dismembering and murdering labor organizers, university professors and students, opposition members, indigenous leaders, and suspected communists. Methods include the usual beatings, burning, and broken bones, but the school's specialty seems to be the use of powerful electric shocks, especially to the genitals. The School of the Americas continues to operate in Fort Benning Georgia to this day, although the name has been changed.
In 2006, major news outlets reported on the existence of secret CIA torture prisons in Europe and the Middle East, and the practice of exporting detainees to third countries for some softening up before interrogation by Americans is well documented. The CIA and other American intelligence agencies have long practiced "coercive interrogation," but the large scale operations we see today are probably new. New less messy torture methods include "simulated drowning," sensory deprivation, exposure to extreme heat and cold, use of loud music, sleep deprivation, dogs, beatings, verbal attacks and sexual humiliation, a tactic found to be especially effective in the Muslim world.
I could go on about specific cases I've unearthed, but I can't decide if I want to drink whiskey or throw up first. Maybe I'll just drink whiskey till I throw up.
In the aftermath of World War II, the British operated their own concentration camps for German POWs and later for Communists captured on the continent or trying to enter Britain. Torture methods included starvation, beatings, exposure to extreme cold, sleep deprivation, and the use of torture implements captured from old German prisons.
In 1946, the US established a school in Panama dedicated to training military and secret police forces in Latin America. Among its graduates, you will find an infamous list of strong men and dictators who operated death squads, detention centers, and torture chambers across the continent. They were known for "disappearing," torturing, dismembering and murdering labor organizers, university professors and students, opposition members, indigenous leaders, and suspected communists. Methods include the usual beatings, burning, and broken bones, but the school's specialty seems to be the use of powerful electric shocks, especially to the genitals. The School of the Americas continues to operate in Fort Benning Georgia to this day, although the name has been changed.
In 2006, major news outlets reported on the existence of secret CIA torture prisons in Europe and the Middle East, and the practice of exporting detainees to third countries for some softening up before interrogation by Americans is well documented. The CIA and other American intelligence agencies have long practiced "coercive interrogation," but the large scale operations we see today are probably new. New less messy torture methods include "simulated drowning," sensory deprivation, exposure to extreme heat and cold, use of loud music, sleep deprivation, dogs, beatings, verbal attacks and sexual humiliation, a tactic found to be especially effective in the Muslim world.
I could go on about specific cases I've unearthed, but I can't decide if I want to drink whiskey or throw up first. Maybe I'll just drink whiskey till I throw up.
Poverty and Politics
Persistent poverty is a political problem.
It is the result of decades of irresponsible regulation, spending, and legislation which have imposed unacceptable costs on the majority of developing societies while conferring enormous rents on the people who have access to power.
Everywhere we go in the developing world, we see convoluted legal systems, arbitrary and manifestly unjust allocations of rights, and a middle class that is totally dependent on the state for its high living standards. This dependency and the enormous gap between the haves and the have nots creates pervasive fear of change and a systemic inability to reform, even in the face of hard economic facts.
The result is that most of the world’s poor “opt out” of the decaying formal legal structure, falling back on alternate forms of self-governance that can protect their assets and their lives. The central government’s power to enact policy often extends little beyond the center of the capital city, although as gate keeper to the outside world and the owner of many guns, it can play an incredibly disruptive role in the lives of its citizens.
The governments of the world are increasingly at odds with the independent structures that have sprung up around them. Violent clashes with police aside, proof of this adversarial relationship comes from the fact that the people who occupy these new spaces go by all sorts of dirty names in the press. The proletariat, informals, tax evaders, drug users, punks, anarchists, hustlers, squatters, criminals, illegal immigrants, smugglers, narco-terrorists, and insurgents are all part of the counterstate array.
The complexity, diversity, and extent of these alternative societies should not be underestimated. Even in countries with apparently liberal political systems, these extralegal forces often represent the majority, not some fringe of radicals and nonconformists. They represent the three quarters of the world that remains “unglobalized” in the sense that their political, social, and economic structures are unrecognized and even deliberately excluded by the global elite.
It should be noted that their attempts at nonparticipation in the formal economies of their countries does not necessarily signify resistance to globalization. In fact, they often work to bypass state institutions that are themselves obstacles to integration and commerce. Most of these people just want what everyone in the developed world wants: to work, to learn, and to prosper, to exert some control over their lives, and to provide more for their children than they were afforded.
With that said, the environment of inequality and exclusion can foster radical and violent ideologies that cut across national borders and attack the state system at its weakest points. It is important to remember that while the leaders may have a clear vision of their political objectives, the cannon fodder does not. The rank-and-file of the revolution is not likely to have read Marx.
As Claude Bowers noted in June 1945,
"The danger of communism comes from the misery of the masses, and where governments show no disposition to alleviate the economic condition, or even to hold forth hope of a higher standard of living. I venture to say that not one “communist” in ten knows what communism is. He understands it is something extremely opposite to the system under which he suffers and he joins the communists as a protest striking blindly and stupidly. He is convinced that nothing could be worse than his present state. Here again, as all through history, we encounter the stupidity of the over-privileged in refusing to concede anything to the man bellow."
The “rank and file” extralegals of the world are not the enemies of civilization, they are the enemies of their particular oppressors. It would be a shame if they destroyed the one to get at the other. We have already seen the consequences of ignoring their plight.
The crisis of state legitimacy has reached proportions that many in the developed world can scarcely imagine. We wring our hands about the handful of “failed” states, places where government has utterly collapsed or where war has reshuffled communities so many times that people are in a permanent state of flight. We are right to be concerned with these places, but the much larger problem is that all but a handful of states in the world are failed or failing if we apply any sort of objective standards to their performance.
The essence of democracy is not in written constitutions or ballot boxes, and it is not unique to western culture. It has to do with the idea that the just government must conform to the people, not the other way around.
The rise of economic informality shows how most people have voted with their feet against the regimes that profess to "represent" them.
It is the result of decades of irresponsible regulation, spending, and legislation which have imposed unacceptable costs on the majority of developing societies while conferring enormous rents on the people who have access to power.
Everywhere we go in the developing world, we see convoluted legal systems, arbitrary and manifestly unjust allocations of rights, and a middle class that is totally dependent on the state for its high living standards. This dependency and the enormous gap between the haves and the have nots creates pervasive fear of change and a systemic inability to reform, even in the face of hard economic facts.
The result is that most of the world’s poor “opt out” of the decaying formal legal structure, falling back on alternate forms of self-governance that can protect their assets and their lives. The central government’s power to enact policy often extends little beyond the center of the capital city, although as gate keeper to the outside world and the owner of many guns, it can play an incredibly disruptive role in the lives of its citizens.
The governments of the world are increasingly at odds with the independent structures that have sprung up around them. Violent clashes with police aside, proof of this adversarial relationship comes from the fact that the people who occupy these new spaces go by all sorts of dirty names in the press. The proletariat, informals, tax evaders, drug users, punks, anarchists, hustlers, squatters, criminals, illegal immigrants, smugglers, narco-terrorists, and insurgents are all part of the counterstate array.
The complexity, diversity, and extent of these alternative societies should not be underestimated. Even in countries with apparently liberal political systems, these extralegal forces often represent the majority, not some fringe of radicals and nonconformists. They represent the three quarters of the world that remains “unglobalized” in the sense that their political, social, and economic structures are unrecognized and even deliberately excluded by the global elite.
It should be noted that their attempts at nonparticipation in the formal economies of their countries does not necessarily signify resistance to globalization. In fact, they often work to bypass state institutions that are themselves obstacles to integration and commerce. Most of these people just want what everyone in the developed world wants: to work, to learn, and to prosper, to exert some control over their lives, and to provide more for their children than they were afforded.
With that said, the environment of inequality and exclusion can foster radical and violent ideologies that cut across national borders and attack the state system at its weakest points. It is important to remember that while the leaders may have a clear vision of their political objectives, the cannon fodder does not. The rank-and-file of the revolution is not likely to have read Marx.
As Claude Bowers noted in June 1945,
"The danger of communism comes from the misery of the masses, and where governments show no disposition to alleviate the economic condition, or even to hold forth hope of a higher standard of living. I venture to say that not one “communist” in ten knows what communism is. He understands it is something extremely opposite to the system under which he suffers and he joins the communists as a protest striking blindly and stupidly. He is convinced that nothing could be worse than his present state. Here again, as all through history, we encounter the stupidity of the over-privileged in refusing to concede anything to the man bellow."
The “rank and file” extralegals of the world are not the enemies of civilization, they are the enemies of their particular oppressors. It would be a shame if they destroyed the one to get at the other. We have already seen the consequences of ignoring their plight.
The crisis of state legitimacy has reached proportions that many in the developed world can scarcely imagine. We wring our hands about the handful of “failed” states, places where government has utterly collapsed or where war has reshuffled communities so many times that people are in a permanent state of flight. We are right to be concerned with these places, but the much larger problem is that all but a handful of states in the world are failed or failing if we apply any sort of objective standards to their performance.
The essence of democracy is not in written constitutions or ballot boxes, and it is not unique to western culture. It has to do with the idea that the just government must conform to the people, not the other way around.
The rise of economic informality shows how most people have voted with their feet against the regimes that profess to "represent" them.
Friday
Letter From Gitmo
The LA Times prints a letter by a current prisoner in Guantanamo Bay.
After you read this letter, you may also want to find this book, Arthur Koestler's "Darkness at Noon."
I'll let Jumah al-Dossari speak for himself.
Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba — I AM WRITING from the darkness of the U.S. detention camp at Guantanamo in the hope that I can make our voices heard by the world. My hand quivers as I hold the pen. In January 2002, I was picked up in Pakistan, blindfolded, shackled, drugged and loaded onto a plane flown to Cuba. When we got off the plane in Guantanamo, we did not know where we were. They took us to Camp X-Ray and locked us in cages with two buckets — one empty and one filled with water. We were to urinate in one and wash in the other. At Guantanamo, soldiers have assaulted me, placed me in solitary confinement, threatened to kill me, threatened to kill my daughter and told me I will stay in Cuba for the rest of my life. They have deprived me of sleep, forced me to listen to extremely loud music and shined intense lights in my face. They have placed me in cold rooms for hours without food, drink or the ability to go to the bathroom or wash for prayers. They have wrapped me in the Israeli flag and told me there is a holy war between the Cross and the Star of David on one hand and the Crescent on the other. They have beaten me unconscious. What I write here is not what my imagination fancies or my insanity dictates. These are verifiable facts witnessed by other detainees, representatives of the Red Cross, interrogators and translators.During the first few years at Guantanamo, I was interrogated many times. My interrogators told me that they wanted me to admit that I am from Al Qaeda and that I was involved in the terrorist attacks on the United States. I told them that I have no connection to what they described. I am not a member of Al Qaeda. I did not encourage anyone to go fight for Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden have done nothing but kill and denigrate a religion. I never fought, and I never carried a weapon. I like the United States, and I am not an enemy. I have lived in the United States, and I wanted to become a citizen. I know that the soldiers who did bad things to me represent themselves, not the United States. And I have to say that not all American soldiers stationed in Cuba tortured us or mistreated us. There were soldiers who treated us very humanely. Some even cried when they witnessed our dire conditions. Once, in Camp Delta, a soldier apologized to me and offered me hot chocolate and cookies. When I thanked him, he said, "I do not need you to thank me." I include this because I do not want readers to think that I fault all Americans.But, why, after five years, is there no conclusion to the situation at Guantanamo? For how long will fathers, mothers, wives, siblings and children cry for their imprisoned loved ones? For how long will my daughter have to ask about my return? The answers can only be found with the fair-minded people of America.I would rather die than stay here forever, and I have tried to commit suicide many times. The purpose of Guantanamo is to destroy people, and I have been destroyed. I am hopeless because our voices are not heard from the depths of the detention center. If I die, please remember that there was a human being named Jumah at Guantanamo whose beliefs, dignity and humanity were abused. Please remember that there are hundreds of detainees at Guantanamo suffering the same misfortune. They have not been charged with any crimes. They have not been accused of taking any action against the United States. Show the world the letters I gave you. Let the world read them. Let the world know the agony of the detainees in Cuba.
After you read this letter, you may also want to find this book, Arthur Koestler's "Darkness at Noon."
I'll let Jumah al-Dossari speak for himself.
Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba — I AM WRITING from the darkness of the U.S. detention camp at Guantanamo in the hope that I can make our voices heard by the world. My hand quivers as I hold the pen. In January 2002, I was picked up in Pakistan, blindfolded, shackled, drugged and loaded onto a plane flown to Cuba. When we got off the plane in Guantanamo, we did not know where we were. They took us to Camp X-Ray and locked us in cages with two buckets — one empty and one filled with water. We were to urinate in one and wash in the other. At Guantanamo, soldiers have assaulted me, placed me in solitary confinement, threatened to kill me, threatened to kill my daughter and told me I will stay in Cuba for the rest of my life. They have deprived me of sleep, forced me to listen to extremely loud music and shined intense lights in my face. They have placed me in cold rooms for hours without food, drink or the ability to go to the bathroom or wash for prayers. They have wrapped me in the Israeli flag and told me there is a holy war between the Cross and the Star of David on one hand and the Crescent on the other. They have beaten me unconscious. What I write here is not what my imagination fancies or my insanity dictates. These are verifiable facts witnessed by other detainees, representatives of the Red Cross, interrogators and translators.During the first few years at Guantanamo, I was interrogated many times. My interrogators told me that they wanted me to admit that I am from Al Qaeda and that I was involved in the terrorist attacks on the United States. I told them that I have no connection to what they described. I am not a member of Al Qaeda. I did not encourage anyone to go fight for Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden have done nothing but kill and denigrate a religion. I never fought, and I never carried a weapon. I like the United States, and I am not an enemy. I have lived in the United States, and I wanted to become a citizen. I know that the soldiers who did bad things to me represent themselves, not the United States. And I have to say that not all American soldiers stationed in Cuba tortured us or mistreated us. There were soldiers who treated us very humanely. Some even cried when they witnessed our dire conditions. Once, in Camp Delta, a soldier apologized to me and offered me hot chocolate and cookies. When I thanked him, he said, "I do not need you to thank me." I include this because I do not want readers to think that I fault all Americans.But, why, after five years, is there no conclusion to the situation at Guantanamo? For how long will fathers, mothers, wives, siblings and children cry for their imprisoned loved ones? For how long will my daughter have to ask about my return? The answers can only be found with the fair-minded people of America.I would rather die than stay here forever, and I have tried to commit suicide many times. The purpose of Guantanamo is to destroy people, and I have been destroyed. I am hopeless because our voices are not heard from the depths of the detention center. If I die, please remember that there was a human being named Jumah at Guantanamo whose beliefs, dignity and humanity were abused. Please remember that there are hundreds of detainees at Guantanamo suffering the same misfortune. They have not been charged with any crimes. They have not been accused of taking any action against the United States. Show the world the letters I gave you. Let the world read them. Let the world know the agony of the detainees in Cuba.
Sunday
You don't have to pay income taxes!
"America: Freedom to Fascism."
If you can ignore the crummy filming and apparent lunacy of the producers, this documentary has some interesting information. The interviews when Rasso is not himself speaking are quite good. Just watch it with an eye for the moments when the gears slip and he launches into his own little dream world. Even if it weren't about a topic close to my heart, his delightfully paranoid conclusions would be worth a view.
Also, to my LA associates, you will notice that much of the documentary is shot at a corner in Venice Beach that has perhaps the highest concentration of crackpots and conspiracy theorists in the in lower 48 states. Way to build credibility.
If you can ignore the crummy filming and apparent lunacy of the producers, this documentary has some interesting information. The interviews when Rasso is not himself speaking are quite good. Just watch it with an eye for the moments when the gears slip and he launches into his own little dream world. Even if it weren't about a topic close to my heart, his delightfully paranoid conclusions would be worth a view.
Also, to my LA associates, you will notice that much of the documentary is shot at a corner in Venice Beach that has perhaps the highest concentration of crackpots and conspiracy theorists in the in lower 48 states. Way to build credibility.
Thursday
100 Hour Orgy
As the Democrats take control of Congress, the Washington scandal clock is reset by the ceremonial placing of hands on books and the mouthing of oaths.
This majority swept in on a reform platform, promising to ram new laws through to correct the excesses of their Republican colleagues. Unfortunately for us, this “hundred hour orgy” is nothing but a publicity stunt and a thinly veiled loyalty test for incoming members. The issues at stake are decidedly trivial, and are unlikely to change the way things are done in Washington.
The leadership wants to know who will play ball, who will bow to the party and vote the way they want - regardless of the details of a given bill - when it is required of them. Am I the only one to notice that Pelosi and the Democrats are taking pages from the notorious playbook of Tom “The Hammer” Delay?
Boxing out the opposition, demanding lock-step party discipline, and passing legislation with no time for consideration or debate? As the oaths of office fade in their minds and Congress settles back into "business as usual," the precedent is set for the kind of one-sided Democratic circle jerk that can only produce a new and deeper round of corruption, graft, and incompetence.
The clock is ticking.
This majority swept in on a reform platform, promising to ram new laws through to correct the excesses of their Republican colleagues. Unfortunately for us, this “hundred hour orgy” is nothing but a publicity stunt and a thinly veiled loyalty test for incoming members. The issues at stake are decidedly trivial, and are unlikely to change the way things are done in Washington.
The leadership wants to know who will play ball, who will bow to the party and vote the way they want - regardless of the details of a given bill - when it is required of them. Am I the only one to notice that Pelosi and the Democrats are taking pages from the notorious playbook of Tom “The Hammer” Delay?
Boxing out the opposition, demanding lock-step party discipline, and passing legislation with no time for consideration or debate? As the oaths of office fade in their minds and Congress settles back into "business as usual," the precedent is set for the kind of one-sided Democratic circle jerk that can only produce a new and deeper round of corruption, graft, and incompetence.
The clock is ticking.
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