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Photo by: joanneleon. July, 2013.
Photo by: joanneleon. July, 2013.
Photo by: joanneleon. July, 2013.
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Judge Lind will announce her verdicts at 1pm today at Fort Meade. My understanding is that this is not anywhere near the end of it though, and that the sentencing will take a number of weeks, witnesses will be called and that it will be some of the most substantial parts of the whole proceedings. Also, in case you missed it, on Sunday, the judge actually altered some of the charges at the request of the prosecution and in favor of the prosecution. I've never heard of anything like that. To me it makes it look even more like a kangaroo court. The trial was over and the judge altered one of the charges? In any case, there will be a lot of media there today. The judge took only two days to consider the massive amount of evidence, testimony, etc. to reach her decisions. There is a lot on the line for Manning, obviously, but also for journalism and freedom of the press, given that they claim posting information on the internet, no matter whether it's Wikileaks or the NY Times, can amount to "aiding the enemy".
Bradley Manning judge to release verdict on Tuesday in WikiLeaks trial
Army private faces sentence of life in military custody with no chance of parole if convicted on 'aiding the enemy' charge
The verdict will be issued at 1pm ET by Lind sitting alone in the courtroom at Fort Meade, Maryland, in the absence of a jury – an arrangement made at Manning's own request. The soldier's decision to put his faith in a military judge, rather than in a panel of his peers – the military equivalent of a jury – was a big legal gamble whose merits will become clear when the verdict comes in.
In another huge legal roll of the dice, Manning decided to plead guilty to a lesser version of 10 of the 21 counts of which he is accused, carrying a possible maximum sentence of 20 years in military jail. He did so with nothing in return in the form of a plea bargain, a highly unusual step in criminal proceedings.
The outcome of the trial has huge potential ramifications, not just for Manning personally but for the wider health of investigative journalism in the United States. Leading media experts have warned that a guilty verdict on the most serious charges could send a devastating chill across news outlets by frightening away potential official leakers.
European Parliamentarians call on President Obama to free Bradley Manning
Open Letter from Members of the European Parliament
to President Barack Obama and US Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel
As Members of the European Parliament, who were elected to represent our constituents throughout Europe, we are writing to express our concerns about the ongoing persecution of Bradley Manning, the young U.S. soldier who released classified information revealing evidence of human rights abuses and apparent war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The U.S. Army has charged Private First Class Manning with 21 different crimes, including ‘Aiding the Enemy’; a capital charge. To convict a person who leaked information to the media of “Aiding the Enemy” would set a terrible precedent. Although we understand the US government is not seeking the death penalty for Bradley Manning, there would be nothing to stop this from happening in future cases. As it is, PFC Manning faces the possibility of life in prison without parole, recently rejected as “inhuman and degrading treatment” by the European Court of Human Rights.
On July 2nd , Army prosecutors closed their arguments in the case without having provided any real evidence that Bradley Manning aided the enemy, or that he intended to do so. In his defense against those charges to which he pleaded not guilty, PFC Manning was not permitted to bring any evidence of motivation. And in a statement calling on the court to allow a ‘public interest’ defense, Amnesty International said that this was ‘disturbing…as he has said he reasonably believed he was exposing human rights and humanitarian law violations. Moreover, the prosecution provided no evidence that PFC Manning caused harm to U.S. national security or to US and NATO troops.
The Grayson hearing will not be held on Wednesday morning as planned. It looks like President Obama stepped on it by calling a meeting between himself and the House Dems. Interestingly, on that same morning, Keith Alexander is scheduled to give a keynote speech at one of the hacker conventions this week in Las Vegas, the BlackHat convention. That could be a very uncomfortable situation for Gen. Alexander, giving a speech as perhaps new information is revealed about the NSA in Washington, or just after the hearing ends. The other convention which immediately follows it, DefCon, has officially asked the feds to stay home this year. So we don't know why Obama scheduled this meeting at 10:10am on Wednesday when the Grayson hearing had been scheduled for 9:30am, and Keith Alexander's keynote at 9am Pacific, but it is apparently very difficult to reschedule during the last few days before the August recess. We don't have any more information about it yet. It would be a great loss if this hearing was canceled or postponed until after the August recess, which is exactly what the Obama admin would like to happen, in my opinion.
This is an important story. Make note of this. There was a report and then a denial by NZ military officials, but the denial was a technicality. They denied that the war correspondent's correspondence was being monitored but that's not what they were doing. They were monitoring his metadata and creating a record of everyone who he called, and it fell under a special program where they categorized and tracked investigative journalists similarly to the way they track terrorists. This is a really important story. This is only one example Who else is being monitored like this? The DoJ (PDF) "Report on Review of News Media Policies" that emptywheel refers to is dated July 12, 2013.
Well, at Least DOJ Promised Not to Mine Journalists’ Metadata Going Forward
[...]
Moreover, this passage represents a revision of previous existing policy.
Which means data from members of the news media may not have been segregated in the past.
[...]
Last year, when this happened, Stephenson was on the Green-on-Blue beat, He published a story that a massacre in Pashtun lands had been retaliation for the killing of Taliban. He reported on another NATO massacre of civilians. He reported that a minister accused of torture and other abuses would be named Hamid Karzai’s intelligence chief. Earlier last year he had reported on the negotiations over prisoner transfers from the US to Afghan custody.
Now, the original report made a both a credibility and factual error when it said Stephenson’s metadata had been “intercepted.” That has provided the Kiwi military with a talking point on which to hang a non-denial denial — a point Jonathan Landay notes in his coverage of the claims.
Jonathan Landay from McClatchy.
Report: New Zealand military collected data on phone calls of McClatchy contributor
WASHINGTON — New Zealand’s defense minister said Monday that an investigation is underway into a report that U.S. intelligence agencies helped his nation’s military track the mobile telephone calls of a freelance journalist while he worked for McClatchy Newspapers in Afghanistan.
New Zealand Defense Minister Jonathan Coleman said he’d seen “no evidence to support these claims at this point. However, the Defense Force is carrying out extensive record checks to see if there is any evidence that this occurred.”
Coleman issued the statement in response to a report published in the Sunday Star Times of Auckland that said that the New Zealand military asked “U.S. spy agencies” to help them collect the “metadata” of cellular calls made by Jon Stephenson, a New Zealand freelance journalist who was based in Afghanistan.
[...]
“There were New Zealand military people who were carrying around copies of Jon’s metadata,” the report’s author, Nicky Hager, said in a telephone interview with McClatchy. “There was no doubt about it existing.”
In his report, Hager quoted Stephenson as saying that there is "a world of difference between investigating a genuine security threat and monitoring a journalist because his reporting is inconvenient or embarrassing to politicians and defense officials.”
Atlantic Wire.
Did the NSA Help New Zealand Spy on a Reporter in Afghanistan?
We know that the United States government has sought similar metadata on journalists. In May, the Associated Press revealed that the FBI had subpoeaned a number of records related to phone numbers the agency maintains. It's not clear if that subpoena was to the metadata database compiled by the NSA or directly to the phone companies. (The metadata is collected by the NSA to track terror suspects, but the FBI can use information from it with a subpoena for criminal investigations.)
The strongest evidence against the idea again comes from the AP, in the form of a partial admission from the New Zealand government — one that even the reporter for the Star-Times called "unsettling" to his story.
New Zealand Defense Minister Jonathan Coleman acknowledged the existence of an embarrassing confidential order that lists investigative journalists alongside spies and terrorists as potential threats to New Zealand's military. That document was leaked to Hager, who provided a copy to The Associated Press. Coleman said the order will be modified to remove references to journalists.
He also said the New Zealand Defense Force had conducted an extensive search of its records over the weekend and had found no evidence that either it or any other agency had spied on Stephenson.
[Emphasis added]
I want to know more about this.
Why YouTube buffers: The secret deals that make—and break—online video
When ISPs and video providers fight over money, Internet users suffer.
"For at least the past year, I've suffered from ridiculously awful YouTube speeds," Hutchinson tells me. "Ads load quickly—there's never anything wrong with the ads!—but during peak times, HD videos have been almost universally unwatchable. I've found myself having to reduce the quality down to 480p and sometimes even down to 240p to watch things without buffering. More recently, videos would start to play and buffer without issue, then simply stop buffering at some point between a third and two-thirds in. When the playhead hit the end of the buffer—which might be at 1:30 of a six-minute video—the video would hang for several seconds, then simply end. The video's total time would change from six minutes to 1:30 minutes and I'd be presented with the standard 'related videos' view that you see when a video is over."
Hutchinson, a Houston resident who pays Comcast for 16Mbps business-class cable, is far from alone. As one Ars reader recently complained, "YouTube is almost unusable on my [Verizon] FiOS connection during peak hours." Another reader responded, "To be fair, it's unusable with almost any ISP." Hutchinson's YouTube playback has actually gotten better in recent weeks. But complaints about streaming video services—notably YouTube and Netflix—are repeated again and again in articles and support forums across the Internet.
[...]
But cynical types who suspect their Internet Service Providers (ISPs) intentionally degrade streaming video may be right as well. No, your ISP (probably) isn't sniffing your traffic every time you click a YouTube or Netflix link, ready to throttle your bandwidth. But behind the scenes, in negotiations that almost never become public, the world's biggest Internet providers and video services argue over how much one network should pay to connect to another. When these negotiations fail, users suffer. In other words, bad video performance is often caused not just by technology problems but also by business decisions made by the companies that control the Internet.
NY Times editorial board.
Gangplank to a Warm Future
ITHACA, N.Y. — MANY concerned about climate change, including President Obama, have embraced hydraulic fracturing for natural gas. In his recent climate speech, the president went so far as to lump gas with renewables as “clean energy.”
As a longtime oil and gas engineer who helped develop shale fracking techniques for the Energy Department, I can assure you that this gas is not “clean.” Because of leaks of methane, the main component of natural gas, the gas extracted from shale deposits is not a “bridge” to a renewable energy future — it’s a gangplank to more warming and away from clean energy investments.
Methane is a far more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, though it doesn’t last nearly as long in the atmosphere. Still, over a 20-year period, one pound of it traps as much heat as at least 72 pounds of carbon dioxide. Its potency declines, but even after a century, it is at least 25 times as powerful as carbon dioxide. When burned, natural gas emits half the carbon dioxide of coal, but methane leakage eviscerates this advantage because of its heat-trapping power.
‘Nobody understands’ spills at Alberta oil sands operation
Oil spills at an oil sands operation in Cold Lake, Alberta have been going on for weeks with no end in sight, according to a government scientist.
Oil spills at a major oil sands operation in Alberta have been ongoing for at least six weeks and have cast doubts on the safety of underground extraction methods, according to documents obtained by the Star and a government scientist who has been on site.
Canadian Natural Resources Ltd. has been unable to stop an underground oil blowout that has killed numerous animals and contaminated a lake, forest, and muskeg at its operations in Cold Lake, Alta.
The documents indicate that, since cleanup started in May, some 26,000 barrels of bitumen mixed with surface water have been removed, including more than 4,500 barrels of bitumen.
80 Percent Of Americans Near Poverty As Obama Laments Less Mobile Society
According to a new survey made available to the Associated Press, . An amazing statistic given America’s position as the richest country in the world and a thorough reality-based indictment of the American Dream mythology. A reality even President Obama, a skilled politician at preying on people’s hopes, was forced to acknowledge recently as the evidence piles up that American society is less mobile than much of the developed world and no longer the land of opportunity.
Four out of 5 U.S. adults struggle with joblessness, near-poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives, a sign of deteriorating economic security and an elusive American dream…
Nationwide, the count of America’s poor remains stuck at a record number: 46.2 million, or 15 percent of the population, due in part to lingering high unemployment following the recession
Major opinion shifts, in the US and Congress, on NSA surveillance and privacy
Pew finds that, for the first time since 9/11, Americans are now more worried about civil liberties abuses than terrorism
Among other things, Pew finds that "a majority of Americans – 56% – say that federal courts fail to provide adequate limits on the telephone and internet data the government is collecting as part of its anti-terrorism efforts." And "an even larger percentage (70%) believes that the government uses this data for purposes other than investigating terrorism." Moreover, "63% think the government is also gathering information about the content of communications." That demonstrates a decisive rejection of the US government's three primary defenses of its secret programs: there is adequate oversight; we're not listening to the content of communication; and the spying is only used to Keep You Safe™.
[...]
But with a few rare and noble exceptions, the Intelligence Committees in both houses of Congress are filled with precisely those members who are most slavishly beholden to, completely captured by, the intelligence community over which they supposedly serve as watchdogs. Many receive large sums of money from the defense and intelligence industries.
There is a clear and powerful correlation between NSA support and amounts of money received by these members from those industries, as Wired's Dave Kravets adeptly documented about last week's NSA vote and has been documented before with similar NSA-protecting actions from the Intelligence Committee. In particular, the two chairs of those committees - Democrat Dianne Feinstein in the Senate and Republican Mike Rogers in the House - are such absolute loyalists to the NSA and the National Security State generally that it is usually impossible to distinguish their behavior, mindset and comments from those of NSA officials.
In sum, the Senate and House Intelligence Committees are the pure embodiment of the worst of Washington: the corrupting influence of money from the very industries they are designed to oversee and the complete capture by the agencies they are supposed to adversarially check. Anything that comes out of the leadership of those two Committees that is labeled "NSA reform" is almost certain to be designed to achieve the opposite effect: to stave off real changes in lieu of illusory tinkering whose real purpose will be to placate rising anger.
Update: New story from McClatchy. Oh, I see! Obama called a special meeting with the Dems on Weds. because they've been "feeling neglected" not to deep six Grayson's NSA hearing! Oh, I understand now!
Obama heads to Congress, but will make nice only with Democrats
WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama will make a rare trek to Capitol Hill this week to huddle behind closed doors with lawmakers as they debate how to pay the government’s bills, rewrite the nation’s immigration laws and adjust the government’s surveillance programs.
But he will only meet with Democrats to push his agenda before Congress departs for its annual month-long vacation – a decision that has served to strain his already tense relations with Republicans.
[...]
Obama is scheduled to meet with House of Representatives and Senate Democrats for an hour each Wednesday morning. White House officials did not respond to questions about whether Obama will schedule similar meetings with Republicans or why he was not meeting with them this week.
[...]
Mo Elleithee, a veteran Democratic political consultant, said Obama has met with Republicans repeatedly – so much so that Democrats have started to feel a little neglected. “This is a president who has reached out his hand,” he said.
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