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Photo by: joanneleon. August, 2013.
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Egyptian Security Forces Clear Pro-Morsi Sit-Ins
CAIRO -- Egypt's police and military stormed a pair of Muslim Brotherhood protest sites here early on Wednesday morning, leaving several protesters dead and dozens wounded as violence threatened to spill across the city.
The storming of the protest sites, at the Rabaa al-Adawiya mosque in Nasr City and another one in Nahda square, had been anticipated for more than a week, but came as a surprise when it began at 7am local time.
Reporters counted the bodies of more than 40 people after security forces moved in, but the Muslim Brotherhood has put the figure at more than 100.
Dozens dead as Egypt cracks down on sit-ins
Guardian liveblog.
Dozens dead as Egypt protests cleared
• Scores of protestors shot and killed during military crackdown on pro-Morsi supporters
• British cameraman amongst dead
• Two protests camps in Cairo cleared. Violence erupts elsewhere in Egyptian capital
• International condemnation from Turkish president and UK foreign secretary
A call to bring the Egyptian military to the ICC court.
Egypt's military will not get away with human rights abuses
Human rights lawyers will use the principle of universal jurisdiction to prosecute perpetrators of international crimes
Everyone in Egypt should now be concerned about the legality and consequences of the military overturning its first democratically elected government. Whatever the stated justification, disenchantment with a democratically elected leader cannot legitimise the use of force and should never be used to remove a democratically elected government.
We can see where Egypt has descended to in the aftermath of the coup. The new military-installed regime does not appear to be interested in safeguarding Egypt's democracy. The hallmarks of a democratic state have vanished almost immediately. Morsi has been detained in a secret location along with much of his administration. Suddenly dubious and historic criminal charges have surfaced and been levelled against them. So far these detainees have not had access to their families or legal teams. How they are being treated is anyone's guess.
[...]
Egypt has for too long been treated as a client state in the cause of geopolitical struggle. Its military has been central to this and has consistently done so with impunity. It is time for the British government to lead the way in bringing this to an end. The situation in Egypt must be referred to the ICC by the security council. Failing that, human rights lawyers will be waiting in courts across the world for Egypt's military, with evidence that they have committed heinous international crimes.
Doctors Without Borders are leaving Somalia.
Somalia: MSF forced to close all medical programmes
After working continuously in Somalia since 1991, the international medical humanitarian organisation Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF) today announced the closure of all its programmes in Somalia, the result of extreme attacks on its staff in an environment where armed groups and civilian leaders increasingly support, tolerate, or condone the killing, assaulting, and abducting of humanitarian aid workers.
White House denies intel chief will lead NSA surveillance review
The Obama administration is denying that James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, will control a review of the government's surveillance programs.
Privacy advocates expressed dismay on Monday after President Obama directed Clapper to establish a group that will provide recommendations for reforming the controversial surveillance programs.
The review is part of the president's push to restore public trust in the programs, but the privacy activists argue that the group can't be independent if it is led by the administration's top intelligence official.
Jeff Jarvis.
How much data the NSA really gets
The NSA claims it 'touches' only 1.6% of internet traffic – doesn't sound a lot. In fact, that's practically everything that matters
Fear not, says the NSA, we "touch" only 1.6% of daily internet traffic. If, as they say, the net carries 1,826 petabytes of information per day, then the NSA "touches" about 29 petabytes a day. They don't say what "touch" means. Ingest? Store? Analyze?
For context, Google in 2010 said it had indexed only 0.004% of the data on the net. So, by inference from the percentages, does that mean that the NSA is equal to 400 Googles?
Seven petabytes of photos are added to Facebook each month. That's .23 petabytes per day. So that means the NSA is 126 Facebooks.
Keep in mind that most of the data passing on the net is not email or web pages. It's media. According to Sandvine data (pdf) for the US fixed net from 2013, real-time entertainment accounted for 62% of net traffic, P2P file-sharing for 10.5%.
Kevin Poulsen publishes the documents in this article.
First 100 Pages of Aaron Swartz’s Secret Service File Released
After half-a-year of delays and roadblocks, the U.S Secret Service today released the first 104 pages of agency documents about the late coder and activist Aaron Swartz, including a brief report on Swartz’s suicide less than three months before his scheduled trial.
[...]
The heavily redacted documents released today confirm earlier reports that the Secret Service was interested in a “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto” that Swartz and others had penned in 2008. In May 2011, a Secret Service agent and a detective from the Cambridge police department interviewed a friend of Swartz and inquired specifically about the political statement. The friend noted that Swartz and his coauthors “believe that the open access movement is a human rights issue.”
The Secret Service documents also describe the February 11, 2011 search on Swartz’s home in Cambridge that came over a month after Swartz was first arrested and released by local police. “Swartz was home at the time the search was executed,” reads one report. “While the search was conducted, Swartz made statements to the effect of, what took you so long, and why didn’t you do this earlier?”
TAKEN
Under civil forfeiture, Americans who haven’t been charged with wrongdoing can be stripped of their cash, cars, and even homes. Is that all we’re losing?
He asked if Henderson knew that he’d been driving in the left lane for more than half a mile without passing.
No, Henderson replied. He said he’d moved into the left lane so that the police car could make its way onto the highway.
[...]
The officers found the couple’s cash and a marbled-glass pipe that Boatright said was a gift for her sister-in-law, and escorted them across town to the police station. In a corner there, two tables were heaped with jewelry, DVD players, cell phones, and the like. According to the police report, Boatright and Henderson fit the profile of drug couriers: they were driving from Houston, “a known point for distribution of illegal narcotics,” to Linden, “a known place to receive illegal narcotics.” The report describes their children as possible decoys, meant to distract police as the couple breezed down the road, smoking marijuana. (None was found in the car, although Washington claimed to have smelled it.)
The county’s district attorney, a fifty-seven-year-old woman with feathered Charlie’s Angels hair named Lynda K. Russell, arrived an hour later. Russell, who moonlighted locally as a country singer, told Henderson and Boatright that they had two options. They could face felony charges for “money laundering” and “child endangerment,” in which case they would go to jail and their children would be handed over to foster care. Or they could sign over their cash to the city of Tenaha, and get back on the road. “No criminal charges shall be filed,” a waiver she drafted read, “and our children shall not be turned over to CPS,” or Child Protective Services.
“Where are we?” Boatright remembers thinking. “Is this some kind of foreign country, where they’re selling people’s kids off?” Holding her sixteen-month-old on her hip, she broke down in tears.
Yemenis exasperated with US focus on beheading Al Qaeda
With Yemen yet again in the news last week because of the local Al Qaeda group, Yemenis want the US to begin addressing what they consider their real problems.
Gathered in the sitting room of a sumptuous house in the Yemeni capital, a mix of relatives and friends wile away the afternoon chewing qat, a leafy stimulant popular in the country. The gathering of members of the country’s educated elite included a prominent surgeon, his activist son, a professor at Sanaa University, and a high-ranking security official, and the topics discussed range from local politics to the ongoing unrest in Egypt to the pros and cons of different smart phones.
Noticeably unmentioned is the issue that’s landed Yemen in the headlines in the United States and Europe: the heightened terror alert after intercepted communications between Al Qaeda leaders hinted at a potential attack. It takes a news report on the subject on a flat screen television hanging on the room’s wall to prompt perturbed comments – but they're not about the possibility of getting attacked.
“There’s no sign of any understanding from the way America deals with Al Qaeda,” the surgeon says, receiving general agreement. “They just can’t get that it’s simply a result of bigger problems – something that has to be dealt with through development, education and more effective governance, rather than the use of force alone.”
Report: Obama appointees using secret email accounts
Several of President Obama’s political appointees are using secret government email accounts, The Associated Press reported Tuesday.
The administration officials contend the separate addresses used by the former head of the Environmental Protection Agency and other departments are necessary to keep their primary inboxes from overflowing.
But the practice invites concerns that federal agencies are conducting official business through accounts that go undetected in public records requests. It brings worries that government officials are hiding information and decisions.
"What happens when that person doesn't work there anymore? He leaves and someone makes a request (to review emails) in two years," Kel McClanahan, executive director of National Security Counselors, an open government group, told AP. "Who's going to know to search the other accounts? You would hope that agencies doing this would keep a list of aliases in a desk drawer, but you know that isn't happening."
Libya's jihadists beyond Benghazi
While the security situation continues to worsen in Libya, over the past few months, Ansar al-Sharia in Libya (ASL) has been taking advantage of the lack of state control by building local communal ties, which is strengthening its ability to operate in more locations than Benghazi. Although Benghazans protested against ASL in response to the consulate attack, which led many in the media, commentariat, and government to believe it had been outright discredited, contrary to this narrative that formed that ASL was marginalized and kicked out of the city, in fact, it is thriving and expanding.
Following the September 11 attack, many Libyans, especially in Benghazi, were embarrassed that the operation on the consulate that killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and other Americans occurred. Many believed Stevens was doing a great job and helping out the local community. As such, citizens went into the streets to repudiate these actions and called for stripping weapons from militias. They also stormed ASL's base. While this might have been a short-term set back, ASL has since been able to alter perceptions of its intentions even if it has not fundamentally changed its ideology.
Unlike Ansar al-Sharia in Tunisia (AST), which has been a national movement from its inception, ASL originally only organized and operated in Benghazi. ASL first announced itself in February 2012. The group is led by Muhammad al-Zahawi, who had previously been an inmate of former President Muammar al-Qaddafi's infamous Abu Salim prison. In recent months, though, ASL has been able to expand its scope beyond Benghazi through its dawa (missionary work), coordination with local leaders and businesses, and programs that are beneficial locally.
EXCLUSIVE: Owner of Snowden's Email Service on Why He Closed Lavabit Rather Than Comply With Gov't
Lavabit, an encrypted email service believed to have been used by National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden, has abruptly shut down. The move came amidst a legal fight that appeared to involve U.S. government attempts to win access to customer information. In a Democracy Now! broadcast exclusive, we are joined by Lavabit owner Ladar Levison and his lawyer, Jesse Binnall. "Unfortunately, I can't talk about it. I would like to, believe me," Levison says. "I think if the American public knew what our government was doing, they wouldn't be allowed to do it anymore."[...]
Former Internet Provider Gagged by National Security Letter Recounts How He Was Silenced For 6 Years
We continue our discussion of government surveillance and internet privacy with someone who was under an FBI gag order for six years. In early 2004, Nicholas Merrill, who was running an internet service provider in New York called Calyx, was issued a national security letter that ordered him to hand over detailed private records about some of his customers. Under the law, recipients of the letters are barred from telling anyone about their encounter with the FBI. While Merrill was not the first American to be gagged after receiving a national security letter, he was the first to challenge the FBI's secret tactics. Merrill went to the American Civil Liberties Union, which then filed the first lawsuit challenging the national security letter statute. In the lawsuit, Merrill was simply identified as John Doe. It was only in August 2010, after reaching a settlement with the FBI, that Merrill was able to reveal his identity. "[The case] resulted in the National Security Letter Provision of the PATRIOT Act being ruled unconstitutional twice," Merrill says. "The problem was, though, we were never able to get to the Supreme Court to get a final, binding ruling that would affect the whole country.... The concern about cybersecurity and the concerns about privacy are really two sides of the same coin. There are a lot of really uncontroversial examples in which organizations and people need confidentiality: Medicine is one, journalism is another, human rights organizations is an obvious third. We're trying to make the case that if the right of Americans to encrypt their data and to have private information is taken away, that it's going to have grave, far-reaching effects on many kinds of industries, on our democracy as a whole, and our standing in the world."
Google Says Gmail Users Should Have No Expectation of Privacy
In response to a lawsuit Google has disclosed that, from the company’s perspective, no one should be expecting their emails to remain private. This is likely news to most gmail users who create a password thinking that limits access to their account and probably expect their emails to be private.
Plantiffs accuse Google of violating the privacy of its users by mining their personal messages for information that it uses to inform which targeted ads it displays. The suit calls for Google to fully disclose exactly what information it’s taking from emails, and to pay damages for these alleged violations of privacy.
The company argued in its motion to dismiss the lawsuit that “all users of email must necessarily expect that their emails will be subject to automated processing.”
Action
Stop Watching Us.
The revelations about the National Security Agency's surveillance apparatus, if true, represent a stunning abuse of our basic rights. We demand the U.S. Congress reveal the full extent of the NSA's spying programs.
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