● 05.17.15

● Links 17/5/2015: NuTyX Saravane 15.05, Panasonic and Firefox OS

Posted in News Roundup at 11:30 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• They have some of the highest shares of page-views from GNU/Linux…

• Chrome OS can do quite a lot, but it’s not all-powerful. A redditor wanted to know what sorts of things Chrome OS devices can’t do.

Kernel Space

• Git is an open-source revision control system, developed by Linus Torvalds, providing a big number of features and an intuitive syntax. It is used a lot by the developers that want to share their code with others.

Graphics Stack

• The release candidate for the upcoming Wayland 1.8 is now available.

• Out today is the first release candidates for 1.8 of Wayland and the reference Weston compositor, a.k.a. Wayland 1.7.92 and Weston 1.7.92.

Applications

• qBittorrent is a torrent client, similar to µTorrent, which was recently ported to the Linux systems. Among others, qBittorrent has built-in search engine for searching in the popular BitTorrent sites, has torrent queueing and prioritizing features, has IP Filtering options, provides a tool for creating torrents and bandwidth limitations.

• Valentina is an open-source software for creating clothing articles. Among others, it allows the users to create cloth patterns using either standard sizes or custom set of measurements, using traditional methods to create unique pattern tools.

• Bitacora is specially designed, although not exclusively, to distributed teams. So we need to first understand what do we mean by a distributed team.

• Atom is an open-source, multi-platform text editor developed by GitHub, having a simple and intuitive graphical user interface and a bunch of interesting features for writing: CSS, HTML, JavaScript and other web programming languages. Among others, it has support for macros, auto-completion a split screen feature and it integrates with the file manager.

Proprietary

Instructionals/Technical

• For quite some time, the Debian version of WordPress has had a configuration tweak that made it possible to run multiple websites on the same server. This came from a while ago when multi-site wasn’t available. While a useful feature, it does make the initial setup of WordPress for simple sites more complicated.

Games

• While Oculus Rift has seen Linux support up to now, the Facebook-owned VR company has now suspended Linux and OS X development to better focus on Windows.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• KDE published the release schedule of the next major release of the KDE Applications software suite for the KDE Plasma 5 desktop environment.

• On May 15, Digia, through Lars Knoll, had the pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download and testing of the first Beta release of the upcoming Qt 5.5 GUI toolkit.

Distributions

New Releases

• Seven months after the release of saravane 14.11 instead of the three months originally planned, I am very proud to annonce you (finally) the release of NuTyX saravane 15.05 which in summary the new features…

• Maren Hachmann had the great pleasure of informing us about the immediate availability for download of the m23 Rock 15.1 open source software deployment and management system for GNU/Linux operating systems.

Screenshots/Screencasts

Ballnux/SUSE

• openSUSE has just announced today, May 16, the immediate availability of the KDE Plasma 5.3 as the default desktop environment in Tumbleweed, along with the KDE Applications 15.04.1 software suite.

Red Hat Family

• If you plan on building ARM devices powered by a Linux kernel-based operating system, then you should know that the excellent CentOS distribution is now available for download for ARM64 (AArch64) hardware architectures.

Fedora

• Fedora 22 is currently scheduled to be released on May 26th — 11 days to go! This will include our Cloud, Server, and Workstation editions, along with other variants like Fedora Atomic (designed for running containerized apps) and of course KDE and Xfce desktop spins.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Chinese smartphone manufacturer Meizu will launch the Ubuntu-running edition of its MX4 smartphone on May 18, according to a report out of China. The device was first shown off back in March at this year’s MWC.

• As a reminder, Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced that Kernel 3.19 has reached end of life (EOL), Kernel 3.19.8 being the last one available from its series. [To install Kernel 3.19 on Ubuntu 15.04, see THIS article.]

• But as expected, Canonical’s Kamal Mostafa has announced that the Ubuntu Kernel Team will maintain Kernel 3.19 until July 2016, a version of Kernel 3.19 being used by default on Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet.

• A new player is determined to take this to the end and we will see a new Ubuntu Edge-like smartphone go on sale before the end of this year. Of course the Ubuntu Edge won’t be the first smartphone to be based on this amazing platform. Just last month, a new BQ Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition was launched. However, this device lacks in some areas when compared to the Edge.

Flavours and Variants

• Linux Mint to go with systemd: While Linux Mint did not join the systemd derby when the green flag dropped, Linux Mint project leader Clement Lefebvre expects the next releases of Linux Mint to use systemd by default, according to an article this week in PC World.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Android

• Motorola has started Android 5.1 Lollipop update for the first generation Moto E smartphone via soak test.

• Folks at XDA forum have confirmed the soak test, which bundles a new software version 23.21.15, weighing in at 209.5MB, for users in India.

Free Software/Open Source

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Multiple reports surfaced yesterday suggesting the much anticipated Panasonic smart TV running Firefox OS is now available in Europe, with shipping in the US and elsewhere to begin in the coming months. First unveiled at CES 2015 in January, the new 4K smart TVs could help Panasonic relive the dizzying success achieved from its iconic plasma sets and gain some much needed market traction.

Project Releases

• After more than a year of absence, the excellent Avidemux open-source video editor designed for all sorts of encoding, cutting, and filtering tasks, which runs under Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows operating systems and supports numerous file types, including AVI, MP4, DVD, and ASF, just reached version 2.6.9.

Leftovers

• Drones are a problem. The FAA has subjected private drone use to all sorts of ridiculous stipulations. Law enforcement agencies seem to feel drone operation should be left to the pros, and are suddenly sprouting privacy concerns whenever a citizen flies one over something of theirs. Our nation’s three-letter agencies want to be able to deploy drones almost anywhere without oversight, even though they’ve proven to be much less efficient than boots on the ground. Then, of course, there are those piloted by the CIA — the kind that kill foreigners (and the occasional American) with almost no oversight, and what oversight there is has “bought in.”

Security

• Roberts first made news in April when he was told he couldn’t fly on United Airlines because of tweets he had made about whether he could hack into the flight’s onboard computer settings.

• Penn State’s College of Engineering has been disconnected from the Internet so it can recover from two serious computer intrusions that exposed personal information for at least 18,000 people and possibly other sensitive data, officials said Friday.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• In the mean time, strikes are expanding in other regions of the world: they fly from Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, just north of the Horn of Africa, to strike Yemen and Somalia.

• The Central Intelligence Agency failed to anticipate the Arab Spring uprisings and then erroneously believed those revolts would hamper Al-Qaeda’s strength in the region, according to a new book by a former deputy director of the CIA.

• The family of an American captive killed in a drone strike said Wednesday it would welcome the creation of a hostage czar to coordinate government efforts to free those held.

• The deaths of an Italian and an American in a covert CIA drone strike in Pakistan — and the rhetorical contortions required of the president when he informed the world — have breathed new urgency into a long-stalled plan to give the Pentagon primacy over targeted killing of terrorists overseas.

• Generals aren’t better than spooks when it comes to reporting civilian casualties.

• As the Bureau revealed recently, the accidental killing of American Warren Weinstein and Italian Giorgio Lo Porto by the CIA in January now means at least 38 Westerners have been killed by covert US drones in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen.

• Today, as a 38-year veteran of the U.S. Senate, I can’t tell who is running our wars.

• In Pakistan alone, drone attacks have killed between 400 and 1,000 civilians and over 100 children.

• But to the families of hundreds of Pakistani and Yemeni victims of US drone strikes, the United States has offered only silence. President Obama stated that he decided to release information about the January strike because “the Weinstein and Lo Porto families deserve to know the truth.” They certainly do. And so do Yemeni and Pakistani families who have lost their loved ones and who thus far have been denied even simple acknowledgment. The contrast is glaring, unfair, and likely to increase the already strong anti-American sentiment the lethal force program has caused abroad.

• Earlier this year, the U.S. announced a new policy for drone exports, purportedly part of a broader effort to work with other countries to “shape international standards” on the use of drones and compel recipient states “to use these systems in accordance with international law.” But, as “Death by Drone” shows, the U.S. drone program is fundamentally flawed and should not be perpetuated. The Obama administration’s recent admissions that its drone strikes killed its own citizens only underscore this fact.

• Without transparency, there is no accountability. The facts validate this. According to CNN, the Obama administration has become famous for launching “signature strikes.” These drone attacks choose targets merely based on patterns of suspicious behavior by a group of men, rather than identification of a particular militant. That is our government’s current criteria for sending a drone strike, and it is alarmingly flexible.

• I wish Obama regretted,apologised, and mourned the deaths of thousands of non-Western victims of U.S. drone attacks, duly compensated the family members of the dead, and the severely maimed victims in Pakistan and elsewhere. Distressingly, Obama’s only regret was U.S. drone attackers didn’t know the presence of Weinstein and Le Porto at the al Qaeda camp in the first place. His regret implies, had the attackers been aware of Weinstein’s and Le Porto’s presence at the camp, they would have definitely called a halt to the attack. Conversely, there’s altogether a different strategy for U.S. drone attacks. The attackers don’t bother to know if there are innocent Pakistani, Afghan or Yemeni women, children and elderly in and around their targets.

• Two US citizens released by the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic’s (DPR) forces in eastern Ukraine are linked to the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), DPR head Alexander Zakharchenko said Saturday.

• Hardline Islamists fighting side-by-side with groups backed by the United States have made gains in northern Syria in recent weeks while showing rare unity, which some fear may be short-lived.

• An Islamist alliance calling itself Army of Fatah, a reference to the conquests that spread Islam across the Middle East from the seventh century, has seized northwestern towns including the provincial capital Idlib from government forces.

• The alliance, which includes al-Qaeda’s wing in Syria, known as the Nusra Front, and another hardline militant group, the Ahrar al-Sham movement, is edging closer to the coastal province of Latakia, President Bashar al-Assad’s stronghold.

• As if “coordinating” with al-Qaeda is functionally different from “aligning” with al-Qaeda.

• The Dalai Lama’s older brother deeply regrets accepting CIA aid. It ‘contributed to the complete destruction of Tibetan culture.’

• What occurred in Macedonia was a classic disinformation ploy to mire the democratically-elected government in a bogus political scandal. The ploy is directly from the CIA playbook and it is now being carried out against Presidents Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner of Argentina, Dilma Rousseff of Brazil, and Michelle Bachelet of Chile. All face financial scandals cooked up by the CIA and its owned and operated media in the three nations.

• If the United States, after the terrorist attacks in Kumanovo, continue with the policy of unconditional support for the Albanians and if the EU continues to tacitly pass over the revival of the “Greater Albania” project, it could lead to the formation of the Orthodox Alliance of Serbia, Greece, Macedonia and Bulgaria, perhaps even the third Balkan War, writes Serbian daily “Kurir”, quoting “Informer”.

• On September 14, 2011, the CIA sent an alarming message to the Pentagon: a decorated U.S. special operations commando admitted during a job interview with the agency to hunting down and killing “an unknown, unarmed” Afghan man.

• Special Forces Maj. Mathew Golsteyn was stripped of a Silver Star for valor after the Army investigated the alleged 2011 confession.

• The hearing for a former Green Beret soldier accused of murder by the Army has been delayed in part because of the same organization that brought him scrutiny in the first place: the CIA.

• Pope Francis did not mince words when he told a group of children gathered at the Vatican that some people will never want peace because they profit off of war.

• “Some powerful people earn their living off making weapons,” the pope said, in a translation provided by Rome Reports. “For this reason, many people do not want peace.”

• He also called the weapons business an “industry of death,” according to Catholic Herald.

• The pontiff spoke in front of roughly 7,000 children at the Vatican on Monday, in a visit sponsored by the Fabbrica della pace (“Peace Factory”), a non-governmental organization that operates educational programming in primary schools with the purpose of promoting cross-cultural understanding.

• On Tuesday, Bush phoned into the Sean Hannity program on Fox to begin the process of retraction and correction, claiming that he had “interpreted the question wrong, I guess.” He added, “I was talking about, given what people knew then.” When Hannity repeated Kelly’s question about the 2003 invasion, Bush stalled, saying, “That’s a hypothetical.”

• Jeb Bush’s stumbling start to his presidential bid has refocused attention on Official Washington’s favorite excuse for the illegal, aggressive and disastrous war in Iraq – that it was just a case of “bad intelligence.” But that isn’t what the real history shows, as ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern recalls.

• It took Jeb Bush nearly a week to settle on an answer about the Iraq War. Many Republicans worry about what this says regarding his presidential campaign skills.

• In which we learn that the CIA would have preferred to have tortured one guy to death.

• Williams quotes FBI whistle blower Sibel Edmonds who said, “Between 1996 and 2002, we, the United States, planned, financed, and helped execute every major terrorist incident by Chechen rebels (and the Mujahideen) against Russia. Between 1996 and 20002, we, the United States, planned, financed, and helped execute every single uprising and terror related scheme in Xinjiang (aka East Turkistan and Uyhurstan). Between 1996 and 2002, we, the United States, planned and carried out at least two assassination schemes against pro-Russian officials in Azerbaijan.”

• Drone is a searing indictment of U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan, which between 2004 and 2013 killed as many as 200 children, compared with 49 high-profile militants – and as many as 3,646 people in total, according to the film. One horrifying tactic described in the documentary is a double wave of bombing: After the first strike kills and injures people on the ground, rescuers who flock to the scene to help are bombed by a second attack. This has resulted in a reluctance to help the injured, who cry out for help for hours because nobody goes to help them, the film explains.

• The Obama administration, like its predecessor, holds that the “exceptional” U.S. has the right to enter other countries to kill “terrorists,” but it would never tolerate, say, Cuba targeting CIA-trained terrorists harbored in Miami, one of many double standards posing as international law, as Coleen Rowley notes.

• On Oct. 22, 1963, the Supreme Court upheld a death penalty ruling for Hwang on charges of spying for the North. On Dec.14, Hwang was executed by a firing squad. A reporter who covered the Ministry of Defense watched the execution in order to quell suspicions that Park had sneaked Hwang out of the country.

• FATA is an area where the media cannot go and research …

• There’s something to be said about choosing to go to war for your country and having to leave your family. You go and you get dirty and you get bloody and you sacrifice yourself. People really think about what they’re doing in those situations. There’s a human contact. You have to look into the person’s eyes you’ve just killed and understand what it means. And when that’s taken away, it’s scary, because the human aspect of war — and war is human instinct, I believe — is gone.

• Council on Foreign Relations fellow Micah Zenko dug up a 2011 assessment, from Pentagon official Michael Vickers, that there were “perhaps four important Qaeda leaders left in Pakistan, and 10 to 20 leaders over all in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.”

• The problem with Obama’s overemphasis on the use of drones for counterterrorism is that it does nothing to address the underlying political problems that allow terrorist organizations to flourish. Because the United States is forced to partner with local governments – many of them authoritarian or military-led regimes – to gain access to sovereign airspace in order to carry out drone strikes, its ability to then pressure its allies to make necessary political reforms is seriously limited.

• From Vietnam to Pakistan, the business of counting deaths by American hands has never been simple math.

• The bottom line is that all law, but most importantly international law, which is sometimes called “soft law” due to its lack of formalized international police enforcement, derives its legitimacy and power from principles of reciprocity and equality, not from the double standards that Harold Koh, John Yoo and other war enablers have worked at legalizing inside and outside our government. International legal principles must therefore not only be rooted in universal Kantian ethics but must also be efficacious and pragmatic, not counterproductive as more and more research is showing is the case with US drone assassination policy that serves to promote and increase terrorism worldwide. To stand the test of time regardless of evolving technology, international law must “work” from all participants’ standpoints, not just those nations which view themselves as most militarily powerful at the moment. Unfortunately the Nuremberg Principle has largely been forgotten that wars of aggression, aka wars of choice, are the supreme crime because they encompass and lead to all other war crimes, regardless of whether utilizing low end box cutters or high end drone and satellite technology.

• No doubt the military will claim that dropping ordnance from drones is more accurate than bombing from bombers, bombers that the military claimed during World War Two were accurate enough to drop a bomb into a pickle barrel. While it is true that drones are often more accurate than bombers, the drone program has been sold on it ability to minimize “collateral damage,” a euphemism for unintended deaths near the target that would be called manslaughter if a citizen did it.

• In other words, when it came to counting, civil society rode to the rescue, though the impact of the figures produced has remained limited indeed in this country. In some ways, the only body count of any sort that has made an impression here in recent years has been sniper Chris Kyle’s 160 confirmed Iraqi “kills” that played such a part in the publicity for the blockbuster movie American Sniper.

• The outrage of Baltimore residents after the fatal police abuse of Freddie Gray spilled over into ugly rioting, drawing media condemnation and public disapproval. But a different attitude prevails toward U.S. drone assassinations around the world despite many civilian deaths, a contradiction addressed by Nat Parry.

• US policymakers need to know the answer to a simple question about American attitudes toward drones. Does the widely-reported strong public support for drone strikes drop off when confronted with the reality of civilian casualties? Of course those policymakers are not alone in their need for such information. Advocacy groups and others would also benefit from knowing whether—and to what degree—American attitudes are contingent on such aspects of drone warfare. Disappointingly, most of the time and money spent on opinion polls asks only generic questions about Americans’ attitudes toward drone strikes against terrorists. These surveys fail to seek information about public attitudes in the face of drone operations that, in reality, often cause civilian deaths.

• Last week, the Daily Beast breathlessly reported an “exclusive” story, alleging that Department of Defense officials admitted that anti-ISIS airstrikes had killed what the Beast characterized as “innocents.”

• Officials at the Pentagon have claimed that the bombing campaign in Iraq and Syria against ISIS has been precise and accurate. However, an internal military investigation claimed civilians were caught in the crossfire.

• A little over a week ago, a somber President Obama delivered early morning remarks on the tragic deaths of Warren Weinstein and Giovanni Lo Porto, two hostages who were accidentally killed by U.S. drone strikes in the tribal regions of Pakistan. It was a rare moment for several reasons: the President openly acknowledged the loss of these men through a covert program, and he took personal responsibility for all of our counter terrorism operations, including these recent ones. But as he offered condolences to the families of Weinstein and Lo Porto, and promised a thorough review of intelligence failures, the President opened himself up to criticism of an unmanned aerial program that has killed thousands – including thousands of civilians according to some reports – in a host of countries.

• President Barack Obama has rejected not only the theory but also the practice of due process by his use of drones launched by the CIA to kill Americans and others overseas. The use of the CIA to do the killing is particularly troubling and has aroused the criticism of senators as disparate in their views as Rand Paul and John McCain, both of whom have argued that the CIA’s job is to steal and keep secrets and the military’s job is to further national security by using force; and their roles should not be confused or conflated, because the laws governing each are different.

• We are also living in an era when technology allows states to use unmanned drones to kill alleged terrorists and, in the process, maims or kills civilians. According to data from human rights group Reprieve, analysed by the Guardian in 2014, US drone strikes that attempted to kill 41 men resulted in the deaths of an estimated 1147 people, including children, mainly in Pakistan but also in Yemen.

• Robby Rothfeld’s April 30 defense of drone bombings was surprising and alarming. He starts by assuring us that he has devoted his lifetime to nonviolence, so we can feel OK about what’s coming. We should stay on guard, however. His rationalizations are thoroughly unoriginal: a) we are at war, b) this is the best way to prosecute the war because b1) drones are accurate and kill only bad guys, and b2) fewer of our people will be endangered. And by the way, if you only knew all the secret stuff, you’d be on board.

• This is not a “gotcha” column. But before reviewing American drone and airstrike policy, it is not inappropriate to remind the president and company that hubris is an unattractive trait.

• Last summer, as Israel was defending itself from Hamas rockets fired at its civilian population often from within the civilian population of Gaza, the White House was vehement in its criticism of Israel. A White House spokesman called Palestinian casualties, “totally unacceptable and totally indefensible.”

• If the U.S. was wrong about what Israel was doing, what about what the U.S. was doing? And specifically, what it was doing to American citizens?

• The war last summer between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip left more than 2,100 Palestinians dead and reduced vast areas to rubble. On Monday, a group of Israeli veterans released sobering testimony from fellow soldiers that suggests permissive rules of engagement coupled with indiscriminate artillery fire contributed to the mass destruction and high numbers of civilian casualties in the coastal enclave.

• Several months ago, a young woman working in Kibbutz Dorot’s carrot fields noticed a piece of paper lying on the ground with a short inscription in Arabic. It looked like a treasure map. She put it in her pocket. Some time later, she gave it to her friend Avihai, who works for Breaking the Silence, an organisation of military veterans who collect testimony from Israeli soldiers to provide a record of everyday life in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Avihai was in the middle of interviewing soldiers about their experiences during Operation Protective Edge, Israel’s assault on the Gaza Strip last summer. He recognised the piece of paper as a leaflet that had been dropped by an Israeli plane above Palestinian neighbourhoods in the northern part of the Strip; the wind had blown it six miles from its intended landing point.

• The leaflet helps explain why 70 per cent of the 2220 Palestinians killed during the war were civilians. The red line on the map traces a route from a bright blue area labelled Beit Lahia, a Palestinian town of 60,000 inhabitants at the north edge of the Strip, and moves south through Muaskar Jabalia to Jabalia city.

• Libya has said it is deeply alarmed over EU proposals to take military action against the smugglers responsible for despatching tens of thousands of desperate migrants across the Mediterranean.

• Israel is preparing for another war that kills masses of civilians– and it’s preparing its propaganda campaign early with the New York Times happy to help.

• I believe if we continue on this path our special operations forces will be seen as villains, as is the CIA today. Ultimately the US too will be judged by the means used to enforce our policies, not just as the policies themselves. We pride ourselves on being the exceptional nation, the exceptional City on a Hill of Matthew 5:14), the one those on the Mayflower hoped to build. The world might hold us to the standard we set for ourselves, and which we have for long boasted about — and see us as just more global gangsters.

• Two issues have dominated the national public discourse in Australia over recent weeks, both of which relate to different manifestations of state-sanctioned killing. The first involved a sometimes highly charged discussion of the impending execution of two Australian citizens in Indonesia for their roles in a drug importation syndicate called the Bali 9, and the legal and moral foundations for capital punishment. In pleading for the commutation of the death penalty in the Bali 9 case the Australian Government enunciated its implacable opposition to capital punishment.

• Costa Rica condemns Saudi Arabia’s dropping US-made cluster bombs on Yemen, in defiance of international law, including the Convention on Cluster Munitions that specifically outlaws the development, production, distribution, stockpiling, and use of cluster munitions, including the cluster bombs the Saudis have used since March 26 in their uncontested air attack on Yemen with an estimated 215 jet fighters from nine countries. (The Saudis are also bombing people in Syria and Iraq.)

• Today, the Euro-American powers actively support the absolutist regime of Saudi Arabia as it bombs and slaughters thousands of Yemeni civilians and resistance fighters. Yemen is the poorest country in the Gulf region.

Transparency Reporting

• A group of 20 former leaders of the CIA issued a scathing criticism of The New York Times on Monday for “outing” the identities of three top officials whose names had largely been a secret.

• In a recent interview in the Lawfare blog discussing his decision to publish the names of three undercover Central Intelligence Agency officers, Dean Baquet, executive editor of The New York Times, defended the decision on the grounds that the benefits of public accountability outweigh the risk to these officers.

• Twenty senior former CIA officials—including every CIA Director (including DCIs) dating back to William Webster (1987-91)—wrote a letter to the NYT to take issue with NYT Executive Editor Dean Baquet’s defense (in this interview on Lawfare) of his decision to publish the names of the three covert CIA operatives in a story a few weeks ago.

• A federal judge has rejected a journalist’s lawsuit seeking to reveal more financial details about the CIA’s detention and interrogation program for terror suspects.

• VICE News has obtained and published 39 pages of redacted documents from the CIA that shed new light on the treatment of CIA detainees after 9/11.

• The documents were released to Jason Leopold at VICE News, who posted a comprehensive article examining them earlier today. Leopold and I have previously written on the subject of drugging prisoners, and examined an earlier Department of Defense IG report on the subject a few years ago, as well as the use of mefloquine at Guantanamo, about which more below.

• But newly declassified documents obtained by VICE show that the CIA conducted its own investigation prior to the Senate’s. Despite claims of those held in black site prisons who reported being forced to take “mind-altering” substances, the CIA would not confirm these claims.

• But mixing and mingling analysts and operations officers as a general proposition is a terrible idea. Operations officers are charged with carrying out government policy on the ground; analysts are supposed to be sifting through intelligence to figure out if policy is working. When the analysts get too close to policy, they’re likely to be seduced by it, to ignore signs that it’s gone off the tracks.

• That possibility is more dangerous than ever because the CIA is more involved in carrying out policy than ever. When the agency’s 2013 budget leaked, it showed the CIA is now spending more money on covert action programs than on collecting human intelligence. Another sign of the times: Earlier this year, the CIA’s top paramilitary officer was named chief of its spying branch.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• In the case of Hong Kong’s Face Of Litter campaign, the creative team teamed up with Parabon Nanolabs, a company out of Virginia that has developed a method to construct digital portraits from small traces of DNA. Parabon began developing this technology more than five years ago in tandem with the Department of Defense, mostly to use as a tool in criminal investigations.

Finance

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• The “accountability” criterion was added in 2010 following Obama’s reauthorization of ESEA. after which Secretary Arne Duncan pledged in a blueprint on school choice that charter schools receiving funding under the program would now be held to even higher standards of accountability than traditional public schools.

• [...]

• For decades, a small group of millionaires and billionaires, like the Koch Brothers, have backed a legislative agenda to privatize public education in America. Lobbying groups funded by them, like the corporate bill mill ALEC (the “American Legislative Exchange Council”), have been pushing states to create and expand charter schools outside of the authority of the state public school agencies and local school boards, confining the state to limited oversight of whether authorizers have adequate policies, not over how charters spend tax dollars.

• Behind the scenes, the CIA secretly worked with the filmmakers, and the movie portrayed the agency’s controversial “enhanced interrogation techniques” — widely described as torture — as a key to uncovering information that led to the finding and killing of bin Laden.

• Zero Dark Thirty, written by Mark Boal and directed by Kathryn Bigelow, was a detestable work for many reasons. The film, released in December 2012 to much critical acclaim, was promoted as the true story of the decade-long hunt for Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, assassinated by the US military in Pakistan in May 2011.

• [...]

• Hersh points out in his lengthy piece that bin Laden was not living secretly at the time of his killing in a well-guarded hideout, as depicted in the film, but “had been a prisoner of the ISI [Pakistani intelligence service] at the Abbottabad compound since 2006.” He further explains “that the CIA did not learn of bin Laden’s whereabouts by tracking his couriers, as the White House has claimed since May 2011 [seconded by Zero Dark Thirty], but from a former senior Pakistani intelligence officer [a “walk-in”!] who betrayed the secret in return for much of the $25 million reward offered by the US.”

• So there was no intense debate at CIA headquarters as to whether bin Laden was actually living at the location in question, an important sequence in Bigelow’s film. In the face of rather wishy-washy superiors, Maya boldly insists it is a “100 percent” certainty that the house’s mysterious resident is indeed the al Qaeda leader. In actual fact, Pakistani officials had acknowledged to their American counterparts he was there in Abbottabad (“less than two miles from the Pakistan Military Academy,” and “another mile or so away” from “a Pakistani army combat battalion headquarters,” observes Hersh) and even handed over a DNA sample to prove the point.

• Nor was there a deadly shoot-out at the compound. The Pakistani military and intelligence deliberately stood down and let the US Navy Seal team do its dirty work. “An ISI liaison officer flying with the Seals guided them into the darkened house and up a staircase to bin Laden’s quarters,” writes Hersh. Bin Laden was unguarded and unarmed, living on the third floor of the “shabby” house “in a cell with bars on the window and barbed wire on the roof.”

Censorship

• Ex-Formula 1 boss Max Mosley reaches confidential deal with Google over images of him at a sex party fuelling concerns of a secret censorship of the web

• Facebook has removed the official page of ExtraTorrent after complaints from copyright holders. With more than 350,000 fans ExtraTorrent had one of the largest fan pages of all torrent sites on the social network. But despite the setback, ExtraTorrent’s operator are not giving up on Facebook just yet.

Privacy

• THE SOCIAL NETWORK Facebook come under fire yet again from the Belgian Privacy Commission, which has critcised the website’s “disregard” for European law.

• Documents seen by The INQUIRER show that the Belgian Privacy Commission warned Facebook on Friday that it’s “make or break” time for the company to respect the private lives of internet users.

• Hayden called up the CEO of Hewlett Packard, Carly Fiorina. “HP made precisely the equipment we needed, and we needed in bulk,” says Robert Deitz, who was general counsel at the NSA from 1998 to 2006. Deitz recalls that a tractor-trailer full of HP servers and other equipment was on the Washington, D.C. Beltway, en route to retailers, at the very moment Hayden called. Fiorina instructed her team to postpone the retailer delivery and have the driver stop. An NSA police car met up with the tractor-trailer and the truck proceeded, with an armed escort, to NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland.

• In 2007, then-CIA Director Michael Hayden was wrestling with a pressing question, one that would rattle the secretive organization long after his tenure: How, he wondered, could the U.S. spy agency continue to fulfill its mission in a society that increasingly demanded more transparency and public accountability?

• The revelation that Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio hired computer consultant Dennis Montgomery to investigate an alleged conspiracy by the Central Intelligence Agency is creating ripples in the contempt of court case against the sheriff.

• On Friday, United States District Court Judge Murray Snow instructed the sheriff’s attorney to contact the chief counsel for the CIA to apprise them the sheriff’s office could be in possession of CIA data.

• During the first round of the contempt hearing in April, Chief Deputy Jerry Sheridan gave a few cryptic details about why the sheriff’s office had hired Montgomery as a paid informant.

• Sheridan said Montgomery “had information that the CIA hacked into individual bank accounts.” The chief deputy testified he believed there were 50,000 Maricopa County residents impacted.

• The pleadings explain the basis for the disqualification and are supported by the sworn declaration of renowned ethics professor and expert Ronald Rotunda. Caught in the judge’s “crossfire” of his “contempt” for Sheriff Joe Arpaio is whistleblower Dennis Montgomery, whose due process, attorney/client privileges, work product and intellectual property rights have been violated.

Civil Rights

• There’s only one paragraph in the piece that tries to answer the question of whether the decrease in complaints about police is related to a decrease in police effectiveness.

• [...]

• Indeed, the Times story, citing a professor of public policy, points out that “despite a continuation of the steep drop in recorded stop-and-frisk encounters, the department’s philosophy of crime prevention has remained the same between the Bloomberg and de Blasio administrations.” The city’s newspapers likewise seem reluctant to let evidence get in the way of a deeply held worldview.

• It would seem to be clearly established (including decisions to this effect from all but one circuit court in the US) and yet certain officers are still shutting down citizens with cameras and arresting them on clearly bogus charges. The NYPD is currently facing a lawsuit from the ACLU that hopes to obtain a ruling declaring this activity to be covered by the First Amendment. That lawsuit may ultimately prove to be extraneous as the Southern District of New York (which oversees New York City) has now confirmed that citizen recordings are protected First Amendment activity.

• Notice anyone missing from the list? How about representatives from privacy and civil liberties organizations? How about someone from the victim’s rights community? How about a law professor? Not even a single computer scientist or technologist is included in the mix.

• ​The US government is prosecuting whistleblowers for sharing information with journalists as the latest Jeffrey Sterling case shows, retired NSA analyst and whistleblower J. Kirk Wiebe, told RT. Often, government witch hunts are driven by cash, he added.

• Sterling blew the whistle on a failed U.S. effort to undermine Iran’s nuclear program.

• Disproportionate penalties given to two CIA employees who leaked secrets raise a question about the fairness of American justice.

• Disgraced former CIA chief and retired general David Petraeus, who recently pleaded guilty to providing secrets to his mistress, has said that he would consider serving the US again if asked.

• Former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling spoke to a journalist in Washington about the CIA. Now a judge has sentenced him to prison for three and a half years for revealing classified information.

• Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA agent convicted of sharing classified information with a New York Times reporter, was sentenced today to three and a half years in prison, a significantly shorter term than had been expected.

• The fake CIA program was real, and was operating around Abbottabad. At no point, however, was it ever even tangentially related to the bin Laden killing, and no one in the program ever attempted to get DNA from anyone in bin Laden’s compound.

• The assassination, rather, was the result of a tip from a former Pakistani official, who simply wanted to collect on the $25 million reward. The administration, determined to keep the identity of the official secret, attributed it falsely to the vaccination scheme that they just happened to be running not far from the area.

• The Polish government on Friday processed payments to two terror suspects currently held by the US at Guantanamo Bay. The European Court of Human Rights [official website] had imposed a Saturday deadline [AP report] on Poland to make the reparations. Last July Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri were awarded USD $147,000 and $113,000, respectively, in a lawsuit against Poland for allowing the CIA to detain them and for not preventing torture and inhumane treatment. The court also ordered Poland to urge the US not to execute the suspects. Many people in Poland are upset with the penalty, feeling they must pay for US actions, and many Americans are upset at the idea that possible terror suspects could receive this money. The detainees’ lawyer, however, claims there rights were violated, they were subjected to torture, and they have never been found guilty of a crime in court.

• “This left bad feelings on our side. We are a small country that was badly treated by a great power”, according to Tadeusz Chabiera, founder of the Euro-Atlantic Association think tank in Warsaw Poland.

• After appealing the ruling in February, Poland has finally decided to abide by the European Court of Human Rights decision to pay reparations to a pair of detainees tortured at a CIA black site on Polish soil.

• Poland is paying a quarter of a million dollars to two terror suspects allegedly tortured by the CIA in a secret facility in this country — prompting outrage among many here who feel they are being punished for American wrongdoing.

• Poland is paying a quarter of a million dollars to two terror suspects tortured by the CIA in a secret facility in this country – prompting outrage among many here who feel they are being punished for American wrongdoing.

• The current US administration hasn’t done enough to hold accountable leading officials who orchestrated a worldwide torture program, says Prof. Ben Davis, University of Toledo College of Law. But there’s hope that may change some day, he adds.

• There may be more lawsuits filed against the countries involved in the CIA torture program after the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ordered Poland to pay damages to terror suspects detained in a CIA-run secret facility in the country, a human rights group official told Sputnik on Friday.

• No other nation involved, from Pakistan and Thailand to Romania and Lithuania, has been held accountable. The Polish Foreign Ministry says it’s processing the payments. However, neither Polish officials nor the US Embassy in Warsaw would say where the money is going or how it will be used.

• Although the current Polish government has not admitted the existence of a CIA site in Poland, former President Aleksander Kwasniewski has said his country provided “a quiet location” for the CIA. His comments came after a U.S. Senate report in 2014 noted prisoners in the Stare Kiejkuty prison, at a former military base, were victims of various torture methods.

• Poland will pay two terror suspects allegedly tortured by the CIA. The Associated Press reports that the move is prompting outrage among many here who feel they are being punished for American wrongdoing. Europe’s top human rights court imposed the penalty against Poland, setting a Saturday deadline. Poland is now the only country in the world to face legal repercussions for the secret rendition and detention program which the CIA operated under then-President George W. Bush in several countries across the world after the 9/11 attacks. No other nation involved, from Pakistan and Thailand to Romania and Lithuania, has been held accountable.

• A trio of Senate Democrats is putting new pressure on CIA Director John Brennan to offer a full-throated apology for the agency’s searches through congressional records.

• Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) and Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii), who are all members of the Intelligence Committee, sent Brennan a letter on Friday calling his lack of a sufficient mea culpa in the year since the searches occurred “entirely unacceptable.”

• Seymour Hersh found himself in the middle of an F-5 shitstorm this week after breaking his biggest blockbuster story of the Obama Era, debunking the official heroic White House story about how Navy SEALs took out Osama Bin Laden in a daring, secret nighttime raid in the heart of Pakistan.

• According to Hersh’s account, OBL was given up by one of his Pakistani ISI prison wardens—our Pakistaini allies had been holding him captive since 2006, with backing from our Saudi allies, to use for leverage. Hersh’s account calls into question a lot of things, starting with the justification for the massive, expensive, and brutal US GWOT military-intelligence web, which apparently had zilch to do with taking out the most wanted terrorist in the world. All it took, says Hersh, was one sleazy Pakistani ISI turncoat walking into a CIA storefront in Islamabad, handing them the address to Bin Laden’s location, and picking up his $25 million bounty check. About as hi-tech as an episode of Gunsmoke.

• Seymour Hersh’s revelations about the systematic mis- representation by the Obama administration of how it brought Osama bin-Laden to bay are causing a stir. Justifiably so. For they puncture the carefully constructed myth of how America revenged itself and renewed itself through this act of righteous justice. Moreover, the unsavory account of chicanery in high places once again spotlights the deceit that now is the hallmark of how our government works.

• In the article titled ‘The Killing of Osama’, for the London Review of Books, Hersh has made many startling claims about the raid carried out by the Obama government to kill Osama.

• US journalist claims al-Qaeda leader held for five years by Pakistani intelligence

• Hersh vigorously defended his story in an interview with Business Insider earlier this week, saying the criticism was a symptom of “attack the messenger.”

• Those Bush-era interrogations involved techniques now widely considered torture, including waterboarding, sleep deprivation and stress positions. But even amid criticism of those techniques — the Obama Administration admitted last year that it did indeed overstep legal boundaries — the CIA had the bin Laden raid to tout as proof that the ends justified the means.

• NBC News has walked back its Monday report that a Pakistani intelligence officer provided the CIA with Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts a year before the U.S. raid in May 2011, a claim that ran counter to the Obama administration’s narrative of events but supported a key detail in an explosive new story by investigative reporter Seymour Hersh.

• The latest contribution is the journalist Seymour Hersh’s 10,000-word article in The London Review of Books, which attempts to punch yet more holes — very big ones — in both the Obama administration’s narrative and the Pakistani government’s narrative. Among other things, Hersh contends that the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, Pakistan’s military-intelligence agency, held Bin Laden prisoner in the Abbottabad compound since 2006, and that “the C.I.A. did not learn of Bin Laden’s whereabouts by tracking his couriers, as the White House has claimed since May 2011, but from a former senior Pakistani intelligence officer who betrayed the secret in return for much of the $25 million reward offered by the U.S.”

• POLICE investigating Scotland’s role in the interrogation and alleged torture of terror suspects by the CIA are pushing US senators to allow them full access to a recently declassified report.

• Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) again urged the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate the American Psychological Association’s (APA) complicity in the CIA torture program, following a new report in today’s New York Times. Internal emails obtained by Times reporter James Risen clearly show that the APA secretly modified its ethics policy to endorse psychologist participation in torture, with the aid of CIA and White House personnel.

• “This calculated undermining of professional ethics is unprecedented in the history of U.S. medical practice and shows how the CIA torture program corrupted other institutions in our society,” said Donna McKay, PHR’s executive director. “Psychologists must never use their knowledge of human behavior to harm or undermine individuals. The Justice Department must look into any crimes or violations that may have been committed. It’s equally critical for psychologists to reclaim the principles of their profession and to reassert the values of human rights in psychology.”

• PHR has repeatedly called on the APA to clarify its ties to the CIA torture program and its architects, including CIA contract psychologists James Mitchell (a former APA member) and Bruce Jessen. PHR said it looked forward to the findings of an independent investigation into the APA’s collusion with the CIA expected in summer 2015. In the meantime, there is sufficient evidence of wrongdoing to warrant a Department of Justice investigation.

• In the fall of 2014, the publication of James Risen’s Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War put the American Psychological Association on the hot seat. The Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter alleged that, after 9/11, the APA’s leadership colluded with the Bush administration to craft ethics policies permitting psychologists to participate in coercive and abusive “war on terror” detention and interrogation operations. The APA was quick to deny any wrongdoing.

• By the end of April, the heat under the APA was turned up another notch by the release and detailed analysis of several previously confidential emails obtained by Risen. These emails, from a much larger trove of hundreds, include correspondence between senior APA officials and members of the intelligence community from 2003 to 2006. Several emails involving one individual in particular – psychologist Kirk Hubbard – go a long way toward undermining the APA’s indignant protestations of innocence.

• A lawyer for a navy nurse who refused to force-feed prisoners on hunger strike at the US base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, says his client will not be formally punished.

• Over half a century ago, the South Korean government banned the word “labor” from the Korean language. The US Military Government in Korea had already banned labor unions, labor strikes, the labor party, all things popular and labor; anything hinting of or leading towards the independent collectivist government that the people desired and wanted. Following the lead of the US Military government in Korea, the newly installed puppet government went even further, excising the word “labor” (“nodong”) from the national lexicon: until recently, in South Korea, it was hard to speak of labor laws, labor safety, labor contracts, labor conditions, or labor in any context. South Koreans, when they have to speak of labor, get by with an unwieldy prescriptive neologism, “diligent work” (“Kunlo”), or other contrived, borrowed words.

• Michael Yi, a former intelligence analyst for U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, talks with the Korea JoongAng Daily on April 28 in Seoul. By Park Sang-moon There were a number of coup attempts during the 1990’s against Pyongyang’s regime instigated from within its elite, one of which involved 11 military officials who graduated from the Frunze Military in Moscow, according to a former U.S. spy agency official.

• A Korean-American scientist was released from prison Tuesday after serving 10 months on a conviction of passing classified information about North Korea to a reporter in a case that has sparked criticism that the U.S. government applied double standards.

• The Senate on Monday unanimously passed a resolution calling on Iranian officials to immediately release three Americans held in Iran and help locate a fourth.

• The CIA’s Phoenix program changed how America fights its wars and how the public views this new type of political and psychological warfare, in which civilian casualties are an explicit objective.

• The CIA created Phoenix in Saigon in 1967 to identify the civilian leaders and supporters of the National Liberation Front; and to detain, torture, and kill them using every means possible, from B-52 raids and “Cordon and Search” operations, to computerized blacklists, secret torture centers, and death squads.

• Formerly incarcerated CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou says that torture is being practiced in the United States’ prison system.

• After I blew the whistle on the CIA’s torture program in 2007, the fallout for me was brutal. To make a long story short, I served nearly two years in federal prison and then endured a few more months of house arrest.

• My last hour at Loretto was a little stressful, not because I was anxious to get out (although I was), but because of a little troll who tried to set me up just as I was leaving. The details aren’t important, other than to say that this prison employee was furious when I wouldn’t take her bait. She taunted me and threatened to put me in solitary because I asked to go to the release office at a time other than a formal “move.” And when I just repeated, “I’m not going to let you set me up. I’m going home and you can’t stop me,” she blew me a cynical kiss. (This secretary, the sister and daughter of Corrections Officers, has a reputation for sending prisoners to solitary for “leering” at her. Take my word for it. She’s nothing to leer at.)

• She taunted me and threatened to put me in solitary because I asked to go to the release office at a time other than a formal “move.” And when I just repeated, “I’m not going to let you set me up. I’m going home and you can’t stop me,” she blew me a cynical kiss. (This secretary, the sister and daughter of corrections officers, has a reputation for sending prisoners to solitary for “leering” at her.)

• In February, after serving two years in a federal prison in Loretto, Pennsylvania, Kiriakou was permitted to serve the remainder of his sentence under house arrest at his home in Northern Virginia. Under the terms of his release from prison, he was required to check in daily at a local halfway house in Washington, DC until May 1 of this year. He’s now on federal probation.

• A government psychologist who helped craft policies central to the CIA’s torture program is now advising an FBI-led interrogation project, according to a series of emails revealed in a new independent report.

• Susan Brandon, the former White House psychologist who helped write the policies that protected former CIA torturers from prosecution is now advising an FBI interrogation project called The High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group.

• The United States has failed to fulfill its human rights commitments by not bringing to justice those responsible for systematic torture by the CIA, a lawyer for Guantanamo Bay detainees told Sputnik Wednesday.

• The public exposure in mid-2004 of a government-sanctioned and highly bureaucratized program of torture and cruel treatment caused a political crisis that threatened to derail the Bush administration’s interrogation and detention policies. In the wake of that crisis, some American Psychological Association (APA) senior staff members and leaders colluded, secretly, with officials from the White House, Defense Department and CIA to enable psychologists’ continuing participation in interrogations at CIA black sites, Guantánamo, and other overseas facilities. One result of this collusion was a revision in 2005 of the APA’s code of ethics for interrogations in order to provide cover for psychologists working in these facilities.

• At this point we all know that, in President Obama’s words, “We tortured some folks.” The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s report on the CIA’s rendition, detention, and interrogation program revealed shocking abuses that went far beyond even the torture that the administration had authorized. The Senate report represents a victory for transparency.

• The BND spy service provided a tip-off that bin Laden was hiding in Pakistan, with the knowledge of Pakistani security services, according to the Bild am Sonntag report, which was published as the agency is battling heavy criticism in a spy scandal.

• Germany’s foreign intelligence agency gave important information to the US in its search for Osama bin Laden, according to a media report. Recent revelations of the agency’s operations have prompted heated debate.

• According to the German Bild am Sonntag newspaper, BND provided US intelligence services with information of “fundamental importance” to catch the terrorist leader.

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