● 09.13.15

● Links 13/9/2015: Enlightenment 0.19.10, Linux 4.3-rc1

Posted in News Roundup at 6:45 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Server

• The popular open-source Docker 1.8 Linux container engine got its second maintenance release a couple of days ago, bringing a great number of changes that we want to tell you all about in the next paragraphs.

• Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical, discusses the need for private cloud and why virtualization alone is not enough.

• As new forms of virtualization, including Docker containers, gain in popularity, there is a reoccurring discussion in technology circles about the continued relevance of the private cloud. There are multiple tools and techniques to manage virtualization, including both hypervisors and containers, yet there is still a place and a need for the private cloud, and in particular OpenStack, according to Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical, the lead commercial sponsor of Ubuntu Linux.

Kernel Space

• So it’s been fairly quiet today (which is normal: there tends to be a small rush of stuff on the last Friday of the merge window is closing, but weekends tend to calm down), and I decided that I’m not interested in catering to anything that comes in tomorrow, and I might as well just close the merge window and do the -rc1 release.

• Every once in a while somebody comes up with an idea for a “new and improved” interface, and the project ends up falling flat on its face. Linus Torvald’s recently expressed his frustration with such things.

• Linus Torvalds has closed the merge window for Linux 4.3 by releasing Linux 4.3-rc1 a day earlier than the normal release cycle.

• And so it begins! The development cycle of the next major version of the great Linux kernel, the core component of each and every GNU/Linux operating system, kicked off on September 12, 2015, with the first RC (Release Candidate) build.

• ZFS On Linux 0.6.5 was released this week with support for the new Linux 4.2 kernel and a variety of new features.

Graphics Stack

• After three RC (Release Candidate) builds, the final release of Mesa 3D Graphics Library 11.0.0 is here, as announced earlier today, September 12, 2015, by Emil Velikov on the Mesa Announce mailing list.

• Mesa 11.0 has been officially released this morning! Mesa 11.0 is a huge, unbelievable upgrade for open-source graphics drivers.

• Mesa 11.0 brings core Mesa support for OpenGL 4.2, RadeonSI and Nouveau NVC0 OpenGL 4.1 support (the other hardware drivers remain at OpenGL 3.3), AMDGPU kernel driver support along with initial R9 Fury/Fiji support, EGL 1.5 support, ongoing OpenGL ES 3.1 work, OpenCL compute image support, HEVC video decode support for RadeonSI via VDPAU, OpenGL ES 3.0 for Freedreno, and many fixes.

Applications

• Today we are releasing 5.0.1, 4.4.10, and 4.2.15. All releases fix a security issue found since the last release.

• Bugzilla 5.0.1 is our latest stable release. It contains several important bug fixes for the 5.0 branch.

• Bugzilla 4.4.10 and 4.2.15 are bug fix updates for the 4.4 branch and the 4.2 branch, respectively.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Cross of the Dutchman, an action adventure title developed and published on Steam by Triangle Studios, has also received a Linux version.

• I was very impressed with the recent Dirt Showdown port from VP, so let’s hope Feral do us proud with their racing game too. We need more of them that’s for sure, as we are pretty starved for decent racing games still.

• The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is a beautiful first person adventure game developed by a studio named The Astronauts and it looks like they are finally willing to take a closer look at Linux support.

• The Vanishing Of Ethan Carter Redux Moved To Unreal Engine 4, Still Has A Linux Port On The Table http://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/the-vanishing-of-ethan-carter-redux-moved-to-unreal-engine-4-still-has-a-linux-port-on-the-table.5935

Desktop Environments/WMs

• Looks to us like the lightweight and modern, yet not so popular Enlightenment open-source desktop environment for GNU/Linux operating system has a very active development cycle with many features being added every two-three weeks or so.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• We have 2015 and Android is a very important platform for (mobile) applications and developers. — This somehow could also have been written a year ago, and actually it was stated then by several people. Those people also started porting some first applications from the KDE/Linux world to the Android platform. Yet, when looking at what happened the last year, as of now, we only have KAlgebra, GCompris and (since recent) Marble Maps that are available on Android.

• KDE developers at Randa have made some progress on working to port KDE applications and libraries to Android.

• KDE developers have been working on porting of KDE on Android infrastructure. They’re working on a simple and easy to use build environment for this process, make development easy for new contributors, and are seeing what KDE Frameworks 5 libraries can be made available for Android.

• Just a quick note that the KDE-FreeBSD “bleeding edge” ports repository area51 has been updated to the most-recently-released KDE Frameworks 5.14.0 and Plasma Desktop 5.4.1.

• Marble’s base source code in this summer has become Android compatible. If you want an Android app can be built on the top of it. Any map can be loaded in, and all of the projections are available. It supports some plugins too.

• I just wrote a KDE Telepathy plugin that blinks the ThinkLight when you get an incoming message. Sounds almost useless, isn’t? Maybe not.

• KDE Frameworks 5.14.0 has just been announced by the KDE Community. The new version is now out and expected to hit repositories from all over the world very soon. Like many of the versions before it, the new Frameworks update is an important one, and it will have repercussions from now on.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

Distributions

New Releases

• After one week from the announcement of the Pinguy OS 14.04.3 Mini GNU/Linux distribution, the developers of the Ubuntu-based operating system had the great pleasure of announcing the release of Pinguy OS 14.04.3.

Screenshots/Screencasts

Arch Family

• We are close to our final release 15.09. One release candidate we will push out next Wednesday. With 15.09 we will keep Thus as our graphical installer.

• However, our focus will be more and more on the new big thing: Calamares.

• We will reach our second version of Calamares in early fall 2015. The Calamares team worked hard to approach this. One big change is now: you can re-use each module in several instances by using different configurations. We now use kpmcore library for the partitioning tool. Some effort will result in luks support for encrypting your installations. Also more and more distro-specific modules got added.

Red Hat Family

Fedora

Debian Family

• While it will be quite some time before seeing Debian 9.0 “Stretch”, the Debian Installer has put out their third alpha release already for Stretch.

• Debian 8 was just released earlier this year while new Debian Installer alphas have been quick to surface. Just shy of one month since the DI Stretch Alpha 2 is now the third alpha.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Ubuntu developers are working hard on the next OTA update for Ubuntu Touch, and they are preparing quite a few changes, some of them being for Mir and Unity 8.

Devices/Embedded

• iWedia, a leading provider of software solutions for TV devices to service operators and Consumer Electronics manufacturers, today announced that it has integrated its Linux-based Teatro-3.0 Set-Top Box (STB) software solution for IP-connected zappers on top of the next-gen hybrid STB of TELE System Communications.

• Advantech’s new 3.5-inch SBC based on Intel U-series 6th Gen Core CPUs will feature 4K video, three display outputs, dual GbE, SATA, and modular expansion.

• Following Intel’s launch of its 6th Gen Core (“Skylake”) processors last week, there was a wave of third-party announcements of computer-on-module (COM) and single-board computer (SBC) products that integrate the Skylake chips. Our subsequent coverage of half a dozen Skylake COMs briefly mentioned a pair of Skylake-based SBCs from Advantech: an AIMB-275 Mini-ITX SBC for which few details are currently revealed, and a 3.5-inch form-factor SBC called the “MIO-5272,” which is the subject of this post.

Phones

Nokia Back to Linux

• Back in 2013, Microsoft acquired Finnish phone manufacturer Nokia, who has been struggling to maintain its business afloat for quite some time.

• What you are seeing above is a canceled Nokia device known only as the ‘Nokia Reader’. While the details of the device are virtually nonexistent, the design looks to predate Nokia’s Lumia design aesthetic that surfaced in 2011.

• Evan Blass unveiled the image above with the simple tweet, “The Nokia Reader, circa 2013 “. Although Blass has a fairly reliable track record, the design looks much older, having looked to borrowed elements from the N900 released in 2009. If the 2013 date is accurate, it means that Nokia was designing a device that deviated heavily from their Lumia line of handsets. Naturally, the “Reader” moniker emblazon on the back of the device leads us to believe that this could have been a dedicated e-reader.

• Nokia is on a wait. The wait is for the arrival of year 2016. That’s when they are to get unchained from the smartphone licensing contract with Microsoft.

Android

• The newest Apple TV adds some long-awaited features to a device that hasn’t been updated since 2012, a lifetime in the world of streaming media.

• While Google’s first connected media platform, Google TV, didn’t catch on, Android has still become a powerhouse for media hubs thanks to the Amazon Fire TV and Android TV devices. Roku was one of the first dedicated media hub brands, and it’s gained in popularity thanks to an easy-to-use interface and hundreds of content channels. There’s also a slew of sticks you can just plug into the back of your HDTV, as well as smart HDTVs with built-in apps. A lot has changed in three years

• Just as you can never be too rich or too thin, your smartphone can never have enough battery life or storage. And while the runs-forever-on-a-single-charge phone is still just a fantasy, a Bay Area smartphone startup is hoping to make near-infinite storage a reality.

• Sure, the rose-gold iPhone 6S and 6S Plus are high on our wish list, but we’re not entirely convinced that’s enough to switch over from an Android. While they are definitely sleek and you can’t deny how amazing 3D Touch and Live Photos are, Android isn’t too far behind on some of this technology. Check out our guide to see if it’s worth it for you to make the switch.

Free Software/Open Source

Events

• Internet is this nice technology, who makes it possible to give a workshop even without being at a place. So yesterday I gave a workshop from Cambodia in Germany. But I had interesting expiriences with in Mumble did not work well, even its lighter and has good latency handling but Google hangout did work, I think Google has some priority in the network here, what is strange. But all participants from https://linux-statt-windows.org had fun in the workshop and learned something on the end.

Web Browsers

• Due to a heavy-handed approach to security Firefox, Chrome and Opera are causing problems. They block access to routers with inadequate SSL reporting the cryptic message, “Server has a weak ephemeral Diffie-Hellman public key”.

Mozilla

• Mozilla wants to keep Firefox profitable, and one of the means to do that is with ads. They can’t just slap them all over the place, so they are going to be shown in the tiles, where they should be the least problematic.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• LibreOffice Draw will not let you redesign a picture of a posing model so that it may go to print in a magazine. I doubt you will design the next generation of Airbus planes with it. But I can tell you it will go a long way in enabling you to draw charts, complex industrial schemas for plans and processes, and more simply, design graphical stuff anyone needs at some point in a business or a household (cards, menus, branding elements, process mapping, etc.)

Education

• We are surrounded by coding (often known as programming). That’s why all the cool kids are coding, or they should be. However, computer classes in the UK are dictated by the national curriculum, with students limiting their computing activities to learning applications such as Word and PowerPoint, and using the internet to help with their school work. However, learning how to use Microsoft Office is often of little or no interest to kids. They are motivated by interactive activities such as programming, as they like to make things to find out how they work.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• GNU gettext allows programs to produce messages in the user’s native language.

Openness/Sharing

• About a month ago the Blender folks released a new film project named Cosmic Laundromat.

• Two days ago the ffmpeg folks released version 2.8. I saw one of the changes was that for webm they are now defaulting to using the vp9 video codec and the opus audio codec. Previous releases defaulted to webm with vp8 and ogg.

Open Access/Content

• Well, FLOSS as textbooks anyway. Instead of post-secondary students paying >$100 per copy of a textbook they may only use for a year, they will be able to use on-line texts for the cost of access to the Internet. Indeed, Manitoba will forgo interest on students’ loans.

• Now, if only they figured out that taxpayers’ money could be saved by using FLOSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software) in IT… They have opened their eyes to see a bigger picture in education; perhaps IT will follow.

Programming

• Google’s latest open source offering, Bazel, automates the building and testing of software, along the lines of Ant or Maven.

• But Bazel, now out in beta, surpasses those solutions. It’s also language-agnostic, highly scalable, and able to generate builds that are bit-exact on both a developer’s machine and the build cluster.

• Languages like Scala and Go are benefiting from a tweaking of the Tiobe Index algorithm this month intended to eliminate spikes in rankings.

• Tiobe assesses language popularity via a formula that analyzes searches in popular search sites, such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Wikipedia. The improved algorithm addresses the number of outliers — “statistical noise” — per search engine, Tiobe said in its monthly report for September.

• Python 3.5.0 was released this morning with a number of major new features and other changes.

• Python 3.5 has improved zip application support, a new operator for matrix multiplication, a new mechanism for loading extension modules, coroutines with async and await syntax, and much more.

• Weblate is not only useful for translating software, it can help in translating any content. Let’s look where our users are using it.

• Software translation is the most usual use case. This is actually where Weblate was used for first time and still provides great support for that. As an example (and oldest project hosted in Weblate) you can look at phpMyAdmin, where Weblate also helps to keep in sync translation for different maintenance branches. It can also help you in using same terminology in command line utility and graphical one like it is done in Gammu and Wammu translations.

Leftovers

• A Philadelphia ambulance driver will face discipline after he was recorded texting while driving an injured patient to a hospital, according to the Associated Press.

• Still, YouPorn statistics seem to bear some resemblance to overall console popularity worldwide. Overall, YouPorn’s stats show 51% of visits coming from PlayStation, 39% from Xbox, and 10% from Wii systems. That’s decently close to the 50%/29%/20% split for PS4/XB1/Wii U sales in our latest analysis. The Wii’s poor showing makes sense when you consider that the Wii’s younger demographic may be underrepresented in porn site stats (The statistics also seem to lump together legacy systems with their current generation counterparts, so visits from the limited browsers on the Xbox 360, PS3, and original Wii could throw off current generation numbers).

Health/Nutrition

• A few facts will make the size and destructive power of this industry clear. Americans travelling to Africa make up more than 60% of the foreign-participated lion trophy hunts, according to John Jackson, president of the lobbying group Conservation Force. Eric Jensen, a University of Warwick professor who studies public engagement in wildlife issues, elaborates that the trophy industry caters to a certain need for dominance, of proving “masculinity” by hunting large animals.

• The current impasse between Jeremy Hunt and the medical profession over what the secretary of state likes to call 24/7 working in NHS hospitals is expected to come to a head this weekend. This says far more about political imperatives in Whitehall than it does about realities on hospital wards.

• Allow me to illustrate my argument referring to a patient recently admitted to our care. After lengthy discussions with the patient’s family, when all hope of recovery was extinguished, the medical team at the hospital where I am a cardiac surgeon switched off the artificial heart that had been supporting their mother, sister and daughter.

• To the best of his knowledge, Jim Smith never saw or handled Agent Orange on the Navy ship he served on during the Vietnam War.

• “I never sprayed the stuff, never touched the stuff,” said Smith, 65, who lives in Virginia Beach. “I knew later, vets started getting sick from it, but I didn’t think it had any impact on me.”

• It turns out, he might have been drinking it.

• The realization came in 2011 – almost 40 years after his one-year tour aboard the ammunition ship Butte – when Smith was diagnosed with prostate cancer and started doing some research.

• The CIA’s fake vaccination campaign meanwhile increased Taliban opposition to immunisation drives, which the militants say are cover for spying, and attacks on health teams have claimed 78 lives since December 2012.

Security

• Attackers successfully compromised U.S. Department of Energy computer systems more than 150 times between 2010 and 2014, a review of federal records obtained by USA TODAY finds.

• Developers of encrypted databases and security researchers are at loggerheads – and it’s over a study that claims property-preserving encrypted databases may be vulnerable to attack.

• A further 7,810 US-market Jeeps have been recalled following Fiat Chrysler Automobiles’ (FCA) after a new hacking exploit was found in the 2015 Jeep Renegade sports utility vehicle (SUV).

• FCA recalled vehicles affected by a software bug that provides a wireless entry point for hackers looking to take control of the vehicle.

• In a presidential field full of big personalities, John McAfee may be the most colorful candidate yet.

• The anti-virus software tycoon announced Tuesday he would run for President under his newly created Cyber Party, making cyber security and government surveillance the key tenets of his campaign.

• On the other hand, a raft of Chinese policies have emerged in the last two years that are meant to wean the country off foreign technology, and Internet blocks have kept out companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter.

• On an SELinux enabled machine, why does getenforce in a docker container say it is disabled?

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• On this fourteenth anniversary of 9/11, the day is best memorialized by reflecting on those 2,977 lives lost and pledging to do more for those survivors and first responders who remain. Much less fitting of a memorial is the 2001 AUMF, passed in the nation’s darkest hours, that still determines so much of American foreign policy today. Although the attacks must never be forgotten, the war must one day be ended. It is our job to begin thinking about what comes next.

• Another controversial byproduct of the attacks has been 9/11 tourism in New York City. The 9/11 Memorial and Museum in Manhattan has received millions of visitors, while guided tours of lower Manhattan are also daily events. The Freedom Tower and the recently opened One World Observatory, built on the site of the twin towers that were destroyed on 9/11, are also popular tourist destinations.

• Ms. Edmonds went to work for the FBI in the weeks following the 9/11 attacks. While under the employ of the State Agency she uncovered ongoing criminal operations implicating foreign nationals and high level US officials. When she tried to report on these revelations, she was told to shut up and eventually dispatched from the agency.

• Edmonds has reported instances of FBI foreknowledge of 9/11. For example, a disclosure by a long-term FBI informant to two FBI agents and a translator, which indicated a terrorist attack in US cities involving airplanes to take place within a few months. After the disclosure was forwarded to the Special Agent in Charge of Counter-terrorism at the Washington Field Office, no action was taken, and following 9/11, the agents and translator in question were told to keep quiet about the issue.

• Having just joined the “real” Foreign Service, I was assigned to Jeddah. There, I learned the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was a mysterious and exotic place — but nowhere near as exotic and mysterious as the American consulate general on Palestine Road.

• Upon arrival, I found, as a new visa officer, I was expected to winnow more than one hundred applications a day, separating them into “issuances,” “refusals,” and what turned out to be “free passes for CIA agents.”

• However, none of the clean-cut young fellows at the consulate, or even the pudgy, “been around too many blocks” types, bothered to clue me in on this special class of applicants.

• One day, Eric Qualkenbush, the CIA Base Chief, stopped me while I was walking on the consulate’s huge compound. He had a request. Could I issue a visa to one of his agents, an Iranian whose family owned an Oriental rug store? Eric said, “Mike, make it look good (wink, wink). We want him in Washington for consultations.”

• Flabbergasted, I said, “Sure.” Up to that point, I had had almost a daily battle with Jay Freres, the Consul General, along with other CIA officials, who demanded visas for peculiar people, that is, people whom law and regulation required me to refuse.

• Michael Springmann was, to all appearances, your run-of-the-mill junior level consular employee, but he was not in a usual place, nor in a usual time. His government sent him to Saudi Arabia right as it was preparing for a battle royale with the USSR in Afghanistan. In this excerpt from his book, Springmann describes a consulate teeming with CIA personnel, and reveals how, as head of the American visa bureau, he was ordered not to follow his best instincts but instead to approve visas for all manner of dubious individuals. In retrospect, he realized he was witnessing the mujahideen pipeline — the flow of young fighters to take on the Soviets — the same people who later became al-Qaeda.

• I saw, but didn’t recognize, what was taking shape at Jeddah. Now we’ve all learned what happens when the intelligence services control foreign policy and diplomacy: The same “assets” they assembled aided in the bloody breakup of Yugoslavia, the destruction of Iraq, the collapse of Libya, and the on-going savaging of Syria.

• THE leading candidiate in Guatemala’s presidential election has links to an alleged war criminal, the country’s media has revealed.

• With almost 80 per cent of polling stations having reported, National Convergence Front candidate Jimmy Morales (below) was leading the field of 14 candidates yesterday with 26 per cent of the vote.

• Oscar-winning doc maker Michael Moore on Thursday took aim at the problems he sees impacting America by looking to Europe and other liberal cultures for answers.

• “What if we showed fellow Americans that what we don’t have, and others do,” Moore said as he discussed his politically charged film Where to Invade Next at its world premiere during the Toronto Film Festival.

• His comic doc showed Moore completing “invasions” of mostly European countries to bring back to the U.S. solutions like better elementary school meals from France, free education in Slovenia, decriminalizing drug use as in Portugal and putting more women in power.

• Security researchers have discovered that a Russian cyber espionage group has been hijacking satellite-based internet links to hide their activities, which include stealing information from diplomats and government agencies around the world.

• According to security firm Kaspersky Lab, a sophisticated group of hackers from Russia called ‘Turla’ has been quietly using satellite-based internet links to conduct their business, as it is much easier to avoid detection.

• Yes, I think the accord with Iran, whose goal is to stop that country from ever getting a nuclear weapon, is a good one and I applaud our congressman, Seth Moulton for backing it. This accord is the result of two years worth of negotiations and it is not a bilateral but a multi-lateral “deal,” hammered out between Iran and Russia, China, France, the U.S., the United Kingdom and Germany. To be against this agreement is to say that all six countries negotiating with Iran are making a mistake. I don’t think so.

• Conservative media seized on the fourteenth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks to stoke fears that the Iran nuclear agreement will create new opportunities for terrorist attacks. But experts have pointed out the deal keeps in place “sanctions related to Iran’s human rights abuses and support for groups linked to terrorism,” and that terrorists would actually benefit more if the agreement were rejected.

• Moving forward, we must begin the essential job of restoring trust between patriotic supporters and equally patriotic opponents of this agreement.

• This flexible strategy, Obama’s version of former President Bill Clinton’s “triangulation” strategy, if you will, has paid solid dividends. This week, Senate Democrats blocked a disapproval resolution of the Iran nuclear deal, an accord that might be Obama’s most significant foreign policy achievement of his second term. In June, Congress gave him authority to negotiate a series of trade deals at the center of his economic agenda.

• But the arrangements made between Iran and the IAEA are “standard operating procedure” and are confidential, as is “every such agreement the IAEA has with other countries” — and those agreements are not subject to congressional approval. Reporting on the the House of Representatives’ vote to reject the Iran nuclear deal, network reporter Doug McKelway repeated the GOP’s debunked claim without noting this, saying that “What’s lacking is this side deal, the two side deals between the IAEA and Iran, which nobody in this legislature has yet seen.”

• In the early 1980s, I was stationed in Geneva, Switzerland, handling legal affairs for my employer in the Middle East and Africa. It was a period of many enlightening experiences that have given me some perspective on recent events.

• My first task was to prepare a claim against the Islamic Republic of Iran, seeking compensation for the 1979 nationalization of my company’s assets. Later I negotiated with Iranian representatives at the Iranian Embassy in Vienna, Austria, to settle the claim. Iran’s chief negotiator wore casual western clothes and was educated in Texas. Many Iranians were educated in the U.S. in the 1970s.

• Our European businesspeople in Geneva were not enthusiastic about making this claim. Iran was the most populous country in the region; they just wanted to do business there.

• Untold amounts of money will pour into the presidential race. That’s because the governmental system that we now have in the United States — a welfare-warfare state — is a money-making racket for hundreds of thousands of people who are on the dole, either directly or indirectly. Much of the big money that will pour into the presidential campaign coffers will be accompanied by the hope of getting a share of the trillions of dollars of welfare-warfare state largess that is provided by the taxpayers.

• Osama bin Laden had a story, as well. It’s a story about the US teaching him in Afghanistan many years ago how to upend and defeat a superpower, about how he used that training against his teachers, about how he facilitated our entry into two fruitless and costly wars that decimated our economy while shredding untold millions, and about how his actions created the crass impetus to make us abandon our freedoms and our constitutional privileges in the name of fear. Were he still among the living, his story would be two words long: “I won.”

• It could be ISIS. Maybe.

• US spy chief James Clapper, best known for lying to Congress about NSA surveillance, is now riled up about refugees “descending on Europe,” saying that even though there’s no evidence of it, he’s super, super worried that those refugees might turn out to be ISIS fighters just sneaking in.

• Which is a great story for scaring people, but makes zero sense. In addition to not being backed by any evidence, it vilifies the people fleeing from ISIS and the war surrounding its rise.

• I’m certain that there are plenty of moments during his eight-year presidential tenure that George W. Bush would love to forget. Somewhere near the top of that list would likely be the comedic trouncing he got in 2006, when Stephen Colbert slammed him at the White House Correspondents Dinner. Presidents always receive perhaps more than their fair share of intense scrutiny via jokes, and another Bush is about to enter Colbert’s politically whip-smart comic hand. Jeb Bush, presidential candidate and younger brother to George W., will be the first guest on the new Late Show hosted by Colbert on Tuesday. And Colbert is not likely to pull any punches.

• Colbert will likely have plenty of fodder for his meeting with Bush, as he’s recently fallen significantly in the polls in both Iowa and New Hampshire. According to Yahoo News, Bush now stands at only six percent in Iowa, and did not even make it into the top three in the polls in New Hampshire. (Trump leads, followed by John Kasich and then Dr. Ben Carson.) Colbert went after President Bush in 2006 for his 32 percent approval rating, saying that if you think of it as the glass being only 2/3 full, there is still liquid in the glass — but he wouldn’t drink it, because the last third of a drink is “mostly backwash.” So what will Colbert make of Bush’s six-percent-full glass?

• Very, very funny. 95% of the people in that room believe in nothing whatsoever that Corbyn believes in. He should beware polonium in his tea. BBC man saying he had just been told by a “senior Laboour figure” Corbyn could be ousted within a year.

• The media is astonishing today in its barrage against Jeremy Corbyn.

• I am unreservedly delighted at Jeremy Corbyn’s election. He made a quite excellent speech, specifically rejecting an attack on Syria, marketization in the NHS and the new anti-union legislation. Hopefully the scale of his victory will give pause to the Blairites who will realise they are not as all-important as they thought.

• Jeremy Corbyn has started work on putting together his shadow cabinet after his dramatic landslide victory in the Labour leadership contest.

• The veteran left winger – who has never held a formal position in the party before now – must also prepare for his first Commons clash with David Cameron.

• The new Labour leader has promised to “unite” the party after getting 60% of the votes in the leadership contest.

• For the past month Jeremy Corbyn, the British MP and democratic socialist who just won the election to lead the UK’s Labour Party in a landslide, has been vociferously accused across the British media of associating with political figures who are anti-Semitic.

• “The problem,” according to the Community Security Trust, a UK Jewish organization, “is not that Corbyn is an anti-Semite or a Holocaust denier — he is neither. The problem is that he seems to gravitate towards people who are, if they come with an anti-Israel sticker on them.” Similarly, political journalist James Bloodworth wrote in the Guardian, “While I genuinely believe Corbyn does not have an anti-Semitic bone in his body, he does have a proclivity for sharing platforms with individuals who do.” The right-wing Telegraph got so excited it falsely claimed that another Labour MP had accused Corbyn himself of using “anti-Semitic rhetoric.”

• Corbyn was forced to repeatedly respond in several venues. Beyond addressing the specific issues, he’s made several statements such as, “I’ve spent my life opposing racism. Until my dying day, I’ll be opposed to racism in any form … Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, far-right racism is totally wrong and absolutely obnoxious and I’ve made that absolutely clear to everybody who will listen to me on this subject.” And Corbyn’s spokesman said that anyone found by the Labour Party’s procedures committee to be responsible for anti-Semitism should not be allowed to vote in the leadership election.

• The ship, now called GSF Explorer, had been retrofitted for oil drilling and exploration since it left US Navy service in 1997. But with the price of oil falling worldwide, its owner Transocean has decided to scrap it, along with several other vessels.

• The outlawing of narcotic drugs at the start of the Twentieth Century, the turning of the matter from public health to social control, coincided with American’s imperial Open Door policy and the belief that the government had an obligation to American industrialists to create markets in every nation in the world, whether those nations liked it or not.

• The newspaper notes that the CIA and the Pentagon kill the leaders of Daesh by bombing them with drones. It observes that this new CIA mission seems to contradict President Obama’s precedent directives, which state that the CIA should concentrate on espionnage and leave military matters to the Pentagon alone.

• Reports were cited that MI6 had cooperated with the CIA on a “rat line” of arms transfers from Libyan stockpiles to the Syrian rebels in 2012 after the fall of the Gaddafi regime.

• UK military personnel are suspected of having participated in the CIA’s controversial drone war in Pakistan, which has resulted in thousands of fatalities.

• The Ministry of Defence has declined to answer a Freedom of Information request that would confirm whether its personnel have been embedded with US military teams operating drones in the skies above the country. The MoD said that it would neither confirm nor deny the situation because it might jeopardise “international relations”.

• However, it insisted that the UK had never conducted its own drone flights over Pakistan. When pressed, an MoD spokesman said: “UK personnel embedded with the US air force have only flown remotely piloted aircraft systems in support of operations in Afghanistan, Libya and Iraq.”

• Last month, a Kentucky man shot down a drone that was hovering near his backyard.

• WDRB News reported that the camera drone’s owners soon showed up at the home of the shooter, William H. Merideth: “Four guys came over to confront me about it, and I happened to be armed, so that changed their minds,” Merideth said. “They asked me, ‘Are you the S-O-B that shot my drone?’ and I said, ‘Yes I am,’” he said. “I had my 40 mm Glock on me and they started toward me and I told them, ‘If you cross my sidewalk, there’s gonna be another shooting.’” Police charged Meredith with criminal mischief and wanton endangerment.

• This is a trend. People have shot down drones in southern New Jersey and rural California as well. It’s illegal, and they get arrested for it.

• The CIA’s inspector general is examining whether an agency drone picked up an image of an American hostage in Pakistan months before he was accidentially killed by a CIA drone strike — and whether the agency therefore missed a chance to save him, U.S. officials briefed on the matter say.

• Iraq and Syria may have been permanently torn asunder by war and sectarian tensions, the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency said Thursday in a frank assessment that is at odds with Obama administration policy.

• “I’m having a tough time seeing it come back together,” Lt. Gen. Vincent Stewart told an industry conference, speaking of Iraq and Syria, both of which have seen large chunks territory seized by the Islamic State.

• On Iraq, Stewart said he is “wrestling with the idea that the Kurds will come back to a central government of Iraq,” suggesting he believed it was unlikely. On Syria, he added: “I can see a time in the future where Syria is fractured into two or three parts.”

• What’s REALLY behind this shift of the masses? The latest “self-induced” calamity, the “refugee crisis” as it is called, is simply more “blowback” from some really bad U. S. foreign policy decisions made post 9/11. And not surprisingly as with most international crises, the globalist elites running this planet have their fingerprints all over the events leading up to this debacle.

• Two key events orchestrated by the elites to accomplish this enormous human dislocation catastrophe were the 2003 Iraq War and the 2011 Arab Spring. The former destroyed Iraq’s government and infrastructure, thus paving the way for future terrorist groups including ISIS. Iraq split into three warring factions after the removal of Saddam Hussein; Sunni, Shia and Kurd. The Arab Spring facilitated the take down of Libya and several other African nations. Had it not been for the intervention of the Egyptian military, Egypt would have been in total chaos also. The foregoing events created massive nation state destabilization in North Africa and the Mid-East. And this destabilization caused the present “refugee crisis”.

• The problematic suggestion made recently by former CIA Director Gen. Petraeus to use al-Qaeda to fight the Islamic State is yet another example of the basic flaw in the thinking of some senior American officials. Traditionally, US strategists have always preferred “good terrorists” who supported their policies against “bad terrorists”.

• Some Republican presidential hopefuls—plus Colin Powell—are trying to shift responsibility for the Iraq War away from Bush administration politicians by blaming the U.S. intelligence community. This is only part of the real story. The rest, which the hoary old intelligence argument is meant to shove off-stage, involved a pre-war PR campaign led by Bush administration hawks like Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. This robust effort to create a case for war involved intelligence that was only partly flawed. It also involved, pushing the envelope on WMD intelligence that was flawed, ignoring solid intelligence on terrorism (including 9/11) not linked to Iraq, and creating their own lurid terrorism pseudo-intelligence to replace the real thing.

• Back in May, Jeb Bush conceded, “knowing what we know now…I would not have gone into Iraq.” However, much like President George W. Bush in his 2010 memoir Decision Points, Jeb placed the blame on faulty intelligence. Republican candidates Ted Cruz and Carly Fiorina also have said that defective intelligence drove the war. Because of years of such deception, many Americans still accept this flawed narrative.

• Powell supported this canard on last Sunday’s Meet the Press when he said: “But the intelligence community, all 16 agencies, assured us that it was right.” Setting the record straight on Powell’s claim is important because he generally has more credibility than most other former Bush administration officials and current Republican presidential hopefuls.

• In 1973, the overseas vote was again padded; proxy and postal voting gave the dead, under-aged, and fictional a say, while disenfranchising real people. Fatal violence also scarred that election. In Berbice, a PPP stronghold of rice farmers, fishermen, and cane cutters, a skirmish erupted when party activists tried to escort ballot boxes to counting stations. The army shot dead two Indo-Guyanese poll workers, who became known as the “Ballot Box Martyrs.” In atelegram, U.S. Embassy officials told the State Department that boxes had likely been stuffed while at army headquarters: “As U.S. had in past devoted much time, effort and treasure to keeping Jagan out,” it read, “we should perhaps not be too disturbed at results this election.”

• Since the World Trade Center bombings, our democracy has come undone. The terrorists accomplished their mission

• Seven weeks after the end of the massive cleanup at Ground Zero in lower Manhattan in 2002, a legal investigator for the families of 9/11 victims requested a copy of an arrest warrant issued by Interpol for fugitive al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden.

• Here’s the reply she got from the Justice Department’s Interpol-U.S. National Central Bureau:

• “Release of information about a living person without that person’s consent generally constitutes an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy in violation of the Freedom of Information Act. You must submit an authorization [privacy waiver] signed by Osama bin Laden, consenting to the USNCB’s release to you of any record that it may have pertaining to him.”

• The extent of Pakistan’s complicity in bin Laden’s extremism was documented in a secret addendum to the 9/11 Commission Report, requested by executive director Philip Zelikow three months before publication, but which arrived too late for inclusion.

• Based on sensitive Pakistani sources, the addendum concluded that senior ISI officers had known in advance about the 9/11 attacks, were protecting bin Laden in Pakistan, and that Pervez Musharraf had personally approved his renal treatment at a military hospital near Peshawar.

• Like the classified 28 pages, these findings remain suppressed by the US government.

• Why then, even as the US unleashes new 9/11s around the world, does it support the very regimes behind the 9/11 attacks?

• Because the “War on Terror” is a colossal fiction. In reality, terror is the price of business as usual: and the US is all too willing to pay.

• Also on September 12, less than 24 hours after the attacks, NATO invoked for the first time in its history “Article 5 of the Washington Treaty – its collective defence clause” declaring the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center (WTC) and the Pentagon “to be an attack against all NATO members.”

• What happened subsequently, with the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq is already part of history. Iran and Syria constitute the next phase of the US adminstration’s military roadmap.

• For many Chileans, September 11th had become a day of tragedy decades before our own 9/11. In 1973, the Chilean army flew fighter jets over Santiago and bombed its own presidential palace during a coup to overthrow its own legally elected president, Salvador Allende.​ Augusto Pinochet, who Allende had appointed to Commander-in-Chief of the army, seized power, put all political parties “in recess” and killed, tortured, disappeared and forced into exile thousands of Chileans. This was supported by the CIA, Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon. Pinochet would remain in power until 1990.

• There are two 9/11’s: one that we all know of and a second, older and neglected aerial assault that took place on Santiago, Chile, when Air Force jets bombed the La Moneda presidential palace and replaced an elected president with a military dictatorship that lasted close to two decades.

• The September 11 attack of 1973 ended with the death of Salvador Allende, Latin America’s first elected Socialist president. Three years earlier, Allende, a talented athlete in his youth and a trained doctor, had narrowly won the presidential elections after three unsuccessful attempts at the head of the Popular Unity coalition that included Socialists of many hues, Communists and breakaway Christian Democrats.

• Sept. 11 of course marks the terrible anniversary of the 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center Twin Towers in New York City by al-Qaida. The attack resulted in 3,000 deaths and several wars. However, many in Latin America alive in 1973 will remember the date 9/11 for another reason.

• Forty-two years ago in Chile, armed forces overthrew the sitting president Salvador Allende, which led to the immediate rise of the right wing dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet. Allende, a promoter of socialism, subsequently committed suicide under suspicious circumstances inside the presidential palace of La Moneda.

• Hillary Clinton backed the Obama administration’s Iran nuclear deal during a speech in Washington on Wednesday, but did so by taking a cautious tone she defined as “distrust and verify.”

• If my own educational experience is any indication, Oliver is right. I graduated from a public high school in Michigan knowing very little about Africa. This proved to be something of a problem when I moved to Cape Town, South Africa, to cover the 2010 World Cup and began traveling around the continent as a reporter.

• Five years and many stories later, I’ve filled much of my knowledge gap. So, to my fellow undereducated Americans — especially you students — here is a crash course in Africa. It’s the basics, plus some trivia that will prove your worldliness at future cocktail parties.

• Russia is to deliver the Kornet-EM long-range anti-tank guided missile systems to international customers.

• Shane also points out ironies. Awlaki’s elimination made clear that Obama, who had campaigned against the Bush administration’s terror-war tactics, had accepted such “targeted killing.” And though that drone strike did kill Awlaki, it didn’t end Awlaki’s radicalization of others; his online calls to jihad influenced the perpetrators of the Boston Marathon bombing and the Charlie Hebdo massacre in France, among others.

• Incorporating information from scores of interviews — with Awlaki’s family, acquaintances and tribal leaders in Yemen, and with current and former U.S. officials and experts on terrorism, radicalization and drone warfare — “Objective Troy” provides much to ponder about how the terror war has affected America, its people and others around the globe.

• The US military said it would launch an investigation into an airstrike last week that Afghan officials say killed 11 members of Afghanistan’s elite counter-narcotics police force.

• They are called “boneyards” by military personnel, but they aren’t human ossuaries. Instead, they are graveyards for machines that kill.

• After the military-industrial complex’s life-destroying aircraft complete their mission of death and decimation, they are replaced by newly designed Molochs of the sky. The multi-billion dollar equipment that is being phased out has to go somewhere – and most US military planes end up in what are nicknamed “boneyards.” Generally, these are enormous swaths of desert in the Southwest of the United States.

• The Labour leadership candidate and shadow home secretary said the Prime Minister’s promise to accept 20,000 Syrian refugees by May 2020 drawn from camps around the war-torn country paled in comparison to historic British efforts.

• The U.S. Air Force is giving an ultimatum to owners of a remote Nevada property now surrounded by a vast bombing range including the super-secret Area 51: Take a $5.2 million “last best offer” by Thursday for their property, or the government will seize it.

• The United States seems to have finally understood that it is losing something in the Arctic; but instead of mobilizing its resources for the development of the region, it has opted to build up its spy network there to watch and listen to what the others are doing, especially Russia.

• LETHAL AUTONOMOUS weapons — robots that can select, attack, and destroy targets without human intervention — have been called the third revolution in warfare, after gunpowder and nuclear arms. While some ridicule the notion of killer robots as “science fiction,” more knowledgeable sources such as the British Ministry of Defence say they are “probably feasible now.” We are not talking about cruise missiles or remotely piloted drones, but about, for example, flying robots that search for human beings in a city and eliminate those who appear to meet specified criteria.

• [...]

• Autonomous weapons are completely different from human soldiers and would be used in completely different ways — as weapons of mass destruction, for example. Moreover, even if ethically adequate robots were to become available, there is no guarantee they would be used ethically.

• The CIA kept other agencies in the dark about its investigation into whether Israel received uranium from a U.S. company, records given to a researcher show.

• Many of the file memos record CIA briefings in the late 1970s to members of Congress inquiring whether the diversion was a covert CIA operation. Arizona Democrat Morris Udall asked bluntly on August 23, 1977 “Is it possible that President Johnson, who was known to be a friend of Israel, could have encouraged the flow of nuclear materials to the Israelis?”

• According to formerly top-secret and secret Central Intelligence Agency files (PDF) released August 31 in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit (PDF), the agency’s long retention of key information ultimately stymied two FBI investigations into the 1960s diversion of weapons-grade uranium from a Pennsylvania-based government contractor into the Israeli nuclear weapons program.

• The Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (NUMEC) was a nuclear fuel processing company founded by legendary chemist Zalman Mordecai Shapiro and financed by entrepreneur David Luzer Lowenthal. According to the Department of Energy, during Shapiro’s reign at NUMEC, the company lost more weapons-grade uranium – 337 kilograms after accounting for losses – much of a particularly unique and high enrichment level than any other U.S. facility. Losses only returned to industry norms after Shapiro, who later unsuccessfully tried to get a job working on advanced hydrogen bomb designs, was forced out of NUMEC.

Transparency Reporting

• Fourteen years of wars, interventions, assassinations, torture, kidnappings, black sites, the growth of the American national security state to monumental proportions, and the spread of Islamic extremism across much of the Greater Middle East and Africa. Fourteen years of astronomical expense, bombing campaigns galore, and a military-first foreign policy of repeated defeats, disappointments, and disasters. Fourteen years of a culture of fear in America, of endless alarms and warnings, as well as dire predictions of terrorist attacks.

• On a Friday night last June, the CIA quietly released an internal accountability report focusing on the lead-up to the September 11 terrorist attacks.

• The declassified report was not new. Titled “Office of Inspector General Report on Central Intelligence Agency Accountability Regarding Findings and Conclusions of the Report of the Joint Inquiry Into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001,” it had first been released in 2007 in a heavily redacted state. The version released last June, however, had far fewer redactions — and also included never-before-seen rebuttal letters from then-CIA Director George Tenet.

• Almost half a century ago, Ralph Nader declared that “A well-informed citizenry is the lifeblood of democracy; and in all areas of government, information, particularly timely information, is the currency of power.” These days, there is almost universal support for this view on the left, right, and center of the political spectrum.

• The phrase “a right to know” dates back to the Constitutional Convention of 1787. But, according to Michael Schudson, a professor of journalism at Columbia University, the concept “has not always been accepted, let alone applauded.” In The Rise of the Right to Know, Schudson argues that disclosure was a key component of public policy in the 1960s and ’70s – and that despite the hazards of transparency, “its expansion has made our politics more worthy of the name ‘democracy.’”

• WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange claimed that the group has not released any information that can help the Islamic State group but emphasised that he would not pass up an opportunity to publish drone attacks information in Syria if available. Furthermore, the Australian said that poor media coverage is one of the reasons the terror organisation grew as it is at present.

• Assange’s statement came following the announcement of British Prime Minister David Cameron about the killing of British ISIS Reyaad Khan. The Royal Air Force drone killed the individual in Syria last August. Cameron maintained that the strike was more of an act of self-defence rather than an attack. He also said that Khan was connected to “barbaric” attacks in Britain.

• WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says the whistleblowing group hasn’t published anything to assist the Islamic State group (IS) but he would “absolutely” publish leaked information on drone attacks into Syria if offered it.

• The 44-year-old Australian on Tuesday partly blamed poor media coverage for the rise of the terror organisation.

• The comments came a day after British Prime Minister David Cameron said a Royal Air Force drone had killed British jihadist Reyaad Khan in Syria last month.

• He says that Clinton really should have known better, suggesting that “anyone who has the clearances that the Secretary of State has, or the director of any top level agency has, knows how classified information should be handled”.

• Negotiators had hoped to conclude the big Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement at the last negotiation round, thinking that since the US had finally granted fast track, all the obstacles were moved out of the way. That didn’t happen, leading many to wonder if the entire agreement is doomed. However, as EFF recently explained there’s still a ton going on behind the scenes (or, rather, behind closed doors). That discussion notes that the USTR has appointed one of its own top lawyers, Tim Reif, to be the USTR’s new “chief transparency officer.” Of course, giving lawyers new titles and actually being transparent are two very separate things.

• A CIA official claims Hillary Clinton’s personal emails included information about North Korean nukes, but Clinton insists she ‘did not send or receive any information marked classified.’

• According to a report from The New York Times, a special intelligence review of two emails that Hillary Clinton received as secretary of state backs the inspector general finding that the emails contained highly classified information.

• The special review conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency found that the emails, sent in 2009 and 2011 were “Top Secret.” The Clinton campaign and State Department responded to the initial finding from the inspector general by questioning if the emails had been overclassified arbitrarily.

• A former CIA high flier convicted of drugging and sexually abusing a Muslim woman in Algeria sued the agency for not treating his PTSD, a condition he blames for his conduct.

• A former Central Intelligence Agency officer who pled guilty to drugging and sexually assaulting a local woman while he was stationed in Algeria is suing the spy agency and former CIA Director Leon Panetta for invasion of privacy.

• Lawyers for Andrew Warren filed the suit Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Washington, alleging that Panetta violated the Privacy Act and his duty to protect the identity of CIA officers when–in response to a question at his confirmation hearing in 2009–he acknowledged Warren’s employment by the agency.

• The suit, which seeks at least $4 million in damages, asserts that the public identification of Warren as a CIA officer caused him to receive threats.

• The CIA announced Wednesday that it will be releasing previously classified President’s Daily Brief (PDB) articles from the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson administrations at the LBJ Library in Austin, Texas.

• A couple suing over leaks in the federal investigation that led to CIA Director David Petraeus’ resignation intend to subpoena at least two journalists in an attempt to compel testimony about their sources, The Associated Press has learned.

• That legal strategy was driven by a judge’s decision in July to quash efforts by lawyers for Scott and Jill Kelley to question Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, who was the Defense Department’s general counsel at the time of the investigation.

• A top U.S. intelligence official confirmed that the Pentagon’s inspector general is investigating complaints that senior officials manipulated intelligence reports to create a more optimistic narrative on the fight against ISIS.

• Lt. Gen. Vincent Stewart, head of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), said Thursday that “the investigation will play itself out” and help “figure out if we did something wrong.”

• Trouble is brewing at US Central Command (Centcom), the Pentagon’s agency covering security interests in nations throughout the Middle East and Central Asia.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• In a rural town in western Pennsylvania, a set of vacant tracks leads to a cluster of trains, still and abandoned. Some are from Philadelphia and Cleveland, and others are shorter, green trolleys. Weather and time have covered them in rust, and trespassers have left their mark with spray paint, but if you look closely, you can still read their destination: North Station. They’re the Green Line cars that once ran up and down Commonwealth and Huntington avenues. The old trains sit in rows with no place to go, their wheels still in line with the tracks, trapped.

• A blanket of thick black dust has covered Lebanon, Syria, Israel, and Cyprus killing at least eight people.

• The choking air is causing respiratory problems and it is believed that more than a thousand have been hospitalised.

• Drone footage shows the thick blanket of dust looming over the holiday paradise of Cyprus.

• Expats say the “horrific” thick cloud has swallowed the mountains and the sea, and made it difficult to see any distance ahead.

• Annual spikes in mercury along the California coastline have been puzzling scientists for over two decades. Now, researchers think they know what’s causing these toxic increases: the fur of molting elephant seals.

Finance

• This new front in the long-running battle against money- laundering is opening as part of a broader U.S. crackdown on tax evasion. Taxpayers who seek amnesty under Internal Revenue Service disclosure programs are snitching on the incorporators, as well as naming Swiss banks and the bankers who aided them.

• More than 50,000 U.S. taxpayers have avoided charges since 2009 in the offshore tax evasion crackdown; the program required them to disclose which banks and advisers helped them hide assets, according to the U.S. Internal Revenue Service.

• “Leads have been pouring into the government with respect to offshore constructs that are available to help people do money laundering, and securities fraud and tax evasion, and all kinds of misdeeds,” said Miriam Fisher, global chair of Latham & Watkins LLP’s tax controversy practice and a former adviser to the assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s tax division.

• My conversation with General Hayden focused on my own specialty, market intelligence (MARKINT), and the ongoing financial wars between the U.S. and Russia and Iran. Hayden agreed with me that financial war will be a primary means of warfare in the twenty-first century. He referred to financial sanctions as “the PGMs of the twenty-first century;’” a reference to Precision Guided Munitions. In effect, asset freezes would replace cruise missiles as a way to disable an enemy.

• From 2011 until 2015, Cohen (Cornell ‘85) was the Under Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence. He was the driving force behind the U.S. Treasury Department’s increasingly sophisticated use of financial warfare against terrorists and the application of financial and trade sanctions against nations, including Russia and Iran, who are threatening vital interests of the United States and its allies. He also led the Department’s efforts to combat money laundering and financial crime.

• Wouldn’t it be great to get paid for commuting? A European court just made that wishful thinking a reality for some workers in Europe.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Trump’s penchant for insulting anyone in his path is now well-known (and often deplorable and sexist), though most candidates usually have to deliberately poke the bear for Trump to engage in his usual charade. But just about every day, Trump will go after Jeb unprompted – whether on Twitter or at campaign events or in interviews with journalists – with a voracity virtually never seen in primary politics. Oftentimes it’s substantive and other times it’s not, but it’s almost always delightful to watch.

• Trump will attack Jeb for his support for the Iraq War, but if Bush lightly criticizes George W Bush, Trump questions why he would throw his brother under the bus. Trump attacks Jeb for his record in Florida, rips him for his $1.3m “no show job” at Lehman Brothers after he left the governorship. He calls Jeb out for being “100% CONTROLLED” by his wealthy donors, and when a few donors recently left Jeb’s campaign, Trump made fun of him for that too.

• Europe appears ready to dust off the Mighty Wurlitzer. In early June, the Czech daily Hospodářské Noviny was first to report the European Union was forming “a special group to fight Russian propaganda.”[8] Based in Brussels, the group will include experienced journalists and press officers who are fluent in Russian. It is charged with promoting the EU more effectively and strengthening its media presence, with special attention to Russian-language media.

Censorship

• For a country whose press freedom ranks alongside the likes of Libya, Belarus and Iraq, Singapore is enjoying a surprisingly vibrant media debate ahead of the city-state’s general election on Friday — aided by the growing reach of social media.

• The original Mad Max movie was banned in New Zealand until after the sequel had screened.

• I’m an American who moved to New Zealand…

• [...]

• Before moving here, I assumed most or all countries in the western world had their own equivalent to the First Amendment in the US which guarantees Americans the right to free speech and expression. This is why the censorship here is so shocking to me.

• Today, technology is being used frequently as a censorship tool as well as a way of getting around censorship. The technology and censorship reading list combines a number of articles released over a twenty-year period on the interference technology can have on free expression and the technological advances meaning censors are being more easily evaded. Includes Bibi van der Zee on the impact of Twitter in driving global political change.

• Many see her film The Burden of Virginity as shining a light on women’s issues the world over, not just in the Central Asian state of Uzbekistan, where it was made.

• Umida Ahmedova, a filmmaker and photographer, prefers to describe herself not as a dissident living in one of the region’s most repressive states, but as an artist with 20 years of creative success to her name.

• It is tempting to think of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting’s (MIB) attack on Sathiyam TV solely as another authoritarian exhibition of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government’s intolerance of criticism and dissent. It certainly is. But it is also another manifestation of the Indian state’s paranoia of the medium of film and television, and consequently, the irrational controlling impulse of the law.

• He writes, “We’re so deluged by information that we fail to see the ways in which censorship and repression are actually creating gaps in the essential knowledge that we need.”

• Nicole Arbour earned a heated reaction for her “Dear Fat People” YouTube video, and apparent censorship on the part of the video-sharing company.

• The YouTube personality posted the six-minute-long video to her page on Thursday, Aug. 3. In it, the Canadian comedian used humor and “trolling” to try to inspire overweight people to lose weight. With over 700,000 views, the video upset a number of people, including vlogger Meghan Tonjes.

• A comedian who criticised overweight people has sparked a row over censorship on YouTube.

• Since 1994, South Africa has been hailed as one of the African countries where civil liberties are enshrined and protected by a progressive Constitution. However, recent draft legislation proposed by the Film and Publication Board (FPB) which would regulate online content has left many people stunned by the degree of poorly-defined yet draconian and far-reaching censorship provisions for online content.

• China is showing no sign of letting up on internet users who seek to hurdle its censorship system after it began imposing new restrictions on a popular censorship avoidance service in the country.

• At the beginning of this year the National Youth Theatre approached us with an idea for a show – to create a large-scale, site-specific, immersive piece looking a the radicalisation of young British Muslims. The original commission was intended to use the Trojan Horse affair as its lens, although very early in our process that angle was abandoned in favour of something more nuanced. Homegrown was intended to be an exploration of radicalisation, the stories behind the headlines and the perceptions and realities of Islam and Muslim communities in Britain today. It’s important to state, however, that we had a number of reservations about making a play about ‘British Muslims going to join ISIS’. Throughout our careers, we have resisted playing to the logic of the entertainment industries and their particularly crude game of identity politics. Homegrown wasn’t to be FUBU – For Us By Us. We weren’t force-feeding our views to mindless young people, but exposing an astute and thoughtful young cast to the full spectrum of voices who are currently having that very conversation about radicalisation. We were giving them certain tools – a language, really – and then allowing them to work their way through it all. Over six months of assembling our enormous cast and workshopping ideas, we were very clear about exactly what we were making, and that the drive behind this was to create a piece of theatre which unsettled all the preconceived ideas people would come with to this subject matter.

• Her story seemed like the kind of thing that anti-censorship organization might want to share with its readers– perhaps even on, say, Facebook. But after we did that, someone at Facebook had a problem with that. After receiving a complaint from a user– “I feel that this post is sexually explicit and should not be on Facebook”– our post was removed and we received this notice:

• This was not our first time this has happened to us, and there are numerous artists who have run into the same problem.I

• GLASGOW City Council has been accused of “censoring” the views of desperate carers protesting against plans which they believe could jeopardise vital support services.

• On September 2, 2015, four eminent personalities, including Chittagong District Court’s Additional Public Prosecutors Ashok Kumar Das and Chandan Bishwas; the Vice-Chancellor of Premier University, Chittagong, Dr. Anupam Sen; and International Crime Tribunal’s Prosecutor Rana Dasgupta received death threats in the form of SMS text messages from the banned terrorist formation, Ansarullah Bangla Team (ABT, Volunteer of Allah Bangla Team).

• Prosecutors filed a case against Today’s Zaman columnist Yavuz Baydar on Saturday for “insulting” the president in two recent columns.

• “This is the latest in a number of cases of journalists being targeted and charged for insulting the president, which in turn forms part of a wider crackdown on a free and independent media in Turkey,” said Index chief executive Jodie Ginsberg.

• To those of you who,after you read stories, write responses in the comments and offer an enlightened, sane take — whether you agree with the author or not — I salute you. To those who read the comments because you find the conversation there informative and intellectually challenging, mazel tov. As for everybody else, forgive me, but I strongly suspect you’re trolls, masochists, or both. That’s why I’m with Jessica Valenti, who this week in the Guardian questions why we still have comments sections at all.

Privacy

• Speaking at a House Intelligence Committee hearing on Thursday, the Wall Street Journal [paywall] reported him saying there had been “significant Iranian activity” related to cyber-attacks against US financial firms a couple of years ago.

• [...]

• Of course, when it comes to cyber-attacks the US has a much better track record than Iran.

• In 2011 the Stuxnet worm crippled Iranian nuclear enrichment facilities, repeatedly attacking five industrial plants inside Iran over a 10-month period.

• The stealth of the attack was so effective that Iran didn’t even seem to be aware that the damage was the result of an attack until the media started reporting the story.

• The US and Israel have never formally admitted to being behind the worm, having refused to discuss it on record.

• This week EFF presented evidence in two of its NSA cases confirming the participation of Verizon Wireless, Sprint and AT&T in the NSA’s mass telephone records collection under the Patriot Act. This is important because, despite broad public acknowledgement, the government is still claiming that it can dismiss our cases because it has never confirmed that anyone other than Verizon Business participated and that disclosing which providers assist the agency is a state secret. This argument was successful recently in convincing the D.C. Circuit to reverse and remand the case of Klayman v. Obama.

• EFF filed requests with the courts in two lawsuits, Smith v. Obama and First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles v. NSA, asking that they accept as evidence and take into account government filings in the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) that were recently made public. The filings confirm that AT&T, Verizon, Verizon Wireless, and Sprint participated in the NSA’s programs since they report on a “compliance incident” involving those companies.

• The security startup may be better defined as a star-studded consultancy firm that produces security software. The majority of the company’s clients are in the financial sector, Bloomberg reported in 2014.

• Bamford was the first-ever NSA whistleblower, whose bravery led to the Church Commission…

• Slaughter, who lives in Mt. Airy, filed a lawsuit in federal court on Wednesday naming the two government agencies as defendants. According to the suit, Slaughter made Freedom of Information Act requests with the NSA and CIA last December, asking for any information pertaining to surveillance of Occupy Philly. He points to articles in the New York Times that confirm that the government was actively spying on the overall Occupy movement, and he wants to know about any such activity in Philadelphia.

• Lawyers for an Occupy Philadelphia activist have sued the National Security Agency and the CIA in federal court for records of any spying the agencies may have conducted on the group during the 2011 protests.

• The lawsuit, filed Wednesday, cites media reports that Occupy Wall Street protesters were subject to government surveillance.

• Dustin Slaughter, an online journalist who participated in Occupy Philadelphia, filed Freedom of Information Act requests in December with both the NSA and CIA for records involving the Philadelphia protesters.

• During a recent trip to Germany, I embarked on what I half-jokingly called a surveillance sightseeing tour in Berlin. More than at any other destination, the city’s vast collection of Cold War–related sites and history offers a wide array of surveillance-related attractions.

• German intelligence agencies made a number of mistakes while cooperating with their US colleagues, the head of Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service said in a media interview on Monday.

• The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had direct and possibly unfiltered access to telecom data from Germany in a secret operation with the German intelligence service (BND), Spiegel.de reports. As part of the operation “glotaic”, telephone and fax traffic of the US provider MCI was surveyed at its German site in Hilden between 2004 and 2006. According to a confidential paper of the German intelligence service BND, audio data of tapped calls were “directly routed to the US” so the “audio function would work without interruptions”.

• Despite an ongoing investigation into the controversial mass surveillance program run by the German intelligence agency, BND, in co-operation with the US National security Agency (NSA), the BND is facing criticism for expanding its operations.

• When I met the artist Trevor Paglen to talk about the surveillance state, I found him crouched in the back of a metal bar called Rasputin. He was in Istanbul for an arts and culture festival where he was giving a lecture on government secrecy, a major theme in his work. We’d spent the last few days at a hotel that used to be a hangout for American spies, and it felt fitting that we left the onetime spook house to discuss the NSA in an antiestablishment bar named after a mystic tied to the downfall of the Russian monarchy.

• The conservative lawyer challenging the National Security Agency’s bulk phone data collection program is acting on a federal judge’s suggestion to beef up his case against the government by adding another plaintiff who used the cell-phone network that the government has publicly admitted to tracking.

• On August 28, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, in Obama v. Klayman, ruled for the government in the ongoing litigation over the National Security Agency’s (NSA’s) telephone metadata program (PDF). The Klayman ruling, while arising out of the context of the government’s foreign intelligence gathering powers, did not opine on the constitutionality of the NSA’s program. Instead, the decision focused on the procedural prerequisites necessary for a federal court to exercise jurisdiction over the case in the first place. Specifically, the appeals court ruled that the Klayman plaintiffs lacked standing to obtain a preliminary order barring the NSA from continuing the telephone metadata program.

• The security world was set abuzz on Friday when the NSA finally revealed the details on its zero day policy. Well, “revealed” might be something of a stretch.

• EFF says it is contemplating challenging some of the redactions. “We [still] don’t know how this process squares with the government’s claims that in the vast majority of cases it discloses vulnerabilities to the public rather than holding on to them for intelligence or law enforcement purposes,” EFF wrote.

• The ongoing battle between researchers and vendors over the public disclosure of security vulnerabilities in vendor products took a bizarre turn yesterday in a new case involving two security firms, FireEye and ERNW.

• In a blog post published Thursday, ERNW revealed that FireEye had obtained a court injunction to prevent its researchers from publicly disclosing certain information around three vulnerabilities they discovered in a security product made by FireEye.

• A European legal opinion regarding Facebook’s alleged data-sharing co-operation with the NSA/PRISM dragnet surveillance program that’s due to be issued by the Advocate General (AG) of Europe’s top court is now slated to be delivered on September 23.

• The AG had originally been scheduled to deliver the opinion in June. The delay has not been explained by the European Court of Justice (ECJ).

• The top advisor to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) will give his opinion on the so-called Europe versus Facebook case on 23 September.

• The ECJ revealed on Monday that Advocate General Yves Bot’s opinion would be given later this month after it was postponed in June.

• The case involves “Angry Austrian” Max Schrems, who complained to the Irish Data Commissioner that Facebook had passed his personal data on to the US National Security Agency in breach of his data protection rights. The Irish data protection authorities (DPA) refused to investigate on the grounds that Facebook is signed up to the so-called safe harbour agreement.

• Former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden on Saturday criticised Russia – the country that has granted him asylum – calling its crackdown on human rights and online freedom “fundamentally wrong” and said he would prefer not to live in exile.

• NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden criticised Russia’s treatment of gay people and the internet as he accepted a Norwegian free speech prize.

• Former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden – who has been granted asylum by Russia – criticised the country’s crackdown on human rights and online freedom on Saturday as “wrong… disappointing and frustrating”.

• In fact, the facility in Bluffdale serves only as a massive data storage facility. It would have no useful purpose if the agency was not engaged in mass, warrantless, dragnet collection of data – the very thing Rand said he wants to stop. The Bluffdale facility does not play any role in the actual gathering of signal intelligence.

• How can the United States spend upwards of $50 billion a year on intelligence, and still be surprised by something like the Russian invasion of Crimea?

• Anonymous intelligence officials are trying to blame Edward Snowden—as if Vladimir Putin had no idea until this summer that the U.S. was trying to eavesdrop on him.

• But last October, cryptographers at the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), Britain’s electronic surveillance agency, posted an enigmatic paper online that called into question the security of some of the most efficient lattice-based schemes. The findings hinted that vulnerabilities had crept in during a decade-long push for ever-greater efficiency. As cryptographers simplified the underlying lattices on which their schemes were based, they rendered the schemes more susceptible to attack.

• Building on the GCHQ claims, two teams of cryptanalysts have spent the past year determining which lattice-based schemes can be broken by quantum computers, and which are safe — for now.

• Homeland Security picked a fight with the library in New Hampshire

• Nearly everything in our society has been or will be exploited by criminals: cars, cellphones, hatchets, cleaning solutions, tape, boats, aircraft–the list is virtually endless. It’s part of living with and in a free society, and the feds don’t come knocking on 3M’s door every time a criminal uses their tape to facilitate a break-in or other criminal act. But federal agencies like DHS and the FBI are literally on an anti-encryption, anti-privacy crusade with respect to consumer electronics and software–especially high-quality, publicly audited and effective anonymization technology like Tor. The Kilton Library’s internet freedom project has just become the federal government’s latest victim in that misguided campaign.

• The British spying agency, found to have been conducting wholesale surveillance on UK citizens, has recommended that the public make their passwords less complex.

• In a brand new document called ‘Password guidance: simplifying your approach’, the company gives a range of guidelines to keep consumers safe. That includes rolling back previous guidance “that complex passwords are ‘stronger’” — instead recommending that people simplify their approach.

• The agency gives a range of hints to those working in IT as well as normal consumers.

• Those include warning people to change their default passwords, to make sure that accounts can be locked out if they’re under attack and avoid storing passwords as plain text files that can be read by anyone.

• American hacker and privacy advocate Jacob Appelbaum is primarily known as a former WikiLeaks spokesperson and persistent thorn in the side of governments worldwide. But he also has an artistic streak.

• Jacob Appelbaum is an American hacker, a privacy activist and an artist with a new show, his first solo photography exhibition in his chosen city of Berlin. Had things gone differently, he could even have been a Communications Security Establishment (CSE) agent.

• According to Appelbaum, he was invited to talk to students about privacy online a few years ago in, if he remembers correctly, Ottawa. It’s something he often does as a member of the Tor project, a free software network providing online anonymity.

• Review: Veteran Russian reporters show the Kremlin relies on “threat and intimidation.”

• This fall, the Senate is expected to take another look at the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, or CISA, but many security experts and privacy advocates are opposed.

• Amendments attached to the proposed Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) make an “already awful cybersecurity bill” worse by making worrying changes to the years-old Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the Electronic Frontier Foundation warned recently.

• Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse introduced amendments to CISA, which, if approved, would make sweeping changes to the CFAA. Instead of helping harden computer systems or protect people from malicious actors, the new provisions would give prosecutors “more power to threaten more people with more prison time,” Cindy Cohn, EFF’s executive director, warned in a recent blog post. CISA, with 20-odd amendments, is on the docket for a full vote in the Senate this year.

• The Kilton Public Library in Lebanon, New Hampshire, is not unusual in its commitment to the freedom to read in privacy. That commitment is shared by libraries all over the world, and written into the basic character of librarianship through documents like the American Library Association’s “Freedom to Read Statement.” What’s exceptional about Kilton, though, is it was selected by the Library Freedom Project and The Tor Project as the pilot location for a program to install Tor relays, and eventually exit nodes, in public libraries all over.

• NSA whistleblower J. Kirk Wiebe claims that providing US authorities with the right to access any individual’s email account around the world would undermine democracy by equipping the government with the means to crush any political opposition.

• There are a number of examples of regulatory challenges facing enterprises that want to adopt cloud computing. The US Patriot Act stipulates that the US government may collect data from US-based cloud companies regardless of the data’s physical location. As part of the PRISM program, the NSA secretly collects Internet communications from major US Internet companies, including Google and Microsoft.

• Is it just me or have ISP (Internet Service Provider) terms and conditions gotten a lot more one-sided about what you can’t do and what they can do?

• A separate 15-year-old data transfer agreement to “ensure an adequate level of [data] protection” whenever the personal data of EU nationals is transferred to firms based in the US is also under review.

• Known as Safe Harbor, the pact underpins a multi-billion euro industry dominated by giants like Google and Facebook, but is riddled with problems. The European Parliament last year voted to have it scrapped.

• Over 3,000 US companies have signed up to the self-certification scheme but a study in 2013 found that hundreds had lied about belonging to the data protection arrangement.

• The US Federal Trade Commission, tasked to enforce it, did little to crack down on the companies.

• The European Commission, for its part, issued 13 recommendations to the Americans to improve it. That was almost two years ago.

• The Americans are refusing to budge on the pact’s national security exceptions.

• But Jourova now says she is confident the work on safe harbor “will soon conclude”.

• When Edward Snowden dropped the NSA/government surveillance bomb on the world, many Americans, as well as countries around the world, started taking privacy a lot seriously. Some began to question just how far reaching the US government had become. So much so in fact, that the government cut NSA surveillance funding and promised to implement new measures for how it goes about procuring such information.

• As thousands of revelers start making the trek home from the Burning Man festival in Northern Nevada, newly released documents reveal the FBI spied on the event a few years ago.

• Documents obtained by the journalist Inkoo Kang, and posted to the website MuckRock, reveal that the event has been under FBI surveillance since at least 2010. That’s when the agency concluded that Burning Man is “considered a cultural and artisan event, which promote (sic) free expression by the participants.”

• This progression to a surveillance state made it easier for our country to impose structure and accountability, but such constant policing posed its own problems. We became accustomed to a culture lacking privacy, such that we addictively share all aspects of ourselves through social media. Afraid to be alone, we’ve embraced constant connectivity. Ultimately, an attachment to sleepless keepers — both NSA watchmen and phone companions — developed. This attachment diverts and stunts personal growth. It created a stifling order with no room for introspection on issues such as war, loss of life and moral principles. It is in this stifling order that I see what was fundamentally lost by our nation: solitude. This loss was a shift in our nation’s consciousness.

• Privacy and anonymity now feel criminalized, as if we must account for every action and thought.

• A debate over data security is brewing in Washington. On one side, law enforcement officials warn that new deployments of encryption, the technology that protects our communications and stored data from prying eyes, is leaving the government without the insight it needs to track down criminals and terrorists. On the other, privacy advocates and tech companies say efforts to build ways for law enforcement to access protected communications will leave everyone less secure.

• But for many longtime techies, this isn’t anything new — it’s a repeat of the “Crypto Wars” of the 1990s. In fact, former Clinton tech policy official Michael Nelson said in a recent op-ed published by the Hill that it is giving him a bad case of “digital deja vu.”

• Nelson, who now works on public policy at CloudFlare, was the Clinton administration’s point person on the Clipper chip — a government-backed piece of technology from the early 1990s designed to give authorities a way to wiretap encrypted phone calls.

• Q. You’ve been teaching privacy law at UConn School of Law since 2003. Have you seen a change in the way your students view their privacy rights?

• A. At the beginning of the first class of each semester, I begin by telling my students, “Welcome to the Right of Privacy. We will spend the next 15 weeks studying that which you do not have.” I used to smile when I made that little joke. I don’t anymore. I also begin the first class by asking my students to think about whether privacy is an absolute or relative value. The purpose of this exercise is to demonstrate that most people are willing to trade away their privacy for something else of value. We give out personal financial information when we buy something we want on the Internet; we reveal highly personal information about our bodies to doctors so that they can make proper diagnoses, etc. The question is whether we can trust the people and entities with whom we share this information to protect it.

• When I started teaching in 2003, Facebook was in its infancy and YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter did not even exist. Social media has fundamentally transformed the way the youth of the 21st century think about and value individual privacy. They share so much information about themselves, and they do so via platforms that make that shared information accessible to thousands, if not millions, of people.

• So, to answer your question directly, have I seen a change in the way my students view their privacy rights? Oh yea. You betcha.

Civil Rights

• The CIA’s controversial, year-long cooperation with the makers of the Oscar-winning film Zero Dark Thirty triggered two internal investigations and a guidance report, according to more than 100 pages of CIA documents disclosed to Vice News following a Freedom of Information request. Two of the investigations, entitled Alleged Disclosure of Classified Information by Former D/CIA, and Potential Ethics Violations Involving Film Producers, related specfiically to Zero Dark Thirty; the third, CIA Processes for Engaging with the Entertainment Industry, was a more general re-evaluation.

• According to the Vice report, a number of CIA employees who were involved in the real-life hunt for Osama bin Laden, whose death at the hands of US Navy Seals is the centrepiece of the film, consulted with director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal. The documents suggest officers received gifts including expensive meals, painted pearl earrings valued at around $60, and a bottle of tequila worth $169. Boal was invited to a classified awards ceremony for participants in the hunt for Bin Laden. CIA director Leon Panetta later told investigators he had no knowledge of the film-maker’s attendance.

• The military command at Guantánamo Bay has stopped honoring security clearances for attorneys representing the only detainee who has agreed to testify against the 9/11 defendants, the Guardian has learned. A doctor specializing in the treatment of torture victims has also lost her ability to visit the base.

• US government officials have blocked the release of 116 pages of defence lawyers’ notes detailing the torture that Guantanamo Bay detainee Abu Zubaydah says he experienced in CIA custody, defence lawyers said on Thursday.

• The treatment of Zubaydah, who lost one eye and was waterboarded 83 times in a single month while held by the CIA, according to government documents, has been the focus of speculation for years.

• The US government has declared that the first-person account by Guantanamo detainee Abu Zubaydah of how he was tortured in a CIA prison is a classified document. In other words, the criminals who ordered the torture have stamped “TOP SECRET” on the eyewitness testimony of one of their victims.

• The legal action involves an effort to make public the notes taken by defense lawyers for Abu Zubaydah, a US prisoner since 2002, held at Guantanamo Bay for the past nine years. The alleged al Qaeda member was waterboarded 83 times in one month and lost an eye under torture at a CIA secret prison.

• The US government blocked the release of 116 pages of notes detailing the torture a Guantanamo Bay detainee says he endured while in CIA custody, defense lawyers said on Thursday.

• Hitting bookstores today: Rebuttal, in which several former CIA officials defend their authorization of torture after 9/11 and criticize the findings of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s (SSCI) report. The book fails to acknowledge any of the mistakes the CIA itself admits it made after 9/11, attempts to justify behavior that can never be justified, and insists on looking backward instead of preventing abuse in the future.

• Now, he has revealed some of the CIA’s most disturbing investigation methods.

• [...]

• “I was there,” he told Dateline.

• “I was involved in the program. I saw what we did is – counts as torture.”

• Former CIA interrogator Glenn Carle says America tortured terror suspects.

• A Maryland appellate court ruled last month that police were justified in taking a DNA sample from a voluntary donor and using it as evidence in a separate and unrelated case. The ruling established that once a DNA sample has been legally obtained, it can be indefinitely stored for use in unsolved crimes without violating the Fourth Amendment.

• The Obama administration’s struggling quest to close the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is mired in state and federal politics. Frustrated White House and Pentagon officials are blaming each other for the slow progress releasing approved detainees and finding a new prison to house those still held.

• Last week in the D.C. District Court, lawyers for Guantanamo detainee Mustafa Adam al-Hawsasi, one of the accused in the 9/11 trial, tried to convince Judge Richard J. Leon to order the government to allow an independent expert to examine Hawsawi, and to provide classified information on his medical condition and conditions of detention.

• The hearing was part of Hawsawi’s habeas corpus petition challenging the legality of his detention. That legal proceeding is separate from his ongoing military commission, in which Hawsawi’s lawyers are also seeking classified information. On Thursday, defense attorney Walter Ruiz argued to the federal District Court in Washington that to have all the evidence necessary to properly challenge his detention, Hawsawi’s defense team needed this additional information on his health. For Ruiz, the two matters were “inextricably linked.”

• In 2009 President Obama rejected prosecution for those who committed torture stating, “This is a time for reflection, not retribution.” But he had no authority to select who should be charged with a crime. Our democracy is based on laws. If we do not follow the laws, we get depravity.

• Those who committed, authorized or enabled torture need to be prosecuted, and that includes medical personnel who designed or monitored torture and lawyers who used weasel-words to say torture isn’t torture.

• In one of Vilnius’s best known museums, over 50,000 visitors a year squeeze themselves into cells used by the KGB in the 1960s to hold dissidents and human rights activists. A few miles up the road, a more recently constructed prison is gaining similar international attention.

• The windowless white warehouse about the size of an Olympic swimming pool was constructed in 2004. It soon became a topic of gossip among the 750 inhabitants of Antaviliai, a small hamlet ten miles north east of the Lithuanian capital and encircled by pine forest.

• What began with the passage of the USA Patriot Act in October 2001 has snowballed into the eradication of every vital safeguard against government overreach, corruption and abuse. Since then, we have been terrorized, traumatized, and acclimated to life in the American Surveillance State.

• The bogeyman’s names and faces change over time, but the end result remains the same: our unquestioning acquiescence to anything the government wants to do in exchange for the phantom promise of safety and security has transitioned us to life in a society where government agents routinely practice violence on the citizens while, in conjunction with the Corporate State, spying on the most intimate details of our personal lives.

• In May, just before students and faculty left school for the summer — we are back now — Fordham University President Joseph M. McShane, S.J., announced his much anticipated response to the school’s human rights advocates: the Board of Trustees had voted not to revoke CIA Director John Brennan’s honorary degree. According to Bob Howe, McShane’s press secretary, the vote was unanimous.

• After the release of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on CIA torture in December 2014, seven Fordham professors formed Fordham Against Torture (FAT), an ad-hoc committee that petitioned McShane with over 730 signatures to revoke Brennan’s honorary degree. It was awarded to Brennan in 2012 when he delivered Fordham’s commencement address, despite protests and a petition by students and faculty.

• In his email to FAT, McShane wrote, “While the Board and I condemn torture and extrajudicial imprisonment in the strongest possible terms, as a public servant, Mr. Brennan does not set the policies that have led us to this place, but rather is responsible to the elected officials, including the President, who have. The President, his predecessor, and Congress are legally responsible for the creation of the policies you — indeed all of us — find so shocking.”

• Bulgaria agreed to stop allowing Russian aircraft flying to Syria into its airspace, a former CIA official has told CBS News.

• In the words of former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell, the United States can respond to Russia’s actions of strengthening its military presence in Syria by cutting off air routes it is using for shipments.

• Russia is stepping up its assistance to the embattled Syrian government in what appears to be an effort to boost President Bashar Assad’s beleaguered forces and to address the rise of Islamic extremist groups, the director of the CIA said Thursday.

• The thing about autonomous weapons that really appeals to the major military powers is that, like the current generation of remote- piloted drones, they can be used with impunity in poor countries.

• Moreover, like drones, they don’t put the lives of rich-country soldiers at risk. That’s a really good reason to oppose them – and if poor countries realise what they are in for, a good opportunity to organise a strong diplomatic coalition that works to ban them.

• [...]

• The thing about autonomous weapons that really appeals to the major military powers is that, like the current generation of remote-piloted drones, they can be used with impunity in poor countries. Moreover, like drones, they don’t put the lives of rich-country soldiers at risk. That’s a really good reason to oppose them – and if poor countries realise what they are in for, a good opportunity to organise a strong diplomatic coalition that works to ban them.

• Since Stephen Harper became prime minister in 2006, Canada’s foreign policy has slipped and sometimes careened downhill, becoming ever more simplistic, ideological and out of touch with the interlocking complexities of international relations.

• North Korea’s invocation of international tribunals was all the more unsettling coming from mild-mannered countries like Slovenia, Luxembourg, Latvia, Chad, Fiji, Trinidad and Tobago, Ghana, Guatemala, Cyprus, Timor-Leste, Hungary, and New Zealand. All urged the US to join the treaty parties of the Rome Statute in pledging to prosecute or extradite those who commit the gravest crimes.

• It was enough to make a diplomat nostalgic for Khrushchev smacking his shoes on the table. Speaking mainly to the grownups in the room, Russia wryly noted the futility of global mentorship based on a state’s “farfetched assumptions of its exceptionality and infallibility.” The good old days of “We will bury you!” are manifestly over. This was more of a rueful eulogy. The state that outlawed war with the Kellogg-Briand Pact, realized humanitarian law with the Lieber Code, and moderated the vindictive Treaty of Versailles with the League of Nations, that state is all but dead and gone. The America that stood for open covenants, openly arrived at; for reduction of armaments; and for political independence and territorial integrity of great and small states alike: she’s not here. Something has displaced her.

• Is France about to follow the lead of the UK and start sending its warplanes to kill French citizens in Syria? The French public would certainly not be against the move, experts say.

• People may need to be looking to the skies to avoid taser strikes by police, if a North Dakota law starts a trend.

• The good news is that a new law that was passed this year in North Dakota requires police in the state to obtain a court order before using a drone for surveillance.

• Armed drones could be used by police in the US state of North Dakota after local lawmakers legalised their use.

• While they will be limited to “less than lethal” weapons, tear gas, tasers, rubber bullets and pepper spray could all be used in theory by the remote controlled flying machines.

• At least 16 Yemeni civilians including ten people from a single family were killed in nationwide air strikes by a Saudi-led military coalition on Saturday, medics in three provinces said.

• Gulf Arab countries have stepped up their air attacks targeting the Shi’ite Muslim Houthi movement allied to Iran after the group killed at least 60 Arab troops deployed to Yemen in a missile attack on their base last Friday.

• Military action in Syria will only lead to civilian deaths, says Labour Party leadership favorite Jeremy Corbyn, who insists there must be a political solution to the crisis.

• Speaking to RT subsidiary Ruptly, the Islington North MP said he has called for an international political conference involving the European Union, the United States, Russia, Iran and regional nations to discuss a resolution to the crisis.

• Britain is exporting drone components worth hundreds of millions pounds to countries that include Saudi Arabia and South Korea, as it tries to regain lost ground in a global arms race to meet burgeoning demand for lethal remote-controlled military aircraft, The Independent on Sunday can reveal.

• Figures based on Government records show that military-grade parts for drones worth more than £250m – from bullet-proof fuel bladders to command and control systems – were licensed for export in the five years since 2010, with orders destined for locations including some of the world’s most dangerous flashpoints, such as the Middle East and the Korean peninsula.

• The United States and allies like Israel regularly use drones to kill enemies, but the unmanned craft are coming into widespread use far from the battlefields of places like Pakistan and Yemen. Here, in Congo, they have become a vital unarmed tool for trying to save lives, not trying to take them.

• Though lethal drone use has seen use by nations other than the United States (primarily Israel), it shows the alarming way warfare is being reshaped. Arguably, the unmanned aerial drone strike as a standard convention is comparable to the mechanization of infantry and cavalry between the First and Second World Wars. And much like that battlefield revolution during the first half of the 20th century, drone warfare in this century is enabling a brand new way to kill exponentially more individuals — in particular, noncombatants.

• British Prime Minister David Cameron’s disclosure that his military used a drone to kill two British jihadis in Syria puts the United Kingdom into an exclusive but growing club of nations that acknowledge using unmanned aircraft to target their own citizens.

• Speaking to his Parliament on Monday, Cameron said an armed drone had targeted Reyaad Khan and had also killed Ruhul Amin, both British citizens, and had killed a third Islamic State militant who was with them at the time of the August strike. The same day, Islamabad announced that a Pakistani drone strike killed three militants near the Afghan border.

• Pakistan has made its first acknowledged operational strike using its Burraq armed UAV, which analysts say shows a higher than expected level of sophistication in the military’s real-time targeting capabilities.

• The strike was confirmed via the Twitter account of the head of the military’s media branch, Inter Services Public Relations, Maj Gen Asim Bajwa. A tweet dated Sept. 7 announced the first “ever use of Pak made Burraq Drone today. Hit a terrorist compound in Shawal Valley killing 3 high profile terrorists.” It also said further details would follow.

• Two drone strikes by two different countries nearly 3,000km apart this week represent the proliferation of Barack Obama’s signature mode of counter-terrorism.

• In September 2011, an American drone strike in Yemen killed Anwar al-Awlaki, a cleric whom US officials said was one of the leaders of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).

• The US had already been conducting drone strikes against suspected al-Qaeda terrorists for a decade. However, Mr al-Awlaki became the first US citizen to be the subject of a targeted killing — sparking a fierce debate in America about the use of executive power and civil liberties.

• A US drone strike in the Gomal District of the Paktika Province, along the Afghan border with Pakistan, killed 15 people who the Pakistani government says were fighters loyal to Mullah Fazlullah’s faction of the Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP).

• In the coming days, they’ll be putting the finishing touches to the pavilions and adding up the orders at the massive Defence & Security Equipment International arms fair which opens in London’s Docklands on September 15.

• At the front of the queue, writing cheques worth billions of dollars, will be the Sunni Arab regimes of the Gulf monarchies, making the latest payments in an arms-buying splurge set to surge through the coming decade – in a region already coming apart at the seams.

• Touring the Middle East to tamp down anxiety about Iranian expansionism after the signing of the long-awaited nuclear deal, US Secretary of State John Kerry said that Washington “had agreed to expedite certain arms sales that are needed and that have taken too long in the past”.

• ISIS is now targeting peacekeepers in Sinai; the latest bomb hurt four U.S. troops. The Pentagon is sending more aid—but there’s talk of pulling out in the face of the threat.

• Unfortunately, David Cameron fails to recognize that other countries too have the right to defend themselves. When we defended our country, successfully, against another terrorist group he took the side of the gossip-mongers purely to satisfy donors to his party funds.

• Whether Cameron has crossed the Rubicon or not, what it confirms is that he is a hypocrite of the highest order.

• Some Twitter users don’t think this would be the right tactic though, if the hashtag #DontBombSyria trending consistently on Monday means anything. Here’s why.

• Prof Christof Heyns says UK’s killing of two British jihadis in Raqqa sets a dangerous precedent as other experts question whether attack was justified

• And Reprieve legal director Kat Craig added: “The fact that David Cameron has bypassed Parliament to commit these covert strikes is deeply worrying — as is his refusal to share what legal advice he was given.”

• THE DECISION to target British militant fighters in Syria without the support or awareness of parliament must face an investigation from the Intelligence and Security Committee, according to the Scottish National Party.

• Rights Watch (UK) [advocacy website] commenced a legal proceeding [press release] against the government on Tuesday, seeking the publication of legal advice the government claims provided justification for a Syrian drone strike that killed three, including two British citizens. Director of Rights Watch (UK) Yasmine Ahmen commented that there is currently insufficient public information to know if the drone strike was lawful, and “If the only oversight for these actions is internal confidential government legal advice, which the British public never gets to see, that is no oversight at all.” Ahmen notes the dangerous precedent that will be set if the government can “kill at will” without public accountability. To justify the attack, Prime Minister David Cameron [official Twitter] cited [Guardian report] Article 51 [text] of the UN charter, which guarantees “the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations.” Rights Watch (UK) and others are now questioning how broadly the government is defining “self-defense” for the purpose of justifying “lawful” drone strikes.

• Previously, RAF drones have been used for lethal strikes in Afghanistan, but only when British or allied forces were threatened by fighting on the ground. Mr Cameron has parliamentary approval for carrying out air strikes in Iraq as part of the anti-IS coalition, but he has yet to secure backing for bombing in Syria.

• David Cameron justifies targeted attack on jihadis as self-defence but action raises political questions over mission creep

• For over a decade, the United States has maintained a ‘Kill List’ of individuals it deems a threat. With the stroke of a pen, President Obama has repeatedly acted as judge, jury and executioner for thousands of individuals. So controversial, the process for deciding the Kill List has reportedly been dubbed “Terror Tuesdays” by White House aides.

• Yesterday, the U.K. government joined the U.S. in its own form of Terror Tuesday. The prime minister calmly stood before parliament and declared that he and the secretary of defence had ordered the killing of a British citizen. Refusing to release the legal justification, he didn’t stop with just this killing. He and various members of his cabinet then declared that the U.K. was considering further targets as far afield as Libya and that they wouldn’t hesitate to launch more attacks.

• The attack was carried out despite parliament voting against allowing military action against Syria in 2013. Although MPs later gave the government authority to launch airstrikes against ISIS, this only applied in Iraq.

• Nevertheless, we are entitled to see the advice, presumably from the Attorney General, Jeremy Wright, by which David Cameron and ministers set such store. We are also entitled to hear a lot more about government policy, whatever it now happens to be, where Syria is concerned. After all, Michael Fallon, the Defence Secretary, has said he “would not hesitate” to order RAF Reaper drones into action again. What does that mean?

• MPs might ask themselves why they should bother, since Monday’s grisly admission that our Prime Minister is happy to despatch killer drones to assassinate people whether the Commons has authorised such action or not.

• Perhaps Fallon should “rethink” a few things himself, and he might understand why this distinction exists.

• The Iraqi government has asked for Western assistance fighting Isis and invites air strikes on Isis positions.

• The Syrian government is fighting an insurgency armed and funded by the West and dominated by Isis.

• Following news that the UK authorized a drone strike that killed two British jihadists in Syria, ethical concerns have been raised about the future of drone warfare, with critics telling Sputnik that any expansion of drones and ‘killer robots’ could “lead to a new arms race”.

• THE public need to be assured that the recent targeted drone strike against Reyaad Khan was legal, the Welsh Liberal Democrats have said.

• Cardiff-born Khan was killed in a precision drone strike in Syria on 21st August, the first of its kind by UK military services.

• The Liberal Democrats have called for the legal advice underpinning the strike to be published.

• The National Security Council, which is chaired by Prime Minister David Cameron and meets weekly, has reportedly authorised a list of about 10 extremists from his country including the Britons killed in a drone attack in Syria last month.

• The justification for the attack, which happened near the Syrian city of Raqqa on 21 August, has been criticised by lawyers for stretching the legal definition of what constitutes an imminent threat to a country and its permissible acts of self-defence.

• The Daily Telegraph reported that government sources had said Khan was also involved in an unspecified plot to attack Armed Forces Day events.

• The prime minister announced Reyaad Khan, 21, from Cardiff and Ruhul Amin, 26, from Aberdeen were killed in August in IS’s Syrian stronghold. The PM’s spokesperson at the time insisted that such flights did not amount to “military action” but also insisted that in an emergency situation, Cameron would authorise the drones to launch strikes. Cameron said there was “clear evidence” that armed attacks on the United Kingdom were being planned.

• “The prime minister’s supposed reasons for carrying out this unprecedented drone attack seem to be changing by the day,” said Kat Craig, Reprieve’s Legal Director of Abuses in Counter-Terrorism.

• “Make no mistake”, said Craig, “what we are seeing is the failed USA model of secret strikes being copied wholesale by the British government”. The answer to that is yes, ‘ he added.

• Some people with good memories may have noted something odd about Tuesday’s coverage of the prime minister’s statement on the drone killing of Reyaad Khan. Had they not read that story somewhere before?

• Only but the most determined ostriches will have failed to note the recent ground-breaking story of British nationals killed by the UK in a ‘drone strike’ – moreover in a country within which we are not currently prosecuting a war.

• Daily Mail feels ‘queasy’ about the attack while the Sun applauds the action

• Specifically, it is true that Cameron and the British government did not release a detailed explanation containing the “legal justification” for the targeted assassinations. But Cameron did explain why the government believed the strikes were “entirely lawful.”

• When a government kills one of its own citizens it’s called an execution.

• When this is done without the due process of a court or even judicial oversight, it’s called an “extra-judicial killing”.

• This term was freely thrown at Israel when it pioneered what it called “targeted killings” of alleged terrorists during the Second Intifada 14 years ago.

• JEREMY Corbyn, the Labour leadership frontrunner, has questioned the point of the British military action in Syria that killed Isis militants Reyaad Khan from Cardiff and Ruhul Amin from Aberdeen.

• The left-winger said he would not have authorised the drone attack that killed the Islamist extremists and insisted David Cameron had “some very difficult questions to answer about the legality of what he did”.

• David Cameron will block Parliament from assessing his secret ‘kill list’ of British jihadis fighting for Islamic State.

• The PM said MPs on the powerful Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) will be barred from looking at Britain’s “current operations” in Iraq and Syria.

• The killing of Reyaad Khan, a British citizen turned jihadist fighter, was never likely to provoke outrage or shock in this country. This was a youth who boasted on Twitter about being implicated in what he called “executions”, including one that he gleefully described as “the longest decapitation ever”. Anyone who so publicly delights in seeing suffering inflicted on others is not a candidate for public sympathy.

• Jeremy Corbyn leads cross-party group of MPs warning government has no legal basis for move as Lib Dem sources say they would have vetoed move in coalition

• IT WAS, Britain’s prime minister conceded, “a new departure”. David Cameron’s announcement to the House of Commons on September 7th that a Royal Air Force (RAF) Reaper drone had targeted and killed Reyaad Khan (pictured, at left) in Syria, an Islamic State (IS) fighter from Cardiff and a British citizen, raised as many questions as he was prepared to answer. The strike, which killed two others who were travelling in the same vehicle, including another Briton, took place on August 21st near IS’s stronghold in Raqqa. While America has for many years used drones for the targeted killing of terrorists in places such as the tribal territories in Pakistan and Yemen, it is the first time that Britain has done so. Previously, RAF drones have been used for lethal strikes in Afghanistan, but only when British or allied forces were threatened by fighting on the ground.

• But concerns have been raised by senior politicians and human rights groups. Former attorney general Dominic Grieve has said the decision to launch the attack could be “legally reviewed or challenged”, while Conservative MP David Davis said it would amount to an “extra-judicial execution” without formal checks.

• If the CIA wanted to spy on Iran, what better person to employ as asset than a journalist, especially one working for a prominent mainstream newspaper like the Washington Post? In that way, the CIA would know that if its asset got busted, the mainstream press and all sorts of First Amendment/free press organizations would immediately come to his defense, arguing what the Post is arguing today — that there is no way that its employees would ever be CIA assets and decrying infringements on freedom of the press.

• Before someone cries, “Conspiracy theory!” let’s not forget Operation Mockingbird, the top-secret CIA campaign during the 1950s to enlist the media to serve as CIA assets. According to Wikipedia, “The organization recruited leading American journalists into a network to help present the CIA’s views…. It also worked to influence foreign media and political campaigns….”

Internet/Net Neutrality

• The cost of IP transiting – the cost to transfer internet data across ISPs and other large public networks – continues to fall. This mean it’s getting cheaper to send webpages, messages and other traffic. London has seen a 22 per cent price drop to just $1 per Mbps per month.

• Vint Cerf, one of the creators of the Internet, wants your help in re-thinking it for the next generation.

DRM

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• Is there any topic in the copyright world that is more appealing and exciting than private copying and related levies? Following Eleonora’s post earlier this week on the recent Opinion of the European Copyright Society in a reference for a preliminary ruling currently pending before the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), this being HP Belgium v Reprobel, today the IPKat is delighted to host a guest contribution by Dr Ulrich Börger (Harte-Bavendamm) on a recent Austrian case on the very topic of levies, in which he acted for one of the parties to the proceedings .

• Digital Music News has an unfortunate story that we’ve heard too many times before: that of an independent musician successfully building a following… only to do a deal with a major label and see it all come crashing down. What’s interesting is that the artist, Terra Naomi, was willing to lay out all of the details. It’s worth a read, as it’s a story that is pretty common. That is not to say that signing a major label deal is necessarily a bad thing. For some artists it may be the right decision. But the way that major labels work is that you’ll only get enough attention for the label to determine if you’re “the next big thing” where all its revenue will come from for the next few years… and if things don’t seem to be going that way, you’ll be pushed aside quickly. The standard stat given is that 90% of major label deals “fail.” That does not mean they are not profitable for the label. The way RIAA accounting works, the labels can make out like a bandit on many of those record deals, while the artist gets hung out to dry. That appears to be the case with Naomi as well.

• The Amesbury Friends Peace Center will open its fall program on Sept. 16 with the showing of the Oscar-winning film “CitizenFour.”

• This film is about Edward Snowden, the high-level government computer expert whose theft of top-secret documents from the National Security Agency represents the most serious intelligence breach in U.S. history. His action exposed the vast extent of U.S. government surveillance programs both in the U.S. and abroad.

• “Citizenfour” director-producer Laura Poitras is teaming with AJ Schnack and Charlotte Cook to launch Field of Vision, a documentary unit that will commission and create 40 to 50 episodic and short-form nonfiction films each year.

• Field of Vision was developed in collaboration with The Intercept and First Look Media. The Intercept, launched in 2014 by Glenn Greenwald, Poitras and Jeremy Scahill, is a website “dedicated to producing fearless, adversarial journalism.”

• Field of Vision will launch at the 53rd Annual New York Film Festival on Sept. 27 with Poitras’ “Asylum,” a short-form series tracking WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange as he publishes diplomatic cables and seeks asylum in London’s Ecuadorian embassy.

• Director Laura Poitras has created an incredible documentary about Edward Snowden but its ham-fisted release strategy has lost a huge potential audience

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