Protests swept Turkey on Friday and deep into Saturday morning as thousands of protesters called on prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to resign.
What began as a demonstration against a shopping mall project turned into one of the biggest challenges in recent years to Mr Erdogan’s rule, as whole districts of Istanbul resounded to the banging of pots and pans into the early hours of the morning. Drivers hit car horns in support of the demonstrators.
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However, the size of the protests, and the speed with which they grew, appeared to be a reaction not just to the police crackdown on the initial demonstration in Gezi Park but to Mr Erdogan’s general approach to government.
“Gezi park is the new Tahrir of the region,” said Koray Caliskan, a Turkish columnist, in reference to the epicentre of Egypt’s 2011 revolution.
Yes, it's the camo-colored-hat skript k1dd13 tool. And is it going to check whether it has the required warrants or legal authorization before launching an attack on a target, or just fire away? I've got some guesses..
Leave it to the government to turn the internet into the next battlefield and to weaponize technology. Any new frontier we explore, the first priority is to figure out how the hell we are going to fight wars in it, because wars are what life is all about.
I work in infosec and I'm not saying passivity is an option, but this is the same idiotic mentality that causes so many problems in the “real world” today. Half the problems they talk about with the vulnerability of our infrastructure are totally avoidable if companies and agencies were willing to take basic security precautions, but that would be too easy and too cheap…how would the defense contractors make their money? Why make it about simple actions which can protect networks and computers and keep issues from spreading, when you can keep doing all the stupid ignorant stuff you were doing all along and find a way to escalate the conflict?
It's wonderful that they're trying to dumb down the technology so that people with no understanding of how this stuff actually works can command it too. We know from documentaries like “This is what winning looks like” and the book The Outpost just how well military bureaucracy functions. I can totally understand why we need to simplify the technology to a point where the brilliant minds that brought us Afghanistan and Iraq can work their magic in cyberspace too. If there's one thing we need on the internet it's the input of bloated, corrupt, out of date government agencies.
Someday humankind will figure it out…if we don't destroy ourselves first, that is. We're allowing the worst and most corrupt elements of our society to lead the way, and then we wonder why everything is so screwed up. I get that the rest of the world has equally corrupt and evil people running it, but is the best answer to that problem really to appoint our own legion of corrupt sheisty assholes to combat them?
Imagine if a senior democratic senator pulled this kind of asinine stunt during the Reagan or Bush II presidencies — Would not the neocons, with McCain in the lead, would howl about usurping the commander chief's prerogatives?
Sen. John McCain’s Monday decision to sneak into Syria for a photo-op with rebel commanders is quickly going from publicity stunt to embarrassment, with the revelation that one of the “commanders” in question is the head of a kidnapping ring.
According to freed kidnap victims, the photo shows Abu Ibrahim, the leader of the rebel Northern Storm brigade, which has been fighting in Aleppo and whose strategy has centered around kidnapping foreigners and Shi’ites and holding them for ransom.
McCain’s spokesmen have issued statements terming the incident “regrettable,” but insisting that McCain had no way of knowing who the rebel commanders he took pictures with were, adding that none introduced themselves as Abu Ibrahim.
Which of course underscores the problem with McCain’s visit. He was eager to endorse the rebels and rushed headlong into the country to give his imprimatur to the civil war, but he showed little interest in finding out who the rebels he was posing with were, or what they stood for. That they were on the side of a war that McCain is hoping to suck the US into was simply good enough for him.
“Rendition Flights Database has been compiled in collaboration with Reprieve, and represents the world's largest set of public flight data relating to those aircraft suspected of involvement in the global network of renditions, secret detention and torture. The interactive here has been produced in collaboration with Craig Bloodworth from The Information Lab, and allows users to search for, and visualise, renditions flights from the underlying database…We hope that by bringing together the data into one place, researchers across the globe will be able to help build a clearer picture of the movements of aircraft associated with the renditions network. In particular, we hope to identify those flights which can be linked to known or suspected detainee transfers between secret detention sites, or which may have played a subsidiary role in servicing the global system of secret detention and interrogation.
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The Rendition Flights Database currently contains flight data on 122 US-registered civilian aircraft, as well as some military flights into Guantanamo Bay. In total, the current version of the database contains over 11,000 individual flights, many of which have been logged by more than one source of data. Of particular importance have been the results of a Freedom of Information project by Access Info Europe and Reprieve, that has unearthed significant new flight data on renditions aricraft. This has not been integrated before now, and sits in our Database alongside data from Eurocontrol, Council of Europe and European Parliament investigations, and a range of other sources. As the project develops, new data will be integrated as it is released into the public domain.”
One cyberactivist’s federal case wrapped up this week, and another’s is set to begin. While these two young men, Jeremy Hammond and Bradley Manning, are the two who were charged, it is the growing menace of government and corporate secrecy that should be on trial.
When I was a graduate student in economics, the social cost of capitalism was a big issue in economic theory. Since those decades ago, the social costs of capitalism have exploded, but the issue seems no longer to trouble the economics profession.
Social costs are costs of production that are not born by the producer or included in the price of the product. There are many classic examples: the pollution of air, water, and land from mining, fracking, oil drilling and pipeline spills, chemical fertilizer farming, GMOs, pesticides, radioactivity released from nuclear accidents, and the the pollution of food by antibiotics and artificial hormones.
Some economists believe that these traditional social costs can be dealt with by well defined property rights. Others think that benevolent government will control social costs in the interests of society.
Today there are new social costs brought by globalism. For developed countries, these are unemployment, lost consumer income, tax base, and GDP growth, and rising trade and current account deficits from the offshoring of manufacturing and tradable professional service jobs. The trade and current account deficits can result in a falling exchange value of the currency and rising inflation from import prices. For underdeveloped countries, the costs are the loss of self-sufficiency and the transformation of agriculture into monocultures to feed the needs of international corporations.
So “the world simply didn’t develop along the lines it (4GW) proposed”? How do you say that in Syriac?
The basic error in Chet Richards’ piece of April 19, “Is 4GW dead?” is confusing the external and internal worlds. Internally, in the U.S. military and the larger defense and foreign policy establishment, 4GW is dead, as is maneuver warfare and increasingly any connection to the external world. The foreign policy types can only perceive a world of states, in which their job is to promote the Wilsonian nee Jacobin, follies of “democracy” and “universal human rights.” They are in fact, 4GW’s allies, in that their demand for “democracy” undermines states, opening the door for more 4GW.
In most of the world, democracy is not an option. The only real options are tyranny or anarchy, and when you work against tyranny, you are working for anarchy. The ghost of bin Laden sends his heartfelt thanks.
Third Generation doctrine has been abandoned, de facto, if not de jure, by the one service that embraced it, the U.S. Marine Corps. The others never gave it a glance. The U.S. military remains and will remain second generation until it disappears from sheer irrelevance coupled with high cost. That is coming much sooner than any of them think.
In the external world, meanwhile, fourth generation war is triumphing on almost all fronts. Somalia appears at the moment to be a setback. But elsewhere, the forces of stateless disorder (and there are many, not just AQ) have much to celebrate. The bottom line that defines victory or defeat for both states and non-states forces is one question: Is there a real state? A quick tour d’horizon shows spreading state failure. Libya is now effectively stateless, thanks to the “democracy” crowd in Europe and Washington. Fourth generation war is spreading from Libya into west Africa, where states are already largely fictions, Syria is now stateless. The Iraq created by the American invasion was always a Potemkin state, and 4GW there is growing fast, in part fueled from Syria. Fourth generation war is again kicking NATO’s and the U.S.’s butt in Afghanistan, and entirely predictable outcome of invading the Graveyard of Empires. Far more dangerously, 4GW elements grow ever stronger in Pakistan, where the state is failing. Even in Egypt, which has been at least a proto-state for 5,000 years, the state is shaky.
In many of these cases, including Egypt and Pakistan, the only element strong enough to hold the state together is the army. But the “democracy” crowd in Washington immediately threatens aid cut-offs, sanctions, etc., if the army acts. Again, the children now running America’s foreign policy are 4GW’s best allies.
