This article refers to GMO labeling, but also to toxic pharmaceuticals, harmful vaccines, and other chemical assaults on human health and life.
There is a myth that the free market wins out against all odds. The consumer decides. He buys what he wants, and doesn’t buy what he thinks is unhealthy. Pretty to think so, but false.
There is another factor at work.
It’s called: crime.
It’s a crime to poison people.
If you’re the CEO of a corporation which sells poison under any name, in any package, a state or federal attorney should have your ass in court, and then in jail. For a long time.
Please be aware that “the Israel Lobby” is not equivalent to “American Jews.” As MJ Rosenberg notes, most American Jews are far more progressive than the organizations that officially speak for them (because most American Jews are not affiliated with those organizations). The Israel Lobby gets much of its strength from a minority of American Jews who back their positions with lots of money, and by the Christian Zionists.
The Israel Lobby Is Killing Iran Negotiations In Favor Of War
MJ Rosenberg
The Israel Lobby has truly gotten out of control.
The Obama administration is close to an agreement with the Iranian government to achieve a decade’s long goal. Iran would give up any plans it might have to develop nuclear weapons (verified by international inspections) in exchange for the lifting of some international sanctions that are doing significant damage to the Iranian economy.
This is certainly no surprise. CSO reveals, “People Flock to Anonymizing Services After NSA Snooping Reports.” Writer Grant Gross highlights several anonymous search services that have seen usage soar since certain NSA practices have come to light. DuckDuckGo is on the list, as well as Tor and mobile solution Silent Circle. The brand new Disconnect Search saw over 400,000 searches within four days of its launch. Clearly, many people are beginning to cover their virtual tracks. But is it pointless, after all? The article points out:
“Disconnect Search’s FAQ includes information about possible government searches. ‘The reality is the U.S. government may force us to begin logging the search queries of a particular user or group of users,’ the FAQ said. ‘If served with a court order that includes a non-disclosure provision, we may not be able to tell our users about this change for some period of time, possibly forever. And the U.S. government may also have other methods of monitoring user searches which Disconnect Search cannot prevent.’”
Though we now know several prominent firms quietly complied with NSA demands to fork over their records, at least one search service has elected to fold rather than cave. Lavabit made the tough choice to shut down their decade-old organization rather than comply with. . . something. Owner Ladar Levison’s explanation, which is all that is left of the site, laments that he can’t tell us exactly what was demanded of him, but his frustration and ire are apparent in the strongly worded note. He writes:
“I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit. After significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend operations. I wish that I could legally share with you the events that led to my decision. I cannot. I feel you deserve to know what’s going on–the first amendment is supposed to guarantee me the freedom to speak out in situations like this. Unfortunately, Congress has passed laws that say otherwise.”
So, there’s that. Not exactly encouraging for fans of privacy. Lavison seems to hold at least a sliver of hope for a favorable verdict as Lavabit takes their fight to court. Is even that too optimistic?
Privacy: The Swedish citizens will get all their phone calls and e-mail traffic wiretapped in real time not just by the Swedish NSA branch, but also by police, customs, the tax authority, and others. These plans were revealed today by the Ny Teknik magazine, sending shockwaves among civil rights activists. This follows a previous law change that gave the Swedish NSA branch, the FRA, realtime access to all Internet traffic that crossed the country borders – effectively wiretapping everybody warrantlessly all the time.
Circumventing the entire legislative process and every democratic shred of oversight, the Swedish Police are demanding voluntary agreements from telecom operators to give the Police and other Swedish authorities direct and real-time access to phone call data, mail traffic, and much more. This is not just the slippery slope into an Orwellian society that civil rights activists have warned about: this is a slippery precipice.
We’re now officially past the point where “national security” (and the the ever-present disgusting child porn/terrorism argument) is used to justify bulk warrantless wiretapping of everybody, all the time. We’ve arrived at the point where the Police justify the complete elimination of entire classes of civil liberties with nothing more than “because it can be done, and we want it”.
The authorities that would get direct real-time access to most communications aren’t just the Police, but also the Customs Office, the Security Police, and the Tax Authority (!!).
A key difference between a functioning democracy and a police state is, that in a functioning democracy, the Police don’t get everything they point at. While the border between the two is arguably a lot of gray area, and subject to a lot of polemic, it can no longer be reasonably stated that police powers are under checks and balances.
According to the Ny Teknik article, followed up by manyothers in Swedish oldmedia, it’s not just real-time data on phone calls and mail that the Police are demanding. A sample of other things included in the proposed mass surveillance package:
How telecom bills are paid – cash, credit, direct deposit. If credit card, which one, and if direct deposit, from which bank account.
The subscriber’s PUK code, enabling a police authority to activate the cellphone’s SIM card without the subscriber’s PIN code.
There are hints in the article that many other items may be covered by the realtime wiretapping, referring to a wiretapping standard called ITS27.
The only telecom operator to say a blank never, this is completely unthinkable to the Police demands is the Swedish Tele 2.
The fact that the Swedish regime isn’t immediately firing everybody in the Police demanding this wholesale abolition of civil rights is practically an endorsement of the plans – and one that goes hand in hand with the much-criticized Swedish FRA Law that legalized warrantless bulk wiretapping in the first place.
On the eve of the Arab Spring, Rachel Ehrenfeld published a lengthy and important study titled, “Their Oil Is Thicker Than Our Blood“*on Saudi support for Islamist terrorism and the global expansion of the radical Islamic base, as well as the inadequacies of the Kingdom’s purported anti-terrorist efforts. While much has happened since, very little has changed regarding the patterns of Saudi behavior in this regard.
Despite continued public statements of support for U.S. and Western counterterrorism efforts, sporadic enforcement of new laws in the Kingdom regarding such things as money laundering, money transfers to dubious foreign recipients, and the occasional rousting of terrorist cells (al Qaeda- and Iran-affiliated), Saudi Arabia remains one of the most important sources of terrorist funding worldwide-if not THE most important source.
The U.S., while knowing this full well, has for many years doled out nothing but praise for the Saudis when it comes to fighting Islamist terrorism. This is as true now as it was after September 11. In this, the U.S. government has seemingly accepted the principal underpinning of the Saudi regime: buying off its would-be Islamist adversaries at home. The leading principle has been all along – not in our backyard. Thus the Kingdom’s support of Osama bin-Laden and al Qaeda in Afghanistan.
But Saudi funding to globally spread their Sunni radical version of Islam-Wahhabism–began in earnest in 1962 with the establishment of the Muslim World League (MWL), which expanded into at least to one hundred branches in more than thirty countries, and served as the main body for other international Saudi charities. Since then, the Kingdom’s charities have been estimated to spend between $1.5 and $2 trillion to build many thousand of mosques, madrassas and Islamic centers equipped with Saudi books and Imams, preaching the Wahhabi doctrine.
Infopolicy – Christian Engström: The NSA has asked Linus Torvalds to inject covert backdoors into the free and open operating system GNU/Linux. This was revealed in this week’s hearing on mass surveillance in the European Parliament. Chalk another one up of the United States NSA trying to make information technology less secure for everyone.
The father of Linus Torvalds, Nils Torvalds, is a Member of the European Parliament for Finland. This week, Nils Torvalds took part in the European Parliament’s hearing on the ongoing mass surveillance, and brought a revelation:
The United States security service NSA has contacted Linus Torvalds with a request to add backdoors into the free and open operating system GNU/Linux.
