Corruption – Page 517 – Public Intelligence Blog

Partnership Between Facebook and Police Could Make Planning Protests Impossible

A partnership between police departments and social media sites discussed at a convention in Philadelphia this week could allow law enforcement to keep anything deemed criminal off the Internet—and even stop people from organizing protests.

A high-ranking official from the Chicago Police Department told attendees at a law enforcement conference on Monday that his agency has been working with a security chief at Facebook to block certain users from the site “if it is determined they have posted what is deemed criminal content,” reports Kenneth Lipp, an independent journalist who attended the lecture.

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2013/10/27

Rickard Falkvinge: Mass Surveillance Fallout — Europe Investigating NSA

Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, Military

Privacy: This week, the European Parliament voted to immediately suspend the sharing of European financial tracking data with the United States in a 280-254 decision, as well as calling for criminal investigations of the NSA. This follows in the footsteps of mass surveillance revelations that the NSA has illegally hacked into the SWIFT financial data. This appears to be yet another public wake-up and backlash against the secretive wiretapping industry.

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2013/10/272013/10/27

Chuck Spinney: Is Israel an Apartheid State?

Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government

Attached is a thoughtful essay in which Israeli war hero (1948), ex-Knesset member, and peace activist Uri Avnery examines the likenesses and differences between Israel and Apartheid South Africa.

Chuck Spinney

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WEEKEND EDITION OCTOBER 25-27, 2013

South African Apartheid was Brought Down by the Blacks Themselves

Is Israel an Apartheid State?

by URI AVNERY, Counterpunch

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/10/25/is-israel-an-apartheid-state/

Is Israel an apartheid state? This question is not going away. It raises its head every few months.

The term “apartheid” is often used purely for propaganda purposes. Apartheid, like racism and fascism, is a rhetorical term one uses to denigrate one’s opponent.

But apartheid is also a term with a precise content. It applies to a specific regime. Equating another regime to it may be accurate, partly correct or just wrong. So, necessarily, will be the conclusions drawn from the comparison.

RECENTLY I had the opportunity to discuss this subject with an expert, who had lived in South Africa throughout the apartheid era. I learned a lot from this.

Is Israel an apartheid state? Well, first one must settle the question: which Israel? Israel proper, within the Green Line, or the Israeli occupation regime in the occupied Palestinian territories, or both together?

Let’s come back to that later.

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2013/10/272013/10/27

Chuck Spinney: The Lofgren Corollary: The Method Behind the Madness of the Shutdown

Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government

It is easy to look at the shutdown and the concomitant chaos in federal government as the product of incompetence and corruption. But it was a deliberate effort by a vocal congressional minority from safe, cynically gerrymandered, congressional districts to sabotage the functioning of the entire federal government.

One would think that a deliberate effort to turn the entire US government into an incompetent global laughing stock would be seen as an act of treason (and it certainly would have been if the effort was focused on the Pentagon), but to date, this has not been the case. Yet as Bruce Barlett observes in the attached essay, there was indeed a systematic method to the destructive objectives of the government shutdown. His critique is important, because Bartlett is no weepy effete liberal from the salons of the upper west side. cHe is a long time card-carrying conservative Republican, having worked for Congressmen Ron Paul and Jack Kemp in Congress, before serving in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations.

Bartlett argues the goals of the Republican radicals in Congress are (1) to wreck the domestic functions of the Federal Government as we know it and (2) mutate the feds into some idealized vision of limited government front for the ubiquitous tentacles of untouchable authoritarian national security state. Borrowing from the work of my good friend Mike Lofgren (another lifelong Republican), Bartlett names this method the Lofgren Corollary to the definition of the Republican chutzpah: which is shorthand for the premeditated self-reinforcing strategy to intentionally sabotage government programs (except defense) by denying them the resources and stability to function efficiently, then attacking those programs when they do not work as advertised, thus justifying further strangulation, which creates more problems and confusion … and adds ammunition for further attacks. In short the goal is to put the Federal Government (defense excepted) into a dead man's spiral.

If Bartlett is correct, and I think he is, he ends by showing why those wishful thinking lefties who think Obama won the shut down debate should think again. To borrow from Winston Churchill (with a twist): the end of the shutdown is not the end, nor is it the beginning of the end … and, given the destabilizing nature of continuing resolutions and public confusion over very basic bytes of information (for example 59% of the people think the deficit is increasing when it is decreasing), it is perhaps not even the end of the beginning.

Chuck Spinney

Alexandria, VA

Republicans and the “Lofgren Corollary

BRUCE BARTLETT

The Fiscal Times

October 25, 2013

http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Columns/2013/10/25/Republicans-and-Lofgren-Corollary

Last week I explained that Congress has become an incompetent institution, unable to do its most basic work of passing annual appropriations bills to keep the government running. We usually think of incompetence as being the result of ineptness, stupidity or ignorance. But in the case of Congress, it is often intentional and deliberate, part of a long-term strategy by some Republicans to undermine government itself.

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2013/10/25

Berto Jongman: NSA A Diplomatic Disaster for USA

04 Inter-State Conflict, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Transnational Crime, Corruption, Idiocy, Ineptitude, IO Deeds of War, Military, Officers Call

Hard National Security Choices

Dispatch from Berlin on a Diplomatic Disaster

By Ingrid Wuerth

Friday, October 25, 2013 at 7:00 AM

A diplomatic disaster for the United States is currently unfolding in Berlin. The revelation that the NSA may have monitored cell phone conversations and text messages of Chancellor Angela Merkel has led to popular outrage in Germany, as well as unusually pointed language from the Chancellor and other government officials. The U.S. Ambassador was not merely asked but summoned (“einbestellt”) to the German foreign office—a strong verb used until now (if at all) only for the Syrian and Iranian ambassadors. The Chancellor’s phone conversation with President Obama did nothing to ease the tension. Merkel declared such practices totally unacceptable: Between friends and partners such as the United States and Germany, the monitoring of communications by government leaders is a grave breach of trust, her press secretary emphasized. The Obama administration, other than saying the Chancellor’s phone is not now and will not in the future be monitored, has offered nothing: neither apology, nor explanation of what happened in the past, nor any sort of suggestion for future cooperation or discussion of a collective solution.

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2013/10/252013/10/25

Berto Jongman: Does Power Make You Mean? Yes. Also Stupid and Very, Very Unethical

Corruption, Cultural Intelligence

Does power make you mean?

By Susanne Gargiulo

CNN October 24, 2013

“Thinking Business” focuses on the psychology of getting ahead in the workplace by exploring techniques to boost employee performance, increase creativity and productivity.

(CNN) — We all know the story. Someone gets promoted at work and suddenly they change — they start forgetting their previous peers or turning into bullies.

As it turns out, it may be in our wiring.

In one of the first studies to make this claim, scientists now say a default brain mechanism may cause us to lose empathy when we gain power.

“This research is important because it opens the door to examining what power does to us,” says Sukhvinder Obhi, senior author of the study at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada. “We have very little understanding of how power affects the brain, both in terms of the neural causes and consequences.”

Specifically, the study showed that when you put people in a state where they feel more powerful, their sensitivity to other people dropped, including their ability to put themselves in other peoples shoes.

Read full article.

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2013/10/252013/10/25