There is something very wrong about the narrative of the Edward Snowden story. I agree with this essay. Everything is focused on Snowden and not on what his leaks have revealed. A story with profound implications for our society has devolved instead into a kind of thriller movie script.
The entire security apparat, perhaps because it is predicated on priorities other than those of the Constitution is inherently in conflict with democracy. Here is yet another aspect of what I mean.
On June 24th the “Prawer Plan for the Arrangement of Bedouin-Palestinian Settlement in the Negev” passed its first reading in the Israeli parliament. If implemented, the Plan will constitute “the largest single act of forced displacement of Arab citizens of Israel since the 1950s,” expelling an estimated forty thousand Palestinian Bedouin from their current dwellings.
The Plan’s ultimate objective is to Judaize the Israeli Negev. In order to do this, however, seventy thousand (out of 200,000) Bedouin who currently live in villages classified as ‘unrecognized’ by the Israeli government must be moved.
The government already forbids them from connecting to the electricity grid or the water and sewage systems. Construction regulations are also harshly enforced, and in 2011 alone about a thousand Bedouin homes and animal pens—usually referred to by the government as mere “structures”—were demolished. There are no paved roads, and signposts from main roads to the villages are removed by government authorities. The villages are not shown on maps, since as a matter of official geography, the places inhabited by these second-class citizens of Israel do not exist.
Repression: The conflicts and tensions between the net generation and the offline legislators are just escalating. The legislators are sitting on all the force, but the net generation is sitting on all the future. With the recent revelations of wholesale spying and surveillance by the United States’ NSA, these tensions have been brought to light again.
People and legislators who were born into the offline world were so through none of their choice. Nobody holds, or should hold, them responsible for being an offline-born. However, people should – and do – hold them responsible when they’re not even making an effort at understanding the net generation and dismissing their demands of privacy and dignity. Listening to lobbyists of big corporations does not count, even if those lobbyists call themselves “stakeholders”. They, too, are offline-born, and will just tell the legislators that the net needs to be curtailed more because it disrupts their business by allowing the competition to do the same thing at one-tenth the cost.
It isn’t just the United States and the NSA spying on their citizens in this manner. The European countries’ security forces do it too, and we know it all too well, even though it probably won’t mentioned too much in election campaigns.
The demands from the net generation of basic privacy, basic respect – even basic dignity – is just getting louder in the face of these egregious privacy violations. Unfortunately, it is usually met with undeserving disrespect from the offline-borns, legislators and lobbyists alike.
College students can be flunked for cut-and-paste reports, think tankers can be embarrassed, Defense News staff writers can be fired, but not, apparently, members of the National Air and Space Intelligence Center (NASIC).
Most of its so-called “updated” report, 2013 Ballistic and Cruise Missile Threat, which contains contributions from the Defense Intelligence Agency Missile and Space Intelligence Center and the Office of Naval Intelligence, was largely a cut-and-paste job from its 2009 report. Some of the material is identical to the 2006 and 1998 report.
Though it was reformatted and photographs rearranged with some being enlarged or decreased, the 2013 report appears verbatim from the 2009 report. This clever reordering and reformatting with new color schemes for boxes and graphs is embarrassing since there is more impressive data on Chinese missiles on Wikipedia.
For the last few months, we've been raising an outcry against Encrypted Media Extensions (EME), a plan by Netflix and a block of other media and software companies to squeeze support for Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) into the HTML standard, the core language of the Worldwide Web. The HTML standard is set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which this block of corporations has been heavily lobbying as of late.
The proposed adoption of EME is disturbing for what it says about the way decisions are made relative to the Web, but what does it mean for you as a free software user?
DRM and free software don't mix. All DRM software relies on keeping secrets, like decryption algorithms, from the user, so that users cannot design their own method to modify it. The secrets are stored on users' own computers in places users cannot access or even read. This practice inherently tramples Freedom 1 of the Free Software Definition: the freedom to study how a program works and change it so it does your computing as you wish.
This means that each time a part of the Web starts requiring DRM software to decrypt it, it becomes inaccessible to free software. And if influential companies like Netflix, Google and Microsoft succeed at jamming DRM into the HTML standard, there will be even more pressure than there already is for people distributing media to encumber it with DRM. We'll see an explosion of DRM on the Web — a growing dark zone inaccessible to free software users. This threatens to happen at a time when the state of free software-friendly media on the Web was starting to improve, with the increasing quality of free video codecs and the decline of Flash accompanied by the rise of the HTML5 video tag.
Netflix's lobbying in the W3C is paid for by subscription fees, so we're asking you to help pull that money out from under them by boycotting their services. If you have an account, use this link to cancel it. Whether you're canceling an account or not, you can help the boycott build momentum by spreading the word with the hashtag #CancelNetflix.[1]
Attached herewith is an essay I just wrote for Counterpunch.
For you convenience I have also attached a very important McClatchy report on the Orwellian Insider Threat Program being promoted by the Obama Administration.
The lead co-author, Jonathan Landay, is one of the few mainstream reporters who has been onto the lunacy unleashed by 9-11 from the git go.
My intent in the essay is to place this dangerous craziness in a somewhat larger larger context of our morally and mentally bankrupt intelligence system … judge for yourself whether or not I have been successful.
At the core of the drone program is the theory of signature targeting. It is a theory based on the idea that analysts can discern “enemy combatants” from an analysis of outward indicators of patterns of behaviour.
DEFCON 20: Bigger Monster, Weaker Chains: The National Security Agency and the Constitution”>DEFCON 20: Bigger Monster, Weaker Chains: The National Security Agency and the Constitution
Published on Nov 17, 2012
Speakers: JAMEEL JAFFER DEPUTY LEGAL DIRECTOR, AMERICAN CIVIL LIBERTIES UNION
WILLIAM BINNEY FORMER OFFICIAL, NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY
JAMES BAMFORD INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST
ALEX ABDO STAFF ATTORNEY, AMERICAN CIVIL LIBERTIES UNION
The panel will be moderated by the Deputy Director of the ACLU, Jameel Jaffer.
The National Security Agency, the largest, most powerful spy agency in the world, has taken in an estimated 15 to 20 trillion communications since 9/11, often in defiance of the Constitution and Congressional statutes. The NSA’s goal, some say, is to collect virtually all of our electronic communications to allow mass data mining reminiscent of the notorious and now reportedly-defunct program, Total Information Awareness. The limits on the agency’s authority to sweep up and analyze this information are critical to our safety and our privacy. The NSA is investing vast amounts in increasing its data storage, code-breaking and analysis capabilities, frequently claiming the investments are for foreign intelligence or “cybersecurity†purposes. However, instead of keeping its equipment trained on terrorism suspects or foreign governments, the NSA is increasingly monitoring the communications of innocent people. Longtime NSA official and whistleblower Bill Binney will join investigative journalist and NSA expert James Bamford and ACLU lawyer Alex Abdo to explore the NSA’s goals, reach, and capabilities, and the legality (or illegality) of its actions.
There is something very wrong about the narrative of the Edward Snowden story. I agree with this essay. Everything is focused on Snowden and not on what his leaks have revealed. A story with profound implications for our society has devolved instead into a kind of thriller movie script. 
