Repression: A proposed pornography-censorship scheme in the United Kingdom is going to censor political speech from day one. There is pressure from the UK Government on UK Internet Service Providers to introduce “default voluntary censorship”, which is supposed to get at “pornography”. This is a covert way of making censorship acceptable and even desirable, “for the children”, but the censorship will cover much more than that.
. . . . . . .
Naked Censorship
We arrive at the important conclusion that censorship is incapable of telling the difference between political contexts and purely pornographic ones. Even if you think the latter is okay to banish from the planet, political discussion is never – never, ever under any circumstance – okay to censor.
The conclusion is inevitable: censorship is not acceptable in any way, shape or form. But those of us who have studied history of power already knew that.
This is an amazing court decision, with enormous implications not only for Catholics, but for religious groups in general. It is hard to believe a court could rule in this way, or that this will not be overturned.
A federal judge in Wisconsin handed down an opinion yesterday granting the Catholic Church – and indeed, potentially all religious institutions – such sweeping immunity from federal bankruptcy law that it is not clear that it would permit any plaintiff to successfully sue any church in any court. While the ostensible issue in this case is whether over $50 million in church funds are shielded from a bankruptcy proceeding triggered largely by a flood of clerical sex abuse claims against the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, Judge Rudolph Randa reads the church’s constitutional and legal right to religious liberty so broadly as to render religious institutions immune from much of the law.
With all the attention pointed towards PRISM, another interesting publication was virtually overlooked. Earlier last month, a taskforce belonging to the US DoD’s Defense Science Board (DSB) released a final report titled “Resilient Military Systems and the Advanced Cyber Threat” [PDF], that reports on the findings of an 18-month research project. The DSB is a committee of civilian experts that is to advise the US DoD on scientific and technical matters. I just threw that line in here to point out that this committee is staffed by individual civilians and not representatives of the industrial military complex. This is worth mentioning, because a good portion of the report is absolutely riveting in its description of how bad they think the situation is, and this is automatically bound to become a target for those people who still don’t believe in Cyber Warfare. The report starts off with a sentiment many of us will find reasonable, and applying to cyber security as a whole (as opposed to cyber warfare specifically):
“Cyber is a complicated domain. There is no silver bullet that will eliminate the threats inherent to leveraging cyber as a force multiplier, and it is impossible to completely defend against the most sophisticated cyber attacks. However, solving this problem is analogous to complex national security and military strategy challenges of the past, such as the counter U-boat strategy in WWII and nuclear deterrence in the Cold War. The risks involved with these challenges were never driven to zero, but through broad systems engineering of a spectrum of techniques, the challenges were successfully contained and managed.” – Mr. James R. Gosler & Mr. Lewis Von Thaer – Resilient Military Systems and the Advanced Cyber Threat.
In this same opening letter, some fairly damning statements are made.
Phi Beta Iota: This staff report avoids all the negatives and fluffs up many dubious positives. The Joint Fusion Centers are a failure — and were called a failure before they were ever built. There is no connection between what can be produced at the national level using a legacy system built for other purposes, and the needs of state and local authorities. Similarly there is no connection between what state and local authorities can produce, and national needs. An Open Source Agency and the redirection of this program to create a Smart Nation with Community Intelligence Networks in each state would go a long way toward helping achieve the worthwhile objectives. What is being now is not working, will never work, and is not worth funding.
Frustration with poor managers is costing the CIA some of its most talented staff, internal surveys and former officers say.
By Ken Dilanian
Los Angeles Times, July 29, 2013
WASHINGTON — For the Central Intelligence Agency, he was a catch: an American citizen who had grown up overseas, was fluent in Mandarin and had a master's degree in his field. He was working in Silicon Valley, but after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, he wanted to serve his country.
The analyst, who declined to be named to shield his association with the CIA, was hired in 2005 into the agency's Directorate of Intelligence, where he was assigned to dig into Chinese politics. He said he was dismayed to discover that unimpressive managers wielded incredible power and suffered no consequences for mistakes. Departments were run like fiefdoms, he said, and “very nasty internecine battles” were a fixture.
By 2009, he had left the CIA. He now does a similar job for the U.S. military.
Note how the information in this NYT report is consistent with a need for even greater surveillance of John Q Average American. This helps to prop up the establishment’s panicky pushback against the growing populist threat to rein in NSA’s snooping that became so evident in the surprisingly narrow defeat of the Amash Amendment — a panic which Blumenthal noted was also on display in the Snowden angst pervading Aspen.
Now think of the unstated elegance implicit in the closed loop of the snooping mentality on display in these two reports: The US and its European establishments (and the Sunni Gulf Monarchies) stoke up a sectarian revolt against Syrian President Assad. Predictably, the best fighters in the revolt are radical Sunni Jihadis, many of whom were trained by our wars in Iraq and Libya and perhaps Afghanistan. Also predictably, given Jihadi spillover from Libya, the radical Jihadis take over the Syrian revolt. The US and Europeans now claim these Syrian Jihadis are attracting Jihadi wannabees from the West (also predictable), who may return to the Europe and US, where they can use their enhanced terrorist skills and Al Qaida connections to wreak havoc at home. Therefore, given the new domestic threat created by the Establishment's policies of perpetual war, we need to increase NSA surveillance (really data mining) capabilities to sniff out indicators of prospective terrorist behaviour at home. Naturally, to do this, we must accept the greatly increased risks of false positives* implicit in all data mining schemes, because they all rely on the mechanistic assumption that the targets of the mining action will not bother to modify their behaviour sufficiently to neutralize their identification by the data mining algorithm or template. (A rather peculiar assumption given the proactive conspiratorial confrontation dynamics so pervasive throughout the Middle East.)
Of course, these legal niceties of avoiding false positives are irrelevant, because thanks to the Patriot (Enabling?) Act, we can detain targets without charging them, and besides, the real threats to be neutralized are the outliers at home who are trying to defend and anachronistic Fourth Amendment like Congressmen Amash and Conyers. So, a few more false positives of innocent John Q. Average Americans are merely collateral damage that must be accepted in the defense of ‘freedom' in the perpetual wars of American Empire.
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* A false positive occurs when a statistical deduction tells you something is true when it is in reality not true. Finding an innocent man guilty of a crime is a false positive, and it is no accident that most legal systems in democracies are premised, at least in theory, on a value system that it is more important to avoid false positives and than false negatives (i.e. it is more important not to convict and innocent person than to fail to convict a guilty person)
WASHINGTON — A rising number of radicalized young Muslims with Western passports are traveling to Syria to fight with the rebels against the government of Bashar al-Assad, raising fears among American and European intelligence officials of a new terrorist threat when the fighters return home.
The income of the average American family is nine per cent lower than it was a decade ago, and it gets harder and harder to get a job. And now this survey showing that young adults, even when they have some work, are working full-time jobs less and less.
DENNIS JACOBE, Chief Economist – The Gallup Organization
WORSE:
We have reached the Orwellian state of continuous war. Who are we fighting? That's a secret. You are required to pay for it, but you are not entitled to know.
