As promised last week, the first magazine of the new Omidyar-Greenwald-Poitras-Scahill First Look Media venture is out today. It is called The Intercept and has an article The NSA’s Secret Role in the U.S. Assassination Program by Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill on how the drones target cell phones not people. [Read more…]
Last month I wrote about an important ruling handed down on January 14, 2014 by US District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco where he slapped down the government for placing a Malaysian architect Rahinah Ibrahim on the no-fly list in 2005 and not telling her why. The trial lasted five days from December 6-10, 2013 during which at least on ten occasions the judge reluctantly closed the court to the public and the press at the request of the government because the case supposedly involved ‘sensitive security information’ or SSI. [Read more…]
Via Atrios I came across this article by Pam Martens. She worked for over two decades on Wall Street but has since turned into a watchdog, exposing its wrongdoings with her insider’s perspective and knowledge. [Read more…]
Canada is one of the ‘Five Eyes’ group of English speaking countries that formed a pact following World War II to share their spying information, the others being the US, UK, Australia, and New Zealand. This arrangement enables these governments to skirt the letter of the law that some countries have that prevent spying on their own citizens, since each country can spy on others and then share the information. [Read more…]
Apparently it is a tradition for the US president to give an interview to a television network just before the Superb Owl game each year and this year the interviewer was Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly. I did not watch it, of course, because O’Reilly is a waste of time, a blowhard who tries to pretend that he is a serious journalist. [Read more…]
You may recall that following the erection of a monument to the Ten Commandments on the grounds of the state capitol in Oklahoma, a Hindu group proposed putting up a statue to their god Hanuman and a Satanic group has proposed one too. Gideon Resnick joined the New York—based Satanic Temple to learn more people behind the latter effort. This group of Satanists seems closer in outlook to the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster than to anything occult. [Read more…]
As children, many of us believed crazy things, such as the existence of ghosts and fairies and other manifestations of the magical or supernatural. As we grew up, we abandoned many of those absurd beliefs, mainly due to our growing realization that they did not make any sense. But in addition, as we got older our families did not actively seek to have us continue to believe them and, in the case of things like Santa Claus and the tooth fairy, actively sought to dissuade us from doing so. Society at large also does not have a vested interest in propagating a lot of magical thinking. [Read more…]
Ahmed Shihab-Eldin is an American journalist of Palestinian origin who has worked at a range of news organizations in the US and abroad and often has to go on overseas assignments. He says that he dreads coming back because of the appalling way he is treated every time by US immigration officials. He recounts his experiences, including the latest one when he was returning from covering the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland. [Read more…]
The Republican members of the House of Representatives had a retreat last week and minority leader Eric Cantor had to tell them some surprising news and that is that not all Americans are business owners. [Read more…]
You may recall the case of Lavabit that I have written about before where Ladar Levinson, the owner of that encrypted mail service, shut down his business to avoid giving the government the master encryption key they demanded so that they could read all his 410,000 clients’ emails. This happened last June, likely when the US government first learned of the NSA leaks and discovered that Edward Snowden used Lavabit to communicate. [Read more…]