Archive for the 'Dictatorship' Category
“An FBI Counterterrorism Agent Tracked Me Down Because I Took a Picture of This”
July 15th, 2014Via: ACLU: So, consider this: A professional photographer taking a photo of a well-known Boston landmark is now considered to be engaged in suspicious terrorist activity? I lived through the McCarthy era, so I know how false accusations, surveillance, and keeping files on innocent people can destroy their careers and lives. I am deeply troubled […]
GCHQ Has Developed Covert Tools to Seed the Internet with False Information
July 15th, 2014The headline is a huge understatement. Go through the document for a laundry list of stuff they’re up to. Via: First Look: The secretive British spy agency GCHQ has developed covert tools to seed the internet with false information, including the ability to manipulate the results of online polls, artificially inflate pageview counts on web […]
From 2004: “Army Test in 1950 May Have Changed Microbial Ecology”
July 14th, 2014Via: San Francisco Chronicle: Serratia is a bacterium that some doctors and residents of the Bay Area have been familiar with for many years. In 1950, government officials believed that serratia did not cause disease. That belief was later used as a justification for a secret post-World War II Army experiment that became a notorious […]
Have We Gone From a Post-War to a Pre-War World?
July 13th, 2014Via: Huffington Post: On June 28, 1914, a chauffeur panicked after a failed bomb attack on his boss, took a wrong turn and came to a complete stop in front of a café in Sarajevo where Gavrilo Princip was sitting. Princip, discouraged at the apparent failure of the planned murder, seized the unexpected opportunity and […]
Banks Dreading Computer Hacks Call for Cyber War Council
July 13th, 2014Via: Bloomberg: Wall Street’s biggest trade group has proposed a government-industry cyber war council to stave off terrorist attacks that could trigger financial panic by temporarily wiping out account balances, according to an internal document. The proposal by the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, known as Sifma, calls for a committee of executives and […]
CIA Employee’s Quest to Release Information Destroyed Career
July 6th, 2014Via: Washington Post: His CIA career included assignments in Africa, Afghanistan and Iraq, but the most perilous posting for Jeffrey Scudder turned out to be a two-year stint in a sleepy office that looks after the agency’s historical files. It was there that Scudder discovered a stack of articles, hundreds of histories of long-dormant conflicts […]
The Military Is Already Using Facebook to Track Your Mood
July 2nd, 2014Via: Defense One: Critics have targeted a recent study on how emotions spread on the popular social network site Facebook, complaining that some 600,000 Facebook users did not know that they were taking part in an experiment. Somewhat more disturbing, the researchers deliberately manipulated users’ feelings to measure an effect called emotional contagion. Though Cornell […]
Billionaire: When The Pitchforks Come Out, There Won’t Be Time to Board Our Gulfstream Jets for New Zealand
June 27th, 2014There’s another take on this over at Daily Ticker. In short: Wealthy People Should “Chill Out” Because Docile, Bewildered Americans Will Just Keep Watching TV: The rich ought to chill out. While the masses may envy their wealth, there’s no evidence of a revolution brewing, or even a well-behaved civil disturbance. Americans are clearly dismayed […]
Obama Asks Congress for $500 Million for Rebels
June 26th, 2014The ink is hardly dry on this one: Militants in Iraq Take Over Four Cities, Make Off with Arms Cache and Nearly Half a Billion Dollars. So they are backing the good terrorists and the bad terrorists. The amount needed for the good terrorists is interesting, wouldn’t you say? The bad terrorists make off with […]
Massachusetts SWAT Teams Claim They’re Private Corporations, Immune from Open Records Laws
June 26th, 2014Via: Washington Post: As part of the American Civil Liberties Union’s recent report on police militarization, the Massachusetts chapter of the organization sent open records requests to SWAT teams across that state. It received an interesting response. As it turns out, a number of SWAT teams in the Bay State are operated by what are […]
