U.S. Pushing Local Cops to Stay Mum on Surveillance
June 15th, 2014Via: AP:
The Obama administration has been quietly advising local police not to disclose details about surveillance technology they are using to sweep up basic cellphone data from entire neighborhoods, The Associated Press has learned.
Citing security reasons, the U.S. has intervened in routine state public records cases and criminal trials regarding use of the technology. This has resulted in police departments withholding materials or heavily censoring documents in rare instances when they disclose any about the purchase and use of such powerful surveillance equipment.
Research Credit: alvinroast
The Craft Distilling… Bubble?
June 15th, 2014*chortle*
Via: The Atlantic:
Craft distilling—a loosely defined industry consisting chiefly of distillers producing fewer than 50,000 cases a year—is now in its heady, early-Internet phase. There were about 70 small distilleries across the United States in 2003; today there are more than 600. Hardly a day passes without the announcement of a new distillery opening its doors to produce craft gin or bourbon or an obscure liqueur inspired by a Pflümli someone once tasted in Pfungen.
“I’m approaching my sixth year as a consultant in the craft industry,” said Dave Pickerell, a former master distiller at Maker’s Mark. “And 100 percent of the clients I worked with in years one, two, and three have already expanded. And the clients I picked up starting in year four are expanding now.”
Starbucks to Provide Free Online College Education to Thousands of Workers
June 15th, 2014Would you like extra foam with that?
Via: New York Times:
Starbucks will provide a free online college education to thousands of its workers, without requiring that they remain with the company, through an unusual arrangement with Arizona State University, the company and the university will announce on Monday.
The program is open to any of the company’s 135,000 United States employees, provided they work at least 20 hours a week and have the grades and test scores to gain admission to Arizona State. For a barista with at least two years of college credit, the company will pay full tuition; for those with fewer credits it will pay part of the cost, but even for many of them, courses will be free, with government and university aid.
“Starbucks is going where no other major corporation has gone,” said Jamie P. Merisotis, president and chief executive of the Lumina Foundation, a group focused on education. “For many of these Starbucks employees, an online university education is the only reasonable way they’re going to get a bachelor’s degree.”
Black Sites: Secret Prisons, Drone Bases, Surveillance Stations, Offices Where Extraordinary Rendition Is Planned
June 15th, 2014Via: Independent:
Trevor Paglen takes pictures of the places that the American and British governments don’t want you to know even exist.
The First Honest Cable Company
June 15th, 2014Via: YouTube Extremely Decent:
Iran Sends Troops Into Iraq to Aid Fight Against Isis Militants
June 15th, 2014Via: Guardian:
Iran has sent 2,000 advance troops to Iraq in the past 48 hours to help tackle a jihadist insurgency, a senior Iraqi official has told the Guardian.
The confirmation comes as the Iranian president, Hassan Rouhani, said Iran was ready to support Iraq from the mortal threat fast spreading through the country, while the Iraqi prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, called on citizens to take up arms in their country’s defence.
Addressing the country on Saturday, Maliki said rebels from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isis) had given “an incentive to the army and to Iraqis to act bravely”. His call to arms came after reports surfaced that hundreds of young men were flocking to volunteer centres across Baghdad to join the fight against Isis.
In Iran, Rouhani raised the prospect of Teheran cooperating with its old enemy Washington to defeat the Sunni insurgent group – which is attempting to ignite a sectarian war beyond Iraq’s borders.
The Iraqi official said 1,500 basiji forces had crossed the border into the town of Khanaqin, in Diyala province, in central Iraq on Friday, while another 500 had entered the Badra Jassan area in Wasat province overnight. The Guardian confirmed on Friday that Major General Qassem Suleimani, the head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ elite Quds Force, had arrived in Baghdad to oversee the defence of the capital.
Richard Rockefeller Dies in Plane Crash
June 14th, 2014Via: Poughkeepsie Journal:
Richard Rockefeller, the son of banker and philanthropist David Rockefeller, was killed Friday when the small plane he was piloting crashed in a neighborhood near the Westchester County Airport shortly after takeoff.
Russia Sent Tanks to Separatists in Ukraine, U.S. Says
June 13th, 2014Via: New York Times:
The State Department confirmed on Friday that Russia had sent tanks and other heavy weapons to separatists in Ukraine.
A column of three T-64 tanks, several BM-21 “Grad” multiple rocket launchers, and other military vehicles crossed the border near the Ukrainian town of Snizhne, State Department officials said. Reports and images of the weapons circulated on Thursday, but there were conflicting claims about where they had come from.
“This is unacceptable,” said Marie Harf, a State Department spokeswoman. “A failure by Russia to de-escalate this situation will lead to additional costs.”
A Western official said that intelligence about the movement of the tanks and other weapons into Ukraine had been shared on Friday with NATO allies. Secretary of State John Kerry complained earlier this week about the flow of Russian arms to separatists in Ukraine in a phone call to Sergey V. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister.
The T-64 is an obsolescent tank no longer in active use by Russian forces, but it is still kept in storage in southwest Russia.
“Russia will claim these tanks were taken from Ukrainian forces, but no Ukrainian tank units have been operating in that area,” the State Department said Friday afternoon. “We are confident that these tanks came from Russia.”
Pentagon Preparing for Mass Civil Breakdown
June 13th, 2014That part of the focus here is protest movements isn’t news.
I read, Low Intensity Operations: Subversion, Insurgency and Peacekeeping by Frank Kitson when I was in college back in the early 1990s and the book was a couple of decades old even then. Summary: Start gathering information on people involved in protest movements before they turn into insurgents.
In the U.S., COINTELPRO and other similar programs are standard operating procedure and have been for decades. Governments employ countless numbers of people who are tasked with infiltrating, discrediting, surveiling and otherwise rendering useless protest movements.
Also, the U.S. has had multiple martial law contingency plans in place at least as far back as the 1980s. See REX84, Garden Plot, NSPD-51.
So, a more appropriate headline might be, “Pentagon Has Been Preparing for Mass Civil Breakdown for Decades.”
Via: Guardian:
A US Department of Defense (DoD) research programme is funding universities to model the dynamics, risks and tipping points for large-scale civil unrest across the world, under the supervision of various US military agencies. The multi-million dollar programme is designed to develop immediate and long-term “warfighter-relevant insights” for senior officials and decision makers in “the defense policy community,” and to inform policy implemented by “combatant commands.”
Launched in 2008 – the year of the global banking crisis – the DoD ‘Minerva Research Initiative’ partners with universities “to improve DoD’s basic understanding of the social, cultural, behavioral, and political forces that shape regions of the world of strategic importance to the US.”
Among the projects awarded for the period 2014-2017 is a Cornell University-led study managed by the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research which aims to develop an empirical model “of the dynamics of social movement mobilisation and contagions.” The project will determine “the critical mass (tipping point)” of social contagians by studying their “digital traces” in the cases of “the 2011 Egyptian revolution, the 2011 Russian Duma elections, the 2012 Nigerian fuel subsidy crisis and the 2013 Gazi park protests in Turkey.”
Twitter posts and conversations will be examined “to identify individuals mobilised in a social contagion and when they become mobilised.”
Another project awarded this year to the University of Washington “seeks to uncover the conditions under which political movements aimed at large-scale political and economic change originate,” along with their “characteristics and consequences.” The project, managed by the US Army Research Office, focuses on “large-scale movements involving more than 1,000 participants in enduring activity,” and will cover 58 countries in total.
Last year, the DoD’s Minerva Initiative funded a project to determine ‘Who Does Not Become a Terrorist, and Why?’ which, however, conflates peaceful activists with “supporters of political violence” who are different from terrorists only in that they do not embark on “armed militancy” themselves. The project explicitly sets out to study non-violent activists:
“In every context we find many individuals who share the demographic, family, cultural, and/or socioeconomic background of those who decided to engage in terrorism, and yet refrained themselves from taking up armed militancy, even though they were sympathetic to the end goals of armed groups. The field of terrorism studies has not, until recently, attempted to look at this control group. This project is not about terrorists, but about supporters of political violence.”
The project’s 14 case studies each “involve extensive interviews with ten or more activists and militants in parties and NGOs who, though sympathetic to radical causes, have chosen a path of non-violence.”
I contacted the project’s principal investigator, Prof Maria Rasmussen of the US Naval Postgraduate School, asking why non-violent activists working for NGOs should be equated to supporters of political violence – and which “parties and NGOs” were being investigated – but received no response.
Why Online Tracking Is Getting Creepier
June 13th, 2014Via: Pro Publica:
The marketers that follow you around the web are getting nosier.
Currently, many companies track where users go on the Web—often through cookies—in order to display customized ads. That’s why if you look at a pair of shoes on one site, ads for those shoes may follow you around the Web.
But online marketers are increasingly seeking to track users offline, as well, by collecting data about people’s offline habits—such as recent purchases, where you live, how many kids you have, and what kind of car you drive.
Here’s how it works, according to some revealing marketing literature we came across from digital marketing firm LiveRamp…
