New York City Council official urges Brooklyn College to hire 'professor from Israel' City Councilman Lew Fidler.(Photo via CSA-NYC.org) New York City Councilman Lew Fidler is still outraged over the Brooklyn College panel that took place in February on the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement. The Assistant Majority leader, an ardent advocate for Israel, has sent a letter to the City University of New York (CUNY) to suggest the hiring of a “professor from Israel” at Brooklyn College to correct what he calls bias in the school’s Political Science department, which co-sponsored the panel. His latest effort comes over three months after he sparked a furor by sending a separate letter suggesting that funding for Brooklyn College could be affected if the event featuring BDS proponents went through. The late April missive also blasts the CUNY report on the Brooklyn College panel, which found that while the planning and execution of the event went haywire, there was no anti-Semitism at hand–contrary to what Israel advocates alleged.
Intellectuals as Subjects and Objects of Violence (Image: Jared Rodriguez / Truthout)Edward Snowden, Russ Tice, Thomas Drake, Jeremy Scahill, and Julian Assange, among others, have recently made clear what it means to embody respect for a public intellectual debate, moral witnessing and intellectual culture. They are not just whistle-blowers or disgruntled ex-employers but individuals who value ideas, think otherwise in order to act otherwise, and use the resources available to them to address important social issues with what might be called a fearsome sense of social responsibility and civic courage. Their anger is not treasonous or self-serving as some critics argue, it is the indispensable sensibility and righteous fury that fuels the meaning over what it means to take a moral and political stand and to continue the struggle to live in a substantive rather than fake democracy. Intellectuals of that older generation have become a rare breed who enriched public life.
Reporter Had To Decide If Snowden Leaks Were 'The Real Thing' hide captionAccording to Barton Gellman, Edward Snowden (above) specifically asked journalists not to make all the documents he leaked available to the public. Getty Images According to Barton Gellman, Edward Snowden (above) specifically asked journalists not to make all the documents he leaked available to the public. Since the beginning of June, Barton Gellman has been reporting on classified intelligence documents given to him by Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor. As a result of the Snowden leaks, Gellman and reporter Laura Poitras broke the story of the PRISM program, which mines data from nine U.S. Internet companies, including Microsoft, Yahoo, Google and Facebook. Gellman, who has been writing for The Washington Post, also found that the NSA has broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times each year since Congress expanded the agency's powers in 2008. Interview Highlights On how he began corresponding with and trusting Snowden
The Transnational Homeland Security State and the Decline of Democracy This is Part 4 in the series, “When Empire Hits Home.” Part 1: War, Racism and the Empire of PovertyPart 2: Western Civilization and the Economic Crisis: The Impoverishment of the Middle ClassPart 3: The Global Economic Crisis: Riots, Rebellion and Revolution As the western world is thrown into debt bondage and the harsh reality of the draconian economic ‘reforms’ to follow, a social collapse seems increasingly inevitable. We will soon witness the collapse of western ‘civilization’. The state structure itself will be altering; nation-states will become subordinate to supra-national continental governance structures and global governance entities simultaneously. As society collapses, the social foundations of the middle class will be pulled out from under their feet. When society collapses, the state will close itself over society to prevent the people from overtaking the levers of power and rebuilding a new social foundation. The US Commission on National Security in the 21st Century
Johns Hopkins and the Case of the Missing NSA Blog Post The university, which works closely with the NSA, apologizes to a professor after he was asked to remove his post. Sept. 10: This post has been updated [1]. Citing concerns about linking to classified material, Johns Hopkins University asked a professor this morning to remove a blog post [2] discussing last week’s revelations about the NSA’s efforts to break encryption. The post had linked to government documents [3] published by ProPublica, the Guardian, and the New York Times. Several hours later, after computer science professor Matthew Green tweeted about [4] the request, the university reversed itself. Baltimore-based Johns Hopkins, which is short drive from the NSA’s headquarters at Fort Meade, works closely with the spy agency. The university’s Applied Physics Laboratory, which employs [5] about 5,000 people, does many projects [6] with the NSA. Green said [7] on Twitter that he had “been told” that someone from the Applied Physics Laboratory had first flagged his blog post.
Gems Mined from the NSA Documents and FISA Court Opinions Released Today Today, in response to Freedom of Information Act lawsuits, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released hundreds of pages of documents about the NSA telephone call record program. The documents primarily concern events in 2009, when the FISA court first learned that the NSA had been misusing its phone records surveillance program for years. We're still reviewing the documents, but here are a few particularly interesting items we've uncovered so far. Clapper's Continued Trouble with the Truth On June 6, just days after the Guardian newspaper published the first of many articles on NSA spying, Director of National Intelligence Clapper attempted to reassure the public that the NSA telephone record program was limited and restrained. Documents released today show this to be false. The Search for a Basis for Searching The Court noted that, nevertheless, the spying was approved, based on the Court's confidence in the NSA's assurances of a good process and strict controls. Gen.
Docs: Officials misused US surveillance program SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Government officials for nearly three years accessed data on thousands of domestic phone numbers they shouldn't have and then misrepresented their actions to a secret spy court to reauthorize the government's surveillance program, documents released Tuesday show. The government's explanation points to an enormous surveillance infrastructure with such incredible power that even the National Security Agency doesn't fully know how to properly use it: Officials told a judge in 2009 that the system is so large and complicated that "there was no single person who had a complete technical understanding" of it. The documents, which the Obama administration was compelled to release as part of a lawsuit by a civil liberties group, show that National Security Agency analysts routinely exceeded their mission to track only phone numbers with reasonable connections to terrorism. "This report was not sufficiently detailed to allay the court's concerns," Walton wrote.
NSA surveillance: The rest of the Snowden files should be destroyed Photo by the Guardian via Getty Images Privacy is fundamental in an open democracy. Without privacy, there is no democracy. Security is also fundamental. Edward Snowden’s leaks revealed that America’s and Britain’s signal intelligence agencies are capable of intercepting vast amounts of Internet traffic, that they have developed sophisticated data-mining tools, that the agencies cooperate with the private sector in their collection effort, that they spy on allies, that the government’s code breakers have cracked encryption that was previously considered safe—and more. The New York Times and the Guardian justify this drip-drip of ongoing intelligence revelations with "the value of a public debate." The revelations have had three major benefits. The second benefit follows from the first: The public is learning. Thirdly, tech companies now take security more seriously. So what about the costs and the downsides of the revelations? There are several items on the list.
The NSA's next move: silencing university professors? | Jay Rosen This actually happened yesterday: A professor in the computer science department at Johns Hopkins, a leading American university, had written a post on his blog, hosted on the university's servers, focused on his area of expertise, which is cryptography. The post was highly critical of the government, specifically the National Security Agency, whose reckless behavior in attacking online security astonished him. Professor Matthew Green wrote on 5 September: I was totally unprepared for today's bombshell revelations describing the NSA's efforts to defeat encryption. The post was widely circulated online because it is about the sense of betrayal within a community of technical people who had often collaborated with the government. On Monday, he gets a note from the acting dean of the engineering school asking him to take the post down and stop using the NSA logo as clip art in his posts. Word gets around, and by late afternoon, the press starts asking questions.
In 2009, the FISA Court Shut Down an NSA Program for 6 Months Because It Had "Frequently and Systemically" Violated the Rules Last month we learned that in 2011 a FISA judge slammed the NSA for "the third instance in less than three years" in which an NSA surveillance program had been misrepresented to the court. Today, the Obama administration released a set of documents that describes one of the previous instances. It involves the NSA's collection of phone records, which are supposed to be governed by strict minimization procedures that prevent analysts from illegally accessing the records of U.S. persons who are not reasonably suspected of terrorist ties. But it turned out that for three years, from 2006 to 2009, NSA had been routinely breaking its own rules; had been routinely providing false affirmations to the court; and apparently had no one on their staff who even understood how their own systems worked. Here is Judge Reggie Walton's conclusion: Josh Gerstein has more details here.
Stop NSA's PRISM! Save your privacy! | Buycott The National Security Agency has obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants, according to a top secret document obtained by the Guardian.The program facilitates extensive, in-depth surveillance on live communications and stored information. The law allows for the targeting of any customers of participating firms who live outside the US, or those Americans whose communications include people outside the US.It also opens the possibility of communications made entirely within the US being collected without warrants. Stop giving your information to the companies that are directly involved in NSA's unconstitutional wiretapping! Search: Startpage has exactly the same results as Google without privacy concerns DuckDuckGo a bit different but has some very useful features and privacy worry freeIxquick high quality meta-search engine without any privacy concerns Maps: OpenStreetMaps a collaborative maps project Email: Private notes Browsing Skype/VoIP
Why the NSA loves Google’s Chromebook As Andrew Cunningham reported today, Intel and Google are announcing an upcoming onslaught of new Google Chromebooks based on Intel's Haswell architecture processors. The idea of a cloud-tethered notebook that can keep its owner connected over Wi-Fi and broadband all day long—in some cases for less than the price of a shiny new Apple iPhone—is going to be awfully appealing to many. And without a doubt, no one will be happier than the National Security Agency (NSA) and law enforcement. While Google's cloud computing has provided a platform for the company to grab a big chunk of the low-cost notebook market and upend Microsoft's Windows applecart, the recent NSA leaks by Edward Snowden have put the cloud under... a cloud. There are some places where this isn't going to necessarily have much impact on Google's market ascension. And Chromebooks are designed to allow users to create a lot more information on the device than they might on a tablet. None of this is necessarily Google's fault.
JHU Politik - Interview With Graduate Student of Political Science: Derek Denman The Human Rights Working Group at the Johns Hopkins University is comprised of professors, graduate students and undergraduates bound by a shared interest in discussing and preventing human rights abuses at all levels of society. We interviewed Derek Denman, a Political Science graduate student involved in the Human Rights Working Group’s current campaign against drone research at the Applied Physics Laboratory, a JHU campus in Laurel Maryland. What is the topic of your research and how did you become interested in it? Are there others doing similar research at other Universities? I’m a graduate student in the political science department and the way that I got into this research was through the Human Rights Working Group (HRWG). What can you tell us about the level of drone research and development at Johns Hopkins? What kind of public oversight, if any, is there for drone research? Are we not better off having drone research in academic institutions? There are two parts to answer that.
Does Classified Research Corrupt an Academic Institution? | Ten Miles Square September 12, 2013 12:50 PMDoes Classified Research Corrupt an Academic Institution? By Rachel Cohen This week Johns Hopkins University received quite a bit of bad press for asking one of their faculty members, Matthew D. Green, to take down a blog post he wrote regarding recent encryption revelations associated with the National Security Agency (NSA). The incident raised major concerns about academic freedom and the role of classified government and military research on campus. As an undergraduate enrolled at Hopkins, I followed the story closely, beginning with Green’s initial tweets midday Monday, to eventually much larger national news coverage in places like ProPublica, The Atlantic, and The Huffington Post by Monday evening. While Douglas’ apology was enough to resolve this particular incident , it raises a host of questions. But over the years the tension between academia—known for its openness and collegiality—and classified government projects has repeatedly surfaced.