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Journalists lawsuit against Yahoo! grows

Thursday, June 14th, 2007

Jailed Chinese reporter Shi Tao seeks compensation from major U.S. Internet company for identifying him to the government

By Melissa Wang
AsiaMedia Staff Writer

Shi Tao, a jailed Chinese reporter and poet, has joined a U.S. lawsuit against Yahoo! Inc. for providing user information to the Chinese government. The suit, filed by the World Organization for Human Rights USA in April, claims that Yahoo! provided identifying information of Internet users to Chinese authorities which led to the arrest of several Chinese dissidents, including Shi.

Shi, a former writer for the financial publication Contemporary Business News and a recipient of this year’s Golden Pen of Freedom Award, was sentenced to ten years in prison by a Chinese court in 2004 for giving state secrets to foreigners via his Yahoo! email account. He joins dissident Wang Xiaoning, imprisoned in 2003 for subversion, and Wang’s wife in seeking compensation from the California-based Internet company for helping in the Chinese government to convict them.

Shi’s conviction stemmed from an e-mail that he sent to a pro-democracy group in the United States regarding media restrictions in China. Yahoo! gave Shi’s anonymous Internet user ID and the location from where he sent his e-mails to the Chinese government upon request. Yahoo! maintains that it had to comply with local laws and hand over the information.

“Companies doing business in China must comply with Chinese law or its local employees could be faced with civil and criminal penalties,” Yahoo! said in a statement.

“Yahoo is distressed that citizens in China have been imprisoned for expressing their political views on the Internet,” the statement said. “We believe deeply in human rights, and as a company built on openness, we strongly support free expression and privacy globally.”

But the World Organization for Human Rights USA disagrees.

“We are filing this lawsuit because Yahoo! should not just give up their user information. This means that Yahoo is giving up free speech,” Morton Sklar, Executive Director of nonprofit group filing the suit, told AsiaMedia on the phone from Washington, DC. “Yahoo! needs to follow the U.S. and international laws regarding human rights. It should not simply follow whatever the Chinese government demands.”

The suit seeks an end Yahoo!’s practice of divulging Internet user information when human rights violations could result and asks that the company assist in securing the release of prisoners that it helped to jail, including Shi.

“Shi Tao’s participation is symbolic. It demonstrates that the practices of Yahoo! do not just affect two or three people. It affects many more,” Sklar said.

On Tuesday, Yahoo! shareholders rejected a proposal by the company to stop revealing user information or to develop a committee to review its policies in China with regards to human rights. Yesterday, Reuters reported that Flickr.com, an online photo-sharing site owned by Yahoo!, was blocked in China, possibly to keep Internet users from accessing images of the June 4 Tiananmen Square massacre.

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Life on Mars? Scientists say probably long ago

Thursday, June 14th, 2007

Scientists now say that an ocean several miles deep once covered a third of the surface of the planet, enough water to support the origin and evolution of life. The red planet, they said, had once been a deep blue, just like Earth.

By Steve Connor

For generations, people have been fascinated by the idea of life on Mars. It began in earnest in the late 19th century when an Italian astronomer called Giovanni Schiaparelli peered through his telescope and saw long, straight lines etched on to the surface of the red planet. He called them “canali” and others quickly became convinced that an alien civilisation had built a sophisticated network of canals, perhaps to move water from one region of Mars to another.

In 1897, H G Wells published The War of the Worlds, which describes an invasion of Martians covetous of Earth’s rich natural resources. When Orson Welles broadcast his famous radio adaptation of the book in 1938, mass panic ensued when thousands of Americans truly believed that the Earth was under attack by Martians.

The true nature of Mars, however, emerged in the late 1960s when the Mariner space missions paid the first visits to Earth’s smaller neighbour. Mars turned out to be heavily cratered, dotted with extinct volcanoes, colder than Antarctica and, crucially, drier than the Atacama desert - the driest place on Earth.

Mars was a dead place, a desiccated wasteland sterilised by harsh solar radiation. Anything approximating to a biological molecule on the Martian surface would be instantly irradiated. There were certainly no canals, no water and quite evidently no life - or, at least, not life as we know it.

When the Viking spacecraft visited Mars in the 1970s they confirmed this view of a lifeless planet. Viking images depicted a bitterly cold, dry landscape of rock and dust, but they also showed another feature that began a fresh debate over whether Mars was always such a dead planet. They detected what seemed to be the shorelines of ancient oceans - and where there was liquid water, there was a strong possibility of life.

Yesterday, American and Canadian scientists reignited the debate over whether there was ever a giant ocean of liquid water on Mars. According to a study published in the journal Nature, an ocean several miles deep once covered a third of the surface of Mars - easily enough water to support the origin and evolution of life. The red planet, they said, had once been a deep blue, just like Earth.

The Viking probes of 25 years ago detected two possible ancient shorelines near the poles of the planet. The shorelines stretched for thousands of kilometres around what looked like dried-up ocean basins. Each shoreline had the distinctive “edges” separating the rugged, weathered landscape of dry land from the smoother, sediment-filled seabed.

The similarity to features seen on Earth were obvious for all to see. The Viking probes had mapped two Martian shorelines - one called Arabia and the other named Deuteronilus - and scientists dated them to be between two and four billion years old.

However, a major problem soon emerged. In the 1990s, Nasa’s Mars Global Surveyor mapped the topography of Mars to a resolution of 300 metres and it quickly became apparent that the two “shorelines” varied in elevation by almost two miles. Differences in height between shorelines on Earth were well known - caused by variations in global sea levels - but the dramatic difference on Mars made it highly unlikely that these “shorelines” were created by an ancient ocean.

The topographic reality revealed by the Mars Global Surveyor became the biggest stumbling block to the notion that Mars was once smothered in water. It was also a blow to the idea of Martian life, because without water in liquid form it was difficult to see how life could ever get going in the first place, never mind evolving into even the most simple of microbial lifeforms.

The latest study seems to have lifted this barrier to the idea of an ocean on Mars. Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Toronto and the Carnegie Institution in Washington have offered a powerful explanation for why the two ancient shorelines of Mars are separated by such dramatically different elevations.

They have shown that the axis of spin of Mars, which determines the position of the true poles rather than the magnetic poles, has varied by as much as 50 degrees during the long geological history of the planet. In other words the shorelines have moved around because the planet itself has in the past shifted significantly on its axis - resulting in huge changes to the shape of the Martian landscape and its shorelines.

“When the spin axis moves relative to the surface, the surface deforms, and this is recorded in the shoreline,” explained Professor Michael Manga, of the University of California, Berkeley.

Planets such as Earth and Mars have an outer shell, or lithosphere, and a change in the spin axis can cause the solid surface to deform differently than the liquid ocean and this explains the warped shorelines, according to Taylor Perron, the lead author of the study, who is now at Harvard University.

“On planets like Mars and Earth with an outer shell, or lithosphere, that behaves elastically, the solid surface will deform differently than the sea surface, creating a non-uniform change in the topography,” Dr Perron said.

Jerry Mitrovica of Toronto University said that the evidence is now so overwhelming that this can explain why the shorelines of Mars formed at such dramatically different heights - more than a mile difference in elevation.

“At some point in the planet’s history, a major shift of mass caused the pole to wander about 50 degrees towards its current location and the resulting change in orientation dramatically warped the topography and the ancient shorelines,” Professor Mitrovica said.

One critical piece of evidence in support of this hypothesis is the position of the immense Tharsis volcano on Mars - the biggest in the Solar System and some 10,000 times bigger than Mauna Loa, the biggest volcano on Earth. Tharsis is so massive that it will always reorient itself to sit on the planet’s equator - it will be spun out to the widest point on the axis of spin, just like a centrifuge. The scientists found that their assessment of how the position of the Martian poles has moved matches precisely the movements of Tharsis as it keeps shifting to maintain its place on the changing position of the equator.

“The chances of this happening randomly are less than 1 in 10,000,” Professor Mitrovica said.

As yet the scientists do not understand why the spin axis of Mars moved so much. It may have resulted from a massive deluge of water on the Martian surface resulting in the first Arabia shoreline. The shift in weight caused the planet to tilt on its axis. Once the water disappeared, the pole could have shifted back, then shifted again as a second deluge created the Deuteronilus shoreline. “What we don’t know is what caused the poles to shift on Mars and what happened to the water. The ocean may have been gradually converted into water vapour, moved to higher elevations, and flowed beneath the surface. There could be a large mass of water deep within Mars,” Dr Perron said.

But what happened to the water on Mars is critical in the assessment of whether there is still life on the planet. Many scientists believe there is a strong chance that if liquid water exists deep under the surface of Mars, there is a good chance that simple lifeforms may still be living underground.

At the end of last year, Nasa scientists analysed successive satellite images of craters on Mars that appeared to show erosion marks caused by streams of liquid water bubbling up from under the surface of Mars and flowing down the sides of the crater. The scientists were convinced that these marks were not simply created by the movement of dry dust.

This finding came on top of a succession of studies pointing to the possibility that water must have flowed on the surface of Mars. And now the major obstacle to the idea of a massive ocean on Mars has been removed. It really does seem that the red planet was once a water-rich world, and that some of this water may still be present in underground deposits.

But what does this mean for life? The point is that without water in its liquid form it is difficult to imagine that life could exist. Water does not make life obligatory, but it does make it far more likely. As yet the only direct evidence for life on Mars has been highly controversial. Ten years ago, Nasa scientists announced that they had found possible signs of life on a Martian meteorite called ALH84001. The potato-sized lump of rock fell to Earth 13,000 years ago and a detailed analysis threw up chemical signatures of life, as well as rod-shaped structures that looked like terrestrial bacteria, but smaller.

Other scientists have been bitterly critical of this analysis, which has gone through a series of claims and counterclaims concerning its authenticity. The only way of truly solving this problem is to look for a similar piece of rock on Mars and bring it back to Earth for analysis. And the best place to find Martian fossils is in sedimentary rock formed by an ocean. At least scientists looking for life on Mars now have a better idea where to find it.

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Pentagon Propaganda: Iran arming Taliban

Thursday, June 14th, 2007

By Mick Meaney
RINF Alternative News

The Bush administration are at it again, making wild accusations in their ‘propaganda war’ against Iran. The latest claim was made by U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who alleges that Iran is providing the Taliban with weapons and equipments.

During a press conference with Hamid Karzai, the Afghan President, Robert Gates stated weapons are being smuggled from Iran to Afghanistan. He also stated that his latest intelligence reports indicate a “fairly substantial flow of weapons”.

However, there is absolutely no evidence to support these claims.

Afghanistan’s defense minister dismissed the claims by saying: “Actually, we have had good relations with Iran and we believe that the security and stability of Afghanistan are also in the interests of Iran.”

Could history be repeating itself as the Bush administration point the finger at innocent nations, rich in natural resources, - while rewarding the American military industrial complex with contracts worth billions of dollars that cost thousands of lives?

America can no longer sustain itself as practically all natural resources have been relinquished and the National Debt has reached an average of $1.34 billion per day.

This alone is could be motive for American to yet again invade and strip another country of its resources.

It has become abundantly clear that the Pentagon has no issues with telling farfetched and blatant lies to build public support for their immoral, illegal and unprovoked wars.

Do they really believe that we the people have learnt nothing from the insane accusations of WMDs and ‘45 minute threats’, - or is it a simply a case that they do not care?

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We’re all Winston Smith now

Thursday, June 14th, 2007

Tony Blair has turned Britain into a land where we are all prisoners

Chris Atkins
The Daily Mail

Even George Orwell would be shocked. He described the sinister machinations of a totalitarian police state in his novel, 1984, and laid bare the danger of eroding our basic civil liberties, including the right to freedom of speech and the right to privacy.

Although he famously coined the phrase ‘Big Brother is watching you’, even Orwell cannot have foreseen just how prescient those words would prove to be.

Today, in Tony Blair’s Britain - which I naively voted into power ten years ago - we have witnessed a breath-taking erosion of civil liberties.

The truth is we are fast becoming an Orwellian state, our every movement watched, our behaviour monitored, and our freedoms curtailed.

Between May 1997 and August 2006, New Labour created 3,023 new criminal offences - taking in everything from a law against Polish potatoes (the Polish Potatoes Order 2004) to one which made the creation of a nuclear explosion in Britain officially illegal.

Then there has been the incredible number of CCTV cameras - a total of 4.2 million, more than in the rest of Europe put together.

And, yesterday, we learnt that the Government has agreed to let the EU have automatic access to databases of DNA (containing samples of people’s hair, sperm or fingernails) in order to help track down criminals, even though many thousands of those on record are totally innocent

How did all this happen? Who allowed it? To try to answer these questions, I have made a film, Talking Liberties, about the attack on our freedoms.

I uncovered a disturbing roll call of ancient basic rights which have been systematically destroyed in the self- serving climate of fear this government has perpetuated since the 9/11 attack.

First there was the Act which banned the age- old right of protest within half-a-mile of Parliament without special police authorisation.

And who can forget Walter Wolfgang, the pensioner who was dragged out of the Labour Party Conference for daring to heckle the Home Secretary? He was detained under the Terrorism Act 2000, which gives the police unprecedented stop and search powers.

In 2005 alone, this law was used to stop 35,000 people - none of whom was a terrorist.

But this is only the thin end of the wedge - our civil liberties, enshrined in British law since the Magna Carta, are being whittled away.

There has been an unprecedented shift of power away from the individual towards the state - but now this power is being used not to defeat terrorism, but to keep tabs on ordinary citizens. As well as a raft of repressive anti-terror legislation, there are the more insidious infringements of our freedom and privacy.

We will soon see the introduction of the vast National Identity Register, linking all databases such as the DNA database to which the EU will soon have access.

The tentacles of these networks will intertwine until they form a vast state surveillance mechanism, which can track every detail of your life: what books you borrowed from the library as a student, your sexual health, your DNA profile, your spending and your whereabouts at any given moment in time.

Ministers are even creating a children’s database, which will record truancy, diet, and medical history.

And, of course, ID cards will be issued in 2009 - to be used every time we carry out routine tasks such as visiting the dentist. Soon, biometric data - your iris scan, fingerprints and DNA, will help to identify you further.

And, all the time, there are those CCTV cameras - 20 per cent of the global total, even though Britain only has 0.2 per cent of the world’s population.

New Labour has an absolute obsession with these devices. Soon, more sophisticated cameras will be able to recognise your face and the information matched to one of the national databases.

All cars will eventually be fitted with a GPS chip, officially to simplify road tax payments but they will also allow government agencies to track every vehicle in the country.

There are, of course, more alarming implications to being constantly monitored - as Orwell understood. Soon, we will be living in an open-air prison.

Some may ask: why does all this matter? The answer is that to surrender our identity and privacy so comprehensively is to give up something we will never get back.

Although New Labour says its mania for data-gathering is all part of its plan to protect us, there’s no guarantee that future governments (who will be inheriting a nationwide surveillance machine and the National Identity Register) won’t use it to more malign ends.

Totalitarian regimes have, after all, always collected information on their citizens. Hitler pioneered the use of ID cards as a means of repression. The Belgians left Rwanda with a bloody legacy by implementing an ID card system which divided the population into Hutu and Tutsi.

When the 1994 genocide began, these cards proved a device for horrific ethnic cleansing, with one million people dying in 100 days. The Stasi secret police in Soviet East Germany kept millions of files in order to keep track of everyone in the country.

Of course these examples are the extremes - but basic liberties such as privacy and free speech have been hard-won over centuries and history shows that we should not allow them to be brushed aside.

This shift away from individual freedom towards state power has happened slowly, and almost without us noticing.

Like so many others, I was proud to put a cross against the box next to New Labour in 1997 as a first-time voter. But now I have become shocked at the vast swathe of new laws which had been introduced, most of them in response to terrorism.

We are told that this is all for the good - these laws, and the surveillance cameras and ID cards will stop terrorists. Is that the case? Sadly not.

The London bombers carried ID and were observed on CCTV - of course it did not stop them committing their terrible crime.

Intelligence experts say that most information leading to genuine breakthroughs come from informants, not through random tracking or surveillance of the general population.

In any case, liberty and security aren’t balanced on some delicate equilibrium, as John Reid, the Home Secretary, and Tony Blair would have us believe. History has shown us that it is precisely when you undermine people’s basic rights that they mobilise towards radical groups.

After all, one of the greatest recruiters for the IRA in Northern Ireland was the policy of internment, under which people were imprisoned without trial. Have we learnt nothing from our past?

Stop and search laws applied to Britain’s Muslim communities will simply polarise those groups. Instead, we need them to help us protect the country from terrorism.

It’s not all doom and gloom, of course - as I hope my film reflects. The sheer absurdity of the bewildering array of idiotic new laws has given us an abundance of bizarre and hilarious situations for our documentary.

But behind this dark comedy is something much more disturbing. Faced with the threat of terrorism, the Government has told us that we must lay down our freedoms for our lives.

Perhaps it has forgotten the millions of people from past generations who have laid down their lives for our freedom. I think we owe it to those people to turn this tide.

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Orwell was an optimist

Thursday, June 14th, 2007

Gold Stream Gazette

Should we track our young children by Global Positioning System for their own safety, with microchips locked on the wrist or implanted under the skin?

Seventy-five per cent of British parents say they are willing to buy such electronic gadgets, BBC News reported, quoting think-tank research. Well, why not? The technology could protect the children from predators, and find them if they get lost.

But there is a gap between talk and action. Few people have bought the GPS or wireless tracking devices that are already on the market.

We send a social signal when we reject the distant-oversight hardware. We admit we are scared of the surveillance world. We confess that we can’t see any landmarks, as events push us deeply into that world.

Nervous quarrels about electronic tracking and surveillance keep bubbling up on the Internet, and in the political arena.

Opposition by civil libertarians and some parents put an end to an elementary-school experiment in the small town of Sutton, California, where all pupils were fitted with Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) badges to keep track of class attendance.

Many Americans are angry about the U.S. Patriot Act and the power of national security officers to shortcut legal safeguards in the name of fighting terrorism. They pry into private lives without court permission, and eavesdrop on millions of phone calls.

Fear of attack stirs actions that provoke further attack. Violence spirals into a seemingly unstoppable tornado. Attackers do not wear identifying arm bands; therefore the guardians feel they must keep watch on almost everybody. The increasing sophistication of technology makes this easier to do.

Debate continues to boil in Britain about the New Labour government’s proposed national data registry, with its connection to passports and smart identity cards. On these documents, every one of Britain’s 60 million people could ultimately have his/her fingerprints, eye iris shape and colour, and other biometric data stored for instant response by pattern-recognition machines.

“The National Identity Register will allow police to add the entire adult population of the UK to their suspect list,” online critic John Lettice complained, “giving them the opportunity to check fingerprints left at scenes of crime against those collected from ID card and passport applicants.”

If you have not committed any crime, why should you worry? Because of the danger of mistaken identity, maybe. The machines do make errors.

Breaches of privacy are another problem. A pattern-recognition machine, reacting to a medically-primed identity card, might have blocked the flight of that patient suffering from a virulent form of tuberculosis, who touched off panic when he flew across the Atlantic and exposed fellow passengers to possible infection.

But suppose the identity card had pin-pointed the traveller as a recovering alcoholic. Could the airline place him on a “no fly” list?

In deciding what information should be on the smart identity card, where do you draw the line, and how do you stay off the slippery slope that drops you into serious violations of human rights?

Bank machines in several countries, including Saudi Arabia, Colombia, Japan, and parts of India, respond to biometric cues that include fingerprints, shape of face and irises, pattern of blood vessels, and tone and rhythm of voice. Some researchers are looking for a way to add body odour.

Most of the world’s ATM bank machines have not converted to biometric. Users still gain access to them through PIN numbers. Engineers are working to make biometric-key systems faster, more sensitive and more efficient, and build in safeguards against fraud and identity theft; but even if they raise bio-reading to a level of robotic perfection, many of us still won’t like the biometric idea.

Our objections are mainly psychological and intuitive, not technical, but we mistrust the technology, for good reason.

The biometric apparatus is part of a box of tricks that includes distantly focused eavesdropping microphones, surveillance cameras and speed cameras, which can be intimidating as well as useful and life-saving. It includes spyware that enables spooks to infiltrate and enslave our personal computers and get to know our past and future behavioural patterns better than we know them ourselves.

Orwell was an optimist. When all the parts of the 21st-century snoop machine are connected, the machine is more invasive than anything Orwell imagined. Winston, the central character in “1984,” could duck away from Big Brother’s eye and take refuge in a blind corner, but we are moving into territory where there truly is no place to hide.

A faint hope shines through this gloomy scene.The new information and communication machinery, including the Internet, can be wielded to mobilize citizen consensus, rather than strengthen elite domination.

This turns the surveillance society upside down. The reversal has no precedent in history. It allows people to confer without hiring a hall, reach agreement, keep close watch on the old-line politicians — national, provincial and local — and persuade them to make plans and policies in the general interest, rather than serving those who have the loudest voices and the strongest political muscles.

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FBI Audit finds widespread Abuse in Data Collection

Thursday, June 14th, 2007

An internal FBI audit has found the agency violated rules more than 1,000 times while collecting data on domestic phone calls, e-mails and financial transactions in recent years, The Washington Post reported on Thursday.

The number of violations uncovered by the audit was far greater than those previously documented in a Justice Department report in March, the Post said.

The vast majority of newly discovered violations were instances in which telephone companies and Internet providers gave agents phone and e-mail records the agents did not request and were not authorized to collect, the Post said.

The agents retained the information in their files, which mostly concerned suspected terrorist or espionage activities, according to the report.

The new audit covers just 10 percent of the FBI’s national security investigations since 2002, so the actual number of violations in the FBI’s domestic surveillance efforts probably number several thousand, bureau officials told the newspaper in interviews.

The Justice Department audit found 22 violations in a much smaller sampling.

Of the more than 1,000 violations uncovered by the new audit, about 700 involved the provision of information by phone companies and other communications firms that exceeded what the FBI’s National Security Letters had sought, the Post said.

However, some two dozen of the newly discovered violations involved agents’ requests for information that U.S. law did not allow them to have, the audit found.

National Security Letters allow the FBI to compel the release of private information such as communications or financial records without getting court authority.

Their use has grown exponentially since the September 11, attacks, the Post said. More than 19,000 such letters were issued in 2005 seeking 47,000 pieces of information, it said.

“The FBI’s comprehensive audit of National Security Letter use across all field offices has confirmed the inspector general’s findings that we had inadequate internal controls for use of an invaluable investigative tool,” FBI General Counsel Valerie Caproni was quoted as telling the Post.

Caproni said that steps have been implemented since March 2007 to fix the problem.

FBI officials said the audit found no evidence that any agent knowingly or willingly violated the laws or that supervisors encouraged such violations, the Post reported.

Rather it showed that many agents did not understand or follow the required legal procedures and paperwork requirements when collecting personal information, the Post reported.

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The 9/11 Solution - The big clue everybody missed

Thursday, June 14th, 2007

Brass check TV

Two major 9/11 anomalies have been thoroughly documented, specifically:

1) The stand down of US air defense on the morning of 9/11 that permitted commercial jet aircraft to fly erratically and in restricted air space without challenge

2) Overwhelming physical evidence that World Trade Center buildings #1, #2, and #7 were brought down by controlled demolition

A third significant anomaly has not been discussed, let alone acknowledged: the reporting by the major US TV news networks in the first few hours immediately after the attacks.

Specifically:

1. MSNBC presented an elaborately detailed story about the lifestyle and anti-US philosophy of Osama bin Laden - while both towers were still burning and long before Bin Laden had been accused by anyone.

2. Fox News featured a “man in the street” eye witness who explained in strangely formal language the science behind why the towers collapsed when most engineers and firemen were utterly baffled and in shock by what had just taken place.

3. CBS featured a Bush administration insider (and not identified as such) as a guest who actively worked to dissuade Dan Rather (and viewers) from speculating that there must have been explosive charges placed in the buildings for them to have collapsed the way they did.

How was it that these stories - based on no fact, no research and no inquirry - appeared in full blown form so quickly on US news networks and then became part of the core myths of what happened on 9/11?

Were these stories prepared in advance?

There’s an old intelligence saying that “once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, but three times is enemy action.”

Because most of these clips ran only once and were not repeated after they’d done their job, it made it difficult, if not impossible, for viewers to analyze them critically.

Now, thanks to the magic of video tape and a few people who immediately started taping the news after the attacks, we have this important evidence that at the very least these attacks appear to have been anticipated and prepared for by forces that have the ability to exert strong influence over the output of the newsrooms of major US news networks.

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Secret Surveillance Evidence Unsealed in AT&T Spying Case

Thursday, June 14th, 2007

Whistleblower Declaration and Other Key Documents Released to Public

EFF

San Francisco - More documents detailing secret government surveillance of AT&T’s Internet traffic have been released to the public as part of the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s (EFF’s) class-action lawsuit against the telecom giant.

Some of the unsealed information was previously made public in redacted form. But after negotiations with AT&T, EFF has filed newly unredacted documents describing a secret, secure room in AT&T’s facilities that gave the National Security Agency (NSA) direct access to customers’ emails and other Internet communications. These include several internal AT&T documents that have long been available on media websites, EFF’s legal arguments to the 9th Circuit, and the full declarations of whistleblower Mark Klein and of J. Scott Marcus, the former Senior Advisor for Internet Technology to the Federal Communications Commission, who bolsters and explains EFF’s evidence.

“This is critical evidence supporting our claim that AT&T is cooperating with the NSA in the illegal dragnet surveillance of millions of ordinary Americans,” said EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn. “This surveillance is under debate in Congress and across the nation, as well as in the courts. The public has a right to see these important documents, the declarations from our witnesses, and our legal arguments, and we are very pleased to release them.”

EFF filed the class-action suit against AT&T last year, accusing the telecom giant of illegally assisting in the NSA’s spying on millions of ordinary Americans. The lower court allowed the case to proceed and the government has now asked the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to dismiss the case, claiming that the lawsuit could expose state secrets. EFF’s newly released brief in response outlines how the case should go forward respecting both liberty and security.

“The District Court rejected the government’s attempt to sweep this case under the rug,” said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kurt Opsahl. “This country has a long tradition of open court proceedings, and we’re pleased that as we present our case to the Court of Appeals, the millions of affected AT&T customers will be able to see our arguments and evidence and judge for themselves.”

Oral arguments in the 9th Circuit appeal are set for the week of August 13.

For the unredacted Klein declaration:
http://eff.org/legal/cases/att/SER_klein_decl.pdf

For the internal documents:
http://eff.org/legal/cases/att/SER_klein_exhibits.pdf

For the unredacted Marcus declaration:
http://eff.org/legal/cases/att/SER_marcus_decl.pdf

For EFF’s 9th Circuit brief:
http://eff.org/legal/cases/att/9thanswerbrief.pdf

For more on the class-action lawsuit against AT&T:
http://www.eff.org/legal/cases/att/

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Freemasons decry secrecy ‘myths’

Thursday, June 14th, 2007

Society’s leaders discuss future of fraternal order in post-communist era

By Lisa Nuch Venbrux
The Prague Post

From beneath the sloping roof of an ornate building in Old Town, a single eye watches Karmelitská street. Framed by a triangle on the building’s facade, the carving’s stony gaze reveals no secrets.

Yet its very presence speaks to a past forgotten by many. This symbol of an eye in a triangle adorns a building used as an 18th-century meeting place for freemasons. Woven into the fabric of this ancient city is a Masonic history that’s still being made. Freemasonry is defined by the United Grand Lodge of England (UGLE), the world administrative center of regular Freemasonry, as a “society of men concerned with moral and spiritual values,” one of the oldest fraternal orders taught precepts through “ritual dramas.”Recently, Masonic leaders from across Europe gathered in Prague to discuss the future of Freemasonry in Central and Eastern Europe.

“It was a very important event for Prague,” says the country’s new grand master, Hynek Beran, who was initiated into the elected post the same April weekend.

Indeed, to a layperson, the European Masonic Forum’s attendance of leaders from 24 masonic “obediences,” including 14 grand masters across Europe, seems momentous. In fact, European Masonic leaders have been meeting annually since the late 1990s, John Hamill, director of communications for the UGLE, told The Prague Post.

The meetings began in 1999, when the grand masters of Germany and Austria met in Romania to discuss the new lodges of Eastern Europe, according to Hamill. Grand masters, elected annually by ballot, head Grand Lodges, of which there is usually one in a given country.

Meeting in a different place every year since, Hamill says the gatherings have “greatly helped” the Grand Lodges of Eastern Europe. “Many of the East European and Balkan Grand Lodges are small and have little money, and one of the topics discussed is how they can adapt themselves to present circumstances.”

With an unbroken tradition dating back to 1923, Czech Freemasonry is among the most well-developed in post-communist Europe. Still, with 10 lodges nationwide, “regular” freemasons number just 360, compared to several thousand in neighboring Austria, Beran says. (“Irregular” Masonic bodies, which operate outside the “regular” tradition originating in the British Isles, claim fewer than 200 adherents here.)

Now, as the organization quietly gains members and momentum, its members are seeking ways to help Freemasonry grow, and show nonmembers that world domination and eating children are not part of its repertoire.

KURT VINION/THE PRAGUE POST

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Opening doors

Grand Master Beran, a lively 45-year-old energy consultant from Prague, makes no attempts to shield his voice from other diners in a busy New Town café. He speaks enthusiastically about his hopes for Czech Freemasonry, revived in 1990 after more than 40 years of dormancy under communist rule.

“We do not want to be secret,” Beran says plainly. “We have a philosophy that should be offered to normal people.”

Though Beran, who was one of the first initiates into the newly reconstituted Czech lodges, would like to see Freemasonry develop here, this does not necessarily mean rapid growth in membership. Rather, he seeks to “build a positive image,” and to attract those interested in “real Freemasonry.”

This involves following three great principles — brotherly love, relief (or charity) and truth — articulated by the Grand Lodge of England after its founding nearly 290 years ago, June 24, 1717. (The origins of Freemasonry, though not specifically known, may date to the Knights Templar centuries before.)

Tolerance and equality are also part of the Freemason creed, according to Armand Muno, treasurer of the Czech Grand Lodge and recently installed worshipful master (or director) of the English-speaking Hiram Lodge in Prague.

“We’re not looking for the elites,” nor for anyone of a particular religion or ethnicity, says Muno, 47. Regular Freemasonry requires a belief in a supreme being, but not necessarily one from the Christian tradition, as well as a commitment to keep religion and politics out of the lodges. Consequently, Czech membership lists include people from several continents as well as from minority groups in the Czech Republic.

They also span the spectrum of religious belief, given some qualifications. “There are Buddhists, Hindus … scientists who don’t believe in any god but nature,” Beran says. According to Muno, religion disqualifies a candidate only when beliefs clash with the principles of masonry, as is the case with Muslims who follow Sharia law. “Muslims who do not abide by Sharia are welcome.”

Closed history

Friendly professionals in pressed slacks contradict popular images of Masons as cannibalistic conspirators. Negative associations and suspicion, however, constitute a natural reaction to something little understood, says widely published Masonic scholar Robert Gilbert. “People are afraid of something they don’t understand,” he says. Still, Freemasonry “has to retain some mystique, or it has no appeal for people.”

This mystique is nowhere stronger than in places where totalitarian regimes have squashed organizations such as the Freemasons. Though Czech Freemasonry swung in and out of royal favor after its birth in Bohemia in the late 1730s, 20th-century regimes dealt dire blows to the order.

“Because Freemasonry embraces such principles as equality, fraternity and freedom of thought, it is not liked by dictators, of the right or left,” the UGLE’s Hamill explains.During World War II, Freemasons were rounded up through membership lists and sent to concentration camps. Incriminating records from that time, Beran says, were burned by Masons themselves. Some Czechoslovak Freemasons managed to escape to France and finally England, where they set up an independent lodge in exile. “Comenius in exile is the only occasion in which England has recognized a Grand Lodge or lodge in exile,” Hamill says.

The communists adopted a different control strategy. Čestmír Bárta became a Mason in December 1949, not long after the communist takeover of Czechoslovakia. His father, who was a Freemason, had been sent to Auschwitz. When the communist regime instituted a policy requiring government agents to attend lodge meetings, the Grand Lodge chose to go into dormancy rather than submit.“It was obvious that there was no way of preventing infiltration, wiretapping and abuse of the information obtained by these means,” Bárta says. “Not even initiations were taking place during that period.”

Bárta was one of 28 Czech Freemasons who, through clandestine informal meetings, maintained contact with each other to eventually re-establish Freemasonry after the fall of the Iron Curtain. He later served seven years as grand master of the Czech Grand Lodge.

“Civil society had to … re-create itself again,” he says, noting the sense of importance surrounding the re-establishment of the order. “Czech Freemasons knew that creation of a normal democratic society was a question of at least one generation, and that the attitudes of Freemasons had great potential to support the process of humanization of the newly germinating civil society.”

Such lofty aims may be gaining appeal in lands now embracing democratic ideals, but Bárta admits there may be a long way to go. “People now usually don’t know what this is about, and they are not interested in it.”

Beran, meanwhile, takes a more optimistic view toward finding those drawn to this philosophy amid the chaos of modern life. “In globalization, everybody is looking for his history.” — Naďa Černá and Hela Balínová contributed to this report.

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BAE unaware of ‘planned US probe’

Thursday, June 14th, 2007

BBC

A BAE Systems spokesman has told the BBC it is “not aware of any proposed criminal inquiry” in the US.

The UK defence group’s comments came after the Guardian newspaper said the US Department of Justice was preparing to open a corruption investigation.

The paper said the inquiry would focus on the allegations that BAE ran a multi-million pound slush fund to help it win a giant order from Saudi Arabia.

BAE has always insisted that it acted lawfully at all times.

Growing US operations

The report in the Guardian said senior Washington sources were “99% certain” that a criminal inquiry would be opened into BAE under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

An inquiry could hit BAE’s operations in the US, where it has achieved an increasing amount of business in recent years.

The allegations of illegal payments date back to the £43bn Al Yamamah deal of the 1980s, which supplied Tornado jets and other military equipment to Saudi Arabia.

It was reported earlier this week that BAE had now appointed Lord Woolf, the former Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, to head an independent review of business practices at the company.

A probe by the UK’s Serious Fraud Office into the Al Yamamah deal was stopped in December 2006 on grounds of national security.

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DU expert to address Conference

Thursday, June 14th, 2007

DU expert Leuren Moret to address Vancouver 9/11 Truth Conference on depleted uranium

Leuren Moret, expert witness at the 2004 Tokyo International Tribunal for War Crimes in Afghanistan and former Environmental Commissioner of the City of Berkeley, Calif., will speak publicly for the first time in Canada, and address the Vancouver 9/11 Truth Conference on June 22-24, 2007, on the serious public health risk to Canada and the world posed by the use of depleted uranium (DU) weapons by the U.S. military forces in Iraq, Yugoslavia and Afghanistan. Israel dropped over 4,000 DU bunker-buster bombs on Lebanon in July 2006.

In April, 2007, Leuren Moret exposed the U.S. military’s illegal use of depleted uranium (DU) weapons in target practice in Hawaii, in violation of U.S. military regulations. The elevated radiation readings she recorded were carried by ABC-TV news in Hawaii on April 29 & 30, 2007.

DU and 9/11

Leuren Moret reported similar elevated radiation readings downwind from the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. on September 11, 2001. Two days after 9/11, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) confirmed that the crash site rubble was radioactive and that it was probably depleted uranium (DU) contaminating the Pentagon crash site rubble. The entry and exit holes through the Pentagon crash site were the signature of a kinetic energy penetrator, such as a Cruise missile, and the term “punch-out hole” was written by crash site investigators over the exit hole. This is a military term used for kinetic energy penetrators. Major Doug Rokke, former Director of the Gulf War I DU Cleanup Team, reported that an email from the Pentagon 30 minutes after impact confirmed a Cruise missile hit the Pentagon on 9/11.

Recently vast Uranium deposits have been reported in Khazakhstan and Afghanistan. Khazakhstan is expected to out-produce Canada in Uranium production within 12 years. This exposes the economic interests behind the events of 9/11, specifically the unjustified military attack by the U.S. on Afghanistan using 9/11 as a pretext.

Public health effects of depleted uranium (DU)

The demonstrated public health effects of depleted uranium (DU) weapons include: diabetes; cancer; birth defects; chronic diseases caused by neurological and neuromuscular radiation damage; mitochondrial diseases (Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Lou Gehrig’s Disease, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s; heart and brain disorders); global DNA damage in men’s sperm; infertility in women; learning disabilities such as autism, and dyslexia; mental illness; infant mortality and low birth weights; Increase in death rates and decrease in birth rates.

Leuren Moret and Alfred Lambremont Webre, JD, MEd, of the Institute for Cooperation in Space (ICIS) will also address the issue of the illegal use of Canadian uranium in U.S. depleted uranium (DU) weapons worldwide. Canada is the world’s largest exporter of uranium, and supplies 30 percent of the world’s uranium. Sixty percent of Canadian uranium is exported to the USA. According to experts such as Dr. Rosalie Bertell, the preponderant majority of depleted uranium in U.S. DU weapons used in the first Iraq war (1991); Balkans war (1998); the Iraq No Fly Zone (1991-2003); the Afghanistan war (2001-2007); and Iraq war II (2003-2007) is of Canadian origin, in non-compliance with Canadian law. The regulations of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission and the Canada-US Nuclear Cooperation Agreement prohibit the use of Canadian uranium in weapons, including DU weapons.

Depleted uranium and DU weapons are already prohibited as weapons of mass destruction under existing international conventions and treaties, including the 1925 Geneva Poison Gas Protocol. According to an August 2002 report by the UN sub-commission, laws which are breached by the use of DU shells include: “the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; the Charter of the United Nations; the Genocide Convention; the Convention Against Torture; the four Geneva Conventions of 1949; the Conventional Weapons Convention of 1980; and the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, which expressly forbid employing ‘poison or poisoned weapons’ and ‘arms, projectiles or materials calculated to cause unnecessary suffering’. All of these laws are designed to spare civilians from unwarranted suffering in armed conflicts.”

Atomic weapons, depleted uranium poison gas weapons and the first Agent Orange prototype were developed in World War Two under the Manhattan Project to target civilian populations, for the specific purpose of depopulation. The global pollution of the atmosphere with depleted uranium radioactive poison gas since 1991 is causing a global epidemic of chronic illnesses, which will contribute to extensive depopulation and ecological destruction. This is newly defined as omnicide. Depopulation became the top U.S. National Security priority detailed in the “Global 2000” Report written by Henry Kissinger, Z. Brzezinski, Gen. Alexander B. Haig, and Sen Edward Muskie for Pres. Jimmy Carter. This national security policy of depopulation is now being carried out by means of global low-level radioactive DU pollution. The result, an increase in death rates and decrease in birth rates, will achieve the goals of maximizing profits and concentrating wealth upwards, for the benefit of an international war crimes racketeering organization.

Joining Leuren Moret on a special panel on depleted uranium (DU) will be Dr. Bill Deagle, a medical toxicologist experienced in DU and environmental health; Dennis Kyne, a former Gulf War I U.S. military combat veteran with DU exposure, author and leader in revealing the depleted uranium scandal, and Alfred Lambremont Webre, JD, MEd, International Director of the Institute for Cooperation in Space (ICIS).

International Citizen’s 9/11 War Crimes Tribunal

Alfred Webre, an international lawyer and member of the Pro Tem Committee for the Kuala Lumpur International War Crimes Tribunal to be held in 2008, will address the Vancouver 9/11 Truth Conference, on the issue of “The 9/11 False Flag Operation as a War Crime under International Law.” Sept. 11 was a pretext to engage in genocidal and ecocidal depleted uranium (DU) bombing of Central Asia (Afghanistan and Iraq). In order to prosecute the 9/11 perpetrators under the 9/11 Independent Prosecutors Act, Alfred Webre and Leuren Moret will call for the establishment of an International Citizen’s 9/11 War Crimes Tribunal to prosecute President George W. Bush, Vice President Richard B. Cheney, former Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, and other Jane and John Does for war crimes under the Geneva Conventions, including genocide, crimes against humanity and crimes against peace. The International Citizen’s 9/11 War Crimes Tribunal would be convened under the jurisdiction of the Kuala Lumpur International War Crimes Tribunal, established in February 2007 as a permanent citizen’s tribunal by The Perdana Global Peace Organization, chaired by Tun Dr. Mahathir bin Mohamad, former Prime Minister of Malaysia, who is the first prominent world leader to take up the DU radiation issue.

The 9/11 Truth Conference: Canada, 9/11 and the New World Order brings together over 18 international speakers on issues:

The History of False Flag Terrorism by governments and intelligence agencies to justify military interventions, spending, and extraordinary domestic measures.
Canada’s participation in the War On Terror and in Afghanistan, and that country’s real relationship to 9/11.
Solid Scientific and Historical Evidence that directly contradicts the Official Narrative of 9/11
Gatekeeping: Suppression of information by the mass media, political parties, authors and political commentators.
The importance, methods and means of 9/11 Truth Activism.
The use of depleted uranium (DU) Weapons and their effects on local populations, soldiers and the world, as well Canada’s role in producing such weapons.
Canadian Pension Funds at the Provincial and Federal levels are heavily invested in the US military-industrial complex. Taking the profit out of war is the most effective way to support peace. It is mandatory that Pension funds be divested from the war machine.
Preventing the Weaponization of Space through an international Space Preservation Treaty-signing with a caucus of five or more progressive nations, the 178 Nations which voted against the weaponization of space at the 2006 U.N. General Assembly.
Globalization and “New World Order” agenda for Canada and the world. The emerging culture of surveillance of ordinary citizens in Canada and worldwide.
The S.P.P. (Security and Prosperity Partnership) between the USA, Canada and Mexico, which many contend is a blueprint for a North American Union (without citizen input nor public debate), as well as the fate of democracy, sovereignty, civil rights, Canadian culture, and our national identity.

Vancouver 9/11 Truth Conference
9/11 Independent Prosecutor Act

References:

KITV Hawaii — Depleted Uranium Hawaii (2 Mins 33 Seconds)

Leuren Moret — Bio

Leuren Moret — Expert Testimony at the Tokyo International Tribunal for War Crimes in Afghanistan

DU: Dirty Bombs, Missiles, Bullets by Leuren Moret

From Hiroshima to Iraq, 61 years of uranium wars: A suicidal, genocidal, omnicidal course

DU: Occupational Hazards of War by Dr. Rosalie Bertell

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FBI ‘broke rules’ on data collection

Thursday, June 14th, 2007

The Sydney Morning Herald

An internal FBI audit has found the agency reportedly violated rules more than 1,000 times while collecting data on domestic phone calls, emails and financial transactions in recent years.

The number of violations uncovered by the audit was far greater than those previously documented in a Justice Department report in March, the Washington Post reported.

The vast majority of newly-discovered violations were instances in which telephone companies and internet providers gave agents phone and email records the agents did not request and were not authorised to collect, the Post said.

The agents retained the information in their files, which mostly concerned suspected terrorist or espionage activities, according to the report.

The new audit covers just 10 per cent of the FBI’s national security investigations since 2002, so the actual number of violations in the FBI’s domestic surveillance efforts probably number several thousand, bureau officials told the newspaper.

The Justice Department audit found 22 violations in a much smaller sampling.

However, some two dozen of the newly discovered violations involved agents’ requests for information that US law did not allow them to have, the audit found.

National Security Letters allow the FBI to compel the release of private information such as communications or financial records without getting court authority.

Their use has grown exponentially since the September 11, attacks, the Post said. More than 19,000 such letters were issued in 2005 seeking 47,000 pieces of information, it said.

Caproni said that steps had been implemented since March 2007 to fix the problem.

FBI officials said the audit found no evidence that any agent knowingly or willingly violated the laws or that supervisors encouraged such violations, the Post reported.

Rather it showed that many agents did not understand or follow the required legal procedures and paperwork requirements when collecting personal information.

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