BREAKING: Discover How A Slacker Makes $100,000 A Year!

WEBMASTERS! Get Your Website To The Top Of Google

Oil, Gas and the New World Order

Thursday, February 21st, 2008

Large Potential Albanian Oil and Gas Discovery Underscores Kosovo’s Importance

By Stephen Lendman
RINF Alternative News

On January 10, Swiss-based Manas Petroleum Corporation broke the news. Gustavson Associates LLC’s Resource Evaluation identified large prospects of oil and gas reserves in Albania, close to Kosovo. They’re in areas called blocks A, B, C, D and E, encompassing about 780,000 acres along the northwest to southeast “trending (geological) fold belt of northwestern Albania.”

Assigned estimates of the find (so far unproved) are up to 2.987 billion barrels of oil and 3.014 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. However, because of their depth, oil deposits may be capped with a layer of gas. If so, Gustavson calculates the potential to be 1.4 billion barrels of light oil and up to 15 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Further, if only gas is present, the discovery may be as much as 28 trillion cubic feet. In any case, if estimates prove out, it’s a sizable find.

In its statement, Gustavson reported: “The probability of success for a wildcat well in a structurally complex area such as this is relatively high (because) it is in a structurally favorable area (and) proven hydrocarbon source and analogous production exists only 20 to 30 kilometers away.”

Currently, the Balkans region has small proved oil reserves of about 345 million barrels, of which an estimated 198 million barrels are in Albania. Proved natural gas reserves are much larger at around 2.7 trillion cubic feet.

In December 2007, Albania’s Council of Ministers allowed DWM Petroleum, AG, a Manas subsidiary, to assist in the exploration, development and production of Albania’s oil and gas reserves in conjunction with the government’s Agency of Natural Resources.

This development further underscores Kosovo’s importance and the cost that’s meant for Serbia. Since the 1999 US-led NATO war, it’s been all downhill for the nation, the region and its people:

– Kosovo is part of Serbia; at least it was; since 1999 it’s been a Washington-NATO occupied colony stripped of its sovereignty in violation of international law;

– it’s been run by three successive US-installed puppet Prime Ministers with known ties to organized crime and drugs trafficking;

– it’s the home of one of America’s largest military bases in the world, Camp Bondsteel; the province/country is more a US military base than a legitimate political entity;

– its part of Washington’s regional strategic objective to control and transport Central Asia’s vast oil and gas reserves to selected markets, primarily in the West;

– on February 17 during a special parliamentary session, Kosovo unilaterally declared its independence; the action violates international law; Kosovo is as much part of Serbia as Illinois is one of America’s 50 states; to no surprise, Washington and dominant western countries support it; opposed are Serbia, Russia, Spain, Greece, Portugal, Slovakia, Malta, Bulgaria, Romania and Cyprus;

– might makes right; the issue is a fait accompli; the February 17 declaration ignores EU division pitting one-third of its 27 members in opposition; and

– unilateral western-supported independence mocks the 1999 UN Security Council Resolution 1244; it only permits Kosovo’s self-government as a Serbian province; the resolution recognizes the “sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia;” only a new UN resolution in compliance with international law can change that legally; nonetheless, it happened anyway on another historic day of infamy when Washington again trashed international law and the rules and norms of civil society.

Have Your Say: Oil, Gas and the New World Order
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

Stop The War - Mass Demo 15 March

Thursday, February 21st, 2008

Stop the War: a mass movement to celebrate and defend

Socialist Worker

The 15 February 2003 demonstration reminds us of the strength of the anti-war movement and shows the importance of the upcoming 15 March protest, writes Andrew Burgin

The fifth anniversary of the great anti-war march of 15 February 2003 was celebrated by the anti-war movement last week, as a high point of a truly unique mass movement that brought millions of people into political activity and ultimately led to the downfall of Tony Blair.

The anniversary was also marked by the mass media – which gave a somewhat mixed appraisal of the day.

One has to admire the Guardian newspaper for its chutzpah – on the anniversary the paper devoted a section of its editorial in praise of the march.

Not mentioned was the paper’s own support for the Iraq war nor its previous editorial position of not covering marches at all.

Nevertheless times change and now not only is the march to be considered as a wonderful event but we were also treated in the same edition to a long article on the march from quirky Guardian journalist, John Harris.

That the Guardian devoted a substantial section of their G2 supplement to the march is to be applauded and it is always good to see the photographs of the march – they show the incredible size and breadth of the anti-war movement that is difficult to express in words alone.

The article itself is a different matter. The main question Harris asks about the march is rather bizarre. He says, “Britain had never before seen a public outcry like it. So why haven’t we seen one again since?”

He states that the march and the movement which built it “failed to develop into anything with real political oomph”.

Effects

You don’t have to agree completely with former Chinese prime minister Zhou Enlai – who when asked in the 1970s to comment on the effects of the French Revolution, said that it was “too early to tell” – to believe that the effects of the largest demonstration in many hundreds of years of British political history may still be playing itself out.

After all British and US troops remain in Iraq and are now even more heavily engaged in Afghanistan than they were in 2003.

Harris rips the march from the movement which created it and tears it from what came before and what came after.

Rather than 15 February 2003 being seen as the high point in a long campaign against the “war on terror” Harris reduces the march to an isolated event which fell into the laps of the organisers by chance.

The organisers, he says, soon managed to whittle away this with “crushingly unimaginative tactics”. Presumably he means by this more marches.

Contrast this with Tony Benn’s approach – “The Stop the War movement is the most powerful and influential popular political movement of my lifetime and possibly of any period of our history.”

It is not a question of the honour of the movement or a question of defending the role of the SWP, which is criticised in the article, in building the anti-war movement, but the necessity of recognising the historic importance of this campaign – a campaign which still has some way to travel.

The marches are the backbone of our movement but they represent only a small part of our day to day activity.

Later this month the Stop the War Coalitions begins a series of nationwide rallies with Hassan Jumaa of the Iraqi oil workers’ union. We have worked closely with the Military Families Against the War campaign to support their demand for a public inquiry.

We have held a series of international peace conferences which have brought activists from across the world together to campaign against the “war on terror”.

There have been days of action against Islamophobia, in defence of civil liberties and opposing an attack on Iran. We have worked with artists and others to create events and exhibitions opposing the war.

And there has been much more – not least a campaign of direct action including sit-downs, banner drops and strikes and school walk-outs.

Lies and deceit

Where John Harris does hit the mark is in his account of the gap between the politicians (those who began the war) and the people (those who opposed it) and who exposed the lies and deceit that were used to promote it.

This week the government was forced to reveal the first draft of the “dodgy dossier” – and we will see the full extent of the “sexing up” of the intelligence by Tony Blair and Alistair Campbell.

We are in the middle of a long campaign to bring these politicians to account and to bring all the troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan.

This is why we make no apology for calling for people to work as hard as possible to build the international day of action and the London and Glasgow demonstrations on Saturday 15 March.

The movement remains mobilised.

Have Your Say: Stop The War - Mass Demo 15 March
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

How the C.I.A. Played Dirty Tricks With Culture

Thursday, February 21st, 2008

By LAURENCE ZUCKERMAN
New York Times

Many people remember reading George Orwell’s ”Animal Farm” in high school or college, with its chilling finale in which the farm animals looked back and forth at the tyrannical pigs and the exploitative human farmers but found it ”impossible to say which was which.”

That ending was altered in the 1955 animated version, which removed the humans, leaving only the nasty pigs. Another example of Hollywood butchering great literature? Yes, but in this case the film’s secret producer was the Central Intelligence Agency.

The C.I.A., it seems, was worried that the public might be too influenced by Orwell’s pox-on-both-their-houses critique of the capitalist humans and Communist pigs. So after his death in 1950, agents were dispatched (by none other than E. Howard Hunt, later of Watergate fame) to buy the film rights to ”Animal Farm” from his widow to make its message more overtly anti-Communist.

Rewriting the end of ”Animal Farm” is just one example of the often absurd lengths to which the C.I.A. went, as recounted in a new book, ”The Cultural Cold War: The C.I.A. and the World of Arts and Letters” (The New Press) by Frances Stonor Saunders, a British journalist. Published in Britain last summer, the book will appear here next month.

Much of what Ms. Stonor Saunders writes about, including the C.I.A.’s covert sponsorship of the Paris-based Congress for Cultural Freedom and the British opinion magazine Encounter, was exposed in the late 1960’s, generating a wave of indignation. But by combing through archives and unpublished manuscripts and interviewing several of the principal actors, Ms. Stonor Saunders has uncovered many new details and gives the most comprehensive account yet of the agency’s activities between 1947 and 1967.

This picture of the C.I.A.’s secret war of ideas has cameo appearances by scores of intellectual celebrities like the critics Dwight Macdonald and Lionel Trilling, the poets Ted Hughes and Derek Walcott and the novelists James Michener and Mary McCarthy, all of whom directly or indirectly benefited from the C.I.A.’s largesse. There are also bundles of cash that were funneled through C.I.A. fronts and several hilarious schemes that resemble a ”Spy vs. Spy” cartoon more than a serious defense against Communism. Traveling first class all the way, the C.I.A. and its counterparts in other Western European nations sponsored art exhibitions, intellectual conferences, concerts and magazines to press their larger anti-Soviet agenda. Ms. Stonor Saunders provides ample evidence, for example, that the editors at Encounter and other agency-sponsored magazines were ordered not to publish articles directly critical of Washington’s foreign policy. She also shows how the C.I.A. bankrolled some of the earliest exhibitions of Abstract Expressionist painting outside of the United States to counter the Socialist Realism being advanced by Moscow.

In one memorable episode, the British Foreign Office subsidized the distribution of 50,000 copies of ”Darkness at Noon,” Arthur Koestler’s anti-Communist classic. But at the same time, the French Communist Party ordered its operatives to buy up every copy of the book. Koestler received a windfall in royalties courtesy of his Communist adversaries.

As it turns out, ”Animal Farm” was not the only instance of the C.I.A.’s dabbling in Hollywood. Ms. Stonor Saunders reports that one operative who was a producer and talent agent slipped affluent-looking African-Americans into several films as extras to try to counter Soviet criticism of the American race problem.

The agency also changed the ending of the movie version of ”1984,” disregarding Orwell’s specific instructions that the story not be altered. In the book, the protagonist, Winston Smith, is entirely defeated by the nightmarish totalitarian regime. In the very last line, Orwell writes of Winston, ”He loved Big Brother.” In the movie, Winston and his lover, Julia, are gunned down after Winston defiantly shouts: ”Down with Big Brother!”

Such changes came from the agency’s obsession with snuffing out a notion then popular among many European intellectuals: that East and West were morally equivalent. But instead of illustrating the differences between the two competing systems by taking the high road, the agency justified its covert activities by referring to the unethical tactics of the Soviets.

”If the other side can use ideas that are camouflaged as being local rather than Soviet-supported or -stimulated, then we ought to be able to use ideas camouflaged as local ideas,” Tom Braden, who ran the C.I.A.’s covert cultural division in the early 1950’s, explained years later. (In one of the book’s many amusing codas, Mr. Braden goes on in the 1980’s to become the leftist foil to Patrick Buchanan on the CNN program ”Crossfire.”)

The cultural cold war began in postwar Europe, with the fraying of the wartime alliance between Washington and Moscow. Officials in the West believed they had to counter Soviet propaganda and undermine the wide sympathy for Communism in France and Italy.

An odd alliance was struck between the C.I.A. leaders, most of them wealthy Ivy League veterans of the wartime Office of Strategic Services and a corps of largely Jewish ex-Communists who had broken with Moscow to become virulently anti-Communist. Acting as intermediaries between the agency and the intellectual community were three colorful agents who included Vladimir Nabokov’s much less talented cousin, Nicholas, a composer.

The C.I.A. recognized from the beginning that it could not openly sponsor artists and intellectuals in Europe because there was so much anti-American feeling there. Instead, it decided to woo intellectuals out of the Soviet orbit by secretly promoting a non-Communist left of democratic socialists disillusioned with Moscow.

Ms. Stonor Saunders describes how the C.I.A. cleverly skimmed hundreds of millions of dollars from the Marshall Plan to finance its activities, funneling the money through fake philanthropies it created or real ones like the Ford Foundation.

”We couldn’t spend it all,” Gilbert Greenway, a former C.I.A. agent, recalled. ”There were no limits, and nobody had to account for it. It was amazing.”

When some of the C.I.A.’s activities were exposed in the late 1960’s, many artists and intellectuals claimed ignorance. But Ms. Stonor Saunders makes a strong case that several people, including the philosopher Isaiah Berlin and the poet Stephen Spender, who was co-editor of Encounter, knew about the C.I.A.’s role.

”She has made it very difficult now to deny that some of these things happened,” said Norman Birnbaum, a professor at the Georgetown University Law School who was a university professor in Europe in the 1950’s and early 1960’s. ”And she has placed a lot of people living and dead in embarrassing situations.”

Still unresolved is what impact the campaign had and whether it was worth it. Some of the participants, like Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., who was in the O.S.S. and knew about some of the C.I.A.’s cultural activities, argue that the agency’s role was benign, even necessary. Compared with the coups the C.I.A. sponsored in Guatemala, Iran and elsewhere, he said, its support of the arts was some of its best work. ”It enabled people to publish what they already believed,” he added. ”It didn’t change anyone’s course of action or thought.”

But Diana Josselson, whose husband, Michael, ran the Congress for Cultural Freedom, told Ms. Stonor Saunders that there were real human costs among those around the world who innocently cooperated with the agency’s front organizations only to be tarred with a C.I.A. affiliation when the truth came out. The author and other critics argue that by using government money covertly to promote such American ideals as democracy and freedom of expression, the agency ultimately stepped on its own message.

”Obviously it was an error, and a rather serious error, to allow intellectuals to be subsidized by the government,” said Alan Brinkley, a history professor at Columbia University. ”And when it was revealed, it did undermine their credibility seriously.”

Have Your Say: How the C.I.A. Played Dirty Tricks With Culture
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

Ex-spy chief denies group killed Diana

Thursday, February 21st, 2008

By Robert Barr

ASSOCIATED PRESS

The former head of MI6 denied yesterday that the British intelligence agency killed Princess Diana and her boyfriend, Dodi Fayed, in 1997.

Sir Richard Dearlove, who was MI6’s director of special operations at the time of Diana’s death in Paris, told a coroner’s inquest that MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service, didn’t assassinate anyone between 1994 and 1999, when he was director.

He also denied that MI6 mounted any operations against her or Fayed, including surveillance or bugging.

Dearlove also testified that an operation by rogue agents would have been impossible.

Fayed’s father, Mohamed Al Fayed, has accused MI6 of engineering the death of his son and the princess at the behest of Prince Philip, husband of Queen Elizabeth II.

As director of special operations, Dearlove said it was his responsibility to sign off on any operation that would otherwise be illegal. The operation would then have to be approved by the foreign secretary, a senior member of the government.

Al Fayed’s assertion that Philip directed MI6 was “utterly ridiculous,” Dearlove said. There was no formal relationship between the agency and the prince, although Philip had visited the agency with the queen, he said.

Have Your Say: Ex-spy chief denies group killed Diana
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

US judge blocks CIA flight case

Thursday, February 21st, 2008

BBC

A US judge has dismissed a case alleging that a subsidiary of Boeing illegally helped the CIA fly terror suspects abroad on rendition flights.

The American Civil Liberties Union brought the case against Jeppesen Dataplan, saying it “falsified flight plans… to avoid public scrutiny”.

But a San Francisco judge halted the case, as the CIA director had urged.

“The very subject matter of this case is a state secret,” Judge James Ware wrote in a ruling.

CIA director Michael Hayden had earlier urged the judge to dismiss the case because he said that covert operations overseas could be exposed.

CIA flights

ACLU brought the case on behalf of five men who alleged the CIA had flown them to foreign prisons, where they were interrogated and tortured.

The plaintiffs were an Ethiopian living in the UK, an Italian working in Pakistan, an Egyptian citizen living in Sweden, a Yemeni, and an Iraqi who was a British resident.

The lawsuit against Jeppesen had claimed the services they provided were crucial to the flights.

However, Jeppesen had said it could not confirm if it was involved with the flights.

A report approved by a European Parliament committee last year said more than 1,000 covert CIA flights had crossed European airspace or stopped at European airports in the four years after the 9/11 attacks in 2001.

Jeppesen’s participation allegedly included securing necessary landing and overflight permits for the flights between the US, Pakistan, Ireland, Cyprus, Morocco, and Afghanistan.

Have Your Say: US judge blocks CIA flight case
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

CIA Flights Landed on British Island

Thursday, February 21st, 2008

CIA And Britain Admit U.S. Rendition Flights Used British Territory In 2002

Reversing an earlier claim, the CIA has acknowledged that two U.S. rendition flights carrying two alleged terrorists refueled on a U.S. base in British territory in 2002. CIA Director Michael Hayden told agency employees in a message on Thursday that information previously provided to Britain that no such flights used British airspace or soil since the 9/11 attacks turned out to be wrong.Britain has confirmed the acknowledgement, as British Foreign Secretary David Miliband made a similar statement in the parliament on Thursday.

“Contrary to earlier explicit assurances that Diego Garcia had not been used for rendition flights, recent U.S. investigations have now revealed that this had in fact occurred on two occasions, both in 2002,” Miliband told the House of Lords.

“In both cases a U.S. plane with a single detainee on board refueled at the U.S. facility in Diego Garcia,” he added.

Hayden said a review of the rendition records late last year found that the refueling, conducted more than five years ago, lasted just a short time.

“We found this mistake ourselves, and that we brought it to the attention of the British government. An important part of intelligence work, inherently urgent, complex, and uncertain, is to take responsibility for errors and to learn from them,” the AP quoted Hayden as saying.

One of the prisoners was ultimately jailed at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base and the other was released to his home country, Hayden revealed in the message. He insisted that neither of them was tortured and denied there has ever been a holding facility for CIA prisoners on Diego Garcia, a British island territory in the Indian Ocean.

Source

Have Your Say: CIA Flights Landed on British Island
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

Israel is stealing Palestinian land, private or not

Thursday, February 21st, 2008

By Amira Hass

Not long ago the greengrocer in Ramallah recalled - between weighing locally grown zucchini and stripped hyssop leaves - that his family owns the land on which the gas station at the old entrance to the Jewish settlement of Beit El in the West Bank is located. He would not be surprised by the figure that the Peace Now movement has succeeded in officially extracting from the defense establishment, after more than a year of fighting for the freedom of information: About one-third of the Jewish settlements in the West Bank (44 out of 120) were built on privately owned Palestinian land that was seized, by means of confiscation orders, for “security needs.”

From the data it emerges that at least 19 of the 44 settlements were built on private land, even after prime minister Menachem Begin decided in 1979 that the construction and expansion of settlements would take place only on state-owned land.

Peace Now has revealed here another act of hypocrisy, even though the Supreme Court is no longer impressed even by this: It did, after all, legitimize the construction of the settlement of Matityahu on land owned by inhabitants of Bil’in.

The known fact that settlements are built on private Palestinian lands combines all too well with the general civic and institutional Israeli perception to the effect that Palestinian lands that are not privately owned, or that lack proof of private ownership, belong to the Jewish people in Israel and the Diaspora.

Under the Israeli approach, which has expanded further since the Oslo Accords, any land that is not private was and remains suitable for Israeli development - for the benefit of the Jewish citizens of the state and for those who have the right to immigrate to Israel under the Law of Return. These are exactly the lands that constitute a considerable part of Area C (which is under Israeli military and administrative responsibility, and holds 60 percent of the area of the West Bank) and prohibited for any Palestinian development. It is on these lands, which are denominated “state lands,” that two-thirds of the settlements are built. No less illegally.

The discussion of whether West Bank lands are privately owned or not reverberates far more loudly than the discussion of Israel’s takeover of the Palestinian expanse by means of the closure policy. For example, since February 5, the army has once again severed the towns of the northern West Bank from the rest of the territory by means of roadblocks, and has forbidden males between the ages of 16 and 35 from leaving their towns. The media don’t report on this.

The discussion of private land reverberates well in the Israeli (and American) media because of the exaggerated sanctification of private property. And now, Peace Now must correct its initial report of October 2006, in which it was stated that 86 percent of the area of Ma’aleh Adumim is private Palestinian land. It emerges that only .05 percent of Ma’aleh Adumim is private land.

Nonetheless, this non-ideological Jewish settlement is among the most damaging to the Palestinians, and it reinforces the regime of apartheid roads: It cuts the northern part of the West Bank off from the southern part, and prevents Palestinian territorial contiguity. The road that leads to Ma’aleh Adumim will soon be closed to Palestinians, who will be diverted to a separate, narrow and winding road. This Jewish settlement has caused the banishment of many Bedouin from their lands and their ways of life. Together with the adjacent Jewish settlements and the separation barrier, it has taken over lands that had served the Palestinian towns and villages in the area, their natural reserve for development and expansion.

And so what if this is land that was not registered as private? Because of this robbery, these villages and towns have become crowded, choking neighborhoods that are cut off from the larger expanse.

The extensive work that Peace Now has invested in exposing the private ownership of lands is a mirror image of the extensive and systematic effort of Civil Administration experts to prevent inhabitants of the villages from cultivating their lands beyond the separation barrier. They measure out for each individual his part in an inheritance and in accordance with this, they allot him the hours during which he may pass through the gate to harvest olives or to plow the land. They prevent shared cultivation of the land and calculate which of the siblings in a family is abroad so that, heaven forfend, his share of the land will not be cultivated by others.

All of this is a preliminary step to expropriate land that remains “without owners” and its transformation in the future into state land - that is, Jews’ land.

The exaggerated concentration on private ownership feeds into the Israeli denial of the fact that the Palestinians’ right is to all of the territory that has been occupied. Not as private individuals, but rather because they constitute an indigenous national group in this land.

Have Your Say: Israel is stealing Palestinian land, private or not
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

UK in Israel WMD cover up

Thursday, February 21st, 2008

Independent Online

An early draft of a pre-war British weapons dossier on Iraq included concerns over Israel’s nuclear capability, but the government fought to suppress the reference before publication, The Guardian reported on Thursday.

The newspaper said the Foreign Office convinced a tribunal to keep secret the handwritten mention of Israel in the margin of the dossier, which was drawn up to justify going to war in Iraq.

The reference, suggesting Israel had disregarded the will of the United Nations (UN) like Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein in pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, was removed before the draft was released this week under Britain’s Freedom of Information Act.

Israel, seen as a key British government ally, is thought to have the Middle East’s only atomic arsenal.

In a witness statement to the Information Tribunal, seen by The Guardian, a senior Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) official warned that any candid reference to Israel would seriously damage bilateral relations.

“I interpret this note to indicate that the person who wrote it believes that Israel has flouted the United Nations’ authority in a manner similar to that of the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein,” the official said, according to The Guardian.

“Unfortunately, there is a perception already in Israel that parts of the FCO are prejudiced against the country,” Foreign Office official Neil Wigan was quoted as saying.

He argued that the reference scrawled on the draft dossier “would therefore confirm this pre-existing suspicion and would increase the damage”.

Asked about the Guardian report, a Foreign Office spokesperson said: “We don’t comment on leaked documents.”

Succumbing to three years of pressure from freedom of information campaigners, the British government released the once-secret draft document on Monday.

The 32-page document, written by a former director of communications at the Foreign Office, cites intelligence sources to state that Iraq had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and could easily use them since it had done so before.

The document, amended in the margins, makes no mention of Saddam Hussein being capable of launching weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes, a false claim later used in another government dossier to make the case for going to war.

Have Your Say: UK in Israel WMD cover up
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

Has Homeland Security Gone Too Far with Surveillance?

Thursday, February 21st, 2008

Dell Key loggers

Normally, I’m all for what Uncle Sam needs to do in order to maintain National Security … so long as it doesn’t go too far. The question is, with this story in Hack N Mod, has Uncle Sam (and Dell Computers) gone a bridge too far in surveilling America?

Big Brother is indeed watching you, my friends … One man found a keylogger connected to the integrated Ethernet board of his Dell PC.

The story goes on to state that Dell gave him a nondescript reply and after consulting local law enforcement, he made a FOIA request regarding it. The reply is interesting, but may not be the entire story. Not everything is black helicopters and wiretaps.

On it’s face, it appears that Dell Computer may be participating in a felony by installing hardware keyloggers in their Dell Laptops. However, there are some real world applications for a hardware keylogger … such as information security on business laptops and backup potential in the event of a catastrophic software or hard drive failure. And one comfort is that according Keyghost, the makers of the keylogger, only an administrator can access the log, which only records up to 128,000 characters. Then there’s the deterrant capability that if employees know that a keylogger is installed on their business computers, they won’t use those computers for unauthorized or nefarious uses.

It could be a mistake of distribution, or deliberate design meant to accommodate their business customers. But if Dell is installing these in all their laptops and not advising their customers with an option to have it removed, then perhaps they are indeed violating a customer’s rights.

Have Your Say: Has Homeland Security Gone Too Far with Surveillance?
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

Assembly says no to ID card proposals

Thursday, February 21st, 2008

The London Assembly has called on the Government to abandon controversial plans to introduce ID cards and instead spend London’s share of the costs of the proposed scheme on tackling crime.

Jenny Jones AM, who proposed the motion, said:

“If the ID card scheme goes ahead it will lead to the creation of a massive database full of personal data and biometric information. There have been several incidents lately where public sector organisations have lost or misplaced huge amounts of personal data, making the information contained in an ID card database an accident waiting to happen. The money would be far better spent reducing crime in the capital.”

Bob Blackman AM, who seconded the motion, said:

“The proposals for ID cards are intrusive and serve no purpose beyond making people more vulnerable to having their personal data lost, sold or abused. If this type of comprehensive personal information were to fall into the wrong hands – which is a real possibility – it would be the average person who has done nothing wrong who would suffer most.”

The motion in full reads as follows:

“This Assembly expresses its alarm over recent government failures to protect the personal data of citizens, including many Londoners, and over major failures with government computer systems. It considers that these failures demonstrate further the huge risks of introducing a National ID Register, involving a massive accumulation of personal information, together with biometric ID cards.

The Assembly calls on the government to recognise these risks and abandon its proposals, including the introduction of ID cards by coercion as part of the passport and driving licence application process. It reiterates its call to government to redirect London’s share of the cost of the scheme to effective crime prevention and policing measures.”

Have Your Say: Assembly says no to ID card proposals
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

Related News

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 21st, 2008 at 8:45 pm and is filed under Contributions & Guests, General, New World Order . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Translate: