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Web Spy Agency Denies Spying

Tuesday, May 5th, 2009

The Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) has denied that it plans to monitor all web and telephone usage in the UK.

The denial comes after an article in the Sunday Times suggested that GCHQ was pushing ahead with plans to monitor communications and create a centralised database of the details gathered.

“GCHQ is not developing technology to enable the monitoring of all internet use and phone calls in Britain, or to target everyone in the UK,” the agency said in a statement.

“GCHQ has no ambitions, expectations or plans for a database or databases to store centrally all communications data in Britain,” the statement continued.

Recently, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said that communications providers should be responsible for logging the senders and recipients of emails and internet telephone calls as well as other details, though not the content of messages.

Last month, a law requiring ISPs to store communications data for 12 months was introduced.

Privacy campaigners were outraged by the new laws saying they created a “snooper’s charter”.

GCHQ reiterated the circumstances under which it would monitor communications in the UK.

“The purposes for which interception may be permitted are set out explicitly in the legislation: national security, safeguarding our economic well being and the prevention and detection of serious crime,” GCHQ said.

“Interception for other purposes is not lawful and we do not do it,” it continued.

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Hypocritical Yahoo hosts human rights summit

Tuesday, May 5th, 2009

By Aharon Etengoff |

Chicago (IL) - Yahoo is currently hosting a summit on business and human rights at its Sunnyvale campus. Journalists and social entrepreneurs from Africa, Asia and the Middle East are expected to discuss how they have used the Internet and social media to “support free expression and drive social change.”

“Yahoo was founded on the belief that access to information can enrich people’s lives, and we hope this summit and our other initiatives will both stimulate greater awareness about free expression issues and bring others to this important cause,” explained Yahoo VP Michael Samway.

Really?

According to Reporters Without Borders, Yahoo has allowed the Chinese version of its search engine to be censored “for years.” In 2002, Yahoo voluntarily signed the “Public Pledge on Self-Discipline for the China Internet Industry,” agreeing to abide by PRC censorship regulations. Searches considered “sensitive” by the Chinese authorities reportedly retrieve only a limited and approved set of results.

In addition, Yahoo! Holdings (Hong Kong) Ltd. provided China’s state security authorities with details that helped to identify and convict journalist Shi Tao - who was subsequently sentenced to 10 years in prison.

“We already knew that Yahoo collaborates enthusiastically with the Chinese regime in questions of censorship, and now we know it is a Chinese police informant as well,” Reporters Without Borders claimed in 2005 statement. “Yahoo obviously complied with requests from the Chinese authorities to furnish information regarding an IP address that linked Shi Tao to materials posted online, and the company will yet again simply state that they just conform to the laws of the countries in which they operate. But does the fact that this corporation operates under Chinese law free it from all ethical considerations? How far will it go to please Beijing?”

Tom Lantos, the former chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, expressed similar sentiments in 2007.

“These were demands by a police state to make an American company a co- conspirator in having a freedom-loving Chinese journalist put in prison. Will you continue to use the phrase `lawful orders,’ or will you just be satisfied saying `orders’? While technologically and financially you are giants, morally you are pygmies,” added Lantos.

We asked Yahoo: “We were wondering if the conference will address the company’s role of cooperating with the Chinese government to censor certain aspects of the Internet.”

A Yahoo rep told TG Daily: “”Yes, we will discuss how technology companies are handling these challenges.”

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Pilots to boycott ID card trial

Tuesday, May 5th, 2009

AIRLINE pilots will resist the ID card scheme ‘with all legal means possible’, according to their union Balpa.

The scheme is to be trialled at Manchester and London City Airports but Balpa said its members were overwhelmingly against it.

Balpa general secretary Jim McAuslan said the scheme was not voluntary as pilots had learned that they would not get a pass to go to the through-security airside part of an airport without having an ID card.

“This is coercion and a case of Big Brother knows best,” he added.

On The Guardian website, Mr McAuslan went on: “Our members are overwhelmingly against the Government’s national ID card scheme trials for pilots and other airside workers, and we will resist the card with all legal means possible.

“Our members believed the Government promise that the ID card would be voluntary, but they now know it is anything but. Our members must have an airside pass to operate aircraft and now discover that to get that pass they must have a national ID card.

“They are told ‘You don’t actually have to have one’ but no card equals no pass, which equals no job. This is coercion and, by trialling the scheme in Manchester and London City Airports, the Government is clearly attempting to isolate pockets of resistance.”

Mr McAuslan continued: “Our members see the regular stories of Government data going missing or falling into the wrong hands. Like every other citizen, they ask themselves what will happen to the data they are coerced into providing; whether it will it be safe, whose hands might it fall into, and what might they do with the data?

“Yes, there have been lots of reassuring noises, but frankly we don’t believe them. Our members, who aim to be the ultimate professionals, increasingly have a sense that a line is being crossed in the relationship between state and citizen; a sense that Big Brother knows best.”

An Identity and Passport Service spokesman said: “The Government remains committed to working in close partnership with the aviation industry and trade unions to introduce identity cards for airside workers.

“Balpa have come to us with their concerns and we have spoken to them a number of times about how we can work with industry to resolve these.”

The spokesman continued: “Identity cards will directly benefit airside workers - not just by improving personnel security, but also by speeding up pre-employment checks and increasing the efficiency of pass issuing arrangements, making it easier for these workers to take up their posts and move from one airside job to another.

“Identity cards will be mandatory for all airside workers, just as other pre-employment checks are today, so that the benefits from the scheme can be realised across the aviation sector. We will work with each airport to agree exactly which employees would initially be subject to this requirement and how it would best be integrated into the pre-employment checking and pass issuing arrangements at that airport.”

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Police facing growing pressure over tactics

Tuesday, May 5th, 2009

By Siân Ruddick |

The Metropolitan Police Authority is under growing pressure over its operation around the G20 protests and the death of Ian Tomlinson shortly after he was pushed and assaulted by police in central London on 1 April.

There are now a number of inquiries underway, scrutinising both individual incidents and the overall tactics of the police.

Campaigners are determined to defend the right to protest and to hold the police to account.

They have set up the United Campaign Against Police Violence (UCAPV) following the G20 protests, which was due to be formally launched on Tuesday, after Socialist Worker went to press.

The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) is now carrying out four investigations relating to the G20 protests.

The most high profile is the inquiry into Ian’s death.

Ian’s family and supporters are pressing for the investigation to be carried out speedily so that they can find out exactly how Ian died and they can get justice.

The second investigation is over an alleged assault by a police officer on a 22 year old woman. The IPCC will also look into the case of an unnamed man in his 20s who was allegedly assaulted by police officers.

A fourth investigation is into the assault of Nicky Fisher, the woman seen on a YouTube video being slapped across the face by a sergeant.

The IPCC has received 256 complaints relating to the policing of G20 protests.

This includes 75 complaints about police tactics. Many relate to the forced containment of protesters, known as “kettling”.

Comments made on the social networking website Facebook have also called into question the attitudes of some police.

PC John Hayter, from the police’s royal protection unit, recently resigned after allegedly writing on his Facebook page, “I see my lot have murdered someone again. Oh well, shit happens.”

This follows the case of PC Rob Ward, a police officer who is being investigated after allegedly writing on Facebook that he was “looking forward to bashing some longhaired hippys [sic] @ the G20”.

There have also been more revelations in the past week about the state’s systematic monitoring of protesters.

Documents released under the Freedom of Information Act reveal how the “comms directorate” at the Department for Transport monitored environmental campaign groups in the run up to the announcement of Heathrow airport’s expansion.

Activists from UCAPV protested outside an MPA meeting at City Hall on Thursday of last week.

Protesters said that there was a lot of anger in the room, although at times it felt as though the meeting was simply a forum for the police to continue to defend their actions.

London mayor Boris Johnson was heckled from the gallery as he claimed that “the Met is a first class force”.

Some MPA members, including Jenny Jones from the Green Party and Kirsten Hearn, an independent, asked questions about police tactics.

Kirsten Hearn raised concerns that the policing on the demonstrations discriminated against people with disabilities, the elderly and pregnant women.

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Senators Accuse Pentagon of Delay in Recovering Millions

Tuesday, May 5th, 2009

The Pentagon has done little to collect at least $100 million in overcharges paid in deals arranged by corrupt former officials of Kellogg Brown & Root, the defense contractor, even though the officials admitted much of the wrongdoing years ago, two senators have complained in a letter to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates.

The letter also said that the Army had almost completely failed to move away from the monopolistic nature of the logistics contract that has paid the contractor, now called KBR, $31.3 billion for logistics operations in Iraq, Kuwait and Afghanistan.

The New York Times obtained a copy of the letter, dated Friday, by the senators, Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri, and Susan M. Collins, Republican of Maine. Senator McCaskill is chairman of a contracting oversight subcommittee of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, and Senator Collins is the subcommittee’s ranking Republican.

Their letter is likely to revive allegations that the Pentagon has become so close to KBR, and relies so heavily on it, that there is little inclination or incentive to discipline the company, in response to either Congress or critics outside the government.

In 2007 the Army split the logistics contract, known as Logcap, in a way that allowed several companies to compete for each new need. The Army did this partly to avoid relying solely on KBR, whose pricing practices, even when technically legal, have sometimes received criticism as exorbitant. But the Army has seldom used the newly competitive arrangement.

The senators wrote that as of February, the latest date for which the subcommittee had received information, the Army had “not awarded a single task order for work in Iraq,” the biggest source of logistics work.

In pressing for use of the new competitive arrangement, the senators cited 2008 legislation that calls for competition by multiple companies on military contracts unless there is “a compelling reason not to do so.” The senators also brought up Congressional testimony by the Army’s chief of logistics that they said indicated the Army had no such compelling reason.

Reached for comment, Dan Carson, a spokesman at the Army Sustainment Command in Rock Island, Ill., which administers the work, pointed out that under the new competitive arrangement, in which KBR, Fluor and Dyncorp submit bids, Fluor and Dyncorp have received some work in Afghanistan and Kuwait. Mr. Carson said that the Army was working toward awarding work in Iraq under the new competitive arrangement.

A spokeswoman for KBR, Heather L. Browne, said all of KBR’s logistics contracts have been won competitively. She added that “when KBR has discovered wrongdoing of any sort by an employee, we have swiftly reported it to the government,” and said the company “in no way condones or tolerates illegal or unethical behavior.” KBR itself has not been accused of wrongdoing in any of the cases of fraud by former employees.

Ms. Browne made clear that the company intended to continue its logistics work, saying KBR remained committed to high quality and to “engaging in a transparent and fact-based dialogue with the government.”

The letter and the Pentagon auditing documents that back up its conclusions are likely to be a point of discussion in Washington on Monday, when the Wartime Contracting Commission, a bipartisan legislative commission, is scheduled to meet on the logistics program, according to its Web site.

To the irritation of KBR’s critics, the Army has generally upheld the bills the company has submitted to the military, even when the Pentagon’s own auditors have questioned the amounts. But the argument that the Army was overcharged appears to be more clear-cut in the cases of several former KBR officials convicted of accepting bribes and kickbacks.

In those cases, the Army asked KBR to perform a certain task under the Logcap contract, like buying living trailers or building a dining facility, and the KBR officials found subcontractors in the region to carry out the actual work. The officials took bribes to steer the work toward subcontractors who were not the low bidders, or simply inflated the worth of the contracts once they had been awarded.

In the contracts handled by just one of those officials, Stephen Lowell Seamans, who pleaded guilty to bribery and conspiracy in March 2006, Pentagon auditors quickly found potential excess profits by a Kuwaiti subcontractor of $49.8 million, or 76 percent, “as a result of Mr. Seamans’s fraudulent activities,” the senators wrote.

Of $306 million in tainted contracts, at least $100 million of the charges appeared to be unjustified, wrote the senators.

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Obama administration spearheads wage cuts for American workers

Tuesday, May 5th, 2009

By Patrick Martin |

The wage cuts imposed on auto workers at Chrysler and General Motors at the insistence of the Obama administration demonstrate the class strategy that American big business as a whole is carrying out: to impose a reduction in the living standards of American workers on a scale unprecedented since the Great Depression.

The White House has given the green light for nationwide wage-cutting with its demands on Chrysler and GM workers, who have seen wages for new-hires slashed by 50 percent, along with the abolition of cost-of-living raises and cuts in vacation pay.

Several new reports show that big business is following the example set in Washington with enthusiasm.

According to an account published Sunday by the Washington Post, recent wage cuts have included a 10 percent reduction for contractors working for Microsoft, cuts for hotel workers in New York City, and reductions for state and local government workers in many areas and in much of the newspaper industry.

The Society for Human Resource Management said that its index of wages for new-hires showed a decline and wage rates for temporary workers are also falling. A survey of young workers by the online advocacy group Qvisory found that 19 percent of adults 29 or younger were out of work, 41 percent had been affected by wage cuts or cuts in work hours, and 40 percent had skipped meals recently to save money. Overall, 62 percent said their economic circumstances were “poor” or only “fair.”

Among the well-known companies that have announced major wage cuts are Advanced Micro Devices, Honda, Hewlett-Packard, Best Buy and FedEx. A Watson Wyatt survey of 245 major corporations in February found that 7 percent had already cut salaries and another 4 percent expected to as the economic slump worsens.

The Federal Reserve Board, in the March edition of its “beige book,” which collates reports from regional Federal Reserve banks, noted “outright reductions in hourly compensation costs” for the first time in the current slump.

The spread of wage-cutting has already begun to impact consumer spending, which fell in March, the first monthly decline of the year. Incomes fell for the third consecutive month, by 0.3 percent in March, “reflecting wage cuts and layoffs as employers cut costs,” according to the Associated Press.

The employment cost index, a broad measure of combined wages and benefits published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, showed a rise of only 0.3 percent in the first quarter of 2009. It was the smallest quarterly increase since the US Department of Labor began tracking such statistics in 1982. Given the more rapid rise in prices, this means that most working class families have suffered a decline in real wages.

The fall in workers’ real incomes and the growth of mass unemployment are driving a continuing increase in poverty, hunger and homelessness. US food stamp enrollment rose again in February, according to figures reported Monday by the US Department of Agriculture, to a staggering 32.55 million Americans. The number of people receiving food stamps has risen by one million since the financial crisis exploded last September, with more than ten percent of all working people compelled to seek food assistance from the federal government.

According to the Food Research and Action Center, a non-profit group, another 16 million people are eligible for food stamps but are not receiving them, either because they are unaware of their right to benefits, have not applied or have been wrongfully denied.

The sharp fall in wages comes after an economic “upturn,” from 2002 through 2007, that was the worst for the incomes of working people since the Census Bureau began tracking the real purchasing power of wages in the 1940s. For the first time, the real earnings of middle-income families were lower at the end of the “recovery” than they were at the beginning.

More than one-quarter of all American workers, 26.4 percent, earned poverty-level wages in 2007, before the beginning of the current recession. That figure has skyrocketed since.

Economist Paul Krugman called attention to what he termed the “Falling Wage Syndrome” in his Monday column in the New York Times. He warned, “Falling wages are a symptom of a sick economy. And they’re a symptom that can make the economy even sicker.” He pointed to the danger that wage cuts would accentuate the problem of defaults on mortgages and consumer debt payments, as well as depressing consumer spending, the principal engine of the US economy.

A supporter of the Obama administration who occasionally criticizes it from a liberal standpoint, Krugman glossed over the fundamental class issues involved in the ongoing assault on wages.

He wrote: “Some of the wage cuts, like the givebacks by Chrysler workers, are the price of federal aid. Others, like the tentative agreement on a salary cut here at the Times, are the result of discussions between employers and their union employees. Still others reflect the brute fact of a weak labor market: workers don’t dare protest when their wages are cut, because they don’t think they can find other jobs.”

Krugman makes arbitrary distinctions in what is in fact a single process. Cutting wages is the class strategy of the American corporate elite, imposed through all the agencies of the ruling class, starting with the Obama administration.

Just as the Reagan administration’s smashing of the PATCO strike in 1981 gave the signal for the orgy of union-busting and strikebreaking that followed, so the Obama administration’s wage-cutting at Chrysler and General Motors is giving the White House seal of approval to a similar policy by corporate America.

Significantly, one of Obama’s key economic advisers today is Paul Volcker, who served as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board from 1979 to 1987, playing a leading role in the corporate onslaught on the working class and hailing Reagan’s mass firing of the PATCO air traffic controllers.

It was President Obama himself who declared that in the new economy he seeks to create, Americans would “consume less and save more.” If one asks exactly which Americans will be consuming less, the figures cited above supply the answer: working class Americans, many of whom are already living on the edge of poverty and bankruptcy.

As for Krugman’s reference to “discussions between employers and their union employees,” this too is an evasion. Giant corporations like the New York Times Co. are demanding savage wage cuts—using, as at the Times-owned Boston Globe—the threat of outright closure and mass layoffs—while relying on the union apparatus to impose their dictates on the work force.

There is no end to the demands by big business that workers pay for the crisis of American and world capitalism. What is required is a movement from below that rejects the entire framework of the profit system and advances the independent social and class interests of working people, based on a socialist program.

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