Get ready for TTIP

The Trouble With TTIP  - A documentary about the dangers of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership trade talks being held between the European Union and the United States of America.

George Orwell

The Shift towards an Authoritarian Future: Why the West Slowly Abandons its Civil Liberties

Politicians on both sides of the Atlantic who construct an image of toughness – tough on crime, on terrorism, on humanistic-inspired idealism etc. – are tapping into a sensitive spot that blocks critical thought among the public. Obama’s brute and harsh reaction on Edward Snowden’s revelations is just another example. Somehow it seems like  “We, the people…”  lost track of ourselves. Four main reasons why we abandon our once hard fought civil rights.

Many countries in the West, like Britain, France, Spain the US and the Netherlands have experienced in recent years an exponential increase in technological surveillance and a resolute decline in parliamentary and judicial control over state police and secret service.

Issues like the ban on torture, the possibility of detention without charge, privacy and freedom of speech were in the public debate reframed in favour of state control. And everybody accepted it. To be fair, there was some opposition – but it lacked intensity. Why is this happening?

To give an example, under former British Prime Minister Tony Blair 45 criminal laws were approved creating 3000 new criminal offences. British writer John Kampfer argues that in the past ten years more criminal offences were made in his country than in a hundred years before. All this was legitimized by the idea that a ‘terroristic’ virus attacked Western civilization. Of course, there is some truth in it – but these risks were grossly exaggerated. Still, we fearfully went along with the proposed measures.

This cultural shift towards perhaps a more authoritarian future for the West is no coincidence of nature. It is manmade. If the opportunity is there, top down induced shifts happen only if politicians, corporations, media pundits and other cultural icons are able to find the right symbols and techniques to get a new message across.

Full article on Global Research

Edward Snowden's Christmas Message

Channel 4 UK/Praxis Films

A New "451" Error Message Would Tell Users When Governments Are Blocking Websites

If you don't think book burning is a fair analogy for blocked websites, may I remind you that the British Library's wi-fi filter recently blocked users from accessing Hamlet due to its "violent" content. And the Shakespeare-blocking library is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to inadvertent censorship. Over the years there's been a steady stream of reports of innocent websites getting swept up in overzealous copyright crackdowns, and free expression activists fear the same will happen under British Prime Minister David Cameron's controversial "pornwall."

To fend off the chilling effects of heavy-handed internet restriction, the UK consumer rights organization Open Rights Group wants to create a new version of the “404 Page Not Found” error message, called “451 unavailable,” to specify that a webpage wasn’t simply not there, it was ordered to be blocked for legal reasons. 

In case you missed the reference, the number is shout-out to Ray Bradbury’s book-burning government censorship novel Fahrenheit 451. The campaign's hope is to increase transparency and shine a light on web censorship—both intended and inadvertent. If the group gets its way, the 451 message would include information on who initiated the block, the reasons for it, links to the relevant court documents, and steps for how to go about challenging the block.

Full article on Motherboard

Google Says You Have No "Reasonable Expectation" of Privacy

Gmail users have no “reasonable expectation” that their emails are confidential,  Google has said in a court filing. Consumer Watchdog, the advocacy group that uncovered the filing, called the revelation a “stunning admission.” It comes as Google and its peers are under pressure to explain their role in the National Security Agency’s (NSA) mass surveillance of US citizens and foreign nationals.

“Google has finally admitted they don’t respect privacy,” said John Simpson, Consumer Watchdog’s privacy project director. “People should take them at their word; if you care about your email correspondents’ privacy, don’t use Gmail.” Google set out its case last month in an attempt to dismiss a class action lawsuit that accuses the tech giant of breaking wire tap laws when it scans emails in order to target ads to Gmail users.

More on Alternet

You're Failures!

Love him or hate him Alex Jones spoons out info with comedy!

Police State USA

A compilation of American news segments and video clips detailing the history of stop and frisk.

NYC Resistance

Everyone's a Terrorist

EuroNews: Obama defends ‘privacy trade-off’ for security - Democracy Now!

Obama’s Unparalleled Spy State

Now we know for sure: The Obama administration has presided over the most thorough expansion of the domestic surveillance state of any U.S. presidency. Even as the nation was still absorbing the news,  broken by Glenn Greenwald at the Guardian on Wednesday night, that the National Security Agency has been routinely collecting phone call records for millions of Americans, the Washington Post and the Guardian published articles revealing even broader  government snooping powers: Since 2007, the NSA and the FBI have had the power to watch nearly every aspect of our online life as well.

The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time. The nine companies are Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple. (PalTalk, according to the Post, “hosted significant traffic during the Arab Spring and in the ongoing Syrian civil war.”)

The program is code-named PRISM, and while it was created during the administration of George W. Bush, the Post reports that it has experienced “exponential growth” under Obama.

More on Alternet – The Guardian – The Washington Post – Fox News – Wikipedia

China's barbaric one-child policy

Ma Jian in The Guardian:

A man with a motorbike agreed to take me to meet a family who had been persecuted the previous year. "They live in a remote valley, far from the nearest village, so the local officials are unlikely to see us," he said as I climbed on behind him. He drove me through dark green hills, past brick shacks painted with half-defaced slogans, one of which read: "After the first child: insert an IUD; after the second: sterilise; after the third: kill, kill kill!" When we arrived at the house, Ah-Li was laying out shrivelled, salted vegetables to dry in the sun. She had to care for four children and her husband's elderly parents, and looked much older than her 30 years. When I asked her about the forced abortion she suffered, she flinched. "It crippled me," she said. "I couldn't stand up straight for weeks afterwards. I had to spend hundreds of yuan on painkillers."

"I heard you worked in a factory in the south for a few years, so you must have had some savings. Did the family-planning squad take the lot?" I looked down at her spindly neck and the duck droppings scattered over her concrete yard. The warm air smelled of singed feathers. I could hear shouting coming from the four children and the television inside her small house.

"Yes, the gods are always against me!" she sighed. "I tried to travel to the county town to lodge a complaint, but the police turned me back. If you write about my story on the internet, don't mention my surname." She rose to her feet and brushed the dung from her trousers. "I paid thousand-yuan fines for my second, third and fourth daughters, but the squad told me that those didn't count, and I'd have to pay another 10,000 yuan for each of them."

"Was the aborted baby a girl or a boy?" I asked, feeling uncomfortable questioning a stranger about such matters."I don't know," she answered. "When the squad turned up, I was cradling my youngest. The officers tore her from my arms, kicked me in the belly and forced me into the minibus. In the clinic, they gave me a shot in the arm. When I woke up two days later, the baby in my belly was gone. I didn't realise until a month afterwards that they'd sterilised me as well. Every woman in this county has been sterilised – apart from the ones who managed to escape. Now look what I've become: a useless, withered wreck." From behind her dark fringe she eyed me with a look of distrust and despair.

Whole story on The Guardian – Wikipedia

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

The anti-drone hoodie that helps you beat Big Brother's spy in the sky

I am wearing a silver hoodie that stops just below the nipples. Or, if you prefer, a baggy crop-top with a hood. The piece – this is fashion, so it has to be a "piece" – is one of a kind, a prototype. It has wide square shoulders and an overzealous zip that does up right to the tip of my nose.

It does not, it's fair to say, make its wearer look especially cool. But that's not really what this hoodie is about. It has been designed to hide me from the thermal imaging systems of unmanned aerial surveillance vehicles – drones. And, as far as I can tell, it's working well.

"It's what I call anti-drone," explains designer Adam Harvey. "That's the sentiment. The material in the anti-drone clothing is made of silver, which is reflective to heat and makes the wearer invisible to thermal imaging."

The "anti-drone hoodie" was the central attraction of Harvey's Stealth Wear exhibition, which opened in central London in January, billed as a showcase for "counter-surveillance fashions". It is a field Harvey has been pioneering for three years now, making headlines in the tech community along the way.

The Guardian (what day is it?)

From grainy CCTV to a positive ID: Recognising the benefits of surveillance

Professor Mark Nixon has “had a few fights” with civil liberties groups in his time. As a world-leading expert in developing biometric techniques to identify people using CCTV – every anti-surveillance campaigner’s Big Bother bête noir – he knows all too well what they think of his work. “They say we’re ruining their privacy,” he says. “I don’t think their personal liberty is in danger.” The techniques he has pioneered “have been used to put murderers away – and I agree with that”.

Through the work of Prof Nixon and Dr John Carter at Southampton University, it is becoming increasingly easy for authorities to monitor us all. Research at the School of Electronics and Computer Science – funded by the Pentagon and the Ministry of Defence among others – means technology can spot and identify criminals in surveillance footage with increasing accuracy.

Now Prof Nixon’s department has received extra funding from GCHQ to form part of the national Cyber Security Centre of Excellence, with Southampton specialising in biometrics: ID-ing people using personal traits or physical characteristics. It’s a controversial area of science which Prof Nixon can claim to have helped father. One of the key aspects is gait analysis: allowing people to be identified by their body shape and the way they walk.

See The Independent for more

Big Brother's Creepiest Toys

Why Privacy Matters

Privacy International asked lawyers, activists, researchers and hackers at Defcon 2012 about some of the debates that thrive at the intersection between law, technology and privacy. We also wanted to know why privacy matters to them, and what they thought the future of privacy looked like. This video is a result of those conversations.

The New York all-seeing surveillance system

New York Mayor Bloomberg is eager to see the project succeed and be implemented across the country, especially since New York City will be getting a kickback on revenue from future sales: “I hope Microsoft sells a lot of copies of this system…because 30 percent of the profits will go to us…I think we can recoup all of our expenses, and maybe even make a few bucks.”
The new technology is reminiscent of the Minority Report-style ‘Intellistreets’ talking surveillance camera system being implemented in cities like Chicago, Detroit, and Pittsburgh; a system that records your conversations and barks orders at you.
Rest assured the rush to deploy the technology is more profit-driven than “for the good of the people,” as defended.
Under the guise of public safety, the creation of this technology represents the frantic determination of the upper-crust megalomaniacs to micro-manage and control every aspect of our lives…the public is the enemy.
Learn more on InfoWars

Everything is OK Again

48 minute compilation of megaphoning, police interactions, vox pox, bleak philosophy, standing up to control freakery, McDonalds Olympic scandal, and a bit of music.

The Love Police

The Khaki games

Now the British military is being asked to “mind the gap” — in security.

London’s Olympic organizers reeled Friday from the fallout of revelations that 3,500 British troops— some of them just back from tours in Afghanistan — would need to step in and help guard venues for the upcoming Olympics. That’s because the security contractor, G4S, failed in its promise to deliver more than 10,000 security guards — and didn’t let anyone know until the last moment.

The Washington Post

Aircraft that stray into the restricted airspace around the Olympic Park could be subject to "lethal force" if they fail to comply with directions from military aircraft.

Puma helicopters, with on-board snipers, and RAF Typhoon fighter jets will be patrolling the restricted zone from midnight tonight, when it comes into force. Unauthorised aircraft will be intercepted and expected to comply with directions from military aircraft, first rocking their wings, then following the military plane or helicopter away from London. (ITV)

Societal Controls

The Love Police in action