The US Government may penalize workers for opening a Washington Post article. [Just wow. The fascism is breathtaking.] 15 Jul 2013 The Department of Homeland Security has warned its employees that the government may penalize them for opening a Washington Post article containing a classified slide that shows how the National Security Agency eavesdrops on international communications. An internal memo from DHS headquarters told workers on Friday that viewing the document from an "unclassified government workstation" could lead to administrative or legal action. "You may be violating your non-disclosure agreement in which you sign that you will protect classified national security information," the communication said. The memo said workers who view the article through an unclassified workstation should report the incident as a "classified data spillage." [LOL!]

Whereabouts of U.S. cars are being recorded and archived through police license plate scanners. - The location and movement of American cars are being recorded and archived through police license plate scanners, even if they haven’t done anything wrong, a Freedom of Information Act requests filed by the American Civil Liberties Union has revealed. In yet another form of U.S. government mass surveillance on its own people, documents obtained through the FOIA show that the new automated plate readers, attached to police cars, bridges, buildings, etc. are capturing images of parked or moving cars and uploading the data to police databases. The law enforcement departments then keep the data for weeks, years, or sometimes indefinitely, according to The Huffington Post. "License plate readers are the most pervasive method of location tracking that nobody has heard of," said Catherine Crump, ACLU lawyer and lead author of the report. "They collect data on millions of Americans, the overwhelming number of whom are entirely innocent of any wrongdoing." The civil rights group has urged the police departments to erase any records of cars that are not linked to a crime.

Common Dreams: Documents Show Location Records Being Kept on Tens of Millions of Innocent Americans
Yahoo: Driving somewhere? There's a gov't record of that
WN.com: With cameras watching, your car isn't your castle

Michael Snyder: 10 Ways That The Iron Grip Of The Big Brother Prison Grid Is Tightening On All Of Our Lives - Do you ever feel trapped in an invisible control grid that is slowly but surely closing in all around you? Do you ever feel like virtually everything that you do is being watched, tracked, monitored and recorded? If so, unfortunately it is not just your imagination. Our society is rapidly being transformed into a Big Brother prison grid by a government that is seemingly obsessed with knowing everything that we do. They want a record of all of our phone calls, all of our Internet activity and all of our financial transactions. They even want our DNA. They put chips in our passports, they are starting to scan the eyes of our children in our schools, and they have declared our border areas to be “Constitution-free zones” where they can do just about anything to us that they want. The Bill of Rights has already been eroded so badly that many would argue that it is already dead. The assault against our most basic freedoms and liberties never seems to end. The following are 10 ways that the iron grip of the Big Brother prison grid is tightening on all of our lives…

"NDAA = Guantanamo For Everyone." - The Obama administration regained the "authority" to indefinitely detain US citizens when a federal appeals court on Wednesday lifted a lower court order which had blocked the indefinite detention provision of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). The 3-0 decision by the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals in New York was a disappointment to journalists and activists who had filed the lawsuit arguing the NDAA unconstitutionally gives the president the authority to detain anyone suspected of supporting al-Qaeda or the Taliban. They argued that journalists who simply speak with terrorists might be subject to arrest and detention without due process.

Jason Ditz: Appeals Court Affirms NDAA Indefinite Detentions
Washington Post: At Guantanamo Bay, genital searches can continue, judge says

The Obama administration tried to placate Europe's anger over spying programs. Not so ex-President Jimmy Carter: The Democrat attacked the U.S. intelligence sharply. The disclosure by whistleblowers Snowden was "useful."

■ In the wake of the NSA spy [surveillance] scandal, Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter has sharply criticized the American political system. "America has no functioning democracy," Carter said Tuesday at a meeting of the "Atlantic Bridge" in Atlanta.
■ Previously, [Carter] had been very critical of the practices of U.S. intelligence. "I think the invasion of privacy has gone too far," Carter told CNN. "And I think that [....] the secrecy was excessive." Commenting on NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, Carter said [these] revelations in the long run were "likely to be useful because they inform the public."
■ Carter has repeatedly warned that the United States' moral authority [has] declined due to excessive restriction of civil rights. Last year he wrote in an article in the New York Times saying recent laws have [...][allowed] "unprecedented violations of our rights to privacy through warrantless wiretapping and government mining of our electronic communications."

Digital Journal: Bush-Cheney began illegal NSA spying before 9/11, says telcom CEO

Staff of RT’s video agency Ruptly were detained for several hours by Berlin police while filming the Anonymous 'United Stasi of America' action. Despite the crew having official permission to work in the area, police attempted to confiscate the footage.

● The reporters were searched and detained for two hours. Police released the Ruptly team without charges as they found no grounds to seize the memory card with the video.
● On July 14, Anonymous activists protested government surveillance programs by beaming giant words reading 'United Stasi of America' across the US embassy wall near the Brandenburg Gate in central Berlin. The projected note – up to three meters high – made reference to the former East German secret police, the Stasi. The projection came from the car parked across the embassy and only lasted for two minutes. After that, three Anonymous activists packed up and left the scene. However, a handful of police proceeded to detain the journalists filming on location. "The police considered them first as suspects and then as Anonymous conspirators,” Ruptly said. "Staffers of Ruptly video agency were shooting Anonymous actions and they had all the necessary work permits and accreditation. In this case, any fact of confiscation is illegal, so the Berlin police failed to remove our stuff," said Margarita Simonyan, RT’s editor-in-chief.
● In June, German magazine Der Spiegel reported that the US combs through half a billion German phone calls, emails and text messages each month, and has classified Germany on the same target level as China. Back then Markus Ferber, a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel's Bavarian sister party and member of the European Parliament, accused Washington of using "American-style Stasi methods," thus comparing them to the communist East Germany’s much-dreaded Ministry for State Security (Stasi). The Stasi secret police employed a network of informants that served as watchdogs against any forms of government dissent. Spies reported the actions of friends and relatives, drilled holes into apartments and hotel rooms to film citizens with hidden cameras, and infiltrated schools and universities. In some cases, spouses and family members spied on each other.

Will Push for Israeli Seat on Security Council. - President Obama’s nominee for be the next US Ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power got off to a rough start with the Israel Lobby with the revelation of a 2002 video in which she expressed support for international intervention in the Israel-Palestine conflict. Power has loudly disavowed that comment since, and promises that should her nomination go through she will work tirelessly as an ambassador at the UN to “defend Israel,” saying she would “go on offense and defense” to stop UN criticism of the nation. Power went on to say that America’s “special relationship” with Israel would have to be preserved and that she would work to secure a seat on the UN Security Council for Israel.

European policy guidelines are composed of small print and impenetrable bureaucratic language that are the product of long hours of wrangling in committee rooms in Brussels, but they can still send out a powerful signal. The furious reaction of the Israeli government underlines an important point about the world's most intractable conflict: Jewish settlements in occupied Palestinian territory are not considered part of the state of Israel under international law. This explicit restatement of the EU's position is intended to force an end to the ambiguity that has helped Israel to maintain and expand its presence beyond the old "green line" border since the 1967 Middle East war – without incurring significant costs. The EU's "territorial applicability clause" spells out that there can be consequences for flouting UN resolutions and international legality.

RINF.com: Israel required to recognize occupations

A top Israeli official says Israeli bodies operating in the occupied Palestinian territories have failed to heed even their own rules. - In his annual report, comptroller Yosef Shapira said on Wednesday that this is because of a culture of impunity. Shapira focused on the expansion of Israeli settlements in his report, saying there is no authority in the West Bank to respect the rule of law. Shapira added that the settlement projects are rapidly expanding without any permission. Anti-settlement group Peace Now reacted to the report, calling the situation in the West Bank “intolerable.”

Vitaly Churkin, Russian UN envoy, told the UN that the Free Syrian Army (FSA) used the chemical weapon sarin in their attack last March in the city of Aleppo. According to Churkin, investigators took samples from the site and analyzed them at a Russian laboratory which gestablishedh that the FSA fired a rocket that was filled with sarin.

Therefore, there is every reason to believe that it was armed opposition fighters who used the chemical weapons in Khan al-Assal. According to information at our disposal, the production of `Bashafir 3Œ unguided projectiles was started in February 2013 by the so-called `Bashafir al-Nasrf brigade affiliated with the Free Syrian Army.

With the help of Rumsfeld, sarin was used in Iraq and killed nearly 5,000 in the Kurd city of Halabja. Later, those same stockpiles sold to Saddam by Rumsfeld became the controversy and the weapons of mass destruction that led to the war, capture and execution of Saddam. Some of those stockpiles mysteriously made their way to Libya and came under the control of Muammar Gaddafi. Last May, The Obama administration has sent covert agents to deliver weapons purchased gfrom the stockpiles of Libyafs former dictator Muammar Gaddafih to the Salafi extremists known as the FSA.

The trailer of ‘The Fifth Estate’, which charts the rise of WikiLeaks, has been released and met with sharp condemnation from the organization. WikiLeaks has slammed the film as misleading and a “propaganda attack” on the whistleblowing institution. - The movie trailer, which bears all the hallmarks of a Hollywood blockbuster, was released on Wednesday. It charts the rise of WikiLeaks from a small, poorly-financed project to the discloser of the largest leak of classified data in history. WikiLeaks called on the movie-goers over Twitter not to be fooled by the film, claiming it implies the organization “gave Iran nuclear weapons and killed 3,000 people.” They said that their comments were based on a copy of the script used for filming that they had obtained. The script itself is based on Daniel Domscheit-Berg's book ‘Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World's Most Dangerous Website,’ as well as Guardian writers David Leigh and Luke Harding's ‘WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy.’

Al exfutbolista argentino Diego Armando Maradona le ha sido denegado el visado para poder entrar a los Estados Unidos. La embajada de Estados Unidos en Dubái -el 'Pelusa' reside allí desde hace un año cuando tomó la secretaría técnica de un club del pequeño territorio pérsico- le ha denegado el permiso de entrada al país por "sus relaciones de amistad con Fidel Castro y Hugo Chávez", según se atrevió a aventurar una fuente al diario británico The Sun. "Para él ha sido como una patada en los dientes", apuntilló. Maradona, que pisó por última vez suelo estadounidense en 1994 con motivo de la celebración de la Copa del Mundo, habría recibido la negativa seis días después de gestionar el permiso de entrada al estado de Florida, donde quería pasar las vacaciones con su familia en el parque temático Disney World. El argentino acudió a la embajada personalmente tras la negativa para intentar revocar la decisión, pero no obtuvo éxito alguno.

Manufacturing Consent - A Propaganda Model (Excerpted from the book Manufacturing Consent by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky)

■ The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. It is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society. In a world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest, to fulfill this role requires systematic propaganda.
■ In countries where the levers of power are in the hands of a state bureaucracy, the monopolistic control over the media, often supplemented by official censorship, makes it clear that the media serve the ends of a dominant elite. It is much more difficult to see a propaganda system at work where the media are private and formal censorship is absent. This is especially true where the media actively compete, periodically attack and expose corporate and governmental malfeasance, and aggressively portray themselves as spokesmen for free speech and the general community interest. What is not evident (and remains undiscussed in the media) is the limited nature of such critiques, as well as the huge inequality in command of resources, and its effect both on access to a private media system and on its behavior and performance.
■ A propaganda model focuses on this inequality of wealth and power and its multilevel effects on mass-media interests and choices. It traces the routes by which money and power are able to filter out the news fit to print, marginalize dissent, and allow the government and dominant private interests to get their messages across to the public. The essential ingredients of our propaganda model, or set of news "filters," fall under the following headings: (I) the size, concentrated ownership, owner wealth, and profit orientation of the dominant mass-media firms; (~) advertising as the primary income source of the mass media; (3) the reliance of the media on information provided by government, business, and "experts" funded and approved by these primary sources and agents of power; (4) "flak" as a means of disciplining the media; and (5) "anticommunism" as a national religion and control mechanism. These elements interact with and reinforce one another. The raw material of news must pass through successive filters, leaving only the cleansed residue fit to print. They fix the premises of discourse and interpretation, and the definition of what is newsworthy in the first place, and they explain the basis and operations of what amount to propaganda campaigns.
■ The elite domination of the media and marginalization of dissidents that results from the operation of these filters occurs so naturally that media news people, frequently operating with complete integrity and goodwill, are able to convince themselves that they choose and interpret the news "objectively" and on the basis of professional news values. Within the limits of the filter constraints they often are objective; the constraints are so powerful, and are built into the system in such a fundamental way, that alternative bases of news choices are hardly imaginable. In assessing the newsworthiness of the U.S. government's urgent claims of a shipment of MIGs to Nicaragua on November 5, I984, the media do not stop to ponder the bias that is inherent in the priority assigned to government-supplied raw material, or the possibility that the government might be manipulating the news, imposing its own agenda, and deliberately diverting attention from other material. It requires a macro, alongside a micro- (story-by-story), view of media operations, to see the pattern of manipulation and systematic bias.