Category: News

Over at PolicyMic, Eileen Shim cites a recent report from Reporters Without Borders that names the U.S. in its annual “Enemies of the Internet” list:

Reporters Without Borders did not name entire governments on its list, but rather focused on the individual agencies that censor the Internet. Last year’s revelations regarding the National Security Agency (NSA)’s spying schemes have landed the U.S. on the list for the first time.NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s leaks regarding the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) have also introduced the U.K. agency to the list for the same reasons.

“The NSA and GCHQ have spied on the communications of millions of citizens including many journalists. They have knowingly introduced security flaws into devices and software used to transmit requests on the Internet. And they have hacked into the very heart of the Internet using programmes such as the NSA’s Quantam Insert and GCHQ’s Tempora. The Internet was a collective resource that the NSA and GCHQ turned into a weapon in the service of special interests, in the process flouting freedom of information, freedom of expression and the right to privacy,” the report said.

It added that the NSA and GCHQ’s surveillance operations were all the more troubling because they were located in “democracies that have traditionally claimed to respect fundamental freedoms”; because these tactics have been so effective for the U.S. and the U.K., “they will be used and indeed are already being used by authoritarians countries such as Iran, China, Turkmenistan, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain to justify their own violations of freedom of information.”

Here’s the map illustrating the “Enemies” list (on their site, it is interactive):

The United States also made headlines upon the release of Reporters Without Borders’ other well-known list, the World Press Freedom Index, because it slipped 13 places in the ranking to 46.

The First Amendment prohibits Congress from making any laws that abridge “the freedom of  speech, or of the press.” The Fourth Amendment commands that the people’s right to privacy “against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated,” and that no warrants to rifle through our shit shall issue without probably cause of specificity. Meanwhile, the government is virtually criminalizing journalism at the margins and using the Internet to destroy our privacy.

How much longer can Americans repeat their masturbatory mantras about “the land of the free” when our government’s rankings for critical things like press and Internet freedoms continue to plummet?

The short documentary news pieces from Vice News on the situation in Crimea have been very enlightening, as reporter Simon Ostrovsky is on the ground and speaking to real people, instead of the uninformed punditry we hear on both U.S. and Russian propaganda outlets. They are very interesting. Here are the latest two.

Vice President Joe Biden, who has been traversing Europe in the aftermath of the pro-Russian referendum in Crimea, announced on Tuesday that the U.S. “may consider rotating units of its ground and naval forces through the [Baltic] region for training exercises.”

This is meant as a show of force ostensibly to demonstrate America’s military commitment to Europe in the face of Russian assertiveness and military incursions in Ukraine. I also heard Fox News panelists this morning demand the Obama administration send warships to the Black Sea to show Putin who is boss.

Let’s make one thing clear: these useless military exercises and demonstrations of force do absolutely nothing to alter the reality or Russia’s strategic calculations. They are essentially for domestic consumption, to satisfy political hardliners who are attacking the president for being too weak.

They also hold the odious pretense that America owns the world and that Russian gains in its traditional sphere of influence represent a defiance of Uncle Sam, ruler of planet Earth.

Three years ago, the UN approved NATO action in Libya to impose a no-fly zone and head off an allegedly imminent bloodbath perpetrated by the Gadhafi regime. Days before this third anniversary, the Libyan parliament basically impeached the Prime Minister following the government’s inability to do anything about armed groups in the east taking control of oil resources. There is veritable power vacuum in the country that continues to generate instability there and throughout the region.

Notably, the US-led NATO action in Libya immediately violated the parameters of the UN Resolution, when the pretense of imposing a no-fly zone quickly manifested into a regime change operation. Clever legal advisers in the Obama administration then made the ridiculous claim that U.S. military action did not count as “hostilities” and thus did not need Congressional approval, as required by the the Constitution and the War Powers Act. The intervention was legally dubious from the beginning.

But how about the practical effects of the intervention? Was it successful? The Republican Party’s manic obsession with the Obama administration’s fumbling in the days following the raid on the State Department’s Benghazi compound has obscured any real debate about the wisdom of the overall intervention. But taking a look at the facts on the ground, it seems eminently clear the consequences of the intervention have gone from bad to worse.

Continue reading “The Libya Intervention Was an Illegal Failure. Thus: Hooray for Intervention!”

The conflict in Ukraine has prompted several level-headed commentators to point out that, of all governments, the U.S. government is in no position to lecture Russia about respecting other nations’ borders. When Secretary of State John Kerry said on Meet the Press, “This is an act of aggression that is completely trumped up in terms of its pretext.… You just don’t invade another country on phony pretext in order to assert your interests,” one of those commentators, Ivan Eland, responded,

Hmmm. What about the George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq after exaggerating threats from Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction” and dreaming up a nonexistent operational link between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden and the 9/11 attacks. And what about Ronald Reagan’s invasion of Grenada in 1983 to save U.S. medical students in no danger and George H.W. Bush’s invasion of Panama because its leader, Manuel Noriega, was associated with the narcotics trade?… More generally, Latin America has been a US sphere of influence and playground for US invasions since the early 1900s – Lyndon Johnson’s invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965 and Bill Clinton’s threatened invasion of Haiti in 1994 being two recent examples.

Indeed, Russia isn’t the only country that has brutally regarded its “backyard” as its sphere of influence and playground. This doesn’t make it okay for the Russian government to behave as it has, but as Adam Gopnik observes,

Russia, as ugly, provocative, and deserving of condemnation as its acts [in Crimea] may be, seems to be behaving as Russia has always behaved, even long before the Bolsheviks arrived. Indeed, Russia is behaving as every regional power in the history of human regions has always behaved, maximizing its influence over its neighbors – in this case, a neighbor with a large chunk of its ethnic countrymen.

Eland of course only scratches the surface in mentioning the U.S. government’s unceasing program to control events in its sphere of influence. Some people understand that this program preceded the 20th century; it did not begin with the Cold War. The Spanish-American War, 1898, may come to mind, but I’m thinking further back than that. How far back? Roughly 1776.

Continue reading “Empire on Their Minds”