Funny Pictures of Kittens!

Psych!  Just conducting a little experiment on the hit count for the blog with an inane subject as the teaser.  But while I have your attention, this article seemed like a better one to end on.  Couldn't have said it better myself!

And not to disappoint, here's the promised picture:

Signing off

Thinking of taking a hiatus at the moment, as it doesn't seem like I've been able to generate much interest.  I may try to retool some things and come back at later date, probably in a different format.  But before I go, I wanted to share this op-ed I stumbled across.  Note, this piece is coming from the Vice President of the Cato Institute, a "libertarian" think tank firmly enmeshed in the Washington establishment.  It's a follow up to the story on the Guatemalan STD experiments, and well, seems appropriate for the spirit of this blog.

What You're Not Supposed to Know About Afghanistan

Today, I want to recommend a piece of analysis I came across from Al-Jazeera.  It discusses the contents of the recent leak from Wikileaks as well as predicting possible reactions to the leak that is expected to be released soon.  I suppose Wikileaks and the recent leak of military documents from the Afghan war deserves a thread of it's own, but this will have to suffice for now.  Pretty devastating stuff.

Some highlights of this article:

"...representatives of the human rights community and foreign policy analysts paint a very different picture of the logs than that presented by the Obama administration, arguing that they reveal evidence of previously unreported or under-reported war crimes, including apparent revenge rampages, secret task forces running amok and attempts to cover-up or gloss over atrocities with little to no investigation."

"Details surrounding at least six possible war crimes emerged from the released Afghan war logs, including a string of shootings by British troops."

"A suicide attack and IED explosion targeted a 120-man convoy of US marines on March 4, 2007 in Shinwar, injuring one soldier. Immediately following the attack, the marines then tore down a six-mile stretch of highway, opening automatic and indiscriminate fire on civilians, including teenage girls and elderly men."

 "Little was known about an elite 'black' unit called Task Force 373 and the man-hunting it undertook before the war logs were released. Since then, however, alarming details have emerged about their previously secret activities.

Some 200 files contained in the war logs reveal that Task Force 373 was a US special forces unit operating with a 'kill or capture' list of supposed Taliban and al-Qaeda commanders, which reportedly numbered well over 2,000 people."

"...US army prosecutors revealed that four US soldiers are being prosecuted for alleged war crimes committed between January and May of this year.
The soldiers have been accused of randomly killing Afghan civilians in a premeditated fashion, mutilating their bodies and collecting their fingers for sport. The case is widely regarded as the worst officially acknowledged war crime by members of the US military."

Just kidding.

So, I really was going to move on to another topic for this post, but this court ruling seemed important enough to warrant breaking my word.  An appeals court has ruled that the government does not require a search warrant in order to track the location of your cell phone signal.  Yes, that's right, the government needs to provide no probable cause in order to require cell phone companies to provide records of your whereabouts.  Supposedly, the court can rule on occasion that a search warrant is needed, but this is the exception to the rule, and the ruling leaves things vague enough that it gives the government carte blanche to track any individual it deems to be of interest.

Not to beat a dead horse here, but why would the government find it necessary to operate without judicial oversight?  I mean let's be real, the courts are supposed to act as a check, but are a part of the State and act in it's interests.  So why the desire to operate free of their supervision?  Could it be that they know their current conduct is particularly egregious and indefensible?  Has anyone being paying attention to what the government has being doing with the powers already at it's disposal?

Moving on

Focusing on government surveillance and spying operations wasn't really the aim of this blog when I decided to start it, so this is going to be the last post along those lines in awhile.  As developments continue, I'll post updates periodically.  For this last piece, I just wanted to recommend a couple of other recent articles dealing with this subject.

The first is a series from the EFF investigating the government's use of social media as tools for investigation and surveillance.  Not surprisingly, it finds that it's use is vast and obtrusive.

The second is from Wikileaks.  It reveals an immense secret network of funding from the NSA to academics researching various surveillance related technologies.  Essentially the problem for the government at this point is access to too much information - what they need now are automated ways to intelligently filter and analyze it.

What all of this reveals is that the government is terrified of people being independent actors.  As long as your activities are limited to working, shopping, heading out to the bar after a hard week at work, you're in the clear.  Start a family and do home improvements on the weekend - great!  Go kill Muslims in distant lands - fantastic!  Limit your political activity to voting every few years for more of the same, dressed up as something different - sure.  Those are State sanctioned roles to fill.  But should you think that you have some kind of meaningful say in how things are run and organized?  Well at a minimum that needs to be watched, and should you start to be successful, it needs to be stopped.  This is the logic of the State.

Say it ain't so...

More government spying unveiled - courtesy of Wired.  It really makes you wonder, are all of these recent revelations the result of increased ineptness or the consequence of increased opportunity for discovery?

I think it's likely the latter - that these stories are surfacing because the number of spy operations being conducted by the federal government has increased and has resulted in more exposure for them.  Note that this is a bi-partisan effort, Obama has only sought to increase the surveillance power of the State during his first term in office, continuing a tradition that long preceded him.

And then they came for me...

How could I have forgotten?  Continuing with the storyline of government repression of political activists, there's this story from September 24th.  Doing a cursory search, it was surprising how few news outlets reported this story - the only mainstream source I could find was this article from Al-Jazeera.  Evidently, the FBI conducted raids on the homes of 14 peace activists in Minneapolis and Chicago under the pretense that the government suspected them of providing material aid to terrorists.  No evidence has been found to substantiate those accusations, and no charges have been filed, however they have now been ordered to appear before a grand jury, a secret court proceeding historically used to stifle dissent.  If they refuse to participate in what amounts to a political witch hunt, as they have announced they will, the law allows them to be held indefinitely. 

First they came for the Communists....

Big Brother Is Watching You, continued...

This time around, we have a story courtesy of the Olympian, reporting on yet another case of the federal government spying on activists.  How many cases does it take before it's safe to assume that these aren't rogue actions but rather institutionalised forms of repression aimed at stifling dissent?

Well, as long as they're sorry...

October 1st, 2010 - The U.S. apologizes for secret STD experiments on Guatamalans. 

We're supposed to believe this is an aberation even though there's a history that dates back all the way to Native Americans being purposefully infected with smallpox. Anyone remember MKULTRA?  It was the CIA program during the 1950's and 60's devoted to torture methods and mind control in which they used unsuspecting mental patients and military personel to test their techniques.  Or how about the Tuskegee syphilis experiments?  When the U.S. government conducted experiments on black men with syphilis and failed to treat them?  We're supposed to have forgotten about all of that and accept this apology at face value, but thanks to a plug in the memory hole, we know better!