Tag Archives: Rogue State

Why Snowden’s Passport Matters

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“Cancelation of the passport wasn’t just an effort to prevent the whistleblower from getting to a country that might grant political asylum. It was also a declaration that the U.S. government can nullify the right to travel just as surely as it can nullify the right to privacy.  Since 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has affirmed with clarity: ‘Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.’ The only other words of Article 14 specify an exception that clearly doesn’t apply: ‘This right may not be invoked in the case of prosecutions genuinely arising from non-political crimes or from acts contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.'”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/norman-solomon/why-snowdens-passport-mat_b_4150236.html

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Amnesty calls on U.S. to explain its ‘license to kill’ with drones

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“The campaign group highlighted two incidents that it said raised serious concerns about violations of international law.  The first was the death of 68-year-old Mamana Bibi in a double strike as she picked vegetables in the family’s fields in October 2012.  In the second, Amnesty said, 18 labourers were killed in a village on the Afghan border as they ate a meal at the end of the day in July last year.  ‘We cannot find any justification for these killings. [..] It is hard to believe that a group of labourers, or an elderly woman surrounded by her grandchildren, were endangering anyone at all, let alone posing an imminent threat to the United States.'”

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/10/22/amnesty-international-calls-on-u-s-to-explain-its-license-to-kill-with-drones/

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Swedish minister declares his support for principles to protect privacy

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“Foreign Minister Carl Bildt acknowledged that internet governance is being challenged, as some States operate vast surveillance systems without any laws of oversight whatsoever, and others are preparing for offensive operations on the net.  The Foreign Minister called for the application of the principles of Legality, Legitimate Aim, Necessity, Adequacy, Proportionality, Judicial Authority, Transparency and Public Oversight to the conduct of online surveillance by States. Each of these principles forms part of the 13 International Principles, an initiative instigated by Privacy International and EFF in October 2012, well before the revelations of widespread NSA and GCHQ surveillance.”

https://www.privacyinternational.org/blog/swedens-foreign-minister-declares-his-support-for-principles-to-protect-privacy-in-the-face-of

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Senate Sits On Devastating Report About CIA Avoiding Torture Oversight

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techdirt1

“Late last week, the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer had a fantastic article revealing some details of a still-classified report put together by the Senate Intelligence Committee which apparently rips the CIA to shreds over its torture program, both in how ineffective the program was, but also in how the CIA tried to avoid any real oversight from Congress.  The CIA, apparently, has been ‘defiant and defensive’ in response to the massive report (over 6,000 pages, and which apparently cost $40 million to produce). CIA boss John Brennan has apparently been especially aggressive in trying to challenge the report and in blocking it from being declassified.”

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131019/02001424935/senate-is-sitting-devastating-report-about-how-cia-avoided-oversight-unnecessary-torture-program.shtml

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U.N. torture investigator seeks access to California’s prison isolation units

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“Juan Mendez, the United Nation’s special monitor on torture, told the Los Angeles Times on Friday that he wanted access to California prisons in order to determine whether inmates held in solitary were having their rights protected.  He argued that ‘[w]e should have more justification’ for placing prisoners in isolated confinement, and that ‘[w]e should put the burden on the state that this is the proper way to do things, and we should all be a lot more skeptical.’  California has an estimated 10,000 inmates currently being held in isolation units, and most of them are there because of gang affiliations.”

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/10/20/u-n-torture-investigator-seeks-access-to-californias-prison-isolation-units/

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The core Internet institutions abandon the US Government

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“In Montevideo, Uruguay this week, the Directors of all the major Internet organizations – ICANN, the Internet Engineering Task Force, the Internet Architecture Board, the World Wide Web Consortium, the Internet Society, all five of the regional Internet address registries – turned their back on the US government. With striking unanimity, the organizations that actually develop and administer Internet standards and resources initiated a break with 3 decades of U.S. dominance of Internet governance.  It is the latest, and one of the most significant manifestations of the fallout from the Snowden revelations about NSA spying on the global Internet.”

http://www.internetgovernance.org/2013/10/11/the-core-internet-institutions-abandon-the-us-government/

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Russia Issues Travel Warning to Its Citizens About U.S. and Extradition

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“‘Warning for Russian citizens traveling internationally,’ the Foreign Ministry bulletin said. ‘Recently, detentions of Russian citizens in various countries, at the request of American law enforcement, have become more frequent — with the goal of extradition and legal prosecution in the United States.’  Citing examples in Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Lithuania and Spain, the Foreign Ministry said, ‘Experience shows that the judicial proceedings against those who were in fact kidnapped and taken to the U.S. are of a biased character, based on shaky evidence, and clearly tilted toward conviction.'”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/03/world/europe/russia-issues-travel-warning-about-united-states.html?_r=0

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Judge Napolitano: Is the FISA Court constitutional?

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“When a FISA court judge rules that the NSA has the constitutional power to spy on Americans about whom it has no evidence of wrongdoing, as one judge did two weeks ago, because that ruling did not emanate out of a case or controversy — no one was in court to dispute it — the court is without authority to hear the matter, and thus the ruling is meaningless. By altering the constitutionally mandated requirement of the existence of a case or controversy before the jurisdiction of the federal courts may be invoked, Congress has lessened the protection of the right to be left alone that the Framers intentionally sought to enshrine.”

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/09/26/is-fisa-court-constitutional/

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NSA Subversion of the Constitution Warrants Impeachment Investigation

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“Public lies were — and are — patronizingly peddled from the White House down. Do they take us for fools? The president often appears to be a captive audience for the Director of National Intelligence and his latest briefing in a sealed-off area of public policy. No one has been sacked for runaway surveillance programs. Each branch of the government covers the backside of the other. In another historical context, impeachment would definitely have been on the table. In the world at large, people have been debating whether Snowden is a traitor or a patriot. But to whom do intelligence civil servants and contractors owe their loyalty? To the state or to the Constitution?”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-e-jackson-jr/nsa-revelations-of-subver_b_3945626.html

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The United Nations vs. the NSA

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“It didn’t take long for the recent NSA leaks to dog President Obama and the United States at Tuesday’s UN General Assembly debate in New York City. The very first speaker of the day was Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, who devoted a third of her speech to bashing the NSA’s mass global surveillance operations. But what other diplomatic fallout might we see at the UN stemming from Edward Snowden’s revelations? RT’s Sam Sacks reports.”

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