News in english

Google on Tuesday filed a motion with the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, asking permission to publish data on national security requests that were made to it and authorized by the court.

The motion is the company’s latest move to control the public relations crisis that has resulted from revelations of government Internet surveillance. It is an escalation of Google’s efforts to publish the data. Last week, it sent a letter to the director of the F.B.I. and the director of national intelligence, asking for the same thing.

By law, recipients of national security requests are not allowed to acknowledge their existence. But with the permission of the government,Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft and Apple have in the last few days published aggregate numbers of national security and criminal requests, including tho

Britain’s banking bosses should face jail if their decisions force fresh bailouts, the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards says today.

The commission’s hotly anticipated report urges the Chancellor, George Osborne, to oversee the creation of a new offence of “reckless misconduct in the management of a bank”.

Were such an offence in place in the aftermath of the financial crisis, several banking leaders could have faced prosecution.

The parliamentary commission, which was established by Mr Osborne to reform banking after the Libor scandal, describes the failure of senior financiers to accept blame for their actions as “dismal”. It says new rules are required to force executives to take proper responsibility.

The report also calls for a new licensing regime for bankers, underpinned by strict rules to ensure traders and ev

Brazilians in the hundreds of thousands have been protesting the high cost of city bus tickets, diversion of government funds to international projects like the world cup, and ‘poor public services, police violence and government corruption.’

 Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian journalist who broke the NSA surveillance story earlier this month, joins us one day after both President Obama and whistleblower Edward Snowden gave extensive interviews on the surveillance programs Snowden exposed and Obama is now forced to defend. Speaking to PBS, Obama distinguished his surveillance efforts from those of the Bush administration and reaffirmed his insistence that no Americans' phone calls or emails are being directly monitored without court orders. Greenwald calls Obama's statements "outright false" for omitting the warrantless spying on phone calls between Americans and callers outside the United States. 

Watch Part 1 of this discussion: http://youtu.be/1-6yRpZ7iHE

"It is true that the NSA can't deliberately target U.S. citizens for [warrantless] surveillance, but it is also the case they are frequently engaged in surveillance of exactly that kind of invasive technique involving U.S. persons," Greenwald says. After moderating Snowden's online Q&A with Guardian readers, Greenwald says of the whistleblower: "I think what you see here is a person who was very disturbed by this massive surveillance apparatus built in the U.S. that spies not only on American citizens, but the world with very little checks, very little oversight. He's making clear his intention was to inform citizens even at the expense of his own liberty or even life."
Democracy Now!, is an independent global news hour that airs weekdays on 1,100+ TV and radio stations Monday through Friday.

FOLLOW DEMOCRACY NOW! ONLINE:
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/democracynow
Twitter: @democracynow
Subscribe on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/democracynow
Listen on SoundCloud: http://www.soundcloud.com/democracynow ;
Daily Email News Digest: http://www.democracynow.org/subscribe

Please consider supporting independent media by making a donation to Democracy Now! today, visithttp://www.democracynow.org/donate/YT

What it's like at the detention center where over 100 prisoners are on hunger strike

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/guantanamo-bay-stories-from-inside-the-worlds-most-infamous-jail-20130617#ixzz2WYijk9WE ;
Follow us: @rollingstone on Twitter | RollingStone on Facebook

Given the massive investment in national security after 9-11, recent news that the federal government is spying on hundreds of millions of people in the United States and around the world may not have come as a surprise. Polls suggest that a majority of Americans are shrugging their shoulders at the revelations of a government espionage effort against them. But an uncomfortable reality of the once secret scheme is the degree to which people of color are disproportionately caught up in the government’s dragnet. That’s because the routine, legal activities of blacks, Latinos and immigrants—96 percent of whom are people of color—make them targets for monitoring in a way not true for whites.

For the over 40 million foreign born immigrants living in America—more than at any point in U.S. history—the basic act of keeping in contact with friends and family abroad is all that’s required to be sucked into the Obama administration’s electronic dragnet. Disturbingly, the fact that much of this historically broad snooping program is conducted by private companies with dubious oversight makes it that much harder for communities of color to figure out exactly what’s going on and how to curb any potential abuses. 

Let’s review the key details of what’s known about these clandestine projects.

America’s intelligence services—particularly the National Security Agency, or NSA—are collecting an almost unfathomable amount of information on the phone calls, spending habits, and Internet activities of countless people in the U.S. and around the world. William Binney, a former NSA employee, estimates that the agency has collected over 20 trillion individual pieces of information on millions o

WASHINGTON — Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who has confessed to disclosing troves of highly classified documents detailing American surveillance at home and abroad, said Monday that he had not given any classified materials to the government of China.

By Sean Rintel

June 17, 2013 "Information Clearing House -  In the wake of former CIA employee Edward Snowden’s revelations of the PRISM NSA mass surveillance, people are once again asking why the general public should care if they’ve got nothing to hide.

“Nothing to hide” hides a lot behind an absolutist gloss. It puts the focus on the individual rather than on the real problem of a society-wide loss of data control at many levels.

Is this a fair question? Not really. Below, I give nine reasons why we must care – regardless of our innocent intentions.

1) Presumption of guilt

Mass surveillance and data retention overturn the foundation of the modern legal system: the presumption of innocence. Not only is the presumption lost for gathering evidence, it also weakens the effect of that presumption throughout the rest of the legal process.

If there is a normalisation in the public consciousness that there is a weakened presumption of innocence, we have compromised the effectiveness of our legal system.

2) The loss of personal data control

Mass surveillance circumvents our right to personal data control, also known as informational self-determination. As the late Professor of Public Law Alan F. Westin put it in his 1970 book, Privacy and Freedom:

The right of the individual to decide what information about himself [sic] should be communicated to others and under what circumstances.

We have envelopes for our letters

Jalal Manzar Khail was at home on March 17, 2011 as dozens of men from two bickering tribal groups met a couple miles away to settle a dispute.

All day long, American drones loomed in the sky above. "It's very normal," Khail said, speaking in Urdu through a translator with the United Kingdom legal charity Reprieve. "You see them during the day, you see them during the night -- they're always hovering."

In Waziristan, the restive region of Pakistan where Khail lives, such drones have become commonplace over the past several years, always holding the possibility of near-instant death. Increasingly, Central Intelligence Agency drones have killed men without knowing their names, simply because from the perspective of a Predator dron

Bank of America’s mortgage servicing unit systematically lied to homeowners, fraudulently denied loan modifications, and paid their staff bonuses for deliberately pushing people into foreclosure: Yes, these allegations were suspected by any homeowner who ever had to deal with the bank to try to get a loan modification – but now they come from six former employees and one contractor, whose sworn statements were added last week to a civil lawsuit filed in federal court in Massachusetts.

“Bank of America’s practice is to string homeowners along with no apparent intention of providing the permanent loan modifications it promises,” said Erika Brown, one of the former employees. The damning evidence

Journalist Michael Hastings died in a car crash in Los Angeles early Tuesday at the age of 33, according to a statement from his employer, BuzzFeed.

Hastings, who was also a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, is perhaps best known for his candid Rolling Stone interview with General Stanley McChrystal, then the commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, that eventually led to McChrystal being relieved of his command.

He is also the author of two books about America's wars: The Operators, detailing the flaws of the U.S. military operation in Afghanistan, and I Lost My Love In Baghdad, about his experiences as a war correspondent in Iraq during his mid-twenties.

Hastings joined BuzzFeed in April 2012 to cover the presidential election.

"We are shocked and devastated by the news that Michael Hastings is gone,"BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith said in a statement. "Michael was a great, fearless journalist with an incredible instinct for the story, and a gift for finding ways to make his readers care about anything he covered from wars to politicians. He wrote stories that would otherwise have gone unwritten, and without him there are great stories that will go untold. Michael was also a wonderful, generous colleague and a joy to work with. Our thoughts are with Elise and and the rest of his family and we are going to miss him."

To understand Qatar is to understand angst. The leadership in Qatar’s first order of business, after Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani deposed his father to take the throne in 1995, was to ensure its sovereignty both domestically and internationally. After many years of following the Saudi narrative, the new emir decided to pursue a different set of policies that would ensure the recognition of this new chapter. To complicate matters further, Qatar’s main gas field was one it had to share with Iran, a country that didn’t always see eye-to-eye with Saudi Arabia, to say the least. Qatar was stuck between a rock and a hard place. It had to pursue bold and radical tactics to ensure its survival. Like many city-states with indefensible borders and a negligible defense force facing existential threats, Qatar decided to become indispensable to everyone.

Read more: http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2013/06/qatar-foreign-policy-muslim-brotherhood.html?utm_source=&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=7537#ixzz2WbxYWmRb

Over 20 anti-Keystone protesters were arrested Monday morning for blockading the doors to a Chicago federal building as part of newly launched call to action that declares "if you don't act, I will."

In an interview with Charlie Rose, President Obama rejected the suggestion that his policies were basically a warmed-over version of those of the last White House and talks about Syria