.The Global War On You (GWOY)

By Tom Engelhardt

In the months after September 11, 2001, it was regularly said that “everything” had changed. It’s a claim long forgotten, buried in everyday American life. Still, if you think about it, in the decade-plus that followed – the years of the PATRIOT Act, “enhanced interrogation techniques,” “black sites,” robot assassination campaigns,extraordinary renditions, the Abu Ghraib photos, the Global War on Terror, and thefirst cyberwar in history – much did change in ways that should still stun us. Perhaps nothing changed more than the American national security state, which, spurred on by 9/11 and the open congressional purse strings that followed, grew in ways that would have been alien even at the height of the Cold War, when there was another giant, nuclear-armed imperial power on planet Earth.

Unfortunately, the language we use to describe the world of the national security state is still largely stuck in the pre-9/11 era. No wonder, for example, it’s hard to begin to grasp the staggering size and changing nature of the world of secret surveillance that Edward Snowden’s recent revelations have allowed us a peek at. If there are no words available to capture the world that is watching us, all of us, we’ve got a problem.

In ancient China, when a new dynasty came to power, it would perform a ceremony called “the rectification of names.” The idea was that the previous dynasty had, in part, fallen because a gap, a chasm, an abyss, had opened between reality and the names available to describe it. Consider this dispatch, then, a first attempt to “rectify” American names in the era of the ascendant national – morphing into global – security state.

Creating a new dictionary of terms is, of course, an awesome undertaking. From the moment work began, it famously took 71 years for the full 10-volume Oxford English Dictionary to first appear! So we at TomDispatch expect to be at work on our new project for years to come. Here, however, is an initial glimpse at a modest selection of our newly rectified definitions.

The Dictionary of the Global War on You

Secret: Anything of yours the government takes possession of and classifies.

Classification: The process of declaring just about any document produced by any branch of the U.S. government – 92 million of them in 2011 – unfit for unclassified eyes. (This term may, in the near future, be retired once no documents produced within, or captured by, the government and its intelligence agencies can be seen or read by anyone not given special clearance.)

Surveillance: Here’s looking at you, kid.

Whistleblower: A homegrown terrorist.

Leak: Information homegrown terrorists slip to journalists to undermine the American way of life and aid and abet the enemy. A recent example would be the National Security Agency (NSA) documents Booz Allen employee Edward Snowden leaked to the media. According to two unnamed U.S. intelligence officials speaking to the Associated Press, “[M]embers of virtually every terrorist group, including core al-Qaida, are attempting to change how they communicate, based on what they are reading in the media [of Snowden’s revelations], to hide from U.S. surveillance.” A clarification: two anonymous intelligence officials communicating obviously secret material to AP reporter Kimberly Dozier does not qualify as a “leak,” but as necessary information for Americans to absorb. In addition, those officials undoubtedly had further secret intelligence indicating that their information, unlike Snowden’s, would be read only by Americans and ignored by al-Qaeda-style terrorists who will not change their actions based on it. As a result, this cannot qualify as aiding or abetting the enemy.

Journalist: Someone who aids and abets terrorists, traitors, defectors, and betrayers hidden within our government as they work to accomplish their grand plan to undermine the security of the country.

Source: Someone who tells a journalist what no one, other than the NSA, the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and similar outfits, should know (see “secret”). Such a source will be hunted down and prosecuted to the full extent of the law – or beyond (see “Espionage Act”). Fortunately, as Associated Press president Gary Pruitt recently pointed out, thanks to diligent government action, sources are drying up. (“Some of our longtime trusted sources have become nervous and anxious about talking to us, even on stories that aren’t about national security. And in some cases, government employees that we once checked in with regularly will no longer speak to us by phone, and some are reluctant to meet in person.”) Someday, they may no longer exist. When an unnamed administration official offers information privately to a journalist, however, he or she is not a source – just too humble to take credit for feeding us crucial information needed to understand the complex world we live in.

Blood: This is what leakers have on their hands. A leak, embarrassing the national security state, endangers careers (bloody enough) and, by definition, American lives. Thus, Bradley Manning, in releasing classified State Department and U.S. military documents to WikiLeaks, and Edward Snowden, in releasing NSA secrets to theGuardian, the Washington Post, the South China Morning Post, and Der Spiegel have blood on their hands. We know this because top U.S. officials have told us so. Note that it does not matter if no deaths or physical injuries can directly be traced to or attributed to their actions. This is, however, a phrase with very specific and limited application. American political and military officials who launch aggressive wars, allow torture, kidnapping, and abuse, run drone assassination programs, and the like do not have blood on their hands. It is well known that they are bloodless.

Insider Threat Program: The name of an Obama administration initiative to promote patriotism inside the government. Its goal is to encourage federal employees to become more patriotic by picking up on clues that potentially traitorous co-workers might consider leaking classified information to the enemy (see “journalist”). Government managers, again to promote love of country, are encouraged to crack down on any employees who are found not to have been patriotic enough to report their suspicions about said co-workers. (Words never to be associated with this program: informer, rat, or fink.)

Patriot: Americans are by nature “patriots.” If they love their country too well like (to take but one example) former Vice President Dick Cheney, they are “super-patriots.” Both of these are good things. Foreigners cannot be patriots. If they exhibit an unseemly love of country, they are “nationalists.” If that love goes beyond all bounds, they are “ultra-nationalists.” These are both bad things.

Espionage Act: A draconian World War I law focused on aiding and abetting the enemy in wartime that has been used more than twice as often by the Obama administration as by all previous administrations combined. Since 9/11, the United States has, of course, been eternally “at war,” which makes the Act handy indeed. Whistleblowers automatically violate the Act when they bring to public’s attention information Americans really shouldn’t bother their pretty little heads about. It may be what an investigative reporter (call him “Glenn Greenwald”) violates when he writes stories based on classified information from the national security state not leaked by the White House.

Trust: What you should have in the national security state and the president to do the right thing, no matter how much power they accrue, how many secrets of yours or anybody else’s they gather, or what other temptations might exist. Americans can make mistakes, but by their nature (see “patriots”), with the exception of whistleblowers, they can never mean to do wrong (unlike the Chinese, the Russians, etc.). As the president has pointed out, “Every member of Congress has been briefed on [NSA’s] telephone program and the intelligence committees have been briefed on the Internet program, with both approved and reauthorized by bipartisan committees since 2006… If people don’t trust Congress and the judiciary then I think we are going to have some problems here.”

Truth: The most important thing on Earth, hence generally classified. It is something that cannot be spoken by national security officials in open session before Congress without putting the American people in danger. As Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has made clear, however, any official offering such public testimony can at least endeavor to speak in “the least untruthful manner” possible; that is, in the nearest approximation of truth that remains unclassified in the post-9/11 era.

U.S. Constitution: A revered piece of paper that no one pays much actual attention to any more, especially if it interferes with American safety from terrorism.

Amendments: Retrospectively unnecessary additions to the U.S. Constitution guaranteeing a series of things, some of which may now put us in peril (examples:First Amendment, Fourth Amendment, Fifth Amendment “due process” clause). Fortunately, amendments turn out to be easy enough to amend within the national security state itself.

Checks and balances: No longer applicable, except to your bank statement.

The fourth branch of government: Classically, the U.S. had three branches of government (the executive, legislative, and judicial), which were to check and balance one another so that power would never become centralized in a single place unopposed. The Founding Fathers, however, were less farsighted than many give them credit for. They hadn’t a clue that a fourth branch of government would arise, dedicated to the centralization of power in an atmosphere of total secrecy: the national (or today global) security state. In the post-9/11 years, it has significantly absorbed the other three branches.

FISA court: The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, much strengthened since September 11, 2001, created a FISA “court” to oversee the government’s covert surveillance activities. A secret “court” for the secret world of surveillance, it can, at just about any time, be convened and conducted via cell phone by the NSA or FBI. There is never a defense lawyer present, only the equivalent of a prosecution request. The search warrants that result read more like legislation by an unelected body. All national security requests for such warrants are granted. Its decisions are not made public. In its arcane rules and prosecutorial stance, it bears a greater relationship to the Inquisition courts of Medieval Europe than any other American court. Its motto might be, “guilty – there are no innocents.” We have no word for what it actually is. The activity it performs is still called “judicial oversight,” but “undersight” would be a more accurate description.

FISA judge: There is, in essence, nothing for a FISA judge to judge. FISA judges never rule against the wishes of the national security state. Hence, a more accurate term for this position might be “FISA rubberstamp.”

Congressional oversight: When a congressional representative forgets to do something. (Historical note: this phrase once had another meaning, but since 9/11, years in which Congress never heard a wish of the national security state that it didn’t grant, no one can quite remember what it was.)

National Security Agency (NSA): A top-secret spy outfit once nicknamed “No Such Agency” because its very existence was not acknowledged by the U.S. government. It is now known as “No Such Agency” because its work has been outsourced to high-priced high-school dropouts, or “No Snowden Anywhere” because it couldn’t locate the world’s most famous leaker.

American security (or safety): The national security state works hard to offer its citizens a guarantee of safety from the nightmare of terror attacks, which since 9/11 have harmed far more Americans than shark attacks, but not much else that is truly dangerous to the public. For this guarantee, there is, of course, a necessary price to be paid. You, the citizen and taxpayer, must fund your own safety from terrorism (to the tune of trillions of dollars heading into the national security budget) and cede rights that were previously yours. You must, for instance, allow yourself to be “seen” in myriad ways by the national security state, must allow for the possibility that you could be assassinated without “due process” to keep this country safe, and so on. This is called “striking a balance” between American liberty and security. Or as the president put it, “You can’t have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience… We’re going to have to make some choices as a society… There are trade-offs involved.” By the way, in return for your pliancy, this guarantee does not extend to keeping you safe from cars, guns, cigarettes, food-borne diseases, natural disasters of any sort, and so on.

The Global War on You (GWOY): This term, not yet in the language, is designed to replace a post-9/11 Bush administration name, the Global War on Terror (GWOT), sometimes also called World War IV by neocons. GWOT was famously retired by President Obama and his top officials, turning the ongoing global war being fought on distant battlefields and in the shadows into a nameless war. That may, however, change. You are, after all, being called to the colors in a war on… you. Congratulations, son or daughter, Uncle Sam wants you (even if not in the way he used to in your grandparents’ day). You, after all, are the central figure in and the key to GWOY and the basis upon which the new global security state will continue to be built.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture(just published in a Kindle edition), runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com. His latest book, co-authored with Nick Turse, is Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050.

Shale Gas Industry Brings PSYOPs & Spy Ops To Poland

By Steve Horn,

Roughly a year ago today in Houston, the shale gas industry was caught red-handed discussing its use of military tactics and personnel on U.S. soil to intimidate and divide communities in order to continue its fracking bonanza. 

In a gathering thought to be exclusively among friends, one industry public relations professional representing Range Resources, Matt Pitzarella, said his company utilizes psychological warfare (PSYOPs) tactics on citizens living in the Marcellus Shale basin. The Marcellus is one of the epicenters of the global hydraulic fracturing boom ("fracking").

Matt Carmichael, External Affairs Manager at Anadarko Petroleum Corporation, told attendees, "we are dealing with an insurgency," referring to citizens concerned about the impacts of oil and gas development in their communities. He advised the PR pros in the room to use the U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Manual, along with Donald Rumsfeld's book, as guidebooks for suppressing dissent.     

A year later, we're learning that the oil industry is taking its aggressive military-style approach global. According to a press release published by Food and Water Europe, the industry is spying on fracking critics in Poland.

"Recent media reports from Poland show that heavy-handed tactics such as spying and undercover operations are being used against groups and individuals who question shale gas development," explains the release. "Shale gas companies have sent spies to anti-fracking meetings and reported their findings to the highest levels of the Polish government and internal security services, according to reports in a Polish daily newspaper."

An internal government report provided by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and conducted by shale gas investors was given to Gazeta Prawna, a Polish newspaper. The Gazeta reported that anti-fracking activists have been deemed to "breach public security and order" by the investors, serving as the motive for the spy ops. This parallels anti-fracking activists in the Marcellus Shale being labeled "insurgents" by Matt Carmichael, Manager of External Affairs for Anadarko Petroleum Corporation at the Media and Stakeholder Relations Hydraulic Fracturing Initiative conference held in Houston in October 2011.   

​This development is a breach of Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which reads, "Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers."

Fracking for commercial use has yet to begin in Poland, but as the Associated Press reported in March, could begin in 2014. Voices of dissent, though, are already being squealched before the fun has even begun. 

“[L]ocal communities increasingly find that their concerns about the environmental and health impacts of shale gas activities are not taken seriously,” said Wenonah Hauter, Executive Director of Food and Water Watch. “This lack of an independent, science-based assessment of risks involved in shale gas in Poland is the reason why numerous local associations there are not welcoming this industry with open arms.” 

Via: "DeSmogBlog"

Forced Sterilization Of Native Americans

 



Late Twentieth Century Physician Cooperation With National Eugenic Policies 

Author: Gregory W. Rutecki, MD 
Post Date: 10/08/2010 
Courtesy Of "The Center For BioEthics & Human Dignity"

Many consider the plight of Native Americans an archetypal genocide. Centuries ago, the British suggested the response to their presence should be “extermination.”[i] Their soldiers then proceeded to knowingly decimate them with smallpox—a virus to which Native Americans had no immunity. Additional efforts over centuries to eradicate their population would follow. There would be a “Trail of Tears,” lethal attacks on Nez Perce men, women, and children to acquire their ancestral homeland, and a massacre at Wounded Knee—to name merely a few. The protracted policy directed against the United States of America’s indigenous peoples represented misguided governments, widespread greed, and enforcement by an at times ruthless, undisciplined military. A recent, albeit weakly publicized, continuation of this policy has been played out in a bioethical arena. Indeed, after the Nuremberg Trials and an explicit international consensus, this would be considered anathema. On view is the evil of forced abortions and sterilizations. This two-pronged approach to knowingly limit births in selected populations was emblematic of eugenic policy in the early to mid-twentieth century. Unfortunately, eugenic birth control had been resuscitated as late as the 1970s through voluntary physician complicity with an immoral national eugenic policy.

When she was 20 years old, a Native American woman underwent a total hysterectomy by an Indian Health Service (IHS) physician for unconvincing indications.[ii] Her experience came to light when she visited Dr. Connie Pinkerton-Uri, a physician of Native American heritage in the 1970s. Two other young women in Montana needed appendectomies and also received “incidental” tubal ligations. Were these merely aberrations or the first examples of a disturbing pattern? Bureau of Census Reports explicitly documented a steep decline in childbirth for diverse Native American tribes comparing birth numbers from 1960 through 1980.[iii] The three examples were, unfortunately, merely the tip of the iceberg.

On November 6, 1976, the Government Accounting Office (GAO) released the results of its investigation into similar events at four of twelve IHS areas (Albuquerque, Aberdeen, Oklahoma City, and Phoenix). Records verified that the IHS performed 3,406 sterilizations between 1973 and 1976.[iv] “Tip of the iceberg” is indeed an appropriate metaphor. Per capita, this figure would be equivalent to sterilizing 452,000 non-Native American women.[v]Albuquerque contracted out their sterilizations to local, non-IHS physicians; therefore their region inaccurately added zero procedures to the government count. Independent research estimated that as many as 25-50% of Native American women were sterilized between 1970 and 1976.[vi]Independent verifications were critical. The GAO did not interview a single women subjected to sterilization. The GAO also admitted that “contract” physicians were not required to comply with any federal regulations (including informed consent) in the context of these surgical procedures. Study of consent forms utilized revealed that three different forms were in use. It also appeared the “consent,” in many instances, was obtained through coercion.

What may be the most disturbing aspect of the investigations followed: it was physicians and healthcare professionals in the IHS who coerced these women. It was they who abandoned their professional responsibility to protect the vulnerable through appropriate, non-eugenic indications for surgery and informed consent prior to the procedures. On a Navaho reservation alone, from 1972-1978, there was a 130% increase in abortions (a ratio of abortions per 1000 deliveries increasing from 34 to 77).[vii] The same study demonstrated that between 1972 and 1978, sterilization procedures went from 15.1% to 30.7% of total female surgeries on that one reservation. Healthcare professionals’ coercive tactics included the threat of withdrawing future healthcare provisions or custody of Native American children already born—if consent for sterilization was withheld.[viii] The scandal of this replay of earlier twentieth century eugenic programs and genocidal tactics led to a congressional hearing (Senator James Abourzek, Democrat, South Dakota), but little else in terms of publicity, justice, or public outcry. It has also not been scrutinized from a careful bioethical perspective.

Although the travesty of forced sterilization and abortions targeting Native Americans occurred a generation ago, and has apparently ended, a revisit in 2009 is critical. First, the breech in ethics took place in America. The record for such immoral activities has already been questioned in light of California’s record with forced sterilization from 1909 through 1979, subsidized through federal funding.[ix] Approximately 20,000 similar operations were performed in that State (mostly on African-Americans and Latinos), a significant number of these occurring after the Nuremberg Trials. Secondly, if the centuries-long treatment of Native Americans is a protracted genocide, not merely archetypal, the addition of physicians to the armamentarium of genocide, especially at this late juncture, is ominous. Physicians in the IHS during the time in question were young. Since their generation, additional medical graduates have moved even further from the Hippocratic tenet of “do no harm.” Furthermore, the ever-increasing shift from a covenantal model for medical practice to a contract model is relevant to the ethics at hand. Physicians who performed abortions and sterilizations on Native American women were contracted and reimbursed in full for their work. Similar models for specialty care which is contracted and reimbursed in full exist today under the umbrella of managed care. Payment for medical technique removed from context of ethical considerations may tempt many physicians in an era of decreasing reimbursement rates. Erosion of Hippocratism inhabits every aspect of the tragedies of care for these Native American women, and serves as more than a warning to us of the danger of divorcing ethical conviction from medical care.

Editor’s Note: This essay served as the basis for a parallel paper presentation at CBHD’s 2009 summer conference, Global Bioethics: Emerging Challenges Facing Human Dignity.

[i] K.B. Patterson and T. Runge, “Smallpox and the Native American,” American Journal of the Medical Sciences 323 (2002): 216-222.

[ii] J. Lawrence, “The Indian Health Service and the Sterilization of Native American Women,”American Indian Quarterly 24 (2000): 400-419.

[iii] Ibid.

[iv] Ibid. Cf. K. Larson, “And Then There Were None,” Christian Century Jan (1997): 61.

[v] Bill Wagner, “Lo the poor and sterilized Indian,” America 136 (1977): 75.

[vi] B. Dillingham, “American Indian Women and IHS Sterilization Practices,” American Indian Journal 3 (1977): 16.

[vii] H. Temkin-Greener, S. J. Kunitz, D. Broudy, M. Haffner, “Surgical fertility regulation among women on the Navaho Indian Reservation, 1972-1978.” American Journal of Public Health 71 (1981) 403-407.

[viii] S. J. Torpy, “Native American Women and Coerced Sterilization: On the Trail of Tears in the 1970s.”American Indian Culture and Research Journal 24 (2000): 1-22.

[ix] A. M. Stern, “Sterilized in the name of Public Health: Race, Immigration, and Reproductive Control in Modern California.” American Journal of Public Health 95 (2005): 1128-1138;

Not Our Debt!!!

Posted by guest blogger "Sayf Maslul"


“We did not create this debt, so we’re not going to pay this debt.”

[Anonymous Greek Protester]

I hear you, brother! 

U.S. Ties to Chinese Surveillance

 



By ANDREW JACOBS and PENN BULLOCK 
Published: March 15, 2012 
Courtesy Of "The New York Times"

BEIJING — As the Chinese government forges ahead on a multibillion-dollar effort to blanket the country with surveillance cameras, one American company stands to profit: Bain Capital, the private equity firm founded by Mitt Romney.

In December, a Bain-run fund in which a Romney family blind trust has holdings purchased the video surveillance division of a Chinese company that claims to be the largest supplier to the government’s Safe Cities program, a highly advanced monitoring system that allows the authorities to watch over university campuses, hospitals, mosques and movie theaters from centralized command posts.

The Bain-owned company, Uniview Technologies, produces what it calls “infrared antiriot” cameras and software that enable police officials in different jurisdictions to share images in real time through the Internet. Previous projects have included an emergency command center in Tibet that “provides a solid foundation for the maintenance of social stability and the protection of people’s peaceful life,” according to Uniview’s Web site.

Such surveillance systems are often used to combat crime and the manufacturer has no control over whether they are used for other purposes. But human rights advocates say in China they are also used to intimidate and monitor political and religious dissidents. “There are video cameras all over our monastery, and their only purpose is to make us feel fear,” said Loksag, a Tibetan Buddhist monk in Gansu Province. He said the cameras helped the authorities identify and detain nearly 200 monks who participated in a protest at his monastery in 2008.

Mr. Romney has had no role in Bain’s operations since 1999 and had no say over the investment in China. But the fortunes of Bain and Mr. Romney are still closely tied.

The financial disclosure forms Mr. Romney filed last August show that a blind trust in the name of his wife, Ann Romney, held a relatively small stake of between $100,000 and $250,000 in the Bain Capital Asia fund that purchased Uniview.

In a statement, R. Bradford Malt, who manages the Romneys’ trusts, noted that he had put trust assets into the fund before it bought Uniview. He said that the Romneys had no role in guiding their investments. He also said he had no control over the Asian fund’s choice of investments.

Mr. Romney reported on his August disclosure forms that he and his wife earned a minimum of $5.6 million from Bain assets held in their blind trusts and retirement accounts. Bain employees and executives are also among the largest donors to his campaign, and their contributions accounted for 10 percent of the money received over the past year by Restore Our Future, the pro-Romney “super PAC.” Bain employees have also made substantial contributions to Democratic candidates, including President Obama.

Bain’s decision to enter China’s fast-growing surveillance industry raises questions about the direct role that American corporations play in outfitting authoritarian governments with technology that can be used to repress their own citizens.

It also comes at a delicate time for Mr. Romney, who has frequently called for a hard line against the Chinese government’s suppression of religious freedom and political dissent.

As with previous deals involving other American companies, critics argue that Bain’s acquisition of Uniview violates the spirit — if not necessarily the letter — of American sanctions imposed on Beijing after the deadly crackdown on protests in Tiananmen Square. Those rules, written two decades ago, bar American corporations from exporting to China “crime-control” products like those that process fingerprints, make photo identification cards or use night vision technology.

Most video surveillance equipment is not covered by the sanctions, even though a Canadian human rights group found in 2001 that Chinese security forces used Western-made video cameras to help identify and apprehend Tiananmen Square protesters.

Representative Frank R. Wolf, Republican of Virginia, who frequently assails companies that do business with Chinese security agencies, said calls by some members of Congress to pass stricter regulations on American businesses have gone nowhere. “These companies are busy making a profit and don’t want to face realities, but what they’re doing is wrong,” said Mr. Wolf, who is co-chairman of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission.

In public comments and in a statement posted on his campaign Web site, Mr. Romney has accused the Obama administration of placing economic concerns above human rights in managing relations with China. He has called on the White House to offer more vigorous support of those who criticize the Chinese Communist Party.

“Any serious U.S. policy toward China must confront the fact that China’s regime continues to deny its people basic political freedoms and human rights,” according to the statement on his Web site. “The United States has an important role to play in encouraging the evolution of China toward a more politically open and democratic order.” 

In recent years, a number of Western companies, including Honeywell, General Electric, I.B.M. and United Technologies, have been criticized for selling sophisticated surveillance-related technology to the Chinese government.

Other companies have been accused of directly helping China quash perceived opponents. In 2007, Yahoo settled a lawsuit asserting that it had provided the authorities with e-mails of a journalist who was later sentenced to 10 years in prison for sending an e-mail that prosecutors charged contained state secrets.

Cisco Systems is fighting a lawsuit in the United States filed by a human rights group over Internet networking equipment it sold to the Chinese government. The lawsuit asserts that the system, tailored to government demands, allowed the authorities to track down and torture members of the religious group Falun Gong.

Bain defended its purchase of Uniview, stressing that the Chinese company’s products were advertised as instruments for crime control, not political repression. “China’s increasingly urban population will face growing needs around personal safety and property protection,” the company said in a statement. “Video surveillance is part of the solution to that, as it is anywhere in the world.” The company also said that only one-third of Uniview’s sales were to public security bureaus.

William A. Reinsch, president of the National Foreign Trade Council in Washington, said it was up to the American government, not individual companies, to set the guidelines for such business ventures. “A lot of the stuff we’re talking about is truly dual use,” said Mr. Reinsch, a former Commerce Department official in the Clinton administration. “You can sell it to a local police force that will use it to track down speeders, but you can also sell it to a ministry of state security that will use it to monitor dissidents.”

But Adam Segal, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and an expert on the intersection of technology and domestic security in China, said American companies could not shirk responsibility for the way their technology is used, especially in the wake of recent controversies over the sales of Western Internet filtering systems to autocratic rulers in the Arab world. “Technology companies have to begin to think about the ethics and political implications of selling these technologies,” he said.

Uniview is proud of its close association with China’s security establishment and boasts about the scores of surveillance systems it has created for local security agencies in the six years since the Safe Cities program was started.

“Social management and society building pose new demands for surveillance and control systems,” Uniview says in its promotional materials, which include an interview with Zhang Pengguo, the company’s chief executive. “A harmonious society is the essential nature of socialism with Chinese characteristics,” Mr. Zhang says.

Until now, Bain’s takeover of Uniview has drawn little attention outside China. The company was formerly the surveillance division of H3C, a joint venture between 3Com and Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications giant whose expansion plans in the United States have faced resistance from Congress over questions about its ties to the Chinese military.

In 2010, 3Com, along with H3C, became a subsidiary of Hewlett-Packard in a $2.7 billion buyout deal.

H3C also sells technology unrelated to video surveillance, including Internet firewall products, but it was the video surveillance division alone that drew Bain Capital’s interest.

In December, H3C announced that Bain had bought out the surveillance division and formed Uniview, although under terms of the buyout, H3C provides Uniview with products, technical support and, for a period of time, the use of its brand name. Bain controls Uniview but says it has no role in its day-to-day operations. 

Bain is, however, well positioned to profit. According to the British firm IMS Research, the Chinese market for security camera networks was $2.5 billion last year, a figure that is expected to double by 2015, with more than two-thirds of that demand coming from the government. Uniview currently has just 1 percent of the market, the firm said.

Chinese cities are rushing to construct their own surveillance systems. Chongqing, in southwest China, is spending $4.2 billion on a network of 500,000 cameras, according to the state news media. Guangdong Province, the manufacturing powerhouse adjacent to Hong Kong, is mounting one million cameras. In Beijing, the municipal government is seeking to place cameras in all entertainment venues, adding to the skein of 300,000 cameras that were installed here for the 2008 Olympics.

By marrying Internet, cellphone and video surveillance, the government is seeking to create an omniscient monitoring system, said Nicholas Bequelin, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch in Hong Kong. “When it comes to surveillance, China is pretty upfront about its totalitarian ambitions,” he said.

For the legion of Chinese intellectuals, democracy advocates and religious figures who have tangled with the government, surveillance cameras have become inescapable.

Yang Weidong, a politically active filmmaker, said a phalanx of 13 cameras were installed in and around his apartment building last year after he submitted an interview request to President Hu Jintao, drawing the ire of domestic security agents. In January, Ai Weiwei, the artist and public critic, was questioned by the police after he threw stones at cameras trained on his front gate.

Li Tiantian, 45, a human rights lawyer in Shanghai, said the police used footage recorded outside a hotel in an effort to manipulate her during the three months she was illegally detained last year. The video, she said, showed her entering the hotel in the company of men other than her boyfriend.

During interrogations, Ms. Li said, the police taunted her about her sex life and threatened to show the video to her boyfriend. The boyfriend, however, refused to watch, she said.

“The scale of intrusion into people’s private lives is unprecedented,” she said in a phone interview. “Now when I walk on the street, I feel so vulnerable, like the police are watching me all the time.”

Andrew Jacobs reported from Beijing, and Penn Bullock from New York. Nicholas Confessore contributed reporting from New York. 

Julian Assange and WikiLeaks

Posted by guest blogger "Sayf Maslul"


"At last, it seems that one person has been able to make disunited governments unite in search of a common goal:

To fuck him and his organisation up as much as they can!"

[Unknown Author] 

The Martyr - Ultimas Palabras

Posted by guest blogger "Sayf Maslul" 

Artist "Immortal Technique (Felipe Andres Coronel)"


Produced by "Immortal Technique & Southpaw"

A new American Revolution has begun. 
Not against the forces of a colonial kingdom, 
But a rebellion against an oppressor that has risen among us. 
It is not a foreign invasion we have to fear,
Rather the threat of a force within our nation that has usurped 
What was once a dream of having the greatest democracy ever known to man.

We now live in a world where the population has grown exponentially, 
And the planet is running out of resources to sustain us all. 
We in the inner city and those struggling in the suburban ghettos may not realise it yet 
But make no mistake, The people who control the technology 
And run every enterprise that makes up our world have seen this coming for a long time.

The ideas of renewable energy, global warming, and the idea of collectively working 
Were purposefully bought out, derailed, demonised or corrupted; 
In favour of an economic structure designed by a monetary caste system. 
In a desperate attempt to convince us that we need to maintain that extravagant existence, 
They have pretended we might share in their dream; that we can justify any inhumanity in its name.

Out of this blind ignorance was born the curse of slavery. 
Many of the founders of this nation were themselves, Masons. 
That is not a left-wing or a right-wing conspiracy theory; it is a widely known and accepted fact. 
So then, explain to me how a nation founded by men who not only understood the long and complicated history of Europe, But also that of Africa, Could permeate such a lie in convincing the American public that one race of men was superior and one inferior.

When in fact, we know that all the early men, the people who created civilisation, 
Every aspect of what we see today, the foundation of all modern human life, were from Africa. 
The greatest cowardice of course came, not with slavery itself, unfortunately, 
But with the excuses for slavery. For if America had been as brave as the Roman Empire and all other empires that had come after her and claimed, "No, we were just stronger and that's why we took you;" 
Then when slavery was over, racism would have probably followed in suit.

But instead, it was the social lie, The religious lie that was told that stayed in the minds of people that separated one human being from another. In order to distract us from the issues of class and freedom, 
It created issues around religion and race to dominate the world for centuries to come.

Some claim that they respect the culture of life in this country. 
They cry out for the indignity of children that are slaughtered before they are born; 
But God has not penetrated their souls, for they have no empathy, 
Nothing in their cold hearts, for the hundreds of thousands of lives we have taken in our wars overseas; 
For that which they call collateral damage, which are the burnt and damaged children of the world. 
They have no prayers for them, Only snide commentary on the internet and laughter in their hearts, 
And yet you claim to be one with God.

We talk about immigration in this country.
Might doesn't make right, ladies and gentlemen, 
It just makes right now. What we are saying to the rest of the world, 
Is one day, when America grows weak, one day when her legions falter, 
On a day when her economy crumbles; China, Russia, Europe, whatever power has arisen; 
All you have to do is come here, and conquer us in a few military excursions; 
And then you too can set up shop here and in a hundred years, 
You can tell every red-blooded American, 
"No, you are an illegal human being. I am the true citizen. I have all the rights. You have no rights."

Maybe you forgot how you got this country. 
Maybe you take for granted the blood, the sweat, 
The tears that the people who live in practical circtum shed every day; 
For we may not run America, but we make America run.

We talk about the law, yet how many indignities have been legal in the past? 
How many treaties with Native American people have we broken? 
How many international laws have we violated? 
And speaking of laws, How can a corporation be regulated by a government that is
funded and controlled by corporations? How could there be accountability for people
who see a profit margin above the lives of Americans; Above the lives of human beings
in other countries?

We have taken the soul out of ourselves and placed them inside machines. 
My words, of course, will be marginalised, Demonised in typical fashion. 
Any time you dare to question the power structure, they say you hate America. 
No, I love this country. I see its beauty everyday in its people. 
And I love it a lot more than those that have abandoned the American worker, 
That have chose to exploit and try and take away every single benefit that she has. 
Those that attempt to make excuses for every atrocity committed in the name of supposed freedom. 
Those who demand accountability from everyone, but offer none themselves. 
Who favour contracts over lives, Who favour invasion and control over organic democracy overseas.

The greatest flaw that any intelligent person has is to think that they are smarter than everyone else. 
And so, as the government has planted its spies amongst us, we have planted our spies among them. 
They have infiltrated every branch of the American government. 
They have retrieved names, data, hard numbers;
The paper trail that will expose those that truly control this country. 
Those that control the political parties. 
Those that control the oil industry, the energy. 
Those that stand behind the companies, faceless, whose names have never been revealed...

Until to-... *Gunshot*

*Civilian screams*

*Heartbeat*