Ray McGovern and the Sam Adams party have presented the Sam Adams award to Edward Snowden. I am delighted. This from Ray’s account of the event:
In brief remarks from his visitors, Snowden was reassured — first and foremost — that he need no longer be worried that nothing significant would happen as a result of his decision to risk his future by revealing documentary proof that the U.S. government was playing fast and loose with the Constitutional rights of Americans.
Even amid the government shutdown, Establishment Washington and the normally docile “mainstream media” have not been able to deflect attention from the intrusive eavesdropping that makes a mockery of the Fourth Amendment. Even Congress is showing signs of awaking from its torpor.
In the somnolent Senate, a few hardy souls have gone so far as to express displeasure at having been lied to by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and NSA Director Keith Alexander — Clapper having formally apologized for telling the Senate Intelligence Committee eavesdropping-related things that were, in his words, “clearly erroneous” and Alexander having told now-discredited whoppers about the effectiveness of NSA’s intrusive and unconstitutional methods in combating terrorism.
Coleen Rowley, the first winner of the Sam Adams Award (2002), cited some little-known history to remind Snowden that he is in good company as a whistleblower — and not only because of previous Sam Adams honorees. She noted that in 1773, Benjamin Franklin leaked confidential information by releasing letters written by then-Lt. Governor of Massachusetts Thomas Hutchinson to Thomas Whatley, an assistant to the British Prime Minister.
The letters suggested that it was impossible for the colonists to enjoy the same rights as subjects living in England and that “an abridgement of what are called English liberties” might be necessary. The content of the letters was so damaging to the British government that Benjamin Franklin was dismissed as colonial Postmaster General and had to endure an hour-long censure from British Solicitor General Alexander Wedderburn.
There has been a determined attempt by government to justify the need to intercept everybody’s communications, all the time. We have, yet again, had MI5 claim there are many thousand violent Islamic terrorists running around the UK, (yet somehow not managing to kill anybody). The cry of “paedophiles” is raised, as always. I can imagine them suggesting the entire population be shot dead, and justifying it as making sure they get the paedophiles. The tabloids would go with that.
There still had not been a single credible claim by the mainstream media that any named individual has died, despite that contingency being trotted out all the time as the reason Snowden and Manning should not have revealed state crimes and abuse of power. I am hopeful that, with the internet still largely free to the dissemination of information, out next massive whistleblower is only weeks away.
Technicolour, I have never referred to you as “techniprick”.
Please supply link to corroborate or withdraw.
@ “Mary”
“Jemand Cease your slurs. I have never had and never will have any connection to Stormfront. If I discover your identity I will sue you.”
“I will sue you” – surely not in the class-conscious fascist courts of the fascist UK? Shome contradiction, shurely?
LOL
Where was the doctor in question arguing for an attack on Syria?
Tech; I think any ill feeling toward the whole of Israel could be compared to say Jim Crow laws in the US. The average person was content to leave the South to it’s own devices because they had other fish to fry. Tolerance can be interpreted as sanctioning such things. Silence could be called consent. Just as there, no doubt, were good people in Rome who were horrified at Christians being fed to lions in Circus Maximus; so too, there were enough folks to fill the Colosseum to watch the show.
Hi Dad! 4 09pm
Good to see you back.
Listen. I’m getting really worried about little bro’s mood swings in the last 24hrs or so. He won’t answer even the politest questions (12:08 am) and the Prendergasts never know whether he’s going to wash their car or swear at them.
I really think you should take him off for a bit of parernal bonding.
Users of the startpage search engine. Something really weird. I have the ghostery addon for firefox which blocks online commercial trackers unless I specifically enable them for a page or service. Normally startpage like duckduckgo has no trackers. Just now ghostery informed me it found 8 trackers on startpage.com – five minutes later and they are gone but not before I got a screenshot.
Trackers
========
Google+1
Google Adsense
Gravatar
Linkedin
Reddit
Sharethis
Stumbleupon
Wordpress
Screenshot at http://squonk.tk/startpagetrackers.png
Either ghostery went mad or something very strange is going on at startpage search engine.
Jemand, it was a while back (might have been ‘dick’ in fact) & no hard feelings, as it were, so happy to withdraw (this is getting worse)
AA; Commercial interests will always, always find a way to monetize. Have you ever seen a disaster where a Banker finds no incentive to make a buck?
(this is getting worse) 🙂 That could have been an entry by Jon, A Node, Clark or meself.
A Node. 4 12pm
We must be kind to Dad. He’s had a tough time recently what with being thrown out of the choir and then forgetting his name.
And now, to cap it all he has the worry of finding help for Little Bro, while all the time trying to keep this unruly blog on the straight and narrow.
You know, even trolls have feelings.
Just as well we delayed our trek up to the cloud forest because the kwangam grubs emerged and we had to stop everything for the feast and Wassamadda couldn’t use her laptop ‘cos one of the Shurtplonk twins got her head stuck in the kidddu hole so I got to ask some more questions that went unanswered, as usual!
Divide and conquer. It’s as easy as shooting fish in a barrel, because people (yes, that includes me) have a natural emotional tendency to take sides. War itself is the ultimate outcome of unchecked polarisation.
Technicolour, it was the Apostate Puppet Theatre who called you “Techniprick”. That doesn’t excuse Jemmand from his “Stormfront Mary” jibe, of course.
Jemmand, I return friendly hellos when I read them in the hope that it will improve people’s moods.
C’mon, everyone, remember to take deep breaths…
A Node
“Your Dad’s turned up again, pretending to be a German.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Aguirre – more fully, Don Lope Aguirre – was Spanish.
Enjoy your scrambled eggs this evening.
@Stormfront Mary
You can poke fun at me but please don’t make jokes about the Oz bushfires. There has already been one fatality – not nice.
Jemand, I’m sorry for misspelling your screen name.
Technicolour, I have not referred to you as “techniprick” or “technidick” or any other variant you’d care to speculate on. And certainly nothing that compares to CUNT, which I reserve for things that I especially like and people whom I especially dislike.
“It’s as easy as shooting fish in a barrel,”
Too true. It’s easy to bate folks who are already pissed off at the state of affairs. Isn’t that why a lot of us comment, to get it off our chests? It’s also easy to jump to conclusions over a miscommunication. And if you like mob mentality and wish to start a riot, striking a match is easiest of all.
Ben,
Startpage.com is the default search engine in the TOR browser. Their entire business is built upon privacy and lack of trackers. I double checked their security certificate on that page and it matches the real one. The page was also transmitted with some elements of the page unencrypted which also should never have happened.
I actually have no real problem with all the trackers – I am not hiding anything. I just disable them because I can.
Questions to ask oneself:
1) Am I in favour of war, any war?
2) If I’m not in favour of war, should I be taking a side?
3) If I see sides developing among others, what should I do about it?
If you look at my screenshot to the left of the URL in firefox you will also notice that the https padlock symbol has been replaced with a warning triangle and exclamation mark indicating that the page was not really secure. So loaded with trackers AND insecure connection. All very strange.
Sophia,
He’s really confused, I’m afraid. He claims to be Spanish but he’s speaking German – might be more convincing if he’d shave off that Charlie Chaplin moustache, although I have to admit it suits him.
The kindest thing is to pretend we haven’t noticed him.
Jemand. Stop calling me by that name please.
I am sorry about the death. Apparently the military think they may have started the fire.
http://news.sky.com/story/1156681/australia-fires-military-investigates-blaze
I think you will agree that suburbs of cities have expanded into habitats where there are fire risks. The same in California.
Here’s the screenshot on imageshack for those who don’t visit random personal sites 🙂
http://img703.imageshack.us/img703/3363/06ij.png
Even Canadians are pissed off. What’s next, riots in Switzerland?
http://progressive.org/canada-sends-armed-paramilitaries-to-clear-fracking-protesters
AlcAnon, it sounds like either startpage got cracked, or some kind of piggybacking or (?) a “man in the middle” attack. Doesn’t surprise me, as TOR itself presumably remains secure, and recent reports suggest that governments attempting to track TOR traffic have targeted the TOR Browser Bundle rather than TOR itself. The default TOR search engine would be another logical target.
If it happens again, save the source of the page so that it can be inspected for links. In Firefox, the “View Page Source” menu item is now in “Tools – Web Developer”.
” In Firefox, the “View Page Source” menu item is now in “Tools – Web Developer”.”
or
CTRL + U
Sorry, Stormfront Mary but immigrants to Oz need to live somewhere. You know that as a vocal supporter of unregulated mass immigration, multiculturalism, illegal immigration, massive population growth, migration of asylum seekers and their cousins. Where would you have them live? In balloons?
Whether the military was responsible or not is irrelevant. All it takes is one cigarette and the energy of 50 Hiroshimas is released in an inferno that you simply cannot fathom. Makes Dresden look like a weekend barbeque. Police are currently investigating two 12yo girls who are reported to have attempted to start YET another murderous fire.
That’s life in Oz – ho hum.
Technicolour at 4.07. I have no idea what you are on about. Lacking in confidence? No. If I was, I would have left this scene months ago. I think you are attempting to denigrate me though by suggesting I deal in trivia.
The point about Middleton’s sister’s boots is that she can afford £360 for them and that she has nothing better to do that fly up to Scotland, shoot beautiful birds, then pose for a photo with her friends with the dead birds’ bodies lined up in front of them and fly back to London.
It reminded me of a photo like one of these with their ‘trophies’, http://www.sportsmenonfilm.com/2013_April.html
or stretching the point, Nos 1 and 2 here!http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/02/presidents-holding-guns-photos-shooting.html
I can never work you out btw.
Jemand. Stop calling me by that name. I repeat the request.
Clark,
I’d have to turn off ghostery blocking to do that. Which I will do I think. If I save the page now it will save the version already stripped of the trackers by ghostery. I still have the page open in another tab. I use CTRL-U as a fast shortcut to bring up the page source. Especially handy now that they’ve moved view source further down the menus.
If it was a man in the middle attack they were using the genuine startpage.com certificate as verified by GoDaddy.com – it was the first thing I checked.
But yes the Snowden leaks revealed that the NSA have very fast responding boxes in key internet hubs which can serve fake versions of any page they want and that is one of the ways they break into TOR as you say. I wasn’t using TOR in case anybody was wondering. That was just a normal connection from home. Again I don’t do searches on startpage I wouldn’t do on Google. I just use it because it is not Google.
I’ll email the ghostery author – it might be ghostery going mad and displaying information from an old page I’d visited. If he can’t explain it I’ll maybe email startpage.
A serious question.
Why are the debates on Craigs blog never about the original post?