When one hears the word "spy," one normally thinks of places like Moscow, London, and Washington rather than Rosemont, Pa. However, the controversy swirling around Rosemont's Harriton High School and the Lower Merion School District increasingly makes for bizarre reading. And even more bizarre thinking.
The school district has been accused of remote-controlled Webcam spying on its students. The student at the center of the allegations, Blake Robbins, claims the school, having produced a still photograph taken remotely by a school official, falsely accused him of selling drugs (I have embedded the video of CBS News interview with Robbins and his family).
One fact, though, has emerged that seems mystifying in the extreme.
According to the Washington Post, the school district has admitted activating students' laptop Webcams 42 times over a 14-month period. The district claims each activation was merely an attempt to locate a stolen or missing laptop.
However, district spokesman Doug Young told the Post that the documentation signed by students when they received the laptops did not make it clear the Webcams could be activated remotely.
"It's clear what was in place was insufficient, and that's unacceptable," he said.
While the school scrambles to defend itself against accusations of violating the Fourth Amendment, as well as transgressing the Electronic Communication Privacy Act, the Computer Fraud Abuse Act, the Stored Communications Act, Section 1983 of the Civil Rights Act, the Pennsylvania Wiretapping and Electronic Surveillance Act, and Pennsylvania common law, it becomes increasingly difficult to see how it will defend its actions.
It's one thing to attempt to install security procedures to protect against the loss of a laptop. It's quite another when those procedures appear to have been enacted without the knowledge of students or parents and leave the school open not only to all of the charges already leveled in the Robbins' lawsuit, but also--as in the case of a student who leaves her laptop open in the shower to listen to music--to charges of child pornography.
I might catch some flak for this one, but here I am advocating interruption as opposed to the typical discourse that I continually push for. In general, I still push for discussions that employ mutual respect, agreement and benefit however, Ive come to see a world where some of the largest players (the United States and Israel for example within this specific case, though there are a great many more players who enjoy the imposition of silence) claim to be discussing an issue under purview of the freedom of speech, but fail to award that very principle to those with deviant and/or opposing viewpoints. When the voice has been all but lost, save the chance thats been invited via a confrontation with an opposing view, a non-approved confrontation, one must take the shot. UC-Irvine students did, Rachel Corrie did, so many people have and there may come a moment where we have to too. As most people know, I refuse to literally take a shot (commit to violence), but my words, our words, may sometimes be explosive. In terms of finding it within myself, the ability to interrupt an individual or party with my particular and/or opposing view, I must rely on what skills I have readily available at the moment, I will speak up, I will promote a platform of peace, and if I have to, Ill do it when someone else expects and/or demands my silence. Perhaps someday, the discourse that I ultimately aim for will become the norm (talks built around mutually assured agreement and respect), but until that day, we must use the tools that we have, remain true to our own senses of integrity and stand up for what we believe in..
A little more info on how to support the students (thank you Rageunderground)
Israel's Ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, at UC Irvine , February 8, 2010.
The UCI students might face suspension or expulsion. You can help by voicing your support.
Contact UCI Chancellor Michael Drake NOW to declare that it is unjust to arrest these students.
Ask to speak with Chancellor Drake or leave a message at: (949) 824 5011 and email him at: chancellor@uci.edu
Ask to speak to the Dean of Students office, who are handling the case at: (949) 824-5181 and email them at: deanstu@uci.edu
Here are some important points to bring up:
• It was unjust to arrest students for simply having the courage to stand up and speak out against a man responsible for propagating the deaths of thousands of innocent people.
• Civil disobedience has historically played an instrumental role in the civil rights movement in America that eventually ensured equality and human rights for all minorities.
• Michael Oren is a representative of a state that is condemned by more UN Human Rights Council resolutions than all other countries in the world and he should not be honored at UC Irvine.
• As concerned community members, we will not support an educational institution that threatens to punish its students with suspension and expulsion for standing up for their principles
You all know the drill, I cant be depressing all the time (at least with regard to my vids). So yesterday was the first day of the Chinese lunar new year, the year of the tiger! We thought we'd ring it in with some singing (though, this footage is from last year, the year of the cow - but it's all good).
Be prepared for a whole bunch of docu-vids! Behold the Chinese Spring Festival, a fun and wonderful adventure for sure!
"Under the Special 301 process the USTR seeks input from US copyright, trademark, and patent owners about whether policies and practices in foreign countries deny them adequate IP protection. The process has generally been used by IP holders to complain not only about lax enforcement in other countries, but also about limitations and exceptions in their laws that are beneficial to libraries, to education, to innovation, and to the public interest generally. The ability to comment in the Special 301 process is not limited to IP owners only. Any member of the public is free to file comments. If you believe in the importance of balanced copyright policies, file comments with the USTR and make your voice heard. Comments can be filed electronically via http://www.regulations.gov/ docket number USTR-2010-0003. You have to include the term '2010 Special 301 Review' in the 'Type Comment and Upload File' field. ... Deadline for filing is February 16 by 5 pm."
Weve seen where trade agreements can get us *cough* NAFTA
U.S. Congress bill threatens to crackdown on terror TV
Cari Machet, who has lived and worked as a multimedia producer throughout the Middle East, writes about a new House bill that could sanction satellite operators if they contract their services to TV stations classified as terrorist entities by Congress. She argues it may prove to be counterproductive.
Last month Congress passed H.R. 2278, which would label certain Middle Eastern satellite providers of incendiary television programming as terrorist organizations — in an effort to prevent radical anti-Americanism from hitting the airwaves.
Representative Gus Bilirakis (R-Florida) introduced the legislation that would label satellite TV channels and content providers as “Specially Designated Global Terrorists” or SDGTs.
The wording of the bill seems too broad to enact and as yet has not been pushed through the Senate.
This bill is almost a carbon copy of a bill passed by Congress in 2008, H.Res.1069, which condemned the use of television programming by Hamas to indoctrinate hatred, violence and Antisemitism.
The earlier bill mainly focused on al-Aqsa TV, the channel run by Palestinian militant organization Hamas. The bill particularly targeted children’s program Tomorrow’s Pioneers, which depicts a Bugs Bunny-like character declaring that he “will finish off the Jews and eat them.”
The station recently launched a new cartoon satirizing a Fatah soldier named Bahlul (Buffoon) and a “blood-drinking Jew.” The network also operates its own film studio where they shoot movies they call the “cinema of resistance.”
Al-Aqsa TV is currently transmitted by satellites owned by the French-based, privately owned Eutelsat and by the Saudi-based, Arab League-owned Arabsat.
The new bill mainly targets Lebanese Hezbollah’s al-Manar TV channel. The station is telecast throughout the Arab world via Arabsat and the Egyptian-based, state-owned Nilesat.
Hezbollah is a Shi’a Islamist political and paramilitary organization that provides social services and operates schools, hospitals and agricultural services for Lebanese Shiites. They hold 11 seats in the Lebanese parliament.
The United States designates Hezbollah a terrorist group, and its militant wing has been linked to several major terrorist attacks. But the E.U. has resisted the terrorist label, with some countries arguing that engagement is a better policy.
Some Lebanese object strenuously to the bill. Lebanese Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri sent a letter to the U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi stating, “This bill represents bypassing the sovereign national laws of the targeted countries, among them Lebanon which is a free ‘Hyde Park’ for the Lebanese and Arab satellite ‘public opinion’ media channels.”
The passing of the bill prompted an Arab League meeting in Cairo on Jan 24th. The Arab information ministers released a statement after that meeting that censured the bill and called it “an interference in the internal affairs of Arab states who regulate their media affairs according to national legislation.”
“We insist on media freedom and reject any restrictions on it,” said Lebanese Information Minister Tareq Mitri.
During that meeting, participants discussed another proposal supported by the Egyptian and Saudi governments for the creation of a regional office to supervise Arab satellite TV stations — which might even impact the BBC Arabic (and BBC World) channels, or even the U.S.- government owned news channel Alhurra.
But the Lebanese government is against the idea of a pan-Arab media commission. Reporters Without Borders concurs: “The danger is that this super-police could be used to censor all TV stations that criticize the region’s governments. It could eventually be turned into a formidable weapon against freedom of information.”
Throughout the Mideast, mainstream American media saturates free satellite airwaves. Some is censored for content, but not always news content. There is a lack of knowledge among the bill’s supporters of the breadth and power of American culture, which blasts on radios, beams out of flat screen televisions and flashes on computers everywhere.
As President Obama said in his State of the Union speech: “Abroad, America’s greatest source of strength has always been our ideals.”
Of course the Senate is a far different body than the House. Also, the president would have to sign H.R. 2278 into law, but so far there is no comment from the White House regarding the bill.
In short, H.R. 2278 is a deeply irresponsible bill which sharply contradicts American support for media freedom and could not be implemented in the Middle East today as crafted without causing great damage. Even Arab governments who despise Hamas and Hezbollah and Qaradawi and al-Jazeera could not sign on to it…The last thing the Arab world needs right now is more state power of censorship over the media — whether the Arab League over satellite TV or the Jordanian government over the internet. Hillary Clinton just laid out a vision of an America committed to internet freedom, and that should be embraced as part of a broader commitment to free and open media. Nobody should be keen on restoring the power of authoritarian governments over one of the few zones of relative freedom which have evolved over the last decade.
- Cari Machet
Sorry if I seem angry and upset with this one. I made a video yesterday - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzQq4h... wherein I am please by a U.S. Corporation that was no longer endorsing censorship in China via an internet search engine of its design. Today, I wake up, look at comments on that vid and see that my dear friend RageUnderground - http://www.youtube.com/user/rageunder... - has left a comment:
thanks for making this video, good on google for doing this, but i have some bad news for you that you may have missed.
As of today, congress passed a bill that lets them block videos from you that may be anti american. So from now on, a lot of videos from Al Jazeera and other middle eastern news channels are blocked from you if you live in the states.
you probably missed this news as you were in china.
feels like im in a damn Orwell movie sometimes.
peace brother.
One step forward, two steps back. Ho can we let our government demonize the actions of others we its just as guilty as the next? Instead of worrying over content, why not look at why that kind of content is being made in the first place!?! (Which will be the subject of a video Ill be having out soon).
Google has publicly announced that that it will cease censorship of its Chinese language, Google.cn website, and is reviewing the feasibility of its entire operation in that country. This follows its detection of malicious attacks on the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists and what Google calls an "attack on their corporate infrastructure originating from China."
When Google first launched a filtered search engine in China, EFF was one of the first to criticize it; we'd now like to be one of the first to commend Google for its brave and forthright declaration to provide only an uncensored Chinese language version of its search engine.
Our hope is that other tech companies will follow Google's lead. Too many of them have been willing to comply with Chinese demands that they check their values at the border.
Of course, whatever the reaction from Chinese authorities, this doesn't mean that Google will vanish from the Chinese Internet. There continue to be many ready means for circumventing China's censorship schemes, and we hope Google will continue to provide an uncensored Chinese language search engine, from servers outside China if need be.
We recognize that there may be short-term economic and political consequences for the company: but if it stands firm in its commitment to provide Chinese citizens with an uncensored view of the Net, we feel sure there will be opportunities and benefits not just for Chinese citizens, but for Google and companies that follow its lead.
The Internet is global, but it relies on a physical infrastructure that is vulnerable to national policies and clumsy attempts to block and censor. The Chinese authorities will no doubt continue to try to censor the Internet as seen by their own citizens, and malicious attacks will continue against those who seek to use uncensored services and secure communications in the exercise of human rights. Google has stepped up to this challenge: now it's up to technologists and policymakers to build the tools and to apply the political, economic and cultural pressure to allow citizens in repressive regimes to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through an uncensored Net and maintain their access to the collective knowledge of humanity that it makes possible.
First of all, please accept my apology for this late response that I'm sure a great many people were expecting out of me - I picked one great time to move, but rest assured, this was something that Ling and I were paying special attention too. Second reason for not having this up sooner, YouTubes new uploader is an absolute piece of junk.
The Right to Know - We should all have it.
On a related note, within the vid I talk about a potential economic gain for Google, should they pull out of China or become forced out by the Chinese Government - in terms of the gain, I feel that they'd see increased internet traffic due to the gains in trust that they'd make. Google could become something of a safe-haven for what I am now terming "internet-refugees." Granted, these gains would be marginal, but they could grow over time to include peoples from other "informationally-repressed" areas of the world. Just some added thoughts.
There's Real Hope From Haiti -- And It's Not What You'd Expect
By Johann Hari - February 4th, 2010
In the weeks after a disaster like the Haiti-quake, journalists always search for an upbeat twist to the tale. You know it by now -- the baby found alive after a week under wreckage. But this time, a shaft of light has parted the rubble and the corpses and the unshakable grief that could last for years. In the middle of Haiti's nightmare, a system that has kept hundreds of millions of people like them poor and broken might just have shown its first fracture.
To understand what has happened, you have to delve into a long-suppressed history -- one you are not supposed to hear. Since the 1970s, we have been told that the gospel of The Free Market has rolled out across the world because The People demand it. We have been informed that free elections will lead ineluctably to people choosing to roll back the state, privatize the essentials of life, and leave the rich to work their magic for us all. We have seen these trends wash across the world because ordinary people believe they offer the best possible system.
There's just one snag: it's not true. In reality, this gospel has proved impossible to impose in any democracy. Few politicians have believed in its core tenets more than Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher -- yet at the end of their long terms, after bitter battles, the proportion of GDP spent by the state remained the same. Why? Because these doctrines are extremely unpopular, and wherever they are tried, they are fiercely resisted. There are majorities in every free country for a mixed economy, where markets are counter-balanced by a strong and active state.
The Gospel spread across the poor world because their governments were given no choice. In her masterpiece 'The Shock Doctrine', Naomi Klein shows how these policies were forced on the world's poor against their will. Sometimes rich governments did it simply by killing the elected leaders and installing a servile dictator, as in Chile. Usually the methods were more subtle. One of the most marked came in the form of "loans" from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. The IMF -- an institution set up by European and American governments after the Second World War -- would approach poor countries and offer them desperately needed cash. But from the 1970s on, they would, in return, require the countries to introduce "structural adjustments" to their economy. The medicine was always the same: end all subsidies for the poor, slash state spending on health and education, deregulate your financial sector, throw your markets open.
Here's a typical example of what happened next. In Malawi in southeast Africa, the country's soil had become badly depleted, so the government decided to subsidize fertilizer for farmers. When the IMF and World Bank came in, they called this "a market distortion", and ordered Malawi to stop at once. They did. So the country's crops failed, and famine began to scythe through the population. Nobody knows how many tens of thousands starved to death; nobody bothered to count. The Malawian government eventually listened to the cries of its people, kicked out the IMF, and reintroduced the subsidies -- and the famine stopped that year. The country is now an exporter of food again.
When people are living so close to the edge, even small increases in prices can break them. Whenever I report from the developing world, the IMF tracts of anti-development lie like wounds across the land. They systematically disregard the fact that every country that has lifted itself out of poverty has done the opposite of their commands. For example, South Korea went from poverty to plenty in just two generations by protecting and heavily subsiding its industries and jacking up state subsidies -- to the IMF's horror.
Even Professor Jeffrey Sachs -- one of their former lackeys -- calls the IMF "the Typhoid Mary of emerging markets, spreading recessions in country after country." So why do they carry on like this? Primarily, it is because IMF programs work very well -- for the rich. They ensure that we get access to the cheapest possible labor and can help ourselves to the glistening resources that inexplicably ended up under their soil.
The serve-the-rich ideology that caused our economy to crash in 2008 has been crashing poor countries for a long time. But there's a sting. After decades of ordering poor countries to slash subsidies and state spending, the IMF reacted to the recession by urging rich countries... to spend a fortune subsidizing the banks, and to increase state spending. They wouldn't dream of drinking the medicine they have been serving out to the poor for so long. It's not as if the IMF has learned from its mistakes: they have just forced countries from El Salvador to Ukraine to Pakistan to sign deals committing themselves to leave the state inert in the face of severe external shocks to their economies. They are forbidden from embarking on a fiscal stimulus. No: the IMF only imposes its deadly prescriptions on those too weak and too distant to matter.
Here's where Haiti comes in. The IMF agenda has often been forced on populations when they are least able to resist -- after a military coup, a massacre, or a natural disaster. For example, the people of Thailand fought for years against clearing their locals off their beaches to make way for holiday resorts, and voted against the privatization of water and electricity. But immediately after the tsunami, both were pushed through. The drowned-out people couldn't fight back any more.
After the earthquake, something similar was poised to happen to Haiti. The IMF announced a $100m loan, stapled onto an earlier loan -- which requires Haiti to steeply raise the price for electricity, and freeze wages for the public sector workers who are needed to rebuild the country. So when people emerged from the rubble, they would find an economy rigged even more heavily against them. It was classic IMF: we'll give you a hand, provided your people feel the back of your hand.
There is no doubt about what the Haitian people would think: they know the IMF. Until 1994, the country at least grew its own staple crop: rice. But the IMF came in and ordered the government to cut its rice tariff from 35 percent to 3 percent. Suddenly the market was flooded with rice grown in the US by hugely subsidized farmers, and Haiti's rice farmers went bust. Hundreds of thousands swelled to the slum-cities and sweat shops of Port au Prince, where they built mud huts -- and were buried in 2010. The IMF reduced the country from self-sufficiency to dependency, in a move known locally as "the Plan of Death." It was one of the external political earthquakes that made this natural earthquake far more deadly.
But something new and startling happened this month. For the first time, the IMF was stopped from shafting a poor country -- by a rebellion here in the rich world. Hours after the quake, a Facebook group called 'No Shock Doctrine For Haiti' had tens of thousands of members, and orchestrated a petition to the IMF of over 150,000 signatures demanding the loan become a no-strings grant. After Naomi Klein's mega-selling expose, there was a vigilant public who wanted to see that the money they were donating to charity was not going to be canceled out by the IMF.
And it worked. The IMF backed down. They publicly renounced their conditions -- and even said they will work to cancel Haiti's entire debt. This is the first sign that exposing and opposing the IMF's agenda works. Klein says it is "unprecedented in my experience, and shows that public pressure in moments of disaster can seriously subvert shock doctrine tactics." Of course, they need to be watched vigilantly for any signs of backtracking. Already they seem to be rolling back some of their panicked initial rhetoric and saying that "beyond the emergency phase" they may go back to business-as-usual. Very powerful interests want the IMF to continue to dance to their tune.
But thanks to all the ordinary Europeans and Americans who pushed back, Haiti will not be IMF-ed up now, in its darkest hour. Not this time. Not these people. Not again. These should be the first baby-steps of a campaign to finally stop the IMF's poverty-promoting machine steam-rollering across continents. On the political Richter scale, that would mark a 7.0 - for the causes of democracy and justice.
My name is Kazuki in Japan, Yun in China, and Cloud among friends. Her's is Ling in China and Lindsay in the "States." We've been here, there and everywhere. There's so much more to learn of this world and this little old thing called "existence." But we make due with the "time" and help where we can...
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