Syrian Rebels: Annan’s Peace Plan ‘Doomed’
Two days before the Syrian military is supposed to withdraw its heavy artillery from cities and four days before the full scale ceasefire is to begin, it already looks unlikely, with top rebel officials saying that the plan is “doomed” to fail.
The comments come after Syrian President Bashar Assad demanded that the Free Syrian Army (FSA), the top rebel combat force, offer a written pledge to participate in the ceasefire. The FSA leadership has ruled out giving any such guarantee.
Assad’s move was somewhat of a last minute change, but not a big one, since naturally the Annan plan for a ceasefire rested on the assumption that both sides would halt their offensives against one another.
Interestingly, Free Syrian Army spokesmen are continuing to insist that the organization will
honor the ceasefire. They are providing no indication why they refuse to put it in writing, however.
The move is the latest in a series of international efforts to get the two sides to the negotiating table. Neither side has appeared very willing to do so, but the Assad regime has agreed in principle on some occasions to talks, only to see them spurned by the rebels.
The Washington Post Jumps the Shark (No, We Shouldn’t Intervene in Mali)
The Washington Post editorial page, which back in the day was one of the firmest bastions of the “liberal media,” has become glaringly and almost ostentatiously reactionary in terms of its foreign policy orientation. Under the tutelage of Fred Hiatt, the Post has been in favor of every single American military intervention over the past decade. It is worth nothing that it was not merely passively in favor of these wars, grudgingly accepting them one they were already underway, but was substantially ahead of the curve on many of them and has remained unapologetic about those which have turned into large-scale disasters. This was particularly the case over the past year, as thePost’s editorial page persistently and aggressively advocated for the use of force to depose Gaddafi and refused to see anything wrong with this campaign even after Libya (predictably) devolved into an anarchic free-for-all among various armed gangs.
Now that the Western intervention in Libya has horribly destabilized nearby countries, particularly Mali which is now de-facto partitioned, theWashington Post has looked in the mirror and decided that the answer to this instability, which was obviously caused by Western military intervention, is… another Western military intervention! Who could have guessed?
I will confess that, when I first saw this editorial, I thought the Post’s website had been hacked. Surely the editorial board couldn’t possibly be so glib and reflexive in its interventionism as to recommend yet another American military adventure in a country that we don’t understand and in which we have no real interest. Right? Wrong, apparently.
Expect more online attacks, Anonymous hackers say
The hacking group Anonymous says it will launch online attacks every weekend, following claims it disrupted access to the Home Office website.
Anonymous Twitter messages warned of the attack on 4 April, and said: “Expect a DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) every Saturday on the UK Government sites.”
The Home Office site was inaccessible for several hours on Saturday night.
Officials say no sensitive information was lost, and it is now back to normal.
A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack floods a webserver with so many requests that it can no longer respond to legitimate users.
The Home Office website became inaccessible around 21:00 BST on Saturday, and was patchy from 05:00 on Sunday.
It is not clear whether the protest was against email surveillance or extradition, but it could be both.
One message on Twitter said it was a protest against “draconian surveillance proposals”, but another claimed it was over extradition from the UK to the US.
‘Civil liberties? They’re safe.’ And if you believe that…
Last week’s hoo-hah about proposed extensions of electronic snooping powers for GCHQ, antiterrorism cops and the intelligence services brought memories of that 2005 seminar flooding back. The basic scenario hasn’t changed. Because of technological changes, we are told, criminals and terrorists are using internet technologies on an increasing scale. Some of these technologies (eg Skype) make it difficult for the authorities to monitor these evil communications. So we need sweeping new powers to enable the government to defend us against these baddies. These powers are as yet unspecified but will probably include “deep packet inspection” as a minimum. And, yes, these new measures will be costly and intrusive, but there will be “safeguards”.
The fierce public reaction to these proposals seems to have taken the government by surprise, which suggests ministers have been asleep at the wheel. My hunch is that the proposals were an attempt by the security services to slip one over politicians by selling them to senior officials in the Home Office, who, like their counterparts across the civil service, know sweet FA about technology and are liable to believe 10 implausible assertions before breakfast. In that sense, the Home Office has been “captured” by GCHQ and MI5 much as the health department has been captured by consultancy companies flogging ludicrous ICT projects.
Lib Dems prepared to ‘kill’ Government surveillance plans
Tim Farron said that if the proposed reforms proved to be a “threat to a free and liberal society” his party’s ministers and MPs would not hesitate to intervene and block the new laws.
The Government is proposing to extend so-called “snooping” laws to allow the monitoring of internet-based forms of communication such as Facebook and Skype.
Ministers have insisted that the new laws will simply widen the current scope of powers which allow the police and intelligence agencies to monitor phones, letters and emails to cover new forms of communication.
Yesterday, the Government confirmed that councils, investigating fraud or other criminal offences, may also be able to access the new data with the approval of a judge.
Civil liberties groups fear that the new legislation will be used to dramatically increase the power of the state to monitor the internet.
Officials: Israel ‘Glad’ to See Iran Rejecting US Demands
Israeli officials are reporting in the domestic media that they are pleased to see that Iran has rejected President Obama’s demands, saying that “as far as Israel is concerned, the Iranian response is good.”
President Obama has demanded that Iran abandon the entirety of its civilian nuclear program, and agree to “surrender” all of its nuclear fuel. Iranian officials have termed the demands “irrational.”
The Israeli officials expressed hope that once the talks are held next weekend and quickly fail, President Obama will use it as an excuse for more sanctions, saying “if Obama sees he’s being challenged he will be forced to toughen the sanctions in an unequivocal manner.”
Officially, Israel has insisted that it will accept the Western members of the P5+1′s position at the bargaining table with Iran. Obama’s sudden demands, however, point to Israel taken a proactive approach in recruiting the US to sabotage the talks.
US: ‘Last Chance’ for Iran to Shut Down Civilian Nuclear Program
Making sure that the level of demands that they are issuing are so high that Iran cannot possibly meet them, US officials today said that the upcoming Turkey meeting is Iran’s “last chance” to abandon its entire civilian nuclear program, shut down all enrichment facilities and “surrender” all of their nuclear fuel to the West.
The demands are much broader than anything US officials ever indicated they would seek earlier, but were in keeping with those that Israeli officials have recently been pushing for, particularly the demand that Iran simply give their nuclear fuel to the West as some sort of bribe for not being attacked.
Under Iran’s IAEA safeguards agreement, they would be under no obligation to do any of these things. President Obama has conceded in the past that Iran has a “right” to a peaceful civilian nuclear program, which indeed is the right of every signatory to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, but seems now to have given up this position, at least in practice.
The vast majority of Iran’s uranium is enriched to 4.5 percent, for use in the Russian-built Bushehr power plant. A smaller amount has been further enriched to 20 percent, with the goal of being converted to fuel rods for the US-built Tehran Research Reactor, a source of medical isotopes. 20 percent is technically “highly enriched uranium,” but is far below weapons grade. Experts agree that uranium would need to be enriched to at least 90 percent, and potentially even higher, to make a nuclear weapon.
Eating These 3 Superfoods Can Make You Look and Feel Decades Younger
Superfoods are naturally occurring foods with high concentrations of nutrients, antioxidants, enzymes, amino acids, and other compounds to protect and repair damage to our cells. Some of these superfoods are backed by over 4000 studies, boost metabolism, have more digestible protein than beef and 11 times more calcium than a cup of cow’s milk.
When it comes to superfoods, chlorella, spirulina and barley grass are at the top of the superfood chain. They are what is considered “health saving” superfoods because they can literally reverse disease and advance health beyond the current limitations of conventional produce.
WE SAID WHAT IN VERMONT? (A Reply From Monsanto)
A few facts:
We have not testified on the bill in question, nor have we made any public statements.
A legislative committee held hearings about the labeling effort and invited a number of groups to provide their input. A representative from BIO, the industry trade group, did testify before the committee, and did say that the bill raised constitutional questions that would need legal review. But there was no threat to sue.
Additionally, the House Agriculture Committee heard similar information regarding constitutional questions from the Vermont Attorney General’s office and the Vermont Legislative Council.
So this isn’t as exciting a story as what the various publications have reported.
But it does happen to be the accurate one.
Germany throws weight behind Iran’s nuclear energy program
According to a commentary by the top German diplomat in the Sunday paper Bild am Sonntag, Westerwelle stressed “Iran’s right to have nuclear energy for civilian use.”
He also made reference to his country’s ongoing efforts for a diplomatic solution to the Western dispute over Iran’s nuclear issue.
The German foreign minister also called for the creation of a Middle East free from nuclear arms.
The United States, Israel and some of their allies have repeatedly accused Iran of pursuing non-civilian objectives in its nuclear program. Washington and Tel Aviv have time and again threatened Tehran with the “option” of a military strike against its civilian nuclear facilities.
Iran argues that as a signatory to the NPT and a member of the IAEA, it has the right to develop and acquire nuclear technology for peaceful purposes.
The IAEA has conducted numerous inspections of Iran’s nuclear facilities, but has never found any evidence indicating that Tehran’s civilian nuclear program has been diverted to nuclear weapons production.
Putting Syria into Some Perspective: The Holy Triumvirate
The Holy Triumvirate — The United States, NATO, and the European Union — or an approved segment thereof, can usually get what they want. They wanted Saddam Hussein out, and soon he was swinging from a rope. They wanted the Taliban ousted from power, and, using overwhelming force, that was achieved rather quickly. They wanted Muammar Gaddafi’s rule to come to an end, and before very long he suffered a horrible death. Jean-Bertrand Aristide was democratically elected, but this black man who didn’t know his place was sent into distant exile by the United States and France in 2004. Iraq and Libya were the two most modern, educated and secular states in the Middle East; now all four of these countries could qualify as failed states.
These are some of the examples from the past decade of how the Holy Triumvirate recognizes no higher power and believes, literally, that they can do whatever they want in the world, to whomever they want, for as long as they want, and call it whatever they want, like “humanitarian intervention”. The 19th- and 20th-century colonialist-imperialist mentality is alive and well in the West.
Next on their agenda: the removal of Bashar al-Assad of Syria. As with Gaddafi, the ground is being laid with continual news reports — from CNN to al Jazeera — of Assad’s alleged barbarity, presented as both uncompromising and unprovoked. After months of this media onslaught who can doubt that what’s happening in Syria is yet another of those cherished Arab Spring “popular uprisings” against a “brutal dictator” who must be overthrown? And that the Assad government is overwhelmingly the cause of the violence.
KONY 2012: a “Trojan Horse” To Get Into Schools, Said Invisible Children Cofounder Russell
As the LGBT rights watchdog group Truth Wins Out reported yesterday, in an April 5th, 2012 press release, the Invisible Children nonprofit behind the viral video hit KONY 2012, and its video sequel “Beyond Famous”, appears to have an invisible agenda – which TWO’s Executive Director Wayne Besen calls “stealth evangelism”.
While most of mainstream media continues to uncritically report on the Invisible Children effort — despite a growing body of reporting tying the KONY 2012 authors to the politicized Christian right — at least a few mainstream media venues have picked up on my 7,000-word report that investigates extensive institutional and social ties between Invisible Children and the Washington, D.C. based neo-fundamentalist evangelical network called “The Fellowship” (or “The Family”). As I wrote in the executive summary to my report (cited by Forbes, USA Today, and The Guardian).
The efforts of Invisible Children, and KONY 2012, have been sharply criticized by a wide range of voices, especially Ugandans — who jeered and threw stones at the screen during a screening of KONY 2012 in North-Central Uganda — as well as journalists [1, 2, 3, 4] familiar with conflict in Northern Uganda and the DRC Congo, and academics [1, 2, 3] who study the Northern Uganda region.
According to Rosabell Kagumir, a young Ugandan journalist, the war in Northern Uganda was, in the beginning, “much more about resources and about marginalization of people of Northern Uganda.” Kagumir, who has studied at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, observed that “the situation [shown] in the [KONY 2012] video was [from] five, six years ago” and noted that the video shows Westerners and Americans as rescuers who swoop in and “save” helpless, benighted Africans. “if you are showing me as voiceless, as hopeless… you shouldn’t be telling my story if you don’t believe that I also have the power to change what is going on”, said Kagumir.
In a March 12, 2012 op-ed in Al Jazeera, Dr. Adam Branch, senior research fellow at the Makerere Institute of Social Research, Uganda, and assistant professor of political science at San Diego State University, USA — and author of Displacing Human Rights: War and Intervention in Northern Uganda — called out Invisible Children for,
“the warmongering, the narcissism, the commercialisation, the reductive and one-sided story they tell, their portrayal of Africans as helpless children in need of rescue by white Americans.
As a result of Invisible Children’s irresponsible advocacy, civilians in Uganda and central Africa may have to pay a steep price in their own lives so that a lot of young Americans can feel good about themselves, and a few can make good money. This, of course, is sickening”
Italy eager to finalize $1bln deal with Israel
“I confirm the government’s intention to put the finishing touches on this important contract as soon as possible,” Monti said on Sunday, Reuters reported.
The Italian premier, who is on a visit to Israel, made the remarks after a meeting with his Israeli counterpart Benjamin Netanyahu.
On February 16, Israeli officials said Tel Aviv had reached a “one-billion-dollar preliminary” agreement with Italy to buy 30 M-346 Master training jets from the partly-state-owned Italian defense and aerospace firm Finmeccanica’s Alenia Aermacchi.
The deal would lead to a “leap of quality” in industrial relations between Rome and Tel Aviv, Monti added.
KOSOVO’S “MAFIA STATE”: From Madeleine to Hillary: The US Secretary of State’s “Love Affair” with the KLA
“I believe strongly in Kosovo’s independence and territorial integrity and in its aspiration to become a full partner in the international community and a member of the European Union, and eventually, NATO,”“The United States will continue to support Kosovo and work with the European Union to resolve the outstanding issues that exist between Kosovo and Serbia,”
“Thaci’s visit to the United States “comes amid increased tensions between Pristina and Belgrade over Serbia’s intention to hold municipal elections in the breakaway region on May 6. Clinton said she was “encouraged” with Kosovo’s progress in European integration and economic development.”
“The prime minister told me Kosovo has grown five percent this year. That’s a very strong signal of the kind of progress that Kosovo is making, and we want to help fully integrate, particularly the young people of Kosovo, into Europe and the international community,” she said.
About 90 states, including the United States and most of the EU countries, have recognized Kosovo since it declared its independence from Serbia in 2008. Belgrade and Moscow have refused to recognize Kosovo’s sovereignty.” (Russian Information Agency Novosti, April 4, 2012)
Supported by the United Nations, the US State Department’s project under Madeleine Albright was to spearhead a terrorist organization linked to Albanian and Italian crime syndicates, into the realm of civilian politics. The KLA was chosen by “the international community” to form a government integrated by known criminals. The Democratic Party of Kosovo (Partia Demokratike e Kosovës)headed by former KLA leader Hashim Thaci, also known as “The Snake”, is essentially an outgrowth of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA).
Robbed and ruined by a British court on the orders of the CIA… and we couldn’t tell a soul: The chilling story of how secret justice cost a couple their £5m home – and £700m business
n an exclusive interview, Mrs Bentham told The Mail on Sunday how the CIA decided a civil court case about the Afghan mobile phone company he had helped to establish was too ‘sensitive’ to air in public.
It used draconian legal powers to shut down the case – so destroying not only the Benthams’ livelihood, but any prospect of redress after Mr Bentham alleged the company had been stolen from him.
‘We lost our £5 million flat in Belgravia,’ said Mrs Bentham, 50. ‘We’d had a thriving telecoms business in London employing 23 people, and we lost that too.
The gagging order imposed by a US court meant I couldn’t even tell our friends what was wrong or Stuart could have gone to prison. It was absolutely Kafkaesque.’ Even now, Mr Bentham could be extradited and jailed if he gave an interview.
The Benthams’ nightmare was made possible by a US legal procedure known as the State Secrets Privilege.
Triggering Economic Disaster: the Insiduous Role of the International Monetary Fund (IMF)
We’ve all heard the old adage about adding insult to injury but the IMF has turned it into an art form. The new IMF Director, Christine Lagarde, came to Washington this week begging for yet more billions so the fund can continue propping up insolvent European banks and wrapping developing countries around the globe in debt chains. Lagarde is on a political junket with the aim of raising an additional $500 billion for the IMF, money that will be used for future Eurozone bailouts and other financial crises, or so they say. The speech was delivered 64 years to the day after Truman’s signing of the Marshall Plan (coincidence, surely) as she asked the American taxpayers to search their hearts, take one for the team and dig deep to help foot the bill for Europe.
Except this is not 1948 and Europe is not recovering from the Nazis. It’s 2012 and the Eurozone is falling apart at the seams because it was a failed concept from the beginning. The cracks in the Euro have been showing for years, despite the best efforts of the Goldman Sachs gang to paper over the debt swap deal that helped Greece lie its way into the Eurozone and helped Goldman earn 12 percent of its entire trading and investment revenue in 2001 on a single day. Lagarde didn’t mention this in her speech, but she did assure the crowd that at the IMF “your money is used prudently.”
The only thing that is remarkable about this is that the public is expected to believe it. No one who has any understanding of the IMF’s past or how it operates would expect that these funds to be used in any other way than they always have been: as leverage over the governments that sign their peoples on to debt servitude. In the 1990s the IMF put “stipulations” on their loan package for Brazil that required amendments to the country’s constitution, and then lobbied extensively for those changes. Between the start of IMF involvement in Peru in 1978 and the second round of loans in the 1990s, the appropriately acronymed SAP (structural adjustment program) managed to quadruple illegal coca production by devastating local farmers and leaving them to choose between growing coca or starving. They chose coca.
There are countless other disasters. And countless swindles. Billions of dollars in IMF loans to Russia in the 1990s were diverted straight into the Swiss bank accounts of oligarchs and gangsters. One $4.8 billion dollar loan program administered by the fund in 1998 went in one door of the Russian central bank and straight out the other. The people never saw a ruble of it and were left with unemployment rates, stock market losses and currency devaluation that rivaled the Great Depression.
The fallout from these operations is invariably the same. The people figure out that they’ve been footed with the bill for someone else’s party and the riots begin. We’ve been witnessing this in Europe since the Euro crisis began and it’s flaring up again. This week a 77 year old Greek pensioner shot himself in the head outside parliament because, he said, he didn’t want to have to start picking through trash in order to feed himself. The IMF issued a statement Thursday that it was “deeply saddened” by the incident, but the people of Athens have taken to the streets yet again, with thousands flocking to the site of his death and many scuffling with police.
These types of protests aren’t merely predictable, they’re part of the plan. The IMF and World Bank documents that leaked out in 2001 detailed the four step plan for looting a country, including the “IMF riot” stage. People take to the streets to protest the austerity measures that are tied to the IMF loans, causing foreign capital to flee, governments to go bankrupt, and foreign speculators to pick up the pieces at fire sale prices. The riots happened in Indonesia in 1998. And Bolivia in 2000. And Ecuador and Argentina in 2001. What’s happening in Europe is not an exact analogue, and it’s aimed at centralizing power in the EU in Brussels and the ECB in Frankfurt, but that the IMF has seen the crisis as an excuse to get its foot in Europe’s door as a lender is particularly telling.
This is how the game is played and that’s why the politicians for the most part are happy to go along with it. After they serve their term in the cockpit, they jump out with a golden parachute and leave the people to crash in the flaming debt bubble the politicians have created. This is why Lagarde is likely to get her $500 billion, or something approximating it, including an extra $63 billion that the US is slated to start paying under a new quota agreement. And the band plays on.
Paris claims Syrian demand for halt of violence unacceptable
The French ministry spokesman Bernard Valero claimed on Sunday that it would have to “draw the consequences” of the Syrian demand.
UN Arab League special envoy to Syria Kofi Annan offered a six-point plan to Damascus last month to withdraw its forces from populated cities hit by violence.
On April 5, Annan’s spokesperson Ahmad Fawzi said, “What we expect on April 10 is that the Syrian government will have completed its withdrawal from populated centers.”
The insistence on Syrian withdrawal of forces comes despite overt pledges by the US and some of its Arab allies to persist with supplying logistics and arms to anti-Damascus opposition forces.
However, the Syrian foreign ministry issued a statement earlier on Sunday, declaring that it would not withdraw its forces as it was still awaiting a guarantee from Annan that the foreign-backed gunmen would end all violence.
“To say that Syria will pull back its forces from towns on April 10 is inaccurate, Kofi Annan having not yet presented written guarantees on the acceptance by armed terrorist groups of a halt to all violence,” the Syrian foreign ministry’s statement said.
“Mr. Annan has not submitted written guarantees from the governments of Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey on stopping their funding to terrorist groups,” the statement added.
“Syria will not repeat what happened during the (Arab League) mission, when it committed to the exit of its armed forces from the cities and surrounding areas; then the armed terrorist groups took advantage to arm its members and conduct all forms of terrorism.”
Saudi Arabia to Execute 25 Indonesian Maids for Alleged Crimes
According to a report published by Lebanese Ad-Diyar Arabic daily on Sunday, 22 other Indonesian maids have been acquitted and deported from the kingdom. Meanwhile, the Indonesian government plans to send a delegation to Riyadh for negotiations over the death sentences.
Monsanto’s Roundup Altering the Physical Shape of Amphibians
Monsanto’s Roundup, which is the most popular herbicide used today, has been found to ignite morphological changes in amphibians.
The research, conducted using tadpoles, found that environmentally relevant concentrations of Roundup are enough to cause two species of amphibians to actually change shape. This is the first research to show that herbicides can have such an effect on animals.
Setting up outdoor tanks closely resembling the environment of natural wetlands, study researcher Rick Relyea, University of Pittsburgh professor of biological sciences in the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences and director of Pitt’s Pymatuning Laboratory of Ecology, added 3 tadpoles to each tank and exposed them to a range of Roundup concentrations over a 3 week period. The cages also contained large predators, which naturally cause changes in tadpole morphology. These natural changes include a larger tail, due to chemical emissions.
While it wasn’t surprising to see morphological changes take part due to the naturally emitted chemicals from predators, it was rather shocking to find out that Roundup had the same effects — causing the tails of the tadpoles to grow in size.
What’s more, the combination of the naturally emitted chemicals and Roundup caused the tadpoles’ tails to grow twice as large
New Super-PAC Threatens to Destroy Candidates Who Side With the People Over Wall Street
A new super-PAC with the purpose of destroying elected officials who oppose the interests of the super-PAC’s founders rather than focusing on electing candidates who favor their interests demonstrates how the movement conservatives on the Supreme Court have fundamentally altered our system.
A super-PAC is a political action committee with no limits on personal or corporate contributions and no limits on the amounts it spends. This system of unlimited corporate –and billionaire – spending for and against candidates was enabled by the recent Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United that said corporations are “people” and the use of corporate money to influence elections is “speech.”
Chickens Fed Caffeine, Banned Antibiotics, and Prozac Often Without the Farmer’s Knowledge
It’s no surprise that conventionally factory farmed chickens aren’t fed the best diet. We already knew that they were routinely fed arsenic. In fact, a 2004 study from the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy showed that more than half of store-bought and fast-food chickens contained elevated levels of arsenic. Roughly 2.2 million pounds of it are being used every year to produce 43 billion pounds of poultry. It’s called roxarsone and it’s used to fight parasites and increase growth in chickens.
New research not only confirms use of arsenic, but finds the addition of a frightening elixir of drugs that includes caffeine, banned antibiotics, and even Prozac. Researchers started off testing just for banned antibiotics but went ahead and looked for other substances because it didn’t add to the cost of the test. What they found even surprised them, according to a story in The New York Times.
Are you ready for ubiquitous surveillance by Big Brother?
For the first time ever, it will become technologically and financially feasible for authoritarian governments to record nearly everything that is said or done within their borders — every phone conversation, electronic message, social media interaction, the movements of nearly every person and vehicle, and video from every street corner. Governments with a history of using all of the tools at their disposal to track and monitor their citizens will undoubtedly make full use of this capability once it becomes available.
So says Recording Everything: Digital Storage as an Enabler of Authoritarian Governments, a Brookings report.
“Plummeting digital storage costs will soon make it possible for authoritarian regimes to not only monitor known dissidents, but to also store the complete set of digital data associated with everyone within their borders,” the report says. “These enormous databases of captured information will create what amounts to a surveillance time machine, enabling state security services to retroactively eavesdrop on people in the months and years before they were designated as surveillance targets. This will fundamentally change the dynamics of dissent, insurgency and revolution.”
Case in point: When Moammar Gadhafi’s forces lost control of Tripoli, it was found that equipment enabled Libya’s state security apparatus to capture and archive “30 to 40 million minutes” of telephone conversations every month and to regularly read e-mails exchanged among activists.
The information identifying the location of each of one million people to that accuracy at 5-minute intervals, 24 hours a day for a full year could easily be stored in 1,000 gigabytes, which would cost slightly over $50 at today’s prices, the report says. For 50 million people, the cost would be under $3000.
The audio for all of the telephone calls made by a single person over the course of one year could be stored using roughly 3.3 gigabytes. The information identifying the location of each of one million people to that accuracy at 5-minute intervals, 24 hours a day for a full year could easily be stored in 1,000 gigabytes, which would cost slightly over $50 at today’s prices. For 50 million people, the cost would be under $3000. On a per capita basis, the cost to store all phone calls will fall from about 17 cents per person per year today to under 2 cents in 2015.
CIA Home Invasion: Smart TVs and the ‘Internet of Things
‘Transformational’ is an overused word, but I do believe it properly applies to these technologies.
Particularly to their effect on clandestine tradecraft. Items of interest will be located, identified, monitored, and remotely controlled through technologies such as radio-frequency identification, sensor networks, tiny embedded servers, and energy harvesters – all connected to the next-generation internet using abundant, low-cost, and high-power computing.
He also added, “the latter now going to cloud computing, in many areas greater and greater supercomputing, and, ultimately heading to quantum computing.”
‘War on Drugs’ Has Failed, say Latin American Leaders
A historic meeting of Latin America’s leaders, to be attended by Barack Obama, will hear serving heads of state admit that the war on drugs has been a failure and that alternatives to prohibition must now be found.
The Summit of the Americas, to be held in Cartagena, Colombia is being seen by foreign policy experts as a watershed moment in the redrafting of global drugs policy in favour of a more nuanced and liberalised approach.
