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Heb-Don’t Believe the Hype About France’s Charlie Hebdo Rally by Kait Bolongaro
France’s record-breaking rally to demonstrate national unity after the Charlie Hebdo attacks masked a disturbing reality about divisions that could get much worse. WhoWhatWhy’s Kait Bolongaro reports from Paris.
WHO
GCHQ Captured Emails Of Journalists From Top International Media
New revelations from the “Snowden Documents” detail a de facto bulk data collection program by the U.K.’s GCHQ spy agency—this time revealing the wholesale targeting of the media and journalists. The Guardian reports: “Emails from the BBC, Reuters, the Guardian, the New York Times, Le Monde, the Sun, NBC and the Washington Post were saved by GCHQ and shared on the agency’s intranet as part of a test exercise by the signals intelligence agency.” The so-called “exercise” by GCHQ “harvested” 70,000 emails in “less than 10 minutes on one day in November 2008.” The Snowden Documents also show that a “GCHQ information security assessment listed ‘investigative journalists’ as a threat in a hierarchy alongside terrorists or hackers.”
Guantanamo Diary By Mohamedou Ould Slahi – Book Review: A Sobering, Chilling Read
A detainee who has been held without charge for over 13 years is the first prisoner to give a detailed, written account of his Kafkaesque journey into America’s legal black hole. In fact, Mr. Slahi first went to Afghanistan to join Al Qaeda’s battle against the communist-led government—a bitter irony that typifies the dark, complicated role the U.S. has played in Afghanistan since it began stoking Islamic fighters there in 1979. That trip haunted him years later when he was arrested in his home country of Mauritania in 2002, then rendered to Jordan and onto Afghanistan … until finally being dropped into the legal limbo and, according to his account, brutal torture routine of Gitmo.
Every Presidential Candidate Should Pledge Release of Missing 9/11 Pages
In something of a surprise, the decidedly neo-conservative folks at Commentary have called for the declassification of the infamously redacted 28 pages of the ‘9/11 Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities’ report. It is surprising because the pages are said to detail Saudi involvement in 9/11 and the Bush Family has been famously close to the Saudi royal family and government. Commentary asserts that whatever embarrassment George W. Bush was trying to hide is now outweighed by the need for transparency—a transparency long since promised by President Obama, but one he has rarely delivered.
WHAT
New Police Radars Can ‘See’ Inside Homes
While everyone was focused on the excessive power of the NSA to peer into our lives, 50 U.S. law enforcement agencies began using the handheld RANGE-R radar device that allows them to effectively see into homes without a warrant … or those inside ever knowing. This report by USA Today includes a nifty video showing how the FBI and U.S. Marshals, among others, simply put the device against an exterior wall to track the movement of the people inside.
More Americans Work for Solar Companies than for Coal Mining
The solar economy is picking up steam—that’s according to a new report by The Solar Foundation. The industry group says that “more than 173,000 people had solar-related jobs as of last year” versus the 93,000 workers employed by the politically powerful coal industry. Another recent report showed that a new solar project comes online every three minutes, buttressing claims by the Solar Foundation that solar-related jobs have grown “by 20% or more in each of the last two years.” Here comes the sun!
WHY
When Money Is a Weapon: How the Treasury Got Into the Spy Game
Why did the Obama Administration tap David Cohen, the Treasury Undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, to become the next deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency? Because finance is being “weaponized” as the U.S. ramps up its effort to choke off revenue streams to terrorists, clamp down harder on countries targeted by sanctions and build a financial warfare bureaucracy with “more than 700 civil service personnel dealing with terrorist and financial intelligence.” According to Bloomberg, “The U.S. government has vastly expanded its collection and use of financial intelligence, bolstered by a series of post-9/11 laws and executive orders that have given the Treasury Department a leading role in financial intelligence and sanctions.”
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