Another good reason that the representative fictional American citizen of our broken times is the zombie.

If there is one thing we can take away from the news of recent weeks it is this: the modern American surveillance state is not really the stuff of paranoid fantasies; it has arrived.

An unusual groundswell of support from House Republicans for a Massachusetts liberal’s measure is a stark example of changing sentiments on Afghanistan.

Es ist schlimm genug, wenn die Bundesregierung uns bespitzelt. Muss sie aber darüber hinaus noch unsere Intelligenz beleidigen?

Die FDP-geführten Justiz- und Wirtschafts-Ministerien haben heute ein “Krisengespäch zur Sicherheit von Daten deutscher Nutzer in den USA” veranstaltet. Justizministerin Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger und Wirtschaftsminister Philipp Rösler wollten von Google, Microsoft, eco und Bitkom wissen, was PRISM ist und wer davon betroffen ist. Das wenig überraschende Ergebnis:

Ah, Congress.

ust consider what she‘s saying: as a member of Congress, she had no idea how invasive and vast the NSA‘s surveillance activities are. Sen. Jon Tester, who is a member of the Homeland Security Committee, said the same thing, telling MSNBC about the disclosures that „I don‘t see how that compromises the security of this country whatsoever“ and adding: „quite frankly, it helps people like me become aware of a situation that I wasn‘t aware of before because I don‘t sit on that Intelligence Committee.“

People ask the M5S what it has done in the last few months. It has put forward new laws for the SMEs, laws to abolish public financing of the newspapers and the parties. It has pushed forward the initiative to get rid of the „Porcellum” electoral law, the only voice in Parliament. It has also taken many other initiatives connected to our manifesto, like pushing for the withdrawal of our troops from Afghanistan. And it has refused to accept the reimbursement of election expenses for 42 million euro, and it has halved the income of the parliamentarians to bring it to about 350,000 euro a month. Any proposals for laws put forward by the M5S are ignored or turned down. The M5S is law-abiding, peaceful, inspired by Ghandi. What did they expect? That we would set fire to Parliament?

Die menschliche Erbsubstanz ist ein „Produkt der Natur“, auf das keine Patente erteilt werden können – so lautet die Grundsatzentscheidung des Obersten Gerichtshofs der USA. Anlass war der Versuch eines Pharmaunternehmens, sich Patente auf Brustkrebs-Gene zu sichern.

Der geplante Handelspakt zwischen den USA und der Europäischen Union sorgt schon vor Beginn der offiziellen Gespräche für Streit – innerhalb der EU-Staaten und in der Bundesregierung.

Paris, which is trying to shield French-language culture from Hollywood, has refused to join the 26 other EU governments that want talks to start in July, unless movies and digital media are left out of any deal.

The European Union will try to overcome French resistance to free-trade talks with the United States on Friday and keep alive plans for a deal that could boost their struggling economies by dramatically increasing transatlantic business.

In Südkorea steht ex-Geheimdienstleiter Won Sei-hoon unter der Anklage mittels im Internet operierender Agenten die Präsidentenwahl 2012 zugunsten der heutigen Präsidentin Park Geun-hye beeinflusst zu haben.

Pentagon lawyers said the AUMF might allow the U.S. to enter Syria, on the grounds that the extremist al-Nusra Front there is an “associated force” of al-Qaeda.

The sweeping law that allows the president to wage an unlimited global war on terror would be repealed under a bill set to be offered this week.

The repeal measure, crafted by Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), would end the 2001 Authorization to Use MIlitary Force, or AUMF, in 2015, as the U.S. finally exits the war in Afghanistan.

A senior member of the House Intelligence committee announced on Monday that he plans to introduce a bill to repeal the Authorization of Military Force (AUMF) Congress passed in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

…

The government has been passing around some „talking points“ to politicians and the press trying to spin the NSA surveillance story. We‘ve got the talking points about scooping up business records (i.e., all data on all phone calls) and on the internet program known as PRISM. Both are embedded below. Let‘s dig in on a few of the points, starting with the business records/FISA issue:

The firm that formerly employed both the director of national intelligence and the NSA whistleblower merits closer scrutiny

Regling told Germany‘s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in an interview to appear on Friday that the so-called troika of the IMF, European Central Bank and European Commission, which has come to the rescue of several euro zone states, should be broken up eventually.

(23.05.) He was speaking at an event hosted by UCD and the Institute of Bankers in Dublin where he added that the ESM was feasible and workable and created the right incentives.

Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft (MSFT) and other software or Internet security companies have been aware that this type of early alert allowed the U.S. to exploit vulnerabilities in software sold to foreign governments, according to two U.S. officials.

„This week‘s revelations have proven [the internet] … is very far from a civilian place,“ he said. „The internet is being transformed into a military-occupied state.“

Communications between husbands and wives, business partners and even the bureaucracy and the government are all under surveillance, according to Assange.

Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Calif.) said lawmakers learned „significantly more“ about the spy programs at the National Security Agency (NSA) during a briefing on Tuesday with counterterrorism officials.

„What we learned in there,“ Sanchez said, „is significantly more than what is out in the media today.“

The Big Picture points out that the NSA was already installing backdoors in the Windows operating system back in 1999, and links to a story detailing a DEA/NSA collaboration, which supposedly installed a domestic „call tracing program“ at AT&T and Verizon in December of 2000 and which had been tracking calls from the US to various countries since the 1990‘s.

Suddenly, it feels like 2000 again. Back then, surveillance programs like Carnivore, Echelon, and Total Information Awareness helped spark a surge in electronic privacy awareness. Now a decade later, the recent discovery of programs like PRISM, Boundless Informant, and FISA orders are catalyzing renewed concern.

In a secret court in Washington, Yahoo’s top lawyers made their case. The government had sought help in spying on certain foreign users, without a warrant, and Yahoo had refused, saying the broad requests were unconstitutional.

The judges disagreed. That left Yahoo two choices: Hand over the data or break the law.

Nine agents from the National Intelligence Service of South Korea wrote more than 1,700 postings on the Internet in a psychological warfare campaign against North Korea last year, using some of them to attack domestic opposition parties and their candidates ahead of South Korea’s presidential election in December, state prosecutors said on Friday.

Das Bundeswirtschaftsministerium lädt am Freitag, 14. Juni 2013 ab 10:00 Uhr Vertreter von Internetunternehmen, Verbände der Internetbranche sowie Verbraucherschützer zu einem Gespräch ein. Hierbei geht es um die Datensicherheit im Zusammenhang mit der aktuellen Diskussion über den Verdacht von Überwachungsmaßnahmen in den USA.

Zu Gast sind Vertreter von Google, Microsoft, eco und Bitkom, die gemeinsam mit Bundesjustizministerin Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, Bundeswirtschaftsminister Philipp Rösler sowie dem Parlamentarischem Staatssekretär Hans-Joachim Otto klären sollen, ob und in welchem Umfang ein Zugriff von US-amerikanischer Seite auf Daten deutscher und europäischer Nutzer erfolgt ist und noch erfolgt.

Nach einer möglichen Reaktion des Bündnisses auf die jüngsten Meldungen über einen C-Waffen-Einsatz befragt, gab Rasmussen zu verstehen, dass die Nato weder eine Flugverbotszone noch andere ähnliche Maßnahmen plane.

„Die Angaben über einen C-Waffen-Einsatz durch Baschar al-Assad sind auf die gleiche Weise gefälscht wie seinerzeit Lügen über Massenvernichtungswaffen bei Hussein verbreitet wurden“, twitterte der Außenpolitiker am Freitag. „Obama geht den Weg von George Bush.“

(28.08.2011) Der Iraker Rafed Aljanabi erzählte dem BND Lügen über Massenvernichtungswaffen. Die USA benutzten die ungeprüften Aussagen, um den Krieg zu rechtfertigen.

(16.12.2012) Der BND warnt vor der Gefahr durch syrische Chemiewaffen. Laut einer Einschätzung des Geheimdienstes, die dem SPIEGEL vorliegt, könnte die Armee ihr Arsenal bei einem Befehl Assads innerhalb weniger Stunden zum Einsatz bringen. Insgesamt soll das Regime über 1000 Tonnen C-Waffen verfügen.

Following a deliberative review, our intelligence community assesses that the Assad regime has used chemical weapons, including the nerve agent sarin, on a small scale against the opposition multiple times in the last year. (…)

The body of information used to make this intelligence assessment includes reporting regarding Syrian officials planning and executing regime chemical weapons attacks;

During a cybersecurity hearing yesterday in the Senate, NSA boss General Keith Alexander was asked a bunch of questions about the NSA surveillance scandal. At one point, he claimed that he didn‘t have an exact number of cases in which the dragnet of information collected had stopped terrorist activity, but that it was „dozens“ and that he would provide more info in a classified session (held today). However, Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall — both on the Senate Intelligence Committee, and both paying close attention to these issues — have put out a statement today saying that they‘ve seen no evidence of this and they‘d like General Alexander to clarify.

According to U.S. State Department cable of February 2010, released by Wikileaks in 2011, the FBI has investigated another suspect, Mohammed al-Mansoori, who had associated with three Qatari citizens who had flown from Washington to London on the eve of the attacks, after allegedly surveying the World Trade Center and the White House. U.S. law enforcement officials said that the information about the four men was „just one of many leads that were thoroughly investigated at the time and never led to terrorism charges“. An official added, however, that the three Qatari citizens have never been questioned by the FBI. Eleanor Hill, the former staff director for the congressional joint inquiry on the September 11 attacks, said the cable reinforces questions about the thoroughness of the FBI‘s investigation. She also said that the inquiry concluded that the hijackers had a support network that helped them in different ways. The three Qatari men were booked to fly from Los Angeles to Washington on Sept. 10, 2001, on the same plane that was hijacked and piloted into the Pentagon on the following day, but did instead fly from Los Angeles to Qatar, via London. While the cable states that Mansoori would be currently under investigation, U.S. law enforcement officials said that was no active investigation of him or of the Qatari citizens mentioned in the cable.

(24.09.2002) The supervisor told the committee staff he was „trying to get people at FBI headquarters ‚spun up‘ because he was trying to make sure that Moussaoui ‚did not take control of a plane and fly it into the World Trade Center,'“ Hill testified.

“Before 9/11, there was an individual by the name of Khalid al- Mihdhar who came to be one of the principle hijackers,” Mueller began. “He was being tracked by the intelligence agencies in the Far East. They lost track of him.”

“At the same time, the intelligence agencies had identified an Al Qaeda safe house in Yemen,” he continued. “They understood that that Al Qaeda safe house had a telephone number, but they could not know who was calling into that particular – that particular safe house.”