Daily Archives: 18. Juni 2013


18.06.2013 - 22:55 [ informationliberation ]

Public Enemy Number One: The Public

Until then the “New Deal social contract” had worked fairly well (at least for middle class whites): We’ll give you a suburban home, a TV, a new car every five years, and a secure union job with benefits and periodic pay raises. In return, you’ll show up for work in between contract renewal times and let us manage the factories as we see fit without bothering your pretty little heads about it. And you’ll let us manage the world in the interests of GE, GM and United Fruit Company, and look the other way when we install genocidal fascist regimes or fund death squads in Indonesia, Nigeria and Latin America.

18.06.2013 - 19:06 [ Activist Post ]

Community Gardening: The Plot Against Hunger

Not only do community gardens draw people to together from various backgrounds regarding their age, race, culture and social class, they also grow more than food – the involvement in social community usually leads to long term relationships among people that might not ordinarily ‘network.’ The seeds of change are planted in the ground, but also through fostering new generations of mindful individuals. Like the guerrilla gardener, Ron Finley of LA says, “if children plant kale, they eat kale.”

18.06.2013 - 18:40 [ Popular Resistance ]

Apathy: The Ultimate Enemy

The Ultimate Enemy We Must Take On & Out

As the unending back-to-back scandals unfold, from the arrest and prosecution of courageous truth-tellers (aka whistleblowers), to the illegal wiretapping of all Americans, torture, indefinite detentions, the groping and handling of travelers, utilizing the IRS as the government’s hit-men and thugs … I am asked to provide statements, interpretations and/ or explanations as to what it is we are facing as a nation today.

18.06.2013 - 18:29 [ Global Research ]

Washington’s Battle Over Syrian Foreign Policy: Will Hawks Or Doves Prevail?

Like Putin’s policy in Russia, Obama’s Syrian policy is being tugged strenuously in Washington, both by hawks and by doves. On June 13, Obama handed two limited but ominous victories to the hawks: a finding of fact that the troops of Syria’s president Bashar al-Assad “have used chemical weapons [i.e. sarin] against rebel forces,” and a consequent decision “to begin supplying the rebels for the first time with small arms and ammunition.”

18.06.2013 - 16:05 [ Radio Utopie ]

U.S.-Texte über “Vereinigte Staaten von Europa” aus dem 18. und 19. Jahrhundert

Morgen, am 19. Mai des Jahres 2013, besucht der Präsident der Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika, Barack Obama, die Hauptstadt der Berliner Republik. In vielen Staaten auf den Kontinenten Europa, Afrika, Asien oder Amerika, ob Griechenland, Türkei, Brasilien oder Syrien, sind Krisen oder gar Krieg ausgebrochen. In den Staaten des “Alten Europa”, wie der damalige Verteidigungsminister der U.S.A. Donald Rumsfeld in 2003 Deutschland und Frankreich angesichts ihrer Weigerung sich an der zweiten Invasion in Asien zu beteiligen bezeichnete, werden seit wenigen Jahren urplötzlich Demokratie, Souveränität und Verfassung seitens Regierungen, etablierten Parteien und Bankern gemeinsam, koordiniert, offen und so dreist in Frage gestellt, als ob ein kollektiver Staatsstreich gegen Dutzende von Demokratien das Selbstverständlichste der Welt sei und dieses Vorhaben außerdem schon seit langem bekannt.

Nun, zumindest Letzterem kann nicht in Gänze widersprochen werden.

18.06.2013 - 14:55 [ ROARMAG ]

Angela Merkel’s appalling hypocrisy on Turkey

That’s funny. I was in Frankfurt in May last year for the Blockupy actions. I very clearly remember being detained along with three friends and fellow PhD researchers as we walked through the city center to pick up another friend from the station. Our passports were taken away, and our freedom to demonstrate and our freedom of speech temporarily suspended as police threatened us with arrest and imprisonment if we were spotted within the city again. Not for throwing stones or fire-bombing riot police; not even for desecrating shop windows or threatening to decapitate the director of the ECB — no, simply for existing at the wrong place at the wrong time. You read that right.

18.06.2013 - 14:41 [ Datacenter Dynamics ]

SunGard takes space at CoreSite‘s Boston data center

SunGard deployed 10,000 sq ft of capacity as a turnkey data center solution for its customers. Its customers stand to benefit from direct connections to multiple networks, including connections to sub-sea cable assets.

18.06.2013 - 14:39 [ This Day Live ]

Infrastructure, Not Mobile Number Portability

I still recall my excitement about five years ago, when my organisation just started consulting for a firm that was in the process of laying massive under-sea fiber-optic cables from Europe to the shores of Lagos. The company was striving to facilitate and enrich communication between Nigeria and the rest of the world by means of broadband internet. Alongside my colleagues, we dreamed of the future which this phenomenal development portended for Nigeria.

18.06.2013 - 14:36 [ stuff.co.nz ]

Undersea cable plan stirs again

A joint plan by Telecom, Vodafone and Australia‘s Telstra to lay a new fibre-optic sub-sea cable between New Zealand and Australia has taken a step forward.

18.06.2013 - 14:31 [ allAfrica ]

Rwandatel Sold

Moreover, Liquid Telecom‘s large fibre connection that runs through the region to South Africa will also rescue regional countries of lack of connection due to problems with the sea cable that goes through Egypt.

18.06.2013 - 13:33 [ Wikipedia ]

Hadschi Mohammed Mohaqiq

Ende 2011 gründete Mohaqiq zusammen mit Ahmad Zia Massoud und Raschid Dostum die Nationale Allianz, die gegen eine Rückkehr der Taliban an die Macht kämpft. Die Allianz plant mit einem eigenen Kandidaten bei der Präsidentschaftswahl in Afghanistan 2014 anzutreten.

18.06.2013 - 13:30 [ Press TV ]

US senator blocks Afghan aid, citing secret CIA payments to Karzai

These officials say in a bid to maintain influence over President Karzai’s inner circle and “stabilize” the Afghan government, the CIA has for more than a decade financed a “slush fund used to pay off warlords, politicians, lawmakers and other powerful Afghans” upon whom Karzai depends for support, the report adds.

18.06.2013 - 11:41 [ Beppe Grillo´s Blog ]

La Stampa is disgusting

The following members of the Senate: Lorenzo Battista, Alessandra Bencini, Rosetta Blundo, Elisa Bulgarelli, Francesco Campanella, Monica Casaletto, Cristina De Pietro, Paola De Pin, Serenella Fucksia, Mario Giarrusso, Barbara Lezzi, Michela Montevecchi, and Ivana Simeoni personally deny that they are „parliamentarians who have decided to go …“. It’s obvious that the media campaign aiming to undermine the foundations of the MoVement for whom there is only space for arid polemics rather than for providing information regarding the great work they are doing in Parliament.

18.06.2013 - 11:34 [ Guardian ]

12 O‘Clock Boys: the documentary for those suffering The Wire withdrawal

For viewers of The Wire, this is a familiar world: stoops silhouetted in the glare of orange sunsets, ominous-looking rowhouses whose boarded-up windows loom over shattered streets and scrubland like blinded eyes, the people beneath them speaking in thick accents and enjoyably inventive slang. Danger is ever-present: we hear of two deaths and the injury of a six-year-old child during the two-year period the film covers, while the police pursue the bikers by helicopter for fear of causing disastrous collisions.

18.06.2013 - 10:46 [ Andrey Hunko, Mitglied des Bundestages ]

Betreff: „Strategische Fernmeldeaufklärung“ durch Geheimdienste des Bundes BT-Drucksache 17/9305 – Hier: Antwortteil zur Veröffentlichung als Bundestags-Drucksache

(11.5.2012) 16. An welchem Ort stehen die vom BND genutzten Informationssysteme bzw. die zur „strategischen Fernmeldeaufklärung“ genutzte Hardware?

a) Inwieweit greifen Bundesbehörden zur Überwachung von Telekommunikation auf den Verkehr über den Frankfurter Netzknoten DE-CIX zu?

b) Inwieweit arbeiten Bundesbehörden zur „strategischen Fernmeldeaufklärung“ auch mit den kommerziellen Telekommunikationsprovidern zusammen?

(Antwort der Bundesregierung) Zu 16.
Einzelheiten zu den technischen Fähigkeiten des BND können in diesem Zusammenhang nicht öffentlich dargestellt werden. Es wird wiederum auf Fähigkeiten, Methoden und Verfahren der strategischen Fernmeldeaufklärung eingegangen. Gleichzeitig werden operative Details beschrieben, deren Offenlegung negative Folgen für den BND haben könnte. Im Ergebnis würde dadurch die Funktionsfähigkeit der Sicherheitsbehörde und mithin die Sicherheit der Bundesrepublik Deutschland beeinträchtigt. Gleichwohl wird die Bundesregierung nach gründlicher Abwägung dem Informationsrecht des Parlaments unter Wahrung berechtigter Geheimhaltungsinteressen nachkommen.

Die Informationen werden als „Geheim“ eingestuft und dem Deutschen Bundestag zur Einsichtnahme übermittelt.

18.06.2013 - 10:40 [ Techdirt ]

Is Encryption Effective Against Snooping? German Government Says No, Snowden Says Yes

Here‘s one view, from Germany. Politicians from the Die Linke party posed a number of questions to their government on the subject of the latter‘s use of surveillance techniques (original PDF in German.) Most of the answers were the kind of thing you might expect — „we can‘t possibly go into details“ etc. etc. — but one was surprising.

18.06.2013 - 08:09 [ Electronic Frontier Foundation ]

How Dozens of Companies Know You‘re Reading About Those NSA Leaks

As news websites around the globe are publishing story after story about dragnet surveillance, these news sites all have one thing in common: when you visit these websites, your personal information is broadcast to dozens of companies, many of which have the ability to track your surfing habits, and many of which are subject to government data requests.
How Does This Happen?

18.06.2013 - 08:07 [ White House ]

Joint Statement by the Presidents of the United States of America and the Russian Federation on a New Field of Cooperation in Confidence Building

We, the Presidents of the United States of America and the Russian Federation, recognize the unprecedented progress in the use of Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs), the new capacity they create for the economies and societies of our countries, and the increasing interdependence of the modern world.

We recognize that threats to or in the use of ICTs include political-military and criminal threats, as well as threats of a terrorist nature, and are some of the most serious national and international security challenges we face in the 21st Century.