(April 16, 2008)
„We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq,“ Ma‘ariv quoted the former prime minister as saying. He reportedly added that these events „swung American public opinion in our favor.“
Netanyahu reportedly made the comments during a conference at Bar-Ilan University on the division of Jerusalem as part of a peace deal with the Palestinians.
(12. September 2001)
Asked tonight what the attack meant for relations between the United States and Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, the former prime minister, replied, “It‘s very good.“ Then he edited himself: “Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy.“ He predicted that the attack would “strengthen the bond between our two peoples, because we‘ve experienced terror over so many decades, but the United States has now experienced a massive hemorrhaging of terror.“
(Devember 21, 2023)
That might have been why, when President Biden and Israeli officials said that Oct. 7 was Israel’s Sept. 11, intending the comparison as a rallying cry for self-defense, their words seemed to many instead a cruel provocation of trauma. Were they kidding? The response to Sept. 11 was catastrophic for the Arab and Muslim world and, eventually, terrible for the United States. A similar response to Oct. 7 would be terrible for the Israeli people, and a total reinvention of hell for the Palestinians. We know this because we are Americans. In the Israelis, we saw our own leaders: shocked victims for a day, destroyers of worlds every day thereafter.
There is no guarantee that history will eventually vindicate the positions of protesters. But it does seem safe to assume that the positions, not the protests, are what will be remembered.
Congress had been up against a Friday deadline after authority for Section 702 was extended through that date as part of the National Defense Authorization Act.
After its midnight deadline, the Senate voted early Saturday to reauthorize a key U.S. surveillance law after divisions over whether the FBI should be restricted from using the program to search for Americans’ data nearly forced the statute to lapse.
The legislation approved 60-34 with bipartisan support would extend for two years the program known as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
(26.03.2024)
Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president in 2024, sat down for an interview with Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom about the ongoing military invasion — and warned that the world was growing tired of the conflict.
„You have to finish up your war. You have to finish it up. You’ve got to get it done,“ he told the newspaper.
He continued, „We’ve got to get to peace. You can’t have this going on, and I will say Israel has to be very careful because you are losing a lot of the world. You are losing a lot of support.“
(27.03.2024)
Although Americans rate Biden‘s handling of the conflict poorly, his overall job approval rating is no lower now than before the conflict began. The issue does not register highly when Americans are asked to name the most important problem facing the U.S. Nor does it rank highly when Americans rate each of several international issues as critical threats to U.S. vital interests.
1. Do you approve or disapprove of the way Joe Biden is handling his job as president?
Strongly approve 18
Somewhat approve 21
Somewhat disapprove 16
Strongly disapprove 43
2. Some members of Congress recently proposed the Stop Politicians Profiting from War Act. This bill would ban members of Congress, their spouses, and dependents from trading stocks or having any financial interests in companies that have contracts with the Department of Defense.
Do you support or oppose this proposal?
Strongly support 61
Somewhat support 21
Somewhat oppose 7
Strongly oppose 3
Don‘t know 8
(…)
5. Do you support or oppose the U.S. calling for a permanent ceasefire and a de-escalation of violence in Gaza?
Strongly support 37
Somewhat support 30
Somewhat oppose 12
Strongly oppose 10
Don‘t know 11
(27.02.2024)
A new survey from Data for Progress asked likely U.S. voters about various foreign policy issues, particularly related to the ongoing war in Gaza.
When asked if they approve or disapprove of the way Joe Biden is handling the Israel-Palestine conflict, voters disapprove by a -21-point margin, with 57% disapproving and 36% approving. This margin has increased since Data for Progress started polling this question in early November, with approval highest in late November after the last temporary ceasefire began.
(03.02.2024)
(31.12.2023)
President Joe Biden once again bypassed Congress to approve an emergency weapons sale to Israel, despite growing domestic and international outrage over Israel’s mass killing of more than 21,000 people in Gaza, mostly women and children, and including hundreds of UN workers, journalists and medical personnel.
[NOTE: Yesterday, CAIR welcomed the launch of a case by South Africa in the United Nations’ top court accusing Israel of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.]
Now, a new poll by the New York Times/ Siena College has found that nearly 75 percent of a sample of young voters aged between 18 and 29 disapprove of how the Democrat is handling the conflict. The same proportion believe Israel isn‘t doing enough to prevent civilian casualties in Gaza and 44 percent said Israel should end its military campaign even if Hamas is not defeated, to 39 percent who said it should continue.
It also found that 27 percent of young people sympathize with Israel while 47 percent sympathize with Palestinians.
A Quinnipiac University poll released on Wednesday indicates that two months after Hamas‘s October 7 attack on Israel, American voters are divided on whether the United States should send more military aid to Israel, with 45 percent of respondents saying yes compared to 46 percent who are opposed.
Young voters who have shifted away from Biden are not necessarily voting for Trump, who is also staunchly pro-Israel and opposes student loan relief. A November New York Times/Siena College poll found that 34 percent of young voters plan to back Robert F. Kennedy Jr, an independent. That poll surveyed 3,662 registered voters across six battleground states from October 22 to November 3.
As recently as this summer, a poll with Donald J. Trump leading among young voters would have been eye-popping.
Now, it’s increasingly familiar — and our new New York Times/Siena College national survey released Tuesday morning is no exception.
For the first time, Mr. Trump leads President Biden among young voters in a Times/Siena national survey, 49 percent to 43 percent. It’s enough to give him a narrow 46-44 lead among registered voters overall.
The survey showed 44% of all those surveyed said Israel should stop its military campaign to protect against civilian casualties, while 39% said Israel should continue to fight despite the rising death toll of Palestinian civilians. But 48% of all voters surveyed said they believed Israel was not taking enough precautions to avoid civilian casualties in Gaza.
(December 5, 2023)
Sixty-one percent of likely voters, including a majority of Democrats (76%) and Independents (57%) and a plurality of Republicans (49%), support the U.S. calling for a permanent ceasefire and a de-escalation of violence in Gaza.
After voters are presented with arguments for and against a permanent ceasefire, a majority of them still support the U.S. calling for a permanent ceasefire by an +18-point margin.
(November 17, 2023)
Already, there are signs that the party is fracturing over Israel. According to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll, about three-quarters of Democrats want a cease-fire, but few in the Democratic establishment share their views. Last week, in a rare gesture of defiance, more than 100 congressional staffers walked out to demand that their bosses back a cease-fire. More than 500 alumni of Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign and Democratic Party staff members have signed a letter imploring Biden to call for a cease-fire, saying, “If you fail to act swiftly, your legacy will be complicity in the face of genocide.”
(December 7, 2023)
In recent days, vice president Kamala Harris – remember her? – has declared that “Israel must do more to protect innocent civilians”, while defence secretary Lloyd Austin delivered the assessment that Israel risks “strategic defeat” unless it protects Palestinians in Gaza.
Talk about too little too late, or perhaps a more appropriate metaphor would be running with the hare and hunting with the hounds.
Sen. Mike Lee, a Utah Republican, said that during his 13 years on the committee, he’d pressed multiple FBI directors about civil liberties violations associated with the surveillance program and had repeatedly been given false reassurances about the reforms being put in place.
“Every darn one of them has told me the same thing: ‘Don’t worry about it, we’ve got this taken care of, we’ve got new procedures, it’s going to be different now,’” Lee said. “It’s never different. You haven’t changed.”
(05.12.2023)
FBI Director Christopher Wray at a Tuesday hearing gave an impassioned pitch for Congress to reauthorize warrantless surveillance powers for the intelligence community without the need to secure a court’s blessing to review information on Americans swept up in the process.
Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is set to expire at the end of the year unless it is reauthorized by Congress, threatening to topple a program that allows the U.S. government to monitor the communications of foreign nationals located abroad.
(December 6, 2023)
The FBI director is pushing senators on reauthorizing Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which is set to expire at the end of this year. The law enables the US government to obtain intelligence by targeting non-Americans overseas who are using US-based communications services.
(August 10, 2023)
On Aug. 28, 1963, about 250,000 people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his historic “I Have a Dream” speech advocating for economic and civil rights for Black Americans.
For democracy to function, the public must know that elections, and not violence, will decide who takes public office. That is why the United States has granted Secret Service protection to all major Presidential candidates.
Last Wednesday, for the second time this election season, an intruder entered Robert F. Kennedy Jr.‘s home in Los Angeles. He had written hundreds of emails to the campaign, which were included in its application for Secret Service protection, one of which made mention of a „bullet in [Mr. Kennedy‘s] brain.“ A month earlier, a man had showed up to one of Mr. Kennedy‘s campaign events carrying loaded weapons and posing as a U.S. Marshal.
In both cases, the individuals were apprehended by Mr. Kennedy‘s private security detail and turned over to the police. But the incidents demonstrate the necessity for Secret Service protection for Mr. Kennedy. Withholding protection puts him and members of the public who attend campaign events at risk. Furthermore, it would be incredibly destabilizing for our nation if another Kennedy came to harm in the course of Presidential politics.
SIGN HERE security.kennedy24.com
(November 02, 2023)
An overwhelming majority of voters (84 percent) are either very concerned (43 percent) or somewhat concerned (41 percent) that the United States will be drawn into a military conflict in the Middle East, according to a Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pea-ack) University national poll of registered voters released today. (…)
Half of voters (50 percent) approve of the way Israel is responding to the October 7th Hamas terrorist attack, while 35 percent disapprove, and 15 percent did not offer an opinion. (…)
A slight majority of voters (51 percent) support the United States sending more military aid to Israel for their efforts in the war with Hamas, while 41 percent oppose it. (…)
Three-quarters of voters (75 percent) think that prejudice against Jewish people in the United States today is either a very serious problem (38 percent) or a somewhat serious problem (37 percent), while 23 percent think it is either a not so serious problem (14 percent) or not a problem at all (9 percent). (…)
Sixty-eight percent of voters think prejudice against Muslim people in the United States today is either a very serious problem (30 percent) or a somewhat serious problem (38 percent), while 28 percent think it is either a not so serious problem (18 percent) or not a problem at all (10 percent).
(October 20, 2023)
A new Data for Progress poll, fielded as part of our national omnibus survey from October 18 to 19, finds that 66% of voters “strongly agree” or “somewhat agree” with the following statement:
The U.S. should call for a ceasefire and a de-escalation of violence in Gaza. The U.S. should leverage its close diplomatic relationship with Israel to prevent further violence and civilian deaths.
This includes 80% of Democrats, 57% of Independents, and 56% of Republicans.
Not everything the United States government did in the name of waging war on the terrorists or destroying the perpetrators of those attacks turned out to be wise, justified, or even moral. To the contrary: so many actions undertaken by the U.S. government in the months and years following the 9/11 attack were self-destructive and shameful. That is the reason that the neocons who dominated the Bush-Cheney administration and George Bush and Dick Cheney themselves ended up discredited and in disgrace, at least until they magically rehabilitated themselves by denouncing Donald Trump, which absolves all sins. But the reason they were discredited and in disgrace is not because people reconsidered whether the 9/11 attack was morally unjustified. Americans still overwhelmingly believe that it was. The shame and horror from that era are, instead, due to the fact that so much of what the US did in the name of „fighting terror“ had the opposite effect: either by inflaming it, turning the world against the U.S. and engaging in actions that destroyed the moral credibility of our government.
(Sept. 24, 2023)
Two polls of the 2024 presidential race released on Sunday showed former President Donald J. Trump cruising through the Republican primary — and a general election between two unpopular candidates if, as seems likely, the nominees are Mr. Trump and President Biden.
EFF has been closely following FBI‘s work to build out its Next Generation Identification (NGI) biometrics database. NGI expands the FBI’s IAFIS criminal and civil fingerprint database to include multimodal biometric identifiers such as iris scans, palm prints, face-recognition-ready photos, and voice data, and makes that data available to other agencies at the state and federal levels. As part of our focus on NGI, we‘ve sent out Freedom of Information Act and Public Records Act requests to the FBI and several state agencies for information on how NGI works and how the states share data with NGI. We‘ve also blogged and testified on facial recognition before the Senate Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law. Those records, the testimony, and the blog posts are linked below. We‘ll report on and post new records here as we receive them.
(24.03.2011)
Das FBI hat begonnen, ihre 2007 geplante neue Datenbank für biometrische Merkmale in Betrieb zu nehmen. Das „Next Generation Identification“-System habe die erste Phase der „operationalen Einsatzfähigkeit“ erreicht, heißt es in US-Medienberichten. Die Datenbank soll das Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS) der US-Polizeibehörde ersetzen und wird daher zunächst mit Fingerabdrücken gefüttert. Später sollen auch Iris-Scans, Stimmproben, Abbildungen von Handabdrücken, Tätowierungen, Narben und Gesichtsformen erfasst werden.
Mr. Haass recently published a book called “The Bill of Obligations: The Ten Habits of Good Citizens,” outlining ways Americans can help heal their own society, like “Be Informed,” “Remain Civil,” “Put Country First” — all admittedly bromides and yet somehow often elusive these days. (…)
Putting his foreign policy hat aside for now, he said he wants to expand the message from his book and help refocus the country on the core values embodied in the Declaration of Independence as the 250th anniversary of the document approaches three years from now.
Section 702 of the FISA Act allows agencies like the NSA to eavesdrop on foreign nationals overseas. It prohibits spying on US citizens or anyone who‘s within the United States. (…)
In practice, then, NSA maintains a huge database of information about the communications of US citizens. Agencies like the FBI are allowed to query this database, but only under strict rules. The primary rule is that queries can only be done if they are related to foreign intelligence or are likely to show evidence of a crime.
„Der Regierung wäre es nie erlaubt worden, Milliarden Menschen dazu zu verpflichten, jederzeit Geräte zur Standortüberwachung bei sich zu haben, ihre sozialen Interaktionen aufzuzeichnen oder lückenlose Aufzeichnungen ihrer Lesegewohnheiten vorzuhalten“, fasst das Office of the Director of National Intelligence zusammen. Doch Smartphones, vernetzte Fahrzeugen, Webtracking, das Internet der Dinge und „andere Innovationen“ hätten die gleichen Folgen, ohne dass die Regierung etwas tun müsse.
Die Art und Weise, wie US-Geheimdienste Daten aus verbundenen Fahrzeugen, Webbrowser-Aktivitäten und Smartphones sammeln und nutzen, steht zunehmend im Fokus. Dabei besteht die Gefahr, dass die unregulierte Verbreitung und der Verkauf von privaten Informationen amerikanischer Bürgerinnen und Bürger deren Privatsphäre bedroht. Der Bericht wurde vom Büro des Direktors der nationalen Geheimdienste (ODNI) veröffentlicht.
(27 January 2022, approved for release by ODNI on 5 June 2023)
(U) EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
(U) There is today a large and growing amount of what the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) refers to as “Commercially Available Information” (CAI). As the acronym indicates, and as we use the term in this report, CAI is information that is available commercially to the general public, and as such, is a subset of publicly available information (PAI). We do not use the term CAI to include, and we do not address in this report, commercial information that is available exclusively to governments. The volume and sensitivity of CAI have expanded in recent years mainly due to the advancement of digital technology, including location-tracking and other features of smartphones and other electronic devices, and the advertising-based monetization models that underlie many commercial offerings available on the Internet. Although CAI may be “anonymized,” it is often possible (using other CAI) to deanonymize and identify individuals, including U.S. persons.
(…)
Today, in a way that far fewer Americans seem to understand, and even fewer of them can avoid, CAI includes information on nearly everyone that is of a type and level of sensitivity that historically could have been obtained, if at all, only through targeted (and predicated) collection, and that could be used to cause harm to an individual’s reputation, emotional well-being, or physical safety.
(…)
(U) A May 2014 report from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) provides a similar account:
(U) Data brokers collect data from commercial, government, and other publicly available sources. Data collected could include bankruptcy information, voting registration, consumer purchase data, web browsing activities, warranty registrations, and other details of consumers’ everyday interactions.
(…)
1.3. (U) Examples of CAI. We do not attempt a comprehensive description of the scope and scale of data that are available as CAI, or the relevant markets, in part because they are so large and so dynamic. However, a few examples of CAI offerings will illustrate the current nature of available offerings:
• (U) “Thomson Reuters CLEAR is powered by billions of data points and leverages cutting-edge public records technology to bring all key content together in a customizable dashboard.”
• (U) LexisNexis offers more than “84B records from 10,000+ sources, including alternative data that helps surface more of the 63M unbanked/underbanked U.S. adults.”
• (U) Exactis has “over 3.5 billion records (updated monthly)” in its “universal data warehouse.”
• (U) PeekYou “collects and combines scattered content from social sites, news sources, homepages, and blog platforms to present comprehensive online identities.”
(…)
As the FTC explained in its May 2014 report:
(U) Data brokers rely on websites with registration features and cookies to find consumers online and target Internet advertisements to them based on their offline activities. Once a data broker locates a consumer online and places a cookie on the consumer’s browser, the data broker’s client can advertise to that consumer across the Internet for as long as the cookie stays on the consumer’s browser. Consumers may not be aware that data brokers are providing companies with products to allow them to advertise to consumers online based on their offline activities. Some data brokers are using similar technology to serve targeted advertisements to consumers on mobile devices.
(…)
2.2. (U) Examples of CAI Contracts. The IC currently acquires a large amount of CAI. Unclassified IC and other contracts for CAI can be found at Sam.Gov, a U.S. government website that allows searching by agency or sub-agency and by keywords, among other things. By way of example only, this website shows that the following agencies have, have had, have considered, or are considering the following contracts or proposals related to CAI:
• (U) The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) with ZeroFox for social media alerting (15F06721P0002431)
• (censored)
• U) The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) for social media reports on individuals who are seeking a security clearance (HHM402-16-SM-CHECKS), and with LexisNexis for “retrieval of comprehensive on-line search results related to commercial due diligence from a maximum number of sources (news, company, public records, legal, regulatory financial, and industry information),” among other things (HHM402-21-Q-0094)
• (U) The U.S. Navy with Sayari Analytics, Inc. for access to its database that “contains tens of thousands of previously-unidentified specific nodes, facilities and key people related to US sanctioned actors including ‘2+3’ threats to national security” (N0001518PR11212)
• (U) Various offices within the Treasury Department for access to Banker’s Almanac (RFQ-FIN-55100-21-0010)
• (U) The Department of Defense (DOD) for access to Jane’s online (W31P4Q17T0009)
• (U) The Coast Guard with Babel Street for “Open Source Data Collection, Translation, Analysis Application” (70Z08419QVA044).
(U) In addition, DIA has provided the following information about a CAI contract in an unclassified and publicly-available paper sent to Congress on January 15, 2021:
(U) DIA currently provides funding to another agency that purchases commercially available geolocation metadata aggregated from smartphones.
……………………………………
The report was completed in January 2022 but only recently declassified. Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon asked the ODNI for the report.
“Congress needs to pass legislation to put guardrails around government purchases, to rein in private companies that collect and sell this data, and keep Americans’ personal information out of the hands of our adversaries,” Wyden said in a statement Monday in response to the report.
Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch recently used a statement in a lawsuit over the Title 42 public health order to give a scathing overview of how civil liberties were trampled during the COVID era.
The U.S., he wrote, may “have experienced the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country….Executive officials across the country issued emergency decrees on a breathtaking scale. Governors and local leaders imposed lockdown orders forcing people to remain in their homes. They shuttered businesses and schools, public and private. They closed churches even as they allowed casinos and other favored businesses to carry on. They threatened violators not just with civil penalties but with criminal sanctions too.”
Many on the left now condemning Kennedy as an “anti-vaxxer” might have no problem with these draconian actions. But guess what? Tens of millions of Americans did and still do.
(October 12, 2022)
There appears to be plenty of room for persuasion on the issue: Over a third of voters said they didn’t know or had no opinion on the topic.
Collectively, Americans have nearly $900 billion dollars in credit card debt, and if you carry a balance, your bill is about to get more expensive, as the Federal Reserve raised its key interest rate for the fifth time this year. Currently, the average interest rate on a new credit card offer is more than 21%, according to LendingTree’s Matt Schulz. “You can expect that average to go up to over 22% in the next couple of months because banks don’t tend to waste a lot of time on raising rates when the Fed does,” Schulz said.
(July 28, 2022)
Voters on both sides of the aisle–especially those in the middle–are all screaming loudly. Sixty-nine percent of independents would like to see three or more parties in the United States. Among registered voters who said they would vote for former President Donald Trump in 2024, 49% would still like to see three or more parties. Among registered voters who said they would vote for President Joe Biden in 2024, 67% would like 3 or more parties.