statism watch

Steve Boggan, The Times Online
August 6, 2008

New microchipped passports designed to be foolproof against identity theft can be cloned and manipulated in minutes and accepted as genuine by the computer software recommended for use at international airports.

Tests for The Times exposed security flaws in the microchips introduced to protect against terrorism and organised crime. The flaws also undermine claims that 3,000 blank passports stolen last week were worthless because they could not be forged.

In the tests, a computer researcher cloned the chips on two British passports and implanted digital images of Osama bin Laden and a suicide bomber. The altered chips were then passed as genuine by passport reader software used by the UN agency that sets standards for e-passports.

The Home Office has always argued that faked chips would be spotted at border checkpoints because they would not match key codes when checked against an international data-base. But only ten of the forty-five countries with e-passports have signed up to the Public Key Directory (PKD) code system, and only five are using it. Britain is a member but will not use the directory before next year. Even then, the system will be fully secure only if every e-passport country has joined.

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Michael Vail, blacklistednews.com
August 6, 2008

By 2015, a globally networked Intelligence Enterprise will be essential to meet the demands for greater forethought and improved strategic agility. The existing agency-centric Intelligence Community must evolve into a true Intelligence Enterprise established on a collaborative foundation of shared services, mission-centric operations, and integrated mission management, all enabled by a smooth flow of people, ideas, and activities across the boundaries of the Intelligence Community agency members.” – Mike McConnell(DNI)[1]

The Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell and The Council on Foreign Relations has made public a twenty eight page document called ‘Vision 2015’ which outlines a plan to integrate the entire United States intelligence network into a global intelligence community. Unsurprisingly there are many in the 16 intelligence agencies that support this project. At this very moment there is in-fighting between our own intelligence agencies, also currently there are problems between the CIA and Pakistani ISI. So how are they going to resolve these issues that have existed for decades?

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Ezra Levant, National Post
August 6, 2008

Some 900 days after I became the only person in the Western world charged with the “offence” of republishing the Danish cartoons of Muhammad, the government has finally acquitted me of illegal “discrimination.” Taxpayers are out more than $500,000 for an investigation that involved fifteen bureaucrats at the Alberta Human Rights Commission. The legal cost to me and the now-defunct Western Standard magazine is $100,000.

The case would have been thrown out long ago if I had been charged in a criminal court, instead of a human rights commission. That’s because accused criminals have the right to a speedy trial. Accused publishers at human rights commissions do not.

And if I had been a defendant in a civil court, the judge would now order the losing parties to pay my legal bills. Instead, the Edmonton Council of Muslim Communities won’t have to pay me a dime. Neither will Syed Soharwardy, the Calgary imam who abandoned his identical complaint against me this spring.

Both managed to hijack a secular government agency to prosecute their radical Islamic fatwa against me — the first blasphemy case in Canada in over 80 years. Their complaints were dismissed, but it is inaccurate to say that they lost: They got the government to rough me up for nearly three years, at no cost to them. The process I was put through was a punishment in itself — and a warning to any other journalists who would defy radical Islam.

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Steve Watson, Infowars.net
August 6, 2008

Sentencing will be passed down later today on Salim Hamdan, a man described by defense attorneys and witnesses as a low level driver who knew nothing of Al Qaeda. The driver will face life imprisonment while it was revealed last week that Osama Bin Laden’s most senior bodyguard was simply let go from the prison at Guantánamo Bay.

A jury of six military officers at Guantanamo Bay reached a split verdict Wednesday in the war crimes trial of a former driver for Osama bin Laden, clearing him of some charges but convicting him of others that could send him to prison for life, reports AP.

The so called “mastermind of 9/11″ Khalid Sheik Mohammed dismissed Hamdan in written testimony as a mere chauffeur “not fit to plan or execute”.

U.S. authorities do not even claim that the driver and sometime mechanic, who earned a mere $200 a month, was a major terror figure. But prosecutors alleged that he carried weapons used by Al Qaeda and helped to spirit Bin Laden out of Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban.

The trial of Hamdan, the first Guantanamo war crimes trial, has been used as a show piece to promote the virtues of the Bush cabal’s “war on terror”.

Last week we revealed that a Pentagon produced documentary on Al Qaeda, which was presented as evidence at the trial, was created by a terrorism consultant who has previously attempted to pass off Pentagon released propaganda as directly released by Al Qaeda.

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[ed. note: The Wikipedia page on Ambien has some interesting information - Ambien has even been parodied on the Simpsons for it's side effects, which include amnesia, hallucinations, delusions, and depression -these are amplified when taken with alcohol or SSRI-class drugs such as Prozac or other similar antidepressants. Heath Ledger was on Ambien in the weeks prior to his death.]

Eric Lichtblau and Scott Shane, New York Times
August 6, 2008

WASHINGTON — A federal judge on Wednesday unsealed documents related to the 2001 anthrax attacks, as the Justice Department prepared to declare, over lingering skepticism, that the case had been solved.

Federal law enforcement officials planned to address the growing questions about the strength of its evidence against a military scientist who killed himself after investigators linked him to the attacks.

Officials at the Federal Bureau of Investigation are particularly eager to close the case and publicly rebut accusations from defenders of the scientist, Bruce E. Ivins, that the bureau may have hounded an innocent man into committing suicide.

Robert M. Blitzer, who formerly directed the F.B.I.’s section on domestic terrorism, bristled at criticism of the bureau’s methods in the anthrax case and called them a necessary part of tracking down the killer.

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The Independent UK
August 6, 2008

The Government is drawing up plans to use unmanned “drone” aircraft currently deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan to counter terrorism and aid police operations in Britain.

The MoD is carrying out research and development to enable the spy planes, which are equipped with highly sophisticated monitoring equipment that allows them to secretly track and photograph suspects without their knowledge, to be deployed within three years.

The plans have been backed by the House of Commons Defence Committee but have attracted criticism from civil liberties campaigners concerned about the implications of covert surveillance of civilians.

The unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) can obtain clear images while flying at up to 50,000ft. If ministers give the scheme the go-ahead the UK will be among the first countries to use UAVs to monitor its own citizens.

The Israeli military operates them over Palestinian cities such as Gaza and Ramallah, while the US Customs and Border Protection agency flies them over the Mexican border to detect illegal migrants along specified routes.

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The Wall Street Journal
August 6, 2008

Tiny Microphones Can Be Activated By Remote Control

BEIJING — Tens of thousands of taxi drivers in Beijing have a tool that could become part of China’s all-out security campaign for the Olympic Games. Their vehicles have microphones — installed ostensibly for driver safety — that can be used to listen to passengers remotely.

The tiny listening devices, which are connected to a global positioning system able to track a cab’s location by satellite, have been installed in almost all of the city’s 70,000 taxis over the past three years, taxi drivers and industry officials say.

As with digital cameras used in cities such as London, Sydney or New York, the stated purpose of the microphones is to protect the driver. But whereas the devices in other countries can only record images, those devices in Beijing taxis can be remotely activated without the driver’s knowledge to eavesdrop on passengers, according to drivers and Yaxon Networks Co., a Chinese company that makes some of the systems used in Beijing. The machines can even remotely shut off engines.

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CBC News
August 6, 2008

Many Chinese people say this Friday is going to be a very special day.

The date, Aug. 8, 2008, translates into 8-8-8 — and in Chinese culture, the number eight signifies wealth and good fortune.

In Toronto, many couples have chosen Friday as the most auspicious day to get married.

Michelle Chai and her fiancé, Dave Hackett, are among those couples. Chai said 8-8-8 is too rare and lucky a date to pass up.

“Very important. In fact, if we didn’t get the venue or the church we wanted, we’d still go around looking for something so we had that date. So when we found something and the opportunity, we took it,” she said.

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Olivia Ward, Toronto Star
August 6, 2008

Former student leader recounts the brutal military crackdown on pro-democracy protests

For Burma’s long-suffering people, Aug. 8, 1988 is a date etched in blood: a national trauma that left scars still unhealed. It commemorates a rebellion that dared to demand democracy, and won a bitter moral victory in its defeat.

“All summer the students were mobilizing,” says Tin Maung Htoo, then a 16-year-old high school student leader in Rangoon. “There were protests and universities were closed. But the tipping point came when (ruling) Gen. Ne Win warned that if demonstrations continued the army would shoot point blank.”

The brutal leader made good on the threat. And at the end of the uprising, more than 10,000 students, monks and ordinary citizens would be dead, and thousands more arrested, beaten, tortured and jailed.

The moment was the closest Burma, also known as Myanmar, has come to a political meltdown since the military junta took over in 1962, and established a one-party state. When they saw power slipping from their hands, the generals struck back with desperate force.

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Gordon Chong, Toronto Star
August 6, 2008

Support for Tibet seen as pretext for tarnishing lustre of Olympic moment

As the outpouring of sympathy for China after the devastating earthquakes fades, the Olympics/Tibet issue is resurfacing.

I’ve been increasingly enthralled by the reported Olympic protests and the earthquakes. As a native-born Canadian of Chinese descent, I struggled with this irresistible centripetal force because I’m almost two generations removed from China.

And I’m a conflicted hybrid of an immigrant Chinese father and immigrant Caucasian English mother – a Eurasian who is the embodiment of both victim and victimizer.

A visceral tribal connection emerged because my lived experience of 60 years is that ethnic Chinese, whether at home or abroad, have faced contempt, discrimination and exploitation.

Personally, I do not know any of my mother’s family because they severed all ties with her for marrying outside her kind. Diplomatic relations were never re-established.

A few months ago, Senator Romeo Dallaire blustered that the Chinese should be “humiliated” into submission – the invidious refuse of old colonialism. Dallaire is either ignoring or ignorant of the fact that – even in Canada – the Chinese have already been well humiliated.

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