statism watch

Flashback: Pre-Olympic transit ads encourage citizen surveillance | Olympic security good for Canada, IOC head says | Security cameras proposed for downtown Sydney | Toronto surveillance project to enter new phase pending review | Tanks, Face-Scanning Cameras Part of ‘Discreet’ 2010 Games Security

Rocco Parascandola, Newsday
March 31, 2009

The NYPD is asking for federal funding so it can duplicate in midtown the measures under way near Ground Zero to protect the city against terrorists, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said Tuesday.

The idea, Kelly testified before a City Council committee, is to allow police to do everything they do downtown – scan license plates, monitor surveillance video cameras and use radiation and bioterrorism detectors - between 34th and 59th streets, from river to river. “We want to take that model and replicate it, to the extent that we can, to midtown Manhattan,” Kelly said.

The bustling swath of Manhattan has what the New York Police Department considers a host of targets attractive to terrorists, among them the United Nations, the Empire State and Chrysler buildings, and St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

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Mark Pittman and Bob Ivry, Bloomberg News
March 31, 2009

March 31 (Bloomberg) — The U.S. government and the Federal Reserve have spent, lent or committed $12.8 trillion, an amount that approaches the value of everything produced in the country last year, to stem the longest recession since the 1930s.

New pledges from the Fed, the Treasury Department and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. include $1 trillion for the Public-Private Investment Program, designed to help investors buy distressed loans and other assets from U.S. banks. The money works out to $42,105 for every man, woman and child in the U.S. and 14 times the $899.8 billion of currency in circulation. The nation’s gross domestic product was $14.2 trillion in 2008.

President Barack Obama and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner met with the chief executives of the nation’s 12 biggest banks on March 27 at the White House to enlist their support to thaw a 20-month freeze in bank lending.

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Flashback: UK: ‘Spy-in-sky’ trials get the go-ahead despite Government promise to scrap road-pricing plan | Calls for GPS-tracked ’speed-limiting’ cars in UK | Oregon Governor Wants GPS-Tracked Vehicle Mileage Tax | Metrolinx Proposes Satellite Vehicle Tracking for Road Tolls

Paul Lewis, The Guardian
March 31, 2009

Privacy row brewing over surveillance on the road, box could reduce accidents, pollution and congestion

The government is backing a project to install a “communication box” in new cars to track the whereabouts of drivers anywhere in Europe, the Guardian can reveal.

Under the proposals, vehicles will emit a constant “heartbeat” revealing their location, speed and direction of travel. The EU officials behind the plan believe it will significantly reduce road accidents, congestion and carbon emissions. A consortium of manufacturers has indicated that the router device could be installed in all new cars as early as 2013.

However, privacy campaigners warned last night that a European-wide car tracking system would create a system of almost total road surveillance.

Follow that car: ‘The British government are the main backers’ Link to this audio

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The peacemaker speaks.

Update (2009/4/1): Netanyahu: We may be forced to attack Iran

CBC News
March 31, 2009

Knesset votes 69-45 in favour of Netanyahu’s picks

Benjamin Netanyahu, introducing his government to the Israeli parliament Tuesday, said peace with Palestinians is possible but spoke out against “radical Islam” and issued a veiled warning to Iran.

Netanyahu’s chosen ministers were confirmed by the Knesset later Tuesday in a 69-45 vote. Following the vote, the 28 new ministers took their oaths of office while Netanyahu is set to formally take over the prime minister’s post from Ehud Olmert on Wednesday.

Prior to being sworn in, Netanyahu told the Knesset he will seek a broad peace with the Muslim world, comments that appeared to advance his efforts to calm international concerns that he will end peace efforts.

“I say to the Palestinian leadership that if you really want peace we can achieve peace,” he said.

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Did Brown take a bunch of marketing electives at LSE? He’s certainly got the ‘repetition’ bit down. And the lighting – so beatific. Yes, perhaps he’s right. I’m sold. Maybe we do need to further centralize control of world finance into fewer and fewer hands. A little bit of fascism keeps the trains running on time. Only problem with that being of course that the power’s being centralized into the hands of the same predators who set the global Ponzi scheme up in the first place. Will we be gullible enough to forgive them as they loot us, ‘for they know not what they do’?

Related: Wall Street’s Big Takeover | Gordon Brown’s amazing patent cure-all globalization deal | Soros points out regulated markets fail to operate on market fundamentals, calls for more regulation

James Chapman, Daily Mail
March 31, 2009

Gordon Brown today made an overtly religious call for a new world order based on the ‘deep moral sense’ shared by all faiths.

Making the first speech by a serving Prime Minister at St Paul’s Cathedral in London, Mr Brown quoted from scripture as he said people could come together to forge a new ‘global society’.

The world economy and society should be rebuilt around a Zulu word for hope – themba – which also stands for ‘there must be an alternative’, the Prime Minister suggested. [Ed. Note: Try freedom and actual capitalism, as opposed to this counterfeit, this journal suggests.]

It was an extraordinary break from his predecessor Tony Blair, whose spin doctor Alastair Campbell, famously declared that ‘we don’t do God’.

At Westminster it was also seen as high risk for a Government mired in allegations of sleaze to put morality and faith at the centre of its political and economic message.

Mr Brown, asked about his decision to discuss religion so openly, declared: ‘I think politicians have got to be very careful that they don’t turn out to try to be bishops.

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Because it’s just so reliable. And if it’s good enough for Obama, it’s good enough for us.

Flashback: Head of RCMP unit that framed Arar promoted to Assistant Commissioner | CSIS faces review in Khadr case | Canada losing moral standing over treatment of Omar Khadr: Dallaire

Daniel Leblanc, The Globe and Mail
March 31, 2009

OTTAWA – If lives are at stake, Canadian spies will act on information obtained abroad with the use of torture, a senior official said today.

Speaking before a parliamentary committee, Canadian Security Intelligence Service adviser Geoffrey O’Brian said Canada deals with spy agencies in 147 countries, many of which “have human-rights records that are not as glowing as ours.”

He added that CSIS simply cannot rule out the use of information obtained with the use of torture in specific circumstances.

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Botnets exist. Therefore we need to regulate the internet. Is that the argument that’s being advanced here? Here’s an idea – don’t open email attachments from untrusted senders. We hope the Citizen’s Lab wouldn’t support SecDev in this call – Citizen’s Lab has done a lot of good work exposing filtering and surveillance activities worldwide.

See also: NSA Dominance of Cybersecurity Would Lead to ‘Grave Peril’, Ex-Cyber Chief Tells Congress | Defense Contractors See $$$ in Cyber Security | John Manley, committed globalist, to chair Munk Centre’s School of International Studies | RCMP to helm a Canadian “cyber-security strategy”

Steve Kupferman, The Torontoist
March 31, 2009

The New York Times broke a story on Sunday that has since stirred up some local interest (and some national interest as well): Toronto researchers Greg Walton and Nart Villeneuve of the U of T Munk Centre for International Studies’ Citizen Lab were, along with Ottawa-based consultancy SecDev, instrumental in ferreting out some very shady spy activity happening on at least 1,295 computers around the world, approximately 30% of which were owned and operated by so-called “high-value” targets, including journalists, embassies–even the Dalai Lama. A lot of the data necessary for the investigation was gathered abroad, but the brunt of the analysis happened right here, in Toronto, under the aegis of U of T.

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