John Lennon’s FBI Files Released December 21, 2006
Posted by publicpolitics in Censorship, Surveillance.add a comment
Clearly a man who sang Imagine all the people/Living life in peace was a major league subversive, but still the FBI could not quite nail John Lennon. An American historian has finally won his 25-year campaign to expose the FBI’s pursuit of the ex-Beatle – but the last 10 pages, released only after a string of court cases, don’t quite make spy thriller reading.
The last few pages of John Lennon’s FBI files, released after years of effort by the historian Jon Wiener, show that while Lennon imagined, the FBI suffered from an acute case of over-imagining. In the early 1970’s , the FBI recruited two Brits to befriend Lennon and persuade him to fund a leftwing bookshop in London. He turned them down, and the FBI concluded that there was “no certain proof” that Lennon had funded subversion. The FBI cited national security reasons for not releasing all of the files to Wiener, who said yesterday that “the claims the FBI has been making ( to support denial of access to the files ) were absurd.”
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Psiphon: Eluding Government Web Censors December 21, 2006
Posted by publicpolitics in Censorship.add a comment
Deep in a basement lab at the University of Toronto a team of political scientists, software engineers and computer-hacking activists, or “hactivists,” have created the latest, and some say most advanced tool yet in allowing Internet users to circumvent government censorship of the Web.
The Psiphon program was released on December 1 in response to growing Web censorship, particularly in China. The University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab designed Psiphon, and it works via a person in an uncensored country downloading the program. The user who wishes to view websites and blogs in a censored country then logs in to the person in the uncensored country’s computer, which with the download, acts as a virtual access proxy. Once the censored user clears the browser history, the program’s designers claim there is no trace of the user having accessed forbidden sites. The Citizen Lab is a member of the Open Net Initiative, which, when it opened in 2000, monitored China, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. Since then , internet filtering has increased, and now the Initiative monitors over 40 countries.
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Saudi Spin Man Is New Ambassador December 21, 2006
Posted by publicpolitics in Diplomacy.add a comment
“Saudi Arabia has informed the State Department that it intends to appoint Adel al-Jubeir as the new ambassador to Washington, according to U.S. officials. Jubeir, who is one of King Abdullah’s closest foreign policy advisers, has long been the public face of the oil-rich kingdom in the West.”
Turki al Faisal’s resignation as Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the US remains unexplained, but the appointment of Adel al Jubeir as the new ambassador to Washington is less of a surprise. Jubeir is known in Washington as being the point man for the Kingdom’s attempt to dissociate Saudi royalty from the al-Qaeda after the 9/11 attacks. Jubeir was also dispatched to the US to defuse an impending uproar over Prince Abdullah’s assertion that “Zionist hands” were “95%” behind terrorist events in 2004.
It is true that the Saudi royals have turned against bin Laden, and that he is dedicated to destroying the Saudi government. But that turnaround took place belatedly, and the new ambassador’s assertion that bin Laden’s popularity has dropped off in the Kingdom is much more questionable.
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