Need more reasons to walk away from Facebook?
Even
if one were to take that seemingly far-fetched claim at face value, it
is a matter of record that ICE requested
private Facebook data last year to obtain a cellphone number for an
unauthorized immigrant in Detroit. The number associated with the
immigrant being pursued by ICE was then tracked through a cell site
simulator, a powerful surveillance tool used to vacuum
up cellphone calls and user location data.
Law
enforcement agencies have a broad reach under the “Stored
Communications Act” to ask communication service
providers, including Facebook, to release information pertinent to
ongoing cases. The kind of data that can be accessed by agencies such as
ICE is quite extensive and much of it can be obtained without court
orders.
Facebook,
now under additional scrutiny and pressure to reveal how and with whom
it shares information because
of the Cambridge Analytica exposé, has released semi-annual
transparency reports in the past detailing the number of government
requests for user data. While there is no breakdown of which particular
law agency has made the requests, the report from last year
is quite telling. It reveals that from January 2017 through June 2017,
Facebook received 32,716 requests for data from 52,280 users. Facebook
notes in its report that it complied with 85 percent of the requests and
“approximately 57 percent of legal process
we received from authorities in the U.S. was accompanied by a
non-disclosure order legally prohibiting us from notifying the affected
users.”
Facebook is flat out evil. They’re using it to track people for the government. Can you believe this?
Maybe we should follow Paul Daley’s lead. At The Guardian, he writes:
The beginning of the end had come a year or so earlier when I deleted the Facebook app from my phone (yes, I reinstalled it; I’ll deal with the addiction shortly) because I felt it had become an unhealthy compulsion – somewhere between not being able to stop eating one of those huge buckets of synthetic-buttery popcorn at the cinema and hating yourself for watching Midsomer Murders week after week after week.
I was a late adopter of Facebook, having opened an account before leaving it mostly dormant for years. I’m a cyber Luddite and didn’t quite know what to do once I’d opened it. The whole “Like” thing I found as pointless and empty as making friends with people I’d never – and had no special desire to – meet. Still, I let them all in.
So
by the time I’d actually engaged I’d already friended hundreds of
people I didn’t know at all. Once
I started posting I was soon checking the app on my phone dozens –
perhaps more – times a day, especially after I’d shared a pic of my
dogs, something I’d written or something I’d read that I thought friends
(real or virtual) would like.
The
little thumbs-up (and eventually other emojis) were a drug. But why has
so-and-so (who I’ve never
met but who I know lives alone with her seven corgis and is obsessed
with Claire Foy) suddenly stopped liking every one of my posts? Did the
depression finally win over? And why doesn’t such and such, who I am
actually real life mates with, ever – ever! –
like my stuff? What sort of friend are they?
We all should follow his lead.
This is C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot:"
Thursday, March 29, 2018. The feel good nonsense or the reality of death and destruction?
RT reports:
The US-led coalition fighting Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) on Wednesday admitted to killing at least 855 civilians in airstrikes in Iraq and Syria in the past four years. “To date, based on information available, CJTF-OIR assesses at least 855 civilians have been unintentionally killed by coalition strikes since the start of Operation Inherent Resolve,” the US Central Command said in its monthly civilian casualty report. The coalition conducted a total of 29,225 strikes between August 2014 and the end of February 2018, and during this period the total number of reports of possible civilian casualties was 2,135. The total number of credible reports of civilian casualties during this time period was 224, according to the statement. It said that 522 reports are still open.
That's what they are now admitting to. You can be sure the actual count of civilians killed in airstrikes is much higher.
RT reports:
The US-led coalition fighting Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) on Wednesday admitted to killing at least 855 civilians in airstrikes in Iraq and Syria in the past four years. “To date, based on information available, CJTF-OIR assesses at least 855 civilians have been unintentionally killed by coalition strikes since the start of Operation Inherent Resolve,” the US Central Command said in its monthly civilian casualty report. The coalition conducted a total of 29,225 strikes between August 2014 and the end of February 2018, and during this period the total number of reports of possible civilian casualties was 2,135. The total number of credible reports of civilian casualties during this time period was 224, according to the statement. It said that 522 reports are still open.
That's what they are now admitting to. You can be sure the actual count of civilians killed in airstrikes is much higher.
Not that I think the gun violence march in America was irrelevant but the children of Iraq, Syria, and Palestine would like to be safe
in school and at home.
Where are the marches for these children? Why is the world so silent when it comes to them?
Yes, we're back to the issue of does violence only matter when effects White kids in the US? Do the lives of Iraqis -- including Iraqi children -- not matter at all?
Ajamu Baraka (BLACK AGENDA REPORT) observes:
So, it was a good week for both
bourgeois parties. The Democrats didn’t get called out for their
collaboration with Trump and the Republicans on the budget. The Trump
folks have more ammunition to use to mobilize their supporters in
opposition to what they will frame as efforts to violate the
constitution and take away their guns and give more power to a
repressive government. Even the intelligence agencies benefited from the
week’s events with attention being shifted away from the FBI scandal
that is threatening to blow the cover off of official criminal activity
to undermine the electoral process, not by the Russians, but unelected
forces in the U.S. state.
But for those of us from the
colonized Black and Brown zones of non-being, we can never allow
ourselves to be distracted by the diversionary and accommodationist
politics of the latest carefully crafted spectacle, especially one that
purports to be advancing a superior moral politics.
We must always remind ourselves
that some can march with the confidence that “their” government might be
trusted with regulating weapons and protecting their lives but that the
protection of our fundamental human rights rest with our ability to
defend our collective rights, and no one else.
Through our painful lived
experiences, we understand and must live by the insight provided by our
dear brother, James Baldwin, who counseled us that we must be vigilant
when our oppressors speak of morality and the sanctity of life:
“The
“civilized” have created the wretched, quite coldly and deliberately,
and do not intend to change the status quo; are responsible for their
slaughter and enslavement; rain down bombs on defenseless children
whenever and wherever they decide that their “vital interests” are
menaced, and think nothing of torturing a man to death; these people are
not to be taken seriously when they speak of the “sanctity” of human
life, or the conscience of civilized world.”
Distraction can be deadly, let’s us get and stay woke.
Saturday's look-at-me-look-at-me tantrum accomplished nothing and was
never going to accomplish anything while rubbing elbows with the likes
of Senator Dianne Feinstein and others. It was an effort to release
some steam from the system, a moment to distract from reality. When
elements of Congress and the press stroke themselves to stroke the
event, you know it was meaningless. As Glen Ford (BAR) points out:
There is “movement” afoot in the U.S., but it does not “arc towards
justice.” Ever since Trump’s electoral victory, the collective national
consciousness has been smothered in a maddening fog of manic,
industrial-scale propaganda, spewed non-stop by corporate communications
conglomerates working hand-in-glove with the most aggressive elements
of the surveillance-intelligence “community” and the bi-partisan War
Party. We are enveloped in a toxic miasma of Russia-hate that, by sheer
weight and repetition, has infested every aspect of American political
thought, distorting and subverting even the most progressive-minded
“movements” struggling to find a way towards human dignity under late
stage capitalism in a profoundly racist country. Voices for peace and
social justice are asphyxiated in the pestilential plume -- unless they
find their own air.
Damn right, there is a conspiracy -- possibly the loudest one in
history! -- megaphoned by a billionaire-owned media screaming “War, War,
War” day and night, fouling the public mind with pure reactionary
malice. The duopoly contest has devolved into a dance of death between
Donald Trump’s raw white supremacist nationalism and Democratic Party
corporate imperial warmongering. Only fools claim there is space for progressive maneuver in the interstices between such forces.
We've been "Down So Long" Jewel notes but doing for-show and feel-good fauxtests won't change a thing ("Down So Long" first appears on Jewel's SPIRIT).
The realities of faux 'protest' and real protest were addressed when Ann Garrison interviewed Riva Enteen (BAR):
RE: Of
course we support the cause of protecting lives, but there is an
exceptionalism to believing it only applies to American lives and
especially white lives. In a promotional video that Democracy Now played
repeatedly during their broadcast of the Washington, DC March for Our
Lives, former US soldiers said that they’d learned how to put assault
rifles to good purpose in US wars, but didn’t want them aimed at US
citizens.
Isn’t it time to stop aiming
those guns—and our missiles, fighter jets, and drones—at the rest of the
world? My mother was a member of Women Strike for Peace, founded in
1961 with the slogan “Stop the Arms Race, Not the Human Race,” and that
has never been more true.
Women, the givers of life, are
confronting the Pentagon in Washington, DC, October 20-21. We hope that
all peace-loving people will consider this a chance to make a stand for
peace. There will be local antiwar actions springing up, as they did
during Occupy, so keep your ear to the ground, and watch for updates on our websiteand our Facebook page .
The action in DC is the Women's March on the Pentagon. This is the
event Cindy Sheehan is one of the organizers of and that we've been
noting here:An Open Invitation:
Women's March on the Pentagon
UPDATED ENDORSER'S LIST:
CLICK HERE ***
UPCOMING LOCAL ORGANIZING MEETINGS FOR
THE MARCH
(CINDY WILL BE LEADING):
NATIONAL ORGANIZING CONFERENCE CALL
WED, MARCH 21 (COMPLETED) CLICK HERE FOR SUMMARY AND RECORDING OF CALL
*
April 5th in Washington DC
CLICK HERE FOR WDC MEETING INFO
*
April 9th in Boston
*
April 12th in Long Island
APRIL 13TH: LANCASTER, PA
JUNE: CHICAGO, IL
contact Cindy Sheehan for
more info, to organize a meeting/action
in your area or ??
CindySheehan@MarchonPentagon.
TAX DEDUCTIBLE
People are dying. Don't expect kids raised on media fawning to tell you that. Certainly don't expect the corporate media to tell you that. All the corporate media does is lie.
Iraq has defeated IS and avoided the wave of Shia-on-Sunni violence that many thought would follow
Things are great in Iraq!
If you forget the fact that people are protesting in the streets because there are so few jobs. Or that the medical situation in Iraq is actually worse now than at any point in the history of this wave of the Iraq War. The brain drain got a big kick in the last six months but no one bothers to notice that -- the flight of needed professional from Iraq. There are enough beds for the orphans but Iraq did open a cat hotel this year so I guess that's the 'great' that THE ECONOMIST sees taking place.
B-b-b-but ISIS is defeated! Except they are not. ANADOLU AGENCY reports that yesterday saw 5 Iraqi soldiers killed when ISIS ambushed them at "a fake checkpoint on the road linking Mosul and the Tal Afar district."
But the corporate press can't stop their waves of Operation Happy Talk. It's been going on for years now and it's never turned out to be true. Hayder al-ABadi, for example, has promised to get the trains running. When I saw that a few days ago, I rolled my eyes as I remembered when we were sold that lie -- in THE NEW YORK TIMES, among other places. The trains were working, running and doing great! It took Deborah Haynes (TIMES OF LONDON) to expose that as a lie. But here we are, about twelve years later and they're trying to re-sell that failed talking point.
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