We see you – so be careful
John Johnson
We had more computer problems after barely getting out the last issue. This time we had to call a guy who fixes most problems but charges $300 for a home visit and $130 for a new hard drive.
We received a donated hard drive for the laptop, so it’s now functional, but we lost some install disks so its not yet usable.
Last month one of our mailing label sheets partially cut off the Zip codes. Mailing volunteers wrote them back in. Most were copies that go to various media and politicians and others.
A few days later about thirty came back to us with a notice that the addresses were wrong. I re-mailed some after taking them to the Post Office and being told they should have been delivered. I couldn’t help feeling as though someone at the PO had screwed with us on purpose.
ALEC
We are running a long article on the American Legislative Exchange Council. Since Color of Change and other groups exposed the organization, and the Trayvon Martin case highlighted its Stand Your Ground Law (the right to commit murder when perceiving threat), the Council has lost several corporate sponsors. This only slightly diminishes it’s power.
ALEC wages its campaigns behind closed doors and without media scrutiny, partnering with large corporations and various government branches to restrict civil liberties. Despite its near invisibility, the Council’s agenda is chillingly fascist and must be opposed, otherwise we are all toast.
President Obama now has power that Bush never had. He can order (and has) (*1) the killing of U.S. citizens abroad who are deemed terrorists. Like Bush, he has asked the Justice Department to draft secret memos authorizing his actions without going before (*2) a federal court or disclosing them. Obama has continued (*3) indefinite detentions at Gitmo, but also brought the policy ashore by signing the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012, which authorizes the military to arrest and indefinitely detain anyone suspected of assisting terrorists, even citizens. That policy, codifying (*4) how the Bush Administration treated Jose Padilla, a citizen who was arrested in a bomb plot after landing at a Chicago airport in 2002 and was transferred from civil to military custody, upends (*5) the 1878’s Posse Comitatus Act’s ban on domestic military deployment.
The National Security Agency is now building its largest data processing center ever, which Wired.com’s James Bamforth reports (*6) will go beyond the public Internet to grab data but also reach password-protected networks.
Obama has continued cases brought by Bush, such as going after (*7) the “leaker” in the warrantless wiretapping story broken by the New York Times in 2005, (*8) as well as the WikiLeaks (*9) case, prosecution of Bradley Manning, (*10) and others (*11) for allegedly mishandling classified materials related to the war on terrorism.
The major defining feature of the Obama administration on this issue is the eagerness with which it embraced the stunning evisceration of civil rights and liberties that was a hallmark of the Bush administration, and then deepened those outrageous programs. [No less defining and outrageous is Obama’s escalation of his predecessor’s preemptive and capricious wars.]
Some of the above info is quoted from an article by Steven Rosenfeld, writing for AlterNet. Look for it on our Website.
Lately, Corporate intrusions into our lives have become more sneaky. Bank of America now adds unspecified charges to accounts. If you have a little-used account that you don’t examine frequently, then discover the added charges, you have to jump through hoops to get them removed. Credit card companies do the same thing. These are only a few examples of the many corporate attempts to rip us all off.
When doing a Google search the first several entries are usually ads. A usable result is then followed by more ads. The other day I noticed more search results in the upper right hand corner. Clicked on one and it changed my browser to the porno browser and installed a couple of programs on my computer, without asking. It took some effort to delete them from my computer. There are a number of alternative browsers to use.
*1 <wsws.org/articles/2011/oct2011/alwa-o01.shtml>
*2 <emptywheel.net/2012/03/05/how-good-are-dojs-reasons-for-burying-its-case-against-anwar-al-awlaki>
*3 <unmultimedia.org/radio/english/2012/01/detention-of-suspects-continues-at-guantanamo-bay>
*4 <balkin.blogspot.com/2012/01/ndaa-and-military-detention.html>
*5 <aclu.org/indefinite-detention-endless-worldwide-war-and-2012-national-defense-authorization-act>
*6 <wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter>
*7 <politico.com/news/stories/1011/66424.html>
*8 <nytimes.com/2005/12/16/politics/16program.html>
*10 <bradleymanning.org>
*11 <salon.com/2012/04/09/journalists_casualties_in_the_war_on_whistleblowers>
