Federal Judge slams Facebook and its legal counsel for not taking terrorism seriously
Greetings from New York City, where I have been since Thursday evening and where I have been totally tied up with work. I have a few minutes now before a conference call - not enough to work but enough to post something.
On Thursday, a Federal Judge in Brooklyn told a shocked lawyer from Chicago's Kirkland & Ellis that the lawyer's client, Facebook, isn't doing enough to deter terrorists from using its site. And then the judge laid into the firm for sending a
first-year associate (someone about four months out of law school at this time of year) alone to the hearing.
U.S. District Judge Nicholas Garaufis in Brooklyn, New York, also
accused Facebook’s lawyers -- by sending a first-year associate to a
hearing -- of not taking seriously lawsuits with implications of
international terrorism and the murder of innocent people.
“I
think it is outrageous, irresponsible and insulting,” Garaufis told the
attorney Thursday. The judge ordered Kirkland & Ellis LLP, the law
firm representing Facebook, to send a more senior lawyer to the next
hearing on Sept. 28 because he wanted to “talk to someone who talks to
senior management at Facebook.”
Garaufis
is overseeing two lawsuits in which more than 20,000 victims of attacks
and their families accused Facebook of helping groups in the Middle
East such as Hamas.
The judge noted similar suits haven’t been
successful under U.S. law which insulates publishers from liability for
the speech of others. But he said that doesn’t mean Facebook shouldn’t
take it seriously and try to address the issue.
Isn’t the social
media platform “basically putting together people who’d like to be
involved in terrorism with people are are terrorists?” the judge asked.
“Doesn’t Facebook have some moral obligation to help cabin the kinds of
communications that appear on it?”
The judge didn’t stop there.
"Let’s put the law aside and talk
about reality,” Garaufis said, less than a week after a bomb rattled the
Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, injuring 29 people. “The reality is
that people are communicating through social media and the outcome of
these inquiries, be it Google or Facebook, has the potential of hooking
people up to do very dangerous, bad and harmful things in terms of
international and domestic terror."
Federal
judges have limited ability to address terrorism and don’t usually get
involved in such cases until someone is arrested and charged with a
crime, Garaufis said.
"Don’t you have a social responsibility as
citizens of the world without having these plaintiffs come to me in
Brooklyn?" he asked. “There are things you could do that don’t involve
the courts or the judicial system."
Facebook said it’s committed to making people feel safe using the social network.
“Our
Community Standards make clear that there is no place on Facebook for
groups that engage in terrorist activity or for content that expresses
support for such activity, and we take swift action to remove this
content when it’s reported to us,” the company said in a statement. “We
sympathize with the victims of these horrible crimes.”
A Kirkland & Ellis spokeswoman didn’t have an immediate comment on the judge’s remarks.
The page pictured above was deemed not to violate Facebook's community standards. But Twitter last week briefly suspended Professor Glenn Reynolds (known as Instapundit on social media) for making a sarcastic comment that didn't threaten anyone. Some 'community standards.'
Labels: Facebook, Islamic terrorism, lawsuit, terror victim suits in US, Twitter
#BDSFail Desperate Europeans look to Zionist entity to help monitor online hate
It's come to this: Europeans, desperate to stop 'lone wolf' terrorists, are
turning to the Zionist entity for help in monitoring social media.
Last week's truck rampage in France and
Monday's axe attack aboard a train in Germany have raised European
concern about self-radicalised assailants who have little or no
communications with militant groups that could be intercepted by spy
agencies.
"How do you capture some signs of someone who has no contact
with any organisation, is just inspired and started expressing some kind
of allegiance? I don't know. It's a challenge," EU Counter-Terrorism
Coordinator Gilles de Kerchove told Reuters on the sidelines of a
intelligence conference in Tel Aviv.
Internet companies asked to monitor their own platforms'
content for material that might flag militants had begged off, De
Kerchove said.
He said they had argued that the information was too massive
to sift through and contextualise, unlike paedophile pornography, for
which there were automatic detectors.
"So maybe a human's intervention is needed. So you cannot just
let the machine do it," De Kerchove said. But he said he hoped "we will
soon find ways to be much more automated" in sifting through social
networks.
"That is why I am here," he said of his visit to Israel. "We know Israel has developed a lot of capability in cyber."
Here's hoping that everyone who does this is located in Judea and Samaria - probably too much to wish for. But it seems to be the only alternative. Everyone else is waiting for the United States to take the lead, and that seems unlikely to happen.
While Israel's emergency laws give security
services more leeway, its intelligence minister, Yisrael Katz, called
for cooperation with Internet providers rather than state crackdowns. He
cited, for example, the encryption provided by messaging platform
WhatsApp which, he said, could be a new way for militants to communicate
and evade detection.
"We will not block these services," Katz told the conference.
"What is needed is an international organisation, preferably headed by
the United States, where shared (security) concerns need to be defined,
characterised."
If the Obama administration ever started an organization like that, it would probably include Turkey (and Iran) and exclude Israel. Remember
this? Maybe someone could ask
Hillary Clinton about it.
Labels: counterterrorism, Facebook, Hillary Clinton, Islamic terrorism, Twitter
#Twitter suspends account exposing hatred and #anti-Semitism in the #BDS movement
Yes, they did.
Labels: anti-Semitism, BDS, censorship, Jew hatred, Twitter
Overcoming Amalek
It's not every day that one of my Twitter followers tags me and six other people with 'my latest blog post' and I get a notice from Twitter that nearly 100 people have retweeted a tweet in which my name is mentioned. It was enough to at least look at what the post is about. It's about a group that's attempting to
subvert weak Israeli Jews. And I know I have at least one reader who devotes his life to stopping them.
When Am Yisrael came out of
Egypt, it was the weak that Amalek targeted and killed physically.
Although the goal of some of Am Yisrael’s enemies, disguised as friends,
is not to attack, their method has remained the same. Today, when Am
Yisrael is in his Home in Eretz Yisrael, it is again the weak that they
target, this time in an effort to induce a spiritual demise upon us.
I am referring to missionaries,
the Eleventh Plague, who spend millions of dollars and every precious
minute of their time trying to convert Jews, disguising their efforts as
love for the People of G-d, in order to save us. As in the past, these
new Amalekites target the weak, the stragglers, the ill-prepared, the
faint and the weary.
Unlike the ancient Amalekites
who were militarily sneaky, albeit very outright and direct about their
agenda, today’s robbers of Jewish souls and the Jewish spirit of the
recipients of the Torah use every devious method to achieve their goal.
They very carefully choose their victims. They target the needy, the
poor, kids from broken families, lone IDF soldiers with no support
network in the country or new olim who are looking for friends. In the
words of S. Jonah Pressman, a long time follower of missionaries who is
well familiar with their Modus Operandi “Wherever you find a ‘needy’
individual, you will find a missionary vulture ready to swoop down and
pick at the flesh until the soul becomes his.”
Once they have identified their
prey, the missionaries then set themselves to luring their victims. They
do it by offering them money, food, inviting them for “Shabbat
Dinners”, handing out candy bars and showering them with attention and
promises for a better life. That is how Shay Gorohovsky fell into their
trap.
Continue reading
here. I reserve the right to reject and/or shut off comments on this post.
Labels: missionaries, Twitter, Twitter Feed
Abu Bluff is on Twitter
And I'm sure you all want to
follow him. (Not me - have to figure out whom I'm going to dump first).
Labels: Abu Mazen, Twitter
Jerusalem light rail terrorist broadcast desire to murder Jews on social media
If I were to write on this blog that I wished to kill Arabs (or 'Palestinians' for that matter), the odds are pretty high that someone from the police department or the General Security Service would pay me a visit and follow me around for a while to see whether I intend to do what I said I'd do.
Abdelrahman Shaludeh, the terrorist who murdered a three-month old infant and wounded eight other people a short distance from my home on Wednesday night, bragged for months on social media that he wished to murder Jews. In the end, the police only stopped him after he succeeded.
A report in Yediot Achronot Thursday quoted Twitter and
Facebook posts of the 20-year-old Shaludeh, an Arab resident of Shiloach
(Silwan) who was a legal Jerusalem resident. In his last post on a
social media site frequented by Islamists, for example, he wrote “now is
the time to defend your home, Muslims – go out on a crusade to protect
the Al-Aqsa mosque” from Jews who sought to pray on the Temple Mount.
The day before the attack, he posted a link to a video published by
the Al Aqsa Brigade terror group – closely associated with Palestinian
Authority chief Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah group. The clip displayed
terrorists in training. Slodi's comment: “See how the Al Aqsa fighters
train for suicide missions” to carry out against Israeli targets.
Speaking to Israel Radio, Israeli security officials said that Shaludeh was known to authorities, and officials believe that he acted on his own.
Shaludeh, who was 20 or 21, had a
long history of arrests for terrorism - and releases.
According to Palestinian
reports, a-Shaludi was released from jail in December 2013 after
serving a 16-month sentence. He was arrested again last February for a
period of one month. He is also reportedly a close relative of the Muhi
a-Din Sharif, aka "Engineer No. 2", a senior member of the Hamas
military wing who was killed near Ramallah in 1998.
A-Shaludi had a
history of security violations. When he was 18, he was indicted, along
with his brother and his friends, for targeting the Jewish residents of
Silwan in East Jerusalem, and for trying to prevent police cars from
entering the neighborhood.
In May 2013, he was sentenced to 16 months in prison in a plea
bargain, having pleaded guilty to, and been convicted of, throwing
petrol bombs at Jewish cars and at a police vehicle, attempted arson,
aggravated assault, attempted assault of a policeman and rioting.
A-Shaludi confessed and was convicted under the plea bargain to one
of three charges, for an incident that occurred on Nakba Day: He and his
friends made Molotov cocktails, which they divided among themselves and
hurled. The two charges that were dropped referred to the throwing of
firebombs at Jewish residents of Silwan.
In addition, he was arrested last March on suspicion of vehicular theft.
I must be missing something. If he was sentenced to 16 months in May 2013, why was he released in December 2013? Is our government now paroling terrorists?
Fortunately, at least this terrorist will not be released in a 'prisoner exchange.' He died during the night. As of now, his body has not been released. Maybe we should trade it for the two bodies of the IDF soldiers who were killed in Gaza over the summer....
By the way, why is it that the police had apparently not done anything to stop Shaludeh?
Labels: East Jerusalem, Facebook, Jerusalem Light Rail, Palestinian terrorism, Twitter
What does it take to be blocked on Twitter by a liberal American journalist?
What does it take to be blocked on Twitter by a liberal American journalist? Apparently, not much. Tom Gara is the
corporate news editor at the Wall Street Journal. Look what happens to someone who tries to argue with him on Twitter.
For the record, Tzippy Yarom is also a journalist (writes for Mishpacha) and is my cousin.
And you thought that the Wall Street Journal was at least less Leftist than those other legacy newspapers....
Labels: liberal media bias, liberal media censorship, Twitter
What you write on social media can get you into trouble
Three soldiers and a civilian have been arrested for
disclosing on WhatsApp the identities of Israeli casualties in Operation Protective Edge before the families had been informed.
The soldiers, who come from the Medical Corps, the Human Resources
Directorate, and the Military Rabbinate, are accused of sending
information about the identities of soldiers killed in action before
the names had been made public. The messages that made their way around
Israel included photos of the coffins of soldiers being prepared.
In a number of cases, relatives who received the messages learned of
their loved ones’ deaths before they had received an official
notification from the IDF. In other cases, false information reporting
that soldiers had been killed had made it to their relatives. Those
relatives spent hours thinking that tragedy had befallen them before
the mistake could be clarified by the IDF.
“Notifying a family of a soldier or an officer who was killed in action
is one of the most sensitive and well-planned procedures that exist in
the military, as befits such a serious moment,” the military said.
The IDF said that the arrests followed an investigation that it
described has having employed “both open-source and undercover means.”
“The unauthorized WhatsApp messages were irresponsible and spread quickly across social networks,” it said.
The issue of information passing via WhatsApp has been a serious one as
of late for the army. A commercial played in recent weeks on Army
Radio has instructed soldiers not to talk about operational information
on the application for fear it could fall into the wrong hands.
While these arrests will certainly have a deterrent effect, I don't think they will change anything in the long run. We live in a global village and foreign media report things that the Israeli media tries to keep secret for far too long. While I agree in principle that families of casualties ought to hear about it from the IDF (where there are units that are trained in how to inform families) and not from the media, I also believe that the government and the IDF are not realistic about how quickly stories spread in this country. This is a small country, nearly everyone in the work place has been involved in the military at some point, and what you hear at a water cooler during your coffee break at the average high tech company is probably far more informative - and tempting to spread - than anything you might read on Israel Matzav. In fact, many people argue that with the rise of Twitter and WhatsApp and other instantaneous methods of disseminating information, blogging may soon be (or may already be) passe.
Labels: censorship, IDF, Operation Protective Edge, Twitter, WhatsApp
If you don't follow @KurtSchlichter on Twitter...
... you should. You really should.
Thank you Kurt!
Labels: Gaza, Hamas, Kurt Schlichter, Operation Protective Edge, Twitter
CNN correspondent pulled after calling some Israelis 'scum'
A CNN correspondent who tweeted on Thursday (see above) that Israelis near Sderot who cheered the bombing of Gaza are '
scum' has been pulled from Israel and
reassigned. This is from the first link.
Diana Magnay, who is in Israel to report on the latest developments
along the Gaza frontier, observed on camera how a group of Israeli
gathered near Sderot applauded as the IDF rained missiles down on the
Gaza Strip.
In a subsequent post on her Twitter feet, she noted that she was
threatened by some of the Israelis who warned her not to air footage of
their reaction lest her car be "destroyed."
She angrily referred to the group as "scum" before the tweet was deleted from her account altogether.
Here's Magnay's report. Let's go to the videotape.
As noted above, Magnay has been
reassigned.
“After being threatened and harassed before and during a liveshot, Diana reacted angrily on Twitter,” a CNN spokeswoman said in a statement to The Huffington Post.
“She deeply regrets the language used, which was aimed directly at
those who had been targeting our crew," the spokeswoman continued. "She
certainly meant no offense to anyone beyond that group, and she and CNN apologize for any offense that may have been taken.”
The spokeswoman said Magnay has been assigned to Moscow.
I agree 1,000% with those people who cheered. Here's why.
Sderot has been tortured by over 10,000 rockets from Gaza fired over the last 14 years.
The IDF is finally being allowed to do something about it. And they shouldn't cheer?
Labels: anti-Israel media bias, CNN, Sderot, Twitter
Trending 'Palestinian' hashtag: #HitlerWasRight
The 'Palestinians' have a long history (see above) of throwing their lot in with the Nazis. They're doing it again. The hashtag
#HitlerWasRight is unabashedly trending as a result of its promotion by 'Palestinians' on Twitter.
The hashtag began to trend yesterday.
...
Read the whole thing.
Labels: Adolph Hitler, anti-Semitism, Gaza, Hamas, Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, myth of moderate Palestinian, Nazis, Twitter
Twitter blocked in Turkey
Twitter says that it's
looking into reports that its service has been blocked in Turkey since midnight (about 2.5 hours before you will see this post). From what I see in my feed, the story is true, but the block isn't very effective.
The Internet company published a message on its service on
Thursday advising users in Turkey that it was possible to send
Tweets using mobile phone text messaging.
Or as Claire Berlinski - whom I follow on Twitter - puts it:
Or the state is just plain incompetent.
Labels: freedom of speech, Turkey, Twitter
A righteous gentile
At least I assume she's a gentile. I'd like you all to meet Chloe Simone Valdary.
Chloe took on Julia Salazar of J Street U earlier on Wednesday in a debate on Twitter. You'll only be able to read it in
Chloe's Twitter feed. 'Open-minded' Julia has
blocked her account.
I'm shocked. Just shocked.
Labels: J Street U, Jewish twitterers, Leftist Jews, radical Left, Twitter
Al-Qassam Brigades Twitter account suspended
For those of you who are on Twitter, you may be following one less account. Hamas' al-Qassam Brigades has announced that
its Twitter account has been suspended. As you might expect, they're whining about it.
The Qassam Brigades confirmed that they did not violate Twitter’s terms of service ever, asserting that reason behind the suspension is Twitter subordination to US government and “Israel” as usual.
Jewish-Christian incitation against the Qassam active account, so long exposed Israel’s war crimes and violations against the Palestinian civilians led to the suspension of the Qassam Twitter account.
The Qassam Brigases strongly condemned the act and asserted on right to freedom of speech and expression and media.
Boo. Hoo. Amazing that it's taken more than four years for this to happen.
Labels: al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas, Twitter
Hamdallah unresigns, Twitter feed still quiet
'Palestinian Prime Minister' Rami Hamdallah
retracted his resignation on Friday night.
Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah retracted his
resignation on Friday evening, after a meeting with PA President Mahmoud
Abbas in Ramallah, a PA official told the Bethlehem-based Ma'an news
agency.
The two met after attempts on Thursday night by Abbas's top aide to persuade Hamdallah not to resign were unsuccessful.
Hamdallah abruptly submitted his resignation on Thursday after less than a month on the job.
Despite
confirmation from the PA source, an official announcement has not been
issued yet, and Hamdallah did not talk to any of the reporters waiting
outside the meeting, Ma'an reported.
So far, nothing on his
Twitter feed either, although he is now up to
252 followers. That doesn't sound very impressive (it's not), but it's about 215 more than the moron who trolls me several times a day, hoping I will give him exposure by retweeting him.
Labels: Abu Mazen, Rami Hamdullah, Twitter
Best Twitter Feed Ever!
This is real. This is the Twitter feed of 'Palestinian Prime Minister' Rami Hamdallah (Hat Tip:
Lahav Harkov).
By the way, the Twitter feed is
real, but now that he resigned , he has 179 followers instead of the 54 he had in Lahav's screen cap. That's not very impressive, but the increase shows just how important the 'Palestinian Authority' government isn't.... Hamdallah has more than three times as many followers now that he's
not 'Prime Minister.' Heh.
Labels: Palestinian Authority corruption, Rami Hamdullah, Twitter
Would you like to be my 5,000th Twitter follower?
As of two hours ago, I was 25 followers short of 5,000 Twitter followers. Who will be the 5,000th follower?
Maybe it can be you.
UPDATE THURSDAY 12:08 PM
In case you're wondering, I'm now at 4,991.
Labels: blogosphere, personal stuff, Twitter
Don't gloat fellow Israelis: 50 companies admit cooperating with NSA but it's much worse here
Despite the title I gave this picture when I saved it, it's not Jerusalem. It's an Israeli camera, but it's Surat, India. And while many Israelis may be watching with some bemusement as Americans go ballistic over reports that they're being spied on, we really have nothing about which to gloat.
PJ Media is now reporting that
some 50 US companies have admitted to cooperating with the National Security Agency.
Analysts at the National Security Agency can now secretly access
real-time user data provided by as many as 50 American companies,
ranging from credit rating agencies to internet service providers, two
government officials familiar with the arrangements said.
Several of the companies have provided records continuously since
2006, while others have given the agency sporadic access, these
officials said. These officials disclosed the number of participating
companies in order to provide context for a series of disclosures about
the NSA’s domestic collection policies. The officials, contacted
independently, repeatedly said that “domestic collection” does not mean
that the target is based in the U.S. or is a U.S. citizen; rather, it
refers only to the origin of the data.
The Wall Street Journal reported today that U.S. credit card
companies had also provided customer information. The officials would
not disclose the names of the companies because, they said, doing so
would provide U.S. enemies with a list of companies to avoid. They
declined to confirm the list of participants in an internet monitoring
program revealed by the Washington Post and the Guardian, but both
confirmed that the program existed.
“The idea is to create a mosaic. We get a tip. We vet it. Then we mine the data for intelligence,” one of the officials said.
Rumor has it that at least some of the 50
companies involved in 'data collection' are Israeli.
What is especially troubling is that both companies have had
extensive ties to Israel, as well as links to that country’s
intelligence service, a country with a long and aggressive history of
spying on the U.S.
In fact, according to Binney, the advanced analytical and data mining
software the NSA had developed for both its worldwide and international
eavesdropping operations was secretly passed to Israel by a mid-level
employee, apparently with close connections to the country. The
employee, a technical director in the Operations Directorate, “who was a
very strong supporter of Israel,” said Binney, “gave, unbeknownst to
us, he gave the software that we had, doing these fast rates, to the
Israelis.”
Because of his position, it was something Binney should have been alerted to, but wasn’t.
“In addition to being the technical director,” he said, “I was the
chair of the TAP, it’s the Technical Advisory Panel, the foreign
relations council. We’re supposed to know what all these foreign
countries, technically what they’re doing…. They didn’t do this that
way, it was under the table.” After discovering the secret transfer of
the technology, Binney argued that the agency simply pass it to them
officially, and in that way get something in return, such as access to
communications terminals. “So we gave it to them for switches,” he said.
“For access.”
But Binney now suspects that Israeli intelligence in turn passed the
technology on to Israeli companies who operate in countries around the
world, including the U.S. In return, the companies could act as
extensions of Israeli intelligence and pass critical military, economic
and diplomatic information back to them. “And then five years later,
four or five years later, you see a Narus device,” he said. “I think
there’s a connection there, we don’t know for sure.”
Narus was formed in
Israel in November 1997 by six Israelis with much of its money coming
from Walden Israel, an Israeli venture capital company. Its founder and
former chairman, Ori Cohen, once told Israel’s Fortune Magazine that his partners have done technology work for Israeli intelligence. And among the five founders was Stanislav Khirman, a husky, bearded Russian who had previously worked for Elta Systems, Inc. A division of Israel Aerospace Industries, Ltd., Elta
specializes in developing advanced eavesdropping systems for Israeli
defense and intelligence organizations. At Narus, Khirman became the
chief technology officer.
A few years ago, Narus boasted that it is “known for its ability to
capture and collect data from the largest networks around the world.”
The company says its equipment is capable of “providing unparalleled
monitoring and intercept capabilities to service providers and
government organizations around the world” and that “Anything that comes
through [an Internet protocol network], we can record. We can
reconstruct all of their e-mails, along with attachments, see what Web
pages they clicked on, we can reconstruct their [Voice over Internet
Protocol] calls.”
Like Narus, Verint was founded by in Israel by Israelis, including
Jacob “Kobi” Alexander, a former Israeli intelligence officer. Some 800
employees work for Verint, including 350 who are based in Israel,
primarily working in research and development and operations, according to the Jerusalem Post. Among its products is STAR-GATE, which according to the company’s sales literature,
lets “service providers … access communications on virtually any type
of network, retain communication data for as long as required, and query
and deliver content and data …” and was “[d]esigned to manage vast
numbers of targets, concurrent sessions, call data records, and
communications.”
In a rare and candid admission to Forbes,
Retired Brig. Gen. Hanan Gefen, a former commander of the highly secret
Unit 8200, Israel’s NSA, noted his former organization’s influence on
Comverse, which owns Verint, as well as other Israeli companies that
dominate the U.S. eavesdropping and surveillance market. “Take NICE,
Comverse and Check Point for example, three of the largest high-tech
companies, which were all directly influenced by 8200 technology,” said
Gefen. “Check Point was founded by Unit alumni. Comverse’s main product,
the Logger, is based on the Unit’s technology.”
According to a former chief of Unit 8200, both the veterans of the
group and much of the high-tech intelligence equipment they developed
are now employed in high-tech firms around the world. “Cautious
estimates indicate that in the past few years,” he told a reporter for the Israeli newspaper Ha’artez
in 2000, “Unit 8200 veterans have set up some 30 to 40 high-tech
companies, including 5 to 10 that were floated on Wall Street.” Referred
to only as “Brigadier General B,” he added, “This correlation between
serving in the intelligence Unit 8200 and starting successful high-tech
companies is not coincidental: Many of the technologies in use around
the world and developed in Israel were originally military technologies
and were developed and improved by Unit veterans.”
Equally troubling is the issue of corruption. Kobi Alexander, the founder and former chairman of Verint, is now a fugitive, wanted by the FBI on nearly three dozen charges of fraud, theft, lying, bribery, money laundering and other crimes. And two of his top associates at Comverse, Chief Financial Officer David Kreinberg and former General Counsel William F. Sorin,
were also indicted in the scheme and later pleaded guilty, with both
serving time in prison and paying millions of dollars in fines and
penalties.
When asked about these contractors, the NSA declined to “verify the allegations made.”
And if they're doing this sort of thing in the US, you can bet that
they're practicing it in Israel.
And whether or not the two companies that are
being cited did indeed work with the US government to gather
information, Israel would have been a perfect “sandbox” (virtual
practice zone) for the companies to perfect their technology
surveillance, according to attorney Jonathan Klinger.
That is because the laws regarding privacy
on the Internet and electronic communications in Israel are much more
“liberal” — for the security agencies, that is – than they are in many
other democracies, notably the US. Indeed, Israelis can only envy the
uproar among Americans over the PRISM program, says Klinger, an internet
privacy expert.
Compared to the extremely wide powers of Israeli police
and security organizations over electronic data, “the powers of the
American agencies are a joke.”
...
According to the reports, the US government’s
PRISM data-gathering program (which, according to James Clapper, US
Director of National Intelligence, is not aimed at Americans, but
against foreigners, and only to prevent terror attacks) is facilitated
by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which is specifically
aimed at gathering intelligence on enemy agents or terrorists who are
not US citizens. The government must show probable cause of security
concerns to the organizations from which it is requesting the
information.
That is apparently not the case in Israel, Klinger wrote in a blog post,
“giving my two cents on Prism. Over the past decade, Israel has enacted
a number of surveillance laws that allow unrestrained use of personal
information of citizens for routine investigations, not only for the
prevention of terrorism.
Among those laws is one ratified by the
Knesset in 2007 allowing police and other agencies to request – and get –
information about individuals under investigation, even without the
requirement to get a warrant from a judge. Companies are required to
supply information on individuals who may be connected — even
circumstantially — to a crime. For example, if police suspect that a
murder took place at a certain time and a specific location, they can
request location data on customers from cellphone service providers, in
order to identify those who were in the area when the crime was
committed, said Klinger.
In 2009, police filed 9,000 requests for
information from cellphone and Internet companies, including 2,000 for
offenses relating to “public order” — offenses which, Klinger said,
often had political overtones, aimed at leaders of protest groups and
movements.
In fact, Klinger said, many of the activists
who led protests over high prices and monopolization in the Israeli
economy over the past several years have reported to him that their e-mail accounts (often Google Mail accounts) were hacked, as was Klinger’s own account several months ago. Google, in fact, has supplied police in Israel with information about hundreds of users over the past several years,
and it’s likely other companies have done so as well. The difference is
that “we know about Google, because they report the requests made by
police. The other companies do not make such reports.”
In 2008, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel filed a lawsuit
against police and other security organizations, as well as against
communications companies like Bezeq, cellphone service providers Cellcom
and Pelephone, Internet service providers Netvision and Hot, and many
others, claiming that police and security agencies, in collusion with
the communications companies, had gone way beyond their authorities in
demanding information about customers.
The courts dismissed the case.
Apparently emboldened, said Klinger, the government asked the Knesset to
expand the number of agencies that could request data, to include tax
authorities, the Agriculture and Environment Ministries, and even the
Parks and Nature Authority.
As things stand today, all those agencies, and
more, can request information from communications companies without
having to present a warrant. Companies that refuse to comply may be
hauled into court to justify why they refused. In such cases, said
Klinger, the courts invariably rule for the government.
Big Brother is watching you. What could go wrong?
Labels: eavesdropping, Facebook, Gmail, government corruption, spying, Twitter
Be careful what you tweet from Turkey
If you use social media - particularly Twitter - from Turkey, you'd better be really careful about what you post. 25 people in Turkey have been arrested for spreading '
untrue information' on Twitter, and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan (Best Friend Forever of Barack Hussein Obama) has called social media 'the worst menace to society' and claimed that the '
best lies' can be found on Twitter.
This is from the first link.
No one seems to have any idea exactly which tweets in question landed
the offending users in jail—something that only highlights the fact that
Turkey's main media outlets have been noticeably slow to give the
protests the coverage they deserve (which, in turn, has left many Turks
relying on the social media site for their updates). Regardless, the
arrest of a couple dozen Twitter users is unlikely to deter the
thousands of others using the social media site to voice their
displeausre with Erdoğan any more than the several thousands of arrests on the streets is going to deter the mass demonstrations that are now occuring across Turkey.
And from the second link:
Social media has been an essential tool for Turkish protesters to
skirt the tight-lipped government-run media. “The Turkish media should
be ashamed. For the past 48 hours, the people have been waging a
struggle and you have not reported anything about it. Shame on you,” said Fatih Akin, a prominent Turkish film director.
Indeed, over the weekend, government-run newspaper, Sabah, splashed
the front page with a story of the Prime Minister receiving an award for
combating smoking and made no mention of the country-wide protests that
have been front-page headlines around the world.
...
Research
by NYU Politics Ph.D. candidates Pablo Barberá and Megan Metzger have
found that, unlike past protests such as Egypt, nearly all of the
geo-located tweets are coming from within Turkey (90 percent). In other
words, social media is a tool for the protestors themselves, not just a
medium to show solidarity from citizens abroad.
Hmmm.
Labels: Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkish spring, Twitter
