March on Washington leader John Lewis: 'This is not a post-racial society'

Part of the reason Lewis is revered today is because he was not only one of the "big six" civil rights leaders of the 60s, but a brave activist on the front line of often brutal encounters with segregationist authorities in the deep south. As chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) at the height of the civil rights movement, he was arrested more than 40 times and knew many of those who lost their lives fighting for the cause.

Half a century ago, John Lewis, a 23-year-old student leader, stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and looked out a sea of black and white faces. It was 1963, and the crowd had gathered in Washington for the most significant protest of the civil rights era.

Lewis saw hundreds of thousands of people, stretched into the distance; some had climbed trees for a better view, while others stood knee-deep in the memorial's long rectangular pool. "It was a hot day," Lewis recalls. "I said to myself: 'This is it, I must go forward.' And then I started speaking."

Now a 73-year-old Democratic congressman, Lewis is the only surviving speaker from the March on Washington, the landmark protest that culminated in Martin Luther King's famous "I have a dream" speech. He will return to the steps of the memorial later this month for the 50th anniversary of that march, which was a turning point for for the civil rights movement.

The March on Washington gave the campaign for equal rights an unstoppable momentum, helping to pass the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act – the two legislative pillars to emerge from the civil rights era. But according to Lewis, the 50th anniversary comes at difficult time for race relations in America. In an interview with the Guardian, he said:

The legacy of slavery and segregation dehumanises people. We have not yet escaped the bitterness. And we don't want to talk about it.

Two recent developments have jarred with the image of a country progressive enough to elect a black man to the White House. A recent Supreme Court decision effectively dismantled one of the key enforcement provisions in the Voting Rights Act, allowing southern states like Texas and North Carolina to implement changes to election rulesthan experts say discriminate against minority voters.

The later decision by a jury in Florida to acquit George Zimmerman over the killing of the black teenager Trayvon Martin has been cited by many – including president Barack Obama – as evidence of a legacy of persistent racial prejudice. "This is not a post-racial society," Lewis said. "Racism is still deeply embedded in American society, and you can't cover it up.".. read more:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/07/john-lewis-march-washington-50th-anniversary

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How to Be a Rogue Superpower A Manual for the 21st Century // Prometheus Among the Cannibals - A Letter to Edward Snowden

At most moments in American history, the revelation that a secret court, which never turns down government requests, is making law “almost” at the level of the Supreme Court would surely have caused an outcry in Congress and elsewhere.  However, there was none..

Today, if you are a twenty-first-century “dissident” and need asylum/protection from the only superpower left, there is essentially none to be had.

It’s hard even to know how to take it in.  I mean, what’s really happening?  An employee of a private contractor working for the National Security Agency makes off with unknown numbers of files about America’s developing global security state on a thumb drive and four laptop computers, and jumps the nearest plane to Hong Kong.  His goal: to expose a vast surveillance structure built in the shadows in the post-9/11 years and significantly aimed at Americans.  He leaks some of the documents to a columnist at the British Guardian and to the Washington Post.  The response is unprecedented: an “international manhunt” (or more politely but less accurately, “a diplomatic full court press”) conducted not by Interpol or the United Nations but by the planet’s sole superpower, the very government whose practices the leaker was so intent on exposing.

And that’s just for starters.  Let’s add another factor.  The leaker, a young man with great techno-savvy, lets the world know that he’s picked and chosen among the NSA files in his possession.  He’s releasing only those he thinks the American public needs in order to start a full-scale debate about the unprecedented secret world of surveillance that their taxpayer dollars have created.  In other words, this is no “document dump.”  He wants to spark change without doing harm.

But here’s the kicker: he couldn’t be more aware of previous whistleblower cases, the punitive reaction of his government to them, and the fate that might be his.  As a result, we now know, he has encrypted the full set of files in his possession and left them in one or more safe places for unknown individuals -- that is, we don’t know who they are -- to access, should he be taken by the U.S.

In other words, from the time Edward Snowden’s first leaked documents came out, it was obvious that he was in control of how much of the NSA’s secret world would be seen.  It would be hard then not to conclude that capturing him, imprisoning him, trying him, and throwing away the key is likely to increase, not decrease, the flow of those documents.  Knowing that, the Obama administration and the representatives of our secret world went after him anyway -- after one man on a global scale and in a way that may not have a precedent.  No thought of future embarrassment stopped them, nor, it seems, did they hesitate because of possible resentments engendered by their heavy-handed pressure on numerous foreign governments.

The result has been a global spectacle, as well as a worldwide debate about the spying practices of the U.S. (and its allies).  In these weeks, Washington has proven determined, vengeful, implacable.  It has strong-armed, threatened, and elbowed powers large and small.  It has essentially pledged that the leaker, former Booz Allen employee Edward Snowden, will never be safe on this planet in his lifetime. And yet, to mention the obvious, the greatest power on Earth has, as yet, failed to get its man and is losing the public opinion battle globally.

An Asylum-less World

Highlighted in all this has been a curious fact of our twenty-first-century world.  In the Cold War years, asylum was always potentially available.  If you opposed one of the two superpowers or its allies, the other was usually ready to open its arms to you, as the U.S. famously did for what were once called “Soviet dissidents” in great numbers.  The Soviets did the same for Americans, Brits, and others, often secret communists, sometimes actual spies, who opposed the leading capitalist power and its global order.

Today, if you are a twenty-first-century “dissident” and need asylum/protection from the only superpower left, there is essentially none to be had.  Even after three Latin American countries, enraged at Washington's actions, extended offers of protection to Snowden, these should be treated as a new category of limited asylum.  After all, the greatest power on the planet has, since 9/11, shown itself perfectly willing to do almost anything in pursuit of its definition of “security” or the security of its security system.  Torture, abuse, the setting up of secret prisons or “black sites,” the kidnapping of terrorist suspects (including perfectly innocent people) off the streets of global cities and in the backlands of the planet, as well as their “rendition” to the torture chambers of complicit allied regimes, and the secret surveillance of anyone anywhere would only start a far longer list.

Nothing about the “international manhunt” for Snowden indicates that the Obama administration would be unwilling to send in the CIA or special operations types to “render” him from Venezuela, Bolivia, or Nicaragua, no matter the cost to hemispheric relations.  Snowden himself brought up this possibility in his first interview with Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald.  “I could,” he said bluntly, “be rendered by the CIA.” This assumes that he can even make it to a land of exile from somewhere in the bowels of the international terminal of Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport without being intercepted by Washington... read more: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175725/

Prometheus Among the Cannibals  A Letter to Edward Snowden  By Rebecca Solnit No matter what’s written about him here in the mainstream, the spectacle of a single remarkably articulate and self-confident individual outwitting the last superpower has been, in its own way, uplifting.  Although the first global polls haven’t come in, I think it’s safe to assume that from Bolivia to Hong Kong, Germany to Japan, Washington is taking a remarkable licking in the global opinion wars.  Even at home, we know that, among the young in particular, opinion seems to be shifting on both Snowden’s acts and the surveillance state whose architecture he revealed...

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James Bamford on domestic surveillance in the USA - They Know Much More Than You Think

Within days of Snowden’s documents appearing in The Guardian and The Washington Post, revealing several of the National Security Agency’s extensive domestic surveillance programs, bookstores reported a sudden spike in the sales of George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel 1984. 


for nearly a century, telecom companies have been allowed to violate the privacy of millions of Americans with impunity.

In mid-May, Edward Snowden, an American in his late twenties, walked through the onyx entrance of the Mira Hotel on Nathan Road in Hong Kong and checked in. He was pulling a small black travel bag and had a number of laptop cases draped over his shoulders. Inside those cases were four computers packed with some of his country’s most closely held secrets.

Within days of Snowden’s documents appearing in The Guardian and The Washington Post, revealing several of the National Security Agency’s extensive domestic surveillance programs, bookstores reported a sudden spike in the sales of George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel 1984. On Amazon.com, the book made the “Movers & Shakers” list and skyrocketed 6,021 percent in a single day. Written sixty-five years ago, it described a fictitious totalitarian society where a shadowy leader known as “Big Brother” controls his population through invasive surveillance. “The telescreens,” Orwell wrote, “have hidden microphones and cameras. These devices, alongside informers, permit the Thought Police to spy upon everyone….”

Today, as the Snowden documents make clear, it is the NSA that keeps track of phone calls, monitors communications, and analyzes people’s thoughts through data mining of Google searches and other online activity. “Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it,” Orwell wrote about his protagonist, Winston Smith.

There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.

Of course the US is not a totalitarian society, and no equivalent of Big Brother runs it, as the widespread reporting of Snowden’s information shows. We know little about what uses the NSA makes of most information available to it—it claims to have exposed a number of terrorist plots—and it has yet to be shown what effects its activities may have on the lives of most American citizens. Congressional committees and a special federal court are charged with overseeing its work, although they are committed to secrecy, and the court can hear appeals only from the government.

Still, the US intelligence agencies also seem to have adopted Orwell’s idea of doublethink—“to be conscious of complete truthfulness,” he wrote, “while telling carefully constructed lies.” For example, James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, was asked at a Senate hearing in March whether “the NSA collect[s] any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans.” Clapper’s answer: “No, sir…. Not wittingly.”

Three months later, following the revelations of the phone-log program in which the NSA collects telephone data—the numbers of both callers and the length of the calls—on hundreds of millions of Americans, Clapper switched to doublethink. He said that his previous answer was not a lie; he just chose to respond in the “least untruthful manner.” With such an Orwellian concept of the truth now being used, it is useful to take a look at what the government has been telling the public about its surveillance activities over the years, and compare it with what we know now as a result of the top secret documents and other information released by, among others, the former NSA contract employee Edward Snowden... read more:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/aug/15/nsa-they-know-much-more-you-think/

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Edward Snowden's not the story. The fate of the internet is

The press has lost the plot over the Snowden revelations. The fact is that the net is finished as a global network and that US firms' cloud services cannot be trusted.."the rhetoric of the 'internet freedom agenda' looks as trustworthy as George Bush's 'freedom agenda' after Abu Ghraib."

Repeat after me: Edward Snowden is not the story. The story is what he has revealed about the hidden wiring of our networked world. This insight seems to have escaped most of the world's mainstream media, for reasons that escape me but would not have surprised Evelyn Waugh, whose contempt for journalists was one of his few endearing characteristics. The obvious explanations are: incorrigible ignorance; the imperative to personalise stories; or gullibility in swallowing US government spin, which brands Snowden as a spy rather than a whistleblower.

In a way, it doesn't matter why the media lost the scent. What matters is that they did. So as a public service, let us summarise what Snowden has achieved thus far.

Without him, we would not know how the National Security Agency (NSA) had been able to access the emails, Facebook accounts and videos of citizens across the world; or how it had secretly acquired the phone records of millions of Americans; or how, through a secret court, it has been able to bend nine US internet companies to its demands for access to their users' data. Similarly, without Snowden, we would not be debating whether the US government should have turned surveillance into a huge, privatised business, offering data-mining contracts to private contractors such as Booz Allen Hamilton and, in the process, high-level security clearance to thousands of people who shouldn't have it. Nor would there be – finally – a serious debate between Europe (excluding the UK, which in these matters is just an overseas franchise of the US) and the United States about where the proper balance between freedom and security lies.

These are pretty significant outcomes and they're just the first-order consequences of Snowden's activities. As far as most of our mass media are concerned, though, they have gone largely unremarked. Instead, we have been fed a constant stream of journalistic pap – speculation about Snowden's travel plans, asylum requests, state of mind, physical appearance, etc. The "human interest" angle has trumped the real story, which is what the NSA revelations tell us about how our networked world actually works and the direction in which it is heading.

As an antidote, here are some of the things we should be thinking about as a result of what we have learned so far.

The first is that the days of the internet as a truly global network are numbered. It was always a possibility that the system would eventually be Balkanised, ie divided into a number of geographical or jurisdiction-determined subnets as societies such as China, Russia, Iran and other Islamic states decided that they needed to control how their citizens communicated. Now, Balkanisation is a certainty.

Second, the issue of internet governance is about to become very contentious. Given what we now know about how the US and its satraps have been abusing their privileged position in the global infrastructure, the idea that the western powers can be allowed to continue to control it has become untenable.

Third, as Evgeny Morozov has pointed out, the Obama administration's "internet freedom agenda" has been exposed as patronising cant. "Today," he writes, "the rhetoric of the 'internet freedom agenda' looks as trustworthy as George Bush's 'freedom agenda' after Abu Ghraib."

That's all at nation-state level. But the Snowden revelations also have implications for you and me.

They tell us, for example, that no US-based internet company can be trusted to protect our privacy or data. The fact is that Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft are all integral components of the US cyber-surveillance system. Nothing, but nothing, that is stored in their "cloud" services can be guaranteed to be safe from surveillance or from illicit downloading by employees of the consultancies employed by the NSA. That means that if you're thinking of outsourcing your troublesome IT operations to, say, Google or Microsoft, then think again... read more:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/jul/28/edward-snowden-death-of-internet

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French MP accused of saying Hitler 'didn't kill enough' Travellers (Romanis)

A centrist MP is facing expulsion from his party and legal action by the state after he allegedly said of French Travellers: "Hitler maybe didn't kill enough of them." Gilles Bourdouleix, MP and mayor of the town of Cholet in the Maine and Loire region of western France, was reported to have made the comments on Sunday during an encounter with a group of Travellers who had parked over 100 caravans in a field owned by the local authority. According to the local paper Le Courrier de L'Ouest, the meeting, in which Bourdouleix told the Travellers they would have to move on, was tense, with some Travellers accusing him of racism and a few making a Nazi salute towards him.

During the exchange, as reported by the newspaper, a man said to Bourdouleix: "You know how to talk better than [the former president Nicolas] Sarkozy." The MP replied that "the law must be implemented". There was murmuring and Bourdouleix reportedly said in a hushed tone: "Just goes to show that Hitler maybe didn't kill enough of them." When the MP denied the comments, the paper published a recording on its website. The 53-year-old insisted he had been the victim of a "scandalous montage" and was considering suing.

He told BFM TV: "I mumbled something like, 'If it was Hitler he would have killed them here,' meaning: 'Thank goodness I'm not Hitler and so there's no reason to call me Hitler.' This is shameful score-settling which aims to smear me." The newspaper said it absolutely stood by its reporting and the published recording. The local police prefect's office has filed a legal complaint with a state prosecutor against Bourdouleix for glorification of crimes against humanity. At least 200,000 Gypsies are estimated to have been killed during the Holocaust.

The Socialist interior minister Manuel Valls said he hoped the MP would be sanctioned "very heavily". He said: "A case has been brought before the courts because this is praise for the crimes of the second world war, it's praise for Nazis, and coming from a mayor it's intolerable." Praising crimes against humanity in France carries a maximum sentence of a year in jail and €45,000 (£37,700) in fines. Bourdouleix belongs to the centre-right grouping the Union of Democrats and Independents (UDI), headed by the former environment minister Jean-Louis Borloo. The party will meet to discuss his possible exclusion on Wednesday.

France has one of the biggest Traveller communities in mainlandEurope. There are around 350,000 French Travellers, a nomadic population which is different from the Roma community from eastern Europe. Politicians from right and left united to condemn Bourdouleix's alleged comments. Valérie Trierweiler, the partner of the president François Hollande, tweeted that the comments were "intolerable" pointing out that one of the Nazi internment camps for Gypsies during the Holocaust was located in Montreuil-Bellay – only 60km (37 miles) from Cholet.

The prime minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, said Bourdouleix's comments were "unacceptable, worrying" and "punishable by the law". Valérie Pécresse, of the traditional right-wing UMP party, said the comments were "utterly reprehensible" and parliament should sanction him.

Rights groups have warned of rising tension in France over non-settled communities, after several rightwing politicians recently spoke out against illegal caravan camps, using strong language that the left said was provocative. This month Christian Estrosi, Nice's right-wing mayor, expelled one group of Travellers from a sports field, vowing to "crush" the "delinquents", and urged other mayors to revolt against what he called leniency by the Socialists. Last month, rights groups said they would take legal action against the far-right politician Jean-Marie Le Pen after he told a meeting in Nice that Roma in the city were "rash-inducing" and "smelly".

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/23/french-mp-hitler-kill-travellers

See also:

Hitler's annihilation of the Romanis (the Gypsies of Europe)

Hitler’s Strange Afterlife in India

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Nelson Mandela 'doing much better' as 95th birthday arrives

Their family has been accused of crass commercialism, exploiting their grandfather's name and tarnishing his legacy by fighting over his final resting place. Undaunted, two of Nelson Mandela's granddaughters chose the eve of his 95th birthday to launch a collection of 299 rand (£20) T-shirts emblazoned with "Legend", "Revolutionary" and "Long Walk to Freedom".

Swati Dlamini and Zaziwe Dlamini-Manaway said they would be among 30 to 40 family members visiting the former president in hospital in Pretoria on Thursday. They said he could expect 95 cupcakes along with cards made by their children, and described his condition as "still critical, but he's doing much better". The pair, who featured in the critically mauled reality TV show Being Mandela, had posted half a dozen tweets on their joint Twitter accountinviting allcomers to the launch in one of South Africa's more luxurious shopping malls. But it could not be described as a public stampede. The handful of shoppers at the Cross Trainer in Sandton were comfortably outnumbered by staff and about 20 journalists eager for health updates.

In a window display there were pictures with fake gold frames showing the anti-apartheid hero. One captured him beaming alongside Michael Jackson. Swati wore two of the 14 new designs. Asked whether they were competing with the Nelson Mandela Foundation's 46664 brand – a reference to his prison number on Robben Island – she replied: "We are all trying to achieve the same objective." She added: "We launched it around my grandfather's birthday to celebrate his legacy. My grandfather was also a lover of fashion. He became famous for his Madiba shirts."

Mandela has been described as a global brand comparable with Coca-Cola or Google. Close to where his granddaughters gave a series of interviews, billboards advertised Mandela commemorative coins, souvenir shops offered Nelson Mandela Day mugs and wristbands, bookshops displayed Long Walk to Freedom and other Mandela titles in their windows and tourists posed for photos beside a giant statue in, perhaps inevitably, Nelson Mandela Square.

Swati and Zaziwe, both in their 30s, denied that they were trying to cash in with their Kardashians-style reality show and clothing range. Swati said: "Our grandparents have always told us that this legacy and this name also belongs to us and that we have a birthright to it, and that's essentially it." Zaziwe said: "This is just us doing us. This is our name as well, there's nothing we can do about it. We were born into this family and it's our name: we love it, we cherish it, we respect it and we are just trying to continue our grandfather's legacy."

When Mandela was admitted to hospital on 8 June with a recurring lung infection and then slipped into a critical condition, many doubted he would see his 95th birthday. But his condition appears to have improved in recent weeks. In a statement released on Wednesday, his grandson Mandla said: "The fact that my grandfather is with us to this day when doomsday people predicted his demise makes me proud of his fighting spirit which he has demonstrated over the many years of his life."

Mandela's daughter Zindzi said he had made "dramatic progress". She told Sky News: "I visited him yesterday and he was watching television with headphones. He gave us a huge smile and raised his hand … He responds with his eyes and his hands." Mandela was gaining energy and strength, Zindzi said. "I should think he will be going home any time soon."

Mandela will be among the first recipients of a smart ID card launched by the South African government on Thursday. It will be accepted by Zindzi on his behalf.

His foundation has asked people in South Africa and beyond to mark international Nelson Mandela Day on Thursday by volunteering 67 minutes to charity in honour of his 67 years of public service. President Jacob Zuma will oversee the donation of houses to poor black and white families in "a non-racial settlement" in the Pretoria area, and the retired archbishop Desmond Tutu will help paint a school in Cape Town. Other celebrations in South Africa include the world's biggest birthday card and the world's biggest Mandela portrait.

The country's last white president, FW de Klerk, said: "Nelson Mandela is approaching the end of the long walk that he began 95 years ago in Qunu. On his birthday we should commemorate the remarkable contribution that he has made to South Africa and to all its people. Today should be a time for quiet and respectful contemplation – and not for unseemly squabbling over the ownership of Mr Mandela's heritage."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/17/nelson-mandela-better-95th-birthday

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Slavery is a $32 billion industry

All too often slavery in some of its more contemporary manifestations – human trafficking, the exploitation of migrant workers, the buying and selling of women and girls into the sex trade – is considered a labour or human rights issue. Ultimately, though, modern-day slavery is at heart a booming economy – a thriving business in human life. Unless this discrepancy is recognised and addressed in the same way as other global crimes, such as those involving drugs and arms, there is no hope of combating the issue.

Legislation is in place to try to curtail modern-day slavery, a multibillion-dollar industry that operates almost entirely by cash and is estimated by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) to earn profits of $32bn each year (pdf). However, while a number of conventions and laws have been passed internationally in the past 10 years to try to stop the business – such as the Council of Europe convention, 2005 (pdf) and the EU directive on trafficking, 2011 – there is no consistent will to implement these measures fully or support them with proper budgets. Across the board, there has been a fundamental failure to address the reality of modern-day slavery – an estimated 21 million people are trapped in some form. UN member states and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime do not effectively implement the UN convention against human trafficking, signed in Palermo in December 2000, which could be making a real difference in combating the issue.

The World Bank could be more insistent in its approach to money laundering across the globe. Although cross-border legislation exists, there seems to be no real push to find out where the cash is being banked and confiscate it. Due to the scale of human trafficking, we know there are huge profits being made. At the same time, the ILO has estimated that global slavery is responsible for more than $21bn of unpaid wages each year. Yet no one is making consistent strides to confiscate the profits and prosecute the ringleaders profiteering from the sale of human beings. Without strong action, criminals will continue to pursue this crime because of the enormous proceeds.

Let's turn to the legislation supposedly in place to prevent trafficking and bring the perpetrators to justice. The US state department's Trafficking in Persons report, the principal diplomatic tool to engage foreign governments on human trafficking, is based on the Palermo convention, still considered the backbone of global anti-slavery legislation. The convention does not, however, promote true cross-border action, and there is no mention of the recovery of cash from the profits of human trafficking.

The 2005 Council of Europe convention and the 2011 EU directive on trafficking are much stronger. Both have been consolidated and include cross-border prosecutions and recovery of money. Despite this, only limited work has been done to implement them, with the amount of money recovered very small. Ultimately, no number of declarations will end the business of human trafficking. We need real investment from governments, and the involvement of people who are trained not only to spot human trafficking but also to follow the money.

At the root of all this inaction is a lack of political will to address global slavery. Many governments remain in denial that the problem even exists. Why? Put bluntly, it is because there is no public demand for money to be spent on the issue. Amid the global economic crisis, the 21 million people who remain trapped in slavery are being ignored.

It isn't only criminals who are profiteering from the trade in human labour. Modern-day slavery is an underground business, intrinsically linked to global supply chains. Individuals and companies are making a huge amount of money out of this business and can make it extremely hard for campaigners and governments to chase the cash back to its true source.

Dealing with the murky links between forced labour and global supply chains is perhaps the only real chance we have of cracking the business of slavery. All private companies should be required to sign up to the Athens ethical principles against human trafficking. By signing this agreement, they will be contributing to the eradication of human trafficking and emphasising that this form of business will not be tolerated.

Conventions and laws have been passed over the past few years – including the British Finance Act – that incorporate strong legislation to combat money laundering. However, more explicit laws on the route of money sourced from human trafficking are needed. Until the profits of this business are monitored and confiscated, no real progress can be made towards ending human trafficking. Ultimately, it's only by cutting off the money that we will stop it.

• Mary Goudie is a senior member of the House of Lords and a global advocate for the rights of women and children. She chairs the UN's women leaders' council to fight human trafficking

http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2013/jul/15/slavery-industry-money-human-trafficking

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CORD JEFFERSON - The Zimmerman Jury Told Young Black Men What We Already Knew

Tonight a Florida man’s acquittal for hunting and killing a black teenager who was armed with only a bag of candy serves as a Rorschach test for the American public. For conservatives, it’s a triumph of permissive gun laws and a victory over the liberal media, which had been unfairly rooting for the dead kid all along. For liberals, it's a tragic and glaring example of the gaps that plague our criminal justice system. For people of color, it’s a vivid reminder that we must always be deferential to white people, or face the very real chance of getting killed.

When I was junior in college in Virginia, my then-girlfriend and I decided one night to meet up for a quick snack while studying for midterms. We bought some sandwiches at a 24-hour deli and, rather than waste time going to either of our homes, which were in opposite directions, we decided to eat in her car in a parking lot near a fancy hotel off-campus. We were listening to music and laughing about something when I saw a security guard’s headlights in the rear view mirror, and I stopped laughing as I watched him—a white man in his mid-40s—walk up to my girlfriend’s door and ask her to step out of the car. “Uh, OK,” she said, clearly as confused as I was about what we’d done to warrant his attention.

He walked her away from her car toward his, but they were close enough that I could hear their conversation. He asked her her name, a slight southern lilt lengthening his vowels. She told him. Then he said, “Are you OK? “

“What do you mean?” she said.

“Are you safe right now?” he asked again.

My girlfriend was white. I am not.

I leapt out of the car and screamed, “What the hell did you just ask her?” I wanted to see if he had the resolve to say it again, to me this time.

The security guard turned to face me. “It’s standard procedure, sir,” he said. “I was going to ask you if you were alright, too.”

“I think you’re lying,” I said.

“You can think what you’d like,” he said, a smile creeping up his face. “We can also call the police right now and sort this all out, because y’all aren’t supposed to be here and this is private property.”

I wanted to hit him in his fucking face. I wanted to take his flashlight from his belt and smash his teeth out, giving him a real reason to call the cops, a reason besides the crime of eating a sandwich in a parking lot.

But I was a 20-year-old brown kid in Virginia. It was late. I was with a white girl. I felt embarrassed, and the thought of being surrounded by more inquisitive white men with pepper spray and tasers and handcuffs and guns only made my face hotter. And so I apologized. “I’m sorry,” I said. “We didn’t know this was private property.”

“Well, now you know,” he said.

My girlfriend drove me home, where I stewed for hours and promised myself I’d report the guard in the morning. When I woke, however, I realized I didn’t have the guard’s name, nor did I even know what to report—it’s not against any rules to ask a white woman if the black man in the car with her is attacking her. It’s not against any rules to humiliate someone in a darkened parking lot in front of the person they love. It may, however, be against the rules to eat food in the parking lot in the first place. I never reported it. I think about it to this day.

It is a complicated thing to be young, black, and male in America. Not only are you well aware that many people are afraid of you—you can see them clutching their purses or stiffening in their subway seats when you sit across from them—you must also remain conscious of the fact that people expect you to be apologetic for their fear. It’s your job to be remorseful about the fact that your very nature makes them uncomfortable, like a pilot having to apologize to a fearful flyer for being in the sky.

If you’re a black man and you don’t remain vigilant of and obsequious to white people’s panic in your presence—if you, say, punch a man who accosts you during dinner with your girlfriend and screams “Nigger!” in your face, or if you, say, punch a man who is following you without cause in the dark with a handgun at his side—then you must be prepared to be arrested, be beaten, be shot through the heart and lung and die on the way home to watch a basketball game with your family. And after you are dead, other blacks should be prepared for people to say you are a vicious thug who deserved it. You smoked weed, for instance, and got in some fights at school (like I did)—obviously you had it coming. You were a ticking time bomb, and sooner or later someone was going to have to put you down.

To stay alive and out of jail, brown and black kids learn to cope. They learn to say, “Sorry, sir,” for having sandwiches in the wrong parking lot. They learn, as LeVar Burton has, to remove their hats and sunglasses and put their hands up when police pull them over. They learn to tolerate the indignity of strange, drunken men approaching them and calling them and their loved ones a bunch of niggers. They learn that even if you’re willing to punch a harasser and face the consequences, there’s always a chance a police officer will come to arrest you, put you face down on the ground, and then shoot you execution style. Maybe the cop who shoots you will only get two years in jail, because it was all a big misunderstanding. You see, he meant to be shooting you in the back with his taser.

Trayvon Martin is dead—and so many young men like him are dead or in prison—because in America it was his responsibility to take it. It was his responsibility to let a stranger with a gun follow him at night in his own neighborhood and suspect him of wrongdoing. It was his responsibility to apologize for being a black kid who scared people. It was not George Zimmerman’s responsibility to let a boy get home to his family.

http://gawker.com/the-zimmerman-jury-told-young-black-men-what-we-already-770650992

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How Microsoft handed the NSA access to encrypted messages

Microsoft has collaborated closely with US intelligence services to allow users' communications to be intercepted, including helping the National Security Agency to circumvent the company's own encryption, according to top-secret documents obtained by the Guardian. The files provided by Edward Snowden illustrate the scale of co-operation between Silicon Valley and the intelligence agencies over the last three years. They also shed new light on the workings of the top-secret Prism program, which was disclosed by the Guardian and the Washington Post last month.

The documents show that:

• Microsoft helped the NSA to circumvent its encryption to address concerns that the agency would be unable to intercept web chats on the new Outlook.com portal;

• The agency already had pre-encryption stage access to email on Outlook.com, including Hotmail;

• The company worked with the FBI this year to allow the NSA easier access via Prism to its cloud storage service SkyDrive, which now has more than 250 million users worldwide;

• Microsoft also worked with the FBI's Data Intercept Unit to "understand" potential issues with a feature in Outlook.com that allows users to create email aliases;

• In July last year, nine months after Microsoft bought Skype, the NSAboasted that a new capability had tripled the amount of Skype video calls being collected through Prism;

• Material collected through Prism is routinely shared with the FBI andCIA, with one NSA document describing the program as a "team sport".

The latest NSA revelations further expose the tensions between Silicon Valley and the Obama administration. All the major tech firms are lobbying the government to allow them to disclose more fully the extent and nature of their co-operation with the NSA to meet their customers'privacy concerns. Privately, tech executives are at pains to distance themselves from claims of collaboration and teamwork given by the NSA documents, and insist the process is driven by legal compulsion.

In a statement, Microsoft said: "When we upgrade or update products we aren't absolved from the need to comply with existing or future lawful demands." The company reiterated its argument that it provides customer data "only in response to government demands and we only ever comply with orders for requests about specific accounts or identifiers".

In June, the Guardian revealed that the NSA claimed to have "direct access" through the Prism program to the systems of many majorinternet companies, including Microsoft, Skype, Apple, Google, Facebook and Yahoo.

Blanket orders from the secret surveillance court allow these communications to be collected without an individual warrant if the NSAoperative has a 51% belief that the target is not a US citizen and is not on US soil at the time. Targeting US citizens does require an individual warrant, but the NSA is able to collect Americans' communications without a warrant if the target is a foreign national located overseas.

Since Prism's existence became public, Microsoft and the other companies listed on the NSA documents as providers have denied all knowledge of the program and insisted that the intelligence agencies do not have back doors into their systems.

Microsoft's latest marketing campaign, launched in April, emphasizes its commitment to privacy with the slogan: "Your privacy is our priority." Similarly, Skype's privacy policy states: "Skype is committed to respecting your privacy and the confidentiality of your personal data, traffic data and communications content."

But internal NSA newsletters, marked top secret, suggest the co-operation between the intelligence community and the companies is deep and ongoing. The latest documents come from the NSA's Special Source Operations (SSO) division, described by Snowden as the "crown jewel" of the agency. It is responsible for all programs aimed at US communications systems through corporate partnerships such as Prism... 

read more:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-collaboration-user-data

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