After New York governor Andrew Cuomo issued an executive order directing the state to monitor and sanction activists in the Boycott, Sanctions and Divest Movement (BDS) against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, critics complained that the order is McCarthyism. They objected that social and economic boycotts have been used in instances such as South Africa’s racial segregation or Apartheid. Interference in such a social and political movement in protest of injustice, they aver, is contrary to the first amendment. (Cuomo’s executive order will certainly be struck down by the courts). The order is creepy, since it suggests that Cuomo will have New York state bureaucrats combing through citizens’ Facebook and Twitter accounts to see if they support BDS, and then find ways of punishing them (no contracts from the state, no state jobs, no internships).

The objections of Cuomo’s critics are often naive, given the actual record of the Israel lobbies in the United States, some of which have sometimes played Sen. Joseph McCarthy all on their own.

The Anti-Discrimination League (ADL), for instance, only poses as a human rights organization. It has at least sometimes functioned as an intelligence organization working on behalf of a foreign state.

Back in the late 1970s and through the 1980s, at the height of the anti-Apartheid movement, the Israeli government was a firm supporter of the racist faction of Afrikaaners. The Israeli government even offered nukes to the white supremacist South African government for use on its African neighbors if they became too uppity. It appears to have instructed the ADL in the US to spy on anti-Apartheid activists, who were engaged in a boycott, divest and sanctions campaign against Praetoria. Many of the same groups were also involved in pro-Palestinian activities.

The ADL in the San Francisco Bay area carefully compiled files on 10,000 Americans and 600 organizations. One ADL secret agent leaked the files on the anti-Apartheid activists, and South Africans in political exile, to the Apartheid government, with potentially dire consequences for any of them that the South African secret police could get hold of.

It is worth noting that President Barack Obama gave his first political speech, in 1981 on the Occidental campus, against Apartheid. Maybe the ADL has a file on him somewhere.

Jeffrey Blankfort reports, based on the dossier of ADL activities ordered released when it lost the suit the activists brought against it, that “The ADL supplied confidential information to foreign governments that it obtained from police and federal agencies in the US.”

One of the people on which the ADL was spying, the non-violent activist Alex Odeh of the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee, was assassinated in 1985; (there is no evidence of a connection).

The same wealthy funders who payed the ADL to undertake this vast domestic spying operation on behalf of two foreign governments underwrite Andrew Cuomo’s political campaign, and have bribed him to turn the state of New York itself into an ADL San Francisco style monitoring and punishing organization.

The point of spying on people is not only to gather information on them but also to intimidate and block them. That is the point of knowing who they are, where they live, and of keeping files on them that can be slipped to a potential employer at the appropriate moment.

Many US ethnic lobbying groups are driven by foreign nationalisms and many of them engage in smear campaigns and dirty tricks. The Israel lobbies aren’t distinctive in this regard, though they are typically better heeled and better organized and better connected politically.

Personally, I don’t support boycotts of Israel proper, though I think the West Bank squatters on Palestinian territory have to be boycotted as a matter of international law. But the Israel lobbies are making a huge error in having Cuomo play Sen Joe McCarthy for them. They will enlist on the side of the BDS activists a whole phalanx of civil and human rights organizations that might otherwise not be sympathetic to them. They have made Israel even more unsympathetic –after years of far right wing Likud government and senseless violence against Palestinians and fruitless assaults like those on Gaza. And they have positioned the pro-Israel cause as a danger to the US constitution.

Attorney Joseph Welch became famous for standing up to Sen. McCarthy. What is often not realized is that Welch was the attorney for the US Army. That’s right, the lunatic McCarthy was investigating the alleged Communist activities of the US Army.

This was the moment when Welch began bringing the country to its senses:

“Mr. Welch: You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

And thus we all say, who care about the first amendment and American civil liberties and basic human rights– thus we all say to Andrew Cuomo today.

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

Wochit News: “New York To Sanction Israel Boycotters”

Attorneys for Professor Steven Salaita called the move by leading academic group ‘a serious blemish on the university’s record’

The university rescinded Salaita’s tenured faculty appointment at school’s the American Indian studies program after he issued a series of Tweets condemning those who defended Israel’s military actions against Palestinians in Gaza.

“If it’s ‘antisemitic’ to deplore colonization, land theft, and child murder, then what choice does any person of conscience have?” was among the comments made last July.

The school board’s dismissal of Salaita received widespread condemnation by groups accusing the university of having a pro-Israel bias.

After its own internal investigation, at the annual meeting on Saturday, the American Association of University Professors elected to censure the institution on the grounds that the dismissal “violated Professor Salaita’s academic freedom and cast a pall of uncertainty over the degree to which academic freedom is understood and respected at UIUC.”

Such a censure “informs the academic community that the administration of an institution has not adhered to generally recognized principles of academic freedom and tenure,” the group explains.

The AAUP currently has 56 institutions on its censure list.

In January, Salaita filed a lawsuit against the school charging that it violated his First Amendment rights. According to the Associated Press,
“The censure vote came one day after a judge ordered the university to turn over thousands of pages of documents sought by Salaita.”

Following the decision, Salaita’s attorneys issued a statement calling the censure “a serious blemish on the university’s record.”

The statement continued:

The association censured UIUC not only for its summary dismissal of Professor Salaita in violation of academic freedom, due process, and shared governance, but also for its continued refusal to rectify its actions. The university’s stubbornness continues in spite of academic boycotts, department votes of no confidence in the UIUC administration, student walk-outs, tens of thousands of petition signatures, a federal lawsuit, and the AAUP’s reprimand, suggesting that the UIUC administration is more beholden to donors than it is to due process, academic freedom, and the First Amendment.”

Via Commondreams.org

[Full AAUP report here.]

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

University of California TV: “Dreaming Palestine – The Time That Remains”

Two years ago today, Glenn Greenwald published in the Guardian a single document confirming a key piece of the NSA’s surveillance program, a document that fundamentally transformed EFF’s long-running battle for an end to unchecked government surveillance. To recap briefly, the document was a secret court order issued under Section 215 of the Patriot Act directing Verizon to provide “on an ongoing daily basis” all call records for any call “wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls” and any call made “between the United States and abroad.” As the days passed, we learned that this document was only one of many crucial disclosures made by Edward Snowden, an NSA whistleblower who has made incredible personal sacrifices in order to disclose information that the American people, and the world, have long deserved to know.

We’ve done a great deal of work in the two years, trying to take every opportunity to ensure that what shocked the world two years ago would serve as a basis for better standards, protections, and challenges to unchecked spying. This has included challenging the government in court (we have three cases arising from the telephone records program alone), forcing the government to disclose secret court opinions, joining with the global community to articulate international principles around communications surveillance, cutting through government misdirection, pushing the world to acknowledge surveillance’s threatening grip on our future freedoms, advocating for encryption technologies, and most recently, helping to convince the US Congress to reform a few of the laws that the government used to justify this surveillance run amok.

But our ambitions don’t end here. Amid those initial disclosures, Snowden wrote, “I really want the focus to be on these documents and the debate which I hope this will trigger among citizens around the globe about what kind of world we want to live in.” We took Mr. Snowden’s words as a challenge and as a solemn responsibility. The world we want to live in is free of invasive surveillance of our digital lives, and EFF has a plan to get there. We need your help, and I hope you will join us.

With the passage of USA Freedom law behind us, we’re setting our sights on Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, a deeply troubling authority used by the NSA to justify mass collection of phone calls and emails by collecting huge quantities of data directly from the physical infrastructure of communications providers. Here too, we are pulling at ominous threads of the government’s surveillance apparatus first identified by whistleblowers like Mark Klein, Thomas Drake, William Binney, J. Kirk Wiebe, and Edward Snowden. Mr. Snowden’s disclosures helped us understand that Section 702 was what the government was using to justify its tapping into fiber optic cables: something we’ve been suing over since 2006 and which we are currently presenting to the Ninth Circuit in Jewel v. NSA. It was a hard-fought loss in 2008 when the FISA Amendments Act passed, unconstitutionally granting retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies that participated in warrantless mass surveillance and ultimately killing our first case, Hepting v. AT&T. But the passage of USA Freedom—even as a first step—demonstrates the strengthening of resources, communities, networks, and strategies that can now be brought to bear in the fight for reform in Congress and in the courts.

Another objective: address Executive Order 12333, which the NSA relies on for most of its digital surveillance of people worldwide. On the roster of legal authorities underpinning the government’s mass surveillance activities, EO 12333 is the most thickly shrouded while also appearing to be one of the most powerful: the Washington Post revealed in 2014 that the order alone—without any court oversight—was used to justify the recording of “100 percent of a foreign country’s telephone calls.” There are many objectives to achieve around 12333: greater public awareness; meaningful transparency from those with the power and responsibility to investigate and disclose details being hidden from the public; and direct pressure on President Obama, who can issue a new executive order to better protect people around the world before he leaves office.

Underpinning the fight for freedom from invasive government surveillance is one more very clear objective: fix rampant government overuse of secrecy, including the classification system, to hide essential facts from the American public. And while this is a big task with many possible facets—like direct fixes to the classification system, strengthened protections for whistleblowers, and a reform of the state secrets privilege—it is work that must be done to rebalance our democracy.

Via Electronic Frontier Foundation

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

Amnesty International UK: “Live Q&A: Edward Snowden”

The Senate passed the USA Freedom Act today by 67-32, marking the first time in over thirty years that both houses of Congress have approved a bill placing real restrictions and oversight on the National Security Agency’s surveillance powers. The weakening amendments to the legislation proposed by NSA defender Senate Majority Mitch McConnell were defeated, and we have every reason to believe that President Obama will sign USA Freedom into law. Technology users everywhere should celebrate, knowing that the NSA will be a little more hampered in its surveillance overreach, and both the NSA and the FISA court will be more transparent and accountable than it was before the USA Freedom Act.

It’s no secret that we wanted more. In the wake of the damning evidence of surveillance abuses disclosed by Edward Snowden, Congress had an opportunity to champion comprehensive surveillance reform and undertake a thorough investigation, like it did with the Church Committee. Congress could have tried to completely end mass surveillance and taken numerous other steps to rein in the NSA and FBI. This bill was the result of compromise and strong leadership by Sens. Patrick Leahy and Mike Lee and Reps. Robert Goodlatte, Jim Sensenbrenner, and John Conyers. It’s not the bill EFF would have written, and in light of the Second Circuit’s thoughtful opinion, we withdrew our support from the bill in an effort to spur Congress to strengthen some of its privacy protections and out of concern about language added to the bill at the behest of the intelligence community.

Even so, we’re celebrating. We’re celebrating because, however small, this bill marks a day that some said could never happen—a day when the NSA saw its surveillance power reduced by Congress. And we’re hoping that this could be a turning point in the fight to rein in the NSA.

For years, the larger EFF community has proven itself capable of fighting bad legislation that would hamper rights and freedoms online, with the clearest example being the 2012 annihilation of the Internet blacklist legislation SOPA. Lawmakers have feared that technology users—organized, politically-savvy, articulate, and educated about the law and its effects on tech—would strike out to stop their misguided legislative efforts. But for all our many victories in stopping bad legislation, we have struggled to pass bills that would better protect our freedoms. Passing a bill is far more difficult than simply killing a bad bill, and takes more sustained pressure from the public, a massive publicity campaign around a central issue, deep connections to lawmakers, and the coordination of diverse groups from across the political spectrum.

The USA Freedom Act shows that the digital rights community has leveled up. We’ve gone from just killing bad bills to passing bills that protect people’s rights.

We’re going to need those skills as we turn to our larger mission: ending overbroad surveillance of our digital lives. EFF has been in legal battles to stop the NSA’s mass Internet surveillance since January 2006. While the USA Freedom Act may have neutered the phone records surveillance program and provided much needed transparency to the secretive FISA Court overseeing the spying, it didn’t solve the broader digital surveillance problem. That’s still firmly on our agenda.

Certain provisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act are scheduled to sunset in 2017, including Section 702, one of the main legal authorities the government relies on to engage in mass surveillance of people’s online communications. We’re going to campaign for the reform—or expiration—of Section 702 in the next year and a half, using the resources, communities, networks, and many of the strategies we developed in the battle around the USA Freedom Act.

We’ve also been speaking out publicly against Executive Order 12333, an executive order that the NSA relies on for most of its digital surveillance of people worldwide. We’ll be launching a big campaign to attack this Executive Order, putting pressure on President Obama. Our goal is to get the president to address the biggest problems with EO 12333 with a new executive order before he leaves office.

Above all, we’re taking aim at the problem of overclassification. The government has used secrecy and the claim of national security interests to ward off public oversight. No reform can be effective unless we bring more sunlight into how the government is interpreting the law and the surveillance programs it is turning against law-abiding citizens. This necessitates an overhauling of the classification system, reforms to the security clearance process, strong protections for whistleblowers, even more transparency to the FISA Court, and addressing the abuses of the state secrets privilege.

The USA Freedom Act will likely affect EFF’s ongoing litigation against the NSA, including Smith v. Obama, First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles v. NSA, and Jewel v. NSA cases, all of which include claims against phone records surveillance. It will also affect several cases in which we serve as amicus (including Klayman v Obama and ACLU v. Clapper). How we proceed in each of these cases will play out in the coming weeks and months. But whatever happens, we will continue fighting in the courts to ensure that the government does not exceed its statutory authority to spy or violate our constitutional rights.

We fought hard to get to this moment in history. Our long-term goals are ambitious—the end of overbroad surveillance of all digital communications, a recognition of the privacy rights of people outside the United States, and strong accountability and oversight for surveillance practices. Today’s Senate vote did not accomplish these things, but it did move us a bit closer. It also demonstrated the political will and organization of the digital rights community, which we know will continue to fight for stronger reforms. It will also hopefully embolden Congress to feel that they can bring a sensible balance to surveillance policy and practice. We extend our thanks to all of our supporters across the globe who fought so hard to bring us to this historic moment, and we look forward to working alongside you as we continue to curb abuses by the surveillance state in the years to come.

Via the Electronic Freedom Foundation

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

Bernie Sanders: Freedom Act ‘Doesn’t Go Far Enough’ | msnbc

“It’s a city where women have been forced to sit at the back of buses. Now Israel’s women are demanding equal rights in Jerusalem with a “SlutWalk”.”

AJ+: “SlutWalk: Israeli Women March For Equal Rights In Jerusalem”

In the midst of the global surveillance debate, talk of online censorship has often taken a backseat. Yet, all around the world, the inalienable right to freedom of expression is violated on a regular basis. While in 2014, issues such as terrorism and online harassment generated new discussions of speech rights, censorship of political and religious speech—as well as “obscenity” and content deemed a risk to “national security”—remains all too common.

A recent Guardian editorial declared online freedom to be “under attack” all around the world. Citing examples from serial offenders China and Russia, the authors state that “repressive techniques are being mimicked from one country to the next” and “repressive regimes have seized upon [surveillance by the US and UK] to introduce more online repression that increasingly leads to detentions.”

Indeed, repression of speech is on the rise in a number of countries.

Saudi Arabia’s Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice claims to have “shut down” (blocked) more than 10,000 Twitter accounts this year. Bahrain has cracked down harder on social media, arresting embattled activist Nabeel Rajab once again, this time for remarks made on Twitter.

Censorship: Not Just for Repressive Regimes

Online repression isn’t limited to those typically thought of as “repressive regimes,” however. Along with Russia, democratic Turkey was recently deemed by Freedom House to have had the greatest increase in web censorship over the past year. In September, the country’s parliament passed a resolution allowing the High Council for Telecommunications to temporarily block websites without a court order. The parliament had already passed laws in February allowing authorities to block without a court order any content that “violates privacy” or is “discriminatory or insulting”.

In the UK, a woman was recently sentenced to five years in prison for “promoting terrorism on Facebook.” This news comes after promises from UK telecoms to block “terrorist” and “extremist” content on their networks. The country also recently cracked down on certain types of pornography, which critics have said unfairly targets sex acts that focus on female pleasure. India has also taken new measures to block pornography this year.

A French anti-terror law passed this autumn provides harsher penalties for extremist speech posted online (as opposed to offline), raising concerns from civil liberties advocates in the country. And in Japan, lawmakers recently passed the controversial State Secrecy Act, effectively preventing government officials from blowing the whistle. The country is also under pressure from the United Nations to enact laws preventing “hate speech”.

Via EFF

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

RT UK: “UK court rules mass surveillance doesn’t violate human rights”

Raana and Hamed have been living together for four years.

They eat together. They both contribute to the household and share a savings account. They fight “like husbands and wives in a registered marriage.” They even wear wedding rings and introduce themselves as a married couple.

But they’re not. Because, as they also told Iranian daily “Ebtekar” in May, they don’t believe in marriage.

Their arrangement is being described in Iran as a “white marriage,” a relatively new phenomenon that is worrying Iranian authorities.

Officials there see couples like Raana and Hamed as an affront to the Islamic values that are preached and enforced by the state through pressure and harassment.

On November 30, Mohammad Mohammad Golpayegani, the chief of staff for Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, criticized cohabitating couples as “shameful” and warned that an entire generation would be doomed.

Golpayegani said “their halal generation will be extinguished and they will become bastards.”

He declared that “the Islamic ruler should strongly fight this kind of life.”

One day later, a deputy at Iran’s Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports blamed the media for fueling interest in so-called white marriages.

Mahmud Golzar allowed that some young Iranians might be cohabitating — following the example of Western countries — but he added to the semiofficial Fars news agency that such reports had not been confirmed.

If confirmed, he warned, the Islamic republic would confront those “ominous marriages,” which have “very negatives effects” in Western countries, including the United States.

There are no reliable estimates of the number of couples cohabitating in Iran, where sexual relations outside of marriage are punishable by law. But public acknowledgement and warnings by officials, as well as media reports and anecdotal evidence, suggest that a number of Iranians in major cities have chosen cohabitation over wedlock.

Thirty-three-year-old Ali, who asked that RFE/RL not use his real name, is an engineer by profession who lived with his former girlfriend for several months before they broke up last year.

“We didn’t want to get married but we wanted to be together, so she moved in,” he said.

He added that they cohabitated despite their parents’ disapproval.

Ali told RFE/RL that some of his friends and acquaintances had also chosen the unmarried route over wedlock.

“We basically want to live our lives the way we want,” Ali said. “Now you can call it a white marriage or whatever you want.”

He said he was aware of the risk he was taking, adding that “everything is risky and illegal in Iran, even partying.”

Kids Will Be Kids

A Tehran-based observer said the possible rise in unmarried couples should be seen in the context of a new generation of Iranians who are turning their backs on tradition and state-promoted values.

“Attitudes are changing, a number of young people don’t care about what other people might think or how the state might react, they are becoming increasingly independent,” he told RFE/RL.

A desire to be free from the responsibilities and financial burden that come with wedding and married life appears to contribute to the perceived trend.

Mostafa Eghlima, the head of Iran’s Society of Social Workers, believes that the so-called white marriages are similar to what “engagements” used to be like in Iranian society.

Eghlima told “Ebtekar” that one of the main reasons that families accept white marriages is because they want to be freed from the burden of responsibility.

“Girls and boys [in white marriages] can easily end their relationship without any problem and without any expectation,” he said.

‘Cultural Invasion’

Javid Samoudi, a psychologist based in the holy city of Qom, home to many of Iran’s senior clerics, blamed such cohabitation on “cultural invasion,” fading religious beliefs, weakening family ties, rising economic costs, and a desire for diversity and noncommitment among young people.

In an interview with the semiofficial ISNA news agency, he likened white marriages to “a microbe that pollutes men’s views and damages the character and personality of women.”

Sociologist Majid Abhari was quoted by Iranian media as saying that the “growing influence” of the Internet and satellite channels was behind white marriages.

The spread of cohabitation comes amid another headache for Iranian authorities: a reported decline in marriages and a soaring divorce rate.

Media reports suggest that in major cities such as Tehran, more than 20 percent of marriages end in divorce.

Authorities have said that marriage should be encouraged and facilitated for young people in order to preserve morals and fight the declining birthrate.

On December 1, presidential adviser Hessamedin Ashna noted that many people are concerned about white marriages. He suggested that if getting married was easy and affordable, Iranians would not choose cohabitation.

Ali, for his part, says he is not planning to get married anytime soon. With a laugh, he says the idea of another white marriage is more appealing to him.

Mirrored from RFE/RL

Copyright (c) 2014. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave NW, Ste 400, Washington DC 20036.

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

From last spring: “How Iranian women defy hijab rule – BBC News”

“”Americans’ assessments of their personal freedom have significantly declined under President Obama, according to a new study from the Legatum Institute in London, and the United States now ranks below 20 other countries on this measure.

The research shows that citizens of countries including France, Uruguay, and Costa Rica now feel that they enjoy more personal freedom than Americans.

As the Washington Examiner reported this morning, representatives of the Legatum Institute are in the U.S. this week to promote the sixth edition of their Prosperity Index. The index aims to measure aspects of prosperity that typical gross domestic product measurements don’t include, such as entrepreneurship and opportunity, education, and social capital.”* The Young Turks hosts Cenk Uygur and John Iadarola (TYT University) break it down.”

The Young Turks: “America Wins The Freedom Rankings, Right? Not. Even. Close.”

Oct. 2 (Bloomberg) — While the newest Apple and Google smartphones will automatically encrypt data stored on them, that won’t keep U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies from obtaining evidence linked to the devices. Bloomberg’s Jordan Robertson reports on “Bloomberg West.” (Source: Bloomberg)”

Bloomberg News: ” Apple and Google Take on U.S. Government Over Encryption”