The feds dropped the ball on a key terrorism case, so now they’re going after privacy itself.
What’s at stake in Apple’s privacy fight
by John Kiriakou
Civil liberties fans in the United States recently got an unlikely champion: the CEO of Apple.
In a high-profile spat with the White House, Tim Cook has emerged as a leading spokesperson against the Obama administration’s efforts to weaken Americans’ constitutional protections and civil liberties.
In particular, Cook is fighting a federal order that would force Apple to create software to bypass the iPhone’s security features — and give the FBI access to the phone and everything on it. He sent a letter to all Apple users explaining the company’s position and promising to keep up the fight.
Here’s what’s at stake.
The FBI is investigating last December’s mass shooting in San Bernardino, California. It wants access to the iPhone used by suspected terrorist Syed Rizwan Farook, who carried out the shooting together with his wife Tashfeen Malik.
But here’s the controversial part: The feds basically want Apple to create a software “backdoor” that would allow the FBI to access the phone’s information remotely.
The FBI insists this is a one-off request. But that’s ridiculous: Once created, the technique could be used over and over again, on any number of devices. Indeed, the FBI is already seeking access to iPhones in nine other cases.
The constitutional implications are chilling. If the government gets its way, nothing would be private. With a secret order from a judge, your phone company or manufacturer could have to provide all the information on your phone to the FBI, including call logs, text messages, emails, chat transcripts, and even photos.
They won’t just find out if you’re talking with “terrorists,” of course. Are you calling a secret girlfriend or boyfriend? Are you talking with an abortion provider — or a psychiatrist? What kind of porn do you look at?
If it’s on your phone, the government would get to know about it. Nothing would be private. Nothing would be sacred.
And worse yet, those same tools the FBI wants could easily fall into the hands of hackers, criminals, or even foreign intelligence services. Once Pandora’s box opens, there’s no closing it.
There’s another issue at play here, too: The FBI dropped the ball on Syed Rizwan Farook months ago, so now it’s trying to cover its mistakes.
Federal law enforcement officials told CNN in December, for example, that Farook had been in touch with “more than one terrorism suspect” the FBI was already investigating. That was well before he carried out the shootings.
Why wasn’t the FBI intercepting his communications then, when they could’ve gotten a warrant? Why was there no authorized surveillance? It’s because the FBI botched the case, and now they’re trying to make up for it by turning Apple — and privacy — into the bad guys.
We should support Apple and its efforts to protect our privacy. We’ve already lost many of our civil liberties since the September 11 attacks. It’s time to turn the tide.
Our privacy is worth fighting for.
OtherWords columnist John Kiriakou is an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies and the winner of the 2015 PEN Center USA First Amendment award.
~ ~ ~
The announcements below are interactive. Click on them for more information
Editor’s note: Most of these links are to media outside of Panama, in many cases “outside looking in,” but on our Facebook page we link to the day’s main stories from the Panamanian media, plust post lots of things from community groups, notices of cultural events here and other more purely local content — along with a lot of other stuff as well.
~ ~ ~
The announcements below are interactive. Click on them for more information
Citizens’ March, starting at Parque Porras at 4 p.m. on March 1.
Panama’s cry for justice needs to be renewed and amplified
Oh. Several Martinelista legislators committed flagrant election crimes but the Electoral Tribunal says that the Supreme Court has jurisdiction over the case and the Supreme Court says that the Electoral Tribunal has jurisdiction, and meanwhile these people are practicing their usual sleazy maneuvers in the National Assembly.
Oh. The Supreme Court voted to order Ricardo Martinelli’s arrest this past December, but more than two months later the papers haven’t been processed.
Oh. The Supreme Court’s presiding magistrate, José Ayú Prado, has at least 10 criminal cases pending against him, including a rather straightforward one about how he allegedly ordered the destruction of evidence when he was attorney general — but the legislature’s Credentials Committee has decided to argue about procedure instead of taking up any of these cases on their merits.
Gather in Parque Porras at 4 p.m. on Tuesday and march down to the Legislative Palace not with the expectation of instant justice but to renew and emphasize the demands for accountability in a plethora of specific cases and for a new constitutional order that doesn’t encourage corruption like the present one. The offenders are counting on Panamanians from all walks of life to forget, or to give up their hopes in despair. Don’t give them that satisfaction.
Bernie Sanders for president
What’s with all the political turmoil in the United States? The country has been looted and de-industrialized, bled dry by foolish and evil wars, left with the economic bargaining position of most of its population undermined to the point that it hardly matters and had its government turned into the crudest form of institutionalized bribery. People on both the left and the right may point at different sets of villains, but the emerging consensus is that people are sick of it.
The television networks, the large national “newspapers of record,” the big cable TV and Internet Service Provider companies and the wannabe news aggregation monopoly that is Google have a huge stake in the system as it now is. The politics of bribery and the unlimited campaign spending that has destroyed all sense of probity add up to billions of dollars in advertising revenue for the corporate mainstream media, and for their Siamese twin online service companies the possibility of overthrowing net neutrality and establishing lucrative Internet monopolies. For a while they found the Donald Trump “reality” show profitable, but now they know that he really is a fascist and really does intend to appropriate control over their customary bailiwicks. All along they have been terrified of Bernie Sanders. When a total news blackout of his campaign didn’t seem to be working then a stream of scurrilous attacks ensued.
The dominant part of the Republican Party lives in an alternative universe of fiction and hate, such that exposure of Donald Trump’s long standing mob ties or the testimonies of the many people whom he has cheated don’t seem to matter in the GOP contest. On that side of the aisle they have gone way past pitting a primitive religious faith against science — the party line is to hate refugees, so now they also oppose that passage in the Bible which tells of how Joseph fled with Mary and Jesus to Egypt for fear of an infanticidal king. Trump is comfortable with the support of the cross burning heretics of the Ku Klux Klan, and if Marco Rubio, the more Catholic than thou “establishment candidate” objects to The Donald’s David Duke endorsement he bashes the head of his own church enough to make his pitch to that part of the religious right that considers Pope Francis to be the Anti-Christ. All of the Republican candidates agree that black lives don’t matter but they argue among themselves about who hates Mexicans and Muslims more. Ordinarily their only prospect would be for a shattering defeat in November.
On the Democratic side a sophisticated influence peddling enterprise now controls most of the party levers, but half of the rank and file were always opposed to this. So how to deal with that? The Clintons, their party apparatchik Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the moneyed interests that support them and their acolytes in the corporate mainstream media are first and foremost moving — with some success — to suppress debate within the Democratic Party, knowledge of the primary process by ordinary Democrats and the turnout in the primaries and caucuses. They heap insults on anyone who objects to this but come November they expect money, unpaid campaign labor and votes from those whom they insult now.
If Hillary is the inevitable Democratic nominee, why do so many polls show Bernie running better against the Republicans? Yes, there is this vast right-wing gaggle of noise makers, whom Hillary tries to trump up to a conspiracy with imprecision that cannot be excused in a Yale-educated lawyer. But the truth of the matter is that she notoriously takes bribes, with the most attention going to the six-figure speaking fees from Wall Street hustlers but most dangerously when the Clinton Foundation has taken millions of dollars from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and other foreign powers. Is it any coincidence that the bigoted Saudi regime is waging a Sunni jihad against Shiites in general and Iran in particular and Hillary is promising a more belligerent US attitude toward Iran?
Are we going to get lawyerly parsing and distinctions to demonstrate that nobody can show how any undue favors or promises were forthcoming from donations of a certain size that bought access to one of the Clintons? Are we going to hear outraged protests about how some mysterious market force works so that a particular former and would-be public official can get more than $200,000 an hour in exchange for just uplifting talk to powerful bankers? Of course — but inferences are properly drawn from concealment. Hillary Clinton’s refusal to publish the transcripts of her speeches to Goldman Sachs are akin to Richard Nixon’s stonewalling on the White House tapes and if the Democratic Party chooses her as a standard bearer it is likely to lead to a disaster of similar proportions. The Clinton Foundation may well fund some good works, but it is also an influence peddling machine and a parking spot where Clinton political operatives get six-figure salaries between political posts. Fortune magazine may attribute the millions that the Clintons have made on the speaking circuit to their labor, but by that standard all of the proceeds of the LIBOR fraud were the product of the labor of that scheme’s perpetrators — all of whom have been seen hanging out with the Clinton entourage. Let’s not be the naive children that we are expected to be. Let’s call things for what they are.
And will the response be that everybody does it? Bernie Sanders does not operate in such disgraceful fashion and never has. His has not been the only progressive voice in American politics that has been raised in defense of working people and in opposition to ruinous wars and corruption. But he’s the one with such a voice who is running for president. In his long years as a mayor and as a member of Congress Bernie Sanders has demonstrated his qualifications to be a good president.
We are not yet in a general election campaign in which we are confronted with a choice between fascism and an imperfect alternative. This is the primary season, when people should vote based on their hopes and their interests. If you run a hedge fund, then maybe Hillary Clinton is your rational choice. But for most Americans — including a few who run hedge funds — Bernie Sanders is the only one offering a reasonable plan for peace and prosperity. Promises to “get things done” by those who have done favors for an ultra-wealthy few at the expense of everyone else and have overseen costly foreign policy disasters are not a proper substitute. Americans should rightly demand and vote for someone who will do things that are positive for most Americans. That’s Bernie Sanders.
Bear in mind…
That which fascists hate, above all else, is intelligence.
Miguel de Unamuno
I am not anti-gun. I’m pro-knife. Consider the merits of the knife. In the first place, you have to catch up with someone in order to stab him. A general substitution of knives for guns would promote physical fitness. We’d turn into a whole nation of great runners. Plus, knives don’t ricochet. And people are seldom killed when cleaning their knives.
Molly Ivins
Doubt is not a pleasant mental state, but certainty is a ridiculous one.
François Voltaire
~ ~ ~
The announcements below are interactive. Click on them for more information
Zulema Sucre and Gucci the Yorkshire terrier on the 2014 campaign trail. Photo from Zulema Sucre’s Facebook page.
The bittersweet lot of upper end dogs in Panamanian culture
by Eric Jackson
Until recently Zulema Sucre, doctor’s wife and daughter of prominent Panamanian families, was vice minister of social development. She’s a Panameñista — a member of Panama’s oldest presently existing political movement — and a devotee of a far more ancient alliance, that symbiosis by which people and dogs bond with one another. The almost inseparable bond between Sucre and a Yorkshire terrier named Gucci might have been a bit happier experience had they been just a bit less separable, as in going to her job together and the vice minister taking Gucci out for a walk now and then, with Ministry of Social Development bodyguards in tow. But instead she ordered the bodyguards assigned to her to walk Gucci in the park, they rebelled and lost their jobs because of it, they complained through official channels and the tabloid dailies and in short order President Varela asked for and received Sucre’s resignation.
Is it a matter of Panamanian political culture? Partly. Throughout his public life Juan Carlos Varela has put up with a lot, but one of them has not been people under his supervision making him, his ministry when he was a minister or his presidency now look ridiculous. This little flap surely did. Then consider that Sucre was and the bodyguards probably were political patronage employees. Were the bodyguards holdovers from a prior administration? Could be. They have not been identified so that it might be ascertained, but the Ministry of Social Development was the first of Ricardo Martinelli’s ministries to get caught in tawdry little financial scandals, starting with overpriced purchases from Martinelli companies for a groceries for gangsters program and then it degenerated into the minister’s drunken reckless driving in the course of which far more reckless gunshots were fired. You don’t get to be a ministry bodyguard without political or family ties — those folks are not like the more professional SPI presidential guards. Did the Varela administration keep any hacks when it took over the Ministry of Social Development? There were survivors, but there was much of the turnover than happens in government every five years.
This was not Zulema Sucre’s first political job. She worked for Panama City’s municipal government during Bosco Vallarino’s sordid and shortened shift. The Ministry of Social Development, like the National Institute of Culture and a number of other government offices, has in Panamanian political culture been considered a proper place for a politically loyal socialite from the right family background. That sort of notion about qualifications is a terrible insult to social services recipients, artists and the taxpayers but to put it that way is to be considered a guttersnipe ingrate rustling one of the sacred cattle of rabiblanco philanthropy.
But consider the matter from the point of view of canine culture.
Go to Paitilla or La Cresta or Punta Pacifica early in the morning and you will run across all these maids walking the dogs of those areas’ upscale residents. The preference is for small dogs, often dogs with papers, animals that have been bought rather than rescued. (Dogs with bogus papers to inflate the prices, or despite papers with genetic maladies could have been predicted? There is a lot of that juega vivo too.) With dogs, and going upscale to horses, having a fine animal is quite the status symbol but taking care of the beast is a set of tasks to be delegated. At least, that’s a big trend among wealthier Panamanians. The notion that entrusting a dog’s care to a child is a part of the kid’s education in work habits, responsibility and humane values is not as big in upper class Panamanian culture as it is with either campesinos or gringos.
One of the complaints about Sucre was that she allowed Gucci to ride in a government car, which is supposed to be reserved for the transportation of public officials and Very Important People. The former vice minister maintained that Gucci is a VIP and that was taken by Panama’s corporate mainstream press as something akin to Caligula appointing his horse to the Roman Senate.
But so many of us of the gringo persuasion, or who know about Americans and the dogs with whom they cohabit, will understand. The dog is not just a loyal friend, but a member of the family. Of course the dog with whom one is bonded is very important. In her labor relations habits and in her expectations about the perks of public office, Zulema Sucre may have been typical of her caste of Panamanians. But her attitude about Gucci makes her an honorary gringa. Let this little Yorkie soothe her through her mortification, which really ought to be ephemeral given the gravity of the offense, and let Ms. Sucre and Gucci walk proudly together through the park, with their heads held high. There are higher forms of loyalty than the partisan ones.
~ ~ ~
The announcements below are interactive. Click on them for more information
Teatro y danza panameños en el Festival de Artes Escénicas
Una selección de los propuestas de búsqueda artística más significativas y destacadas en cuanto a obras de teatro y danza realizadas por artistas panameños o residentes aquí, fueron invitadas a formar parte de la programación que disfrutará el público de la ciudad durante el 7° FESTIVAL INTERNACIONAL DE ARTES ESCÉNICOS – PANAMÁ 2016 (FAE 16), que se extenderá del 3 al 9 de marzo en distintos escenarios, con un precio de $ 2.00 general para todo lo nacional, con el fin de hacer este segmento accesible a todos.
Los espectáculos locales seleccionados son B612, VIAJE AL SOL (El principito), del Teatro Rayuela bajo la dirección de Javier Romero; tres obras de MICROTEATRO, del Laboratorio Teatral dirigidas por Teresita Mans y Carlos Algecira; EL ÚLTIMO ASALTO, performance del Teatro Carilimpia de Maritza Vernaza y Mariela Aragón; LA SEÑORITA JULIA, del Proyecto Actinio en dirección de Carlos Algecira y SIN NINGÚN ORDEN, coreografía de la compañía de danza Wa-taa, dirigida por Omaris Mariñas. También participarán La Tribu Performance, bajo la dirección de Edwin Borden y Elleonora D’alasta y el Mago Marko. Otros montajes fueron invitadas, pero no pudieron participar por compromisos previos.
At least 70 communities, mostly in the Interior, are without water. A June trial has been set for some of the suspects in the Martinelli administration’s Tonosi water project fraud, but the company at the center of it is still allowed to get government contracts. PanCanal lake levels are down and we may see ship draft restrictions before this El Niño has run its course. As Madden Lake is way down, there is already the start of a tug-of-war over water to slake the metro area’s thirst and water to run ships through the canal.
Juan Carlos Varela made ambitious promises of running water in every Panamanian household but so far the movement on that has been in the other direction. A slowing economy does not help. However, the solution to the water problems is not rocket science. The nation’s many water systems need to be connected with one another. Along the dry western littoral of the Gulf of Panama there need to be several desalination plants to extract salt from sea water to make potable water. Some of the more useless or corruptly obtained hydroelectric projects that have already been built might properly be nationalized, at least in part, to provide water for public systems.
But what do we see instead? An inappropriate $13.5 million desalination plant for 160 mostly very wealthy residents of Isla Contadora, with some vague promise that this might keep CBS coming to the island from time to time to record espisodes of its faux reality Survivor shows. It’s a big insult to the many people of much lesser means who haven’t had water coming to their homes for weeks and it’s also an example of development priorities aimed at making contractors rich with needlessly expensive and expensive to run systems.
That’s the big irritant in the daily lives of many Panamanians at this moment. But meanwhile in high places, things are also amiss and drifting toward worse:
Dozens of Varela administration appointees turn out to be naturalized citizens of the United States or other countries who have not had their citizenship rights restored and thus illegally occupy their posts.
There are 19 criminal complaints pending against members of the Supreme Court, most of them against presiding magistrate José Ayú Prado. One of these looks like a fairly flagrant and open-and-shut matter in which as attorney general Ayú Prado allegedly ordered the destruction of evidence. It that’s true he has no business occupying any public post, let along the important one he holds. But the National Assembly’s Credentials Committee has chosen to hold turf battles and play partisan games instead of moving steadily but with all due caution in resolving these cases.
Two months after the high court ordered Ricardo Martinelli’s arrest, the papers have yet to be processed.
The audit of the University of Panama and the “private foundation” through which university assets were diverted is not done and it’s not clear that the comptroller general intends to do a complete audit.
Panamanian shell companies and law firms are shown to have been at the center of some of the biggest international corruption scandals of our times — the Brazilian Petrobras affair and the multifaceted looting of Spain — but our prosecutors seem not to be interested.
A new set of election laws has been proposed, by most indications to favor the bosses of the existing political parties rather than the causes of democracy or honest government.
The country’s two largest political parties, the PRD and Cambio Democratico, are fragmented with disreputable party leaders trying to cling to power and make deals with one another.
People will be marching against corruption with impunity on March 1, with factions that don’t ordinarily speak with one another taking part. Usuallly meek civic groups are now demanding the resignation en masse of the entire Supreme Court.
Is it an acute crisis? Not really. But consider the backdrop of exports and commercial activity down and declining, with unemployment and the national debt up and rising. It’s a deepening malaise from which an acute crisis might pop up at a surprising moment.
Bear in mind…
Among the individuals, as well as among nations, respecting the other people’s rights leads to peace.
Benito Juarez
No society that feeds its children on tales of successful violence can expect them not to believe that violence in the end is rewarded.
Margaret Mead
All formal dogmatic religions are fallacious and must never be accepted by self-respecting persons as final.
Hypatia of Alexandria
~ ~ ~
The announcements below are interactive. Click on them for more information
