May 2014

“Collect It All”: Glenn Greenwald on NSA Bugging Tech Hardware, Economic Espionage & Spying on U.N.

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Nearly a year after he first met Edward Snowden, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald continues to unveil new secrets about the National Security Agency and the surveillance state. His new book, “No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State,” is being published today. It includes dozens of previously secret NSA documents, including new details on how the NSA routinely intercepts routers, servers and other computer hardware devices being exported from the United States. According to leaked documents published in the book, the NSA then implants backdoor surveillance tools, repackages the devices with a factory seal and sends them on. This gives the NSA access to entire networks and all their users. The book includes one previously secret NSA file that shows a photo of an agent opening a box marked CISCO. Below it reads a caption: “Intercepted packages are opened carefully.” Another memo observes that some signals intelligence tradecraft is “very hands-on (literally!).”

Greenwald joins us in the studio to talk about this and other new revelations about the NSA, including its global economic espionage, spying at the United Nations, and attempting to monitor in-flight Internet users and phone calls. For his reporting on the NSA, Greenwald recently won a George Polk Award and was part of the team from The Guardian that just won the Pulitzer Prize in Public Service.

“Once people understood that this extraordinary system of suspicionless surveillance, which was truly unprecedented in scope, had been created completely in the dark, it became more than a surveillance story,” Greenwald says. “It became a story about government secrecy and accountability and the role of journalism, and certainly privacy and surveillance in the digital age.”

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: Today we bring you a Democracy Now! special: the first of a two-day interview with investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald. He has just published a riveting new book, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State. The book chronicles the inside story behind perhaps the biggest leak in the nation’s history.

Greenwald and filmmaker Laura Poitras were the journalists who first met former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden in Hong Kong last June. Days after their first meeting, Greenwald published an explosive article in The Guardian about the NSA collecting the phone records of millions of Verizon customers daily. It was the first of hundreds of articles based on documents leaked by Snowden. And more disclosures are now coming out. Greenwald’s book includes dozens of previously secret NSA documents.

For his reporting on the NSA, Glenn Greenwald recently won a George Polk Award and was part of the team from The Guardian that just won the Pulitzer Prize in Public Service.

Glenn Greenwald came to Democracy Now!’s studios on Monday.

see full transcript here

May 14, 2014 3

A unique insight into the world of Israeli arms dealers selling weapons and experience around the world.

Israel has been one of the world’s largest arms exporters and has spent millions of dollars on developing state-of-the-art weapons.Armies and police around the world are interested in the latest Israeli weapons and their military tactics, which have been refined by fighting in the occupied territories.

With unique access, Witness follows private Israeli arms dealers in their day-to-day work; making deals, attending arms fairs, shipping weapons, and inspecting armed forces overseas.

This film reveals how the Israeli arms industry is making vast profits worldwide, and partly thanks to their activities in the occupied territories.
By Yotam Feldman

“The Lab” is a cinematic investigation into the lure of Israeli weapons in the international arms trade. Why are countries all over the world lining up to buy Israeli arms? And how did such a small country become one of the biggest military exporters in the world? Israeli salesmen and executives in huge arms corporations seem eager to promote their products and pride themselves on their booming business. Profits have never been better — sales are doubling every year, and the potential seems unlimited.

But the product they are selling is unique. Rather than rifles, rockets or bombs, the Israeli companies sell their experience. The long-running conflict with the Palestinians has created a unique and unrivalled laboratory for testing technologies and ideas relating to “asymmetric warfare” — a conflict between a state and civil or irregular resistance. In this manner the Israeli conflict with the Palestinians may be seen as a national asset — rather than a burden.

Following the 9/11 attacks, the Afghanistan war and the second Iraq war, countries all over the world have become increasingly interested in the way the Israeli army controls civilian populations, how it fights in urban areas, and how it deals with terror and guerrilla tactics.

Moreover, Israel had become a leading exporter of theory for this “asymmetric warfare”. Israel has created a science out of targeted killings and of close combat fighting. In fact, Israel’s produced some of the world’s leading advisors and lecturers specialising in armed combat.

Despite the general openness of salesmen and executives within the arms corporations, an unknown truth seems to underlie the public facade. Certain questions are treated with discretion and suspicion, and instances where cameras dive too far provoke immediate actions, limiting the filmmakers’ access. But what is the big secret?

Two private businessmen, Amos Golan and Leo Glaser, allowed us to accompany them in their dealings. The first is a producer of a gun model specialised for urban fighting, widely sold to European and Latin American countries. The second is an advisor and training expert, specialised in asymmetric fighting against drug traffickers in Brazilian favelas.

As we accompanied them in their day-to-day work, less obvious truths were exposed.

While making the film, I witnessed the relationship between a network of military generals, politicians and private business; the use of current military operations as a promotional device for private business; the brutal employment of the Israeli experience, and the blurred lines between what is legitimate and forbidden in this line of business.

The agents I spoke to were honest about their dealings, their personal understandings of what’s good versus bad, and why they take pride in the business of global weapons proliferation.

The effects of Israeli theory and technology on other countries can hardly be overestimated.

Forces choosing to employ Israeli-cultivated military techniques ultimately begin to alter their political and social circumstances. Therefore, countries all over the world are increasingly “Palestinizing” (or “Israelizing”) their conditions. Both sides — seller and buyer — become partners in the development of a form of future war between the state and civil resistance groups.

see video here

The Lab can be seen from Wednesday, May 7 at the following times GMT: Wednesday: 2000; Thursday: 1200; Friday: 0100; Saturday: 0600.

Click here for more Witness films.

May 9, 2014 0

May 8, 2014 0

Remembering the Nakba: Israeli group puts 1948 Palestine back on the map

May 4, 2014 by SR Editor

Zochrot aims to educate Israeli Jews – through tours and a new phone app – about a history obscured by enmity and denial

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By Ian Black from TheGuardian.com

In a run-down office in the busy centre of Tel Aviv, a group of Israelis are finalising preparations for this year’s independence day holiday. But their conversation – switching between Arabic and Hebrew – centres not on celebrating the historic realisation of the Zionist dream in May 1948, but on the other side of the coin: the flight, expulsion and dispossession that Palestinians call their catastrophe – the Nakba.

Maps, leaflets and posters explain the work of Zochrot – Hebrew for “Remembering”. The organisation’s mission is to educate Israeli Jews about a history that has been obscured by enmity, propaganda and denial for much of the last 66 years.

Next week, Zochrot, whose activists include Jews and Palestinians, will connect the bitterly contested past with the hi-tech present. Its iNakba phone app will allow users to locate any Arab village that was abandoned during the 1948 war on an interactive map, learn about its history (including, in many cases, the Jewish presence that replaced it), and add photos, comments and data.

It is all part of a highly political and inevitably controversial effort to undo the decades-long erasure of landscape and memory – and, so the hope goes, to build a better future for the two peoples who share a divided land.

“There is an app for everything these days, and this one will show all the places that have been wiped off the map,” explains Raneen Jeries, Zochrot’s media director. “It means that Palestinians in Ein Hilweh refugee camp in Lebanon, say, can follow what happened to the village in Galilee that their family came from – and they will get a notification every time there’s an update. Its amazing.”

In a conflict famous for its irreconcilable national narratives, the basic facts are not disputed, though the figures are. Between November 1947, when the UN voted to partition British-ruled Palestine into separate Arab and Jewish states, and mid-1949, when Israel emerged victorious against its enemies, 400-500 Arab villages and towns were depopulated and destroyed or occupied and renamed. Most of them were left in ruins.

Understanding has deepened since the late 1980s, when Israeli historians used newly opened state archives to revisit that fateful period. Key elements of this new history contradicted the old, official version and partially confirmed what Palestinians had always claimed – that many were expelled by Israeli forces rather than fled at the urging of Arab leaders.

Fierce debate still rages over whether this was done on an ad hoc basis by local military commanders or according to a masterplan for ethnic cleansing. The result either way was disastrous.

palestine-before-after-1948-map Zochrot’s focus on the hyper-sensitive question of the 750,000 Palestinians who became refugees has earned it the hostility of the vast majority of Israeli Jews who flatly reject any Palestinian right of return. Allowing these refugees – now, with their descendants, numbering seven million people – to return to Jaffa, Haifa or Acre, the argument goes, would destroy the Jewish majority, the raison d’etre of the Zionist project. (Israelis often also suggest an equivalence with the hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees who lost homes and property after 1948 in Arab countries such as Iraq and Morocco – although their departure was encouraged and facilitated by the young state in the 1950s.)

“There are a lot of Israeli organisations that deal with the occupation of 1967, but Zochrot is the only one that is dealing with 1948,” said Liat Rosenberg, the NGO’s director. “It’s true that our influence is more or less negligible but nowadays there is no Israeli who does not at least know the word Nakba. It’s entered the Hebrew language, and that’s progress.”

Rosenberg and colleagues hold courses and prepare learning resources for teachers, skirting around attempts to outlaw any kind of Nakba commemoration. But the heart of Zochrot’s work is regular guided tours that are designed, like the gimmicky iPhone app, to put Palestine back on the map and to prepare the ground for the refugees’ return.

On a recent Saturday morning, a couple of dozen Jews and Arabs met at a petrol station on the southern outskirts of Jerusalem and followed a dirt track to al-Walaja, a village of 2,000 inhabitants that was attacked and depopulated in 1948. Zochrot’s Omar al-Ghubari pointed out the concrete foundations – all that remains – of a school and marked the spot with a metal sign in Arabic, Hebrew and English, before posing for photographs.

Among those following him was Shireen al-Araj, whose father was born in al-Walaja and fled to Beit Jallah across what until 1967 was the armistice line with Jordan. “I have never given up the idea of going back to al-Walaja,” she said. Araj is campaigning against the extension of the West Bank separation wall, part of what she and many Palestinians call a continuing Nakba.

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Another participant was Tarik Ramahi, an American surgeon raised in Saudi Arabia by Palestinian refugee parents. Marina, a Jewish social worker, came with her boyfriend Tomer, an IT student. Wandering among the ruins, these unconventional daytrippers attracted some curious glances from Israelis picnicking on the terraces or bathing in the village spring – now named for a Jewish teenager murdered by Palestinians in the 1990s. Claire Oren, a teacher, had a heated argument with two off-duty soldiers who were unaware of al-Walaja’s past – or even of the extent of Israel’s continuing control of the West Bank.

Nearby Ein Karem – Zochrot’s most popular tour – is a different story. Abandoned by the Palestinians in July 1948 (it is near Deir Yassin, the scene of the period’s most notorious massacre), it boasts churches, a mosque and fine stone houses clustered around a valley that is choked with wild flowers in the spring. Its first post-war residents were poor Moroccan Jewish immigrants, but it was intensively gentrified in the 1970s and is now one of west Jerusalem’s most desirable neighbourhoods.

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In 1967, Shlomo Abulafia, now a retired agronomist, moved into a two-room hovel that he and his wife, Meira, have transformed beyond recognition into a gracious Arab-style home set in a charming garden. Relatives of the original owners once visited from Jordan. Like other Israeli Jews who yearn for coexistence with the Palestinians, Abulafia believes it is vital to understand how the other side feels. He worries desperately about the future of his fractured homeland and about his children and grandchildren.

“The Nakba is history for us but a catastrophe for them,” he says. “What have we got to lose from recognising the Palestinians’ suffering? The two sides are moving further and further away from each other. People live in fear. There is a lot of denial here.”

Many other Arab villages disappeared without trace under kibbutz fields and orchards, city suburbs or forests planted by the Jewish National Fund. Arab Isdud became Israeli Ashdod. Saffuriya in Galilee is now Zippori, the town’s Hebrew name before the Arab conquest in the seventh century.

Zochrot’s bilingual guide book identifies traces of Arab Palestine all over the country – fragments of stone wall, clumps of prickly pears that served as fences, or the neglected tombs of Muslim holy men. The faculty club of Tel Aviv University used to be the finest house in Sheikh Muwannis, once on the northern edge of the expanding Jewish city. Nothing else is left. Manshiyeh, a suburb of Jaffa, lies beneath the seaside Charles Clore promenade.

Palestinians have long mourned their lost land, eulogising it – and in recent years documenting it – with obsessive care. Politically, the right of return remains a totemic demand even if PLO leaders have often said privately that they do not expect it to be implemented – except for symbolic numbers – if an independent Palestinian state is created alongside Israel and Jewish settlers uprooted from its territory. Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, provoked uproar in 2012 when he said he would not expect to be able to return to his home town of Safed.

Older Israeli Jews like Meron Benvenisti, raised in British-ruled Palestine during the 1930s, have written nostalgically about the forgotten landscapes of their childhood.

“I also identify with the images of the destroyed villages,” said Danny Rubinstein, a Jerusalem-born author and journalist.

“I do understand the Palestinians’ longing and I empathise with it. But I think that Zochrot is a mistake. The Palestinians know, or their leadership knows, that they have to forget Ramle and Lod and Jaffa. Abbas says he can’t go back to Safed. They have to give up the return as a national goal. If I was a Palestinian politician I would say that you don’t have to remember. You have to forget.”

Hopes for a negotiated two-state solution to the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians are fading after the collapse of the latest US-brokered effort, and mutual empathy and understanding are in short supply. But Claire Oren, resting in a shady grove in what was once the centre of al-Walaja, thinks more knowledge might help. “Even if only one Israeli becomes a bit more aware of the Nakba and the Palestinian refugees, it is important,” she reflected. “The more Israelis who understand, the more likely we are to be able to prevent another catastrophe in this land.”

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May 5, 2014 1

Meet the Four Americans who defected to North Korea in the 1960s

Earlier this month, a 24-year-old American named Matthew Todd Miller tore up his tourist visa while attempting to enter North Korea and shouted that that he had gone to the country “after choosing it as a shelter” and “would seek asylum,” according to the country’s state-run news agency, KCNA. He was subsequently arrested by a “relevant organ” of the country’s security services, which KCNA reports is investigating the case.

For now, very little is known about the man. According to the New York Times, Miller traveled to North Korea alone and, so far, no family members have contacted the travel agency that handled his trip. But if it turns out that he is a defector, he’ll join a colorful cast of expatriate Americans who have sought Pyongyang’s cold embrace.

Between 1962 and 1965, four American soldiers defected to North Korea in an attempt to escape their military responsibilities. James Dresnok, 21, Charles Jenkins, 24, Larry Abshier, 19, and Jerry Wayne Parrish, 19, did not know one another before they fled north, but once they arrived in the country, the authorities brought them together, forcing them to live in a house where they were under constant surveillance and subjected to “re-education,” which involved memorizing the political philosophy and writings of Kim Il-sung, then the country’s paramount leader, as well as studying the Korean language.

Eventually, they were forced to play Western villains in North Korean propaganda films — notably the late 1970s picture Unsung Heroes, which is about a North Korean spy working in Seoul during the Korean War. At various points, North Korea assigned the men wives, many of whom turned out to be foreigners kidnapped as part of a DPRK intelligence campaign to recruit spies.

A 2006 documentary, Crossing the Line, revealed the stark reality of the men’s lives under North Korean rule. Produced with the permission of the state, the film largely profiles Dresnok, who still lives in Pyongang with his family — and seems to enjoy it. “I don’t have any intentions of leaving,” Dresnok tells the filmmakers, “I don’t give a shit if you put a billion damn dollars of gold on the table.”

Dresnok has two sons from his late wife, a Romanian woman believed to have been kidnapped by DPRK agents, and one child from his second wife, who is reportedly the daughter of a North Korean woman and a Togolese diplomat. Dresnok paints a complicated but sentimental picture of contemporary North Korea. Here’s a preview from the documentary:

But Jenkins conjures a harsher version of life in North Korea — and a crueler portrait of Dresnok. Jenkins managed to leave North Korea in 2003 thanks to his wife, a Japanese abductee named Hitomi Soga who was curiously repatriated to Japan in 2002. Jenkins and their two daughters were allowed to follow her out of the country 18 months later. The couple’s story is laid out in Jenkins’s 2008 memoir, The Reluctant Communist. (Foreign Policy reviewed an earlier, Korean-language version of the book in 2006). In it, he writes of his defection: “I did not understand that the country I was seeking temporary refuge in was literally a giant, demented prison; once someone goes there, they almost never get out.”

Jenkins later appeared on CBS’s 60 Minutes and challenged Dresnok’s cheery representation of North Korea. He said that when his North Korean minder wanted to punish him, he tied Jenkins’ hands behind his back and let Dresnok beat him, turning one American against another. “Dresnok is a man who likes to hurt someone,” he said on television. “He feels good after he does it.”

Here’s the segment:
see here

Today, little is known about Abshier and Parrish, who both dies from health complications years ago, and never had the chance to tell their own stories.

Whether Miller has in fact joined the ranks of American defectors remains unknown, but he is not the sole American detained in North Korea. Kenneth Bae, a Korean-American tour operator, is currently in North Korean custody after being arrested in November 2012 and sentenced to 15 years of hard labor. In March, North Korea freed an Australian missionary it had detained for allegedly trying to spread Christianity in the isolated nation.

AFP/Getty Images

May 3, 2014 1