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We spend the hour remembering the pioneering journalist William Worthy, who died earlier this month at the age of 92. During the height of the Cold War, Worthy defied the U.S. government by reporting from the Soviet Union, Cuba, China, Iran, North Vietnam and Algeria. He also worked closely with many African-American leaders, including A. Philip Randolph and Malcolm X. In the late 1950s, the State Department refused to renew his passport after he returned from a reporting trip into China. Despite not having a passport, Worthy traveled to Cuba in 1961 — two years after the Cuban revolution — and interviewed Fidel Castro. He was arrested upon returning to the United States — not for traveling to Cuba but for entering the United States illegally — an American citizen without a passport. The ordeal became the subject of Phil Ochs’ song, “The Ballad of William Worthy.” In 1981, Worthy traveled to Iran, two years after the revolution ousted the U.S.-backed Shah, resulting in a series of blockbuster exposés about U.S. actions in Iran.
“For this generation of younger journalists who are coming of age in the era of the Edward Snowden documents, WikiLeaks, of the government surveillance on the metadata of journalists and many millions of people in this country and around the world, I would say that William Worthy is the single most important journalist that they’ve never heard of,” said investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill, who considered Worthy a mentor. “If Bill Worthy was a white journalist, and not been an African-American journalist, he would be much better known than he is right now.” We air excerpts of our 1998 interview with Worthy and speak to Scahill, former Washington Post reporter Scott Armstrong, and Randy Goodman, a photojournalist who worked and traveled with Worthy throughout the 1980s.
Photo Credit: Walter Lippmann
Here’s a list of possible indicators that your computer may be infected with Blackshades or similar remote access tool malware:
- Mouse cursor moves erratically with no input from user;
- Web camera light (if equipped) unexpectedly turns on when web camera is not in use;
- Monitor turns off while in use;
- Usernames and passwords for online accounts have been compromised;
- Unauthorized logins to bank accounts or unauthorized money transfers;
- Text-based chat window appears on your computer’s desktop unexpectedly;
- Computer files become encrypted and ransom demand is made to unlock files.
Blackshades malware affects Microsoft Windows-based operating systems. If you believe you or someone you know may have a computer that is infected with this malware, search the computer’s hard drive for the following files that are known to be present on Blackshade-infected computers:
- dos_sock.bss
- nir_cmd.bss
- pws_cdk.bss
- pws_chro.bss
- pws_ff.bss
- pws_mail.bss
- pws_mess.bss
To perform the above check, click the Start menu and type each file name in the search field. If the search yields positive matches for one or more of these files, the computer may be infected with Blackshades.
In addition to the above files being added to the computer’s hard drive, Blackshades also makes modifications to the Windows registry. The exact location may vary depending on the verson of the Microsoft Windows you’re using, but the following registry subkey is added:
- Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\VBandVBA Program Settings\SrvID\ID\[string of letters and numbers]
To perform a check for this registry modification, take the following steps:
- Click the Start menu.
- Type “regedit” in the search field.
- Execute the Registry Editor (regedit.exe). If prompted, select “Yes” to allow the program to make changes to the computer.
- Select “Edit” from the window toolbar.
- Select “Find” from the Edit menu.
- Type “SrvID” in the Find field.
Anyone who performs the above checks and gets positive results is encouraged to submit a complaint to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center. Please include the term “Blackshades” in the incident description section of the complaint.
And for assistance on removing Blackshades, please contact your Internet service provider, your antivirus software company, or another computer security professional.
Presentation at the National Summit to Reassess the U.S.-Israel “Special Relationship” on March 7, 2014 at the National Press Club.
Stephen M. Walt is professor of International Affairs at Harvard University; previously taught at Princeton University, University of Chicago.
There has been a lot of criticism of the ADL’s worldwide survey of anti-Semitism, and many of the obvious flaws in the study already have been discussed (or linked to) here. At the outset, the organization that commissioned the study is hardly a disinterested, unbiased observer. An ADL study on anti-Semitism should be greeted with the same skepticism as a tobacco industry study on the effects of second-hand smoke.
The ADL has multiple interests in exaggerating and even promoting the threat of anti-Semitism. First, ADL perpetually has its hand out for donations, and what better way to motivate donors than a screaming headline that there are one billion anti-Semitic adults on the planet? In fact it wasted no time in doing that here, as ADL’s home page trumpets the frightening results and offers visitors an easy way to “Help ADL Change the World” with a single click. Just have your VISA card ready. It is difficult to imagine that the survey was not planned, at least in part, as a fundraiser, with foreknowledge of a direct relationship between the quantification of the danger and the anticipated revenues.
Second, the ADL enhances its own prestige and even justifies its existence with the looming threat of anti-Semitism. This point was scathingly made a few years ago by an unlikely source, the comedian Jackie Mason, a steadfast pro-Israel voice who has been known to dabble unapologetically in anti-Palestinian racism. Mason, for reasons of his own, passionately defended Mel Gibson following his drunken anti-Semitic tirade. Gibson’s detractors were motivated, said Mason, by
jealousy and hate and contempt for a guy who’s doing too good. Also with this guy Abe Foxman, this head of the ADL. Another fake from top to bottom. I don’t talk about people, it’s not my nature, but he’s a total fake. Let’s be honest about it. Anybody who makes a life out of fighting racism in effect has to blow-up racism in order to justify himself and the job he has, otherwise he’d have to go to work. Otherwise he’d have to get up in the morning and get a real job.
Finally, the ADL makes no secret of its own pro-Israel agenda. Israel, like the ADL itself, feeds off the perception of worldwide anti-Semitism, which serves to portray the country as a necessary refuge for Jews from the threat of persecution.
Posted: 13 May 2014 10:49 AM PDT
Please, tell me more about your “Resistance” project, and how you are fighting the good fight against imperialism and occupation and cultural hegemony. About how you think the necktie is a remnant of the uniform worn by the old Knights Templar (it’s not but I like to see you keep bringing that up). Tell me more about how the freedom of the individual, this so-called negative and positive freedom you keep liking to invoke, is so, so, very important to the historic struggles of the brown man as he shakes off the yoke of his oppressor. Tell me about your amazing plan to liberate Jerusalem, for the dignity of all Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims (no dignity to any of them until then, of course). Tell me about your glorious leaders and martyrs, about “keeping your word” with a brutal dictator who has butchered the Syrian people just so that he can be a president like his Daddy.
You’ll only be happy to, I am sure. But right now there is something you’re not telling me. Right now the so-called “Zionist Enemy” has, through their courts and laws, imprisoned a former president on charges of rape, and that there is a former prime minister who will now serve six years in prison on charges of bribery. Maybe they’re not as good at picking their leaders as you are. And you definitely don’t want to tell me about how your torture chambers make anything the villainous “Empire” can think of, including Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib – yes, especially them – look like Disney land in comparison. You don’t want to tell me that your pet dictator and the militias you send to support him have killed more Syrians than everybody killed by US drone strikes since 2001. That they have displaced in three years more Syrians than the “Zionist enemy” ever did when it took part of Palestine in 1948, and then the rest of it in 1967. I guess these are things you don’t want to tell me about…
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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.
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