TiLTNews Network: Earth Watch - Freedom is defined by the ability of citizens to live without government interference, not by safety. It is easy to clamor for government security when terrible things happen; but liberty is given true meaning when we support it without exception, and we will be safer for it ~ Dr. Ron Paul
Wednesday, April 8, 2015
Our Secure Drop System for Leaks Now Uses HTTPS
Our SecureDrop System for Leaks Now Uses HTTPS
We’re happy to announce that sources can now access our SecureDrop document-submission website using HTTPS. Although SecureDrop connections were already encrypted previously, our new setup provides leakers with additional assurance that they are connecting with the authentic Intercept SecureDrop and not an impostor.
You can visit our SecureDrop server by pointing the Tor Browser here: https://y6xjgkgwj47us5ca.onion/
SecureDrop runs as a “hidden service” within the anonymous web network Tor. A hidden service is a special kind of server that is only accessible through Tor and has a domain name ending in .onion (Tor was originally called The Onion Router because it works by creating layers upon layers of encryption to hide users’ IP addresses).
The Intercept’s SecureDrop installation is only the third Tor hidden service to receive a browser-trusted HTTPS certificate, following Facebook and the Bitcoin website Blockchain.info. HTTPS provides two things: Confidentiality — data shared between web browsers and HTTPS websites is encrypted — and authentication — web browsers can verify that they’re visiting the website the user thinks they’re visiting. Authentication helps prevent man-in-the-middle attacks, which occur when an attacker entices someone to open an encrypted connection to the attacker’s server by impersonating the real server.
Even without HTTPS, the connection between Tor Browser and our SecureDrop hidden service was already encrypted. Adding HTTPS provides a second redundant layer of encryption, and it also adds authentication. So if a source finds herself visiting a SecureDrop website that looks like it belongs to The Intercept, she can inspect our SSL certificate to confirm that it actually belongs to us and isn’t a honeypot posing as our SecureDrop website — or at least confirm that this is the case according to DigiCert, the certificate authority that issued our SSL certificate.
The future of combining HTTPS and the .onion top-level domain is uncertain because .onion is not an officially recognized top-level domain. But the gears are in motion to get .onion recognized as a “Special-Use Domain Name.” We won’t know for sure if we get to keep our SSL certificate until the Internet Engineering Steering Group agrees on whether or not to make .onion a standard, a decision slated to be made in October.
Until then, our sources can enjoy this extra layer of protection when they communicate with us through SecureDrop.
The post Our SecureDrop System for Leaks Now Uses HTTPS appeared first on The Intercept.
Our SecureDrop System for Leaks Now Uses HTTPS
Micah Lee
Wed, 08 Apr 2015 18:06:56 GMT
Six Things You Didn’t Know the U.S. and Its Allies Did to Iran
It’s hard for some Americans to understand why the Obama administration is so determined to come to an agreement with Iran on its nuclear capability, given that huge Iranian rallies are constantly chanting “Death to America!” I know the chanting makes me unhappy, since I’m part of America, and I strongly oppose me dying.
But if you know our actual history with Iran, you can kind of see where they’re coming from. They have understandable reasons to be angry at and frightened of us — things we’ve done that if, say, Norway had done them to us, would have us out in the streets shouting “Death to Norway!” Unfortunately, not only have the U.S. and our allies done horrendous things to Iran, we’re not even polite enough to remember it.
Reminding ourselves of this history does not mean endorsing an Iran with nuclear-tipped ICBMs. It does mean realizing how absurd it sounds when critics of the proposed agreement say it suddenly makes the U.S. the weaker party or that we’re getting a bad deal because Iran, as Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham put it, does not fear Obama enough. It’s exactly the opposite: This is the best agreement the U.S. could get because for the first time in 35 years, U.S.-Iranian relations aren’t being driven purely by fear.
1. The founder of Reuters purchased Iran in 1872
Paul Julius Reuter (Getty)
Getty Images
Nasir al-Din Shah, Shah of Iran from 1848-1896, sold Baron Julius de Reuter the right to operate all of Iran’s railroads and canals, most of the mines, all of the government’s forests, and all future industries. The famous British statesman Lord Curzon called it “the most complete and extraordinary surrender of the entire industrial resources of a kingdom into foreign hands that has probably ever been dreamed of.” Iranians were so infuriated that the Shah had to rescind the sale the next year.
2. The BBC lent a hand to the CIA’s 1953 overthrow of Iran’s Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh
Kermit Roosevelt (AP)
ASSOCIATED PRESS
If the Reuters thing weren’t enough to give Iranians a grudge against the Western media, the BBC transmitted a secret code to help Kermit Roosevelt (Teddy’s grandson) lay the groundwork for an American and British coup against Mosaddegh. (BBC Persian also assisted by broadcasting pro-coup propaganda on the orders of the British government.) Soon enough the U.S. was training the regime’s secret police in how to interrogate Iranians with methods a CIA analyst said were “based on German torture techniques from World War II.”
3. We had extensive plans to use nuclear weapons in Iran
In 1980 the U.S. military was terrified the Soviet Union would take advantage of the Iranian Revolution to invade Iran and seize the Straits of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf. So the Pentagon came up with a plan: If the Soviets began massing their troops, we would use small nuclear weapons to destroy the mountain passes in northern Iran the Soviets needed to move their troops into the country.
So we wouldn’t be using nukes on Iran, just in Iran. As Pentagon historian David Crist put it, “No one reflected on how the Iranians might view such a scenario.” But they probably would have been fine with it, just as we’d be fine with Iran nuking Minnesota to prevent Canada from gaining control of the Gulf of Mexico. “No problem,” we’d say. “Nuestra casa es su casa.”
4. U.S. leaders have repeatedly threatened to outright destroy Iran
It’s not just John McCain singing “bomb bomb bomb Iran.” Admiral William Fallon, who retired as head of CENTCOM in 2008, said about Iran: “These guys are ants. When the time comes, you crush them.” Admiral James Lyons Jr., commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet in the 1980s, has said we were prepared to “drill them back to the fourth century.” Richard Armitage, then assistant secretary of defense, explained that we considered whether to “completely obliterate Iran.” Billionaire and GOP kingmaker Sheldon Adelson advocates an unprovoked nuclear attack on Iran — “in the middle of the desert” at first, then possibly moving on to places with more people.
Most seriously, the Obama administration’s 2010 Nuclear Posture Review declared that we will not use nuclear weapons “against non-nuclear weapons states that are party to the NPT [Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty] and in compliance with their nuclear non-proliferation obligations.” There’s only one country that’s plausibly not in this category. So we were saying we will never use nuclear weapons against any country that doesn’t have them already — with a single exception, Iran. Understandably, Iran found having a nuclear target painted on it pretty upsetting.
5. We shot down a civilian Iranian airliner — killing 290 people, including 66 children
Funeral for victims of downing of Flight 655. (AP)
On July 3, 1988, the USS Vincennes, patrolling in the Persian Gulf, blew Iran Air Flight 655 out of the sky. The New York Times had editorialized about “Murder in the Air” in 1983 when the Soviet Union mistakenly shot down a South Korean civilian airliner in its airspace, declaring, “there is no conceivable excuse for any nation shooting down a harmless airliner.” After the Vincennes missile strike, a Times editorial announced that what happened to Flight 655 “raises stern questions for Iran.” That’s right — for Iran. Two years later the U.S. Navy gave the Vincennes’s commander the highly prestigious Legion of Merit commendation.
6. We worry about Iranian nukes because they would deter our own military strikes
Our rhetoric on Iran seems nonsensical: Do U.S. leaders actually believe Iran would engage in a first nuclear strike on Israel or the U.S., given that would lead to a quick and devastating retaliation from those well-armed nuclear powers?
Even conservative U.S. foreign policy experts know that’s incredibly unlikely. They’re not worried that we can’t deter a nuclear-armed Iran — they’re worried that a nuclear-armed Iran could deter us. As Thomas Donnelly, a top Iran analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, put it in 2004, “the prospect of a nuclear Iran is a nightmare … because of the constraining effect it threatens to impose upon U.S. strategy for the greater Middle East. … The surest deterrent to American action is a functioning nuclear arsenal.”
This perspective — that we must prevent other countries from being able to deter us from waging war — is a bedrock belief of the U.S. establishment, and in fact was touted as a major reason to invade Iraq.
Photo: Sipa/AP
The post Six Things You Didn’t Know the U.S. and Its Allies Did to Iran appeared first on The Intercept.
Six Things You Didn’t Know the U.S. and Its Allies Did to Iran
Jon Schwarz
Tue, 07 Apr 2015 17:44:03 GMT
Political Smears in U.S. Never Change: the NYT’s 1967 Attack on MLK’s Anti-War Speech
John Oliver’s Monday night interview of Edward Snowden — which in 24 hours has been viewed by 3 million people on YouTube alone — renewed all the standard attacks in Democratic circles accusing Snowden of being a traitor in cahoots with the Kremlin. What’s most striking about this — aside from the utter lack of evidence for any of it — is how identical it is to what Nixon officials said to smear the last generation’s greatest whistleblower, Daniel Ellsberg (who is widely regarded by Democrats as a hero because his leak occurred with a Republican in the White House). As The New York Times reported in August 1973:
. . .
As the Freedom of the Press Foundation recently noted: in December 1973, The NYT described the origins of Nixon’s “Plumbers Unit” and detailed how much of it was motivated by the innuendo spread by Henry Kissinger that Ellsberg was a covert Soviet operative:
I defy anyone to listen to any Democratic apparatchik insinuate that Snowden is a Russian agent and identify any differences with how Nixon apparatchiks smeared Ellsberg (or, for that matter, how today’s warnings from Obama officials about the grave harm coming from leaks differ from the warnings issued by Bush and Nixon officials). The script for smearing never changes — it stays constant over five decades and through the establishments of both parties — and it’s one of the reasons Ellsberg so closely identifies with Snowden and has become one of his most vocal defenders.
A reader this morning pointed me to one of the most illustrative examples of this dynamic: an April 1967 New York Times editorial harshly chastising Martin Luther King for his anti-war activism. That editorial was published three days after King’s speech on the Vietnam War at the Riverside Church in New York City, which, as I have written about many times, was one of the most powerful (and radical) indictments of American militarism delivered in the 20th century.
Among other things, King denounced the U.S. government as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” as well as the leading exponent of “the deadly Western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long.” He said “the war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit.” And he argued that no significant American problem can be cured as long as the country remains an aggressive and violent actor in the world: “if America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over.”
The attack of the NYT editors on King for that speech is strikingly familiar, because it’s completely identical to how anti-war advocates in the U.S. are maligned today. It begins by lecturing King that his condemnation of U.S. militarism is far too simplistic: “the moral issues in Vietnam are less clear cut than he suggests.” It accuses him of “slandering” the U.S. by comparing it to evil regimes. And it warns him that anti-war activism could destroy the civil rights movement, because he is guilty of overstating American culpability and downplaying those of its enemies:
That has every element of the standard Washington attack on contemporary anti-war advocates: condemnation of U.S. militarism is “overly-simplistic,” ignores complexities and nuances, “slanders” our government leaders and military officials, and downplays or “whitewashes” the crimes of America’s enemies. It’s worth remembering that Washington smear merchants never change their script: they haul the same ones out regardless of the issue or who is doing the dissenting.
Photo of King’s anti-war speech at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Ga. on April 30, 1967. (AP)
The post Political Smears in U.S. Never Change: the NYT’s 1967 Attack on MLK’s Anti-War Speech appeared first on The Intercept.
Political Smears in U.S. Never Change: the NYT’s 1967 Attack on MLK’s Anti-War Speech
Glenn Greenwald
Tue, 07 Apr 2015 18:36:00 GMT
Tuesday, April 7, 2015
Jade Helm Precursor: The Phoenix Program
Jade Helm Precursor: The Phoenix Program: https://youtu.be/-x9OBFG0Bfg
Texas Sheriff Deputy Punches Pregnant Woman: Please call the Hunt County Sheriff’s Department
Texas Sheriff Deputy Punches Pregnant Woman: Please call the Hunt County Sheriff’s Department and let them know you have seen the video and pictures and this behavior is not acceptable.
Ask for Chief Buddy Oxford :(903) 453-6800
Also, go by and leave them a comment on their Facebook page. They need to hear from us!
http://www.infowars.com/texas-sheriff-deputy-punches-pregnant-woman/
Obama Criticizes Christians At Easter Breakfast Prayer
» Obama Criticizes Christians At Easter Breakfast Prayer Alex Jones' Infowars: There's a war on for your mind! http://www.infowars.com/obama-criticizes-christians-at-easter-breakfast-prayer/
Rand Paul announces he’s running for president
Rand Paul announces he’s running for president
Rand Paul announced his bid for president Tuesday morning on his campaign website, randpaul.com.
On the web page, Paul wrote, “I am running for president to return our country to the principles of liberty and limited government.” The Kentucky senator has already begun asking his supporters for donations to help his cause, too.
His political action committee sent a long email imploring supporters to contribute anywhere from $10 to $500 for a “Stand With Rand Money Bomb.” Paul has used this fundraising technique in the past to collect small-dollar donations online from grassroots supporters.
“The media tells us — if our Republican Party has any hope of defeating Hillary Clinton — you and I should choose a nominee with a track record full of sellouts, compromises and Big Government betrayals. So even though I’m at or near the top of every state poll for the nomination, they continue to try and dismiss my message of liberty and limited government!” the appeal reads.
Paul is expected to formally launch his White House bid at an event in Louisville, Kentucky Tuesday afternoon. The announcement has been expected for weeks, and Paul spent the early part of the week converting his campaign-in-waiting to an actual campaign.
Paul is expected to formally launch his White House bid at an event in Louisville, Kentucky Tuesday afternoon.
Rand Paul announces he’s running for president
kurtnimmo
Tue, 07 Apr 2015 14:33:33 GMT
Think Jade Helm’s Bad? Wait Till You Hear About This Police Force
Think Jade Helm’s Bad? Wait Till You Hear About This Police Force
President Barack Obama secretly signed an executive order creating a Presidential Task Force geared at 21st Century Policing.
Think Jade Helm’s Bad? Wait Till You Hear About This Police Force
Think Jade Helm’s Bad? Wait Till You Hear About This Police Force
kurtnimmo
Tue, 07 Apr 2015 14:40:41 GMT