13-03-24 Hello World!

Recent:

3/24 @ 12:43 : Israel, IL

3/24 @ 12:35 : Ocala, Florida, US

3/23 @ 11:00 : Toronto, CA

3/23 @ 10:54 : Louisville, Kentucky, US

3/23 @ 10:26 : Barcelona, ES

3/23 @ 10:00 : Chantilly, Virginia, US

3/23 @ 10:00 : Chicago, Illinois, US

3/23 @ 9:46 : Savigny-le-temple, FR

3/23 @ 9:22 : San Francisco, California, US

3/23 @ 9:12 : Romania, RO

3/23 @ 7:22 : Sweden, SE

13-03-23 U.S. Drone Pilot: 'Did We Just Kill A Kid?'

U.S. Drone Pilot: 'Did We Just Kill A Kid?'

Drone pilots at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico.

---

'Did We Just Kill A Kid?' — Six Words That Ended A US Drone Pilot's Career

Der Spiegel

The New Mexico desert gets blistering hot, but inside the small windowless container where Brandon Bryant worked as a drone operator for the U.S. Air Force it stays a cool 63 degrees all year long.  Sixty-three finger numbing degrees and Bryant describes sitting with a group of other pilots looking at more than a dozen computer monitors. The crew are directing drones over Afghanistan 6,250 miles away and the screens jump with a two to five second delay, as infrared video sent from the UAVs whips through the air to New Mexico.

When the order to fire on a target arrives, Bryant paints the roof of a hut with the laser that will guide in a Hellfire missile fired by the pilot beside him.

"These moments are like in slow motion," he says to Abé.  No doubt, because on this occasion Bryant says a child walked from behind the building at the last second.

Too late for him to do anything else but ask the other pilot, "Did we just kill a kid?"

"Yeah, I guess that was a kid," the pilot replied.

"Was that a kid?" they wrote into a chat window on the monitor.

Then, someone they didn't know answered, someone sitting in a military command center somewhere in the world who had observed their attack. "No. That was a dog," the person wrote.

They reviewed the scene on video.  A dog on two legs?

READ MORE:

http://dailybail.com/home/us-drone-pilot-did-we-just-kill-a-kid.html

13-03-23 NY Times Ignores Banks' Latest Role In Distorting The Housing Market

The claims against the NYT, below, are unjustified.  

On Christmas Day 2010, in a landmark editorial, "Bank and Wikileaks", the NYT explained that it would no longer dare to publish news that may irritate the banks, given the banks unlawful reprisal against Wikileaks a few weeks earlier.  jz

LINK:

[1] 10-12-25 Banks and WikiLeaks - NYTimes 

http://www.scribd.com/doc/46072423/

_____

NY Times Ignores Banks' Latest Role In Distorting The Housing Market

The newspaper reports a shortage of houses for sale, not surplus of underwater loans.

READ MORE:

http://www.alternet.org/ny-times-ignores-banks-latest-role-distorting-housing-market?akid=10230.1117888.c3WFKW&rd=1&src=newsletter813486&t=9

13-03-23 Meet the Journalist Rotting in Prison for Crossing the FBI

Prosecutorial abuse is becoming the preeminent weapon used by the US government to destroy online activism and journalism.



Aaron's Swartz's suicide in January triggered waves of indignation, and rightly so. He faced multiple felony counts and years in prison for what were, at worst, trivial transgressions of law. But his prosecution revealed the excess of both anti-hacking criminal statutes, particularly the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), and the fixation of federal prosecutors on severely punishing all forms of activism that challenge the power of the government and related entities to control the flow of information on the internet.
...
Just this week alone, a US federal judge sentenced hactivist Andrew "Weev" Auernheimer to 3 1/2 years in prison for exploiting a flaw in AT&T's security system that allowed him entrance without any hacking, an act about which Slate's Justin Peters wrote: "it's not clear that Auernheimer committed any actual crime", while Jeff Blagdon at the Verge added: "he cracked no codes, stole no passwords, or in any way 'broke into' AT&T's customer database - something company representatives confirmed during testimony."

READ MORE:
http://www.alternet.org/glenn-greenwald-meet-journalist-rotting-prison-crossing-fbi?akid=10230.1117888.c3WFKW&rd=1&src=newsletter813486&t=5