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WikiLeaks has published transcripts of 10 months of German Parliamentary hearings into the National Security Agency and Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND). The 1,380 pages cover 34 witnesses from May 2014 to February 2015. "WikiLeaks has also written summaries of each session in German and English as the inquiry, due to its subject matter, is of international significance." For example, there is a synopsis of William Binney and Thomas Drake's appearance before the Bundestag inquiry in July. The inquiry calendar lists hearings with documents and synopses indicated by paper clips and hourglasses respectively. Some hearings are labelled "Synopsis to follow". Although the transcripts are of public hearings, WikiLeaks claims that "despite many sessions being technically public, in practice public understanding has been compromised as transcripts have been withheld, recording devices banned and reporters intrusively watched by police."
The Register reports:
The inquiry was set up in March 2014, tasked with investigating surveillance activities by the United States on German soil and to what degree German agencies have been complicit in this spying. During the inquiry it emerged that the German Chancery sent a letter to the chief exec of Deutsche Telekom calling for help with the continuous mass surveillance of German and international internet and telecommunications data at Deutsche Telekom's Frankfurt exchange point. This operation, codenamed "Eikonal", saw these intercepts then pass from the BND to the NSA.
More recently, it emerged that the NSA was passing on selectors – IP addresses, emails, and mobile phone numbers – for spying. Targets included members of the French government and European industry, including the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company (EADS) and Eurocopter. Airbus, another target of alleged spying, has launched a lawsuit.
The NSA also reportedly wanted the BND to spy on Siemens over its alleged business with Russian intelligence. The BND-NSA co-operation on surveillance was ostensibly about fighting international terrorism but much of what happened in practice seemed to be about harvesting geo-political intelligence, if not downright economic espionage.
Some weeks into the inquiry, a German intelligence agency staffer was arrested after allegedly being caught spying on behalf on the US.
Highlights of the leaked files include how the BND tap fibre optic cables from the German intelligence officer who does the tapping. WikiLeaks is saying it released the files in order to inform the debate.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by kurenai.tsubasa on Friday May 15 2015, @02:12AM
If someone claims to be something, than they must not deny it and make peace with the entire history of that something.
Ok, this I understand. I can pull out my rants about feminists as an example. I think we may have a common frame of reference here.
I encountered a vicious, mean-spirited brand of feminism. The deep irony is that I could march into the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival unquestioned, but I would rather stand with Camp Trans because I know I'm just a birth certificate check away from incurring the wrath of these gender lunatics. (Plus, I'm not sure I even want to know what happens at the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival that not even post-op trans women may see, so I never actually have stood with Camp Trans.) Yet, folks like Thexalon and some feminists I've met IRL have helped to counter that. I've reflected on the nature of feminism and how we got to this point.
Here's what I mean. Remember when Violet Blue's panel got shut down [wikipedia.org] by Valerie Aurora of the Ada Initiative? Now compare and contrast with “date rape” presentations that incoming freshmen are required to attend at many US universities. Frankly, I'm having trouble finding any significant difference between Blue's panel and the date rape presentation I was required to attend due to being legally male except one: I've never researched Blue's outreach on matters of sex education, but I have a distinct feeling that she doesn't go about blaming “all you men sitting here today” for date rape.
I wonder why Valerie Aurora and the Ada Initiative hasn't attempted to shut down these date rape presentations at universitites? Well, one of the common themes to those presentations is not only that everyone assigned the male gender, regardless of anatomy, is guilty of being a rapist who hasn't been caught in the act yet, but that people assigned the male gender at birth may be rapists without even knowing it! I remember a character from Xenogears, Miang [wikipedia.org], who could possess any woman at any time. It's as though Aurora's brand of “feminism” thinks that there's a male Miang out there who can take over any assigned male at any time and turn him into a rapist.
For a long time, I thought these attitudes were normal in feminism.
However, it turns out that like the examples of Christian denominations I gave, there are many different kinds of feminists. To address your point of making peace with the entire history of something, it becomes a moot point for feminists who aren't gender lunatics. It's not part of their history. Why should they make peace with some sexist lunatics?
We hear those who shout the loudest, and extremists like the Westboro Baptist Church and the gender lunatics shout the loudest. Have you ever encountered Amazon philosophy? Probably not; they keep to themselves. What about the millions of women who see feminism as a force for true gender equality to be used to deal with practical, real problems? They work quietly and without drama to solve practical problems. We'll hear about some cunt lawyer suing somebody else in Silicon Valley and it gets painted as somehow representative of the real issues, yet we don't hear about the girl who has the mind of a programmer but is stuck in the “pink ghetto” (never thought I'd use that term sympathetically). We just hear from the drama queens.
Where I live in flyover country is a very diverse place. I suppose that's why I settled here. It's an island of sanity in a sea of ignorance (although as I've indicated in previous posts, the ignornace and insanity seems to be gaining ground lately). There are many muslims. Yet, all of them would rather just get along peacefully while practicing their faith. I used to live just down the road (less than a kilometer) from a “Temple and Cultural Center” where they would gather, peacefully, every Sunday for worship. Actually they might have been Hindu, but they did the whole head-scarf thing. Forcing the “no true Scotsman” fallacy on them is not the correct approach (especially if they were Hindu and not Muslim!). It's been said many times by many people that Islam was the excuse for the Charlie Hebdo attack, not the root cause. Racism and lunacy were the root causes.
I guess what I'm saying is that if you keep insisting that they're all true Scotsman, you're just encouraging the more mentally unstable and marganalized individuals in that group to actually become a true Scotsman.
No, I'm not attempting to provide a justification for lethal violence from religious lunatics. I'm all in favor of honey pots like that convention in Texas recently. These extremists are people with larger issues that are only using mumbo-jumbo woo as an excuse for their violence. The woo is not the root cause. As Hairyfeet pointed out earlier today (and one of the reasons my first example of a Christian denomination was Christian Identity), the Old Testament contains more than enough woo. Justice is the only way, not prejudice.
There is no argument here that humanity is a nasty piece of work. For a while, I was obsessed with end-of-the-world scenarios and End of Evangelion showed up often in my playlist (not the touchy-feely bits, I just wanted to see the death of everyone on the planet), and one of the themes is that humanity, the 18th angel [yahoo.com] (apologies again for linking to Yahoo! answers) is the only angel in the series actually capable of causing the end of the world. Yes, the raw cruelty of humanity can cause someone to snap (thus adding to the aggregate cruelty, kind of like entropy). That's why I suggested help. Yeah, I know, that's kind of a cheesy thing to say. Psychology has plenty of woo of its own.
Iaido I am not terribly familiar with, but now that you mention it, I recognize it. The martial arts discipline I trained in when I was in China focused on unarmed techniques.