[Peace-discuss] Notes

[J.B. Nicholson]

Here are some topics for discussion for tomorrow's show or AOTA. Have a 
good show, guys!

-J




Privacy/exploitation: Apple's "voice assistant" Siri also records its users 
at times when the user isn't making a request (in other words, spying). 
There's a large market for spying on people and people are bringing the 
devices of their own exploitation into their lives in exchange for a minor 
bit of convenience.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJdvkg_sVG0 -- RT's report.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/07/siri-records-fights-doctors-appointments-and-sex-and-contractors-hear-it/ 
-- Condé Nast's report.

> One of the contract workers told The Guardian that Siri did sometimes
> record audio after mistaken activations. The wake word is the phrase
> “hey Siri,” but the anonymous source said that it could be activated by
> similar-sounding words or with the noise of a zipper. They also said
> that when an Apple Watch is raised and speech is detected, Siri will
> automatically activate.
> 
> “There have been countless instances of recordings featuring private
> discussions between doctors and patients, business deals, seemingly
> criminal dealings, sexual encounters and so on,” the source said. “These
> recordings are accompanied by user data showing location, contact
> details, and app data.”
> 
> Apple has said that it takes steps to protect users from being connected
> with the recordings sent to contractors. The audio is not linked to an
> Apple ID and less than 1% of daily Siri activations are reviewed. It
> also sets confidentiality requirements for those contract workers. We
> reached out to Apple for further comment and will update the story if we
> receive it.
> 
> Apple, along with Google and Amazon, all have similar policies for the
> contract workers it hires to review those audio snippets. But all three
> voice AI makers have also been the subject of similar privacy breaches,
> either by whistleblowers going to the press or through errors that give
> users access to incorrect audio files.

Right in line with being the corporate-compatible source of "journalism" 
they always were, Condé Nast and Anna Washenko concludes this story with:

> Voice assistants appear to be yet another instance where a technology
> has been developed and adopted faster than its consequences have been
> fully thought-out.

Another way of looking at this which explains all of the available evidence 
says that voice assistants were "fully thought-out" and that's why they're 
all delivered to the user as proprietary software driven applications which 
report far more than they should to the proprietor. Therefore stories like 
these come as no surprise to anyone who looks at this structurally -- whose 
interests are being served with proprietary software -- rather than taking 
a proprietor's word for things.

Condé Nast wants to continue to be of service to the companies it publishes 
about, and it knows that framing the issue in the way I framed it above 
encourages the reader to understand that these privacy violations are no 
accident, nor is the consistency of such stories across so many 
voice-driven products a surprise.

The cure for this remains the same: software freedom.

With a free software voice activated system, the user would get to choose 
how the system works, when the data is uploaded, where to upload the data, 
and which data to upload for further processing. A free software system 
would let the user review things, or only trigger voice activation after 
pressing a button; essentially putting in a delay before using the speech 
to cause something to happen. This would help prevent a service from 
getting "countless instances of recordings featuring private discussions 
between doctors and patients, business deals, seemingly criminal dealings, 
sexual encounters and so on" in the first place which is critically 
necessary in order to avoid being exploited by these proprietors and their 
contractors.






Poverty/The Rent Is Too Damn High: Millions of people are struggling to put 
food on the table.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBfe6CTWQEc -- RT's report:

> 4 million people in "deep poverty" in the UK (meaning their income is 
> below the poverty line).
> 
> 7 million people in "persistent poverty" (they've been destitute for at 
> least 2 of the last 3 years) and this includes 2.3 million children.

This piece includes an interview with Rev. Paul Nicolson, founder 
"Taxpayers Against Poverty":

> Well, I think those figures are shaming but even those figures don't go
> to the root of the problem. The life that has been led by people who are
> renters are paying high rents and low incomes [...are why] those people
> are here in demonstration here today. Because what they've been doing in
> London for so long is simply grabbing every bit of public land and
> taking it out from underneath the council tenants.

In 2005 and 2009 Jimmy McMillan founded and ran for New York City mayor in 
The Rent Is Too Damn High Party. "The Rent Is Too Damn High" was his 
catchphrase and, quite frankly, he was correct. We're seeing this sentiment 
expressed more around the world.

The name of the party was cause for trying to deny that party ballot access:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_rent_is_too_damn_high#In_the_District_of_Columbia
> Former District of Columbia shadow representative John Capozzi and a 
> group of incumbents used the name Rent Is Too Darn High for their slate 
> while running for the District of Columbia Democratic State Committee
> in 2014. McMillan endorsed the group. On the ballot, the slate used the
> word darn rather than damn because District rules prohibit expletives on
> the ballot.
> 
> McMillan sued the District of Columbia Board of Elections in federal 
> court, saying the ban on expletives violated his right to free speech.
> In December 2014, Judge Beryl A. Howell of the U.S. District Court for
> the District of Columbia dismissed the suit, determining that McMillan
> lacked standing because he was not a candidate or registered voter in
> the District of Columbia, and determining that the matter was moot in
> any case because the slate had disbanded and "demonstrated no intent to
> use the plaintiff's party's name in a future election."





War: War funding, arms will move, and the status quo continues without any 
serious obstacles from the so-called "resistance" and the Democrats 
including the so-called "anti-war" Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RexyXGNyJo -- (estimated value) $1 billion 
arms block fails in the Senate, so the arms sales to Saudi Arabia & UAE 
(which will kill more Yemeni) continue.

http://www.ye.undp.org/content/dam/yemen/General/Docs/ImpactOfWarOnDevelopmentInYemen.pdf
https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/ImpactOfWarOnDevelopmentInYemen.pdf 
-- UN report "Assessing the Impact of War on Development in Yemen" which 
concludes:

> If the conflict were to end in 2019, it would account for:
> 
> 233,000 deaths -- (0.8 per cent of the 2019 population) with 102,000
> combat deaths and 131,000 indirect deaths due to lack of food, health
> services and infrastructure
> 
> 1 child death every 11 minutes and 54 seconds in 2019
> 
> 140,000 deaths of children under the age of five
> 
> If conflict continues, the cost in mortality, especially the lives of
> children, will grow. In a scenario that assumes reduced conflict
> intensity relative to 2018, but continued large-scale violence through
> 2022, we estimate that fighting will account for:
> 
> (1.5 per cent of the 2022 population) with 166,000 combat deaths and
> 316,000 indirect deaths due to lack of food, health services, and
> infrastructure
> 
> 1 child death every 7 minutes in 2022
> 
> If  the  conflict  continues  through  2030,  it  will  increasingly
> and  disproportionately impact the lives of the youngest:
> 
> 1.8M deaths (4.6 per cent of the 2030 population) with 296,000 people
> dying directly in conflict and an additional 1.48 million people dying
> indirectly due to lack of food, health services and infrastructure
> 
> 1 child death every 2 minutes and 24 seconds in 2019
> 
> 1.5M deaths of children under the age of five





Russiagate/Maria Butina: Butina's lawyer says that there is enough evidence 
of federal misconduct for an appeal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_G420VKs2Xk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoRNy189gCM -- RT interview with Robert 
Driscoll.

Robert Driscoll is Maria Butina's lawyer. Driscoll has done a number of 
exclusive pieces for RT. The interviews end up being exclusive in part 
because other outlets don't want to talk to anyone knowledgeable about 
Butina's case. Other news outlets want to propagandize and frame Butina as 
having used sex to do some "spying" for Russia. This is not true. Even 
though the US government had to admit that Butina wasn't using sex at all 
in this case. If you read the US government's indictment of Butina it 
doesn't involve spying. Butina was convicted of failing to register under 
FARA (Foreign Agents Registration Act), the same act RT was pressured into 
registering under in order to keep broadcasting. The same act that was used 
as the means for denying RT its Capitol credentials, and why Lee Camp, host 
of RT's "Redacted Tonight" opens every show with "Welcome to Redacted 
Tonight, the comedy show where Americans covering American news are called 
'foreign agents'.". The same act that explains why some RT shows produced 
in the US ("Redacted Tonight" and "On Contact with Chris Hedges") have a 
credit which reads "Additional material is on file with the Department of 
Justice, Washington, DC".

Driscoll says that Patrick Byrne, philanthropist and CEO of an online 
retail chain, had a sporadic relationship with Butina and was an informant 
for the FBI the entire time beginning in 2015 through Butina's arrest:

> Mr. Byrne has now contacted me and has confirmed that he, indeed, had a
> 'non-standard arrangement' with the FBI for many years and that
> beginning in 2015 through Maria's arrest, he communicated and assisted
> government agents with their investigation of Maria. He also told me
> that [...] he reported to the government that Maria's behavior and
> interaction with him was inconsistent with her being a foreign agent and
> more likely an idealist and age-appropriate peace activist.

She used her connections with the National Rifle Association and National 
Prayer Breakfast to try to lobby for gun rights in Russia because she was a 
gun enthusiast. Under US law, foreign lobbyists are required to register 
with the US Dept. of Justice and she did not register and has been serving 
her 18 month jail sentence.





War funding: Democrats support war despite their rhetoric putting such 
rhetoric into context.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4_wgBE1v8M -- RT: "'Endless costly war' 
FTW! [For the win!] Dems & Reps unite in passing new $732bn military 
budget" (referring to HR3877 which is titled the "Bipartisan Budget Act of 
2019").

Who is part of that supportive House majority from the Democrats 
(ostensibly resisting Pres. Trump)?

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (HI) -- who is repeatedly referred to as "anti-war"
Rep. Rashida Tlaib (MI)
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY)

But don't worry, they all still talk tough. The President thanked the House 
for their support of the funding:

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1154533077986603008
> I am pleased to announce the House has passed our budget deal 284-149. 
> Great for our Military and our Vets. A big thank you!





Free speech: Democrats support Israel-backed bill against BDS.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSi3hqnY2u8 -- Progressive Democrats vote 
against Boycott, Divest, Sanction (BDS), Palestinian rights in passing HR246.

https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/progressive-democrats-vote-against-palestinian-rights 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSi3hqnY2u8 -- Ali Abunimah interviewed by 
Aaron Maté's on Maté's new show "Push Back".

Abunimah from his article:
> Many were disappointed that among the 398 representatives who backed the
> bill were several prominent Democratic progressives and antiwar figures,
> including Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, California’s Ro Khanna and
> Tulsi Gabbard, the Hawaii congresswoman who is running for president.
> 
> On Monday, I wrote about how Gabbard and Pressley have tried, amid
> outrage at their votes, to defend their decisions.
> 
> In the interview, Maté and I talk about these developments as well as
> why the Democratic Party leadership is so eager to attack and smear
> Palestinians.
> 
> The resolution condemning BDS had the full backing of top Democrat Nancy
> Pelosi, the speaker of the House.

Related:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XTBBrTs3e8 -- Rep. Tulsi Gabbard on why 
she supported HR246. Here's a transcript of what she said in this video:

> Tulsi Gabbard: Some of you have sent me messages and posted on social
> media asking for more information about why I voted the way I did on a
> recent resolution talking about BDS. So I wanted to give you some
> background and talk to you about my commitment to defending our first
> amendment rights. Nothing is more fundamental to the identity of our
> country then the rights and freedoms that are enshrined in our
> constitution. Now I've fought to defend these freedoms both as a soldier
> and as a Congresswoman. It's why we'll continue to oppose
> unconstitutional legislation like S1 -- a bill that does seek to
> restrict freedom of speech by imposing legal penalties against those who
> participate in the BDS movement. That's why I cosponsored HRes496 -- to
> affirm our freedom of speech and right to protest or boycott for any
> cause as well as stating opposition to any legislative efforts that seek
> to restrict these fundamental first amendment rights. Now I voted for
> HRes246 because I support a two-state solution that provides for the
> rights of both Israel and Palestine to exist and for their people to
> live in peace with security in their homes. I don't believe BDS is the
> way to accomplish that. However, I will continue to defend those who
> choose to exercise their right to free speech without any threat of
> legal action. Now HRes246 does not in any way limit or hinder our first
> amendment rights. In fact, it affirms every American's right to exercise
> free speech for or against US foreign policy as well as the right of
> Israeli and Palestinian people to live in safe and sovereign states free
> from fear and violence and with mutual recognition. The right to protest
> the actions of our government is essential if America is to truly be a
> free society. So no matter what our disagreements are about various
> political positions or choices that our government makes, we can all
> agree that every American should have the freedom to make those
> disagreements known and to protest peacefully in support of their
> views.

Related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SeVaVcyrR_E -- Jimmy Dore on how 
disappointed he is in who supported this bill (including Rep. Tulsi Gabbard).

Dore also includes playing back Rep. Gabbard's explanation (above) 
defending her vote for the non-binding referendum. He calls her explanation 
"not clear" and points out that "She seems to say a lot of things in 
support of free speech and people, although this thing [HR 246] kind of 
smeared people who were doing that. So that seems contradictory. In the 
future, if I ever get a chance to interview her again I will ask her: 'What 
is your clear position on Israel?' [...] Also, 'What is your position on 
AIPAC's lobbying?' because this bill is proof of the power of AIPAC. And 
'What is your view on Israel's policies, its human rights abuses, and what 
would be the alternative peaceful way to pressure Israel to STOP murdering 
Palestinians?'". Dore is scheduled to do a live show in Hawaii in December, 
perhaps he'll speak with Rep. Gabbard then. I'd also like him to ask her 
why she's okay with drone warfare (and the concomitant extrajudicial 
assassinations of innocent civilians) and how that squares with being 
called "anti-war" by both supporters and critics alike. See my blog article 
https://digitalcitizen.info/2019/02/13/is-tulsi-gabbard-really-anti-war-no-shes-pro-drone-and-for-surgical-strikes/ 
for more on this.

Related: https://www.democracynow.org/2019/3/8/its_time_to_tell_the_truth 
-- Amy Goodman interviews Israeli journalist Gideon Levy who supports Ilhan 
Omar's critique of Israel:

> Gideon Levy: It’s wonderful that the House deals with anti-Semitism.
> It’s wonderful that the House condemns anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism
> should be condemned. But the context is very suspicious and very
> troubling. Let me be very frank with you, Amy. We have to say the truth:
> The Israeli lobby, the Jewish lobby, are, by far, too strong and too
> aggressive. It’s not good for the Jewish community. It’s not good for
> Israel.
> 
> What is happening now is that some kind of fresh air, some kind of new
> voices are emerging from Capitol Hill, raising legitimate questions
> about Israel, about America’s foreign policy toward Israel and about the
> Israeli lobby in the States. Those are very legitimate questions, and it
> is more than needed to raise them. But the Israeli propaganda and the
> Jewish propaganda in recent years made it as a systematic method,
> whenever anybody dares to raise questions or to criticize Israel, he is
> immediately and automatically labeled as anti-Semite, and then he has to
> shut his mouth, because after this, what can he say?
> 
> This vicious circle should be broken. And I really hope that great,
> great politicians, like Mrs. Omar and others, will be courageous enough
> to stand in front those accusations and to say, “Yes, it is legitimate
> to criticize Israel. Yes, it is legitimate to raise questions. And this
> does not mean that we are anti-Semites. We are not ready to play this
> game anymore, in which they shut our mouths with those accusations,
> which, in most of the cases, are hollow.”





Free speech and private publishing power: Rep. Tulsi Gabbard sues Google 
for $50 million after Google suspends her ad campaign for 6 hours after the 
first Democratic Party debate

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8A2kzeEqGA -- Jimmy Dore and company 
discuss this, including a clip of Rep. Gabbard on Tucker Carlson's show.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/25/technology/tulsi-gabbard-sues-google.html
https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/25/8930373/google-tulsi-gabbard-democratic-candidate-lawsuit-ad-search-ban-political-bias-debates
et al. -- coverage of the lawsuit.
https://int.nyt.com/data/documenthelper/1510-complaint-tulsi-now-v-google/7394d92b6540191c57c5/optimized/full.pdf#page=1 
-- Gabbard's filing

Tulsi Gabbard's campaign is suing Google because their campaign ads were 
purposefully not distributed for 6 hours after the first Democratic Party 
campaign. Google's Jose Castaneda, a spokesman for the company, said:

> In this case, our system triggered a suspension and the account was
> reinstated shortly thereafter. We are proud to offer ad products that
> help campaigns connect directly with voters, and we do so without bias
> toward any party or political ideology.
I think this lawsuit is likely to go nowhere for virtually everyone 
involved because:

- my understanding is that most lawsuits are settled out of court and 
therefore this one is likely to be settled out of court too.

- this case comes down not to freedom of speech (as Rep. Gabbard has been 
talking about with the press, basically throwing red meat to people who say 
they like free speech in the abstract) but to a contract dispute centered 
on terms listed in the agreement between Google and Gabbard's campaign. I 
can't address any of the contract terms because I haven't read that agreement.

- The repeated references to the US 1st Amendment misunderstand that that 
amendment doesn't apply to private organizations. That amendment is to keep 
the government from stopping an American's freedom of speech, it doesn't 
compel Google to reorder search results in a particular (ostensibly more 
amenable) way, or compel Google to run Gabbard's campaign ads. The previous 
Gabbard support for HR246 speaks more to Gabbard's view of freedom of 
speech and a genuine freedom of speech issue than her campaign's lawsuit 
against Google. But the press around her support for HR246 is embarrassing 
to her supporters, so perhaps there's good reason for her to try and 
conflate freedom of speech with her campaign's lawsuit against Google.

- Dore's show engages in some very shoddy arguments in his defense of 
Gabbard's lawsuit. Dore lumps in unfair search results in his complaints 
against Google but it's not clear that unfair search results have anything 
to do with Gabbard's issue against Google -- her complaint is due to her 
ads not running at a time when people were most interested in her campaign. 
And Dore repeats the refrain of "break up Google" as a simple answer to a 
complex question.

While it's true that Google is currently dominant in web searches and 
therefore has the power to help steer people to read certain webpages 
instead of others, breaking up Google is both inactionably vague (break 
Google up along what lines?) and unlikely to produce the results supporters 
want. Bell telephone was broken up and we ended up with multiple ostensibly 
competing telephone companies. Some of them effectively merged through 
various buyouts and made the modern-day AT&T. Consider the introduction 
paragraphs from the Wikipedia entry on AT&T:

 From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At%26t
> AT&T began its history as Southwestern Bell Telephone Company, a
> subsidiary of the Bell Telephone Company, founded by Alexander Graham
> Bell in 1880. The Bell Telephone Company evolved into American Telephone
> and Telegraph Company in 1885, which later rebranded as AT&T
> Corporation. The 1982 United States v. AT&T antitrust lawsuit resulted
> in the divestiture of AT&T Corporation's ("Ma Bell") subsidiaries or
> Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs), commonly referred to as "Baby
> Bells", resulting in several independent companies, including
> Southwestern Bell Corporation; the latter changed its name to SBC
> Communications Inc. in 1995. In 2005, SBC purchased its former parent
> AT&T Corporation and took on its branding, with the merged entity naming
> itself AT&T Inc. and using its iconic logo and stock-trading symbol. In
> 2006, AT&T Inc. acquired BellSouth, the last independent Baby Bell
> company, making their formerly joint venture Cingular Wireless (which
> had acquired AT&T Wireless in 2004) wholly owned and rebranding it as
> AT&T Mobility.
> 
> The current AT&T reconstitutes much of the former Bell System, and
> includes ten of the original 22 Bell Operating Companies along with the
> original long distance division.

Services are also quite fungible (freely exchangeable or replaceable) when 
everything becomes data.

Services we used to think of as separate (telephone, cable TV, and Internet 
access to name a few) were merged in many areas. Cable TV is currently a 
primary source of getting online, and online access can subsume TV and 
telephony.

Services took on new functionality -- modern-day telephony (meaning 
anything to do with what we used to call a "telephone"), for example, means 
outsourcing one's answering machine functionality to the place one gets 
their telephone service. This choice implicitly means allowing a 
third-party to decide if a user gets a particular message at all and 
whether they get to hear the message or keep the message. Adding callers to 
a call used to require considerable setup and so-called "party-line" 
functionality that cost extra. Now voice over Internet protocol ("VOIP") 
renders that function as standard and costs nothing extra. Video calls 
aren't handled by telephone companies at all, for most people. Video calls 
are routed completely over the Internet. People expect the devices they 
call a "phone" to show them videos (TV episodes, movies, other videos from 
everyday computer users) with some people using these devices full-time as 
their only computer. There will come a day when people have no use for a 
phone number. Google, Amazon, Apple, and any other organization selling 
those spying robots (which listen all the time and obey any voice commands) 
stand to do well if they let users make calls to one another's spybots via 
something that looks like an email address (known as a "SIP address").

Breaking up tech companies can be quickly and effectively undone by 
companies merging and taking on new functionality. These qualities allow 
the firms to recapitulate their old arrangement, challenging the reasons 
why they were broken up in the first place.

The call to break up Google (or any other tech firm) is likely an inchoate 
call borne of frustration made by people who don't understand how 
computers, the Internet, or recent tech firm decisions work.





Law enforcer overreach posing as helpful: More reason to host your own 
services and run exclusively free software.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1ZOteqX9ls -- Five Eyes intelligence 
services (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United 
States) want access to user's data so that they can fight crime. Privacy 
advocates argue that this is morally wrong and the only way to comply with 
this request (even when there's a court order for said user data) is to 
keep in-the-clear (unencrypted) copies of user data to hand over in the 
event of a request. That retention of data is itself a reason to reject any 
service that would be implemented in such a way.

This request is not new. What Five Eyes now says they want is 
indistinguishable from spying, despite the crime-fighting rationale for 
their request. What Five Eyes is after remains the same -- user activity 
data to let others see what user said over some service:

1993: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip -- The Clinton 
administration implements shoddy encryption in hardware (called a Clipper 
Chip) in their attempt at getting technologists to use services with a 
built-in backdoor. Consumers rejected this encryption and the technology 
was obsolete by 1996.

2018: 
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/04/us/politics/government-access-encrypted-data.html 
-- David E. Sanger and Sheera Frenkel's September 2018 article about Five 
Eyes repeated requests of US government for access to user data:

> The Trump administration and its closest intelligence partners have
> quietly warned technology firms that they will demand “lawful access” to
> all encrypted emails, text messages and voice communications,
> threatening to compel compliance if the private companies refuse to
> voluntarily provide the information to the governments.
> 
> The threat was issued last week by the United States, Britain,
> Australia, New Zealand and Canada, the so-called Five Eyes nations that
> broadly share intelligence. Collectively, they have been frustrated by
> the spread of encrypted apps on cellphones and the ability to send
> encrypted messages through social media and, most prominently, on
> Apple’s iPhones.
> 
> The issue flared repeatedly during the Obama administration, with the
> former F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, warning that law enforcement
> officials were “going dark” as nefarious actors relied on encrypted
> channels to discuss or plan criminal activity or terrorist plots. But
> the Trump administration has  said little about the subject, even after
> the meeting in Australia where the demand was issued in a joint
> statement by the five nations.
> 
> “Should governments continue to encounter impediments to lawful access
> to information necessary to aid the protection of the citizens of our
> countries,” the joint statement said, “we may pursue technological,
> enforcement, legislative or other measures to achieve lawful access
> solutions.”

2019: Now the UK government is joining with the US in carrying the Five 
Eyes demand to the public. Here's the UK Home Office's variant of this request:

> We need to ensure that our law enforcement and security and intelligence
> agencies are able to gain lawful and exceptional access to the
> information they need.
There is some reason to believe service providers will comply with Five 
Eyes request. Many companies secretly joined the NSA's PRISM program, in 
which companies supplied user activity data to the NSA, this data is the 
backbone of mass surveillance (indiscriminate widespread spying). You can 
see the slide from an NSA presentation Edward Snowden liberated (hosted in 
many places including 
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c7/Prism_slide_5.jpg) 
which has a chart indicating which organization joined the PRISM program: 
Microsoft on 9/11/2007, Yahoo on 3/12/2008, Google on 1/14/2009, Apple in 
October 2012, and many other organizations you've heard of. Snowden also 
told us (with evidence) that Five Eyes countries had been spying on each 
others citizens to avoid their own domestic regulations. These are some of 
the reasons why Snowden is internationally widely seen as a hero.

Five Eyes issued a "Statement of Principles on Access to Evidence and 
Encryption" 
(https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/about/national-security/five-country-ministerial-2018/access-evidence-encryption) 
which threatens the language we saw in 2018: Five Eyes will take 
"technological, enforcement, legislative or other measures to achieve 
lawful access solutions" if service providers don't comply with their 
request for access to data.






Russiagate: Rachel Maddow loses over 800,000 viewers in 6 months.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6cOtsZmuyE -- Rachel Maddow's undying 
support for the Russiagate conspiracy theory is a losing bet for her. It 
was the source for her high MSNBC-leading ratings pre-Muller report. 
Post-Muller report she's been hemorrhaging viewers: her show fell to 6th 
place, below Fox News' Sean Hannity whose show has nearly double her ratings.

As Aaron Maté pointed out in 
https://theintercept.com/2017/04/12/msnbcs-rachel-maddow-sees-a-russia-connection-lurking-around-every-corner/ 
-- a story that simultaneously helped form his reputation as a leading 
debunker of Russiagate and a reason for his break with The Intercept which 
supports Russiagate:

> The Intercept conducted a quantitative study of all 28 TRMS episodes in
> the six-week period between February 20 and March 31. Russia-focused
> segments accounted for 53 percent of these broadcasts.
> 
> That figure is conservative, excluding segments where Russia was
> discussed, but was not the overarching topic.
> 
> Maddow’s Russia coverage has dwarfed the time devoted to other top
> issues, including Trump’s escalating crackdown on undocumented
> immigrants (1.3 percent of coverage); Obamacare repeal (3.8 percent);
> the legal battle over Trump’s Muslim ban (5.6 percent), a surge of
> anti-GOP activism and town halls since Trump took office (5.8 percent),
> and Trump administration scandals and stumbles (11 percent).

Maté also found support for Russiagate on Democracy Now and left that show 
as well. Now you can find Maté on The Grayzone hosting his own show called 
"Push Back with Aaron Maté" -- 
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAZrqdbdGGQyeZmHn7ypybTcm1qPsBRUB