The forcing down of the Bolivian President’s jet was a clear breach of the Vienna Convention by Spain and Portugal, which closed their airspace to this Head of State while on a diplomatic mission. It has never been thought necessary to write down in a Treaty that Heads of State enjoy diplomatic immunity while engaged in diplomacy, as their representatives only enjoy diplomatic immunity as cyphers for their Head of State. But it is a hitherto unchallenged precept of customary international law, indeed arguably the oldest provision of international law.
To the US and its allies, international law is no longer of any consequence. I can see no evidence that anyone in an official position has even noted the illegality of repeated Israeli air and missile strikes against Syria. Snowden, Manning and Assange all exposed illegality on a massive scale, and no action whatsoever has been taken against any of the criminals they exposed. Instead they are being hounded out of all meaningful life and ability to function in society.
I have repeatedly posted, and have been saying in public speeches for ten years, that under the UK/US intelligence sharing agreements the NSA spies on UK citizens and GCHQ spies on US citizens and they swap the information. As they use a shared technological infrastructure, the division is simply a fiction to get round the law in each country restricting those agencies from spying on their own citizens.
I have also frequently remarked how extraordinary it is that the media keep this “secret”, which they have all known for years.
The Guardian published the truth on 29 June:
| This article has been taken down pending an investigation. | |
The strange script which appears there happens when I try to copy and paste from this site which preserved the article before the Guardian censored all the material about the UK/US intelligence sharing agreement from it.
As you can see from the newssniffer site linked above, for many hours there was just a notice stating that the article was “taken down pending investigation”, and then it was replaced on the same URL by the Guardian with a different story which does not mention the whistleblower Wayne Madsen or the intelligence sharing agreements!!
I can give, and I would give on oath, an eye witness guarantee that from my direct personal experience of twenty years as a British diplomat the deleted information from Wayne Madsen was true.
@Someone (8:25pm)
A bit slow on the uptake then the EU Parliament: New Zealander Nicky Hager layed out ECHELON in excruciating painstaking detail in his 1996 book Secret Power, focusing mainly on the NZ side of operations, and made it clear too that it targetted diplomatic communications as well served US commercial espionage ends, subverted legitimate governments and made regular enough forays into civilian chatter as to be a grave concern to everyone, everywhere. Duncan Campbell had been plugging away at the subject for at least a decade before that, as well as other closely related subjects from the Zircon and other spy satellites to the useless, ineffectual first version of the UK Data Protection Act. I think Craig Murray pointed in a recent blog post that something like ECHELON dates back to the the 1940s, having roots in US-UK WW2 joint activities and was common knowledge in diplomatic and government particularly for many decades. The current programs are like echelon on stilts and echelon is bottom rung old hat.
This is not good news….
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/03/edward-snowden-digital-misuse-ban-ki-moon
“The former NSA contractor Edward Snowden misused his right to digital access and has created problems that outweigh the benefits of public disclosure, the UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon has said.
Speaking to a gathering of the foreign affairs committee of the Icelandic parliament in Reykjavik on Tuesday, Ban said that in his personal opinion “the Snowden case is something I consider to be misuse.” The UN chief added that the opening up of digital communications should not be “misused in such a way as Snowden did”.
24 January 2012
“Google announces privacy changes across products; users can’t opt out”
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2837288/posts
You apparently know the answer to your own question – i.e. the incompetent American spooks, despite all their machinery to help them out, guessed wrong about Snowden’s whereabouts, like when they guessed that they could get rid of the USSR by simply triggering Palme’s assassination or when the planned to get rid of Castro’s Cuba at JFK’s expense.
As for Austria’s role, it has been in America’s pocket ever since the departure of the Red Army. Don’t forget that the Mad Austrian aka Josef Fritzl was set up first as Palme’s assassin.
As for tossers now, I would look along NATO’s covert Gladio line from Stockholm to Vienna. Sweden’s FRA is the biggest eavesdropping asset it has on the continent.
Doug Scorgie
Thanks for making me laugh, I nearly choked on my apple:
Although you are being so charitable calling the “illustrious contributor” a troll. An asshat is a more appropriate terminology.
The point you have picked clearly shows he/she has no fucking clue and has not read Craig’s post (this post is not about an obscure and highly specialist field) , however in its haste bashing the keyboard trying to earn a couple more pennies, seeing as it gets paid for the linage, by hasbara dept.
Cryptonym,
You can bet that Echelon has been upgraded, it still plays a big part of a greater whole that has many, many parts to it.
Jesus, Ben, that’s weird.
That was to Ben at 8.50pm
Thanks for the heads up.
The mechanics:
How come US came by the information about Snowden being on the plane? ie Clearly the US assets in Russia should command a high credibility for the US to kick in to action the stop and search procedure. However, the reverse could be also true; a flimsy passing remark has been picked up by the US, and taken to be true.
Christian Science Monitor
“Since Morsi’s election, the US has been oddly supportive of Morsi, muted in its criticism even when his government has prosecuted American NGO workers dispatched to Egypt to work on democracy promotion. Though the message of the Obama administration this week has been that “democracy” is about far more than elections, for much of the past year it has given the opposite impression.”
Weird is exactly right, Dreoilin.
My guess would be that Putin had his spooks put out messages about what Snowden et al were up to – what FRA picked up, and sent along to its Gladio contacts who got France, Portugal and Austria involved.
Bildt is obsessed in gaining points with the tossers because of what FRA can do.
“a flimsy passing remark has been picked up by the US, and taken to be true.”
They have a bug or bugs in the transit area at Sheremetyevo airport and heard something that gave them hysterics – someone threw a freaker. And sent out the word to Europe, STOP THAT PLANE!
(and no, I’m not joking – when you ‘run the world’, the last thing you’re thinking about when trying to catch a leaker is what’s legal or what’s acceptable under the Vienna Convention. Vienna what?)
I sincerely hope UNASUR kick up blue holy murder.
Ok, ok. It was just a big international misunderstanding resulting in the re-routing of the flight to Austria, where they wouldn’t allow it to depart until searched….all is forgiven.
http://www.politico.com/story/2013/07/edward-snowden-asylum-93694.html
Someone – 9:02 pm
Scrooo Google! I use https://ixquick.com/uk/ and have deleted any and all “accounts” online, other than gravatar and my Irish email.
Trowbridge H. Ford
3 Jul, 2013 – 2:58 pm
“Thanks, N.., certainly sounds fishy, and I shall look into it.”
“Wonder if he, like Rawlings, was asking too many questions about what was going around Oxbridge.”
“It’s clearly open season on any possible trouble.makers, as I well know by narrowly escaping assassination last Thursday night at about 12:40 PM. If I had only stood up when the killer with a beam light, laser pistol shined it into the window next to my bed, I wouldn’t be doing this.”
Another imposter post???
Nah, Doug, he’s 008, semi-retired.
Trowbridge, do you have any ideas on how this Snowden situation might have a connection, however tenuous, with the disappearance of Harold Holt?
Who is the imposter poster, Doug Scorgie, N..for asking me if there is in the alleged suicide some foul play, or me for stating it looked fishy, would investigate, and did so – concluding that Professr JohnTiler apparently committed suicide for unknown reasons?
Or am I alone the Imposter poster for claiming that I was almost assassinated – what I have complained about to the FBi for trying to set me up for something, and going to the police here three times, the last time to 911 which has apparently provided officer Bryce to keep an eye on where I live?
Which is it?
Oh, I see others have joined in to discredit me.
I am no one’s spook, and am completely retired.
And Jemand, if you tried to tie it to Gough Whitlam’s political disappearance, it might be worth answering,
You guys will have to work harder to be taken as serious trolls.
“Or am I alone the Imposter poster for claiming that I was almost assassinated – what I have complained about to the FBi for trying to set me up for something, and going to the police here three times, the last time to 911 which has apparently provided officer Bryce to keep an eye on where I live?”
Actually it was because you thought 12:40 PM was night that got me wondering.
Flaming June
3 Jul, 2013 – 4:15 pm
“The boy killed for an off-hand remark about Muhammad – Sharia spreads in Syria”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-23139784
“I am amazed that the BBC have carried this.”
Don’t be amazed Mary. If its from the BBC its from MI6
This appalling activity is not Sharia law
Don’t be taken in
As for you, Fred, you will have to provide more than a miscalculation in typing the time,12:40 AM, to make out I am nuts.
And the earlier threat was at around 12:30 AM Tuesday.
One apparently has to have everything perfect to be simply ignored on this site.
“As for you, Fred, you will have to provide more than a miscalculation in typing the time,12:40 AM, to make out I am nuts. ”
I didn’t say anything about nuts. Just thought you might be an imposter that’s all.
What makes you think you are nuts?
“What’s a £1 billion fraud worth? A suspended sentence”
http://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2013/07/03/whats-a-1-billion-fraud-worth-a-suspended-sentence/
@ Someone (20h25), who regales us with :
““EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT Session document”
11 July 2001
“This report makes an important point in emphasising that Echelon does exist, but it stops short of drawing political conclusions. It is hypocritical for the European Parliament to criticise the Echelon interception practice while taking part in plans to establish a European Secret Service.””
_________________
Sorry for correcting a post which might otherwise give a misleading impression (purely innocently, I’M SURE), but the above quotation is not from the Main Report of the EP’s Temporary Committee on the ECHELON Interception System but from one of the several Minority Reports appended to the Main Report, signed by 2 members of the full 34 member Committee (Patricia Mc Kenna and Ilka Schroeder.
These words do not, of course, appear in the Resolution adopted by the European Parliament pursuant to the Report.
Just thought I’d clear that up for the edification of the reading public 🙂
@ Fred and Trowbridge:
I know you are not trolls and would hate to see you being accused of being such. So please stop this silly mini-quarrel and stop disrupting this thread.
Thank you!
[Jon/Mod: removed, abusive]
“Thank you!”
Pot/Kettle
President Morales is a blusterer and I predict that he will find some very good reason for very regrettably not delivering on his offer of asylum.
I further predict that his fellow El Presidente, Rafeal Correa, is at this very moment thinking furiously about how to retreat gracefully – and also very regrettably, from his bluster in the matter of Julian Assange.
I fear that some of the regulars on here will soon have to be looking for new heroes.
Dreoilin
ixquick/startpage seem to be secure search engines if you believe them. Of course they could be a front for some spooks but even if they are the worst that’s happened is you’ve cut out the middle-man (Google) so I can’t see any harm in using it (and I do among others).
If you use ixquick/startpage via https then your search terms won’t be flying down the wires in clear text for anyone to see. If the spooks have obtained their private encryption keys though then they’ll be decoding all that traffic in real time. Normal https security is no security at all if the watcher steals or buys the private key.
Which brings me to Diffie-Hellman key negotiation also known as “(perfect) forward security”. All modern browsers support this but very few web sites use it. With Diffie-Hellman even if the spooks have the private key and monitor the entire connection they cannot normally decode your encrypted transmission by any known method. – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffie%E2%80%93Hellman_key_exchange
So who does use this? Step forward “Google” for one. When you make an https connection to Google an exceptionally high grade of encryption will be negotiated with your browser. Nobody spies on Google without being part of their club it seems.
Interestingly https://duckduckgo.com (the other main private search engine besides ixquick/startpage) also uses Diffie-Hellman so searches on it should be highly secure (unless they also are a front for the spooks).
Anyway I just thought it interesting, Google will use the most secure encryption (even against those in possession of Google’s private keys) when you make an https connection to their servers.
If all webservers turned on Diffie-Hellman (it is usually explicitly turned off) then decoding “civilian” encrypted traffic would probably be beyond any agency anywhere. At least for now.
There is an extra cpu overhead on the servers to support this form of encryption but not enough it seems to me to explain why it is relatively rarely deployed.
I am surprised that ixquick/startpage don’t support this form of encryption as it makes their private keys worth a lot of money. I’ve thought of emailing them and asking why but thought better of it.