Long time, no LTG.

1. SURVEILLANCE AND CONTROL

1.1 The Times: Brussels to sign away your private details to US; The Mail: US to get access to your personal files - bank details, visited websites, salaries…

Summary: An internal report leaked to The New York Times yesterday said the EU was on the verge of agreeing to give US law enforcement and security agencies information about all EU citizens. Negotiators are trying to agree on minimum standards to protect privacy rights. This would include limiting access to information to “authorised individuals with an identified purpose” for their search. The internal report said negotiators had largely agreed on an “international binding agreement”. The pact would make it clear that it was lawful for European governments and companies such as internet and credit card firms to transfer private information to the United States and vice versa.

One source at the department said that as a result of the deal, the U.S. was likely to ask for full details on everyone visiting from Europe. This will include all visitors’ financial details - their bank statements, salaries, who they write cheques to and receive money from and what they buy with credit cards - and what internet sites they visit on their home computers. The information involved is already available on the massive computerised databases kept by private companies that closely monitor each individual’s credit rating for the financial industry and by the major computer search engines that are used to browse the Internet.

This will result in a flood of information crossing the Atlantic but the American intelligence agencies can handle it with super-computers that are programmed to pick out only those reports that contain what the U.S. considers to be suspicious activity.

1.2 via Rinf.com: UK government fined for violation of right to privacy

It’s interesting that the EU could simultaneously sign away our personal information to the States and bother to find the UK guilty of something that surely will be openly available to the DHS after this agreement is signed. I guess the EU is a mass of this kind of contradictions.

THE EUROPEAN Court of Human Rights has ordered the British government to pay €7,500 in costs and expenses to the UK human rights organisation Liberty for violating its right to privacy by intercepting its telecommunications.

Liberty took the case along with the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) and British-Irish Rights Watch over the interception of telephone, fax, e-mail and data between these organisations over a seven-year period, from 1991 to 1997.

The UK government, while refusing to disclose specifics, acknowledged these communications were likely to have been intercepted and stored en masse by an electronic test facility operated by the British ministry of defence.

It defended the interception on the grounds that, while the surveillance did violate the applicants’ right to privacy, this was necessary in the interests of national security, for the prevention of serious crime and to safeguard the economic wellbeing of the United Kingdom. It argued that there was a system of safeguards in place to ensure that people’s communications were not unnecessarily intercepted, and that appropriate procedures were followed.
Liberty argued that the “safeguards” that surrounded the interception were not accessible and not known to the public, so that people could not foresee the extent to which their privacy was being violated.

1.3 via Rinf.com: Groups Sue U.S. for Data On Tracking By Cellphone

An article in The Washington Post last fall revealed that federal officials were routinely asking courts to order cellphone companies to furnish real-time tracking data on individuals and that courts sometimes have ordered the data released without first requiring a showing of probable cause.

Now the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation sued the government in federal court in Washington under the Freedom of Information Act. Last November, the ACLU had filed a FOIA request with the Justice Department for documents, memos and guides regarding the policies for tracking people through the use of their cellphones.

The groups also want to know how many times the government sought location information without first establishing probable cause that a crime was taking place.

Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd declined to comment on the suit. But with respect to cell-tracking data in general, he said, “It is important to remember that the courts determine whether or not cell-site data or more precise cell location data can be turned over to law enforcement in a particular case.”

2. WAR

2.1 via SpinWatch: The Privileged Prisoner of Black Beach

This article has some information on mercenary Simon Mann, who has admitted to being involved in a 2004 plot to overthrow the Equatorial Guinea government along with Margaret Thatcher’s son, Mark Thatcher. In the early nineties he set up Executive Outcomes, that made millions protecting oil installations from rebels in Angola. He then set up another company, Sandline International, which shipped arms to Sierra Leone in flagrant contravention of a UN embargo. The plotters actually set up a trading company after the Equatorial Guinea coup, called the Bight of Benin Company (BBC).The company would have controlled the country’s economy, its oil reserves, army and police, as a “private fiefdom”, modeled on the British colonial company the East India Company.

2.2 via DeepJournal: Casus Belli: The Ultimate Spin

In an article released last weekend by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker Magazine, we learned the White House has met, considered and is probably working to fabricate a situation that could be used by the United States as a pretext for attacking Iran. In this piece Sam Gardiner suggests that Special Operations teams now in Iran could act as provocateurs, attacking a target high-profile enough to obtain a response that could be used as a cause for war. He also suggests another ‘threatening maneuver’ by Iranian speedboats in the Gulf could do the trick.

2.3 via Cryptogon via IHT: China Inspired Interrogations at Guantánamo

… the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base atGuantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency.

3. ECONOMY

3.1 via Calculated Risk: What we can do in this dangerous moment

Lawrence Summers writes in the Financial Times that we are now at the most dangerous moment since the American financial crisis began last August. His remedies seem singularly unlikely to work, or happen.

3.2 via Reuters: Factories hit worldwide as commodity prices soar

3.3 via Ben Seymour: In The Middle Of A Whirlwind

Long piece on the Food / Energy / Work crisis.