Glenn Greenwald's Blog, page 49

U.S. Drops to 49th in World Press Freedom Rankings, Worst Since Obama Became President

Each year, Reporters Without Borders issues a worldwide ranking of nations based on the extent to which they protect or abridge press freedom. The group’s 2015 ranking was released this morning, and the United States is ranked 49th.

That is the lowest ranking ever during the Obama presidency, and the second-lowest ranking for the U.S. since the rankings began in 2002 (in 2006, under Bush, the U.S.was ranked 53rd).The countries immediately ahead of the U.S. are Malta, Niger, Burkino Faso, El Sa...

The U.S. Media and the 13-Year-Old Yemeni Boy Burned to Death Last Month by a U.S. Drone

On January 26,the New York Times claimed that “a CIAdrone strike in Yemen. . . .killed three suspected Qaeda fighters on Monday.” How did they know the identity of the dead? As usual, it was in part because “American officials said.” There was not a whiff of skepticism about this claim despite the fact that “a senior American official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, declined to confirm the names of the victims” and “aC.I.A. spokesman declined to comment.”

ThatNYT article did cite what...

NSA Claims Iran Learned from Western Cyberattacks

The U.S. Government often warns of increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks from adversaries, but it may have actually contributed to those capabilities in the case of Iran.

A top secret National Security Agency documentfrom April 2013 reveals that the U.S. intelligence community is worried that the West’s campaign of aggressive and sophisticated cyberattacks enabled Iran to improve its own capabilities bystudying and then replicating those tactics.

The NSA is specifically concerned that Iran’s...

Exclusive Interview: Sami Al-Arian, Professor Who Defeated Controversial Terrorism Charges, is Deported from U.S.

In 2003, Sami Al-Arian was a professor at the University of South Florida, a legal resident of the U.S. since 1975,and one of the most prominent Palestinian civil rights activists in the U.S. That year, the course of his life wasaltered irrevocably when he was indicted on highly controversial terrorism charges by then Attorney General John Ashcroft.These charges commenced a decade-long campaignof government persecution in which Al-Arian was systematically denied his freedom and saw his person...

Western Spy Agencies Secretly Rely on Hackers for Intel and Expertise

The U.S., U.K. and Canadiangovernments characterize hackers asa criminal menace, warn of the threats they allegedly poseto critical infrastructure, andaggressively prosecute them, but they are also secretly exploiting their information and expertise, according to top secret documents.

In some cases, the surveillance agenciesare obtaining the content of emails by monitoring hackers as they breach emailaccounts, often without notifying the hacking victims of these breaches.“Hackers are stealing...

Burning Victims to Death: Still a Common Practice

(updated below)

The latest ISIS atrocity – releasing a video of a captured Jordanian fighter pilot being burned alive – prompted substantial discussion yesterday about this particular form of savagery. It is thus worth noting that deliberately burning people to death is achievable – and deliberately achieved – in all sorts of other ways:

“Living Under Drones: Death, Injury and Trauma to Civilians From US Drone Practices in Pakistan”, NYU School of Law and Stanford University Law School, 2012:

Th...

Under Suspicious Circumstances, FBI Places Brother of No-Fly Litigant on Most Wanted Terrorist List

In late December 2010, 18-year-old Somali-American Gulet Mohamed was detained in Kuwait without charges and tortured, almost certainly at the behest of U.S. officials. Through a cellphone smuggled into the detention camp by another inmate, Guletwas able to call me andNew York Times reporter Mark Mazzettiand recount what happened;that morning,we both published articlesreporting on thedetention, and (with Gulet’s consent) I publishedtherecording of the 50-minute callI had with him, showing him...

The Petulant Entitlement Syndrome of Journalists

As intended, Jonathan Chait’s denunciation of the “PC language police” – a trite note of self-victimization he’s been sounding for decades –provoked intensereaction: much criticism from liberals and praise from conservatives (with plenty of exceptions both ways). I haveall sorts ofpoints I could make about his argument – beginning withhow he tellingly focuses on the pseudo-oppression of still-influential people like himself and his journalist-friends whilesteadfastly ignoring the much more se...

Canada Casts Global Surveillance Dragnet Over File Downloads

Canada’s leading surveillance agency is monitoring millions of Internet users’ file downloads in a dragnet search to identify extremists, according to top-secret documents.

The covert operation, revealed Wednesday by CBC News in collaboration with The Intercept, taps into Internet cables and analyzes records of up to 15 million downloads daily from popular websites commonly used to share videos, photographs, music, and other files.

The revelations about the spying initiative, codenamed LEVITATI...

Compare and Contrast: Obama’s Reaction to the Deaths of King Abdullah and Hugo Chávez

Hugo Chávez was elected President of Venezuela four times from 1998 through 2012 and was admired and supported by a large majority of that country’s citizens, largely due to his policies that helped the poor.King Abdullah was the dictator and tyrant who ran one of the most repressive regimes on the planet.

The effusive praisebeing heaped on the brutal Saudi despotby western media and political figures has been nothing short of nauseating; the UK Government, which arouses itself on a daily basi...