[Marxism] from bad to worse for Puerto Rico

[Dennis Brasky via Marxism]

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SAN JUAN – Puerto Rico’s deep and prolonged recession has led to a severe
debt crisis. And the combination of economic contraction and massive
liabilities is having dire consequences for the island.

Everywhere in the United States commonwealth, private-sector jobs are being
lost. Total employment in Puerto Rico has fallen from 1.25 million in the
last quarter of the 2007 fiscal year workers to less than a million almost
a decade later. Without employment, large numbers of Puerto Ricans (who are
US citizens) have emigrated. But, despite this flight, the unemployment
rate is now 12.4
%.
Without job prospects, the labor participation rate has plummeted to 40%,
two-thirds of the level on the US mainland. About 60%
 of Puerto
Rico’s children live in poverty.

The commonwealth’s debt position is clearly unsustainable, and its economy
will be able to recover only if it gets a fresh start. But, unlike US
municipalities, Puerto Rico is not protected by the US bankruptcy code. It
is well known that decentralized bargaining processes for debt
restructuring often lead to disastrous outcomes, with the relief obtained
being insufficient to restore debt sustainability.

Aware of this reality, Puerto Rico enacted its own bankruptcy law
,
but the US Supreme Court struck it down, because the island is *de facto* an
American colony, and the federal bankruptcy code permits only the US
Congress to enact bankruptcy legislation over its territory. Eventually,
Congress took action and enacted PROMESA
, a law
ostensibly designed to facilitate debt restructuring and economic recovery.
Reflecting the standard colonialist view that a colony cannot be trusted to
make independent decisions, a bipartisan Financial Oversight and Management
Board was created to make fiscal decisions for Puerto Rico.



https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/puerto-rico-debt-plan-deep-depression-by-joseph-e--stiglitz-and-martin-guzman-2017-02
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[Marxism] Fwd: Muhammad Ali’s son says he was detained again at airport - The Washington Post

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/religion/muhammad-alis-son-says-he-was-detained-again-at-airport/2017/03/10/d41b0068-05e1-11e7-9d14-9724d48f5666_story.html
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[Marxism] Fwd: Parts From Hell | Jacobin

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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The automobile industry takes massive risks with workers’ and consumers’ 
lives every day.


by Dianne Feeley

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/03/cars-automobiles-safety-accidents-gm-takata-airbags-negligence/
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[Marxism] Fwd: Trump supporters call for ‘liberal genocide’ and deportation of Jews at Arizona Rally

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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http://www.rawstory.com/2017/03/trump-supporters-call-for-liberal-genocide-and-deportation-of-jews-at-arizona-rally/
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[Marxism] Fwd: Trotsky: The Prickly Lion of the Revolution (an interview with Alexander Reznik) | Lefteast

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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http://www.criticatac.ro/lefteast/trotsky/
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[Marxism] Fwd: The Revolutionary Force of Stupidity: A Conversation with Matt Taibbi - Los Angeles Review of Books

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https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-revolutionary-force-of-stupidity-a-conversation-with-matt-taibbi/
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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Perry Anderson: Passing the Baton. New Left Review 103, January-February 2017.

[Ernest Leif via Marxism]

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Sorry, forgot to cut text...

E
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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Perry Anderson: Passing the Baton. New Left Review 103, January-February 2017.

[Ernest Leif via Marxism]

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I have a soft spot for old Perry, but can he start using "undocumented" as
opposed to "illegals" in his texts? Or do I detect a vague antipathy
towards the idea of the free movement of people?

On Fri, Mar 10, 2017 at 10:52 AM, Louis Proyect via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

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>
> (Perry Anderson in fine fettle.)
>
> There is a further, obvious obstacle to reconfiguring the Democrats with
> even the weakest ‘social’ and hyphen before their name. Standing in the way
> of that is not only the whole history of the party since the inception of
> the Cold War, and its contemporary machinery of billionaire donors and
> fixers, but its principal icon. Obama, still resident in Washington, will
> be active—behind the scenes or from a cloud above them—in lending the party
> he neglected in office suitable guidance and energy to ensure the Democrats
> remain a congenial, avowedly middle-of-the-road vehicle for capital in
> 2020. He, not Trump, is likely to be the leading impediment to any
> expansion of a Sanders-plus insurgency uniting downwardly mobile
> millennials, hard-pressed workers and restive minorities on any more
> radical and genuinely internationalist platform of a sort that would merit
> the term left.
>
> full: https://newleftreview.org/II/103/perry-anderson-passing-the-baton
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[Marxism] Fwd: Donald Trump's State Department approves Saudi Arabia weapons sales blocked by Barack Obama | The Independent

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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( thought that was only supposed to happen if Clinton got elected.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/donald-trump-state-department-saudi-arabia-arms-sales-yemen-air-strikes-barack-obama-block-weapons-a7620821.html
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[Marxism] Fwd: Perry Anderson: Passing the Baton. New Left Review 103, January-February 2017.

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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(Perry Anderson in fine fettle.)

There is a further, obvious obstacle to reconfiguring the Democrats with 
even the weakest ‘social’ and hyphen before their name. Standing in the 
way of that is not only the whole history of the party since the 
inception of the Cold War, and its contemporary machinery of billionaire 
donors and fixers, but its principal icon. Obama, still resident in 
Washington, will be active—behind the scenes or from a cloud above 
them—in lending the party he neglected in office suitable guidance and 
energy to ensure the Democrats remain a congenial, avowedly 
middle-of-the-road vehicle for capital in 2020. He, not Trump, is likely 
to be the leading impediment to any expansion of a Sanders-plus 
insurgency uniting downwardly mobile millennials, hard-pressed workers 
and restive minorities on any more radical and genuinely 
internationalist platform of a sort that would merit the term left.


full: https://newleftreview.org/II/103/perry-anderson-passing-the-baton
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[Marxism] Fwd: Mike Davis: Election 2016. New Left Review 103, January-February 2017.

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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(Sad to see Mike Davis becoming more and more of a Democratic Party 
liberal.)


But Trumpism, however it evolves, cannot unify millennial economic 
distress with that of older white workers, while Sanders showed that 
heartland discontent can be brought under the umbrella of a ‘democratic 
socialism’ that reignites New Deal hopes for fundamental economic 
rights. With the Democratic establishment in temporary disarray, the 
real opportunity for transformational political change (‘critical 
realignment’, in a now archaic vocabulary) belongs to Sanders and Warren.


https://newleftreview.org/II/103/mike-davis-election-2016
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[Marxism] Fwd: The Rise of the ‘Traditionalist International’: How the American Right Learned to Love Moscow in the Era of Trump | Right Wing Watch

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http://www.rightwingwatch.org/report/the-rise-of-the-traditionalist-international-how-the-american-right-learned-to-love-moscow-in-the-era-of-trump/
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Re: [Marxism] Marilyn Young, Historian Who Challenged U.S. Foreign Policy, Dies at 79

[Andrew Pollack via Marxism]

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Notice mention that she founded NYU's Women's Studies Department.
She co-edited "Promissory Notes," an essential anthology on women in
liberation movements and post-revolution states.
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[Marxism] Marilyn Young, Historian Who Challenged U.S. Foreign Policy, Dies at 79

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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NY Times, Mar. 10 2017
Marilyn Young, Historian Who Challenged U.S. Foreign Policy, Dies at 79
By SAM ROBERTS

Marilyn B. Young, a leftist, feminist, antiwar historian who challenged 
conventional interpretations of American foreign policy, died on Feb. 19 
at her home in Manhattan, where she was a longtime professor at New York 
University. She was 79.


The cause was complications of breast cancer, said her son, Michael.

Professor Young’s political consciousness was rudely awakened as a 
Brooklyn teenager in 1953, when she defied her father and watched from 
the fire escape of her family’s East Flatbush apartment as thousands of 
mourners gathered for the funeral of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who had 
been executed two days before at Sing Sing Prison for conspiracy to 
commit espionage.


“Get back inside,” her father yelled, a friend recalled. “The F.B.I. is 
taking pictures.”


The government’s aggressive pursuit of Soviet spies and her father’s 
trepidation set her on a course from which she never deviated: writing 
editorials for the Vassar College newspaper against red-baiting and 
favoring civil rights for blacks and political opportunities for women; 
researching a doctoral thesis that re-evaluated historic United States 
relations with China; and laying an anticolonial foundation for her 
opposition to the wars in Vietnam and Iraq.


Describing the United States as “a nation dedicated to 
counterrevolutionary violence,” she wrote in The New York Times Book 
Review in 1971 that “the most agonizing problems of recent American 
foreign policy have concerned not our ability to reach accommodation 
with acknowledged big powers, but our persistent refusal to allow 
revolutionary change and self-determination in smaller ones.”


In one form or another, she explained in 2012, since her childhood the 
United States had been at war — “the wars were not really limited and 
were never cold and in many places have not ended — in Latin America, in 
Africa, in East, South and Southeast Asia.”


She described her evolving foreign policy until then as 
“anti-interventionist” — a policy she forswore, however, when it came to 
advancing the causes she cared about.


She was born Marilyn Blatt on April 25, 1937, in Brooklyn to Aaron 
Blatt, a postal superintendent, and the former Mollie Persoff, a school 
secretary.


She graduated from Samuel J. Tilden High School, earned a bachelor’s 
degree in history from Vassar in 1957 and received her doctorate from 
Harvard. Her dissertation became, in 1968, her first book: “The Rhetoric 
of Empire: American China Policy, 1895-1901.”


She also wrote “The Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990,” published in 1991, in 
which she called the conflict a revolution driven by anti-foreign 
nationalism. The Cornell historian Walter LaFeber described the book as 
a “deeply researched, detailed, well-written and outspoken account that 
should help shape how serious people view the Vietnam wars.”


She married a fellow graduate student, Ernest P. Young. They moved to 
Japan, where he was a speechwriter to the American ambassador, and then 
to Ann Arbor, Mich., where both became professors at the University of 
Michigan. They separated in 1976 and later divorced.


In addition to their son, Michael J. Young, the president of the New 
York Film Academy, Professor Young is survived by a daughter, Dr. Lauren 
Young, a psychologist; three grandchildren; and her sister, Leah 
Glasser, a dean at Mount Holyoke College.


Professor Young joined the faculty of N.Y.U. in 1980. She founded its 
Women Studies Department, was chairwoman of the history department from 
1993 to 1996 and was co-director of the Center for the United States and 
the Cold War at the Tamiment Library. In 2011, she was elected president 
of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.


“I find that I have spent most of my life as a teacher and scholar 
thinking and writing about war,” Professor Young said in her 
presidential address to the organization. “I moved from war to war, from 
the War of 1898 and U.S. participation in the Boxer Expedition and the 
Chinese civil war, to the Vietnam War, back to the Korean War, then 
further back to World War II and forward to the wars of the 20th and 
early 21st centuries.”


“Initially, I wrote about all these as if war and peace were discrete: 
prewar, war, peace or postwar,” she said. “Over time, this progression 
of wars has looked to me less like a progression than a continuation: as 
if between one war and the next, the country was on hold.”

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[Marxism] Fwd: Philly Socialist: Grassroots Political Party Organizes Locally – Spirit News - Spirit News

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://spiritnews.org/articles/philly-socialist-grassroots-political-party-organizes-locally/
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[Marxism] Fwd: Robert Mercer: the big data billionaire waging war on mainstream media | Politics | The Guardian

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/26/robert-mercer-breitbart-war-on-media-steve-bannon-donald-trump-nigel-farage
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Re: [Marxism] The Truth About the WikiLeaks C.I.A. Cache

[Mark Lause via Marxism]

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Very amusing that media tends to boil this down to defending the much
maligned but trustworthy CIA against "WikiLeaks’ misinformation campaign."

The problem seems to be the utterly corrupted memory chip.

And that's not a problem susceptible to a simple technological fix.

ML
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[Marxism] Fwd: From Debs to Berlusconi: the Socially Relevant Film Festival

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Monday, March 13th is opening night for the Socially Relevant Film 
Festival in New York, an annual event I have been covering since 2014. 
Featuring both narrative and documentary films, it is the quintessential 
alternative to the sort of escapism embodied in Hollywood blockbuster 
films and especially relevant in the current period, when the president 
of the United States is mounting an assault on the humane and 
progressive values expressed in the festival’s offerings. As you will 
see, the three films I have had a chance to preview amount to a rebuttal 
of the racist, xenophobic, corporatist and warmongering Trump 
administration.


full: 
http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/03/10/from-debs-to-berlusconi-the-socially-relevant-film-festival/

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[Marxism] Fwd: The movement needs to invite debate | SocialistWorker.org

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Bravo to the ISO for understanding what the Rania Khalek controversy is 
*really* about.


https://socialistworker.org/2017/03/09/the-movement-needs-to-invite-debate
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[Marxism] ‘Revolution? What Revolution?’ Russia Asks 100 Years Later

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NY Times, Mar. 10 2017
‘Revolution? What Revolution?’ Russia Asks 100 Years Later
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR

A painting of Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the Bolshevik revolution, at 
a flea market on the outskirts of Moscow. There will be no national 
holiday on Sunday, March 12, the date generally recognized as the start 
of the uprising. Credit Spencer Platt/Getty Images
MOSCOW — The Kremlin plans to sit out the centenary of the Russian 
Revolution.


Never mind that the upheavals of 1917 transformed the country and the 
world, abruptly ending the long rule of the czars, ushering in the 
Communist era and spawning an ideological confrontation with the West 
that still resonates.


There will be no national holiday on Sunday, March 12, the date 
generally recognized as the start of the uprising. Nor will there even 
be a government-issued official interpretation, like the one mandating 
that World War II was a “Great Victory.”


The official reason proffered for ignoring the event is that Russia 
remains too divided over the consequences of that fateful year.


The more likely explanation, some Kremlin officials, historians and 
other analysts say, is that President Vladimir V. Putin loathes the very 
idea of revolution, not to mention the thought of Russians dancing in 
the streets to celebrate the overthrow of any ruler. Moreover, 1917 
smudges the Kremlin’s version of Russian history as a long, unified 
march to greatness, meant to instill a sense of national pride and purpose.


For the record, the Kremlin is sticking to the official line of avoiding 
domestic discord.


“For one group of people, the revolution was the death knell of Great 
Russia — it was ‘Brexit,’ when we stopped our development in Europe,” 
said Mikhail Shvydkoy, Mr. Putin’s special representative on cultural 
matters, in an interview in the wood-paneled cafe at the Central House 
of Writers, a prerevolutionary mansion. “For many other people, the 
Soviet past was the best time of their lives.”


Mr. Putin strives to unite the country, he said, whereas “any 
festivities on the state level would deepen those divisions.”


Despite the widespread perception that the czar was overthrown in what 
the Soviets called the Great October Socialist Revolution, there were 
two revolutions in 1917. The February Revolution (now falling in March, 
given a different calendar) deposed the czar and replaced him with a 
provisional government that introduced liberal reforms like universal 
suffrage. Eight months later, Lenin and his marginal Bolshevik faction 
engineered a remarkable coup that gave rise to the world’s first 
communist state.


Mr. Putin’s critiques of the revolution contrast markedly with his usual 
glowing tributes to Russian history.


“We know well the consequences that these great upheavals can bring,” he 
said in his state of the federation speech in December. “Unfortunately, 
our country went through many such upheavals and their consequences in 
the 20th century.”


At an earlier public forum, after disparaging Lenin, he said, “We didn’t 
need the world revolution.”


The president shunted the anniversary off into the realm of academia, 
appointing a special committee to organize seminars and the like.


Previously, the official narrative was an essay written by Aleksandr 
Solzhenitsyn, in which he argued that deep distrust between the court 
and the educated elite along with German meddling brought about catastrophe.


The latter fits the Kremlin narrative that Russia has long been besieged 
by foreign aggressors and that the West strives to implant friendly 
regimes everywhere by sponsoring “color revolutions.” Columnists have 
been lumping 1917 among more recent color revolutions in places like 
Georgia and Ukraine, naturally listing the United States among the 
suspected agitators.


There is also a damning lack of heroic figures in the revolution. Czar 
Nicholas II was deposed and thus weak. Alexander F. Kerensky, the 
central figure in the provisional government, proved ineffective. Lenin 
fomented appalling bloodshed and destroyed the Russian Orthodox Church, 
a pillar of Mr. Putin’s support.


“Vladimir Putin cannot compare himself to Nicholas II, nor to Lenin nor 
to Kerensky, because that is not Russian history to be proud of,” said 
Mikhail Zygar, a Russian journalist and the author of a best-selling 
book, “All the Kremlin’s Men,” which details the inner workings of the 
Putin regime. “In terms of 1917, nothing can be used as a propaganda tool.”


In comparison, the Kremlin has turned World War II into the apogee of 
national unity.


In the absence of official spin, other factions are only too happy to 

[Marxism] Fwd: Meet the Hundreds of Officials Trump Has Quietly Installed Across the Government - ProPublica

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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A Trump campaign aide who argues that Democrats committed “ethnic 
cleansing” in a plot to “liquidate” the white working class. A former 
reality show contestant whose study of societal collapse inspired him to 
invent a bow-and-arrow-cum-survivalist multi-tool. A pair of healthcare 
industry lobbyists. A lobbyist for defense contractors. An “evangelist” 
and lobbyist for Palantir, the Silicon Valley company with close ties to 
intelligence agencies. And a New Hampshire Trump supporter who has only 
recently graduated from high school.


These are some of the people the Trump administration has hired for 
positions across the federal government, according to documents received 
by ProPublica through public-records requests.


full: 
https://www.propublica.org/article/meet-hundreds-of-officials-trump-has-quietly-installed-across-government

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[Marxism] Fwd: On Labor and Beyond, Trump Is Following Scott Walker's Playbook

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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The analogy was never with Hitler and Mussolini, not even Berlusconi (my 
analysis). It was with Scott Walker.


http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/39761-on-labor-and-beyond-trump-is-following-scott-walker-s-playbook
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[Marxism] Fwd: The Never-Ending Lukács Debate - Los Angeles Review of Books

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Written by G.M. Tamas, Hungary's leading Marxist.

http://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-never-ending-lukacs-debate/
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[Marxism] The Truth About the WikiLeaks C.I.A. Cache

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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(Co-moderator of mailing list that spawned Marxmail debunks Julian Assange.)

NY Times Op-Ed, Mar. 10 2017
The Truth About the WikiLeaks C.I.A. Cache
by Zeynep Tufekci

On Tuesday morning, WikiLeaks released an enormous cache of documents 
that it claimed detailed “C.I.A. hacking tools.” Immediately afterward, 
it posted two startling tweets asserting that “C.I.A. hacker malware” 
posed a threat to journalists and others who require secure 
communication by infecting iPhone and Android devices and “bypassing” 
encrypted message apps such as Signal and WhatsApp.


This appeared to be a bombshell. Signal is considered the gold standard 
for secure communication. WhatsApp has a billion users. The C.I.A., it 
seemed, had the capacity to conduct sweeping surveillance on what we had 
previously assumed were our safest and most private digital conversations.


In their haste to post articles about the release, almost all the 
leading news organizations took the WikiLeaks tweets at face value. 
Their initial accounts mentioned Signal, WhatsApp and other encrypted 
apps by name, and described them as “bypassed” or otherwise compromised 
by the C.I.A.’s cyberspying tools.


Yet on closer inspection, this turned out to be misleading. Neither 
Signal nor WhatsApp, for example, appears by name in any of the alleged 
C.I.A. files in the cache. (Using automated tools to search the whole 
database, as security researchers subsequently did, turned up no hits.) 
More important, the hacking methods described in the documents do not, 
in fact, include the ability to bypass such encrypted apps — at least 
not in the sense of “bypass” that had seemed so alarming. Indeed, if 
anything, the C.I.A. documents in the cache confirm the strength of 
encryption technologies.


What had gone wrong? There were two culprits: an honest (if careless) 
misunderstanding about technology on the part of the press; and yet 
another shrewd misinformation campaign orchestrated by WikiLeaks.


Let’s start with the technology. In the aftermath of Edward J. Snowden’s 
revelations about potential mass surveillance, there has been a sharp 
increase in the use of these “end to end” encryption apps, which render 
even the company that owns the app or phone essentially unable to read 
or hear the communications between the two “end” users.


Given that entities like Signal and WhatsApp cannot get access to the 
content of these conversations, even in response to a warrant — WhatsApp 
keeps logs of who talked to whom, Signal doesn’t do even that — 
intelligence agencies have been looking to develop techniques for 
hacking into individual phones. That way, they could see the encrypted 
communications just as individual users of the apps would.


These techniques are what the leaked cache revealed. Security experts I 
spoke with, however, stressed that these techniques appear to be mostly 
known methods — some of them learned from academic and other open 
conferences — and that there were no big surprises or unexpected wizardry.


In other words, the cache reminds us that if your phone is hacked, the 
Signal or WhatsApp messages on it are not secure. This should not come 
as a surprise. If an intelligence agency, or a nosy sibling, can get you 
to install, say, a “key logger” on your phone, either one can bypass the 
encrypted communication app. But so can someone looking over your 
shoulder while you use your phone. That is about the vulnerability of 
your device. It has nothing to do with the security of the apps.


If anything in the WikiLeaks revelations is a bombshell, it is just how 
strong these encrypted apps appear to be. Since it doesn’t have a means 
of easy mass surveillance of such apps, the C.I.A. seems to have had to 
turn its attention to the harder and often high-risk task of breaking 
into individual devices one by one.


Which brings us to WikiLeaks’ misinformation campaign. An accurate tweet 
accompanying the cache would have said something like, “If the C.I.A. 
goes after your specific phone and hacks it, the agency can look at its 
content.” But that, of course, wouldn’t have caused alarm and defeatism 
about the prospects of secure conversations.


We’ve seen WikiLeaks do this before. Last July, right after the 
attempted coup in Turkey, WikiLeaks promised, with much fanfare, to 
release emails belonging to Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development 
Party. What WikiLeaks ultimately released, however, was nothing but 
mundane mailing lists of tens of thousands of ordinary people who 
discussed politics online. Back then, too, the ruse worked: Many Western 
journalists had hyped these non-leaks.


WikiLeaks seems to have a 

[Marxism] Syria Solidarity Sydney formed

[Michael Karadjis via Marxism]

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Some events being planned soon, among other things to counter an 
upcoming Anderson Syria freak show ("conference") in Sydney.


FB page: https://www.facebook.com/SyriaSolidaritySydney/ 


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