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August 22, 2013
surveillance secrecy
The national security state's' reaction to Edward Snowden's whistleblowing material on state surveillance and its secrecy is very disturbing.
Steve Bell
The modus operandi of the UK and US governments is to convey a thuggish message of intimidation. More deeply, however, as Simon Jenkins says:
The material revealed by Edward Snowden through the Guardian and the Washington Post is of a wholly different order from WikiLeaks and other recent whistle-blowing incidents. It indicates not just that the modern state is gathering, storing and processing for its own ends electronic communication from around the world; far more serious, it reveals that this power has so corrupted those wielding it as to put them beyond effective democratic control. It was not the scope of NSA surveillance that led to Snowden's defection. It was hearing his boss lie to Congress about it for hours on end.
This lying to a democratic body indicates that the American (or Anglo-American?) surveillance industry, which grown big by exploiting laws to combat terrorism, has grown has a culture of misinformation. It simply disregards democratic orders to destroy intercepts, emails and files; treats the parliamentary and legal institutions with falsehoods and contempt to the extent that Parliamentary and legal control is a charade.
As John Kampfner remarks with respect to the UK national security state:
Whenever challenged about the breadth of these powers, government ministers talk of checks and balances. None of these work properly: not parliament, not the courts, not ministerial accountability. Most MPs and peers do not have the technical knowledge to grasp the details of online surveillance. It's easy for the security agencies to run rings around them. Lawyers struggle to find out the facts as so much of the legal side of the security state is now held in secret. As for the politics, the government gives the police sweeping, vague powers and then says it cannot comment on operational issues.
The ministers justify the inexorable extension of security powers by resorting to two mantras: "If you've done nothing wrong, you've got nothing to hide; and "If only you knew what we know …"
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 7:42 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
August 20, 2013
on the road
I've been on the road for a couple of weeks and I'm due to go off on a photographic trip to the west coast of the Eyre Peninsula on Friday. So I've not been following the election.
Nor have I been reading the mainstream media about the election as the mobile broadband connections have been real flakey at best.
David Rowe
However, I gather from the headlines that the Coalition, with its deficit fetishism, remains in an election-winning position. So nothing much has changed. What has changed is that Labor is in with a chance of holding onto power even if it loses the popular vote nationwide.
By all accounts I've not missed much with respect to the election campaign. Its full of evasive half truths, trivia and heavily script6ed politicians staying on message and kissing babies.
Apparently, both parties are promising to increase spending and to not cut anywhere - beyond relatively minor "efficiency dividends" from the public service - and to not increase taxes, but instead to cut them, then to gesture to about possible revenue to match the cuts.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:03 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack
August 9, 2013
locked in a bitter struggle
The real political battle is not over economic policy. It is between the old News Ltd---now News Corp Australia--- and Rudd Labor. To put it crudely Murdoch wants to destroy the Labor Government to protect his commercial Foxtel interests and the influence of his declining newspapers.
David Rowe
Thursday’s Daily Telegraph, for instance, depicted the prime minister and deputy prime minister as bumbling Nazis from Hogan’s Heroes, and the front page of Monday’s Daily Telegraph told voters to “kick this mob [Kevin Rudd’s government] out”. “Send in the clown” was how page 1 of how Brisbane’s Courier-Mail reported Peter Beattie’s recruitment as a Labor candidate on August 9. It appears that the newspaper editors of the Daily Telegraph and Courier-Mail are working under orders from New York during the election.
The confrontational, populist and biased coverage of the election has made News Corp Australia an election issue in that it draws more attention to Murdoch's motives and agenda.
This is especially so in the light of the executive disunity and News Corp's back to the future direction.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 4:28 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack
August 1, 2013
NSW Labor: corrupt
The NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) has found that the NSW Labor powerbrokers Ian Macdonald and Eddie Obeid, and his son Moses Obeid, engaged in corrupt conduct and has recommended criminal charges against them.The ICAC has referred its findings to the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP).
David Rowe
The ICAC doesn’t have recourse to make criminal charges or recommend specific charges. What the ICAC does is puts together the body of evidence and determines that what has been done can be deemed corrupt. That gets passed onto the DPP and then it’s up to the DPP to lay individual charges. Will anyone go to jail though?
These findings confirm that Sussex Street sure has a tawdry and corrupt past. Eddie Obeid controlled the ALP factional system in NSW and controlled most ALP preselections, state and federal, in NSW for two decades. The NSW Right controlled the Labor party, including federal Labor.
The consequence, as Ben Eltham points out in Obeid Was At The Heart Of ALP Power in New Matilda, is that:
If Eddie Obeid was corrupt, then the greater part of the Labor Party was too, because Obeid controlled it. It was Labor's factional system that allowed a man such as Obeid to seize control of the apparatus of state power, and use to enrich his family ... Preventing another Obeid is tantamount to dismantling the factional system itself ...... The factional system permeates the entire party, all the way down to the grassroots.
That suggests a long clean-up process and substantive reform to clean the stables. I cannot see it happening because it needs to reform its structure and culture, including its union linkages. Labor can only reduce its factionalism if it reforms the party-union nexus.
So will the stench around the Labor Right deprive it of office and power for many a decade?
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:03 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack