Glenn Greenwald: Obama Makes "False" Surveillance Claims

Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian journalist who broke the NSA surveillance story, joins Democracy Now one day after both President Obama and whistleblower Edward Snowden gave extensive interviews on the surveillance programs Snowden exposed and Obama is now forced to defend.  Speaking to PBS, Obama distinguished his surveillance efforts from those of the Bush administration and reaffirmed his insistence that no Americans’ phone calls or emails are being directly monitored without court orders. Greenwald calls Obama’s statements "outright false" for omitting the warrantless spying on phone calls between Americans and callers outside the United States.  "It is true that the NSA can’t deliberately target U.S. citizens for [warrantless] surveillance, but it is also the case they are frequently engaged in surveillance of exactly that kind of invasive technique involving U.S. persons," Greenwald says. After moderating Snowden’s online Q&A with Guardian readers, Greenwald says of the whistleblower: "I think what you see here is a person who was very disturbed by this massive surveillance apparatus built in the U.S. that spies not only on American citizens, but the world, with very little checks, very little oversight. He’s making clear his intention was to inform citizens even at the expense of his own liberty or even life."

The Struggle Against Dogmatism: Wittgenstein and the Concept of Philosophy

Oskari Kuusela - Marie McGinn
One of the most perplexing, and to some irritating, aspects of Wittgenstein's later philosophy is his apparent insistence that he is not putting forward philosophical theses, or making any claim with which others could possibly disagree or which it is possible to dispute. It can be hard to see how this can be understood as anything other than an attempt by Wittgenstein to privilege his own conceptions of meaning or of psychological phenomena, or as a claim to the absolute and indisputable correctness of his observations on rules, understanding, sensations, the propositions of mathematics, and so on. The idea that Wittgenstein's later philosophy is in some way implicitly dogmatic has been encouraged by interpretations, such as the one developed in great detail by Peter Hacker and Gordon Baker in their commentary on the Philosophical Investigations, which hold that Wittgenstein does not put forward theses insofar as he is merely describing the rules for the use of expressions; his remarks are held to be indisputable insofar as anyone who understands the relevant expressions must agree to Wittgenstein's descriptions, and recognize that any deviation from them inevitably results in nonsense. On this conception of it, the kind of conceptual investigation that Wittgenstein is engaged in results in the articulation of the grammatical rules implicit in our use of expressions, and provides a base from which unanswerable criticisms of the use that philosophers make of the expressions of our language can be mounted. Wittgenstein's idea that his aim is to make philosophical problems 'completely disappear' is, on this interpretation, taken to be equivalent to an intention to show that they one and all depend upon a demonstrably deviant, and therefore nonsensical, employment of words.

El Poema Más Bello del Mundo

Cada vez que yo pasaba por la casa donde vivió Stephane Mallarmé, rue de Rome, Distrito XVII, París, para tomar mi metro, miraba la placa de bronce que informaba que allí había vivido el poeta a fines del siglo diecinueve, y es en ella donde se celebraban los famosos martes literarios que frecuentaban los grandes poetas simbolistas: Rimbaud, Verlaine, Valery, Lecompte-de-Isle quienes habían coronado a Mallarmé como el Príncipe de los Poetas, y le habían ceñido la Corona de Laurel, como en los Juegos Olímpicos de la antigua Grecia. Había sido un poeta oscuro y legendario, oscuro porque sus cincelados versos parnasianos “oscurecían la oscuridad” de sus enigmáticos poemas, y en los últimos años de su vida se había dedicado obsesivamente a escribir “El Libro Perfecto” cuya ejecución puntual y verdadera se describía en un folleto titulado “A Propósito del Libro”, publicado poco antes de su muerte ocurrida en 1898. Explicaba cuántas páginas debía tener este mítico libro, qué formato, qué tipografía, qué papel y de qué gramaje, qué carátula, cómo y por cuántas personas debería ser leído ante el público, y cuántas personas deberían asistir a esa lectura. Porque el Libro Perfecto no podía ser otra cosa que un libro de poemas; qué duda cabe! que contuviese en sus páginas toda la belleza y la sabiduría del mundo, y no una vulgar novela, que era para alimento de las masas, como aquellos esperpentos “naturalistas” de Zolá cuyos capítulos venían en el suplemento de los periódicos, para atraer a la ignorante clase media incipiente que agotaba la edición. No por nada los simbolistas despreciaban a los burgueses arribistas, de esos que pueblan las novelas de Balzac.

Noam Chomsky on the Heroism of Bradley Manning

The linguistics professor, activist, and public intellectual on secret trade deals, killing polio workers, fighting for the commons in Turkey and terrorism
What do Takism Square, Google Glass, the Trans-Pacific Partnership and NSA data gathering have in common?
Chomsky always provides perspective, even when one is pretty well informed about the topics he addresses. The Magna Carta was about protecting The Commons.  It was the origin of habeas corpus, - something the world's indigenous people are trying to teach us about.

Influence & Massive Growth of Surveillance, Cyberwar

James Bamford on NSA Secrets

James Bamford discusses the National Security Agency’s secret expansion of government surveillance and cyberwarfare.  In his latest reporting for Wired magazine, Bamford profiles NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander and connects the dots on PRISM, phone surveillance and the NSA’s massive spy center in Bluffdale, Utah. Says Bamford of Alexander: "Never before has anyone in America’s intelligence sphere come close to his degree of power, the number of people under his command, the expanse of his rule, the length of his reign or the depth of his secrecy." The author of "The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America," Bamford has covered the National Security Agency for the last three decades, after helping expose its existence in the 1980s.

Big Brother’s Prying Eyes

How we can protect our privacy when Big Government and Big Business morph into Big Brother

Whatever your take on the recent revelations about government spying on our phone calls and Internet activity, there’s no denying that Big Brother is bigger and less brotherly than we thought. What’s the resulting cost to our privacy — and more so, our democracy? Lawrence Lessig, professor of law and director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University and founder of Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society, discusses the implications of our government’s actions, Edward Snowden’s role in leaking the information, and steps we must take to better protect our privacy.

“Snowden describes agents having the authority to pick and choose who they’re going to be following on the basis of their hunch about what makes sense and what doesn’t make sense. This is the worst of both worlds. We have a technology now that gives them access to everything, but a culture if again it’s true that encourages them to be as wide ranging as they can,” Lessig tells Bill. “The question is — are there protections or controls or counter technologies to make sure that when the government gets access to this information they can’t misuse it in all the ways that, you know, anybody who remembers Nixon believes and fears governments might use?”

Few are as knowledgeable about the impact of the Internet on our public and private lives as Lessig, who argues that government needs to protect American rights with the same determination and technological sophistication it uses to invade our privacy and root out terrorists.

“If we don’t have technical measures in place to protect against misuse, this is just a trove of potential misuse…We’ve got to think about the technology as a protector of liberty too. And the government should be implementing technologies to protect our liberties,” Lessig says. “Because if they don’t, we don’t figure out how to build that protection into the technology, it won’t be there.”

“We should recognize in a world of terrorism the government’s going to be out there trying to protect us. But let’s make sure that they’re using tools or technology that also protects the privacy side of what they should be protecting.”

Venezuela -conspiración permanente

En su primer mes de gobierno, Nicolás Maduro ha denunciado varias conspiraciones, un apartheid mediático destinado a “invisibilizarlo”, dos o tres proyectos de golpes de Estado, un nuevo plan de magnicidio, más de un complot internacional y alguna guerra de cuarta o de quinta generación. Todo eso cabe en tan solo treinta días. Y todavía más: Maduro ha viajado a la cumbre de Unasur, a Cuba, a Argentina, Uruguay y Brasil... y en todos lados siempre ha sostenido un mismo discurso. Reactivo, en contraofensiva, hablando permanentemente de la oposición. Maduro, de pronto, es un exceso de adjetivos. Se comporta como si todavía estuviera en campaña electoral.

La sospecha de que su gobierno no es del todo legítimo gravita a su alrededor. No es un pájaro. Es una nube que no lo deja en paz, que danza junto a él de manera insistente. Nada parece salirle como lo tenía planeado. La imagen del caos se ha mudado y ahora empieza a estar asociada al chavismo. También la violencia cabe en estos primeros treinta días. En la Asamblea Nacional, los partidarios del oficialismo atacaron a puñetazo limpio a los parlamentarios de oposición, a quienes ya se les había negado el derecho de palabra mientras no reconocieran públicamente que Maduro es el presidente legítimo de Venezuela. Por más que el poder ensayó distintos trucos para responsabilizar a las víctimas de la agresión, los videos tomados con teléfonos celulares desbarataron cualquier farsa. Pocos días después, Iris Varela, ministra de Asuntos Penitenciarios y alta dirigente del partido de gobierno, declaró con franqueza que “la oposición se merecía sus coñazos”.