RSN: Media Silent as US-Backed Saudi Forces Starve Half Million Yemeni Children, The Big Money in US Prisons, Bernie Sanders Just Vaulted Into the Lead Over Hillary Clinton in New Iowa Poll

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Andy Borowitz | Trump's Plan to Randomly Shoot People Lacks Details, Random Shooters Say 
 
Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker 
Borowitz writes: "One day after Donald Trump claimed that he could shoot people on New York's Fifth Avenue and not lose support, a leading member of the random-shooting community complained that the billionaire's random-shooting plan lacks specifics." 
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Bernie Sanders Just Vaulted Into the Lead Over Hillary Clinton in New Iowa Poll 
Maxwell Tani, Business Insider 
Tani writes: "Sen. Bernie Sanders took the lead over former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in a new poll of Iowa Democratic voters just less than two weeks before the state's caucus." 
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The Big Money in US Prisons 
Eric Markowitz, International Business Times 
Markowitz writes: "Unlike other conventions, the American Correctional Association's annual winter conference is closed off to the public, and the customers on the trade show floor are mostly prison wardens, jail officials and directors from state corrections agencies. The exhibitors are there to make their pitch for a slice of the $80 billion incarceration industry in the U.S." 
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How a Small Company in Switzerland Is Fighting a Surveillance Law - and Winning 
Jenna McLaughlin, The Intercept 
McLaughlin writes: "A small email provider and its customers have almost single-handedly forced the Swiss government to put its new invasive surveillance law up for a public vote in a national referendum in June." 
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The referendum on Switzerland's new invasive surveillance law will happen in June. (photo: ProtonMail)

 small email provider and its customers have almost single-handedly forced the Swiss government to put its new invasive surveillance law up for a public vote in a national referendum in June.

“This law was approved in September, and after the Paris attacks, we assumed privacy was dead at that point,” said Andy Yen, co-founder of ProtonMail, when I spoke with him on the phone. He was referring to the Nachrichtendienstgesetzt (NDG), a mouthful of a name for a bill that gave Swiss intelligence authorities more clout to spy on private communications, hack into citizens’ computers, and sweep up their cellphone information.

The climate of fear and terrorism, he said, felt too overwhelming to get people to care about constitutional rights when people first started organizing to fight the NDG law. Governments around the world, not to mention cable news networks, have taken advantage of tragedy to expand their reach under the guise of protecting people, even in classically neutral Switzerland — without much transparency or public debate on whether or not increased surveillance would help solve the problem.

But thanks to the way Swiss law works — if you get together 50,000 signatures within three months of the law passing — you can force a nationwide referendum where every citizen gets a say.

“In Switzerland, and overseas, no one really thought to ask the people,” Yen said. “The public opinion, especially from the young people, has shifted to pro-privacy.”

By gathering its users and teaming up with political groups including the Green and Pirate parties, as well as technological and privacy advocates including Chaos Computer Club Switzerland and Digitale Gesellschaft Switzerland, ProtonMail was able to collect over 70,000 signatures before the deadline.

The new law is the first of two surveillance laws that have been circulating through the Swiss Parliament. The NDG law was fully passed in September, but can’t take full effect until after the referendum vote in June. The NDG would “create a mini NSA in Switzerland,” Yen wrote — allowing Swiss intelligence to spy without getting court approval. It would authorize increased use of “Trojans,” or remote hacking tactics to investigate suspects’ computers, including remotely turning on Webcams and taking photos, as well as hacking abroad to protect Swiss infrastructure. It would legalize IMSI catchers, or Stingrays, which sweep up data about cellphones in the area.

The second law, known as the “BÜPF,” might come up for a vote in the Parliament’s spring session, but may be revised or delayed. The BÜPF would expand the government’s ability to retain data for longer, including communications and metadata, as well as deputize private companies to help spy on their users, or face a fine. “What I have heard from insiders is that they will reduce its scope now that they know we have the numbers to also force a vote on that law,” Yen wrote in an email to The Intercept.

ProtonMail, created by scientists and engineers with know-how in particle physics, software, cryptology, and civil liberties, provides unbreakable end-to-end encryption by default to its users for free — making it easy for ordinary people to protect their communications and preserve their anonymity.

With end-to-end encryption, only the person who sends the message and the person who receives it can access the content; not even the company can see what was written. Encryption protects transactions on the internet, so that criminals can’t read messages, steal credit card information, or impersonate others.

The Swiss surveillance bill does not compel ProtonMail to decrypt its users’ communications, so if the Swiss intelligence service forces it to hand over data, all the intelligence service will get is gobbledygook. But ProtonMail still feels the measure threatens Swiss privacy — something the company hopes to defend, regardless of its bottom line.

There are some strong political currents in Europe, as in the United States, beating strongly againstencryption and privacy — which law enforcement says prevents them from accessing evidence with a warrant. Lawmakers, government officials, and law enforcement agencies alike have been pushing for a way to gain access into uncrackable end-to-end encryption. Scientists collectively agree this is a bad idea, and would threaten the security of the internet without actually helping anyone catch bad guys.

As of November, 14 countries had passed new laws bequeathing more power to intelligence agencies to spy. France’s upcoming surveillance law, though it will not mandate backdoors in encryption, will allow law enforcement more surveillance powers, including to spy on phone calls and emails without a judge’s approval and install key logger devices on suspects’ computers to retrieve their passwords. The Chinese government passed a law in December requiring companies to turn over encryption keys, and the Cuban government has the power to approve all encryption technology before it hits the market. In Bahrain, where dissenting political speech is condemned, encryption is outlawed for “criminal intentions.”

The U.K.’s Investigatory Powers Bill, or “Snooper’s Charter,” as many call it, could compel companies to help the government circumvent encryption if it becomes law, according to privacy advocates familiar with the draft legislation.

Other countries’ laws might affect ProtonMail’s business overseas, as well as major American companies offering end-to-end encryption, like Apple.

According to Yen, issues of national security and privacy aren’t usually brought to a vote by the entire country. Nationwide referendums aren’t all that common — they happen maybe five or six times a year, usually when the government wants to build something expensive and people don’t want to pay for it. Forcing a referendum is a lengthy, pricey process, he says.

But now, the Swiss want to be an example for the rest of the world by “pushing to make data a cornerstone of the Swiss economy,” he said. “When you talk about data privacy, all our data goes online — we have to find a way to secure it. At the end of the day this privacy comes as a result of security.”

The same fight is brewing in the U.S., where people might have to be more creative and forceful to make their opinions heard. “ProtonMail went out to get signatures, worked with political parties, the Green party, the Pirate party. In the U.S., maybe with non-mainstream political groups, with the support of young people, and a few of the technology companies — there’s a real chance,” Yen said.

“A couple months ago we thought this referendum was totally impossible. Now here we are.”

http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/34817-how-a-small-company-in-switzerland-is-fighting-a-surveillance-law-and-winning

Media Silent as US-Backed Saudi Forces Starve Half Million Yemeni Children 
Mint Press News 
Excerpt: "The United Nations warned that 8,000 children could suffer from severe malnutrition in 2016. And that's just in one southern Yemeni city." 
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A woman brings her child to a hospital in Yemen to be treated for severe acute malnutrition. (photo:

 Mint Press News)

The United Nations warned that 8,000 children could suffer from severe malnutrition in 2016. And that’s just in one southern Yemeni city.

hile the media was flooded with images of the starving children of Syria, the thousands of children suffering from Saudi Arabia’s U.S.-backed onslaught on Yemen made far fewer headlines.

The mainstream media was eager to report on the struggle for survival in Madaya. The mountain town near Syria’s southwestern border was once known as a popular resort destination in the Middle East, but its population is now reportedly being starved under a siege by the Syrian army.

However, the actual situation is far more complex. The U.S.-supported, so-called “moderate” rebels including the Nusra Front, the Syrian branch of al-Qaida, had first laid siege to the cities of Kefraya and Fua, leading to a retaliatory siege on Madaya by the Assad government. Those same rebel groups were also, in turn, responsible for allowing the starvation in Madaya to continue by occupying the city and keeping humanitarian aid out of reach of the populace as a strategic tactic. Additionally, many images used in media reports on Madaya turned out to be fake or misleading.

Meanwhile, far fewer journalists are covering the large-scale starvation and displacement taking place in Yemen, a situation caused by a bombing campaign and blockade led by Saudi Arabia and its allies andbacked by U.S. military aid. The Nusra Front, one of the groups responsible for skyrocketing food prices in Madaya, also has the backing of the Saudi government, like many of the rebel forces in the region.

Saudi Arabia is currently engaged in a proxy war with Iran, who Riyadh blames, inaccurately, for the rise to power of the Houthis in Yemen and setbacks to the kingdom’s agenda in Syria, leading to a bombing campaign and embargo on crucial resources that began in April.

UNICEF reported in October that 537,000 Yemeni children were at risk of severe malnutritionnationwide, while Alexi O’Brien, reporting for Al-Jazeera in September, noted that the United Nations warned that 96,000 children were “starving and close to death” in the port city of al-Hodeidah, and an additional 8,000 children faced starvation in Aden in 2016.

The situation was so dire nationwide that, in June, the U.N. reported “that at least six million people in Yemen are in urgent need of emergency food and life-saving assistance, a new United Nations (UN) investigation has found … 10 out of Yemen’s 22 governorates are facing an ‘emergency level’ food security situation amid the ongoing conflict, including major areas like Aden, Taiz, Saa’da and Al Baida.” In July, Oxfam reported that the number of starving people in Yemen had topped 6 million — nearly half the country’s population of 13 million. Aid workers are struggling to reach the needy, with the World Food Programme reporting that it had served 3.5 million Yemenis by August.

While the suffering of the residents of Madaya is heart-wrenching, some critics have questioned the motives behind the media’s focus on this single town rather than suffering in Yemen or even elsewhere in Syria. Vladimir Safronkov, Russia’s deputy ambassador to the U.N. Security Council, lamented recently that the timing of the reports seemed calculated to undermine the budding peace process in Syria, according to a report from RT. “It looks like that, under the pretext of the deterioration of the situation in besieged cities, attempts are being made to undermine the launch of the inter-Syrian dialogue scheduled for January 25,” he told an emergency meeting of the Security Council on Saturday.

Safronkov said the West practices a “double standard” by raising the alarm about Madaya while ignoring cities besieged by anti-Assad forces:

“Much is being said about Madaya, but not a word about the villages of Nubul and Az-Zahra in the province of Aleppo. And we are talking about the fate of tens of thousands of people.”

On Monday, Ben Norton, politics staff writer for Salon, cited the siege of Yemen, as well as Israel’s decade-long blockade of Gaza, when he questioned why some atrocities are condemned and others are “barely even acknowledged.” He wrote:

“All sieges are of course tragic, because they harm civilians. There should be outrage at the siege on Madaya, but there should be proportionate outrage. All of the other ongoing sieges — and the much larger blockades — that happened to be supported by the West should not conveniently be ignored.

Americans, in particular, should be concerned about the millions upon millions of people being starved in policies backed by their ostensibly democratic government, right at this very moment.”

http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/34816-media-silent-as-us-backed-saudi-forces-starve-half-million-yemeni-children

Fighting to Bury Their Sons: On the Necropolitics of Israeli Occupation 
Budour Hassan, ROAR Magazine 
Hassan writes: "Parents whose children's bodies or remains are detained by Israel, either in morgues or in the infamous 'cemeteries of numbers,' wait to receive their bodies as if they were waiting to welcome living people after their release from their prisons." 
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Beyond Flint: Poor Blacks, Latinos Endure Oversized Burden of America's Industrial Waste and Hazards 
Aaron Morrison, International Business Times 
Morrison writes: "The Flint water crisis continues to generate headlines, but the negligence and mismanagement of public resources in largely minority communities reaches far beyond the borders of that central Michigan city. Across the country, blacks and Latinos are more likely than whites to live dangerously close to environmental hazards." 
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