Many people will recall Jean Seberg as the young blonde gamine who played opposite Jean-Paul Belmondo in Godard’s classic 1960′s film Breathless.
Few remember that she was hounded by the FBI for supporting liberal causes, and committed suicide in 1979 at the age of 40. J. Edgar Hoover personally tried to destroy her career by planting the story that the married Seberg was pregnant by a member of the Black Panthers. As the LA Times wrote in 2009:
Hoover oversaw the Seberg smear, ordering agents in Los Angeles to wait until Seberg’s pregnancy grew more visible. He didn’t want the wiretap–which agents apparently misinterpreted–to be suspected. Ronald Ostrow, a former Los Angeles Times reporter who worked in the Washington bureau, obtained documents in 1980 showing that FBI officials in Washington and agents in Los Angeles targeted Seberg for giving $10,500 to the Panthers.
The psychological toll of being targeted by the government for political beliefs is massive, the stuff that filled Soviet-era gulags. People like John Kiriakou and Thomas Drake have had their careers destroyed and their lives torn apart simply for telling uncomfortable truths that expose corruption and lawlessness at the highest levels. The only surprise is that there aren’t more people who simply can’t handle the intense pressure.
Aaron Swartz isn’t the first victim of this war nor, sadly, will he be the last. His death is collateral damage in a war being waged by a ruthless government intent on protecting a secretive and unaccountable kleptocracy at all costs.
It’s tragic that this lesson must be learned anew by every generation, it seems.
I very much enjoyed seeing people’s art projects on the equally sacrilegious Happy Thanksgiving Knitting, so if you’d really like to get under Bill O’Reilly’s skin feel free to leave links to your holiday (or non-holiday) artistry in the comments.
Firedoglake has been working with the Walmart strikers in preparation for Black Friday. We’ve been talking with young organizers across the country who are finally starting to have some traction against the big box monolith that has wiped out small American businesses everywhere they’ve been been built.
Walmart is not going to take this lying down. They have filed a complaint with the NLRB trying to stop the strikers, and yesterday when an employee in Florida walked off the job, Walmart called the police who issued her a warning for trespassing.
Having worked with groups ranging from Occupy WallStreet to OccupySandy to the Keystone XL tree sitters, we’ve learned an awful lot about supplying demonstrators. We’ve consulted with experienced union strike bosses to anticipate needs that demonstrators will have that they may not even realize until they’re in the thick of it. And ironically, the Walmart strike organizers said they actually learned a lot from studying the FDL member distribution system we set up for Occupy Supply.
So once again we’re digging in behind the workers, sending supplies to the picket lines and directing nearby activists to attend the Black Friday protests in solidarity.
Public support for the strikers is going to be critical to the narrative that comes out of Black Friday. If you’re inclined to show up and support the strikers, they can really use your help:
We’ve seen that bringing change to Walmart and its third party contractors is possible. In September, 38 warehouse workers in Elwood, IL struck alongside 600 supporters, and were able to clog up an important national distribution point for Walmart facilities across the nation. The strike was successful, and the workers were allowed to return to work without retaliation.
But Walmart employees have a long way to go for justice, and the Black Friday actions are a major step in that direction. With your help, we’ll show Walmart strikers that we’ve got their backs and help them continue to strike until their voices have been heard.
We’ll continue to support the Walmart strikers long after Black Friday. We hope you’ll join with us in supporting them.
By: Jane Hamsher Thursday November 22, 2012 8:56 am
Happy Thanksgiving from Lucy and her mom
When your dad is a minister, some old lady is sticking a pair of knitting needles in your hands before you can walk. Like tuna noodle casserole and out-of-tune pianos in the basement, it’s a staple of a church upbringing.
So I’ve been knitting for as long as I can remember. I like to pick up patterns over at Ravelry (I’m JaneHamsher, if you’re on Ravelry, friend me!) My best friend from high school, Mary Jane M, is a bit of a star knitter over there and sometimes I do test knitting for her. I knitted the Fair Isle sock in this pattern (and took the photo too as I recall, though I think I just snapped the shutter since it was Mary Jane’s foot in the sock.)
The dogs and I have a fire going in the fireplace, we’re watching the Macy’s parade, and I’m working on these mittens, worn by Kristen Stewart in possibly the stupidest movie of all time, Twilight.
Lucy wanted to say “happy Thanksgiving” too, so she jumped in the photo. That’s me in the green cowl and new red hair. Katie was attending to other urgent business in the yard.
So happy Thanksgiving, from all of us to all of you.
What’s your hobby, and how are you faring this fine Thanksgiving day?
Our front page editor John Chandley, aka Scarecrow, has been around FDL since we opened the doors in 2004, and I can’t think of anyone who has been a more loyal friend to the community. His insights and his passion for justice have inspired all of us throughout the years.
People may have noticed that for several weeks now, I’ve been on front page editing duty in his place. What they didn’t know is that John was recently diagnosed with metastatic melanoma which has spread to his lungs and his brain.
John is in the hospital right now, waiting for Glaxo Smith Klein to approve him for the use of dabrafenib, just about the only known drug effective on treating his form of melanoma after it has spread to the brain, because it can cross the blood/brain barrier. I don’t want to get into how the thieves at Glaxo Smith Klein are charging thousands of dollars per month for a drug that was developed with NIH funding or that John has to be hospitalized to afford it even if he is approved, because I’ll just be shaking with rage and it will detract from the point of this post, which is to wish him the best for a speedy recovery.
John didn’t have WiFi access in the hospital so we bought him a wireless card yesterday and Phred and her husband delivered it to him in the hospital last night. So I know you can read this, Scarecrow.
“All text you enter in Amazon Silk’s address bar is sent to a default search engine,” Amazon writes in the Amazon Silk browser terms and conditions, updated yesterday. “The initial default search engine is selected by Amazon Silk, and we may change the default search engine in the future without notice to you. If you would like, you may choose to use a different search provider as your default search engine. The privacy policy of the selected default search engine applies to information sent to it.”
Google signed a deal for $300 million last year to be the default search engine in Mozilla’s Firefox.
Microsoft is no doubt desperate to reverse the trends in this chart:
Google’s cozy position as a government-granted monopoly has certainly reaped rewards for the company, and they’re eating everyone’s lunch in the global race for the almighty online advertising dollar. Microsoft had to make a big move.
I switched to DuckDuckGo a few months ago when Google changed their algorithm to favor their own sites and it became impossible to find anything I was looking for. When DuckDuckGo doesn’t work and I need a more sophisticated tool I do find that Bing consistently has a better chance of delivering what I want, although the creaky design takes some getting used to.
Bottom line: I don’t think it’s a bad move for Amazon. Kindle users will probably be better served by the deal.
Oh the irony: Video of app developed by defense contractor Boeing allowing “minimally trained” people to operate drones by iPhone
Everyone with an iPhone knows there are apps out there that are ugly, poorly designed and just plain don’t work. But according to FDL alum Spencer Ackerman, Apple is applying a new standard of excellence to an app that tells you when people are killed by drones:
It seemed like a simple enough idea for an iPhone app: Send users a pop-up notice whenever a flying robots kills someone in one of America’s many undeclared wars. But Apple keeps blocking the Drones+ program from its App Store — and therefore, from iPhones everywhere. The Cupertino company says the content is “objectionable and crude,” according to Apple’s latest rejection letter.
There are no grizzly images of dead bodies in Drones+, which was developed by Josh Begley, a student at Clay Shirky’s lab at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. Neither are there security concerns — the information feeds from a publicly available database and qualifies as, you know, news.
But critical to the DoD’s efforts to sustain itself as the biggest corporate welfare program in existence is its ability to keep their wars media-sanitized. They don’t want people’s iPhone buzzing every time someone is killed in a drone strike. And neither do the defense contractors, who expect drone spending to rise to $11.3 billion annually in the next decade.
Fortunately for the DoD (not so much for you), Apple has a solid history of helping defense operations around the world target their own citizens.
In 2008 Steve Jobs claimed that Apple developed “back door” capability only to protect consumers against the accidental distribution of malicious software. But a hack of the Indian military network in 2012 revealed memos that claim Apple, along with RIM and Nokia, routinely give backdoor access to their devices in exchange for market access:
The memo suggests that, “in exchange for the Indian market presence” mobile device manufacturers, including RIM, Nokia, and Apple (collectively defined in the document as “RINOA”) have agreed to provide backdoor access on their devices. The Indian government then “utilized backdoors provided by RINOA” to intercept internal emails of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a U.S. government body with a mandate to monitor, investigate and report to Congress on ‘the national security implications of the bilateral trade and economic relationship’ between the U.S. and China. Manan Kakkar, an Indian blogger for ZDNet, has also picked up the story and writes that it may be the fruits of an earlier hack of Symantec. If Apple is providing governments with a backdoor to iOS, can we assume that they have also done so with Mac OS X?”
What a cozy relationship. I doubt we’d have to look too far to figure out who found Drones+ content to be “exceptional and crude” and wanted it out of the App store.
As Adam Clark Estes notes, Apple’s decision to protect its customer base by purging Drone+ is positively dripping with irony:
[T]here’s no baby violence, naked politicians or kiddie porn in Drones+. It’s literally a news feed from the publicly available database of the U.K.-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism but with some added features. If the content’s the problem, there must be some political underpinning to Apple’s decision. Unless you think about it from a 30,000-foot perspective. At the end of the day, this is an app that sends you push alerts when people get killed. It’s a smart and noble idea to try and push these drone deaths in front of the public eye, but Apple is a little bit sensitive to these kinds of topics. They don’t even condone zombie violence! If you want to use an iPhone app to actually fly a drone, though, that’s totally fine.
You read that right. Apple’s paternalism doesn’t extend to protecting their customers from actual drones:
As we reported in Monday’s Times, the Pentagon is testing all manner of smart devices, including iPhones and iPads, for action in the war zone. It has kicked off a race among software companies and defense firms to develop innovative apps for future soldiers to operate.
Apparently it’s okay with Apple if iPhones are used to pilot drones that kill people (see video above), it’s just “objectionable” to tell anyone about it afterwards.
Thanks, Apple. I’m sure your iPhone customers will all rest easier knowing you keep the App store free of software that allows people to track the consequences of the dangerous, lethal and privacy-invading drone technology you’re helping the DoD to develop.
MyFDL is the community site of progressive political blog Firedoglake. Anyone can participate by writing a diary, commenting on others’ diaries, or joining groups to find other people in your area. Content posted to MyFDL is the opinion of the author alone, and should not be attributed to Firedoglake.
John Chandley’s son Christopher just called to say that John passed away last night.
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