Since Jon's presentation about cyber-terrorism, I have been quite interested in looking up this new kind of "warfare". I have come to think that it could totally change our world in the next few years. Hacking groups, such as LulzSec, Anonymous, Masters Of Deception (MOD), and Milw0rm have potential to do many things that could cause much destruction. For example the group Milw0rm hacked into the systems of Bhabha Atomic Research Center (BARC) which is the main nuclear center in India. What would happen if someone in the group just wanted something at that reactor site to go wrong. It could potentially kill millions of people. There is a lot of power and responsibility on the internet. As some have said. It could even be the next form of terrorism. In my opinion, it is even scarier than people who run planes into buildings because a terrorist/hacker does not even have to leave the comfort of his or her home to do things of potentially very destructive nature. These people are also good enough that it is very hard to track and find them. Just as we had to look for terrorists in the mountains of Afghanistan, we will have to look for them in the streaming and endless world of digital information. It might just be easier to find them in the mountains.
Now to go to somewhat of a tangent. Recently, the government has attempted to cut down on internet crime such as this with acts such as SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act). This was however not well received by the American people. The acts could very easily lead to violation of personal information and privacy laws. This would give some people complete authority to go where ever they needed to go to find information and it would also give them the authority to take a website completely offline without any red tape. Those acts thus failed, but the government will not stop trying. They now are trying to pass CISPA, or the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act. I will attach an article from a few days ago for reference. We just have to keep in mind that our rights are at stake when the government gets involved with the internet. Is it worth the cost just so the gov. can stop some online piracy? What do people think? Do you think that it will solve cyber-terrorism of will we ever be able to stop it?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/apr/23/ron-paul-cispa-cyberterrorism-bill?newsfeed=true
Sunday, April 29, 2012
Friday, April 27, 2012
Point of View
Bethany's recent presentation on the terrorist stereotype throughout literature brought me back to Hayan Charara's visit to our class and his reading the same night in Rodman, both of which were extremely thought provoking. His words and readings tied in extremely well with the overall goal of the class. I found the most interesting aspect of Charara's work to be his decision to focus on his personal aspect of the post 9/11 world. Being an Arab American, Charara has had to experience a completely different aspect of the attacks on 9/11 than most Americans would have to experience. Because he is of similar ethnicity as the terrorists on 9/11, Charara has gone through a number of different trying times associated with the hatred and racism towards the Middle Eastern community.
After hearing his readings I was struck by his decision to focus on the perceived "attackers" rather than most of the other material that we have read which focused on the victims of 9/11. In one of my classes this semester we read and discussed Truman Capote's In Cold Blood in which Capote focuses the majority of the story on the two murderers of the Clutter family.
I was curious as to what impact this has on a reader? Is there a major difference between focusing on the victims or focusing on the guilty party? Do you think that one is better than the other? Or if this raised any other points of interest or questions.
After hearing his readings I was struck by his decision to focus on the perceived "attackers" rather than most of the other material that we have read which focused on the victims of 9/11. In one of my classes this semester we read and discussed Truman Capote's In Cold Blood in which Capote focuses the majority of the story on the two murderers of the Clutter family.
I was curious as to what impact this has on a reader? Is there a major difference between focusing on the victims or focusing on the guilty party? Do you think that one is better than the other? Or if this raised any other points of interest or questions.
A Must-Watch Video On How Military Drones Are Changing War
Hey guys,
Here is a video on drones and there affect on warfare that I watched while writing my special project. You may find it interesting and informative. Hopefully it can spark some dialogue.
http://gizmodo.com/5878417/a-must+watch-video-on-how-military-drones-are-changing-war
Here is a video on drones and there affect on warfare that I watched while writing my special project. You may find it interesting and informative. Hopefully it can spark some dialogue.
http://gizmodo.com/5878417/a-must+watch-video-on-how-military-drones-are-changing-war
Thursday, April 26, 2012
Our Present-Day Will Become History: Portraying 9/11 to Future Generations
After reading
David Rieff’s article, “After 9/11: The Limits of Remembrance,” I’ve considerd
how we will portray the attacks of September 11, 2001 as an event in history. For
our class, excluding our professors, these attacks mark the first largely
infamous event that affected America in our lifetime. With that being said, I
think it is important to consider how we view events in history that we have
not experienced. Accordingly, we must consider how we will portray the events
of September 11 to the generations of people in the future who will only have
our stories as a means of understanding.
I started thinking
this way after considering Rieff’s comparison between 9/11 and Pearl Harbor. I
don’t know many people—aside from my grandparents—who lived during the time of
the attacks on Pearl Harbor, so the only knowledge I have about this tragedy comes
from a history textbook. I started thinking that this medium of communication
could be highly dangerous. If we only communicate events in history through one
medium, that medium becomes the monopoly on the topic, and we receive a
one-sided account.
Considering this
danger, I think we should practice caution when we plan to portray the events
of September 11 to future generations. For me, it’s hard to fathom that someone
will only know of the attacks through word of mouth. However, this concept will
become a reality in the near future, as our youth will learn about this event
from a textbook.
With that being
said, I wanted to pose some questions to the class. How do you think we should
portray these events? Should we take any specific precautions? Should we teach
them, like Rieff suggests, to move on and eventually forget the events?
To answer my own
question, I would advise using caution when portraying al-Qaeda, because I can
see our anger influencing future generations and ultimately perpetuating
violence. I would take caution against portraying the events with an “us versus
them” mentality, for I could see our grievances overflowing onto future
generations. Do you agree? Disagree? Suggest otherwise?
Iran a Potential Cyber Threat?
Jon, just going off of your project and your main focus in your education here at Carroll, I thought you might be interested in this. It's a little different from a majority of the concerns being raised up until this point. A lot of the focus has been on China and potentially Russia, but not a lot of attention has been on Iran. This ties in nicely with America's standing in the post 9/11 Middle East and how it has been impacted by decisions made by the United States government.
http://www.npr.org/2012/04/26/151400805/could-iran-wage-a-cyberwar-on-the-u-s
http://www.npr.org/2012/04/26/151400805/could-iran-wage-a-cyberwar-on-the-u-s
Friday, April 20, 2012
39 Ways to Limit Free Speech
More evidence for Danner's claim about our state of exception.
Google “39 Ways to Serve and Participate in Jihad” and you’ll get
over 590,000 hits. You’ll find full-text English language translations
of this Arabic document on the Internet Archive, an Internet library; on 4Shared Desktop,
a file-sharing site; and on numerous Islamic sites. You will find it
cited and discussed in a US Senate Committee staff report and
Congressional testimony. Feel free to read it. Just don’t try to make
your own translation from the original, which was written in Arabic in
Saudi Arabia in 2003. Because if you look a little further on Google you
will find multiple news accounts reporting that on April 12, a 29-year
old citizen from Sudbury, Massachusetts named Tarek Mehanna was
sentenced to seventeen and a half years in prison for translating “39
Ways” and helping to distribute it online.
As Anthony Lewis was wont to ask in his New York Times columns, “Is this America?” Seventeen and a half years for translating a document? Granted, it’s an extremist text. Among the “39 ways” it advocates include “Truthfully Ask Allah for Martyrdom,” “Go for Jihad Yourself,” “Giving Shelter to the Mujahedin,” and “Have Enmity Towards the Disbelievers.” (Other “ways to serve,” however, include, “Learn to Swim and Ride Horses,” “Get Physically Fit,” “Stand in Opposition to the Disbelievers,” and “Expose the Hypocrites and Traitors.”) But surely we have not come to the point where we lock people up for nearly two decades for translating a widely available document? After all, news organizations and scholars routinely translate and publicize jihadist texts; think, for example, of the many reports about messages from Osama bin Laden.
In 2009, Tarek Mehanna, who has no prior criminal record, was arrested and placed in maximum security confinement on “terrorism” charges. The case against him rested on allegations that as a 21-year old he had traveled with friends to Yemen in 2004 in an unsuccessful search for a jihadist training camp in order to fight in Iraq, and that he had translated several jihadist tracts and videos into English for distribution on the Internet, allegedly to spur readers on to jihad. After a two-month trial, he was convicted of conspiring to provide material support to a terrorist organization. The jury did not specify whether it found him guilty for his aborted trip to Yemen—which resulted in no known contacts with jihadists—or for his translations, so under established law, the conviction cannot stand unless it’s permissible to penalize him for his speech. Mehanna is appealing.
Under traditional (read “pre-9/11”) First Amendment doctrine, Mehanna could not have been convicted even if he had written “39 Ways” himself, unless the government could shoulder the heavy burden of demonstrating that the document was “intended and likely to incite imminent lawless action,” a standard virtually impossible to meet for written texts. In 1969, in Brandenburg v. Ohio, the Supreme Court established that standard in ruling that the First Amendment protected a Ku Klux Klansman who made a speech to a Klan gathering advocating “revengeance” against “niggers” and “Jews.” It did so only after years of experience with federal and state governments using laws prohibiting advocacy of crime as a tool to target political dissidents (anarchists, anti-war protesters, and Communists, to name a few).
But in Mehanna’s case, the government never tried to satisfy that standard. It didn’t show that any violent act was caused by the document or its translation, much less that Mehanna intended to incite imminent criminal conduct and was likely, through the translation, to do so. In fact, it accused Mehanna of no violent act of any kind. Instead, the prosecutor successfully argued that Mehanna’s translation was intended to aid al-Qaeda, by inspiring readers to pursue jihad themselves, and therefore constituted “material support” to a “terrorist organization.”
The prosecutor relied on a 2010 Supreme Court decision in a case I argued, Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project. In Humanitarian Law Project, a divided Court upheld the “material support” statute as applied to advocacy of peace and human rights, when done in coordination with and to aid a designated “terrorist organization.” (The plaintiffs in the case sought to encourage the Kurdistan Workers Party in Turkey to resolve their disputes with the Turkish government through lawful means, by training them in bringing human rights complaints before the United Nations and helping them in peace overtures to the Turkish government.) The Court ruled that the government could criminalize such advocacy of peaceful nonviolent activity without transgressing the First Amendment, because, it reasoned, any aid to a foreign terrorist organization might ultimately support illegal ends.
The Humanitarian Law Project decision is troubling enough, as I have previously explained. But Mehanna’s case goes still further. The government provided no evidence that Mehanna ever met or communicated with anyone from al-Qaeda. Nor did it demonstrate that the translation was sent to al-Qaeda. (It was posted by an online publisher, Al-Tibyan Publications, that has not been designated as a part of or a front for al-Qaeda.) It did not even claim that the “39 Ways” was written by al-Qaeda. The prosecution offered plenty of evidence that in Internet chat rooms Mehanna expressed admiration for the group’s ideology, and for Osama bin Laden in particular. But can one provide “material support” to a group with which one has never communicated?
The Supreme Court in Humanitarian Law Project emphasized, as had the United States government in defending the “material support” statute, that the law does not make it a crime to engage in “independent advocacy” in support of a designated organization’s cause. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts strongly implied that this limitation was constitutionally mandated:
Why should those of us who have no interest in reading “39 Ways to Serve and Participate in Jihad” care? For the same reason that we should care about the prosecution of a Klansman or an anarchist for their speech. History shows that free speech is fundamental to a robust democracy, and that if the government can punish expression because of its political content, it will use that power to go after its enemies. Today’s enemy may be anyone who shows sympathy with jihadism, but who knows who tomorrow’s enemy will be. You don’t need 39 ways to unravel democracy; giving the government the power to penalize the speech it detests will do it in one.
April 19, 2012, 3:15 p.m.
39 Ways to Limit Free Speech
David Cole
Sudbury Police Department
Tarek Mehanna
As Anthony Lewis was wont to ask in his New York Times columns, “Is this America?” Seventeen and a half years for translating a document? Granted, it’s an extremist text. Among the “39 ways” it advocates include “Truthfully Ask Allah for Martyrdom,” “Go for Jihad Yourself,” “Giving Shelter to the Mujahedin,” and “Have Enmity Towards the Disbelievers.” (Other “ways to serve,” however, include, “Learn to Swim and Ride Horses,” “Get Physically Fit,” “Stand in Opposition to the Disbelievers,” and “Expose the Hypocrites and Traitors.”) But surely we have not come to the point where we lock people up for nearly two decades for translating a widely available document? After all, news organizations and scholars routinely translate and publicize jihadist texts; think, for example, of the many reports about messages from Osama bin Laden.
In 2009, Tarek Mehanna, who has no prior criminal record, was arrested and placed in maximum security confinement on “terrorism” charges. The case against him rested on allegations that as a 21-year old he had traveled with friends to Yemen in 2004 in an unsuccessful search for a jihadist training camp in order to fight in Iraq, and that he had translated several jihadist tracts and videos into English for distribution on the Internet, allegedly to spur readers on to jihad. After a two-month trial, he was convicted of conspiring to provide material support to a terrorist organization. The jury did not specify whether it found him guilty for his aborted trip to Yemen—which resulted in no known contacts with jihadists—or for his translations, so under established law, the conviction cannot stand unless it’s permissible to penalize him for his speech. Mehanna is appealing.
Under traditional (read “pre-9/11”) First Amendment doctrine, Mehanna could not have been convicted even if he had written “39 Ways” himself, unless the government could shoulder the heavy burden of demonstrating that the document was “intended and likely to incite imminent lawless action,” a standard virtually impossible to meet for written texts. In 1969, in Brandenburg v. Ohio, the Supreme Court established that standard in ruling that the First Amendment protected a Ku Klux Klansman who made a speech to a Klan gathering advocating “revengeance” against “niggers” and “Jews.” It did so only after years of experience with federal and state governments using laws prohibiting advocacy of crime as a tool to target political dissidents (anarchists, anti-war protesters, and Communists, to name a few).
But in Mehanna’s case, the government never tried to satisfy that standard. It didn’t show that any violent act was caused by the document or its translation, much less that Mehanna intended to incite imminent criminal conduct and was likely, through the translation, to do so. In fact, it accused Mehanna of no violent act of any kind. Instead, the prosecutor successfully argued that Mehanna’s translation was intended to aid al-Qaeda, by inspiring readers to pursue jihad themselves, and therefore constituted “material support” to a “terrorist organization.”
The prosecutor relied on a 2010 Supreme Court decision in a case I argued, Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project. In Humanitarian Law Project, a divided Court upheld the “material support” statute as applied to advocacy of peace and human rights, when done in coordination with and to aid a designated “terrorist organization.” (The plaintiffs in the case sought to encourage the Kurdistan Workers Party in Turkey to resolve their disputes with the Turkish government through lawful means, by training them in bringing human rights complaints before the United Nations and helping them in peace overtures to the Turkish government.) The Court ruled that the government could criminalize such advocacy of peaceful nonviolent activity without transgressing the First Amendment, because, it reasoned, any aid to a foreign terrorist organization might ultimately support illegal ends.
The Humanitarian Law Project decision is troubling enough, as I have previously explained. But Mehanna’s case goes still further. The government provided no evidence that Mehanna ever met or communicated with anyone from al-Qaeda. Nor did it demonstrate that the translation was sent to al-Qaeda. (It was posted by an online publisher, Al-Tibyan Publications, that has not been designated as a part of or a front for al-Qaeda.) It did not even claim that the “39 Ways” was written by al-Qaeda. The prosecution offered plenty of evidence that in Internet chat rooms Mehanna expressed admiration for the group’s ideology, and for Osama bin Laden in particular. But can one provide “material support” to a group with which one has never communicated?
The Supreme Court in Humanitarian Law Project emphasized, as had the United States government in defending the “material support” statute, that the law does not make it a crime to engage in “independent advocacy” in support of a designated organization’s cause. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts strongly implied that this limitation was constitutionally mandated:
The Court also finds it significant that Congress has been conscious of its own responsibility to consider how its actions may implicate constitutional concerns. Most importantly, Congress has avoided any restriction on independent advocacy, or indeed any activities not directed to, coordinated with, or controlled by foreign terrorist groups.“Under the material-support statute,” the Court insisted, people “may say anything they wish on any topic.” But apparently not on “jihad.” The prosecutor in Mehanna’s case argued that the translation was motivated by Mehanna’s ideological support of jihadism, and of al-Qaeda in particular. But without coordination, and without delivery of the final product to al-Qaeda or any of its known affiliates, it looks like nothing more than “independent advocacy,” activity that the government said would not, and the Supreme Court implied could not, be punished.
Why should those of us who have no interest in reading “39 Ways to Serve and Participate in Jihad” care? For the same reason that we should care about the prosecution of a Klansman or an anarchist for their speech. History shows that free speech is fundamental to a robust democracy, and that if the government can punish expression because of its political content, it will use that power to go after its enemies. Today’s enemy may be anyone who shows sympathy with jihadism, but who knows who tomorrow’s enemy will be. You don’t need 39 ways to unravel democracy; giving the government the power to penalize the speech it detests will do it in one.
April 19, 2012, 3:15 p.m.
Just this one breath, just this one exhale
I was looking back over Lidless and I was rereading the parts where Rhriannon says, "Just this one breath, just this one exhale, just this one breath, just this one exhale... I want this, I love this, I'm happy." It is the very first lines of the play and the very last lines she says before she dies. In the beginning we are not just what we mean and where they come from. Later on in the play, we find out that Bashir teaches Rhiannon to tell this to herself when she is dealing with her asthma, the suffocating disease that ended her life. I think there could be an interesting correlation made here between Bashir and Rhiannon. We know that Rhiannon is the product of her mother's decision to rape her detainee at Gitmo. Bashir plausibly could have gone through other types of torture at Gitmo such as waterboarding. I say this because of the reference to the sound of ocean waves in the very beginning of the play after Rhiannon's line, "Just this one breath, just this one exhale..." Bashir could have told himself, "I want this, I love this, I 'm happy" as was being tortured, or water boarded, to physically make it through. I would argue that it saved him physically, but killed him mentally. (When his daughter comes to visit him, he told her that she had lost her dad back at Gitmo.) Bashir then passes his technique onto Rhiannon when he learns of her asthma. At the end of the play Rhiannon doesn't die mentally, but physically. Just as Bashir died mentally from torture at Gitmo, Rhiannon died physically from the torture of asthma.
Just food for thought and potential discussion. Let me know if I am way out there with this...
Just food for thought and potential discussion. Let me know if I am way out there with this...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)