freeze on the use of drones in combat (citing US killer drone strikes in particular) that have taken the lives of numerous civilians in various Middle East conflicts.
The UNHRC seeks a moratorium on the “testing, production, assembly, transfer, acquisition, deployment and use” of fully or semi-autonomous weapons including drones and robots until an international forum can establish rules for their use." Read more here.
Image if we could re-purpose attack drones for scientific purposes: endangered species tracking, oceanographic inquiry, climate change data collection, and human rights data collection to name a few more noble pursuits.
Check out this awesome site that tells the shameful stories of drones strikes in Pakistan.
Democracy Now! Roundtable on Drones.
Check out this awesome site that tells the shameful stories of drones strikes in Pakistan.
Democracy Now! Roundtable on Drones.
Video Source: DemocracyNow!
The personal costs for whistle blowers are high. They often face legal, physical, and mental danger. Enter PRISM and Edward Snowden, the 29-year-old NSA contractor and ex-CIA employee, who was responsible for the leaks that have appeared in the Guardian and Washington Post, which detailed the now infamous wide-ranging surveillance systems operated by U.S. Spy 'r Us with the apparent cooperation of the Obama administration. Read more here of his incredible story. Now would be a good time to breakout that old copy of 1984.
“There will come a time when it isn't 'They're spying on me through my phone' anymore. Eventually, it will be 'My phone is spying on me'.” ― Philip K. Dick
Edward Snowden Speaks.
Video Source: LeakSourceNews.
Rockwell, Pop Music Warnings from the 1980s.
Video Source: RockwellVevo.
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| DARPA surveillance drone. Hummingbird. Cute. |
Lest we forget Bradley Manning and the costs one pays when acting with courage, ironically, a trait U.S. military branches so avidly expouse in commercial after commercial. Manning is facing an avalanche of charges, not the least of which includes, "aiding the enemy." Lovely vague language that.
New Yorker blogger, Amy Davidson, recently posed an interesting question on this account: "Would it aid the enemy, for example, to expose war crimes committed by American forces or lies told by the American government?” “In that case, who is aiding the enemy -- the whistle blower or the perpetrators themselves?”
Read more here about the arguments around security, protection, and governmental transparency.
More links:
NSA collecting phone records of millions of Verizon customers daily
NSA taps in to user data of Facebook, Apple, Google and others, secret files reveal
Image Source: Drone. By Thelionking95 (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
image Source: Drone Hummingbird. By DARPA [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
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