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Showing posts from October 18, 2014

A Caliph in a Wilderness of Mirrors

By Pepe Escobar I'm aiming at you, lover  Cause killing you is killing myself - Orson Welles (director), The Lady from Shanghai,1947 He's invincible. He beheads. He smuggles. He conquers. He's the ultimate jack-of-all-trades. No Tomahawk or Hellfire can touch him. He always gets what he wants; in Kobani; in Anbar province; with the House of Saud (which he wants to replace) trying to make Putin (who he wants to behead) suffer because of low oil prices . If this was a remake of Orson Welles's noir classic The Lady from Shanghai , in the mirror sequence the lawyer (American?) and the femme fatale (Shi'ite?) would also get killed; but The Caliph of Islamic State would survive as a larger than life Welles, free to roam, plunder and "give my love to the sunrise" - as in a Brave Caliphate World shining in "Syraq" over the ashes of the Sykes-Picot agreement. He's winning big in Iraq's Anbar province. The Caliph's goons are now closing in on

FBI director wants access to encrypt Apple, Google users’ data, demands law ‘fix’

Reuters / Brendan McDermid The FBI director has slammed Apple and Google for offering their customers encryption technology that protects users’ privacy. “Deeply concerned” James Comey wants to push on Congress to “fix” laws to ensure police can still access private data. “It’s the equivalent of a closet that can’t be opened. A safe that can’t be cracked,” Comey, speaking at the Brookings Institute in Washington DC, referred to the encryption technology calling the new service “a marketing pitch.” “But it will have very serious consequences for law enforcement and national security agencies at all levels,” he warned . Apple has recently presented its latest Mac OS X operating system for desktop and laptop computers, encouraging its customers to use FileVault disk encryption technology to keep their data secure. The tool would also prevent NSA or FBI from having access to phones and computers. Google said it wanted to follow suit with its Android operating system and “encryption will be