Tag: terrorism

Terrorists aren’t the same anymore

NBC News reports:

In a rare public apology, the militant leader of al-Qaeda’s branch in Yemen has said that one of his fighters disobeyed orders and attacked a hospital attached to the Defense Ministry during a December assault that killed 52 people.

Qassim al-Rimi, commander of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, said in a video posted on militant websites that the attackers were warned in advance not to enter the hospital within the complex, nor a place for prayer there. But he said one fighter did.

“Now we acknowledge our mistake and guilt,” al-Rimi said in a video released late Saturday by al-Qaeda’s media arm al-Mallahem. “We offer our apology and condolences to the victims’ families. We accept full responsibility for what happened in the hospital and will pay blood money for the victims’ families.”

A what? An apology? They don’t make them like they used to …

Stunned. Angry. Fighting back against NSA spying. | EFFector 26.14

Stunned. Angry. Fighting back against NSA spying. | EFFector 26.14

Last night, we received confirmation from a report in theGuardian that the National Security Agency (NSA) is currently collecting the call records of every Verizon customer in America. The NSA order forces Verizon to provide “on an ongoing daily basis” all call records for any call “wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls” and any call made “between the United States and abroad.”

And that’s not all. Today, the Washington Post and theGuardian published reports based on information provided by a career intelligence officer showing how the NSA and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies. The government is extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time.

The age of information. Not.

Who hasn’t heard the phrase “21st century is the age of information“?  I think everybody heard it in this or that variation.  Well, know that we have the context, let’s see what US Military thinks of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange:

The U.S. military has designated Julian Assange and WikiLeaks as enemies of the United States — the same legal category as the al-Qaeda terrorist network and the Taliban insurgency. Declassified US Air Force counter-intelligence documents, released under US freedom-of-information laws, reveal that military personnel who contact WikiLeaks or WikiLeaks supporters may be at risk of being charged with ‘communicating with the enemy.’

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