Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Native American Activist Winona LaDuke on Use of "Geronimo" as Code for Osama bin Laden: "The Continuation of the Wars Against Indigenous People"

The Obama administration has sparked outrage in the Native American community following the revelation it used the name of the legendary Apache leader Geronimo as a secret code word during the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Geronimo was an Apache leader who fought to preserve tribal lands against U.S. and Mexican forces in the 19th century. We get reaction from Native American activist and writer, Winona LaDuke. "The reality is that the military is full of native nomenclature,” says LaDuke. "You’ve got Black Hawk helicopters, Apache Longbow helicopters. You’ve got Tomahawk missiles. The term used when you leave a military base in a foreign country is to go 'off the reservation, into Indian Country.' So what is that messaging that is passed on? It is basically the continuation of the wars against indigenous people." [includes rush transcript]


Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Anarchy Phone

U.S. Works to Deploy Secret Internet, Mobile Phone Systems for Dissidents

New details have emerged about a secret U.S. effort to deploy shadow internet and mobile phone systems overseas to give political dissidents a way to communicate with the world free of government censorship. The New York Times reports the project involves developing what has been described as an "Internet in a suitcase" that would allow dissidents to use “mesh network” technology to create an invisible wireless web without a centralized hub. Part of the effort is being led by Sascha Meinrath, director of the Open Technology Initiative at the New America Foundation. Meinrath described part of the project on Democracy Now! in April.
Sascha Meinrath, New America Foundation, Open Technology Initiative Director: “So we’ve been working on a number of technologies to develop distributed communication systems, so that you can turn cell phones, for example, into a medium that doesn’t need to go through a cell tower, a central location, but communicate in a peer-to-peer manner, directly with one another. And so, you can imagine if you daisy-chain a lot of these together, you can actually have an entire network built out of the already existing hardware that doesn’t need a central authority.”