NEW YORK TIMES: Comcast is expected to announce on Thursday an agreement to acquire Time Warner Cable for more than $45 billion in stock, a deal that would combine the biggest and second-biggest cable television operators in the country.For Comcast, which completed its acquisition of NBC Universal, the television and movie powerhouse, from General Electric less than a year ago, the latest deal would be its second big act to radically reshape the media landscape in the United States. MORE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER: President Obama headlined a big-bucks fund-raiser Thursday night at the Northwest Philadelphia home of Comcast Corp. executive […]
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RIP: Pete Seeger, Inexhaustible Avatar Of American Folk And Fearless Populist Troubadour, Dead At 94
EDITOR’S NOTE: This review of Bruce Springsteen’s The Seeger Sessions originally ran in PW back in 2006. I think it ably serves double duty as a Pete Seeger obituary, which was in the back of my mind when I wrote it given that he was 87 at the time. Goodnight Mr. Seeger wherever you are. It’s no accident that you don’t really know what Pete Seeger did. That he’s truly larger than life, an American original, the kind that walk out of storybooks, like Paul Bunyan or Johnny Appleseed, but more real. That he more or less singlehandedly carried […]
Because Sometimes The Only Way To Stop A Crime Hiding Behind The Law Is To Break The Law
NBC NEWS: Forty-three years after the mysterious theft of up to 1,000 documents from an FBI office outside Philadelphia, three former political activists are publicly confessing to the brazen burglary, calling it an act of “resistance” that exposed “massive illegal surveillance and intimidation.” “We did it … because somebody had to do it,” John Raines, 80, a retired professor of religion at Temple University, said in an interview with NBC News. “In this case, by breaking a law — entering, removing files — we exposed a crime that was going on. … When we are denied the information we […]
Federal Judge Rules NSA’s Mass Surveillance Of Americans Unconstitutional, ‘Almost-Orwellian’
Artwork by POASTERCHILD ELECTRONIC FRONTIER FOUNDATION: In a historic decision, a federal judge in Washington, D.C. today declared that the NSA’s mass phone records surveillance is likely unconstitutional, ruling that the plaintiff’s data should be purged from the system and prohibiting the NSA from collecting further phone records from the plaintiffs. The case, Klayman v. Obama, undermines the government’s assertions that its bulk surveillance program, which collects virtually every phone record in the United States, is legal. MORE U.S. DISTRICT COURT JUDGE RICHARD LEON: “I believe that bulk telephony metadata collection and analysis almost certainly does violate a reasonable expectation […]
AMERICA NEEDS TO ASK ITSELF: At What Point Does The Extraordinary Measures Taken To Protect A Free Country Render It No Longer Free?
THE ATLANTIC: consider these ways in which our current “national-security complex” is more dangerous to democratic survival, and more difficult for President Obama to roll back, than in times past: 1. The national-security complex was charged after 9-11 with this credo: “Never Again.” This is a mission so absolute that it permits no cost-benefit analysis of any kind. 2. Throughout the Cold War we understood that the enemy was roughly as afraid of being wiped out by nuclear weapons as we were—hence the “mutually assured destruction” doctrine … Deterrence does not work well against terrorists. 3. The War on […]
The Rally To End Mass Surveillance Of Americans
STOPWATCHING.US: The NSA is spying on everyone’s personal communications. It’s operating without any meaningful oversight.On October 26th, the 12th anniversary of the signing of the USA Patriot Act, we’re holding the largest rally yet against NSA surveillance. We’ll be handing more than a half-million petitions to Congress to remind them that they work for us — and we won’t tolerate mass surveillance any longer. A stellar group of whistleblowers, activists, researchers and others from both sides of the political spectrum will be speaking at this historic event. The list includes: Congressman Justin Amash Former senior NSA executive and whistleblower […]
WORTH REPEATING: Total Information Awareness Will Be The Death Of American Democracy
THE BROOKINGS INSTITUTE: Within the next few years an important threshold will be crossed: For the first time ever, it will become technologically and financially feasible for authoritarian governments to record nearly everything that is said or done within their borders – every phone conversation, electronic message, social mediainteraction, the movements of nearly every person and vehicle, and video from every street corner. Governments with a history of using all of the tools at their disposal to track and monitor their citizens will undoubtedly make full use of this capability once it becomes available . The Arab Spring of […]
Number Of Anonymous Hacktavists Indicted For Causing $5.6 Million In Damages: 13; Number Of Wall Street Bankers Indicted For Causing $12 Trillion To Vanish From The American Economy: 0
YAHOO NEWS: A federal grand jury this week indicted 13 members of the “hacktivist” group Anonymous on charges of orchestrating a series of cyber attacks across the globe. As Reuters reports, the 13 suspects were allegedly involved with Anonymous’ “Operation Payback” scheme, originally launched in 2010 as retaliation for the shutdown of the Pirate Bay file sharing site. The operation also included distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against credit card companies and financial institutions that refused to process payments for WikiLeaks, in the wake of the secret-spilling organization’s publication of 250,000 classified US diplomatic cables (an incident known as “Cablegate”). MORE […]
FEUD: Queens Of The Stone Age’s Josh Homme Puts Full Court Diss On Jay-Z & Made In America
Artwork by ANTSANDMOTHS SPIN: In an interview earlier this week on CBC Radio 2‘s Strombo Show, as Pitchforkpoints out, frontman Josh Homme aired some criticism about Jay Z and the rapper’s recent Made in America festival. QOTSA performed at the Philadelphia-based fest (indeed, they were one of the 15 Best Things We Saw at Made in America Festival 2013), and Homme sounds none too pleased with the experience. “That guy’s a kook, you know,” he said of Jay Z. “He has his security frisking the bands on the way in.” Homme added that he warned security his band wouldn’t perform […]
BEING THERE: Made In America
Photo by PETE TROSHAK Made In America, the two day music festival organized by Jay-Z, returned to Philadelphia’s Benjamin Franklin Parkway over Labor Day Weekend. Early in day one, much-buzzed-about sister act Haim impressed the crowd with their unique percussion-heavy mix of 80’s pop and jam band-ian hippie-rock. Public Enemy’s Chuck D and Flava Flav performed their politically charged rap backed by a sizzling live band and delivered one of the best sets of the fest. Public Enemy put their money where their mouth is, announcing that they were donating their payment for the show to the embattled and underfunded […]
Snowden-Leaked Internal NSA Review Reveals Thousands Of Americans Were Illegally Spied On
WASHINGTON POST: The National Security Agency has broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times each year since Congress granted the agency broad new powers in 2008, according to an internal audit and other top-secret documents. Most of the infractions involve unauthorized surveillance of Americans or foreign intelligence targets in the United States, both of which are restricted by statute and executive order. They range from significant violations of law to typographical errors that resulted in unintended interception of U.S. e-mails and telephone calls. The documents, provided earlier this summer to The Washington Post by former […]
Timber Justinlake Bringing Sexy Back To The 215
Justin Timberlake, announced today he will expand The 20/20 Experience World Tour with a new date added in Philadelphia, PA (November 10). Tickets for the Philadelphia show will go on-sale Friday, August 23 at 10AM local time and will be available at ComcastTIX.com, Ticketmaster.com. Wells Fargo Center Box Office, or by-phone at 800-298-4200. RELATED: Jay-Z Dissed Philly Last Night PREVIOUSLY: Jay-Z is the living embodiment of the American Dream, never mind that his ticket out of the projects wasn’t rapping, but the sale and distribution of crack cocaine. At the height of his drug dealing days, when he oversaw […]
When Obama Told Jay Leno The NSA Isn’t Spying On Americans, He Was Lying Through His Teeth
NEW YORK TIMES: The National Security Agency is searching the contents of vast amounts of Americans’ e-mail and text communications into and out of the country, hunting for people who mention information about foreigners under surveillance, according to intelligence officials. The N.S.A. is not just intercepting the communications of Americans who are in direct contact with foreigners targeted overseas, a practice that government officials have openly acknowledged. It is also casting a far wider net for people who cite information linked to those foreigners, like a little used e-mail address, according to a senior intelligence official. While it has […]