http://www.fantasylandmedia.org
Each week, we cover the stories that are just left out of the US propaganda machine. News that the people in charge, the corporations and your government want to keep from the public eye.
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Common Dreams:
"Germany's Der Spiegel is reporting Sunday that the US National Security Agency (NSA), working with the CIA and FBI, has been intercepting laptops and other electronics bought online before delivery to install malware and other spying tools.
According to Der Spiegel, the NSA diverts shipping deliveries to its own 'secret workshops' to install the software before resending the deliveries to their purchasers.
Elite hackers working for the NSA's Tailored Access Operations (TAO) division are considered to be the intelligence agency's top secret weapon.
The NSA's TAO reportedly has backdoor access to many hardware and software systems from major tech companies such as Cisco, Dell, and Western Digital and others. The NSA exploits Microsoft Windows error reports to find weak spots in compromised machines in order to install Trojans and other viruses."
-->Order a laptop on-line and have the NSA put spying tools on it? Readers of the NYT didn't get to see this story. Maybe it was only "fit to print" in a foreign newspaper.
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Common Dreams:
"For months, the 'slam-dunk' evidence 'proving' Syrian government guilt in the Aug. 21 Sarin attack near Damascus was a 'vector analysis' pushed by the New York Times showing where the rockets supposedly were launched. But the Times now grudgingly admits its analysis was flawed
The New York Times has, kind of, admitted that it messed up its big front-page story that used a 'vector analysis' to pin the blame for the Aug. 21 Sarin attack on the Syrian-government, an assertion that was treated by Official Washington as the slam-dunk proof that President Bashar al-Assad gassed his own people.
But you’d be forgiven if you missed the Times’ embarrassing confession, since it was buried on page 8, below the fold, 18 paragraphs into a story under the not-so-eye-catching title, 'New Study Refines View Of Sarin Attack in Syria.' "
-->The NY Times fabricated evidence again to support a US invasion, just like it did before the invasion of Iraq. Our newspaper of record does retract these war propaganda stories, but only halfheartedly and well after the admission makes any difference. Why is it that The NYT feels compelled to provide false evidence for the empire's war crimes?
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The Progressive:
"Edward Snowden: Recently, we learned that our governments, working in concert, have created a system of worldwide mass surveillance, watching everything we do. Great Britain’s George Orwell warned us of the danger of this kind of information.
The types of collection in the book — microphones and video cameras, TVs that watch us — are nothing compared to what we have available today. We have sensors in our pockets that track us everywhere we go. Think about what this means for the privacy of the average person. A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all. They’ll never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves, an unrecorded, unanalyzed thought. And that’s a problem, because privacy matters. Privacy is what allows us to determine who we are and who we want to be. The conversation occurring today will determine the amount of trust we can place both in the technology that surrounds us and the government that regulates it.
Together, we can find a better balance, end mass surveillance and remind the government that if it really wants to know how we feel, asking is always cheaper than spying. For everyone out there listening, thank you and Merry Christmas."
-->The NYT runs a lot of spying stories with the usual suspect, the Chinese. Why can't it run Edward Snowden's Christmas message about Orwell and freedom of expression in America? Maybe it's because our news media cares so little about that freedom, having been relegated to publishing pro-corporate propaganda.
