Free media security

A VPN will not save you from government surveillance

Late on Friday afternoon, the Commissioner of the Australian Federal Police waltzed out in front of the microphones and admitted that his agency had misused the metadata that the nation's telecommunication companies are forced to store.

It was a stunning admission. The nation had barely made it a fortnight since the deadline for telcos to have their data retention systems in place had passed, yet here was the AFP self-reporting an event that saw an officer in breach of the metadata laws, and despite years of preparation and interaction with metadata, placed the blame on "human error".

Naturally for the cynics watching, AFP Commissioner Andrew Colvin said the officer involved would not be punished, and the AFP said later in a statement that "it was not an offence under the Act".

Free media security

The Link Between Brexit And The US Election, MI6, Fake News And Dark Money

There are stories too numerous to mention of government collusion with the mainstream press to push their political causes but it has been a fact for some years that Journalists are routinely being fed false information by MI6 and MI5 and worse, the journalists themselves are in some instances indeed government operatives. Think this is the arena of conspiracy theories? Think again!

Back in June 2000 the Guardian newspaper was so concerned at the scale of the problem, they wrote a piece entitled “Tinker, Taylor, Soldier, Journalist” where they accused British government spies for working as full-time journalists. The Guardian accused spooks of writing tendentious articles under false names or that the intelligence agency was planting propaganda stories on willing journalists who disguise their origin from their readers. And from here it starts to get a bit ‘dark’.

Free media security

WashPost Owner Secretly Doing Business With the CIA

The owner of the Washington Post, a newspaper that has done little to hide its contempt for the current US president, has been quietly doing business with the CIA for years.

In 2013, it was revealed that Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Post and retail behemoth Amazon, had secured a contract for $600 million with the intelligence agency — an agency that also happens to be seemingly rebelling against President Donald Trump. The contract came just four months after Bezos purchased the newspaper.

“News media should illuminate conflicts of interest, not embody them. But the owner of the Washington Post is now doing big business with the Central Intelligence Agency, while readers of the newspaper’s CIA coverage are left in the dark,” Norman Solomon wrote for AlterNet. Despite requests to disclose its affiliation, the Washington Post repeatedly refused to post disclaimers confirming its owner’s business ties with the agency.

Free media security

AfD bans German public TV from European right-wing parties’ conference for ‘biased’ reporting

All German public broadcasters have been barred from a conference of the European populist anti-immigration parties by the event hosts from the German right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which said the media did not meet journalistic standards.

Marcus Pretzell, an AfD MEP and the co-organizer of the conference scheduled for January 21, slammed German publicly funded media for their biased reporting as he explained the organizers’ decision to the German dpa news agency.

“The public broadcasters have such biased reporting that they could easily produce their scripted stories without direct access [to the conference], alongside with Compact and Handelsblatt,” he said, mentioning the German Handelsblatt business daily and a right-wing populist Compact journal among the media outlets banned from the event.

Free media security

Seymour Hersh on White House Lies About bin Laden's Death, Pakistan and the Syrian Civil War

Seymour Hersh: The mainstream press relies on access. The reporters covering beats -- most notably national security beats -- must be able to get calls returned and interviews when needed. This does not mean that the reporters on those beats are incompetent or in the hands of the White House -- it is just a fact of life that those who cross boundaries, as defined by the White House, do not get the same treatment as those who faithfully reflect the view of the President and his minions. It is especially so when it comes to crisis reporting -- an airplane tragedy, a battlefield victory or defeat. Thus, the White House controlled all details of the story from the moment President Obama announced the kill, and it did all -- as White Houses will -- to glorify the President’s action and shape the story in ways that would help in Obama’s re-election the next year.