Bolivian presidential plane forced down in Austria

The Continuing Saga of the Keystone Kops, Part >9000

"Bolivia denounced the “abduction” of President Evo Morales and alleged that international law had been violated after his plane was grounded and searched amid a false rumor that NSA leaker Edward Snowden was on board.

"The jet took off from Vienna, Austria, on Wednesday, almost 12 hours after it was forced to land there when France, Portugal, Italy and Spain all denied the plane access to their airspace.
"The aircraft was stopped and searched as it was taking Morales home from Russia, where he had met with Russian President Vladimir Putin at a summit for gas exporters.

"No unauthorized people were found on board.

“'We want to tell Bolivians, we want to tell the world, that President Evo Morales, our president, the president of all Bolivians, was kidnapped in Europe today,' Vice President Alvaro García Linera said late Tuesday in front of the official presidential residence in the capital, La Paz. 'We want to say to the nations of the world that President Evo Morales has been abducted by imperialism and is being held in Europe.'”

"A statement (http://www.presidencia.gob.bo/index.php) from aboard the presidential plane on Wednesday underlined the indignation and fury felt at the highest levels of the Bolivian government."

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Ironically, the president's aircraft, under the Vienna Convention of 1961, is considered to be sovereign territory and the president himself a 'diplomatic emissary', and not to be hindered in his travels. Vienna is, of course, the capital of Austria.

 
Source: http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/07/03/19264421-the-hunt-for-edward-snowden-search-of-presidential-jet-angers-bolivia?lite

current-events

Olbermann: Bush's 8 in 8

While Bush is scrambling around trying to find his "legacy," some have accused him of being an incompetent idiot. The fact is that he succeeded rather well in his goal of shredding the Constitution and making Congress irrelevant.

For someone who didn't spend much time in the White House, preferring to whack innocent shrubbery at his Texas "ranch," he managed to get a lot done, even if every single bit of it was damaging to the nation.

MSNBC's Keith Olbermann sums up Bush's 8 years of accomplishment in 8 minutes. It's quite a list.





current-events

AT&T former employee to detail gov't spying

Your federal tax dollars at work:

In summer 2002, Klein was working in an office responsible for Internet equipment when an NSA representative arrived to interview a management-level technician for a special job whose details were secret.

[...]

His first inkling that something was amiss came...when he opened the door to admit a visitor from the National Security Agency to an office of AT&T in San Francisco.

"What the heck is the NSA doing here?" Mark Klein, a former AT&T technician, said he asked himself.

[...]

"That's when my antennas started to go up," he said. He knew that the NSA was supposed to work on overseas signals intelligence.

The job entailed building a "secret room" in an AT&T office 10 blocks away, he said. By coincidence, in October 2003, Klein was transferred to that office and assigned to the Internet room. He asked a technician there about the secret room on the 6th floor, and the technician told him it was connected to the Internet room a floor above. The technician, who was about to retire, handed him some wiring diagrams.

"That was my 'aha!' moment," Klein said. "They're sending the entire Internet to the secret room."

The diagram showed splitters, glass prisms that split signals from each network into two identical copies. One fed into the secret room, the other proceeded to its destination, he said.

"This splitter was sweeping up everything, vacuum-cleaner-style," he said. "The NSA is getting everything. These are major pipes that carry not just AT&T's customers but everybody's."

One of Klein's documents listed links to 16 entities, including Global Crossing, a large provider of voice and data services in the United States and abroad; UUNet, a large Internet provider in Northern Virginia now owned by Verizon; Level 3 Communications, which provides local, long-distance and data transmission in the United States and overseas; and more familiar names such as Sprint and Qwest. It also included data exchanges MAE-West and PAIX, or Palo Alto Internet Exchange, facilities where telecom carriers hand off Internet traffic to each other.

"I flipped out," he said. "They're copying the whole Internet. There's no selection going on here. Maybe they select out later, but at the point of handoff to the government, they get everything."

[...]

Klein is in Washington urging Congress not to block Hepting v. AT&T, a class-action suit pending in federal court in San Francisco, as well as 37 other lawsuits charging carriers with illegally collaborating with the NSA. He was accompanied yesterday by lawyers for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed Hepting v. AT&T in 2006. Together, they are urging key U.S. senators to oppose a pending White House-endorsed immunity provision that would effectively wipe out the lawsuits. The Judiciary Committee is expected to take up the measure Thursday.
- Washington Post (11/7/07) [emphasis mine]

Update: After Senator Dodd posted an interview with Mr Klein on YouTube, the debate on the immunization of the telecos from prosecution for their involvement in government spying has been extended. Electronic Frontier Foundation has the details.

current-events