Serious doubts have arisen over claims that an asylum seeker at the centre of a political furore over immigration security was convicted of murder and the possession of explosives, Guardian Australia has learned.

Sayed Abdellatif, an Egyptian asylum seeker who arrived in Australia in May 2012, has been labelled a "convicted jihadist terrorist" by the opposition leader, Tony Abbott, and in numerous media reports. Last Thursday Australian federal police deputy commissioner Peter Drennan told a Senate estimates committee that Abdellatif had been convicted of premeditated murder and possession of explosives.

The allegations and the fact that Abdellatif had been placed under a severe "red notice" warning by Interpol since 2001, prompted Julia Gillard on Wednesday to call for an immediate review by the inspector general of intelligence and security of the way security services deal with "high-risk" asylum seekers. The furore over the case has plagued the prime minister over the past week in Canberra, with opposition politicians scathing about the fact that the immigration minister, Brendan O'Connor, was not told that Abdellatif had been housed in low-security detention up until August, when he was transferred to Villawood, a higher security detention centre in Sydney.

On Wednesday, Abbott said in question time: "Given that a convicted jihadist terrorist was held at a family facility in the Adelaide hills for almost a year through what officials call a clerical error, will the prime minister now concede that Labor's policies have made Australia less safe than it was under the former government?" He reiterated his criticism in parliament on Thursday.

But court documents seen by Guardian Australia, which appear to detail the convictions used to issue Interpol's red notice, make no record of a murder case or of any possession of explosives. The Egyptian Organisation for Human Rights (EOHR), an independent human rights body in Cairo, has verified the documents. Abdellatif's actual convictions, of being party to a criminal agreement and being a member of an illegal extremist group – under the rule of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt – were part of the "returnees from Albania" trial in Cairo in 1999, heavily criticised by Amnesty International at the time for using evidence allegedly obtained under torture.

....

Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young told Guardian Australia she was "dismayed at how this matter has been handled, with the Oppostion so desperate to whip fear and hysteria in the community. That approach has made it near impossible to have all the facts of the case calmly and reasonably considered."

"The Opposition are exploiting the government's failures in this case to continue their fear mingering campaign."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/07/conviction-egyptian-asylum-seeker

May I point to some hypocrisy from the Green Senator Hanson-Young. There are no government failures in this case... It is proper for the government to assess in truth the reality of this case without making a song and dance about it. If this takes a couple of years to be certain of facts, so be it... Meanwhile the opposition is completely vile and garbaged in the head — but what can you expect from someone called Tony Abbott?.... one could say that in a not so distant past a person like Sayed Abdellatif would have been used by the West to be a "witness" to weapons of mass destruction in a regime we did not like...

Yes Gus.

We might forget about all the wars of aggression; the invasions, coup d'états, the murder of millions of civilians, the assassinations, human rights abuses, the lies & extortion, the cover-ups, the corruption, the pretence, the sanctimonious self-righteous cant & hypocrisy, the terrorism, the defence of criminals & dictators, the organised crime, the corruption, television, drugs, the greed, the ugliness, the pillaging of natural resources, the despoiling of the planet & the environment. the destruction of civilisations, the betrayal of her own people – forget it all. But the one thing that would still get-up my nose more than anything-else about ‘our special friends’ is their arrogant breathtaking belief that they are entitled to pass laws that apply to every person in every place on the planet.

More than anything-else, that single act of exceptionalism deserves the royal finger from everyone!!

Published in the New York Times June 1 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/02/opinion/sunday/the-banality-of-googles-dont-be-evil.html?pagewanted=all

The Banality of ‘Don’t Be Evil’

“THE New Digital Age” is a startlingly clear and provocative blueprint for technocratic imperialism, from two of its leading witch doctors, Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, who construct a new idiom for United States global power in the 21st century. This idiom reflects the ever closer union between the State Department and Silicon Valley, as personified by Mr. Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, and Mr. Cohen, a former adviser to Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton who is now director of Google Ideas.

The authors met in occupied Baghdad in 2009, when the book was conceived. Strolling among the ruins, the two became excited that consumer technology was transforming a society flattened by United States military occupation. They decided the tech industry could be a powerful agent of American foreign policy.

The book proselytizes the role of technology in reshaping the world’s people and nations into likenesses of the world’s dominant superpower, whether they want to be reshaped or not. The prose is terse, the argument confident and the wisdom — banal. But this isn’t a book designed to be read. It is a major declaration designed to foster alliances.

“The New Digital Age” is, beyond anything else, an attempt by Google to position itself as America’s geopolitical visionary — the one company that can answer the question “Where should America go?” It is not surprising that a respectable cast of the world’s most famous warmongers has been trotted out to give its stamp of approval to this enticement to Western soft power. The acknowledgments give pride of place to Henry Kissinger, who along with Tony Blair and the former C.I.A. director Michael Hayden provided advance praise for the book.

In the book the authors happily take up the white geek’s burden. A liberal sprinkling of convenient, hypothetical dark-skinned worthies appear: Congolese fisherwomen, graphic designers in Botswana, anticorruption activists in San Salvador and illiterate Masai cattle herders in the Serengeti are all obediently summoned to demonstrate the progressive properties of Google phones jacked into the informational supply chain of the Western empire.

The authors offer an expertly banalized version of tomorrow’s world: the gadgetry of decades hence is predicted to be much like what we have right now — only cooler. “Progress” is driven by the inexorable spread of American consumer technology over the surface of the earth. Already, every day, another million or so Google-run mobile devices are activated. Google will interpose itself, and hence the United States government, between the communications of every human being not in China (naughty China). Commodities just become more marvelous; young, urban professionals sleep, work and shop with greater ease and comfort; democracy is insidiously subverted by technologies of surveillance, and control is enthusiastically rebranded as “participation”; and our present world order of systematized domination, intimidation and oppression continues, unmentioned, unafflicted or only faintly perturbed.

The authors are sour about the Egyptian triumph of 2011. They dismiss the Egyptian youth witheringly, claiming that “the mix of activism and arrogance in young people is universal.” Digitally inspired mobs mean revolutions will be “easier to start” but “harder to finish.” Because of the absence of strong leaders, the result, or so Mr. Kissinger tells the authors, will be coalition governments that descend into autocracies. They say there will be “no more springs” (but China is on the ropes).

The authors fantasize about the future of “well resourced” revolutionary groups. A new “crop of consultants” will “use data to build and fine-tune a political figure.”

“His” speeches (the future isn’t all that different) and writing will be fed “through complex feature-extraction and trend-analysis software suites” while “mapping his brain function,” and other “sophisticated diagnostics” will be used to “assess the weak parts of his political repertoire.”

The book mirrors State Department institutional taboos and obsessions. It avoids meaningful criticism of Israel and Saudi Arabia. It pretends, quite extraordinarily, that the Latin American sovereignty movement, which has liberated so many from United States-backed plutocracies and dictatorships over the last 30 years, never happened. Referring instead to the region’s “aging leaders,” the book can’t see Latin America for Cuba. And, of course, the book frets theatrically over Washington’s favorite boogeymen: North Korea and Iran.

Google, which started out as an expression of independent Californian graduate student culture — a decent, humane and playful culture — has, as it encountered the big, bad world, thrown its lot in with traditional Washington power elements, from the State Department to the National Security Agency.

Despite accounting for an infinitesimal fraction of violent deaths globally, terrorism is a favorite brand in United States policy circles. This is a fetish that must also be catered to, and so “The Future of Terrorism” gets a whole chapter. The future of terrorism, we learn, is cyberterrorism. A session of indulgent scaremongering follows, including a breathless disaster-movie scenario, wherein cyberterrorists take control of American air-traffic control systems and send planes crashing into buildings, shutting down power grids and launching nuclear weapons. The authors then tar activists who engage in digital sit-ins with the same brush.

I have a very different perspective. The advance of information technology epitomized by Google heralds the death of privacy for most people and shifts the world toward authoritarianism. This is the principal thesis in my book, “Cypherpunks.” But while Mr. Schmidt and Mr. Cohen tell us that the death of privacy will aid governments in “repressive autocracies” in “targeting their citizens,” they also say governments in “open” democracies will see it as “a gift” enabling them to “better respond to citizen and customer concerns.” In reality, the erosion of individual privacy in the West and the attendant centralization of power make abuses inevitable, moving the “good” societies closer to the “bad” ones.

The section on “repressive autocracies” describes, disapprovingly, various repressive surveillance measures: legislation to insert back doors into software to enable spying on citizens, monitoring of social networks and the collection of intelligence on entire populations. All of these are already in widespread use in the United States. In fact, some of those measures — like the push to require every social-network profile to be linked to a real name — were spearheaded by Google itself.

THE writing is on the wall, but the authors cannot see it. They borrow from William Dobson the idea that the media, in an autocracy, “allows for an opposition press as long as regime opponents understand where the unspoken limits are.” But these trends are beginning to emerge in the United States. No one doubts the chilling effects of the investigations into The Associated Press and Fox’s James Rosen. But there has been little analysis of Google’s role in complying with the Rosen subpoena. I have personal experience of these trends.

The Department of Justice admitted in March that it was in its third year of a continuing criminal investigation of WikiLeaks. Court testimony states that its targets include “the founders, owners, or managers of WikiLeaks.” One alleged source, Bradley Manning, faces a 12-week trial beginning tomorrow, with 24 prosecution witnesses expected to testify in secret.

This book is a balefully seminal work in which neither author has the language to see, much less to express, the titanic centralizing evil they are constructing. “What Lockheed Martin was to the 20th century,” they tell us, “technology and cybersecurity companies will be to the 21st.” Without even understanding how, they have updated and seamlessly implemented George Orwell’s prophecy. If you want a vision of the future, imagine Washington-backed Google Glasses strapped onto vacant human faces — forever. Zealots of the cult of consumer technology will find little to inspire them here, not that they ever seem to need it. But this is essential reading for anyone caught up in the struggle for the future, in view of one simple imperative: Know your enemy.

Julian Assange is the editor in chief of WikiLeaks and author of “Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet.”

Some Internet services in the European Union are blocked by providers because they undermine profits. Skype and Whatsapp are just two examples. The EU now wants to take action, but critics are skeptical.

EU commissioner Neelie Kroes last week promised new rights for every EU citizen and new responsibilities for every Internet provider. She wants the principle of so-called 'net neutrality' to be a legal right across the EU. All data on the web would then be equal, and would have to be transmitted with the same speed, regardless of where it's from or what the content is.

Currently, that is not the case. Recently, an EU study found that within the EU one-in-five phone connections was blocking services. Also one-in-three mobile phone connections is being meddled with.

Often, this affects services where the provider can't profit himself, explains Constanze Kurz of the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) "That affects their business model and that's why some providers have blocked that." Voice over IP software, like Skype or messenger Whatsapp, offer services for free and are very popular with users.

http://www.dw.de/net-neutrality-is-still-a-chimera-in-the-eu/a-16868727

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says the Australian Government must reveal any links it has to the massive public surveillance operation uncovered in the US.

Key points

Interpol's National Central Bureau (NCB) has dropped the majority of the most severe charges against the Egyptian asylum seeker branded a "convicted jihadist terrorist" by Tony Abbott, following an investigation by Guardian Australia.

At the request of Egyptian Interpol, the charges of premeditated murder, firearm and explosives possession and destruction of property against Sayed Abdellatif have been dropped. The existence of these convictions was heavily quoted by opposition politicians, news reports and the Australian Federal Police as evidence that Sayed Abdellatif was a dangerous terrorist.

Interpol has confirmed that the "Red Notice" on Abdellatif's name is still in existence, but now relates to membership of an extremist group and of forging travel documents.

In a statement to the press Interpol said:

"Questions have recently been raised in relation to Mr Abdellatif's convictions as stated by Egyptian authorities in their original Red Notice application.

"In following up on the matter with NCB Cairo, the NCB asked Interpol's General Secretariat to remove the charge of premeditated murder and the other charges ...

"Interpol immediately implemented NCB Cairo's request and is advising all member countries accordingly."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/13/interpol-drops-murder-sayed-abdellatif

The rabid rite wing oppostion in this country wasted an entire week of parliamentary time to slam the government in regard to Sayed Abdellatif being treated lightly for his supposed crimes... Tony Abbott, Christopher Pyne and Julie Bishop (with accoutrement of eye popping and frothed mouth twisting, plus pointing — like a mad chook picking crap on a dirt coop floor — at a picture in hand) attacked the government relentlessly for DOING THE RIGHT THING, which was to find out the fact from fiction. But the COALition prefers fiction — dangerous fiction...