fin de ce blog

En janvier 2006 j’ai créé Modernitudes sur un site de ti-coune 😉 Finalement, en octobre on a pris pieds sur WordPress.

Sept ans!

1047 articles !

Oui je suis fier de ceci! 110,000 consultations c’est pas rien!

Enfin la vie et mes priorités ont changées. Je n’ai plus les heures que Modernitudes exiges.

La liberté de la presse en jeux

LeMonde. NSA : ce que révèle l’arrestation du compagnon de M. Greenwald

Qui est Glenn Greenwald.?

Guardian. The destructive power of state snooping is on display for all to see. The press must not yield to this intimidation

August 20, 2013  You’ve had your fun: now we want the stuff back. With these words the British government embarked on the most bizarre act of state censorship of the internet age.  In a Guardian basement, officials from GCHQ gazed with satisfaction on a pile of mangled hard drives like so many book burners sent by the Spanish Inquisition. They were unmoved by the fact that copies of the drives were lodged round the globe. They wanted their symbolic auto-da-fe. Had the Guardian refused this ritual they said they would have obtained a search and destroy order from a compliant British court.

Two great forces are now in fierce but unresolved contention. The material revealed by Edward Snowden through the Guardian and the Washington Post is of a wholly different order from  WikiLeaks and other recent whistle-blowing incidents. It indicates not just that the modern state is gathering, storing and processing for its own ends electronic communication from around the world; far more serious, it reveals that this power has so corrupted those wielding it as to put them beyond effective democratic control. It was not the scope of NSA surveillance that led to Snowden’s defection. It was hearing his boss lie to Congress about it for hours on end.

Last week in Washington, Congressional investigators discovered that the America’s  foreign intelligence surveillance court, a body set up specifically to oversee the NSA,  had itself been defied by the agency« thousands of times ». It was victim to « a culture of misinformation » as orders to destroy intercepts, emails and files were simply disregarded; an intelligence community that seems neither intelligent nor a community commanding a global empire that could suborn the world’s largest corporations, draw up targets for drone assassination, blackmail US Muslims into becoming spies and haul passengers off planes.

Yet like all empires, this one has bred its own antibodies. The American (or Anglo-American?) surveillance industry has grown so big by exploiting laws to combat terrorism that it is as impossible to manage internally as it is to control externally. It cannot sustain its own security. Some two million people were reported to have had access to the WikiLeaks material disseminated by Bradley Manning from his Baghdad cell. Snowden himself was a mere employee of a subcontractor to the NSA, yet had full access to its data. The thousands, millions, billions of messages now being devoured daily by US data storage centres may be beyond the dreams of Space Odyssey’s HAL 9000. But even HAL proved vulnerable to human morality. Manning and Snowden cannot have been the only US officials to have pondered blowing a whistle on data abuse. There must be hundreds more waiting in the wings – and always will be.

L’Égypte au bord de la guerre civile

LeDevoir. Les Égyptiens craignent de plus en plus que la crise qui secoue actuellement leur pays ne débouche sur une guerre civile. De hauts fonctionnaires du gouvernement égyptien préfèrent pour le moment parler d’« un grand bouleversement de masse », mais ils sont nombreux à redouter un véritable conflit armé comparable à celui dans lequel s’enlise la Syrie.

Lors de leur « vendredi de la colère », les Frères musulmans ont d’ailleurs appelé les partisans du président déchu, Mohamed Morsi, « à manifester désormais quotidiennement » pour dénoncer le bain de sang de mercredi qui a fait au moins 578 morts, la plupart membres de la confrérie islamiste. Bien qu’il soit en fuite, leur guide suprême, Mohamed Badie, a laissé savoir que les responsables des « massacres » allaient devoir payer.

Modernitudes. Economist. BBC.

I have a dream: 50 ans!

LeDevoir  Washington — Le président Barack Obama prononcera un discours au cours d’une cérémonie marquant le 50e anniversaire de la Marche sur Washington, a annoncé la Maison-Blanche mercredi.

Le discours sera prononcé lors de la cérémonie sur les marches du Lincoln Memorial le 28 août, a indiqué la Maison-Blanche. Aucun autre détail n’a été fourni.

Le discours de M. Obama surviendra 50 ans après que le révérend Martin Luther King Jr. eut mené environ 250 000 personnes au National Mall de Washington, dans le cadre d’une marche pour le travail et la liberté.

C’est à cette occasion que le révérend King avait prononcé son célèbre discours, «I Have a Dream», sur les marches du monument.

La Marche sur Washington avait contribué à faire pression sur le Congrès pour qu’il adopte la loi sur les droits civils en 1964 et la loi sur le droit de vote en 1965.

USA – Russie: dure dure les relations

Economist Is VLADIMIR PUTIN a man with whom Barack Obama can do business? During his first term, the American president invested much time and effort in seeking a positive answer to that question. The White House’s announcement, on August 7th, that Mr Obama was cancelling a Moscow summit with his Russian counterpart, shows how far the Americans have drifted towards concluding that the answer may, in fact, be mostly negative.

The immediate cause of the cancelled bilateral summit—which will not prevent Mr Obama from attending a meeting of G20 leaders in St Petersburg on September 5th and 6th—was Russia’s grant of temporary asylum to Edward Snowden, the ex-spook on the run after leaking details of spying on global phone and e-mail records by America’s National Security Agency. Congress, not to mention public opinion, would have been outraged had Mr Obama carried on with summitry-as-usual.

But the White House set its decision in a wider context, listing frustrations predating the Snowden crisis, from a lack of progress on missile defence and trade wrangles to the treatment of Russian civil society. There was offsetting talk of areas where Russia has been helpful: over Iran and North Korea, and in granting access to Afghanistan through its territory.

But a final grumble on the list, “global security issues”, hinted at a large dispute of the moment: Russia’s defence of the Assad regime in Syria, and threats to deliver an advanced air-defence system to Syria that would gravely complicate future Western or Israeli air strikes or no-fly zones over Syria.

Mr Obama has spent years tolerating anti-American rhetoric from Russia, including harassment of his diplomats and American-funded projects. Growing political repression and anti-gay campaigns prompt revulsion among Obama supporters back home. Yet a day before the summit’s cancellation Mr Obama called Mr Snowden’s asylum merely “disappointing”, adding that “a lot of business” can still be done with Russia.

Alas, Mr Putin is not in the mood for serious business, and Mr Obama has no time for small talk.

Ex president : America does not have a functioning democracy at this point in time

Huffington. Former President Jimmy Carter announced support for NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden this week, saying that his uncovering of the agency’s massive surveillance programs had proven « beneficial. »

Speaking at a closed-door event in Atlanta covered by German newspaper Der Spiegel, Carter also criticized the NSA’s domestic spying as damaging to the core of the nation’s principles.

« America does not have a functioning democracy at this point in time, » Carter said, according to a translation by Inquisitr.

No American outlets covered Carter’s speech, given at an Atlantic Bridge meeting, which has reportedly led to some skepticism over Der Spiegel’s quotes. But Carter’s stance would be in line with remarks he’s made on Snowden and the issue of civil liberties in the past.

Original de l’entrevue

Detroit est en faillite

LeDevoir. Jadis perçue comme le symbole de la puissance industrielle des États-Unis, Detroit est devenue la plus grande ville américaine à déclarer faillite, jeudi, ployant sous le poids d’un bilan financier désastreux, des quartiers déserts et une économie locale sur le déclin.

La faillite, qui était anticipée depuis plusieurs mois déjà, place la ville dans une position précaire qui pourrait se traduire par le licenciement d’employés municipaux, la vente d’actifs, la hausse des tarifs et une diminution encore plus accentuée de services publics de base déjà réduits, tels la cueillette des ordures et le déneigement des rues.

Kevin Orr, un expert en faillite d’entreprises embauché par l’État du Michigan en mars dernier pour tenter de mettre de l’ordre dans les livres de la municipalité, a déposé jeudi à la cour les documents pour demander l’autorisation de déclarer faillite.

Egypte: coup d’état ou pas?

Ou : pourquoi la Maison Blanche ne réagit pas à l’activité en Egypte!

BBC. When is a coup not a coup? With $1.5bn on the line

L’Égypte s’engage dans un sentier bien connu: celui de la guerre civile. Depuis une semaine déjà, je me dis que cà ressemble de plus en plus à l’Algérie (guerre civile de 92 à 97)

Cependant, l’impact géopolitique d’une guerre civile Égyptienne serait beaucoup plus important. L’Égypte compte 84 millions de citoyens alors que l’Algérie en comptait 34 millions. Il ne faut pas négliger cet impact sur le monde musulman dans son ensemble qui mijote encore dans son printemps arabe.