Australian Labor Party embraces huge tax cuts for richest 5 percent

Mike Head

“I don’t regard someone who’s earning $200,000 a year as being from the top end of town… It’s a good thing that people all aspire to get a higher standard of living for themselves and their family.”

These comments were made on Sky News last Friday by Anthony Albanese, who was installed as Labor Party leader following its crushing May 18 election defeat. They were the most blatant expression yet of Labor’s further sharp shift to the right, to openly embrace enriching the wealthiest layers of society.

Anyone taking home $200,000 a year is in the top 5 percent of income recipients. Their salary is more than four times the median wage of taxpayers, which was estimated last year to be just under $45,000.

Since Labor’s election debacle, it has dropped its populist pitch of standing for a “fair go” against the “top end of town.” As the Socialist Equality Party warned in its election statement, Labor’s claims were “worthless.” Whether Labor returned to office or not, its rhetoric was pure “duplicity and deceit,” intended to contain rising working class discontent over falling living conditions, the destruction of full-time jobs and ever-widening social inequality.

As soon as he became the party’s leader on May 30, Albanese declared that Labor backed “successful” people, “wealth creation,” bipartisan unity and a closer partnership with the corporate elite. His latest remarks were made in the context of justifying Labor’s readiness to accept, directly or indirectly, the Liberal-National Coalition government’s proposed three-stage plan to slash income taxes for those receiving more than $200,000 a year.

A meeting of Labor’s shadow cabinet yesterday decided to appeal to the government for a bipartisan approach of immediately implementing the first two stages of the tax plan, while “deferring” a vote on the third stage. Both the second and third stages would be a bonanza for the wealthy, but the third stage would be the most brazen, handing tax cuts worth $33 billion over five years to those earning above $200,000.

Some media outlets presented Labor’s decision as a “rejection” of the government’s third stage. Nothing could be further from the truth. After the shadow cabinet meeting, Albanese said Labor’s stance was simply a “negotiating position.”

Albanese said that if the government agreed to defer stage three’s consideration “to the following sitting of Parliament or whenever they deemed fit to debate it some time between now and 2024-2025 when it’s due to commence, then we would facilitate the passage of those stages (one and two) through the Parliament next week.”

Prime Minister Scott Morrison immediately dismissed Labor’s deferral request and announced that the Senate would sit indefinitely next week until it passed the full package.

The government may not need Labor’s votes. It could push the tax cuts through the Senate with the support of three “crossbench” senators. This would allow Labor to formally vote against stage three—knowing it would pass anyway—as a means of defusing the popular hostility toward Labor’s embrace of the tax handouts to the rich.

But the government previously ruled out negotiating deals with those senators, preferring to force Labor into openly voting for the whole package.

Labor’s shadow cabinet reaffirmed its support for stage one, which is backdated to July 1 last year. It offers a pittance to “middle-income earners” between $41,000 and $90,000—a temporary annual rebate of $1,080. That is only $20 a week, not even enough for public transport fares or petrol costs.

Because of a rapid descent of the economy into recession, Labor’s shadow ministers urged an acceleration of stage two, bringing it forward by three years, from 2022-23 to 2019-20. That would increase the income threshold for the 32.5 percent tax rate from $90,000 to $120,000.

That alone would hand an immediate boost of $1,350 a year for those on more than $90,000, and more than double that for those above $200,000. Labor did not propose bringing forward another part of stage two, which would benefit middle-income recipients by raising the top income threshold for the 19 percent tax bracket from $41,000 to $45,000.

Half the country’s taxpayers are on less than $45,000, because of low and stagnant wages, and high levels of under-employment, but Labor’s proposal would only speed up the tax cuts for those above $90,000.

Albanese told reporters that Labor’s suggestions “would bring forward tax cuts faster for those who need it, and importantly those who will spend it, to stimulate demand in the economy.” While paying lip service to “need,” Labor’s only concern was to reverse the worsening economic slump by handing cash to households that were likely to spend it straight away, while leaving low-income households with nothing.

For now, Labor has baulked at openly endorsing stage three, scheduled to begin on July 1, 2024, which would multiply the handouts to higher-income households. According to calculations by the Australia Institute, someone on $125,000 would be $7,035 a year better off than if the tax rates were only adjusted for inflation, and someone on $200,000 would be $19,785 better off.

But Labor’s objection to stage three was not that it would benefit the rich. Labor’s only reservation was that it would be “economically irresponsible” to immediately commit to stage three’s $33 billion cost at a time when the economy was “very soft.”

At the same time, Labor leaders are sending out clear signals of their willingness to facilitate the passage of the whole package. Unnamed “senior Labor sources” reportedly told the Australian on Monday that Labor might still wave through all three stages.

Labor’s backing for tax cuts for the wealthy is no aberration. It is in line with its decades-long record of boosting the fortunes of the financial elite at the expense of the working class. The Hawke and Keating Labor governments of 1983 to 1996 slashed the top income tax rate from 60 percent to 49 percent, and the company tax rate from 49 to 33 percent.

These tax cuts—the largest in history—were part of a global process. Capitalist governments around the world are competing to satisfy the financial markets and attract investment by slashing high-income and corporate taxes, while spending billions on their militaries and dismantling essential social programs, such as public health care, education and housing.

Labor’s appeal for a bipartisan front encouraged Prime Minister Morrison to use his first domestic post-election speech on Monday to outline a new wave of pro-business “reform” modeled on the Trump administration’s program in the US. On top of “lower taxes,” Morrison proposed stripping away regulation to provoke economic “animal spirits” and conducting a “review” of workplace relations.

Morrison provided no details whatsoever, but the thrust is clear. Under conditions of a deepening global downturn, intensifying US-driven trade wars and growing indicators of a recession, the government and big business are intent on launching a further assault on the jobs, wages and conditions of the working class.

With the Coalition barely scraping back into office, and knowing that their agenda will provoke explosive working class struggles, they are counting on the continued assistance of the Labor Party and the trade unions.

US schools erecting a massive digital surveillance infrastructure, choking dissent and free speech

Doug Martin

Despite popular concerns over the violation of civil liberties and the right to privacy, 63 school districts in at least 20 US states purchased social media monitoring software in 2018 up from only six districts in 2013, according to a report published in April by NYU School of Law’s Brennan Center for Justice.

The actual number of schools using social media surveillance tools or services to spy on their students, while unknown, is much greater than those represented by the study since districts self-report to the database of government purchases examined by the Brennan Center.

Despite the lack of any evidence that online surveillance has ever foiled violence, school districts in Texas, Illinois, California, and Florida spent, from 2012-2018, a combined total of almost $1.5 million, allegedly to detect potential social media threats from well over a million students. Education Week noted in a May 30 report, “Social media monitoring companies track the posts of everyone in the areas surrounding schools, including adults. Other companies scan the private digital content of millions of students using district-issued computers and accounts. Those services are complemented with tip-reporting apps, facial-recognition software, and other new technology systems.”

By tapping private companies’ services or tools to comb 24/7 through social media posts—including those by adults originating from a student’s home on family-owned devices—schools are trampling on US constitutional rights to privacy and playing a growing role in the efforts of the government and tech giants to surveil and censor the internet.

A series of court decisions have opened the door to widespread surveillance in schools, including the US Supreme Court decision Board of Education v. Earls, written in 2002 by the arch-reactionary Clarence Thomas. The court held that “a student’s privacy interest is limited in a public school environment where the State is responsible for maintaining discipline, health, and safety.”

As the World Socialist Web Site revealed last year, many data mining companies surveilling students on Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms are operated by or employ former intelligence and law enforcement members. It is unsurprisingly, then, that many social media tracking companies have provided public school officials and police a way to stalk student protesters.

Solana Beach, California’s Geo Listening is one such company. After spotting social media chatter regarding a 2009 protest planned by students over teachers’ pay in the Golden State, the company, fearing nationwide walkouts, “notified all the appropriate schools, who were able to stop it before it happened,” according to the Hawaii student newspaper Ka Leo o Nä Koa.

In March 2016, Geofeedia—a Chicago company funded by the CIA’s venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel—“pulled together a little content” from social media posts for the Boston Regional Intelligence Center, a fusion center managed by the Boston Police Department, to track a walkout in which 1,000 public school students marched past the statehouse to protest proposed budget cuts to education. The company also helped law enforcement intercept students in Baltimore during the protests in 2015 after the police killing of Freddie Gray.

Students marching at Boston City Hall

Geofeedia markets its services by boasting of its surveillance of middle and high school students for police, netting lucrative contracts. Geofeedia claimed it had 500 public safety and law enforcement clients in 2016, but Illinois’ Lincolnshire-Prairie View School District 103, after shelling out $10,000 to the company to monitor Adlai E. Stevenson High School students on social media, ended Geofeedia’s services because of a “lack of relevant information and cost.”

The Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office in Florida used Geofeedia to trawl for high school violence, drug use, track the activities of African American protest organizations, and bomb threats. But a 2017 Times-Union analysis found that of the 146 Geofeedia alerts covering the time of one month and a half, “nearly half were false-alarm ‘bomb threats’—usually triggered by people describing food, beer and other things as ‘bomb.’” Not one “of the alerts documented over that six-week time span contained any hint of criminal activity.”

Another social media surveillance company, Social Sentinel, also has received failing grades on this score. Mark Pompano, director of security for the Connecticut school district that includes Sandy Hook Elementary, the scene of the 2012 mass shooting, told the New York Times that the district briefly hired the Vermont company after the tragedy, but its software “never caught anything serious,” and there was not “a single incident that we used Social Sentinel to pursue some type of security threat or anything like that.”

Social Sentinel, in March 2019, wasn’t of much use in San Antonio, Texas, either, when online fighting between teenagers led to a stabbing death involving a James Madison High School student. The previous summer, Social Sentinel was hired by the North East Independent School District, which includes James Madison High, but the company “does not have a database of student names and would not flag threats unless a school or the district is mentioned,” a district spokeswoman told the San Antonio Express-News at the time of the stabbing, adding that community reporting of potential violence is what they mostly depend on.

The scale of the growing surveillance of America’s youth is breathtaking. Social Sentinel not only mines social media but also the emails of students. Bloomington, Illinois-based Gaggle monitors the digital documents and emails of almost 5 million K12 students, even vacuuming up data from personal devices connected to school district-owned computers.

Securly, a San Jose, California-based social media surveillance company, scans the online searches of students and even offers a blacklist program which blocks “inappropriate” websites from being accessed by millions of students. Similar web filtering software has prevented students from visiting anti-capitalist, antiwar, and anti-censorship sites in the past.

The more data, the better for those eying students. Florida is taking data collection and sharing to extremes.

In wake of the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, which left 17 dead, lawmakers passed a school safety law which, among other things, requires a database to combine people’s social media posts with millions of records of those who have been placed in foster care, diagnosed with substance abuse problems, received forced psychiatric evaluations, or were “mentioned in unverified tips made to law enforcement.”

Detroit Public Schools police command center

Implementation of the massive social media surveillance-based database has hit a snag due to legal concerns and the cancellation of a six-year contract for $4.5 million to a company named Abacode, after Social Sentinel protested the “unclear language” in the state’s “intent to negotiate” document which opened the bidding.

Florida’s project is a perfect example of how spying on students is, from the standpoint of student safety, a terrible waste of resources—emphasizing its real purpose—an intensification of the militarization of schools and society at large.

While both Republican and Democratic lawmakers nationwide slash funding for teachers, educational aides, social workers, school counselors and psychologists, billions of dollars are allocated to hire more school police, install bulletproof doors, deploy metal detectors, mount surveillance cameras with facial recognition technology, issue RFID student tags, and now arm teachers.

School shootings have become the pretext for a mass spying campaign on young people, aimed above all at crushing social opposition to the ravages of the capitalist profit system. Nothing has been or will be done to eliminate social inequality, halt the violence of endless war and police brutality inside and outside the schoolhouse, or foster a positive school culture by either big business party. On the contrary it is capitalism, the global socioeconomic system, that produces the two fundamental causes of mass violence: imperialism and inequality.

The real target of all forms of censorship and surveillance is the increasingly militant working class. The ruling elites are particularly worried over the radicalization of the younger generation, the majority of whom already identify as socialist.

Britain at centre of international “corporate tax haven network”

Simon Whelan

Research by the Tax Justice Network (TJN) advocacy group shows how Britain is at the centre of an international web of tax havens, solely serving the profit interests of transnational corporations (TNCs).

The study by the London-based group, which calls for “the elimination of cross-border tax evasion and limit tax avoidance, so large corporations and wealthy individuals pay tax in line with their ability to do so,” found that the UK and a number of its territories are the world’s foremost facilitator of global tax avoidance. It states that the UK has “single-handedly” done the most to ensure that existing rules on corporation tax are overcome. It is estimated that approximately $500 billion (£395 billion) in corporation tax is lost to avoidance.

The report reveals how successive UK governments have facilitated, on behalf of corporations, the construction of a global network in which hundreds of billions of pounds are funnelled away from national taxation, thereby slashing tax revenues required to pay for public services.

The TJN offers this definition: “A corporate tax haven is pretty much what most people would imagine it to be: a jurisdiction that provides facilities to help multinationals escape paying taxes elsewhere.”

The TJN compiles what is defined as a Corporate Tax Haven Index. It ranks according to how aggressively and extensively a territory and jurisdiction contributes towards assisting TNCs to avoid paying taxation.

The UK “corporate tax haven network,” explains the TJN, is by far the world’s greatest enabler of corporate tax avoidance. British territories and dependencies made up four of the top 10 places on the avoidance index who do their utmost to “proliferate corporate tax avoidance.” Such nefarious activity supplements the main UK centre of financial parasitism, the City of London—a swindler’s paradise which operates virtually as a law unto itself. The UK mainland is ranked just outside the top 10, at 13th on the list, and is the world’s biggest economy able to operate effectively as an offshore tax haven.

Eight jurisdictions are part of the UK-centred tax haven network of territories and dependencies: the British Virgin Islands, Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, Turks and Caicos Islands, Anguilla, the Isle of Man, Jersey and Guernsey. The report notes that if these British Overseas Territories and crown dependencies were calculated together, the UK would top the index overall.

Tax haven territories linked to Britain are responsible for approximately a third of the world’s corporate tax avoidance, a figure in excess of four times more than the next greatest tax haven, the Netherlands.

Many of these top-ranking tax haven territories, including the top three—British Virgin Islands, Bermuda, the Cayman Islands—are geographically tiny but are home to trillions of dollars of foreign direct investment motivated by reducing tax bills rather than any genuine economic activity.

Alex Cobham, chief executive at TJN, stated, “A handful of the richest countries have waged a world tax war so corrosive, they’ve broken down the global corporate tax system beyond repair.” Cobham continued, “The UK, Netherlands, Switzerland and Luxembourg, the Axis of Avoidance, line their own pockets at the expense of a crucial funding stream for sustainable human progress. The ability of governments across the world to tax multinational corporations in order to pay teachers’ wages, build hospitals and ensure a level playing field for local businesses has been deliberately and ruthlessly undermined.”

The Corporate Tax Avoidance Index is the first ever study of its size and scope to score each country’s system based on the degree to which it facilitates tax avoidance. This measure is then combined with the scale of its corporate activity to determine the share of global taxes avoided. The index covers 64 jurisdictions and their scores reflect how aggressively they use tax cuts and create loopholes, secrecy and other mechanisms to attract corporate activity.

The countries listed by the index, explains the TJN, have created a downward spiral of taxation in a “race to the bottom,” that increasingly depletes tax revenues and therefore public spending on crucial services. The TNCs utilise the transport infrastructure, postal services, scientific research, property rights and court systems paid for by public funds to maximise profits but make no contribution themselves. Therefore, the tax burden falls increasingly upon waged workers, who cannot avoid paying their taxes.

Countries compete with one another to provide the most favourable conditions for Foreign Direct Investment, tax loopholes and incentives to attract globally mobile capital. As a consequence, they create a downward spiral towards the bottom where the tax burden is removed almost entirely from the TNCs and hoisted entirely onto the shoulders of workers and small businesses. The profits of the TNCs increase in direct proportion to decreases in corporate taxation.

The TJN estimates that national governments are losing $500 billion in tax to corporate tax havens annually. The IMF recently estimated that some of the world’s poorest economies lose an incredible $200 billion per year, representing an even larger proportion of their collective GDP.

Tax avoidance assists the monopoly over commodity production enjoyed by the global corporations. They design their global production networks and internal trading to integrate into a web of subsidiaries and affiliates across tax havens around the globe. These affiliates trade with one another and it is estimated that up to one-third of all world trade is conducted within the TNCs.

The TNCs seek to shift their profits into the zero- or low-tax havens and conversely to shift all costs they incur into higher tax locations where they can be deducted against their tax bills.

This “transfer pricing” allows TNCs to adjust their internal pricing at which their affiliates trade with one another across borders in order to minimise profits in the countries with higher taxes and maximise profits in the tax havens.

The TJN points out how even the “headline” tax rates published by countries can be deliberately misleading. It warns, “Don’t be misled by a country’s headline tax rate: this rate might be bypassed through sweetheart deals between the tax administration and multinationals, and its tax system may well contain gaps and loopholes. Luxembourg, for instance, claims to tax corporate income at 26 percent. Yet Luxleaks [a financial scandal revealed in November 2014 via an investigation conducted by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists] revealed that some multinationals were taxed at less than 1 percent.”

There can be little doubt the other members of “the axis of avoidance,” the UK, Netherlands and Switzerland, utilise similar tax avoidance tactics.

The global corporations enjoy rules and laws that are the polar opposite of those faced by workers. Employees must automatically pay their taxes to the state in deductions straight from their pay packet. Self-employed workers face financial punishment if they do not pay their taxes promptly. In stark contrast, governments like the UK allow the giant global corporations to avoid paying almost any taxes on their enormous profits into public funds.

The competing sections of the ruling class in Britain, who are fighting to ensure the strategic interests of the factions of big business they represent, are committed to ramping up the exploitation of the working class.

Central to this is ensuring the competitiveness of British capital through further deregulation of the economy and massive giveaways to the corporations and super-rich in tax concessions. Such policies were outlined by all the favoured candidates in the ongoing leadership contest to determine the next Conservative Party leader and UK prime minister. Some £84 billion in annual tax cuts was outlined by five of the remaining candidates. The favourite of the two final candidates, Boris Johnson, outlined £10 billion in tax cuts for 3 million high earners and denounced any policies that would “hike taxes to penal rates and attack wealth creation and private property …” His opponent, Jeremy Hunt, plans to slash corporation tax from its current level of 19 percent to below even that of the 12.5 percent in the Irish Republic.

Production organized by the TNCs under capitalism, involving the exploitation of hundreds of millions of workers, rather than providing for human need, only creates ever greater grotesque levels of private wealth that the super-rich hoard in their tax havens or fritter away on socially useless luxury amulets.

The billions of pounds of unpaid taxes by TNCs alone, without even including their gigantic profits, are an undeniable refutation of capitalist governments of all political stripes who insist there are “no funds” as “we are living beyond our means” and “cannot afford” to provide a decent standard of living for the working class. The reality is that there are gigantic sums that could be immediately utilized under a planned socialist economy to provide high-quality jobs, homes, education, transport, healthcare, cultural and leisure facilities for all.

Why is the US government using social media to monitor the public?

Kevin Reed 

A series of recent reports—based on documents obtained from Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) filings and other leaked information—have revealed that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is violating the First Amendment right to free speech and assembly by gathering social media data for surveillance purposes and targeting organizations and individuals for harassment, intimidation, deportation and arrest.

Among the facts revealed by these reports are:

•  DHS is using increasingly sophisticated methods for collecting and analyzing social media data to monitor political protests and demonstrations against US government policies.
  
•  These methods are being used to target left-wing and oppositional political organizations and individuals in the name of “national security” and “public safety.”
  
•  DHS is working with private security firms to scrape individual social media information including profile photographs, organizational affiliations, event activity and page roles.
  
•  Once individuals and organizations have been targeted by DHS through their social media activity, their identities and dossiers are merged with other big data resources of the surveillance state including those of the Departments of Justice, State, Defense and the CIA.

ICE’s “Anti-Trump Spreadsheet”

On March 6 of this year, the Nation published a report—based on documents obtained in a FOIA request—that shows how the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) used social media intelligence to track a series of protests in the summer of 2018. These demonstrations were organized to promote immigrant rights, oppose the deportation policies of the Trump administration and protest the politics of the National Rifle Association (NRA).

In one case, the Nation report says, the Homeland Security Investigations arm of ICE distributed an email with an attachment containing the headline “Anti-Trump Spreadsheet 7/31/2018” to a DHS representative and an undisclosed list of others on the eve of protests against racism and xenophobia in New York City.

The spreadsheet provided detailed information about demonstrations opposed to the immigration policies of the Trump administration taking place between July 31 and August 17. It included the names of groups participating in the demonstrations and the number of individuals who had signed up on Facebook to attend it.

Among the organizations listed were the Young Progressives of America, Refuse Fascism NYC, NYC Says Enough, the New Sanctuary Coalition and Rise and Resist. The Nation report says the documents show how ICE “has been keenly attuned to left-leaning political activity” and “highly aware of organizations and advocates opposed to their controversial agency, which includes detaining and deporting undocumented immigrants.”

The Nation reported on another incident on July 24, 2018 where the deputy director of ICE’s New York Field Office sent an email to top local ICE officials with information copied from the Facebook event page of a demonstration scheduled to take place two days later. The information included the name of the event, the number of people who signed up on Facebook to attend it and the names of the sponsoring organizations such as the Legal Aid Society and the New Sanctuary Coalition.

The Nation quoted from the July 24 ICE email, “This e-mail is to inform you of a planned protest at the ERO [ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations] NYC Area. … The protest is being coordinated by approximately 40 different groups located throughout the NYC area.”

In response to these revelations, the New Sanctuary Coalition and other groups filed a lawsuit against ICE for violating the First Amendment by targeting prominent immigrant rights activists for surveillance, arrest and deportation. The lawsuit says that ICE specifically targeted individuals for deportation in order to suppress their political speech.

CBP’s San Diego target list

In March, NBC 7 San Diego obtained and published a series of leaked Customs and Border Protection (CBP) slides showing the agency maintained a secret database of 59 individual activists, journalists and social media influencers associated with the Migrant Caravan that was making its way to the US-Mexico border in late 2018. The leaked document, called “San Diego Sector Foreign Operations Branch: Migrant Caravan FY-2019, Suspected Organizers, Coordinators, Instigators and Media,” was dated January 9, 2019.

A page from the secret government watchlist tracking those associated with the immgirant caravan [Credit: NBC7 Investigates]

The published list contained head shots—including many gleaned from Facebook profiles—along with dossiers of the individuals, 40 of whom were US citizens. According to the NBC 7 report, “The individuals listed include ten journalists, seven of whom are US citizens, a US attorney, and 48 people from the US and other countries, labeled as organizers, instigators or their roles ‘unknown.’ The target list includes advocates from organizations like Border Angels and Pueblo Sin Fronteras.”

The NBC 7 report said that among those profiled in the document, “Some had alerts placed on their passports, keeping at least two photojournalists and an attorney from entering Mexico to work.” Other reports about the incident said that 43 of those on the list had alerts placed against their names so that they would be tagged for questioning and stopped for additional screening by US border agents. Among the information scraped from their social media accounts was their “role” in Facebook pages set up to support those in the caravan such as administrator or editor.

Title slide of the leaked DHS document pubished by NBC 7 San Diego

In one case, Nora Phillips, a US attorney who specializes in legal aid to migrants, refugees and deportees in Tijuana was listed in the database and has since been denied entry to Mexico because an alert was placed on her passport. Phillips and two other lawyers say that border agents placed them on the target list to retaliate and harass them for defending asylum seekers and being publicly critical of CBP practices.

As of May 24, four separate requests from members of Congress for detailed information about the target database—including a recent letter from US Senators Kamala Harris (D-CA), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Tom Udall (D-NM) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) to DHS Acting Secretary Kevin McAleenan—had no response.

Social media intel from private security firms

On April 29, the Intercept published a report—based on documents obtained by the America Immigration Council through a freedom of information request—showing that a private intelligence firm gathered and provided to DHS social media information on people preparing to participate in more than 600 demonstrations across the country at the end of June 2018.

According to the Intercept report, LookingGlass Cyber Solutions of Reston, Virginia scraped social media information of individuals in the days leading up to the protests against the Trump administration’s policy of separating migrant children from their families at the border. This information was shared with DHS and then distributed through “fusion centers” nationwide to local law enforcement.

According to the DHS website, fusion centers operate as “focal points for the receipt, analysis, gathering, and sharing of threat-related information between federal; state, local, tribal, territorial (SLTT); and private sector partners.”

The Intercept said the documents showed that a LookingGlass “Threat Analyst” emailed the finished intelligence report to a “LookingGlass Shared Services” web address on June 28, two days before the protests were to take place. The analyst’s report included the following summary: “LookingGlass has compiled a spreadsheet for State Fusion Centers detailing over 600 planned ‘Family Separation Day Protests’ across the US on June 30. These originated from Cyber Threat Center (CTC) and are broken out by City and State; they provide physical location and the Facebook event ID.”

A DHS official confirmed the role of LookingGlass in social media analytics saying, “In this particular instance, a private sector entity shared unsolicited information it collected through publicly available channels with DHS I&A [Office of Intelligence and Analysis] on protests that were scheduled to take place near Federal facilities.”

The claims of “unsolicited” private sector participation notwithstanding, the involvement of firms like LookingGlass—a global provider of “360° cybersecurity and intelligence” with former CIA and US military-intelligence representatives on its executive team—indicates that corporate-military entities are involved in perfecting methods of harvesting social media information for DHS.

Brennan Center report on social media monitoring

On May 22, the Brennan Center for Justice of the NYU Law School published an extensive report entitled, “Social Media Monitoring: How the Department of Homeland Security Uses Digital Data in the Name of National Security.” This document substantiates the facts in the above reports from the Nation, NBC 7 San Diego and the Intercept and provides critical details about the scale and scope of the social media data gathering operations of DHS.

The Brennan Center document analyzes how DHS and its agencies—CPB, TSA, ICE and US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS)—are “vacuuming up social media information” from a variety of sources and using it “to evaluate the security risks posed by foreign and American travelers.”

Among the key findings of this important report are:

•  Social media information is being collected from travelers, including Americans, even when they are not suspected of any connection to illegal activity
  
•  Social media checks extend to travelers’ family, friends, business associates and social media contacts
  
•  DHS is continuously monitoring some people inside the US and plans to expand these efforts
  
•  DHS is increasingly seeking and using automated tools to gather and analyze social media data
  
•  Social media information collected by DHS is shared with other law enforcement and state security agencies under broad standards

The Brennan Center report analyzes how DHS gathers basic traveler information through the Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA)—where foreign travelers must complete an online application—and then connects it up with social media data and other “link analysis” to make an evaluation of the “national security threat” or “potential risk to the homeland” of individuals.

Diagram from Brennan Center report showing how inormation is shared across DHS databases

When an individual is applying for a visa waiver (permission to travel to the US for 90 days or less without a visa), for example, their social media information is stored in the CBP’s Automated Targeting System (ATS). The ATS data and other information are then fed “into a number of other watch lists, such as the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Database and TSA Watch Lists, as well as analytical products on trends and threats.”

All of this information—about the applicant, their family and friends—is disseminated to a series of agencies including the Departments of Justice and State, the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) and the CIA and Department of Defense through an organization called the National Vetting Center (NVC).

The NVC was established under the Trump Administration on February 6, 2018. According to the DHS website, “The NVC is a collaborative, interagency effort to provide a clearer picture of threats to national security, border security, homeland security, or public safety posed by individuals seeking to transit our borders or exploit our immigration system.”

Social media data scraping and warrantless searches

The Brennan report also reveals that as of March 2018, the State Department has begun collecting “social media identifiers” on all 15 million individuals who apply for visas each year. These identifiers are being scraped from 20 different social media platforms including the most widely used in the US (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.) as well as others that are popular in China, Russia, Belgium and Latvia.

The CPB also uses warrantless searches of personal electronics at the border to gather social media information. By using powerful handheld devices called Universal Forensic Extraction Devices (UFEDs), CBP staff is copying “in a matter of seconds the entirety of a device’s memory, including all data from social media applications both on the device and from cloud-based accounts like Facebook, Gmail, iCloud and WhatsApp.”

A group of individuals targeted for alerts by DHS San Diego [Credit: NBC7 Investigates]

According to the Brennan Center report, 30,200 people had their devices scrubbed in this manner at the border without a warrant in 2017. Although a subsequent lawsuit blocked these intrusions by CPB, a modification to the procedure still allows warrantless copying of device data if there is evidence of a vaguely defined “national security concern.”

The report also outlines the network infrastructure that has been erected by CBP for gathering and processing big data components from multiple sources. The CPB Intelligence Records System (CIRS) stores a “wide variety of information on individuals, including many who are not suspected of any criminal activity.” The CIRS gathers “commercial data, and information from public sources such as social media, news media outlets and the internet.”

This information gathering operation is exempt from certain requirements of the Privacy Act, such that the CIRS data “may be ingested, stored, and shared regardless of whether it is accurate, complete, relevant or necessary for an investigation. There is no public guidance on quality controls for information” in the CIRS.

Third-party data mining tools

The data from the ATS and CIRS are then integrated into a master database known as the Analytical Framework for Intelligence (AFI). According to the DHS website, the AFI has big data mining tools that provide “enhanced search and analytical capabilities to identify, apprehend, and prosecute individuals who pose a potential law enforcement or security risk.”

The AFI database is used for a host of law enforcement purposes and the analytics and data mining tools that access it are provided by third party private entities. One of these firms, Palantir, is a longtime contracting partner of the government and previously provided services to the National Security Agency in a massive public surveillance program.

The report describes the way Palantir analytics tools take “personal information about people that Palantir ingests from disparate sources—such as airline reservations, cell phone records, financial documents, and social media — and combines [it] into a colorful graphic that purports to show software-generated linkages between crimes and people.”

Another private company called Babel Street provides software that specifically scans social media platforms. The Brennan Center report says that Babel Street’s precise role is unknown, but “CPB likely uses Babel Street’s web-based application Babel X, which is multilingual text-analytics platform that has access to more than 25 social media sites, including Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.”

What is the Department of Homeland Security?

Since its establishment on November 25, 2002 by then-President George W. Bush, DHS has grown into a massive state apparatus of thirteen operational and support agencies with 240,000 employees and an annual budget of more than $45 billion. Founded in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks—with overwhelming bipartisan support from the Democrats and Republicans—DHS reorganized the previously separate departments of the Customs Service, the Coast Guard and the US Secret Service under one office. It was the largest federal government reorganization since the end of World War II.

From the beginning, DHS was established as a domestic instrument for suppressing democratic rights in concert with the militarism and illegal wars fought by US imperialism in the Middle East and elsewhere. Among its primary functions is to carry through the mandate of the Patriot Act of 2001—also passed with overwhelming bipartisan support and renewed in 2011 by then-President Barak Obama—which sanctions a host of undemocratic measures, including indefinite detention and warrantless searches, wiretapping and electronic surveillance, all in the name of “national security.”

During the Trump administration, DHS has shifted focus away from “the war on terror” as it had been utilized over the previous fifteen years. With the reorientation of foreign policy toward the conflict with US rivals Russia and China, DHS has been redirected towards enforcing Trump’s racist Muslim refugee ban, policing the manufactured “crisis” at the southern border and cracking down on migrants seeking asylum in America.

Understood within this context, the inclusion of social media information gathering and analytics as part the repressive apparatus of DHS is entirely in line with the attack on democratic rights and increasingly xenophobic and authoritarian character of the Trump administration.

While organizations such as the Brennan Center, the Nation and the Intercept have brought to light the use of social media data by DHS and its affiliates, their objections are largely based on appeals to Democrats and Republicans in Washington, D.C. and the courts to stop it. These appeals are frequently combined with criticism of the “ineffective” nature of social media data gathering as a law enforcement methodology.

The use of social media data by DHS and other federal, state and local police agencies exposes as a sham the professed opposition of various Democratic and Republicans Party politicians to “privacy violations” by the social media and technology corporations. As long as social media information is being gathered and used secretly by the state, the parties of the ruling elite have no problem with such violations.

Behind the campaign against “fake news” on social media platforms—and the growing calls for a government break-up of all the big technology companies—is a drive to censor online political content. With workers and young people internationally using social media to plan, organize and coordinate a wave of demonstrations and strikes, the ruling elite is working on the one hand to subordinate all online content to its interests and on the other to spy on the political activity of the public in order to suppress growing social opposition to the capitalist order.

The violation of free speech and assembly rights by the intelligence and surveillance state cannot be fought by appeals to the capitalist political parties and politicians. The defense of basic democratic rights can only be mounted in a coordinated struggle of the working class internationally on the basis of the fight for socialism.

Four men charged with murder based on bogus MH-17 investigation

Clara Weiss

On June 19, the Joint Investigation Team (JIT) set up in 2014 to investigate the crash of the MH-17 Malaysian Airlines flight over East Ukraine on July 17, 2014, which resulted in 298 deaths, announced the criminal prosecution of four individuals for murder by the Public Prosecution Service of the Netherlands.

The four suspects—Igor Girkin, Sergey Dubinsky, Oleg Yuldashevich (all three Russian) and Leonid Kharchenko (a Ukrainian citizen)—were, and in some cases still are, active as leaders of the Russian-backed eastern Ukrainian separatists. They now face international arrest warrants and will be put on trial on March 9, 2020. Since the Netherlands cannot demand extradition from either Russia or Ukraine, it is likely that they will be tried and sentenced in absentia.

The four men, as well as the Russian government, maintain that they had no involvement whatsoever with the plane crash. Russian President Vladimir Putin reiterated Russia’s rejection of the JIT commission, saying at a “direct line” Q&A on Russian television on Friday that he “completely disagrees” with the evidence it put forward.

Malaysian President Mahathir Mohamad denounced the charges as politically motivated: “As far as we are concerned, we want proof of guilt. But so far, there is no proof. Only hearsay.”

The shooting down of the plane occurred at the height of the Ukraine crisis and civil war in 2014, triggered by the US- and German-backed coup in Kiev in 2014 led by fascist forces and sections of the Ukrainian oligarchy working closely with Washington and Berlin. The Ukrainian and the US governments, the EU and the international bourgeois media rushed to blame Russia for the downing of the plane before any purported evidence was even presented. It was exploited as a new “Gulf of Tonkin,” an unclear and dubious military incident that the imperialist powers could use as a pretext for war.

The MH-17 case has fallen out of the limelight in recent years. However, the military build-up against Russia, led by the US and NATO, and US-led economic warfare against the country have accelerated.

The announcement of the criminal prosecution last week came amid an escalation of both the Trump administration’s war preparations against Iran, which might trigger a direct conflict with Russia, and the Democratic Party’s ongoing campaign against Trump, focusing on his allegedly “soft” stance on Russia. It also comes amid growing conflicts between the European imperialist powers, especially Germany, and the United States, including over Russian gas supplies to Germany through the NordStream2 pipeline.

The Western bourgeois press latched upon the announcement, issuing a flood of commentaries, with the editorial board of the New York Times suggesting the plane’s downing was nothing less than “state-sponsored murder.” International media like Der Spiegel largely presented the JIT’s announcement and “findings” as facts to their readership.

The Washington Post wrote that “international investigators” had “worked diligently to uncover the truth” and were “peeling away Russia’s lies about the downed Malaysian Airlines flight.” The paper dismissed out of hand evidence of possible Ukrainian involvement presented by Russia as “fabricated.”

In reality, the JIT’s announcement of the criminal prosecution of these four men is based on old findings that have no credibility. The JIT investigation is heavily biased, and part of a massive campaign to exploit the tragic death of 298 people to escalate anti-Russia war preparations. In almost five years of this “investigation,” no proof of Russian state involvement has been presented, and significant evidence pointing to potential Ukrainian involvement has been deliberately suppressed.

The JIT’s “finding” that a Russian SA-11 BUK missile system was allegedly brought by the Russian army to the Russian-backed East Ukrainian separatists was continuously cited as “evidence” of Russian involvement.

A 2016 investigative report by journalist Robert Parry pointed to multiple gaps and contradictions in this version. The second piece of “evidence” are barely audible phone conversations, allegedly tapped from Russian military sources, suggesting that the SA-11 BUK missile system was deliberately delivered to the separatists. However, these phone conversations do not at any point explicitly refer to the missile system nor to transport across the Russian-Ukrainian border.

The fact that not only Russian but also US and Dutch intelligence have found evidence suggesting Ukrainian involvement has been completely omitted from the official press coverage.

In October 2015, the Dutch intelligence service MIVD determined that the only high-powered anti-aircraft missile systems in Eastern Ukraine that could have shot down the MH-17 at 33,000 feet belonged to the Ukrainian military.

An anonymous US intelligence analyst explained in 2015 that “definitive analysis pointed to a rogue Ukrainian operation implicating one of the pro-regime oligarchs.” Malayasian news media reported as early as August 2014 that American intelligence officials assumed that the plane had been shot down by a Ukrainian fighter jet. Russian military officials have also released radar data that seemed to show a Ukrainian Sukhoi-25 jet fighter trailing MH 17 at the time it was shot.

The JIT’s investigation’s primary aim has been to suppress and divert attention from any evidence suggesting Ukrainian rather than Russian involvement. Not a single report produced by the commission in the past five years has even tried to disprove the evidence pointing to Ukrainian military involvement in the shoot-down of the plane. They were simply ignored.

This is no coincidence. Contrary to how it is presented by the media, the JIT is not an independent body of “international investigators.” It includes representatives of the Dutch, Belgian, Malaysian and Ukrainian government and secret services. The Russian government has from the beginning been barred from participating in the investigations.

Though Ukraine should itself have been considered a suspect in any serious investigation, the JIT not only collaborated with Kiev, but also operated under an agreement allowing the Ukrainian government to veto the release of information. There could hardly be a more glaring conflict of interest.

The Ukrainian secret service (SBU), which was heavily involved in both the imperialist-backed fascist coup in Kiev in February 2014 and subsequent operation of far-right forces in the civil war, was Ukraine’s official representative on the JIT. It massively influenced the investigation.

An internal JIT report from 2016 said: “Since the first week of September 2014, investigating officers from The Netherlands and Australia have worked here [in Kiev]. They work in close cooperation here with the Security and Investigation Service of the Ukraine (SBU). Immediately after the crash, the SBU provided access to large numbers of tapped telephone conversations and other data. …At first rather formal, cooperation with the SBU became more and more flexible. ‘In particular because of the data analysis, we were able to prove our added value’, says [Dutch police official Gert] Van Doorn. ‘Since then, we notice in all kinds of ways that they deal with us in an open way. They share their questions with us and think along as much as they can.’”

It was the SBU, moreover, that supplied the phone intercepts and other material now universally cited as “evidence” of Russian involvement.

Despite these glaring contradictions and violations of proper investigative procedure, the “findings” and actions of the JIT are presented as credible, definitive “proof” of “Russian guilt.” This testifies yet again to the lengths the bourgeois media and Western imperialists are prepared to go in their criminal and dangerous campaign against Russia—a reckless campaign which could spark a war between the world’s two largest nuclear-armed powers.

Turkey’s ruling AKP defeated in re-run of İstanbul mayoral election

Ulas Atesci

On Sunday, voters in İstanbul went to the polls in a re-run of the March 31 municipal elections as demanded by the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). According to the state-run Anadolu Agency, the People’s Alliance between the AKP and the far-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) suffered a severe defeat. On Sunday evening, People’s Alliance candidate Binali Yıldırım issued a statement conceding the election.

Ekrem İmamoğlu, the candidate of the Nation Alliance between the Republican People’s Party (CHP) and the far-right Good Party (İYİ), backed by the Kurdish nationalist Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) and numerous pseudo-left groups, carried İstanbul. He won 54 percent of the 8.7 million valid votes, while AKP (People’s Alliance) candidate Yıldırım obtained 45 percent. Candidates from the Islamist Felicity Party and the Homeland Party as well as several independents also ran.

İmamoğlu won nearly 800,000 more votes than Yıldırım. This marked a substantial increase in the CHP-led alliance’s vote. In the initial March 31 election, it led by only 13,000 votes, after which the AKP challenged the results.

Sunday’s result was celebrated with demonstrations in the streets of İstanbul. It clearly represents a major blow to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s AKP government, showing growing discontent in the population. The AKP’s provocative cancellation of the March 31 result in İstanbul only provoked more opposition and increased anger against the national government.

The decision to re-run the İstanbul municipal election, taken by Turkey’s Supreme Election Council on May 6, was only the latest in a series of authoritarian actions by Erdoğan and his Islamist populist regime.

On April 17, seventeen days after the March 31 local elections, İmamoğlu received the mandate of the electoral authorities, officially making him mayor of Turkey’s largest city. But the following month, the YSK canceled the mayoral election on the grounds that some of those supervising the vote were not civil servants, as required by law. It did not, however, annul the other elections held at the same time as the mayoral race, including for the city’s various districts, most of which the AKP-led alliance carried.

Immediately after Yıldırım’s concession speech on Sunday, İmamoğlu gave a long speech on the results. Extending a friendly hand to Erdoğan, İmamoğlu said: “Mr. President, I am ready to work in harmony with you. I convey from here my request to meet with you as soon as possible.”

President Erdoğan subsequently tweeted his acceptance of the results, saying, “I congratulate Ekrem İmamoğlu, who won the election according to the unofficial results.”

MHP leader Devlet Bahçeli did not congratulate İmamoğlu, however, but declared, “Turkey should now return to its real agenda and end the election process.”

The AKP quickly accepted the election result, apparently calculating that it could not challenge growing popular anger by again overturning an election under conditions of growing economic crisis and war tensions. In the first İstanbul vote, Erdoğan’s AKP was clearly hostile to allowing a rival party to control the city, as it faces an explosive international situation with the threatened breakdown of the US-Turkish alliance, compounded by an eruption of class struggle.

Home to one-fifth of Turkey’s population and almost a third of its total economic output, İstanbul plays an outsized role in Turkish politics. Erdoğan’s own rise to power began with his election as the city’s mayor in 1994, and he and his supporters have controlled the city’s administration ever since. Erdoğan himself has repeatedly declared that İstanbul plays a decisive role in Turkish politics.

CHP leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu said, “Everyone who believes in democracy is proud of Turkey today. The whole world who believe in democracy are proud of Turkey.” He added, “The CHP is now the party of 82 million. It will work to solve the problems of 82 million. The CHP will not marginalize anyone, will respect their religion, ethnicity and social identity.” His ally Meral Akşener, chairwoman of the Good Party, congratulated İmamoğlu.

Despite direct calls from Abdullah Öcalan, the jailed leader of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), to be neutral in the İstanbul elections, the Kurdish-nationalist HDP supported İmamoğlu. HDP co-leader Sezai Temelli called on all parties to launch a “constitutional process” and “save the country from destruction created by polarized politics.”

Simone Kaslowski, the chair of Turkey’s leading business federation TÜSİAD, also tweeted congratulations to İmamoğlu.

Alper Tas, the leader of the petty-bourgeois Freedom and Solidarity Party (ÖDP), who had agreed to run for office in the Beyoğlu district of Istanbul with the support of the CHP and the far-right Good Party on March 31, shared a photo with İmamoğlu. In his Twitter account, he said, “It’s good to win.”

The AKP has reportedly lost in many districts in İstanbul. In the March 31 elections, it won 25 of İstanbul’s 39 districts. This time, however, it led in just nine. Moreover, İmamoğlu increased his vote by almost 600,000, or nine percentage points, compared to the March 31 election, while Yıldırım lost nearly 250,000 votes, or three percentage points.

While the Supreme Election Council’s decision to accede to Erdoğan’s demand for an election re-run was unpopular and widely opposed, it was not the only reason for the AKP’s debacle. There is a mounting discontent over the anti-democratic and increasingly authoritarian policies of the government. The election also took place amid an economic crisis in Turkey, which has seen inflation skyrocket and unemployment rise to 14.7 percent (nearly 25 percent among youth). The economy fell into recession in the fall of last year. Growing sections of the population recognize that the government has no solution to this crisis.

Masses of people are undoubtedly looking for a way out against the dead-end of the government’s policies. However, placing hopes in the CHP-led bourgeois opposition can only produce new disappointments for the working class and youth.

In the run-up to the June 23 election, President Erdoğan used all possible means to secure a victory, even appealing to Öcalan for support. Just two days before the election, Öcalan declared that he had called on the HDP to be neutral in the election. Erdoğan and MHP leader Bahçeli supported this call, asking Kurdish voters to act accordingly. But the government failed to maintain the support of either Kurdish or Turkish voters, indicating that the government crisis and social opposition among workers and youth will only escalate.

Punitive fines threaten whistleblower Chelsea Manning with bankruptcy

Oscar Grenfell

Last Thursday, lawyers for the courageous whistleblower Chelsea Manning issued a legal challenge to punitive fines that were imposed upon her by a federal district court judge last month. Her legal team has warned that the unprecedented financial penalties threaten her with imminent bankruptcy.

Manning has been imprisoned by the Trump administration since May 16 for refusing to give perjured testimony before a grand jury against WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange.

Her jailing is part of the attempt by the American government to railroad Assange into a US prison for his role in the exposure of war crimes and global diplomatic conspiracies. The British authorities have greenlighted hearings next February for Assange’s extradition to the US on 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act, carrying a maximum sentence of 170 years imprisonment.

Chelsea Manning [Credit: Sparrow Media]

In a ruling last month, Judge Anthony Trenga not only ordered that Manning be held in jail until she agreed to testify before the grand jury, he also imposed fines against her of $500 per day, beginning after one month’s imprisonment. The daily penalty will rise to $1,000 after she has been jailed for two months.

The sanctions came into effect on June 15, meaning that Manning has already been fined $5,000. Her official Twitter page, which is operated by her legal team and closest supporters, reported on June 20 that Manning had lost her apartment.

A subsequent Tweet stated: “She can pay the $500 daily fines for 11 days before she is flat broke.” In other words, if the fines are enforced, Manning will effectively be bankrupt this week.

On Thursday, Manning’s lawyers submitted a reply brief to propose guidelines for future hearings that will assess her capacity to pay the fines. Her legal team is seeking to table documents they say will demonstrate that as a result of her protracted persecution, Manning has virtually no money.

The whistleblower was prosecuted by the Obama administration for leaking US army and diplomatic documents and videos to WikiLeaks that exposed war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Washington’s global meddling operations. Manning was convicted in 2013 and held in prison until 2017, during which time she was subjected to treatment deemed as torture by United Nations experts and international rights organisations.

On March 8, 2019, Manning was held in contempt of court and sent to jail for refusing to participate in grand jury hearings aimed at concocting charges against Assange. She was released on May 9, when that grand jury’s term expired, but was immediately issued with a new subpoena and cruelly imprisoned a week later.

In a statement accompanying last week’s legal filling, Manning explained that, “The government, and maybe the general public, think that I have access to resources just because I am a public figure but that’s just not true. Making money has never been my priority.”

She defiantly concluded: “I do the work I do for the same reason I do everything: because I want to make a difference. Now, my work has been totally interrupted by my incarceration. I definitely feel the costs of these sanctions, but I never expected to have a comfortable life, and I would rather be in debt forever than betray my principles.”

According to the Sparrow Project, Manning’s lawyers will argue in future hearings over the financial penalties that she will be unable to pay the fines, because they are far greater than her current or potential net worth. They will also note that “it is unheard of for an individual to be hit with such heavy fines, particularly where the underlying matter involves no financial misconduct.”

Manning’s legal team will reportedly also argue that the fines, along with her imprisonment, are unlawful, because they will not coerce her to cooperate with the grand jury process.

Under existing anti-democratic legislation, fines and terms of imprisonment can only be imposed if there is a reasonable prospect that they will force a witness to testify. If there is not, they are deemed a punitive form of illegitimate punishment.

Last week’s legal challenge follows mounting questions over why Manning remains in prison, given that the US Justice Department has already unveiled its indictment against Assange.

Under existing British and US laws, individuals who are extradited from the UK to the US cannot be charged with additional crimes other than those included in the formal extradition request, or that were allegedly committed after the application had been issued.

In response to a motion by Manning’s legal team earlier this month for sanctions against her to be reconsidered, the US Justice Department stated on June 14 that “Manning’s testimony remains relevant and essential to an ongoing, investigation into charges or targets that are not included in the superseding indictment.”

The “superseding indictment” contains the publicly unveiled charges against Assange.

The response raises the prospect that the US is seeking to impose even further charges against Assange, other than those it has already revealed. Further counts against Assange could potentially carry a sentence of the death penalty. US authorities would have an interest in concealing such charges, to get around provisions banning extraditions from the UK on charges with a maximum sentence of capital punishment.

The response is also a warning that the US government may be preparing a broader legal assault on WikiLeaks, and those alleged to have assisted it, both in the United States and internationally.

The possibility that the Justice Department is preparing additional indictments targeting WikiLeaks collaborators was indicated by a report in the Associated Press on June 16. It revealed that US investigators had received permission from the Ecuadorian government to question Ola Bini, a Swedish programmer and personal friend of Assange, who was arrested on April 11 by the Ecuadorian regime of Lenin Moreno.

Bini was held for almost two months without charge or any evidence that he had committed a crime. He was released from prison last week but remains under investigation. US officials will reportedly seek to interrogate him in Quito this Thursday. Bini has stated that he has never been a member of WikiLeaks.

The WSWS International Editorial Board last week issued a statement calling for a Global Defence Committee to coordinate a worldwide campaign to prevent Assange’s extradition to the US, and to secure his and Manning’s complete freedom.

As part of this crucial struggle, the Socialist Equality Parties around the world have called meetings and rallies, including a series of protests in Australia beginning this Saturday.

The demonstrations, in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, will demand that the Australian government use its diplomatic and legal powers to block Assange’s dispatch to the US and ensure his return to Australia, with a guarantee against further political persecution.