Gag Order: Fired Employees vs. Foreign Workers

Posted on January 30, 2016January 30, 2016 by Denise Simon

Laid-off IT workers muzzled as H-1B debate heats up

ComputerWorld: IT workers are challenging the replacement of U.S. employees with foreign visa holders. Lawsuits are on the rise and workers are contacting lawmakers. Disney workers who lost their jobs on Jan. 30, 2015, are especially aggressive.

There’s a reason for this.

The Disney severance package offered to them did not include a non-disparagement clause, making it easier for laid-off workers to speak out. This is in contrast to the severance offered to Northeast Utility workers.

The utility, now known as Eversource Energy and based in Connecticut and Massachusetts, laid off approximately 200 IT employees in 2014 after contracting with two India-based offshore outsourcing firms. The employees contacted local media and lawmakers to pressure the utility to abandon its outsourcing plan.

Some of the utility’s IT employees had to train their foreign replacements. Failure to do so meant loss of severance. But an idea emerged to show workers’ disdain for what was happening: Small American flags were placed in cubicles and along the hallway in silent protest — flags that disappeared as the workers were terminated.

The utility employees left their jobs with a severance package that included this sentence: “Employee agrees that he/she shall make no statements to anyone, spoken or written, that would tend to disparage or discredit the Company or any of the Company’s officers, directors, employees, or agents.”

That clause has kept former Eversource employees from speaking out because of fears the utility will sue them if they say anything about their experience. The IT firms that Eversource uses, Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services, are major users of the H-1B visa.

But staying silent is difficult, especially after Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) co-sponsored legislation in January 2015 that would hike the 65,000 H-1B base cap hike to as high as 195,000. The measure, known as the I-Squared Act, left some of the former utility IT employees incredulous. They were far from alone.

The 200,000-member engineering association, IEEE-USA, said the I-Squared bill would “help destroy” the IT workforce with a flood of lower paid foreign workers.

Eventually, Blumenthal’s staff did learn, confidentially, about the experiences of former Eversource IT workers.

In November, Blumenthal co-sponsored new H-1B legislation by longtime program critics, Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), designed to prevent the replacement of U.S. workers by H-1B visa holders.

Nonetheless, Blumenthal remains a co-sponsor of the I-Squared Act, which raised questions among those laid off about his intentions.

“He is still co-sponsoring everything,” one former Connecticut utility worker said about Blumenthal. The worker asked not to be identified because of severance package limitations. “He is totally unbelievable.” Blumenthal was not immediately available for comment.

Leo Perrero, an IT worker at Disney who was laid off after training his foreign replacement, says non-disparagement agreements hinder the debate over the H-1B visa. Without such agreements, “you would have a lot more people speaking out – real human beings with real stories, not just anonymous persons speaking out,” said Perrero.

“Their freedom of speech is being taken away from them with the non-disparagement agreements,” he said.

The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee wanted to hear, last year, from IT employees who had been displaced by H-1B workers. It also wanted them to testify. It reached out nationally to affected employees, but had to settle for written testimony that was kept anonymous by the committee. The workers were too afraid to speak publicly.

In December, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), who is also the chairman of the Immigration subcommittee, and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), introduced an H-1B reform bill that includes a prohibition against non-disparagement clauses.

The bill “would prevent employers who seek access to the (H-1B) program from requiring American employees to sign so-called non-disclosure and non-disparagement agreements.” The agreements can prevent “American employees from discussing potential misuse of the program publicly.”

Non-disparagement clauses are common in severance agreements. But the Disney severance did not have one, and had no prohibition against any claims or lawsuits, said Sara Blackwell, an attorney representing former Disney IT workers. It is unclear why the company went this route.

Fear of jeopardizing new employment also keeps many displaced IT workers quiet. But lawsuits alleging discrimination and racketeering are being filed on behalf of displaced IT workers.

Brian Buchanan, a former Southern California Edison IT worker, is another who trained his foreign replacements. He is now part of a lawsuit alleging discrimination by Tata Consultancy Services, one of the IT services firms used by Edison. He is also included in a lawsuit challenging the U.S. government’s decision to allow spouses of some H-1B workers to seek employment. That lawsuit argues that the added workers will hurt the job market for U.S. workers.

Buchanan, who has contacted lawmakers about the impact of the H-1B programs, sees “little progress” in the past year. “Americans are going to have to act and they are going to have to act in mass, because we are fighting a huge, unseen force,” said Buchanan.

Eversource was asked about the non-disparagement agreement, and had this response: “These are private arrangements between affected employees and our company that were made more than two years ago during a period of transition and change in support of our merger. We have successfully moved on to form a new organization focused on providing superior service and value to our customers.”

But many IT workers hurt by offshore outsourcing have not been able to move on.

Former employees at Disney, Edison and Eversource tell of financial strains, tapped retirement funds and an inability to find a job, or to find one that pays close to what they once made.

Workers will say, anecdotally, that they know of many former co-workers who are now struggling. The H-1B workers tend to be younger, and the displaced ones, older, they say.

“It’s hard to start over at 50 when no one wants you,” said one former Edison IT worker. That worker is still searching for a job.

Obama Coming out of the Taqiyyah Closet?

Posted on January 30, 2016January 30, 2016 by Denise Simon

One of this mosques hosted speakers in December was Shaykh Hamzah wald Maqbul who gave a twisted sermon on Christians a year ago. It was also last year that Obama and his team met with Muslim Brotherhood leaders at the White House, some of whom were pronounced as unindicted coconspirators in the Holyland Foundation trial. It appears during Obama’s last year in his presidency he is finishing some items in his bucket list and you can bet he is holding talks during this mosque visit to encourage aggressive Muslim community action against Donald Trump and to promote Muslim refugee resettlement in America which has been highly contested in several states by governors and citizens.

Obama to make first visit of his presidency to a U.S. mosque next week

WaPo: President Obama takes a moment to show respect as he receives a tour by the Grand Imam Tan Sri Syaikh Ismail Muhammad, left, and Abdul Rashid Bin Md Isa, as he visits the National Mosque of Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on April 27, 2014. While Obaba has visited mosques overseas, he has never visited one in the United States during his presidency. (Larry Downing/ Reuters)

President Obama will make the first visit during his presidency to a U.S. mosque next week, the White House announced Saturday, as the administration tries to promote religious tolerance at a time when rhetoric linking Islam with terrorism is becoming more voluminous.

On Wednesday the president will visit the Islamic Society of Baltimore, a sprawling community center in the the city’s western suburbs, that serves thousands of people with a place of worship, a housing complex and schools, according to its website. It is one of the Mid-Atlantic region’s largest Muslim centers and describes itself as aspiring “to be the anchor of a growing Muslim community with diverse backgrounds, democratically governed, relating to one another with inclusiveness and tolerance, and interacting with neighbors in an Islamic exemplary manner.”

On Saturday, a White House official said in an e-mail that the president is making the visit: “to celebrate the contributions Muslim Americans make to our nation and reaffirm the importance of religious freedom to our way of life.

The President believes that one of our nation’s greatest strengths is our rich diversity and the very idea that Americans of different faiths and backgrounds can thrive together – that we’re all part of the same American family. As the President has said, Muslim Americans are our friends, and neighbors; our co-workers, and sports heroes – and our men and women in uniform defending our country.”

At the Islamic Society, the president will hold a round table with community members, the official said.

For years Muslim Americans have lobbied the president to visit a mosque in order to counter the perception that Islam is inextricably linked to terrorism.

The trip to Baltimore comes a month after several prominent Muslim Americans met with senior White House officials to discuss concerns about rising hostility toward people of their faith. During that session — attended by White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, Domestic Policy Council director Cecilia Muñoz and deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes — the Islamic leaders asked for Obama to visit a mosque, ideally with former president George W. Bush, as well.

Bush visited the Islamic Cultural Center of Washington D.C. six days after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, where he declared, “Islam is peace,” and “the face of terror is not the true faith of Islam.”

At a time when some leading Republican presidential candidates, including businessman Donald Trump, have suggested barring foreign Muslims from entering the country, Obama has taken pains to criticize rhetoric that stereotypes one faith group.

“When politicians insult Muslims, whether abroad or our fellow citizens, when a mosque is vandalized, or a kid bullied, that doesn’t make us safer,” Obama said during his State of the Union address earlier this month. “That’s not telling it like it is. It’s just wrong. It diminishes us in the eyes of the world. It makes it harder to achieve our goals. It betrays who we are as a country.”

It wasn’t immediately clear why the White House selected the Islamic Society in Baltimore, although it has been the subject of threats in recent months. Baltimore County beefed up security there last spring after it received two phone threats, one citing a bomb and the other from someone threatening to “spill Muslim blood,” CBS Baltimore reported at the time.

It also is the mosque of the family of Adnan Syed, whose conviction for murder drew huge global interest when his story was told through the radio podcast “Serial.” The series was made because of the activism of a friend of Syed’s family from the Islamic Society, Rabia Chaudry, a Greenbelt lawyer who advises law enforcement about Islam, the Baltimore Sun reported in 2014.

President Obama tours the Sultan Hassan Mosque in Cairo with then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on June 4, 2009. Obama arrived in Egypt on Thursday for high level meetings before delivering a much heralded speech to an audience at Cairo University. (Gerald Herbert/AP)

Obama has visited mosques overseas, but never one in this country while serving as president.

“I think it would be enormously comforting and also send powerful message to Americans about recommitting to religious freedom — especially if we had Bush and Obama visit together,” Farhana Khera, executive director of Muslim Advocates, a legal advocacy group, said last month when she met with the president’s aides.

Obama’s relationship with American Muslim has been complicated. They are among his most enthusiastic backers, but some feel he has not done enough to address their concerns at a time of social unrest.

He has shown support for Muslims overseas, including the 2009 “New Beginning” speech in Cairo before the Arab Spring, and he has drawn praise — and intense criticism from conservatives — for declining to connect Islam and terrorism.

However, concern about profiling and domestic surveillance at mosques has escalated under Obama, and some Muslim leaders expressed concern last year when he held a key summit about violent extremism that focused significantly on Muslim extremism.

And though Obama is a Christian, many Americans remain convinced he actually follows the Islamic faith. Recent polls show that 29 percent of Americans, and nearly 45 percent of Republicans, believe he is a Muslim.

Allies Hacked Israel’s Drone and Fighter Jet Feeds

Posted on January 29, 2016January 29, 2016 by Denise Simon

U.S. and Britain hacked into feeds from Israeli drones and fighter jets, according to report

WashingtonPost: The United States and Great Britain combined to hack into Israeli drone and fighter jet surveillance feeds as part of secret program that in part watched for a potential Israeli military strike against Iran, according to a new report published along with corresponding photos.

The Intercept reported that the secret program was called “Anarchist.” It was carried out by Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, and the National Security Agency from a mountaintop Royal Air Force base in Cyprus, according to the report.

“GCHQ files provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden include a series of ‘Anarchist snapshots’ — thumbnail images from videos recorded by drone cameras,” The Intercept reported. “The files also show location data mapping the flight paths of the aircraft. In essence, U.S. and British agencies stole a bird’s-eye view from the drones.”

An Israeli official downplayed the significance of the report on Friday, telling the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that the revelations weren’t “very dramatic.” Israeli military operations were not harmed in the process, the source told Haaretz, adding that “it goes without saying that foreign intelligence elements in the Middle East detect our operations, just like we detect the operations of other states in the region.”

Officials at the NSA couldn’t immediately be reached for comment, and have historically declined to comment on classified programs.

Anarchist was first started in 1998, according to The Intercept. It occasionally hacked into the feeds of drones operated by Syria and Hezbollah, but the bulk of the effort was focused on Israel, which has long had a complicated relationship with the United States when it comes to spying and intelligence collection. A summary of the CIA’s budget, also released by Snowden, notes that Israel is a “priority” target for U.S. counterintelligence operations. Although allies, the United States and Israel have a history of spying on one another.

Photographs from the program appear to show Israeli drones equipped with missiles. Israel has long declined to discuss the arming of any of its unmanned aircraft, saying they are used for surveillance and to mark targets so that fighter jets and others manned aircraft can carry out airstrikes.

A 2008 British military document quoted by The Intercept suggested the Anarchist program was “indispensable” for maintaining an understanding of Israeli military operations and gaining insight into possible future developments in the region.

“In times of crisis,” it said, “this access is critical and one of the only avenues to provide up to the minute information and support to U.S. and Allied operations in the area.”

Military technology experts do not consider hacking into a video feed from a manned jet or drone to be difficult. In 2009, for example, U.S. defense officials acknowledged in media reports that Iranian-backed militants in Iraq had used off-the-shelf software costing about $26 to hack the video feeds of Predator drones.

Air Force officials said that year that they were working toward encrypting all feeds by 2014. It is not clear if that has occurred.

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These and other images from Anarchist will be on view as part of Intercept co-founder Laura Poitras’ solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. The exhibition,Astro Noise, opens February 5.

On January 28, 2010, GCHQ analysts on Cyprus captured six minutes of video from what appears to be a Heron TP, a giant drone manufactured by the state-owned Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI).

In this snapshot still from the video, a large missile-shaped object is clearly visible on the left side. A GCHQ report mentions “regular collects of Heron TP carrying weapons” in 2009. A very similar image, likely from the same intercept, is named “Heron_TP_Payload.” The video is shot from the right-hand rear vertical stabilizer of the TP (this open-source videooffers a similar viewpoint).

Drone experts consulted byThe Intercept confirmed that the image shows a Heron TP.

“It certainly looks like the missile-shaped objects are weapons,” said Bill Sweetman, an editor at Aviation Week. “The bodies appear to have cruciform tail fins. The distortion makes it a bit to hard to tell size but — assuming they are bombs — these are definitely less than 500-pound class.” He added that because the Heron-TP is an Israeli strategic intelligence system, the objects could be decoys, used to “force a response from Iran’s air defenses, while the UAV orbits and hoovers up signals.”

This is another image taken from a Heron TP, intercepted on February 9, 2010. The Heron TP or Eitan (meaning “strong” or “steadfast”) has an 85-foot wingspan, can carry a 1-ton load, and can stay aloft for up to 36 hours. It has been described in the press as “the drone that can reach Iran.”

The image is blurred, but objects appear to be mounted under the wings. The GCHQ file notes that the signal was “too poor to process” further.

An IAI Heron, intercepted on April 26, 2009. “This is the standard IAI Heron, which can be recognized by the shape of the satellite communications radome,” said Sweetman.

Former U.S. drone pilots interviewed for this story told The Intercept that this view, showing the body of the aircraft, was a way of checking for ice or other problems.

This particular Heron seems to be modified to carry arms or other wing-mounted equipment such as sensors, but given the quality of the image, it is not entirely clear.

This is an IAI Searcher MK III, said Sweetman.The Searcher was developed in the 1980s, but is still used by the Israel Defense Forces and by a number of other countries.

This image was intercepted early on the morning of January 7, 2010. Based on the display markings like the dial in the upper right-hand corner, it appears to be from a drone made by the company Aeronautics. (This videofrom the manufacturer shows a similar view.) The image indicates that this model was equipped with Forward-Looking Infrared (FLIR) camera.

Unlike other Anarchist snapshots identified byThe Intercept, the video angles downward, and appears to show a view of buildings below.

A GCHQ document from 2010 reported that analysts on Cyprus had collected signals from Aeronautics’ Aerostar Tactical, a medium-sized drone that has been used by the Israeli military since 2000, and sold to countries from Poland toThailand.

This blurred image was recorded on August 25, 2009, the same day that news agencies reported that the IDF bombed a smuggler tunnel in Gaza, killing three Palestinians inside. According to an Anarchist document, the signal was “too poor to process” further.

This image is from a March 2008 internal NSA newsletter celebrating the successful capture of video from the cockpit of an Israeli F-16 during unrest in the Gaza Strip. The newsletter describes a “14-second long video” captured on January 3, 2008, which “showed an ‘unbroken line’ running through the targeting display, indicating that the target being tracked was on the ground.” On that same day, Israeli airstrikes and shelling from tanks reportedly killed nine people in Gaza.

The F-16 display was captured by operators of satellite surveillance systems at Menwith Hill, an important NSA site in England, working “closely with a GCHQ site in Cyprus for tip-offs.”

This image comes from a PowerPointpresentation and shows a video still from an Iranian-made Ababil III drone flying out of western Syria. The signal was captured by Anarchist analysts and recorded on March 11, 2012. Many more images and background are found here.

Source: http://defence.pk/threads/u-k-u-s-spy-program-hacked-into-video-feeds-on-israeli-drones-fighter-jets.419902/#ixzz3yg34WXj9

Obama Joins Europe Orders Labels on Israeli Products

Posted on January 28, 2016January 28, 2016 by Denise Simon

Obama Administration Orders Labeling of Israeli Goods

Memo directs ‘trade community’ to label Jewish goods

FreeBeacon: A memo issued earlier this month by the Obama administration directs the U.S. “trade community” and government partner agencies to explicitly label Israeli-made goods that have been produced in the West Bank.

The Jan. 23 directive states that it is “not acceptable” to label goods coming from Israeli companies in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as having been produced in “Israel.”

The order comes amid an effort by the European Union to label Israeli-made goods, a move the Israeli government called anti-Israel and that prominent anti-Semitism watchdog groups have condemned as among the worst incidents of anti-Semitism in 2015.

This is a shift from the administration’s previous position. A State Department spokesman told reporters in November that such labeling could be perceived as “a step on the way to a boycott” and said boycotts would be opposed by the administration.

But earlier this month, senior Obama administration officials defended the EU’s move and reaffirmed its position against “Israeli settlement activity.”

The new guidance references a decades-old administrative directive that sought to promote the import of Palestinian goods produced in the West Bank. The Obama administration is facing criticism for reinterpreting it and enforcing it to punish Israeli businesses.

The new memo, issued by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, is meant to “provide guidance to the trade community regarding the country of origin marking requirements for goods that are manufactured in the West Bank.”

Good produced in these areas are not to be labeled “with the words ‘Israel,’” according to the memo, which warns that inappropriate labeling will subject the products to “enforcement action” by Customs and Border Protection.

“Goods produced in the West Bank or Gaza Strip shall be marked as originating from ‘West Bank,’ ‘Gaza,’ ‘Gaza Strip,’ ‘West Bank/Gaza,’ ‘West Bank/Gaza Strip,’ ‘West Bank and Gaza,’ or ‘West Bank and Gaza Strip,’” according to the directive.

“It is not acceptable to mark the aforementioned goods with the words ‘Israel,’’ ‘Made in Israel,’ ‘Occupied Territories-Israel,’ or any variation thereof,” it states.

Goods that are erroneously marked as products of Israel will be subject to an enforcement action carried out by U.S. Customs and Border Protection,” the memo states. “Goods entering the United States must conform to the U.S. marking statute and regulations promulgated thereunder.”

Pro-Israel organizations have taken a firm stand against the explicit labeling of Jewish goods, with some viewing the latest memo as part of a larger effort to economically isolate Israel.

“This is an administration that slaps labels on Jewish goods on a Saturday and has the president give a Holocaust Remembrance speech the next Wednesday,” said Omri Ceren, a managing director at The Israel Project, an organization that promotes stronger U.S.-Israeli ties.

“It’s worse than incoherent. It needlessly alienates Israel at a time when the Middle East is falling apart and U.S. allies are looking for signals about whose side the administration is on,” he said.

A State Department official who spoke to the Washington Free Beacon on Thursday said that the department is aware of the new memo but does not view it as a shift in longstanding policy.

“We are aware that the U.S. Customs and Border Protection re-issued guidance on their marking requirements,” the official said. “There has been no change in policy or in our approach to enforcement of marking requirements.”

The latest guidance stands as a “restatement of previous requirements,” the official added. “CBP has made clear that it in no way supersedes prior rulings or regulations, nor does it impose additional requirements with respect to merchandise imported from the West Bank, Gaza Strip, or Israel.”

“Longstanding U.S. guidelines, dating to 1995, on country of origin product marking requires that products produced in the West Bank be marked as products of the West Bank, and products of Israel be marked as products of Israel,” the official explained.

Custom and Border Protection did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the memo.

By the Numbers: Muslim Opinions and Demographics

Posted on January 28, 2016January 28, 2016 by Denise Simon

By the Numbers is an honest and open discussion about Muslim opinions and demographics. Narrated by Raheel Raza, president of Muslims Facing Tomorrow, this short film is about the acceptance that radical Islam is a bigger problem than most politically correct governments and individuals are ready to admit. Is ISIS, the Islamic State, trying to penetrate the U.S. with the refugee influx? Are Muslims radicalized on U.S. soil? Are organizations such as CAIR, who purport to represent American Muslims accepting and liberal or radicalized with links to terror organizations?

The full document supporting the NUMBERS is found here.

• The main source of the numbers we used was the poll conducted by the Pew

Research center titled The World’s Muslims: Religion, Politics and Society. It is the

single largest and most reliable survey on Muslim attitudes around the world.

• The Pew Research Center did not survey the whole of the Muslim world. Muslims in

countries including Saudi Arabia, Iran, India and China were not surveyed.

According to their own numbers, Pew numerically surveyed only 67 percent of the

Muslim world. 1 Therefore, when we were computing averages and the like, we did

not use the number for the total Muslim population of the world (1.6 billion), but

rather the total population of the countries surveyed.