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For Immediate Release
June, 12 2015, 03:15pm EDT
Contact:
Evan Greer, 978-852-6457, press@fightforthefuture.org
Statement on Defeat of Fast Track Trade Package in U.S. House of Representatives
WASHINGTON
Moments ago, the U.S. House of Representatives dealt a blow to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), Trade in Services Agreement (TISA), and other secret trade deals by overwhelmingly voting down a critical Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) provision linked to the fast track authority package. Under the rules for the fast track debate, the vote means that the current version of the "Fast Track" bill sent over by the Senate is dead, and it pushes future votes further into election season, putting the TPP and other secret agreements on shakier ground than ever before.
The House may reconsider the TAA vote next week in attempt to salvage the badly beaten Fast Track package, but a growing and politically diverse coalition stands ready to fight it going forward if necessary.
Fight for the Future, an Internet-freedom nonprofit best known for their role organizing massive online protests around SOPA, online privacy, and net neutrality, issued the following statement, which can be attributed to campaign director, Evan Greer:
"Today, the Internet wins again. The public has resoundingly rejected every attempt to limit our online freedom from SOPA to attacks on net neutrality. Today, Internet users around the world made their voices heard when Congress rejected an utterly broken and outdated trade negotiations process that has been abused for far too long to advance the interests of the largest industries at the expense of innovation and basic human rights.
Every month pro-Fast Track members of Congress have claimed that they would pass it and every month the overwhelming resistance from the public has forced them to abandon or delay their plans at the last minute. Trade Promotion Authority legislation will put us on a Fast Track to Internet censorship and decreased privacy, and would allow bureaucrats and lobbyists to make crucial decisions that impact the future of the Web in total secrecy.
Lobbyists from the MPAA and RIAA, the same folks that brought us Internet censorship bills like SOPA and PIPA and terrible trade agreements like ACTA, thought that the closed-door Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations would be the perfect place for them to push through extreme copyright provisions that could be devastating for online free speech and the startup economy.
Today, we can celebrate a victory over this secrecy, and prepare ourselves to continue fighting for a world where decisions that impact the Web are made with transparency and accountability."
Fight for the Future is a digital rights nonprofit that has driven more than 130,000 emails and more than 15,000 phone calls to Congress in recent months, rallied more than 7,500 websites for an online protest, and helped coordinate a letter to Congress from more than 250 tech companies expressing transparency and tech related concerns about Fast Track legislation.
The group made headlines in March when they flew a 30' blimp over several of Senator Ron Wyden's town hall meetings calling for him to "Save the Internet" by opposing Fast Track for the TPP, and then parked a Jumbotron on capitol hill to display the viral video they made about the stunt. More recently, Fight for the Future made a splash on the hill when they delivered actual rubber stamps to every house Republican's office with a mock letter from President Obama asking Congress to "please rubber stamp my secret trade agenda."
Fight for the Future works to defend the Internet as a free and open platform for expression and creativity, and is best known for their role organizing the massive online protests against SOPA, the Internet Slowdown for net neutrality, and the Reset The Net campaign for online privacy, which was endorsed by Edward Snowden.
Fight for the Future is a group of artists, engineers, activists, and technologists who have been behind the largest online protests in human history, channeling Internet outrage into political power to win public interest victories previously thought to be impossible. We fight for a future where technology liberates -- not oppresses -- us.
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Iran Says Trump Will Go Down as a 'Supreme War Criminal' If He Follows Through With Threat
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Iranian officials on Monday warned US President Donald Trump that his name will be "etched in history as a supreme war criminal" if he follows through with his threat to wage total war on Iran's civilian infrastructure, including bridges and power plants.
Kazem Gharibabadi, Iran's deputy foreign minister, wrote on social media following Trump's Easter-morning outburst that "threats to attack power plants and bridges (civilian infrastructure) constitute war crimes under Article 8(2)(b) of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court and Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions of 1977 (Article 52)."
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Absolute bombshell. Iran's Spokesperson Esmail Baghaei accuses the Trump administration of a criminal mindset and public incitement for genocide. Threatening a nation's critical infrastructure puts the entire population at risk. The White House has completely abandoned morality. pic.twitter.com/HcBZGZho5p
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But Trump on Sunday threatened an indiscriminate assault, telling Fox News that if the Iranians "don't make a deal and fast," he is "considering blowing everything up and taking the oil."
"You're going to see bridges and power plants dropping all over their country," the president said, setting a new deadline of 8 pm ET for the complete reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.
Trump's remarks came after he published a deranged post on his Truth Social platform demanding that Iran "open the Fuckin' Strait, you crazy bastards, or you'll be living in Hell."
Analysts and lawmakers in the US echoed Iranian officials' warnings that Trump's threatened attacks would constitute war crimes.
"Trump's advisers are telling him to hit civilian sites because it will cause unrest and potentially topple the regime. But just think about the insanity of this plan: kill tens of thousands of civilians in order to cause a national panic," US Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) wrote. "Bombing to induce political panic IS A WAR CRIME."
Dylan Williams, vice president for government affairs at the Center for International Policy, said that "any lawmaker who votes for supplemental funding for the war on Iran or against war powers resolutions to end it will be fully complicit in the war crimes threatened here, as well as those already committed by this unhinged and unfit Commander in Chief."
The US president's renewed threats came amid reports of a diplomatic effort, mediated in part by Pakistan, to enact a 45-day ceasefire to provide space for a lasting resolution to the war.
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President Donald Trump's Department of Health and Human Services and its office in charge of providing care for unaccompanied immigrant children have been named in a civil lawsuit alleging that a three-year-old was sexually abused after immigration officials separated her from her mother at the US border, while her father waited for months to be reunited with the child.
The girl crossed the border with her mother last September but was separated from her mother after the woman was charged with making false statements, according to The Associated Press. She was sent to the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), which operates under HHS and places children in foster or shelter settings.
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The process through which ORR releases children to the care of their parents or sponsors has grown more arduous under the Trump administration, and in the case of the three-year-old, she waited for five months in foster care while the government repeatedly told her father it couldn't make an appointment for him to be fingerprinted.
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The Trump administration has claimed its new restrictions for sponsors and family members seeking custody of their children who are in ORR's care have prevented traffickers from illegally bringing children into the US and have kept unaccompanied minors safe.
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The satellite firm Planet Labs told customers, including major news outlets, that it was acting on the Trump administration's request as it announced it was implementing "an indefinite withhold of imagery" in Iran and across the Middle Eastern countries where the widening conflict started by the US and Israel is unfolding.
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Planet Labs sent an email to journalists who have regularly used the company's satellite images to report on the US-Israeli bombing of Iran and Iran's retaliatory actions on Saturday, saying that after receiving a request from the US government, it was "moving to a managed access model... and releasing imagery on a case-by-case basis and for urgent, mission-critical requirements or in the public interest."
Washington Post reporter Evan Hill suggested the announcement would limit reporters' access to information from "one of the most important US-based commercial satellite imagery providers on whom most media outlets rely."
The announcement comes as Iran's military capabilities have reportedly exceeded US expectations, with US intelligence reporting Iran has retained many of its missile and mobile launchers and casting doubt on the Pentagon's claims that the US is severely diminishing Iran's missile stockpile.
The White House's request for a suspension of satellite imagery was the latest sign that "Trump’s war is going swimmingly," said podcast host Mark Ames sardonically.
It also coincided with multiple threats over the weekend from President Donald Trump, who said this coming Tuesday would be "Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one"—with increased attacks on Iran's civilian infrastructure unless Iran agrees to a deal on Monday.
A major bridge was destroyed by the US on Saturday, while Israeli forces bombed a significant petrochemical complex, reportedly sending pollution into the surrounding city. At least 13 people were killed in the two attacks combined. A projectile that struck the vicinity of the Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant also killed at least one person and raised concerns about a larger attack, which "could trigger a nuclear accident, with health impacts that would devastate generations," as World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.
Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch, said the Trump administration's demand for satellite images to be withheld "will make it much more difficult to monitor US-Israeli bombing there, which seems to be the point."
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