Israel to Recruit Students to Serve as Undercover Agents to Monitor Social Media

It is becoming extremely precarious to air views on Social Media or in any other platform like the mainstream medium of mobile phones with the continuous espionage network hovering around the earth surface massively coming from Washington and Tel Aviv. First it was Julian Assange in collaboration with Bradley Manning that revealed our vulnerability. Later, Edward Snowden came. This was even closely followed by the action of the Israeli students against perceived 'anti-semitism' in France in which twitter was sued.

Israel is set to recruit students to work undercover in "covert units" at universities. The students will post messages on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube on the Israeli government’s behalf – without identifying themselves as government agents. The students participating in the project will be part of the public diplomacy arm of Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu’s office. Leaders of the “covert units” will receive full scholarships in return for their online public diplomacy (hasbara).

The Prime Minister’s Office is looking to invest up to 3 million shekels ($840,000) to recruit, organize and fund the activities of hundreds of university students, Haaretz reported. Sources in the Prime Minister’s Office told the newspaper that the main subjects that the campus-based units will deal with are diplomatic- and security-related issues, efforts to combat boycotts of Israel, anti-Semitism and the de-legitimization of Israel. The students will focus on Israel’s democratic values, freedom of religion, pluralism and “other subjects that give expression to the Israeli government’s public diplomacy policy.”

A member of the Israeli Knesset, Dov Lipman, and the Prime Minister’s Office’s director for interactive media, Danny Seaman, revealed the new initiative during a meeting of the Knesset’s Diaspora Affairs Committee last month.

The Prime Minister’s Office is planning to have Israel's student union recruit up to 550 students with knowledge of foreign languages from Israel’s seven universities. The student union is to publicize the project among tens of thousands of students, and is to provide computers and work space for a project headquarters at all university campuses. “With social media, you can’t wait,” an unnamed official involved in the effort told the Jerusalem Post.

“We will get authoritative information out and make sure it goes viral,” the official said. “We won’t leave negative stories out there online without a response, and we will spread positive messages. What we are doing is revolutionary. We are putting public diplomacy in the hands of the public. The covert units will be set up at each university and structured in a semi-military fashion. While groups will take directions from staff at the Prime Minister’s Office, the government says that officially they will be politically independent.

“The idea requires that the state’s role not be highlighted and therefore it is necessary to insist on major involvement by the students themselves without any political link [or] affiliation,” Seaman said. Leaders of covert units will receive full scholarships from the Prime Minister’s Office, which will fund a total of 2.78 million shekels ($780,000) in scholarships for the program in the upcoming academic year, Haaretz reported.

“The national public diplomacy unit in the PMO places an emphasis on social network activity,” the Prime Minister’s Office said in a statement. “As part of this, a new pro-Israel public diplomacy infrastructure of students on Israeli campuses is being established that will assist in advancing and disseminating content on the social networks, particularly to international audiences.” According to details provided to Israeli media, a government liaison officer for Israel advocacy will oversee the dissemination of “rapid responses” from Israeli officials to respond to news events, and coordinate with other government bodies that deal with public diplomacy, including the Israeli Defense Force.

The IDF has recently asserted a stronger, at times controversial presence on social media with mixed results. The new program may well seek to address perceived deficiencies in the way that Israel communicates with the world online. "The perception dominating the online discourse was that the IDF had embarked on an unjustified attack,” said Tomer Simon, an Israeli researcher who studied social networking activity during the conflict.

Last year, during Israel’s eight-day Operation Pillar of Defense, an incursion launched into the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip in response to rocket attacks, the Palestinian group was widely seen as having won the war of words on online media. Haaretz reported that in the fallout of the military operation, the hashtag #GazaUnderAttack with 170,000 mentions easily surpassed Israel’s own #IsraelUnderFire, with a comparably meager 25,000 mentions.

RT

Latin American Countries to Recall Ambassadors from Selected European Countries

Leaders in Latin American took a very drastic decision in the wake of the mistreatment of one of their own by the symphatisers of the United States over the Snowden saga. The leaders are to summon the European ambassadors for countries who blocked their airspace to Bolivian President Evo Morales and demand an explanation. Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Venezuela, on Friday decided to call their representatives in Spain, France, Italy and Portugal for consultations.

Bolivia demanded apologies from the four European nations for the July 2 dramatic airspace blockade and detour to Vienna, when Morales' plane was blocked from entering the airspace above several countries. The president was flying home from a meeting of natural gas producers in Moscow.

European governments are believed to have acted on suspicions that fugitive US intelligence leaker Edward Snowden, who had been in diplomatic impasse in the Moscow airport, was on board the plane. The decision to take this stance was made during a summit of the Mercosur trade bloc. Bolivia is in the process of becoming a full member of Mercosur but is currently an associate.

"We emphatically reject the interception of telecommunications and espionage actions in our nations, as they constitute a violation of human rights, of the right of our citizens to privacy and information,'' Mercosur leaders said in the summit's final statement. "It's unacceptable behaviour that breaches our sovereignty and harms relations between nations."

The South American group also defended the right of asylum after Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua recently offered it to Snowden. Washington has put pressure on regional presidents to block Snowden from finding refuge in Latin America. "We repudiate any activity that could undermine the authority of States to grant and fully implement the right of asylum," the statement said.

"We reject any attempt in pressuring, harassment or criminalisation of a State over a country's sovereign right to grant asylum." Uruguayan Foreign Minister Luis Almagro said the four Mercosur trace bloc nations will recall their own ambassadors in the European countries involved for consultations over the incident. The actions of the four European countries were "unfounded, discriminatory and arbitrary, in a flagrant violation of the precepts of international law," Almagro said.

He said the summit found that Morales was subjected to "neo-colonial practices." "It is an incredible, unfriendly and hostile action that violates human rights and affects the freedom of transit and movement and the immunity that every head of state enjoys," Mercosur leaders concluded, according to Almagro.

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff said that the European actions were offensive to each of the leaders at the summit as Latin American presidents, and vowed "concrete and effective actions, be it with regard to the governments or the ambassadors of those countries." According to US National Security Agency (NSA) documents leaked by Snowden that the United States spied on many countries around the world including Mercosur members Brazil, Argentina and Venezuela.

Snowden was granted audience by Human Rights Watch in Moscow. He hinted that he would prefer to be in Russia where he is safe because of the hurdles of and dangers in flying to Latin America. He earlier wrote to 21 countries for asylum and has received no positive response. Wikileaks later revealed he wrote to additional six.

Reports from Moscow reveal Russia is yet to formally receive his asylum request. The Russian  President has expressed willingness in granting him asylum only to the extent that he stops the damaging act of revealing US secrets.

The White House, after Snowden's meeting with HRW, said Russia should not provide him with 'Propaganda Platform'. UN human rights chief, Navi Pillay in her first reaction on the Snowden imbroglio said the fiugitive NSA leaker is worth protecting and the world rejects US espionage act.

Nigeria, Boko Haram and Mali

Nigerian authorities arrested Mohammed Zangina , one of the ideologists of the terrorist group Boko Haram, accused of killing hundreds of people, CNN reports. The military spokesman was captured in the city of Maiduguru in the northeast of the country.

The terrorist group has killed more than 2,800 people, according to Human Rights Watch. Boko Haram has repeatedly attacked Nigerian villages and Christian churches in a campaign to impose strict Islamic law on Muslims in Nigeria.

The issue is not the arrests. Numerous have been reported including that of high profile politicians but nothing has come out of it. Everything we have successfully heard and witnessed are people walking freely in the so-called prisons and even in the society. Boko Haram suspects use mobile phones, eat perfectly well and still live like kings in the prisons.

None of them can be taken to court. When Boko Haram sneezes, Nigeria catches cold. Officials in government circles and among prison workers revealed that the fear of Boko Haram is the beginning of wisdom for Nigeria and the Jonathan administration.

With French involvement in Mali, more headache will be on for Nigeria because there could be a backlog of attacks. The insurgency can easily melt into Northern Nigeria and launch heinous attacks from there.