San Diego, U.S.A. – Skye Maritime, a new firm offering security and anti-piracy solutions for clients operating in war risk regions at sea, is beginning operations this month. The company, launched by two U.S. Armed Forces veterans, provides a specialized training and ethics based approach to security, employing teams of highly skilled professionals with backgrounds in the U.S. armed forces and law enforcement communities.

The firm helps clients by providing services aimed at understanding and predicting changes in pirate threat tactics, techniques and procedures. In-turn they offer protection to combat those threats, including detailed risk assessments, physical security consulting, and embedded armed teams. Their security professionals are carefully screened, receive extensive follow-on threat-based training, and deploy with superior insurance, weapons and equipment. Skye Maritime’s operations are centered on carefully vetted rules for the use of force and standard operating procedures supported by a 24/7 maritime operations center to ensure each mission is executed with extreme precision. Their procedures and credentials have been carefully vetted and approved by a major U.S. shipping company who now enlists Skye Maritime as an authorized service vendor.

“We are excited to offer our distinctive security services to our clients who are looking for reliable protection for their vessels, crew and cargo,” says Skye Maritime CEO Mike Slattery, who served with distinction in the Navy aboard the submarine USS Jimmy Carter conducting classified missions around the world. “We have carefully and purposefully spent the past year building our procedures and training our teams with extensive care and precision. We are confident our uniquely professional approach to maritime security will distinguish Skye Maritime as a highly trusted company that will bring our clients added value in very uncertain environments around the globe.”

Slattery has partnered with Alexander Martin, who serves as President of Skye Maritime, and is a former active duty Marine Corps Captain who led infantry, reconnaissance and special operations units in multiple combat deployments. Together they formed Skye Maritime, in part, to create full-time jobs for veterans with special operations and combat experience; specifically those who were born to lead, protect and serve. The firm operates under the standard that its in-house assessment, selection and training curriculum coupled with the seasoned combat professionals that go through each course best prepares its maritime security team members to make the right decisions in a complex maritime environment and enable them to more accurately identify credible threats and, in such a situation, react with discretion and restraint.

“While serving as the assault element leader of the counter-piracy operations raid force for Task Force 151 off the coast of Somalia, our unit embraced the understanding that what was ‘special’ about our special operations capability was that we didn’t shoot if we didn’t have to – that we would train harder and perform with a higher degree of professionalism and excellence so that we did not have to take any lives if at all possible. That was exactly what happened when we took back the Magellan Star from pirates in 2010,” explained Martin. “That very same ethos of restraint, discipline, excellence and dedication to our mission is the heartbeat of Skye Maritime.”

Based in Southern California, Skye Maritime is fully certified and licensed to move weapons and provide security services with governmental approvals from the United States and multiple countries at strategic embark/debark positions around the world.

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As the fight against internet censorship continues, the organization Fight for the Future has launched a new campaign in the wake of the victory over SOPA. In a recent press release, the non-profit is organizing a protest against the new creation of the pro-SOPA movement and they are once again asking the online society for help. The statement reads:

Together, we beat SOPA in a huge victory for internet freedom. But this Saturday, internet freedom protests are breaking out in over 200 cities across Europe.  Why?

Because the companies behind SOPA are using international trade agreements as a backdoor to pass SOPA-style laws

SOPA’s supporters are pushing two agreements: ACTA and TPP¹.  ACTA would criminalize users, encourage internet providers to spy on you, and make it easier for media companies to sue sites out of existence and jail their founders.  Sound familiar?  That’s right, ACTA is from the same playbook as SOPA, but global.  Plus it didn’t even have to pass through Congress².

TPP goes even farther than ACTA, and the process has been even more secretive and corrupt.  Last weekend (we wish this was a joke) trade negotiators partied with MPAA (pro-SOPA) lobbyists before secret negotiations in a Hollywood hotel, while public interest groups were barred from meeting in the same building.³

Trade agreements are a gaping loophole, a secretive backdoor track that–even though it creates new laws–is miles removed from democracy.  Trade negotiators are unelected and unaccountable, so these agreements have been very hard for internet rights groups to stop.

But now the tide is turning.  Fueled by the movement to stop SOPA, anti-ACTA protests are breaking out across the EU, which hasn’t ratified ACTA.  The protests are having an impact: leaders in Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia have backtracked on ACTA.⁴  Now a massive round of street protests in over 200 cities is planned for this Saturday February 11th.

We’re planning an online protest this Saturday to support the protests in the streets.  Why?  Because together we can drive millions of emails to key decision makers–and start tipping the scales like we did on SOPA.

Can you take part?  Click here to get the code to run on your site!

We just built an ACTA & TPP contact tool, and it’s not just a petition.   It’s code for your site that figures out the visitor’s country and lets them email all their Members of European Parliament–the politicians who will be voting on ACTA in June–or the trade negotiators behind TPP.  This direct contact between voters and their officials, driven by websites of all sizes, was instrumental in the fight against SOPA.

We can use the same tactics to defeat ACTA & TPP, but we need your help!

Support the street protests with a flood of emails to the officials responsible for ACTA & TPP.  Get the code for your website!

Don’t have a website?  Tell officials in your country to scrap ACTA & TPP!   And spread the word about Saturday’s protests! 

This is going to be tough fight.  But we need to make secretive trade agreements harder to pass than US law.  If we don’t, our internet’s future belongs to the lobbyists behind SOPA.

This is just the beginning,

–Holmes Wilson, Tiffiniy Cheng, Joshua Blount & the whole Fight for the Future team.

P.S. This map of ACTA street protests in Europe is amazing. The largest has almost 50,000 RSVP’s!

Image Courtesy of   http://www.flickr.com/photos/aseraphin/

The article Anti-SOPA Non-profit Launch New Protest Saturday appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.