NSA Watch: Climate as 'Terrorism', War on Journalism and Anonymity, Anger in Europe and Angry Birds
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2014-01-30 12:37:56 UTC
- Modified: 2014-01-30 12:37:56 UTC
Summary: A roundup of yesterday's and today's news about the NSA
New Leaks
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The document, with portions marked "top secret," indicates that the NSA was monitoring the communications of other countries ahead of the conference, and intended to continue doing so throughout the meeting. Posted on an internal NSA website on Dec. 7, 2009, the first day of the Copenhagen summit, it states that "analysts here at NSA, as well as our Second Party partners, will continue to provide policymakers with unique, timely, and valuable insights into key countries' preparations and goals for the conference, as well as the deliberations within countries on climate change policies and negotiation strategies."
Illegal Collection of 'Evidence'
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A man charged with aiding a terrorist organization has asked a U.S. court to throw out information collected by the National Security Agency, saying the NSA's surveillance of his Internet communications violates the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
Prosecuting Anonymisers
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In oral arguments heard on Tuesday, Lavabit and federal prosecutors each presented their cases in front of a three-judge panel at the Fourth US Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia. The case is an appeal of contempt-of-court charges against Lavabit, a now-defunct e-mail hosting service that once offered secure communication.
In the summer of 2013, Lavabit was ordered to provide real-time e-mail monitoring of one of its users, widely believed to be Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor-turned-leaker. When Lavabit told the feds that the only way it could hand over communications was through an internal process that would deliver results 60 days after any communication was sent, the authorities returned with a search warrant for Lavabit's SSL keys, which could decrypt the traffic of all of Lavabit's users. Ladar Levison, the CEO of Lavabit, handed over the SSL keys but then shut down his 10-year-old business rather than expose all of Lavabit's users.
War on Journalism
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James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, has issued a blistering condemnation of Edward Snowden, calling the surveillance disclosures published by the Guardian and other news outlets a “perfect storm” that would endanger American lives.
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Director of National Intelligence James Clapper urged former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and his “accomplices” to return leaked documents during a hearing on Wednesday.
Europe
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A former Ukrainian president warned on Wednesday that the country is now on “the brink of civil war,” and Russia added to the gloom by announcing the suspension of its financial aid package, which was all that had been keeping Ukraine solvent.
[...]
Protesters for weeks had suspected that the government was using location data from cellphones near the demonstration to pinpoint people for political profiling, and they received alarming confirmation when a court formally ordered a telephone company to hand over such data.
Earlier this month, protesters at a clash with riot police officers received text messages on their phones saying they had been “registered as a participant in a mass disturbance.”
Then, three cellphone companies — Kyivstar, MTS and Life — denied that they had provided the location data to the government or had sent the text messages. Kyivstar suggested that it was instead the work of a “pirate” cellphone tower set up in the area.
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Former employee of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Edward Snowden will be invited to the spring session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), APA’s Europe bureau reports.
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Chancellor says Germany and US still 'far apart' on sweeping surveillance and spying activities revealed by Edward Snowden
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Berlin and Washington are still "far apart" in their views on the US National Security Agency's (NSA) mass surveillance of Germany but they remain close allies, Chancellor Angela Merkel told parliament on Wednesday.
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The German government and the German Federal Intelligence Service are facing legal action because they allegedly aided the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) data collection program.
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THE EUROPEAN UNION JUSTICE COMMISSIONER has spoken out on Data Protection Day about national security agency surveillance.
US Politics
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Ever since leaked NSA documents first started popping up this summer, the battle against NSA surveillance has proceeded on multiple fronts: legislators pushing for new laws, journalists pushing for new stories, and tech companies fighting to regain users’ trust. Yesterday, one of the major fronts closed down. Since July, tech companies had been putting pressure on the Department of Justice, fighting for the right to say more about their interactions with law enforcement. Yesterday they made peace, reaching a settlement and withdrawing a class action suit that had drawn in some of the most powerful companies in America. On this front at least, reformers have likely gotten all they’re going to get.
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Senator Patrick Leahy questioned how the Constitution allows the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of U.S. telephone records and repeated his calls for President Barack Obama’s administration to end the program during a hearing Wednesday.
The Obama administration should heed the recent advice of the U.S. Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) and end the phone records collection program, said Leahy, a Vermont Democrat.
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The NSA's new data center in Utah has provided the flashpoint for legislation targeted at "nullifying" the agency by cutting off its access to public utilities and/or leveraging the powers granted to states to combat federal government overreach. An activist group known as The Tenth Amendment Center proposed a state law that would cut off the new data center's much needed water supply, along with any other public utility or service, like sanitation and road repair, in hopes of (at minimum) forcing the NSA to reconsider its collection tactics, or failing that, to find a new home.
Angry Birds
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Some users trying to access the www.angrybirds.com website late Tuesday were greeted by an image depicting the Angry Birds game characters accompanied by the text "Spying Birds." The U.S. National Security Agency's logo was also visible in the image.
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Reacting to recent revelations that smartphone apps such as Angry Birds and Google Maps are being used by the National Security Agency (NSA) and Britain’s Government Communications Headquarter (GCHQ) to spy on their users, the Application Developers Alliance has condemned the NSA for damaging the industry.
BBC
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When the Guardian and Washington Post newspapers published the first of Edward Snowden's NSA-GCHQ leaks in June, it unleashed a stream of abbreviations, acronyms and jargon describing the cyberspies' activities.
Recent Techrights' Posts
- If Matthias Kirschner Loves Free Software, He'll Change the Name of the Microsoft-Sponsored Organisation He Governs (in Order to Avoid Confusion)
- The FSF-EEE does not really like Software Freedom, it just loves money (including Microsoft's)
- EPO's Local Occupational Health, Safety and Ergonomics Committee (LOHSEC) in The Hague: Workers Are Getting Sicker, Conditions in Which to Assess Patent Applications Deteriorate
- "According to the Office statistics the total number of days of absence has gone up from 12.4 to 13.1 total number of sick days per Full Time Equivalent (FTE) from 2023 to 2024."
- The Standard Needs to Improve Its Standards for Fact-Checking, Aaron Swartz Had Nothing to Do With Reddit and He Detested the Company That Created It
- The Web is already bad enough as it is
- New Paper From the EPO Highlights Large-Scale Discrimination at the Office, Where People Are Rewarded for Granting More and More Illegal Patents
- Even the Kremlin is probably more competent than this
- The Ultimate and Inevitable Fall of OpenAI (Even Brave is 'Bigger' Now)
- "When you advertise at the Super Bowl, you’ve reached just about every consumer in America. It’s the last stop. If you’re not profitable yet, you never will be."
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- Scheduled Maintenance Tomorrow and on Valentines
- If the site (or Gemini capsule) is offline for a bit, the maintenance windows are likely the root cause
- Soylent News Lessens the Scope of Discussion Due to Persistent Trolling and Online Abuse
- if they make it a lot harder for new people to participate, then they limit the "general appeal" and reach
- When the Livestream of Richard Stallman is Apparently Bury-Brigaded Offline You Finally Learn to Avoid Google/YouTube for Streaming
- Please, people, stop uploading to Google/YouTube
- Links 10/02/2025: Ban on D.E.I. Language, Listeria Risk/Outbreak
- Links for the day
- Links 10/02/2025: Announcing "Stringless" and Mental Health Improvement
- Links for the day
- Links 10/02/2025: Facebook Mass Layoffs, "Meta" Did What Aaron Swartz Had Done But to the Tune of 81.7 Terabytes
- Links for the day
- Microsoft Tarnishing the Brand of Arch
- Of course Arch can do whatever it wants, but being associated with Microsoft is a badge of shame
- Adding Slop to Your Blog Only Makes One Assume All the Text is LLM Slop
- Simon Coter from Oracle has turned to slop
- Macao is Leaving Microsoft Behind
- Windows is falling to new all-time lows
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Sunday, February 09, 2025
- IRC logs for Sunday, February 09, 2025
- Microsoft's WSL (LSW) Shows That It Can Never Love Linux, Only Windows
- that's just how Microsoft rolls
- Activism in Times of War and a Coup
- 'Linux' Foundation works for fascism
- What the Silencing of Neatnik Tells Us About Linus Torvalds Inside a Microsoft-Dominated 'Linux' Foundation
- Is Linus Torvalds free to express his mind as he wishes about every topic, even just any technical topic?
- Windows Down to 11.35% in Senegal, as Measured by statCounter
- Another all-time low (Windows was at 99% in 2009)
- "Latest Technology News" in BetaNews is LLM Slop Promoting OOXML and Proprietary Software at the Expense of LibreOffice and OpenDocument Format (ODF)
- Remember that "open-source" and Open Source aren't the same; the former is fake
- Links 09/02/2025: Coffee, Toxic Productivity, and Programming
- Links for the day
- Debian's Human Rights violations & Swiss women Nazi symbolism
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Links 09/02/2025: Software Patents on MP3 and Another Scam Dressed Up as "Crypto"
- Links for the day
- Links 09/02/2025: Russian Energy Cut Off, LLM Pushers Show Signs of Desperation
- Links for the day
- Richard Stallman (RMS) Does Not Have Media Companies and Lobbyists on His Side, But His Message Spreads Regardless
- The message of RMS is spreading in spite of all the smears
- GNU/Linux Rises to All-Time High in Chile
- sharp rise for GNU/Linux in Chile
- Links 09/02/2025: Hottest January on Record, Panama Blackmailed
- Links for the day
- Why We Still Love Gemini Protocol
- Gemini Protocol may seem like something "old" (it's actually very new) and something "nobody would use", but many people use it
- Gemini Links 09/02/2025: "Died as a Mineral" and Game Interface for a Non-Game
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Saturday, February 08, 2025
- IRC logs for Saturday, February 08, 2025
- Links 08/02/2025: UK Back Doors and Religious Fundamentalists in Positions of Higher Power
- Links for the day
- Today's IBM (Red Hat) Isn't the Company That Fought a Microsoft-Sponsored SCO in Court
- IBM is nowadays in a state of rapid disintegration
- When You Simply Rebrand Almost Everything as "Hey Hi" ("AI"), "Hey Hi Workloads", "Hey Hi Datacentres" and Whatnot
- The "growth" has been a growing lie for years if not decades
- Microsoft Windows Falls to 12% in Myanmar
- Remember that Microsoft is virtually 0% in mobile
- This is the Man Who's Attacking Linus Torvalds et al in "a Disease" (Social Control Media)
- One thing that Richard M. Stallman and Torvalds can agree on is that Social Control Media should be avoided
- Gemini Links 08/02/2025: "Thought Leaders" and Returns to Gemini Protocol
- Links for the day
- Links 08/02/2025: MElon Coup, Mass Layoffs at Facebook, and PlayStation Network Down
- Links for the day
- Unlike GAFAM, Free Software Serves You, It Does Not Serve Governments and MElons (Overlapping Forces)
- Tired of oligarchy controlling your life through gadgets and "apps"?
- On Wars Against Founders
- We need to insist that founders remain
- When It Comes to Social Control Media, Linus Torvalds is Channeling Techrights
- GAFAM workers know exactly who to aim at
- New EPO Paper: Promoting (Rewarding) People Who Grant Many Illegal European Patents to Make More Money (at Europeans' Expense) While Patent Courts in the EU Are Themselves Illegal
- now the coup is sort of complete and even the "courts" are part of the corruption
- Slopwatch: Carnival of LLM Slop and FUD Spewed by Bots, Pasted in by MaKenna Hensley and Day
- Welcome to the Web in 2025. Articles about "Linux", "Security", and the Web (e.g. "Firefox") are fake.
- Links 08/02/2025: News Corp Admits Traffic Declines, Wildlife Trafficking Tackled
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 08/02/2025: Lamp and Notions
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Friday, February 07, 2025
- IRC logs for Friday, February 07, 2025