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
- Submit Your Suggestions for EU's Embrace of Software Freedom by Tomorrow
- Time to leave GAFAM (US) hegemony behind
- Slopless Weekend
- This is not sustainable
- IBM Misleads and Gaslights Investors With Slop Sold as "AI" (the Business is Waning, Mass Layoffs Continue)
- People who do this are dishonest. They should not be put in charge.
- Why Microsoft Accenture Has So Many Layoffs in Recent Years
- The debt of Accenture doubled a year ago
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- Doing More Detailed Series (Long-Form Works)
- Long readings or book-like reading binges are only possible when parts are suitably labeled (name and numbers) if not interlinked
- Mobbing at the European Patent Office (EPO) - Part II - Racism, Cocaine Use and White-Collar Corruption
- When you hire people illegally, to work for cocaine users and keep quite about the cocaine use, what will be the impact on the reputation of an institution?
- A Can of WORMS - Part II - Darkening the Name of RMS, Associating It With Crime
- Beware projection tactics
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Sunday, February 01, 2026
- IRC logs for Sunday, February 01, 2026
- Gemini Links 01/02/2026: Fossil Heating Installations and Some FOSDEM Coverage
- Links for the day
- The State of Memory Leaks in GNU/Linux
- The issue won't be solved by adding more memory
- Links 01/02/2026: Nvidia's Jensen Talks Down Microsoft 'Open' 'Hey Hi' and Britain's Starmer Makes Friends With China, Japan
- Links for the day
- Links 01/02/2026: Public TV Gutted by Cheeto, Billionaires Fund a Cheeto Propaganda Movie in 'Documentary' Clothing
- Links for the day
- The New Site ("New Techrights", SSG Since 2023) Exceeds the Old Site in Requests
- The "New Techrights" gets about twice as many requests as the "old" (WordPress) "Techrights", the site of 2006-2023
- 20 Years Ago
- Some time soon all this slop frenzy will become like yesterday's "blockchain" or "metaverse"
- Gemini Links 01/02/2026: Zdzisław Beksiński and Disconnected Git Workflow
- Links for the day
- Talks About Nadella's Microsoft Exit After Chatter About Tim Crook Leaving Apple (Years Ahead of Retirement Age)
- Mass layoffs and record debt do not represent a company's health.
- We Still Cover the Same Problems We Spoke of 20 Years Ago
- We're not easily seduced by "novelty" (new things), we try to judge them critically
- Patents Standing in the Way
- They also cause environmental harm
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Saturday, January 31, 2026
- IRC logs for Saturday, January 31, 2026
- IBM, a Microsoft Company
- Microsoft and IBM as a pair go a long way back
- A Lot Less GAFAM in Scandinavia
- Are they reacting to geopolitics and risks from the US?
- IBM Kills Companies It Bought (Neudesic Seems Like Latest Casualty)
- Why isn't even a single publisher investigating those things?
- Fake "Linux" Articles
- Just because some platform has "Linux" in the domain name and/or site name does not imply that it is a news/Linux site
- Gemini Links 31/01/2026: "Proof Without Content" and "Technology Connections"
- Links for the day
- Links 31/01/2026: Microsoft "OpenAI Representatives Are Going to Critics’ Houses With Threats and Demands", Its Proprietary Chaffbot Faces More Lawsuits
- Links for the day
- Links 31/01/2026: "Introducing Encrypt It Already" and "Huge Cache of Epstein"
- Links for the day
- A Can of WORMS - Part I - Trying to Throw RMS Under the Bus at MIT and Everywhere Else
- This series won't give air to online 'trolls'
- Mobbing at the European Patent Office (EPO) - Part I - An Introduction
- When the series ends, some time around the second or third EPO strike of this year, we'll contact the relevant authorities and plead for intervention
- The Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) Delusion - Part I - Who Regulates This Regulator? (Only Itself!)
- We won't self-censor or prematurely terminate this series
- Norway Almost Trusts Russia More Than the Bill Gates (Sleeping With Young Russian Girls) Company, Microsoft
- Microsoft represents crime
- Riddle Us This... (Jim Zemlin and Bill Gates)
- Do these people even understand the literal meaning of "safe space"?
- Is "Nobel Prize for Peace" a Sick Person's 'Code Word' for Gangbanging Now? Ask Bill Gates.
- Watch all the Gates apologists getting all silenced/silent
- BBC Gaslights Women Sexually Exploited (Many Under Legal Age) for Its Rich Sponsor, Bill Epsteingate (Gates)
- Is this a national broadcaster or a propaganda tool "For Rent"?
- Microsoft 'Open' 'AI' Reportedly About to Become Bankrupt, Seeking Emergency Cash Infusion (Loans)
- the money promised to Microsoft 'Open' 'AI' failed to arrive
- Gemini Links 31/01/2026: Deep Ice and Slide Rules
- Links for the day
- Writing About Abuse
- Never ever allow misogynists to get their way if you strive to live in a decent society
- MIT DEDP MicroMasters online learner's blog post about cover-up linked to resignation of Swiss financial regulator
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Salary Erosion Procedure (SAP) as the Primary Reason for EPO Strikes
- They focus on financials, as the corruption aspects are un-sayable or unspeakable, except in private
- IBM Bluewashing: Feels Like IBM is Scuttling Neudesic (and Some of Red Hat)
- We recently saw some Red Hat staff joining a Microsoft proxy
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Friday, January 30, 2026
- IRC logs for Friday, January 30, 2026
- Microsoft Stock Collapsing Due to the Slop Bubble and Microsoft is Hiding Budget 'Black Holes'
- Microsoft does not perform like it tells "the media" and "the market"