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
- 'Tech' Gimmicks Are for Advertising, Not for Usability
- In the case of Microsoft, they latched onto slop
- BetaNews Sacked Brian Fagioli and Deleted His Comments, But He Still Tries to Use the "BetaNews" Brand for Self-Affirmation
- Fagioli takes the work of other people
- [Meme] Hard to Be a Better Person?
- Sooner or later they'll realise that for each pound I spend they need to spend about 1,000 times more
- New US Editor for The Register is a Microsoft Booster
- "Avram Piltch has served as US editor for The Register since July 2025."
- Reda Demanded That FSF Removes Its Founder, Now Reda Works Directly for Microsoft
- A sellout and a traitor, first working for GAFAM, now Microsoft
- PCLinuxOS is Raising Money to Support Development After Fire Incident at the Host
- PCLinuxOS has not had announcements lately
- Over 3 Months Later Brett Wilson LLP Still Unable to Recruit a Media Lawyer?
- "Immediate start", but not found... still unfilled
- Microsoft is Trying to "Pull a Nokia" on GNU/Linux as Desktop/Laptop Platform
- We all remember that rather well, don't we?
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- Gemini Links 24/07/2025: Forgejo Woes and Smolnet Directory Week
- Links for the day
- Misinformation is Not Intelligence
- It's low-grade plagiarism and it fails to show any signs of intelligence
- Links 24/07/2025: Storage Tapes Still Kicking, Windows TCO 'on Steroids' (Microsoft-Induced Catastrophes)
- Links for the day
- Bobby Borisov (LinuxIac) Has Apparently Begun Experimenting With LLM Slop, So We Cannot Trust LinuxIac Anymore
- So did LinuxIac become a slopfarm? Maybe not yet, but it's getting there
- Informa TechTarget's ITProToday is Becoming a Slopfarm Generated by Microsoft Chatbots
- Busted.
- The LLM Con Artists Are Highly Destructive
- Who will ever be held accountable for this scam?
- Too Bribed by Microsoft to Move to Free Software?
- Microsoft lies and Microsoft bribery (in politics)
- Microsoft Hiring European Politicians is Another Form of Bribery; There Should be a European Investigation
- When Microsoft bribed people in Europe for OOXML (there's no denying this!) a European government delegate said that Microsoft operated like a cult
- Speed of the Site Should be Better Now
- The "bot attacks" impact the speed of the sister site too
- Getting More From AnalogNowhere
- Recently we used many images from AnalogNowhere
- Microsoft, Microsofters and 'Secure' Boot Shills Already Storming the LWN Report About Expiring Certificate, Shooting the Messenger
- LWN has clearly stuck a nerve
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, July 23, 2025
- IRC logs for Wednesday, July 23, 2025
- Disable "Secure" Boot Today (the Only Better Time to Do So Was Yesterday)
- Don't trust anything Red Hat tells you about security
- Links 23/07/2025: Windows Killed Company After 150+ Years, US Government Mimics Russia's Attacks on the Media
- Links for the day
- Freedom Generally Wins at the End, History Shows (But It's Constantly Attacked, Too)
- At the moment people realise "Linux" (e.g. Android) isn't enough to guarantee any freedoms
- “Inhumane” and “Disgusting” Mass Layoff Execution, According to Microsoft Staff
- The workers are looking for other places to work
- The Free Software Foundation (FSF) Has a New Slogan for Its 40th Anniversary
- The freedoms are what's most important
- LLM Slopfarms gbhackers.com, "Cyber Press" and CyberSecurityNews Are Drowning Google News (and Shame on Google for Feeding and Facilitating Them)
- All are run by the same people
- Links 23/07/2025: Droplets GUI Patent Monopoly Challenge, Nokia Leverages Illegal Patent Court Against Rivals
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 23/07/2025: Community in Geminispace and Challenges With Old Computers
- Links for the day
- Links 23/07/2025: Slop Patents Tackled, Slop Copyright Misuses Tackled by Politicians
- Links for the day
- Our Three Lawsuits Against Microsofters Are About to Become a Lot More Relevant to GNU/Linux
- The Master will easily understand why Garrett has been attacking me since 2012
- Links 23/07/2025: Retreating From Transparency on Jeffrey Epstein, We No Longer Have Press Freedom
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 23/07/2025: Piano and Food
- Links for the day
- New and Old
- On Ageism in Tech
- Slop Is Not Intelligence and It Does Not Enhance Productivity
- Like voice dictation, which cannot tell the difference between "sheet" and "shit"
- EPO Crimes Are Spreading to the British Court System
- Society is now paying the price for failing to tackle crimes at the EPO
- It's Time to Dump SharePoint and Here's What to Use Instead
- Nextcloud, ownCloud, Bookstack, MediaWiki, and MediaGoblin
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, July 22, 2025
- IRC logs for Tuesday, July 22, 2025
- Brett Wilson LLP Has Gone Silent
- Sometimes silence says more than nothing at all
- Slopwatch: LinuxSecurity, Planet Ubuntu, and LinuxTechLab
- some slopfarms show no remorse and they don't value their reputation at all
- Links 23/07/2025: Book Bans, Storms, and Kangaroo Court for Patents Commits More Unlawful Acts of Overreach
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 22/07/2025: Thinkpad and Pinephone
- Links for the day
- Links 22/07/2025: "Blog Restart" and Microsoft Clobbered by “ToolShell"
- Links for the day
- Global Warming and Global GAFAM Energy-Wasting
- Burn more money (borrowed, loans), then hope the waste will somehow translate into profit?
- No Compliance With the European Patent Convention (EPC) at the European Patent Office (EPO)
- It's about preventing competition against this autocracy
- Blue-Collar Trolls vs White-Collar Trolls
- Examples of white-collar trolls
- Apple Vision Pro Failed So Badly That Its Sales Are About 2,000 Times Smaller Than iPhone Sales
- What's left for Apple to offer other than hype?
- To Millions of People "Year of the Linux Desktop" Was Some Time in the 1990s (Bootable GNU/Linux as a Complete Operating System is Over 33 in Age)
- In some sense, "year of the Linux desktop" was 33 years ago
- Make No Assumptions (or Demands) About the Screen Resolution Used by Other People
- There are usability aspects, aside from accessibility aspects
- Why Wayland (and XWayland) Won't Solve the Key Problem It Proclaims to be Tackling (the Same Is True for Rust)
- The problem isn't Wayland per se but the false promises and efforts to force everybody to move to it whilst insulting or demonising everyone who won't play along
- They Don't Tell Us that 'Digitalisation' (Now Sold as "Hey Hi") Just Means Customers Become Unpaid Staff and Are Made Accountable
- People are being conditioned to associate technology with something undesirable, at times even unbearable
- Diplomatic Immunity Should Not Exist for Anybody
- The EPO in its current form gradually 'normalises' the end of European democracy
- Brett Wilson LLP Stopped Sending Me Papers When I Showed It had Sent Me Over 5 Kilograms of Legal Papers
- A week ago we lodged our third lawsuit
- Microsoft Mass Layoffs and Shutdowns Became the New Normal at Microsoft
- Microsoft mass layoffs became a topic of everyday media coverage since May
- Amazon Web Services (AWS) Has Layoffs and Microsoft Gaming/Entertainment Division Has an Uncertain Future
- it's good to see all those horrible things crashing and burning
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Monday, July 21, 2025
- IRC logs for Monday, July 21, 2025
- FSF "Raised Almost $139,000 During This Summer Campaign"
- "Thank you for making a stand against dystopia!"
- Gemini Links 22/07/2025: VPS Exploited and Fear of View
- Links for the day