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
- Microsoft XBox Layoffs: Almost 2,000 Layoffs Became "Over 2,000"? (Over 20% of the Staff)
- over 20% of staff will be let go, not counting staff that leaves voluntarily
- Summer Plans in Techrights and Elsewhere
- massive layoffs at Microsoft
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- EPO Presentation Bemoans Misuse of Slop in Decision-Making on Patents and in Classification (Which is Likely Illegal Too)
- We habitually mention failed use cases of LLMs on the Web
- Mass Layoffs at Microsoft Confirmed, "XBox Hardware Is Dead"
- It's possible that over 20% of the staff will be laid off
- Links 30/06/2025: Kyrgyzstan vs Media Freedom, Dalai Lama Succession
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 30/06/2025: Backend Programs in Gemini and Dynamic Content Without The Scripting
- Links for the day
- Links 30/06/2025: Zuckerberg’s Tax-Evading Scheme Harms Kids, US Copyright Office Lacks Leadership
- Links for the day
- Microsoft Isn't Laying Off Tens of Thousands to 'Invest' in Slop ('Hey Hi'), It's Laying Off Tens of Thousands Because It's Running Out of Money (and Willing Lenders)
- the layoffs are a sign of the business failing, not "hey hi" (whatever that is) replacing staff
- Intel Lays Off 20% of Its Workforce, Microsoft is Doing the Same This Year
- Like a yoyo, whatever goes up will come back down
- GNU/Linux Rises to New Highs in Angola, Africa in General is Abandoning Windows
- Western media barely covers Microsoft layoffs in Africa, but in recent years Microsoft culled the workforce and even shut down entire operations
- Destination Geminispace (in the Age of LLM Slop and Slop Images That Infest the Web and Social Control Media)
- Geminispace isn't vast, but at least it is - on average - a lot "cleaner"
- GNU/Linux Growing in Sierra Leone This Year
- Based on what statCounter is seeing, this year there are more and more people there who adopt GNU/Linux
- Serial Sloppers Gonna Slop
- More sites out there ought to call out the cheaters
- Quartz (qz.com) is Spam and a Slopfarm
- It used to be OK. Then they fired the staff.
- Links 30/06/2025: US Economic Woes, Extreme Heat
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Sunday, June 29, 2025
- IRC logs for Sunday, June 29, 2025
- Gemini Links 30/06/2025: "The AI Hype" and New AuraGem Ask
- Links for the day
- Our Desktops Are Not Your Experiments, X is Not an Experiment
- Breaking what already worked
- Microsoft's Big Lies Regarding This Week's Mass Layoffs Have Already Begun (and They're Already Being Spread by Slopfarms)
- Microsoft is the "market leader" in slop
- Explaining the Full Story of SLAPPs From Microsoft Staff
- For every action there is a reaction, for every attack there will be proportionate consequences
- The Openwashing Shills Initiative (OSI) - Part III: IRS and Status of OSI
- "They lied to the US IRS and there’s a paper trail"
- IBM Red Hat's Dogmatic Fanaticism Under a Thin Veil of "Modernism"
- IBM now has the audacity to paint people who don't agree as "nazis"
- Microsoft's Share in Guatemala Fell From 97% to 14%
- Eventually Microsoft will get stuck in a loop of layoffs, layoffs, and more layoffs
- They Made Technology Scary and Taught Us That It's Innocent, Friendly, Even "Social"
- Rejection of all this "apps" and "gadgets" and "Smart" (whatever that means!) status quo isn't a rejection of society
- The Media is Under Attacks Partly Because There's Little Other (Remaining) Press to Speak in Its Defence
- The biggest danger here is that when there's very little press or no "opposition media" left it becomes even easier to crush critics because there aren't many people left to speak about the matter
- If Your Web Site is Run by Bots, Eventually Nobody Will 'Read' It Except Bots (People Don't Want to Read Slop)
- Eventually people learn from mistakes
- Links 29/06/2025: Microsoft Releases False/Fake Benchmarks, "Google Wants You to Watch Ads or Take Surveys to Read Articles"
- Links for the day
- Links 29/06/2025: Data Breaches and Online Censorship
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 29/06/2025: "The Price Of Eggs" and Gemini 3D Tic Tac Toe
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Saturday, June 28, 2025
- IRC logs for Saturday, June 28, 2025
- The "News" You Saw About Canonical is Misleading, It Made Only 18 Million Dollars Last Year and Barely Paid Any Taxes
- Lies are the norm these days...
- Pushing Wayland Using Straw Man Arguments
- phoronix.com has long promoted the talking point of "Wayland people" (for at least a decade already)
- Australia: Windows Fell to All-Time Low, Even Lower Than iOS
- There's a good reason why next week there will be so many Microsoft layoffs
- Slopwatch: Linuxsecurity, WebProNews, and Google News Boosting Slopfarms as 'News'
- People who don't recognise the slopfarms and don't know which sites are fake would struggle to understand what's really going on
- Links 28/06/2025: Hardware/GPU Wars, GAFAM Throws Money (Borrowed Cash) at Hopeless Slop Pipe Dream
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 28/06/2025: Shellshock and Network UPS Tools
- Links for the day
- Links 28/06/2025: The Age of Integrity and FreeBSD Foundation Added John Baldwin as Board Member
- Links for the day
- Fedora 44
- IBM now does to Fedora what it did to RHEL
- Microsoft Already Shaved Off Costs Anywhere It Could. It Was Not Enough.
- Office and Windows aren't "selling" (licences) like they used to
- Scheduled Maintenance Next Week
- Our community is alive and well
- BetaNews: We're Publishing LLM Slop About LLM Slop
- Beta version of a slopfarm?
- 3-Month Updates on Our Complaint to the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA)
- In short, the complaint remains open, updated, and is advancing
- IBM Red States Hat (Project 2025): Our "New Thing" Replaces This "Old Thing"
- The new replaces the old. That's how IBM frames it.
- Start X
- Just because something is old does not mean it is bad
- Slopwatch: Linuxsecurity, Google News Slopfarms, and Linux Journal (LJ)
- Today we take a quick look at 3 slopfarms
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Friday, June 27, 2025
- IRC logs for Friday, June 27, 2025
- Links 28/06/2025: "CC Signals" Virtue-Signals to Slop Ponzi Schemes, North Korea Aims for Tourism
- Links for the day