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
- IBM Firings (or Silent Layoffs) After Bluewashing; "IBM’s Employment History is More Troubling Than its Patriotic Marketing Suggests"
- "It has zip to do with race but everything to do with the greed of the 1% who have been doing all they can to destroy the middle class..."
- “Week van de Werkstress” and Work-Related Stress at the EPO, Where Staff is Bullied Into Granting Illegal Patents for Foreign Monopolists
- "poor working environments, including discrimination and inequality, excessive workloads, low job control and job insecurity pose a risk to mental health"
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- Intercontinental Brigading - Part XXXXIV - Why the Swatting Failed
- After that we only ever heard from or spoke to cops when we invited them to our home to collect evidence
- “Concerned Microsoft Workers” Say “Working at Microsoft Has Become Joyless and Demoralizing.” (That's What Microsoft Wants, More Will Leave That Way)
- Many Microsoft employees are going to leave
- The Register MS is Losing Hundreds of Thousands of Pounds a Year While Directors Pay Themselves Hundreds of Thousands of Pounds a Year in Dividends
- they take money from slop pushers and have clearly compromised some journalistic standards in the process
- GNU/Linux Measured at 7.4% in the UK This Weekend: Clownflare Radar
- I hope that one day GNU/Linux will be everywhere here
- Never a One-Person Project
- Just because I'm the main "public face" of the site (who takes all the insults and SLAPPs) doesn't mean I deserve all the credit
- Digitalisation Is Not Inevitable or Unavoidable
- Nor inescapable
- “I Always Expect to Lose. I Fight Anyway, and Sometimes I Win.” — Richard Stallman
- To change the world meaningfully people must think big
- Stop Looking for News About "Layoffs", Layoffs Are Over (They've Been Rebranded)
- To properly assess the status quo we need other yardsticks
- Links 08/11/2026: Bosses Who Were Forcing Their Workers to Use Slop Change Mind, "Rapper RBX Files Ninth Circuit Appeal in Fraud-Focused Class Action Lawsuit Against Spotify"
- Links for the day
- Links 08/11/2026: Why Vikings Stayed in Iceland and "TikTok Accused Of Promoting Sex Industry To Young Girls"
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 08/11/2026: "Before Sunrise" and LLM Scrapers Versus Self-Hosting (or Web in General)
- Links for the day
- Intercontinental Brigading - Part XXXXIII - Weaponising Cops in Another Continent (Europe), Knowing They Cannot Come to Your Home in America, While Threatening Women
- This year it culminated in death threats
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Saturday, November 07, 2026
- IRC logs for Saturday, November 07, 2026
- The Decade Ahead, a Decade of Suppressed Stories
- Our stories aren't discouraged or considered taboo because of racism or "toxic politics" or anything like that; they just hurt powerful people and corporations
- Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) Inaction and Incompetence - Part V - "Reports Closed Without the Evidence Being Examined."
- Totally what the SRA did regarding Brett Wilson LLP
- Gemini Links 07/11/2026: Illusion Garden and Lagrange 2
- Links for the day
- Complexity is the Tyrant's Friend
- Slop is for feeble minds and cheaters
- Czech Republic: GNU/Linux Rises Above 5% in Desktops and Laptops
- A year ago it was somewhere around 4%
- EPO's Local Staff Committee The Hague Says Almost or About a Third of Staff Assembled to Organise at "a Time of Continued Social Unrest"
- They speak of "circa 850 staff members in attendance" (in The Netherlands there are about a couple thousand)
- Suggestions That XBox Will be Offloaded by Microsoft, Rather Than Shut Down, Make the False Assumption XBox is Profitable (It's Not, It's a Liability)
- Microsoft has serious financial troubles
- Which "Smart" "Phone", Which "Social" "Media", and Which "Cloud" "Storage"?
- Let's take back control of the language
- State of the (Linux) Slop, Late 2026 Edition
- Google News (Gulag Noise) is a plagiarism booster
- Year 21
- It's 5PM here
- Links 07/11/2026: "Flock Cameras Got Eviscerated by the Midterms" and Joshua Wong Shows China is Highly Repressive and Fully Controls Hong Kong
- Links for the day
- At The Register MS the Net Liabilities Doubled in One Year, Tangible Assets Down About 35% in One Year
- signed off in 2026
- Intercontinental Brigading - Part XXXXII - Running One's Mouth
- British Police told me "making a false complaint to police is a crime" in relation to Lozza
- Another 20 Years of Exposing Corruption
- We'll focus on carrying on what we do
- EPO Budget and Finance Committee (in Very Recent Meeting) Increases Bribes to People Who Vote on Campinos Reappointment ("Cooperation Activities")
- Buying 'elections' to protect the cocaine-stained regime in Europe's second-largest institution
- Links 07/11/2026: London's SLAPP Industry Now Targets Kirkenes (Northern Norway) at the Behest of Corrupt Thieves in Russia and Microsoft’s 'Buyout' Offer Crashes Microsoft Systems
- Links for the day
- Links 07/11/2026: "The Moon is Waning Crescent", Homeworlds, and "Can't Handle The AVIF!"
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Friday, November 06, 2026
- IRC logs for Friday, November 06, 2026
- IBM Compels Workers - Even at Red Hat - to Become "Retired-ish"
- Who needs RAs (layoffs, which have been rebranded as "buyouts" like pink slips are generous "gifts") when workers can have their butts kicked every day and WARN Act reporting thresholds are never approached?
- Links 06/11/2026: "XBox Is Closer Than Ever to Being Sold Off" and "BuzzFeed Stock in Free Fall"
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 06/11/2026: Dao and Dreams
- Links for the day
- 20 Years of Techrights
- Celebrating 2 decades of abuses of power being watched (and looking back at key changes)
- Linux (and Linus Torvalds) Sleepwalking Into a Binance-Level Catastrophe With Slop 'Code'
- Someone should ask Linus Torvalds or his boss (Linux Foundation) if they deem slop, which nobody audits, trustworthy enough to add to every computer out there running the Linux kernel
- Vitaly Orlov Weaponises Deep Pockets to Leverage High Court of Justice in London for Censorship and Punishment of Critics
- reproduced in full for more exposure and to make censorship harder
- Intercontinental Brigading - Part XXXXI - What I Told British Police About Lozza the Same Month Garrett Was Preparing His First Nastygram From 'Hired Guns' Brett Wilson LLP
- Lozza and Garrett
- Outsourcing at IBM
- Cheapening of the workforce is hardly a new problem
- The Register MS: Turnover Fell by Over a Million Pounds (About 20%) in One Year, Administrative Expenses Rose by Almost Half a Million Pounds, The Register MS Operates at a Loss
- This is not a (commercially) healthy publisher
- Links 06/11/2026: Slop "Companies Race to Lock Down Oil Clients" and Salon Shuts Down
- Links for the day
- Our Third Decade
- Our anniversary is tonight at midnight
- Freedom Is Not Free of Charge, Freedom Can be Very Expensive
- Being someone's "slave" is the "default" when no resistance exists
- Intercontinental Brigading - Part XXXX - Swatting by Proxy
- Using imbeciles who lie to cops and then dox cops (and already have arrest record and court documents wherein they admit being stoned in front of the cops)
- Intel Craters at Taxpayers' Expense (Bailouts for Failing Companies Simple Don't Work)
- GOP, which did this, has lost many seats
- Mass Layoffs at IBM, Also Outsourcing to India
- What IBM does to itself it is doing to other entities as well
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Thursday, November 05, 2026
- IRC logs for Thursday, November 05, 2026
- During Strikes and Industrial Actions Lots of EPO Staff Organised Yesterday and Will Do the Same Next Week
- There really needs to be a genuine election, not a reappointment
- Gemini Links 06/11/2026: Hadestown and "Where Has the Electronics Shop Gone?"
- Links for the day