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
- Network Plumbing
- We hope it'll help speed things up
- "My Hands Are Shaking While Writing" About IBM's Mass Layoffs at Red Hat (Bluewashing)
- Shame, shame, shame on the corporate media for not covering Red Hat's layoffs this year
- Taking a Look at the Last Articles of Bob Cringely at Forbes, They Were All About IBM and Its Collapse
- It's all about IBM
- What is "Computer Science"? It is What Broligarchs Reject.
- Nowadays some people call themselves informal terms or made-up titles (with terms like "AI" or "big data" or "data" tossed into the mix)
- Brigading Against Women - Part XXVII - Americans and Public Executions
- "People who work for Facebook / Xitter / Bytedance's Tiktok / Microsoft / Oracle / IBM / Apple / Uber / Lyft / Wolt / DoorDash / AirBnB / Bolt / and so on are doing some world-class projection when they have the audacity to call others Bad People(tm)"
- Gemini Links 12/10/2026: Westminster Quarters, Civilization, Luddites, and More
- Links for the day
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- Mass Layoffs at Microsoft Again (October 2026), So-Called 'AI' Units Impacted Because Slop ('AI') Has No Real Future
- So much for the future of Microsoft being "hey hi" (AI)
- European Readers, Please Contact Representatives (in One's Nation) Attending the Administrative Council Meeting
- Normalising cocaine in in Europe's largest institutions (the people running these) is a slippery slope
- For Half a Year the European Patent Office (EPO), Europe's Second-Largest Institution, Has Had Water Problems in the Toilets
- And it's not being fixed
- Intercontinental Brigading - Part I - The Failed Attempt to 'Swat' Our Series About the Attacks and Crimes Committed Against Us
- This coincided with threats to our lives
- Links 12/10/2026: Strike on Riyadh and GOP Pays Voters ("Surprise $90 Social Security Payments")
- Links for the day
- Microsoft's XBox CEO Spoke of a "Return to Growth" Last Week, But XBox Sales Lowest in XBox History (Quarter of a Century)
- Microsoft's XBox is dying. It's a countdown to nothingness.
- Links 12/10/2026: Shopify (Slop Booster) Has Security Issues, "Russia’s Yandex Says Data Center in Vladimir Shut Down After Drone Attack"
- Links for the day
- Microsoft Windows Causes Problems (and Delays) to LibreOffice and The Document Foundation
- Nothing would please Microsoft more than Windows curtailing the development of LibreOffice and adoption of ODF
- So Far This Year Microsoft Windows Lost a Lot of Ground in China, GNU/Linux Gaining at Its Expense
- GNU/Linux will soon exceed 10%
- Lessons of Margaret Hamilton (Software Engineer)
- Stop abetting men who attack women in the sciences
- RIP, Bob Cringely
- He was too young to leave us, his articles were still brilliant and his mind as lucid as ever
- Linus Torvalds Has a Conflict of Interest Regarding Slop
- Linus Torvalds is paid by the slop pushers
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Sunday, October 11, 2026
- IRC logs for Sunday, October 11, 2026
- Africa Sees GNU/Linux Exceeding 5% "Market Share"
- It wasn't always like this. It used to be measured at 1 or 2 percent.
- Slop-ware Is Not Newsworthy
- LLMs are exceptionally loquacious and create large code bases
- Links 11/10/2026: US Sides With Vladimir Putin, Convicted Felon Dubbed "Agent of a Foreign Power"
- Links for the day
- IRC Tracker Back in Order, Number of Known IRC Networks Continues to Increase
- We don't know if our article helped trigger a resolution
- Links 11/10/2026: "Execution TV" (Iran Aped by US) and ‘Digital Oblivion’ Caused by Slop Frenzy Online
- Links for the day
- Voice for the Impoverished
- the country's leaders attack the country's own press
- Gemini Links 11/10/2026: Adults Dressing Up as Animals, 44th Birthday, and More
- Links for the day
- Running a Country's Economy by Borrowing Over $400,000,000,000 Per Month
- This is the hallmark of an economy in irreversible decline
- Brigading Against Women - Part XXVI - Trying to Deplatform Critics of Microsoft's Restricted Boot
- Like James Bottomley, Matthew Garrett served Microsoft's agenda while employed and salaried by other companies
- Anderon Is Not a Real Company, It's an IBM Bailout Dressed Up or Wrapped Up In Buzzwords
- It certainly does seem like they receive money from taxpayers for nothing, or for IBM to do mass layoffs/closure at Albany under the guise of "making a new spinoff"...
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Saturday, October 10, 2026
- IRC logs for Saturday, October 10, 2026
- Gemini Links 10/10/2026: Radio Romania International, Avoiding GAFAM, Open Camera, and Another Palm
- Links for the day
- The 2026 Slop Prediction (Slopfarms Perishing)
- Morality in the "digital world" has deteriorated profoundly
- netsplit.de (Survey of IRC Networks and History) Only Partly Functional This Month
- Get well soon, netsplit.de
- Microsoft Cuts
- GAFAM enshittification
- NVIDIA Acts Like It Cannot Pay Salaries (Too Many Obligations, Sales in Circular Financing, or Basically Accounting Fraud)
- Masters of acting as clients of themselves
- Paying for elections, Reform UK illegal confession in High Court
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Contemptuous Law Firm Accusing Others of Contempt of Court
- Keeping a running tally can help
- Links 10/10/2026: Let's Encrypt Making Changes (Problem for Small Sites/Operations), Quartz is Officially a Slopfarm (Busted)
- Links for the day
- Microsoft Abuses PERM and Lays Off Workers in India
- The US government has made it easier for Microsoft to hide the mass layoffs
- The GAFAM Elections in the United States
- If the election is run by platforms that have back doors "baked-in" and if the communications are overseen by GAFAM, you would not have to be a "nutty MAGAt" to dispute the outcome
- More GAFAM Layoffs (Late on Friday Night)
- They say they are worth trillions, but they don't even make money
- Male-Dominated EPO Fails to Have "Concrete Measures to Support Female Staff"
- Being a female at the EPO is exceptionally hard
- Brigading Against Women - Part XXV - No Anonymity for People Who Did Illegal Things
- "Empathy is the sunlight to the vampire of culture."
- Production Freeze at the European Patent Office (Opposing Monarchy, Institutional Maladministration and Corruption)
- Eight reasons to participate
- Links 10/10/2026: Microsoft 'Open' 'AI' Silencing Critics, "Data Centres are the New Front Line in the Russia-Ukraine War"
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Friday, October 09, 2026
- IRC logs for Friday, October 09, 2026
- Gemini Links 10/10/2026: Optimism, Stargazing, "Life Without Smartphone", and Fairphone 4
- Links for the day