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 Works for Microsoft
- Hours ago in IBM.com
- Microsoft May Already Be Shutting Down More Gaming Studios
- the writings are on the wall: XBox is in disarray.
- European Patent Office (EPO) Series: The EPO's Brussels Liaison Officer
- It would appear that in January 2020, Pellegrino was induced by Campinos to jump ship from the EUIPO and take up his current position as Brussels Liaison Officer for the EPO
- European Patent Office (EPO) Receiving Section (RS) and Elimination of Many Roles
- Open letter to Mr Rowan (VP1) and Mr Aledo Lopez (COO) [...] Does the EU leadership intend to tolerate this?
- Microsoft's XBox is Disintegrating, Executives Are Quitting
- We're basically witnessing the slow-motion "end of XBox"
- Gemini Links 15/06/2026: Slop Code Benchmarked, Wireguard on NixOS and Guix
- Links for the day
- Links 15/06/2026: More Own Goals for the Slop Industry, Palantir Trouble in UK
- Links for the day
- Apple Wants Everybody to Forget About "Vision Pro" Because It Was a Giant Flop
- worthless gadgets with no obvious use case/s
- The Cyber Show is Adopting 'Book Form' (or Long Form Publications)
- Andy and Helen nowadays invest more time in making their site faster
- Richard Stallman's Software Freedom/Digital Sovereignty Tour in Europe
- As things stand at present, the vast majority of people have their interactions controlled/policed by GAFAM
- Estimates of Scale of Microsoft Layoffs, Will Likely Happen "in Batches"
- "Heard 10 to 15 percent eventually but idk date."
- IBM Has Put Red Hat on a Poor Diet of Slop, Now Fedora and Red Hat Suffocate or Choke on It
- Over the weekend we saw more people leaving the company
- Estimates of Microsoft Layoffs: 3,000 Staff to be Culled Just in Gaming, How Many in Other Divisions?
- Now the XBox division has its own "fall guy", but it is a woman
- Straw Man Arguments Against Rust
- If anything, it teaches the importance of auditing packages
- Tesla Debt Rose Sharply, Sales Declined, Wall Street's Claim of Tesla "Value" is Merely a Fairytale (and Not Just Tesla)
- We would gladly sell land on Mars to anyone who honestly believes a company that loses money is somehow "worth" trillions in Wall Street
- Stop Calling Losses "Investment"
- XBox is losing money, it is a sinkhole
- For Justice We Need More Speech, Not Less Speech
- When you attack something you are just giving that something a bigger platform
- SLAPP Censorship - Part 107 Out of 200: Keeping Law Accessible to Everybody
- We'll have stories related to this in the future
- Links 15/06/2026: Slop "Beg Bounties", Wall Street Fakes 'Worth', and Arkansans Saved PBS
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 15/06/2026: Dating Oaks, Simulation, and Theremin
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Sunday, June 14, 2026
- IRC logs for Sunday, June 14, 2026
- Links 14/06/2026: Energy Cost and Reality Strikes at Heart of Slop Bubble, 75 Data Center Build-outs "Successfully Blocked"
- Links for the day
- Microsoft CEO Says XBox is Not a Sustainable Business
- "Now, we have to turn this into a sustainable business," he said about XBox
- MElon (MUSK, Elon) is a Trillionaire Like Penguins Are Mammals
- Have media outlets told the truth?
- Unlikely Heroes
- One personal hero who is not alive (anymore) is Navalny
- Bruce Schneier Was Probably Wrong About Slop
- Right now politicians who openly speak in favour of slop are committing "political suicide"
- SLAPP Censorship - Part 106 Out of 200: 100 Kilograms of Legal Papers
- When one party's communications and filings weigh at about 3 KG of paper and another's... at about 100 KG of paper
- Links 14/06/2026: More Google Layoffs, Wall Street Deems Companies That Lose Money "Worth" Trillions
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 14/06/2026: "The Universe is a Hologram", "Matrix Brain Download", and "Happy 0th Year"
- Links for the day
- European Patent Office (EPO) Series: Battistelli's "Baltic Crusader"
- Gilles Requena, Battistelli's erstwhile "Baltic Crusader" and the loyal servant of his successor Campinos
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Saturday, June 13, 2026
- IRC logs for Saturday, June 13, 2026
- Links 13/06/2026: University of Nottingham Confirms Data/System Breach, Courts Fuming at Fraudulent Lawyers Who Fling LLM Slop at Them
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 13/06/2026: World Cups and 做人
- Links for the day
- Microsoft's XBox "Bloodbath" Seems to Have Already Begun (Informally), Studios Allegedly to Face Shutdowns, Layoff Notices Handed Out, 100% Layoffs in Some Cases, 10% in Others or on Average
- So is a complete closure/shutdown imminent? (Compulsion Games in this case)
- Discussing Morale at IBM and Conversations Regarding IBM Layoffs (Disguised as Other Things)
- Trolling can be a form of censorship
- European Patent Office (EPO) Series: All the President's Men
- Gilles Requena,Patrice Pellegrino, and Sandro Mendonça
- SUEPO Elections Coming Up, Union Leaders at Europe's Second-Largest Institution (EPO) to be Determined Soon
- The staff union of the European Patent Office (SUEPO) is having an election soon
- SLAPP Censorship - Part 105 Out of 200: When Bad Legal Advice Results in Your Client, Dale Vince, Ordered to Pay £600k - or 801,930 United States Dollar (USD) - to the Person Frivolously Sued (Lord Bailey of Paddington)
- "A judge has ruled that Dale Vince must pay punitive costs to Lord Bailey of Paddington, the Tory peer, over the 'unexplained abandonment' of his" SLAPP
- How Long for Can American Taxpayers Justify Bailing Out Microsoft?
- How many times need the American taxpayers give Microsoft money for vapourware that's neither necessary nor delivered?
- IBM is Importing/Exporting Corporations' Regime of Censorship (Hiding the Wrongdoing) to Free Software Communities
- Is IBM protecting criminals in the name of "manners"?
- Links 13/06/2026: Microsoft’s XBox Crisis and "Apple Deepfakes"
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 13/06/2026: Why Humans Are Mostly Right Handed and "Getting Things Done"
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Friday, June 12, 2026
- IRC logs for Friday, June 12, 2026