Another Day of High-Level Abuses: Microsoft Kinect a Target of Spooks, Apple-PRISM Allegations, Ukraine Interventions...
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2014-03-01 10:39:31 UTC
- Modified: 2014-03-01 10:39:31 UTC
Summary: News from the past 24 hours about British and US surveillance, assassination, and outside intervention in East Europe
NSA/GCHQ
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Nothing To Hide is an "anti-stealth game," in which you must carry cameras and spy gear to live in a world of self-surveillance and self-censorship. A world where you're made to be your own watchdog. Released for The Day We Fight Back, the game is now seeking crowdfunding to complete the open source game—10% of what's raised will first go to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Demand Progress, and the Freedom of the Press Foundation.
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Psssst! Wanna come in on a private satellite with me? They're available, and they cost about $2m a year to run, so it would need an awful lot of us to club together via Kickstarter or some such.George Clooney's got one. He trains it between Sudan and South Sudan, keeping a particular eye on the Hague-wanted president Omar al-Bashir, and uses the footage to draw attention to human rights violations. But in the wake of news that the Optic Nerve programme targeted and retained the webcam images of 1.8m UK internet users not suspected of wrongdoing, I'd like you to consider pointing ours somewhere pointed, such as the NSA or GCHQ. Just their car parks would do.
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THE MOST INTERESTING DEVICE shown at Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona this week was the secure Blackphone developed by Silent Circle and Geeksphone.
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"Whatever the level of cryptography you're using, the NSA can probably break into your home network, install keyloggers and grab whatever they want -- passwords, private PGP keys, screenshots, etc.," said Cyril Soler, a developer on the RetroShare project. "This is always easier than breaking the encryption." Their ability to do that is probably facilitated by backdoors.
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Levison was prohibited from discussing any details of the case until last October, when the court unsealed a portion of the documents. The unsealed records reveal that the FBI was demanding access to Lavabit's Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) keys, which would essentially allow the agency access to all messages on Lavabit's server. While the FBI was ostensibly targeting only a single user, Levison was unwilling to sacrifice the privacy of his other 400,000+ users.
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This year's RSA Conference began with controversy. Even before Chairman Art Coviello took the stage to deliver his opening keynote, protesters unfurled banners on the Moscone Center reminding the world of RSA's alleged complicity in enabling the NSA to access data that was believed to be secure.
However, after an interview with Coviello, we are no closer to any meaningful information as he does a skilful job of obfuscating and avoiding questions regarding the NSA.
Webcams
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Three senators condemn UK spy agency’s ‘breathtaking lack of respect’ over interception of Yahoo users’ webcam images
Microsoft
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G.C.H.Q. was apparently also interested in tapping into Microsoft’s Kinect.
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The Kinect for Xbox 360 was once considered for its potential use as a mass surveillance tool by the British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), according to documents published by The Guardian.
The GCHQ is the British equivalent to the United States' NSA.
The information comes from documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. They document a program entitled "Optic Nerve" that collected images of users through their webcams, including users of Yahoo chats between 2008 and 2010.
Messaging
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The instant messenger is still in the early planning stages, but Tor's developers seem to be preparing to turn it around quickly. The messenger will be built on Instantbird, an existing open-source messenger, and development will largely involve adding in Off-the-Record Messaging encryption, making it send its messages over Tor, and stripping it of some automated logging and reporting features. Tor hopes to have its first step of work on the messaging app completed by the end of March, but it doesn't draw a timeline for the project out from there.
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Tor, the team behind the world’s leading online anonymity service, is developing a new anonymous instant messenger client, according to documents produced at the Tor 2014 Winter Developers Meeting in Reykjavík, Iceland.
The Tor Instant Messaging Bundle (TIMB) is set to work with the open-source InstantBird messenger client in experimental builds released to the public by March 31, 2014. The developers aim to build in encrypted off-the-record chatting and then bundle the client with the general Tor Launcher in the following months.
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Sutton displays precisely the mind-set of the security state, that led GCHQ to intercept the webcam chats of 1.4 million completely random British people, in the hope of finding Islamic terrorists. (They didn’t find any terrorists, but they did look at over 100,000 people masturbating). Sutton states that Begg must be a terrorist because ”a convicted Groupe Islamique Armé (GIA) supporter identified as ‘D’ ” had used Begg’s bookshop. And he calls me “conspiratorial”! The poor man must see terrorists everywhere. The fact that Moazzam Begg is now detained again, had been detained for years, has had everything belonging to him searched microscopically, and nothing has ever been found to justify a criminal charge of any kind, means nothing to witchfinder Sutton. That anti-Muslim bigot is plainly convinced of Moazzam Begg’s guilt, though as he has not been charged, of what is unsure.
Simon Phipps on Spying
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Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp gains them almost half a billion users worth of telephone data
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Maybe there’s more to the Facebook acquisition of WhatsApp than just the centralised consolidation of users and user information that Simon denounced in his previous InfoWorld article . Perhaps this particular addition to their portfolio is Facebook’s move towards becoming the first truly global telco!
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Knowing we could be watched, as Jeremy Bentham observed, changes our behaviour; specifically, it chills our creativity. This in turn affects innovation and hence the economy. More directly, businesses (like RSA) are harmed by the disclosure of their for-profit collusion.
ORG
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Asking for comments and feedback on the code is a positive move, but the survey is not balanced to capture a variety of opinions. For example it asks whether the code explains the benefits of anonymisation, but not whether it explains the risks. And it doesn't.
Apple
[First, watch AOL
promoting the fiction that iMessage is secure. It's
not alone.]
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If you are an iPhone owner, you may have noticed that a minor security update to the iOS software that runs you device was “pushed” to all users by Apple last Friday. The original explanation from Apple was that an attacker “with a privileged network position” could capture or modify data.
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According to slide 6 in the leaked PowerPoint deck on NSA’s PRISM program, Apple was “added” in October 2012.
These three facts prove nothing; it’s purely circumstantial. But the shoe fits.
Sure would be interesting to know who added that spurious line of code to the file. Conspiratorially, one could suppose the NSA planted the bug, through an employee mole, perhaps. Innocuously, the Occam’s Razor explanation would be that this was an inadvertent error on the part of an Apple engineer. It looks like the sort of bug that could result from a merge gone bad, duplicating the goto fail; line.
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Twice now that Apple's bypassed Snow Leopard when it patched newer editions
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The critical iOS vulnerability that Apple patched last week is an excellent example. Look at the code. What caused the vulnerability is a single line of code: a second "goto fail;" statement. Since that statement isn't a conditional, it causes the whole procedure to terminate.
Alexander
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General Keith Alexander, the soon-to-be departed chief of the NSA, admitted Thursday in front of a congressional committee that the massive intelligence agency may be open to extracting less, or more targeted metadata from communication companies.
Classified documents leaked last summer by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that the intelligence agency currently compels at least three major telephone providers – Verizon, Sprint, and AT&T – to turn over call information on millions of Americans. Among that information, known as metadata, is the duration of the call, the time the call was made, who the phone call was to, and where it originated.
Ukraine and Intervention
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"Yats is the guy," said Obama's potty-mouthed Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, Victoria Nuland, in a recorded and widely disseminated discussion with the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine earlier this year. She was referring to Arseni Yatsenyuk, the former foreign and economics minister who was confirmed as the interim Prime Minister of Ukraine today.
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The very first act of the western-backed insurrectionists which represent a small percentage of the population and have managed to overthrow the government was to attempt rob Russian speakers in Ukraine of their language.
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Yanukovych is now in Russia and is expected to hold a news conference today. Meanwhile, the United States is rejecting claims that the change in power in Ukraine constitutes a coup. On Thursday, White House spokesperson Jay Carney said Yanukovych had "abdicated his responsibilities" and "undermined his legitimacy" by fleeing Kiev. Carney outlined U.S. plans to work with the new government.
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But the secretive agency is no newcomer to American combat zones. In Vietnam, a war without battle lines, it played a behind-the-scenes role in advancing American interests.
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Soon, intrepid journalists get wind of the operation and file Freedom of Information Act requests for more information. A CIA lawyer — operating under the cover name Walt Logan — thinks up a novel way to keep the mission secret without telling an all-out lie: refuse to confirm or deny whether records about the Glomar Explorer's mission exist. One journalist sues over this confusing non-response, and a battle over government secrecy follows in court.
[...]
There are limited circumstances in which a Glomar response may be necessary to protect veritable government secrets, but as I've written before in The New York Times (with Jameel Jaffer) and in the NYU Law Review, it has been deployed far beyond acceptable bounds. Perhaps most disturbing is the way the government uses Glomar to facilitate selective and misleading disclosures. Government officials often "leak" information to the press that paints controversial programs in a positive light on the condition that the press withholds their names. But when asked to officially release records under FOIA, those officials clam up and hide behind the Glomar response. The result is an absurd double standard, and our democracy suffers for it.
Civil Rights
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The interrogators told him he was under interrogation for publishing a picture of Jerusalem City Council Head, Nir Barkat, describing him as the “mayor of occupied Jerusalem”.
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Months after their conduct was discovered, two police officers were disciplined for making a game of stealing signs from homeless people in Midland, Texas — and many believe the cops’ punishment was not harsh enough to fit the offense.
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Moazzam Begg, a native-born British citizen of Pakistani descent, spent three years incarcerated in the most notorious detention camps created in the post-9/11 “War on Terror”: all without ever being charged with any crime.
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Britain’s citizenship deprivation processes may help obscure the Obama Administration’s willingness to kill and kidnap Britons.
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Five years into his presidency, it’s clear Obama failed to keep promises he claimed were at the heart of his approach to governance. We expected better.
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Idaho’s governor has signed a bill into law that makes it illegal for undercover investigators and whistleblowers to expose animal cruelty on factory farms and slaughterhouses.
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The Whist€ler, the new whis€tleblower sup€port net€work in the UK, recently held an inter€na€tional pre-launch in London.
The Whist€ler has been set up by Gavin Mac€Fa€dyen, Dir€ector of the Centre for Invest€ig€at€ive Journ€al€ism and Eileen Chubb of Com€pas€sion in Care.
Both, through their work, real€ise the heavy price that all whis€tleblowers from every sec€tor have to pay, not just pro€fes€sion€ally, but also socially, psy€cho€lo€gic€ally and also poten€tially leg€ally. And they want to help.
Drones
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Pakistani anti-drone activist Karim Khan was abducted February 5, just before he was due to travel to Europe to speak out about U.S. drone strikes. He joins us to describe how he was held for nine days. During that time he says he was repeatedly tortured and beaten. In 2009, a U.S. drone killed Khan’s brother and son. He joins us from London, where he traveled to to meet with British lawmakers to raise concerns about the U.S. drone program. "They attacked our mosques, they attacked our schools, they attacked our schoolchildren, they attacked our teachers," Khan says. "So everything is completely destroyed by these drone strikes." We also speak with Khan’s lawyer, Shahzad Akbar. "This is what the human face of the victim is, and it is important that the American people are told about who these people are," Akbar says. "They are being targeted in the name of national security, [but] what we see on the ground is that it is not really serving the national security interests of anyone."
Recent Techrights' Posts
- Who Asked Software in the Public Interest (SPI) for a Refund? ($100,000, Resulting in Losses of $267,201 in 12 Months, Highest-Ever Losses)
- The IRS does not reveal who or what's tied to this refund (or the cause/reason)
- "Cloud Computing" Was Always a Joke, But This Week Was the Punchline
- Maybe stop following tech trends and fashions
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- Slopwatch: Google News is Promoting Fake 'Articles' About Fake Xubuntu, Fake Articles About Replacing Windows With GNU/Linux
- The quality of the Web deteriorates and unless someone cleans up the mess, real sites will lose an incentive to produce anything
- When "AI Layoffs" Mean Layoffs Due to the "AI" Bubble Popping
- many people that are laid off by Microsoft claim to be specialists in "AI"
- Mysterious grant forfeited, $100,000 from Software in the Public Interest accounts 2023
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Evidence: bullying, student union behaviour: Armijn Hemel's FSFE resignation
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Evidence: psychological abuse, stalking, Galia Mancheva, Susanne Eiswirt ignored by FSFE judgment for Matthias Kirschner
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Helping FSFE scam victims and conference organisers
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Nigerian fraud in FSFE constitution
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Worrying and Amusing Stories of "Clown Computing" Gone Awry
- Many of these disasters could be avoided
- Some Large German Media Covers Richard Stallman's Talks in Germany Earlier This Week
- LLM-based chatbots are just "bullshit generators" (as he has long called them)
- Links 22/10/2025: Amazon Plans to Replace Workers With Robotics, AWS and Clown Computing in General Ridiculed
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 22/10/2025: Niri Completely Changes Multitasking and Overview of Diff-ers
- Links for the day
- Links 22/10/2025: Study on Misinformation by Slop and Heavily Debt-Sabbled Microsoft OpenAI (ClosedSlop) Uses "Browser" as Gimmick/Distraction
- Links for the day
- They've Already Spent Close to a Million Dollars on Lawyers and Sent Us About 50 KG of Legal Papers (Sponsored by Mysterious Third Party) to Try to Censor Techrights, Without Success
- They try to overcompensate with sheer volume for a lack of solid, clear arguments (we are the victims here)
- Trouble in Red Hat/IBM and a Retreat to Ponzi Economics in Search of Wall Street Market Heist
- Would you invest your life savings in this kind of crap?
- 12 Months Ago the 'Hulk Hogan of UEFI' Officially Went 'Tag-Team'
- We're actually sort of flattered or proud that such despicable people are so desperate to censor us
- "Cloud Computing" Does Not Mean Safety
- Fault tolerance is related to the notion of software freedom
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, October 21, 2025
- IRC logs for Tuesday, October 21, 2025
- The Fall of Windows: From Something to Nothing
- Of course Microsoft will pretend everything is fine and "just trust the hey hi" (AI)
- Sounds Like Fedora is Ready to Become Less of a Slave of Microsoft (GitHub)
- This seems like a belated move in a positive direction
- XBox is a Dead Microsoft Product in a Dying Industry
- It's probable that another wave of XBox layoffs is just over the horizon (maybe even before month's end)
- Progress on Techrights Site Search
- Fun times
- IBM's Bluewashing of Red Hat Means the Layoffs Are Silent, Barely Reported
- Don't wait to hear about "Red Hat layoffs"
- Gemini Links 21/10/2025: Happy Disconnection, AWS Falling Apart, Closing of Gemlog Blue
- Links for the day
- Full Audio of Today's Richard Stallman Talk in the Technical University of Munich
- Free/Libre software and freedom in the digital society
- Microsoft XBox is Just Vapourware (Promises of Hardware That Doesn't Exist), Real Products Perish
- just as developers lose interest in developing for XBox Microsoft is increasing the costs imposed upon them
- Slopwatch: Fake Articles (Slop) in "Linux" Clothing in Google News (Noise)
- all about what Google does
- Links 21/10/2025: Even "Inventor of Vibe Coding" Rejects Vibe Coding, USPTO Experiments With Slop in Examination
- Links for the day
- Richard Stallman Talk Now Available for Viewing (Archived Copy, Not Live-streamed)
- This recording is over 2 hours old
- Links 21/10/2025: AWS-Induced Chaos and Social Control Media Curbs
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 21/10/2025: Programming, StarGrid, Brand-New Palm OS Strategy Game in 2025, and Chatbot as Addiction Mechanisms
- Links for the day
- The African Lion and the American Cowards
- Safaris exist for people to watch and enjoy animals
- Amazon Web Shenanigans Perfectly Timed for Today's Talk by Richard Stallman
- Maybe listen to him instead of looking for excuses to ridicule the messenger
- Mission:Libre Has Taken Off (Project by Carmen Maris)
- there will be a lot more to report on next month (after the event)
- Techrights to Publish More EPO Leaks Next Week
- We're meanwhile also doing lots of work on search, whose interface now looks better
- Links 21/10/2025: 'The Lost Art' of Neon Signs and Twitter (X) to Enable Identity Theft (or Handle Theft) as a Service
- Links for the day
- Plagiarism With LLM Slop: Hindustan Times (HT Digital Streams Limited) Has Become a Slop Factory/Hub
- What a disgrace
- A radical proposal to keep your personal data safe, by Richard Stallman
- "The surveillance imposed on us today is worse than in the Soviet Union. We need laws to stop this data being collected in the first place"
- Next Week We Launch Search at Techrights
- We're planning to launch it some time next week. Maybe Tuesday, maybe Thursday.
- Talk by Richard Stallman Will be Live-streamed in Less Than 10 Hours
- Happy hacking
- "No Kings" in the Software World (GAFAM Should Not Exist, Either)
- "No Kings" is a good slogan. Let's start by ridding ourselves of masters, not only those who reside in DC or visit DC
- Every Morning
- Bugs/edge cases combined with automation can spell disaster
- Insane, Deliberately Dishonest, or Just Another Bigot?
- very intellectually-dishonest human being
- A Lot of Techrights is Built on Perl
- Perl also runs the sister site
- The Register MS Selling Slop for Microsoft (Vapourware, Ponzi Scheme, False Claims)
- What will be left of The Register MS if it keeps repeating falsehoods and looking to profit from Ponzi schemes?
- analytics.usa.gov Says Less Than 14% of Web Requests (to Government Sites) Come From Vista 11
- Vista 11 was released more than 4 years ago!
- People Who Attempt to Take Down Correct Information Need a Doctor a Day
- “Journalism is printing something that someone does not want printed. Everything else is public relations.” ― George Orwell
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Monday, October 20, 2025
- IRC logs for Monday, October 20, 2025
- Vista 11 is Sinking While Microsoft is PIPing (Mass Layoffs But Silent Layoffs)
- We're witnessing a shift in platform dominance
- Richard Stallman is Having a Good Week Already (Stallman Was Right About 'Clown Computing')
- That alone is worth bringing up in his talk
- An Update About Soylent News, With Jan Rinok "Back in the Saddle"
- Burnout or "near burnout" a possibility when having to curate abuse
- When Prominent GNU/Linux Distros Are Run by Spies
- What has Microsoft Canonical become?
- More Publishers and Companies Nowadays Say "GNU/Linux", Not "Linux"
- It's not to see InstallAware saying GNU/Linux this week
- Google News is Now Promoting a Parasitic Slopfarm Called "findarticles.com", Where Plagiarism of "Linux" Articles is Rampant
- Does Google even care about the slop epidemic? Google itself is a vendor of slop now (and it calls it "Gemini")
- Gemini Links 20/10/2025: Pumpkin Carving, "Hey Hi", and Other Buzzwords
- Links for the day
- Slopwatch: Google News Promoting Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt (FUD)
- What is the value of Google News if so many results in it are fake 'articles?
- Rejecting 'Snoop-Phones' and Turning "Old" Phones (or Tablets) Into Freedom-Respecting Appliances
- Paul Fernhout (pdfernhout.net) wrote back to Akira Urushibatathis this past weekend
- Our Uptime This Year Was Better Than AWS (Also a Lot Cheaper)
- We never used "the cloud"
- Amazon Web Shenanigans
- An ongoing, experimental endeavour
- Death of Elias Diem: FSFE mailing list archives hidden
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Links 20/10/2025: Louvre Museum Reveals Weakness, About 7 Million Protest US Turning Into Oligarchy/Monarchy
- Links for the day
- They Should Have Listened to Techrights Over a Month Earlier (Xubuntu Site Compromised)
- we reported this issue about 40 days earlier and nobody did anything about it
- Richard Stallman to Give Another Talk Today in Bavaria (Bavarian Academy of Science)
- Tomorrow at 6 PM he speaks in Munich
- Apple is the Company of Dictators and Worse
- Apple is just another greedy corporation in search of sweatshops and even pedophiles (especially the high-profile ones)
- Counting Unhatched Eggs Is Not Counting Chickens
- Everything here will persist as normal
- Barry Kauler Explains That Puppy Linux and EasyOS Exclude Systemd to Keep Things Simple
- Barry Kauler's Puppy Linux is in the community's hands. He now focuses on EasyOS and more.
- The "Infinite Bread"
- The biblical story of Jesus feeding the 5,000 has software parallels
- Half a Year After Brian Fagioli Got Kicked Out of BetaNews for Slop He's Still Doing LLM Slop and Slop Images Targeting 'Linux' (Plagiarising Original Works)
- If the Web gets polluted or flooded by slopfarms such as these, and Slashdot then sends traffic so these slopfarms (Slashdot probably doesn't do this intentionally), then real writers with real knowledge of GNU/Linux will lose the spark for publishing
- In Many Cases and in Many Different Ways, Technology Became Less Durable and Less Reliable Over Time
- The "modern" things are more complex. And complexity is a foe or reliability and repair-ability.
- Microsoft's LinkedIn is Losing Money, Traffic, and Hope; Now It Wants to Sell Its Users' Lifeblood (and Data)
- Let this be a reminder of what social control media really is about
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Sunday, October 19, 2025
- IRC logs for Sunday, October 19, 2025
- Campaign of FUD Against Framework Laptops and GNU/Linux (Using Microsoft's Attack on Linux, 'Secure Boot')
- Ritual Defamation Cult has turned its attention over to Framework
- Microsoft Lunduke: Freedom of Speech Means Spreading What I Have to Say and Banning People I Disagree With
- 4Chan is one he aims for and he is siccing 4Chan trolls at people he doesn't like
- Liberation From 'The Feed'
- They rank things based on the editor's choice/ideology (he or she knows the sponsors, hence the masters)
- Microsoft's Killing of Vista 10 Seems to Have Resulted in More Articles About GNU/Linux (But Also FUD)
- We not only saw a rise in traffic, we also saw a remarkable rise in the number of articles