Weekend News: Surveillance, Drones, CIA, and Ukraine
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2014-03-10 09:29:54 UTC
- Modified: 2014-03-10 09:29:54 UTC
Summary: More weekend news (plus early Monday news) about issues scarcely covered in the wider media/press
NSA/Surveillance
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed two briefs on Friday challenging secret government demands for information known as National Security Letters (NSLs) with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The briefs—one filed on behalf of a telecom company and another for an Internet company—remain under seal because the government continues to insist that even identifying the companies involved might endanger national security.
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Has it only been 10 months since Edward Snowden's NSA revelations changed the world? Can you even remember what the world was like, before he gave 50,000 -- no, 200,000 -- no, wait, 2 million-- secret documents to Glenn Greenwald: smoking guns that exposed Washington's global surveillance state, which far outstripped the wildest, wettest dreams of the Stasi, of Stalin, yea of Orwell himself?
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Speaking over Skype from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, fugitive WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said his living situation is a bit like prison - with a more lenient visitor policy.
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We never knew the National Security Agency were such fans of the Master Sword.
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Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt wants you to know he's "pretty sure" your data is safe from surveillance.
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There are also other eras I could proclaim, the Era of Severe Money Troubles, since some of the surveillance is justified by lack of monetary responsibility, and the Era of Complacency, because of people not doing anything about the mounting surveillance when they could. I could even call this the Era of Cyber Warfare. But one thing at a time.
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National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden answered questions before the European Parliament on Friday, saying that the United States spy agency pressures its allies to take steps towards further enabling widespread and indiscriminate surveillance.
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We have seen how the NSA’s phony court system has acted as a substitute for genuine judicial review, allowing the NSA to build up precedents purporting to assist its constitutional claims. We have also seen that the NSA is able to obtain surveillance authorization through misrepresentations to the court, without any genuine consequence to the agency, even when discovered. In this Part, we now examine how the NSA shields its activities from review by the public court system, through the control of secret information that could be used as evidence against them.
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Addressing thousands of audience during a teleconference interview at South by Southwest, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said that Americans in exile were fast emerging as new age National security reporters.
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CHELSEA Manning is ‘happy’ and ‘doing well’, according to her Pembrokeshire family who travelled to the US last month.
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Julian Assange, who has been at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London since 2012 to avoid extradition, addressed attendees of SXSW via Skype, where the confirmed 'there is upcoming material' that will be released and made mention of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
Drones
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The idea of a killer robot, as a coalition of international human rights groups has dubbed the autonomous machines, conjures a humanoid Terminator-style robot. The humanoid robots Google recently bought are neat, but most machines being used or tested by national militaries are, for now, more like robotic weapons than robotic soldiers. Still, the line between useful weapons with some automated features and robot soldiers ready to kill can be disturbingly blurry.
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Will we rescue our character, our culture, and our Constitution from a sort of 9/11 P.T.S.D?
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As an adapter to the thinking of men of power, Obama was a quick study. It took him less than half a year as president to subscribe to Dick Cheney’s view on the need for the constant surveillance of all Americans. This had to be done for the sake of our own safety in a war without a visible end. The leading consideration here is that Obama, quite as much as George W. Bush, wants to be seen as having done everything possible to avoid the “next 9/11.” He cares far less about doing everything possible to uphold the Constitution (a word that seldom occurs in his speeches or writings). Nevertheless, if you ask him, he will be happy to declare his preference for a return to the state of civil liberties we enjoyed in the pre-2001 era. In the same way, he will order drone killings in secret and then give a speech in which he informs us that eventually this kind of killing must stop.
CIA
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A month later, at a meeting sponsored by Schwab Capital markets, CIA executive director "Buzzy" Krongard laid out for investors what such a war would entail. "[It] will be won in large measure by forces you do not know about, in actions you will not see and in ways you may not want to know about," he said.
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Investigators for the Senate Intelligence Committee, working in the basement of a C.I.A. facility in Northern Virginia, had obtained an internal agency review summarizing thousands of documents related to the agency’s detention and interrogation program. Parts of the C.I.A. report cast a particularly harsh light on the program, the same program the agency was in the midst of defending in a prolonged dispute with the intelligence committee.
Ukraine
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Foreign Minister Andriy Deshchysta on March 8th said the Ukraine is ready to negotiate with Russia “at any level” over the Crimea issue, the move followed announcements by India and China that they were officially backing Russia’ right to intervene in the Crimea. Deshchysta added that international mediation efforts over the issue have made some small steps forward, including progress in efforts to establish a contact group. He also said the mediation group membership had yet to be settled, and progress is fragile. But with over a third of the world’s population backing Russia, the Ukrainian Crisis is over.
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Double standards are on display as Western leaders attack Russia regarding Ukraine, while they themselves commit or endorse worse aggression on other countries.
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In her March, 2011 testimony before Congress, Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, lamented that the US propaganda mill was losing ground to its rivals for lack of funding. In an informal interview she went further, stating that when abroad she got her news from RT, since CNN had become obsessed with celebrity trials and failed to cover international developments. So the US Secretary of State declared publicly that her most trusted news source was....(drum roll ) Russia Today .
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As the Euromaidan protests in the Ukrainian capitol of Kiev culminated this week, displays of open fascism and neo-Nazi extremism became too glaring to ignore. Since demonstrators filled the downtown square to battle Ukrainian riot police and demand the ouster of the corruption-stained, pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovich, it has been filled with far-right streetfighting men pledging to defend their country’s ethnic purity.
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The Russian invasion of Crimea occurred in a place little known to Americans, for reasons rooted in a tangled and bloody history. The showdown between President Vladimir Putin and the new Ukrainian government is a fight about tangible matters of intense mutual interest.
But many Americans can't address international crises without sounding like a Toby Keith song: "I Wanna Talk About Me."
Recent Techrights' Posts
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- Maybe this coming Monday Microsoft will come up with more false promises and vapourware
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- When the only remaining proponents of slop are slop, which is pretty much what's happening right now, the bubble is popping
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- Europe's largest media intentionally covers up serious scandals in Europe's second-largest institution
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- this is the desirable thing
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- The proprietary software boosters are projecting
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- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
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- IRC logs for Thursday, January 01, 2026
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- Gerstner is still alive, but he's shorter and more arrogant
- Designing a Better Mousetrap or Tools for the SSG
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- Links for the day
- Firefox is Toast Because It Got Toasted by Mozilla
- Firefox cannot keep above 2% and hasn't been able to for quite some time
- Ignore the LLM Slop and the Noise, Microsoft is in a Death Spiral
- So what does Microsoft have left to sell?
- Red Hat is Vanishing Before Our Eyes
- With some Red Hat staff "transitioning" we wonder if it's an HR hack, wherein they "reset the clock" on employment duration so as to lessen severance obligations
- In 2025 Microsoft Lost Palau
- Palau now has GNU/Linux at steadily high levels
- Microsoft Mocked UNIX/Linux for Not Handling Dates After 2038, Microsoft Breaks Down on 2026!
- Only a truly moronic company would design it that way
- Another New Year's Resolution: Public Domain Sources, Credits
- In addition to our first one
- Combatting Slop Images (and ClownFlare)
- we won't use or reuse slop images
- The End of Red Hat
- expect many more layoffs soon
- A New Year's Resolution: Maximal Transparency
- We'll do our very best to be transparent about everything that's going on, even legal matters
- Gemini Links 01/01/2026: 2025 Comes to a Close and Capsular Gemlog Manager
- Links for the day
- Free Software Foundation (FSF) Raised About 1.3 Million Dollars in the Past Couple of Months!
- the FSF's Board now has 10 people in it
- 2026 IBM Phaseout of Red Hat
- Red Hat won't fare any better than most IBM acquisitions
- Microsoft Budget Issues, XBox Thrown Under the Bus
- They're cutting budget. Soon they'll cut the staff.
- Only Hours Into the New Year People Already Discuss the Next Round of Layoffs at Red Hat/IBM
- 2026 will be another tough year for Red Hat and IBM
- EPO People Power - Part XXI - Europe's Second-Largest Institution Became a Corrupt For-Profit Company Run by Drug Addicts
- it'll be the demise of the Rule of Law in Europe and maybe a death blow to the EU (eventually), not just the EPO
- Another Very Productive Year Commences
- "a total of over 17,000 pages in a year"
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
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- IRC logs for Wednesday, December 31, 2025
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- It's not as small as people are led to believe
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- Links for the day
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- In a sense, social control media is a giant delusion
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- statCounter sees a gradual demise in Social Control Media access
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- Why should we favour paper use sometimes? Well, many reasons.
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- "Initially confined to single-tasking on 8-bit processors and no more than 64 kilobytes of memory"
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- we reckon that Google will eventually delist all slopfarms, recognising they're just a form of SPAM
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- Links for the day
- Enshittification of Postal Services Isn't Technological Advancement
- Societies that say the aim is to "go digital" and eliminate paper trail aren't advanced; they're moving backwards
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- People who get bluewashed out of their job (or bluewashed into unemployment) are gagged by NDAs
- XBox is Likely Dead Already, But the Threat It Posed to Us All for Two Decades Isn't Over
- "the Xbox was never about gaming and merely served as a test bed for DRM in commodity systems."
- Ahead of 2026 Mass Layoffs at Microsoft the Tree Gets Shaken to See Who 'Falls' (Resigns/Retires)
- "We had a quiet meeting last week about budget realignment. No one said layoffs, but it’s clear where the focus is shifting."
- Almost 6,5000 Pages in 2025, Aiming Higher in 2026
- if we can keep focused, then quantity will increase
- Microsoft XBox Having a "Dog Ate My Homework" Moment: No New Console Until 3 Years From Now... Because "RAM Prices"
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- What a difference a year makes
- Gemini Links 31/12/2025: New Resolution, Reverse Hexdump, and Programming Languages
- Links for the day
- Dr. Andy Farnell Explains Why Chatbots Became Dishonesty on Top of Dishonesty (Hiding Usage of Dishonest Salads of Words)
- new article from CyberShow
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- Links for the day
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- Greetings from Georgia Tech!
- EPO People Power - Part XX - Why António Campinos Chose to Put His Cokehead Friend on 'Sick Leave'
- EPO Cocainegate will be covered for months to come
- Over at Tux Machines...
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- IRC logs for Tuesday, December 30, 2025