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
-
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.
-
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?
-
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.
-
We never knew the National Security Agency were such fans of the Master Sword.
-
Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt wants you to know he's "pretty sure" your data is safe from surveillance.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
CHELSEA Manning is ‘happy’ and ‘doing well’, according to her Pembrokeshire family who travelled to the US last month.
-
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
-
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.
-
Will we rescue our character, our culture, and our Constitution from a sort of 9/11 P.T.S.D?
-
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
-
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.
-
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
-
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.
-
Double standards are on display as Western leaders attack Russia regarding Ukraine, while they themselves commit or endorse worse aggression on other countries.
-
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 .
-
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.
-
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
- BASIC Predates Microsoft by Over a Decade, Microsoft-Controlled Sites Like The Register MS Don't Want You to Know This
- The state of the media is really bad when it relies a lot on oligarchs' money and is appointing editors who are working for oligarchs
- Brian Kernighan, "Only Third to Dennis Richie and Ken Thompson" (UNIX), Agreed With Someone Who Said Rust Was Just Hype, Should Not Replace C
- 17 hours ago
- Reminder: Microsoft's "Secure Boot" Certificate for "Linux" Will be Expired in One Week
- Many PCs won't manage to 'rotate' to another certificate
-
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Friday, September 05, 2025
- IRC logs for Friday, September 05, 2025
- Genini Links 05/09/2025: Community, ROOPHLOCH, and PITkit
- Links for the day
- Links 05/09/2025: Vaccine Sceptics Poison the Well, Two Exploited Vulnerabilities Patched in Android
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 05/09/2025: Logitech Lift and DIY Gemini Servers
- Links for the day
- Links 05/09/2025: Sainsbury's Caught Spying on In-Store Shoppers and Microsoft "OpenAI is Using Legal Threats to Harass its Critics"
- Links for the day
- Analogies for "Memory Safety" in Rust
- Don't worry, it's Rust! It can do anything!
- "Many of the Red Hat Employees Are Still Looking for Work"
- Shame on IBM's CEO
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Thursday, September 04, 2025
- IRC logs for Thursday, September 04, 2025
- Microsoft Started With Code Literally From The Trash, Nothing Has Improved Since
- The reality is, there are systems and code that are reliable. But they're not Microsoft's.
- Hypothesis That New McKinsey/Microsoft Executive Inside Red Hat Will Outsource Research and Development Operations to India (Like They Do in IBM)
- IBM is floundering
- Slopwatch: Scams, Fake Articles About "Linux", Plagiarism, and Worse
- Perhaps some time soon the LLMs or the "Big LLMs" will run out of money (to borrow) and go offline, leaving those slopfarms in a tough place
- Gemini Links 04/09/2025: Means of Production and Rusting Out
- Links for the day
- Links 04/09/2025: Science, Hardware, and Eyes on China
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 04/09/2025: Digital Minimalism and Social Control Media
- Links for the day
- IBM's GNU/Linux Divestment, Based on Hard But Anecdotal Evidence (IBM Fails to Recognise How Much Money It Made and Can Still Make From "Linux")
- Love us or hate us, a lot of what we've been saying about Red Hat under IBM turns out to be rather accurate
- Links 04/09/2025: Massive Microsoft Staff Cuts (Barely Reported), "Strange Conspiracy Theory Is Reportedly Spreading Inside OpenAI"
- Links for the day
- Activists Can Win, But Keep an Eye on the Ball and on the Trophy
- GitHub is dying, it was a loss-making trap, not free hosting
- Gemini Links 04/09/2025: Katrina Remembered, Distracted Driving, and Virtual Economics
- Links for the day
- At This Point It's No Longer Matthew Garrett But People Who Fund Matthew Garrett (or Companies That Fund His SLAPPs Against My Wife and I)
- The only thing worse than misogynists are misogynists who fail to respect other people's right to go on holiday
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, September 03, 2025
- IRC logs for Wednesday, September 03, 2025
- The UEFI 9/11 - Part VI - This Serious Harm Was Planned for Over a Decade, Not an Accident or Merely Some Misfortune
- The term "Serious Harm" is legally meaningful here
- GNOME Unfit for Diversity and Inclusion
- GNOME's leadership is using "bad words"
- Brodie Robertson Addressing the Recently-Discovered Comments
- Most people probably knew nothing about this until he wrote a response
- Red Hat QA Team "Had Shrunk by Half Over the Past Year." (After IBM Divestment)
- If Red Hat's workforce is being moved to the East, then RHEL can become a national security problem
- Slopwatch: "Open Source" and "Linux" News Faked, Made by Bots and Entered Into Google News
- Spam combined with slop about "Linux" has entered Google News