Links 6/12/2013: NSA News
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2013-12-06 15:30:07 UTC
- Modified: 2013-12-06 15:30:07 UTC
-
Recently, I committed support for a new authenticated encryption cipher for OpenSSH, chacha20-poly1305@openssh.com.
-
The 5€½ minute video was made by Brian Knappenberger. Knappenberger is no stranger to tackling controversial internet subjects related to security and privacy, having previously made the documentary “We are Legion”, about Anonymous.
He is currently making another documentary about internet activist Aaron Swartz, who killed himself in January 2013 after he was charged with using MIT’s network to grab millions of articles from the non-for-profit academic journal archive JSTOR, with the aim of republishing them without restriction.
-
The video, which is part of the newspaper’s Made Simple series, uses fairly simple animation and a jazzy soundtrack to make a fairly complex topic accessible. By avoiding jargon, the video also does a pretty good job of explaining what implications this kind of surveillance has for every day web users.
-
MuckRock has been filing dozens of FOIA requests in hopes of freeing up info on the many contractors employed by the NSA. Unsurprisingly, this has met with little success. While it did manage to secure 16 pages on French security firm Vupen, its other requests have been met with claims that no responsive documents have been found. This is hard to believe considering some of the requests are about known NSA contractors.
-
Yesterday the 2014-2019 defense bill passed first reading in the French National Assembly. It marks a strong shift towards total online surveillance. If passed, the bill will not only allow live monitoring of everyone's personal and private data but also do so without judicial oversight, as the surveillance will be enabled through administrative request. The bill also turns permanent measures that were only temporary.
-
Some German politicians and lobbyists have been pushing for some of Europe's technology companies to group together and create separate IT infrastructure from US-based or US-controlled systems. These calls have come in light of concerns about US intelligence agencies' surveillance of data held by US technology companies.
-
Uppdrag granskning (Mission Investigation) and SVT is the first Swedish news outlet to get access to documents concerning Sweden leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden, who left the American organization for surveillance, NSA (National Security Agency) in May this year.
-
Corporate spies for Dow, Kraft and others have tried to discredit, shame and infiltrate civic groups using an array of dirty tricks.
-
When Edward Snowden unleashed the flood of classified documents and surveillance data secreted from U.S. spy agencies earlier this year, it is unclear if he anticipated the high-level damage it would do to U.S. international relations.
Headlines have focused on irate calls by heads of state to President Barack Obama and parliamentary moves to restore privacy. Diplomats have been summoned to repair fractured relationships.
-
US President Barack Obama, a well-known BlackBerry fan, has said that he’s not allowed to have an iPhone for “security reasons”.
In a speech at the White House promoting his healthcare changes to a youth audience, Obama said that he couldn’t use an iPhone, though he joked that his daughters seemed to spend a lot of time on theirs.
-
While the facility will feature state of the art technology and security measures, at the end of the day, like any other building, the data center will rely on local utilities, and local opponents want to cut it off from the grid. Advocacy groups, which have formed the OffNow coalition, are pushing for state legislation that would cut off utilities to the NSA’s new data center being built in Bluffdale, Utah. The argues that the NSA’s electronic snooping violates the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unwarranted searches and seizures, and proposed state legislation known as the 4th Amendment Protection Act would prevent the local government from supporting the building with local utilities.
-
If the National Security Agency says that it is not “intentionally” doing something—say, collecting records of the locations of Americans’ cell phones—then it is almost certainly taking that very action.
If it says it is doing so “incidentally,” it’s probably doing so on a large scale. If it adds that said effort does not “target” Americans or isn’t “directed” at them, that means it doesn’t believe those Americans—or Congress, or the courts—should mind, because the N.S.A. analyst who entered a search term or tapped into a mobile-network cable had first closed his eyes and thought about terrorists.
-
The website of the National Security Agency (NSA) went down on Thursday in what is at least the second instance of such an outage since former government contractor Edward Snowden began releasing classified documents about the agency's surveillance activities earlier this year.
-
NSA surveillance allegations have led to countries questioning the country's commitment to Internet freedom, a former Obama official says
Recent Techrights' Posts
- Coming Soon: Microsoft Fake Results, Mass Layoffs, and Silence About All the People Microsoft Pressured to "Quit" (So That They Don't Get Counted as Layoffs)
- there will be more mass layoffs
- Speed of GNU/Linux
- The media seldom speaks of the dangers of "proprietary software"
- Proprietary Windows Versus "Linux" News (Trying to Keep People on Windows, Never Exploring GNU/Linux)
- Good editors know better how to recognise threats and not give them lip service
- Ensuring That Every Computer User Anywhere in the World Can Take Control of All His or Her Computers
- We must fight the people who attack general-purpose computing, in particular those who push this agenda very aggressively inside Linux
- Gemini Links 28/04/2025: Autism and Structural Navigation
- Links for the day
- What Happened to the Open Source Initiative (OSI) Elections: The Purge, the Cover-up, and the Witch-hunts
- OSI has gone "full Microsoft"
-
- China is Already Culling GAFAM (Not Just Microsoft Windows)
- OS monoculture or "OS hegemony" may be coming to an end
- The "Telephone Operating System in the Vatican" is 95 Years Old, Vatican Moved to GNU/Linux
- Maybe Microsoft is down to zero already
- If Tesla Shares (and Alleged Value) Fell 55% (From $489 to $222) in a Few Months Maybe It's Not Worth Anything At All (It's Just Gambling)
- Tesla swasticars have turned from a "status symbol" into a "public embarrassment" and cause for casual humiliation
- Chromebooks' Adoption in Sweden No Longer Depends on Schools
- School breaks are when classrooms are shut
- No, IBM is Not Investing $150 Billion in the US and It Doesn't Even Have That Kind of Money
- Here we go again... media as a vehicle of lobbying and misinformation
- Leak: The EPO's General Consultative Committee (GCC) Does Not Consult Staff on Crucial Matters and Bypasses the Administrative Council (AC) to Do Illegal Things
- violations against the EPO's very staff
- New Leaks Coming Soon, We Maintain 100% Record of Successful Resistance to Censorship
- We won't be told what we can and cannot say (especially when it's true)
- Central African Republic (CAR): Vista 11 is Only ~0.2% Market Share
- 99.8% to go!
- BSD and GNU/Linux Replaced Microsoft in Secure Servers, All Microsoft Has Left is LLM Slop for Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD)
- the FUD machine never rests
- Gemini Links 28/04/2025: A Simple Task Tracking and Auto-Prioritization Tool and Other Programs
- Links for the day
- Links 28/04/2025: Canada's Election, Pakistan-India Conflict
- Links for the day
- Glue Inside Your Pizza (or Why People Will Get Fed Up With Slop)
- People are given "answers" from non-intelligence word dumpsters
- Links 28/04/2025: Cyberattacks Happening, Chatbots Disappointing, and "Free Speech Under Fire"
- Links for the day
- Phone Adoption Very Low in Vatican, Windows Usage Fell Nonetheless
- Even in places where people still use desktops/laptops most of the time (and have access to these) Windows is gradually losing ground
- GNU/Linux 9% in Cuba, Vista 11 Waning, Android Dominant
- Microsoft has pretty much lost Cuba
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Sunday, April 27, 2025
- IRC logs for Sunday, April 27, 2025
- In 24 Countries Observed by statCounter Vista 11 is Still Less Than a Quarter of Windows Users Despite All Other Versions Being 'Expired'
- They ought to move to GNU/Linux
- Links 27/04/2025: Pope Goodbyes, "Politics of Fear", Slop Redux and More Google Shutdowns (Google Debt Had Grown This Year)
- Links for the day
- Links 27/04/2025: Serenity Dialectics, Hockey Jersey Ethics, and More
- Links for the day
- Links 27/04/2025: Death of Nest Thermostats, Death of Metaverse
- Links for the day
- Links 27/04/2025: Projects Workflow and Discovering Technology
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Saturday, April 26, 2025
- IRC logs for Saturday, April 26, 2025
- Microsoft Isn't on the Map in USSR
- To them, it's either Google or Yandex
- In Central America Windows Became a Small Force
- These are countries where Windows used to have well over 95% of the "market"
- What's Very Vexing to GAFAM, EPO and Others Is That It's Incredibly Hard to Censor Us (and Nobody Ever Successfully Did That Before)
- resist, do not capitulate
- Site May be Even Faster Now
- It basically takes less than a tenth of a second to serve the page
- Receiving SLAPPs and Collecting Them Like Trophies (the SLAPPs Always Fail)
- People who file lawsuits bring even more attention to themselves (or to embarrassing statements about them)
- Year of GNU/Linux on the Laptop?
- It's not happening only in Lenovo
- What People Must Understand About the Open Source Initiative (OSI)
- some facts about the Open Source Initiative (OSI)
- Many of the Scandals Are Interconnected (Overlapping People and Corporations)
- We're only getting started
- More Copyright Lawsuits Against LLM Slop Providers and Suppliers of LLM Slopfarms Would Benefit Society
- It's not just bad for the Web and for society; it's also legally dangerous
- Links 26/04/2025: General Assassinated in the Town of Balashikha, US Promoting Seafloor Mining
- Links for the day
- Links 26/04/2025: Facebook Layoffs Again, Remembering What's Real, and Say No to Mass Surveillance
- Links for the day
- Links 26/04/2025: NOAA Budget Cuts and "Dog Days Ahead"
- Links for the day
- In defence of JD Vance, death of Pope Francis
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Three Years in Prison for Disney Employee’s ‘Menu Hacking’: The Economic Fallout of Digital Menus
- Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Friday, April 25, 2025
- IRC logs for Friday, April 25, 2025