Privacy Watch: NHS Sells Out, Snowden Makes Headlines, GOP Uses NSA for Anti-Obama Partisanship, NSA Program Deemed Illegal, Bieber Rips NSA Coverage
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2014-01-25 18:37:43 UTC
- Modified: 2014-01-25 18:37:43 UTC
Summary: News coverage about the NSA, primarily from Friday and today
NHS
-
Well, what do you know. The government saw fit to send us a message about the NHS and all the wonderful things they are doing for us with it. The Guardian tells us a bit about it here.
-
Our medical information will be uploaded to a central database. In some ways this makes sense, but the care.data project is cause for concern too
Snowden
-
"Not all spying is bad. The biggest problem we face right now is the new technique of indiscriminate mass surveillance, where governments are seizing billions and billions and billions of innocents' communication every single day," he said.
-
Attorney general prepared to 'engage in conversation' with NSA whistleblower but says full clemency is 'going too far'
-
In an online Q&A session, former NSA contractor-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden answered 13 questions posed by Twitter users. The questions he considered ranged from the reasoning behind his leaks, to his hope for what the future of American intelligence programs may look like.
-
Former NSA contractor says he will stay in Russia, claiming that he stands no chance of getting a fair trial under current whistle-blower laws
-
Over the past few months, it's been funny to watch the personal attacks on Ed Snowden -- especially those that call him either a narcissist or a traitor. These seem to be based on little more than, well, a dislike of what Snowden has done, rather than any sort of logical or rational exploration of his statements and deeds.
GOP on Bush Policies
-
New GOP resolution says NSA metadata dragnet program harms basic human rights.
Crime
-
A growing set of people and organizations have spoken out calling for an end to the spy program. Here's what they said
-
A US oversight board has said the NSA's bulk telephone spying program is illegal. The man responsible for revealing it, fugitive whistleblower Edward Snowden, believes he cannot receive a fair trial in the US.
-
Former federal prosecutor Eric Friedberg conducted the first court-approved email wiretap nearly 20 years ago while investigating an international conspiracy to sell fraudulent cellphones.
-
In Kamloops, B.C., cool overnight temperatures in summer mean Telus (TU) needs to run its air conditioning for only about 40 hours a year to keep its computer servers from overheating. Lower cooling costs are part of the Canadian telecommunications company’s sales pitch to businesses looking to store troves of digital information cheaply. Telus also promotes Canada’s inexpensive hydroelectric power, low seismic activity—and, now, lower risk of government snooping. “There is a structural advantage in Canada in that the data is here and the privacy protection is more stringent,” says Lloyd Switzer, who runs Telus’s 10 data centers.
-
This is the GRTV Backgrounder on Global Research TV.
More Important Than NSA Crimes
-
There were signs that it is time for us to detonate the Earth and begin colonising a new planet last night, when an MSNBC anchor cut off congresswoman Jane Harman mid-sentence to bring news of Justin Bieber's arrest.
-
Social media users were outraged last night when a MSNBC segment was interrupted for "breaking news" relating to Justin Beiber's arrest.
Corporate Views
-
Is Red Hat secretly working with the NSA to build back doors into their products? I don’t think so. As far as I can tell, the company is the best of breed when it comes to big business and Linux. The company seems to be a very good open source citizen.
-
Also, some more details from PrivacySOS. As you can see, rather than go from the Amazon warehouse in Santa Ana, California up the coast to Seattle, instead the package went across the country to Dulles, Virginia to Alexandria (right outside of DC) and was "delivered" there. Upon seeing this, my initial reaction was that it might not be a big deal. With shipping logistics these days, it's no uncommon to see a sort of hub system, where packages travel across the country from one warehouse to a shipping hub, only to be shipped back across the country for actual delivery.
-
On the NSA front, however, Cook said quite pointedly that Apple is under a gag order and can’t tell what it knows about the NSA surveillance.
-
Google's chairman Eric Schmidt has reportedly said that encryption is the key to many of Internet's modern-day problems, including opening up countries with strict censorship laws.
-
Google's Eric Schmidt is at the Davos World Economic forum right now talking up his company's potential to end government surveillance and censorship completely using solely "strong encryption," reports Rich McCormick of The Verge.
The American NSA has proven itself quite adept at finding cracks in Google's systems, and China's real-time censorship machine is unlike any other in the world.
Nevertheless, Schmidt is confident, from the Verge:
Schmidt said that Google was attempting to strengthen its encryption so the world's governments "won't be able to penetrate it" and obtain private data. Those efforts creates problems for "governments like China's," which he thought responsible for "80 to 85 percent of the world's industrial espionage."
The Google chairman also said he saw the eventual relaxation of Chinese censorship over time as the number of people using social media in the country continued to grow.
Misc.
-
Perhaps the biggest condemnation of President Obama’s address last Friday announcing reforms to the NSA’s surveillance programs was his failure to mention any of the agency’s alleged involvement in subverting cryptography standards and the impact that has had on the trustworthiness of products built on those baselines.
-
A couple of days ago Obama gave a long speech about the so-called reforms he was going to bring to NSA. When I went through the transcript of his speech it reminded me of a packet of chips that's practically full of air.
-
The turtle wearing a hat backward, baggy jeans and purple sunglasses looks just like other cartoon characters that marketers use to make products like cereal and toys appealing to children.
But the reptile, known as T. Top, who says creating and breaking codes is really "kewl," is pushing something far weightier: the benefits of the National Security Agency.
-
Just imagine the “network of all networks,” the globe-spanning Internet, becoming a loose web of tightly guarded, nearly impermeable regional or even national networks. It seems antithetical to the mythology surrounding the Internet’s power and purpose. But ongoing revelations about the extensive surveillance activities of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) are pushing countries like Germany and Brazil to take concrete steps in that direction.
Recent Techrights' Posts
- [Video] Richard Stallman's Talk in Sweden, Attended by Nearly 700 People, is Now Online
- The Web page is in Swedish, but the talk is in English
- Coping With the Site Going More Mainstream
- Fame is no laughing matter
- 21 Pages in Less Than 7 Hours is No Joking Matter
- We've become a lot more effective and efficient
- Generation Chaff - Phase V: Censorship of Dissent (Painted as Harassment or Terrorism)
- Censorship is all around us now
- Generation Chaff - Phase IV: Apps Only Few Companies Decide On
- Tools are being collectively confiscated, under the premise or false prospect of "security"
-
- The Serial Slopper Starts Up - or Restarts - His Plagiarism Machine (LLMs)
- Serial Sloppers like these don't belong in news sites. That's why he got sacked by BetaNews.
- Links 24/10/2025: Esperanto Music History, Anxiety, and New Portals
- Links for the day
- Slopwatch: LinuxSecurity.com, Linux Journal, and Pet Slopfarms of Google News
- Why does Google News still advance these fake sites to the top of search results?
- Links 24/10/2025: Inequality Grows, Billion-Dollar Scam Center Industry
- Links for the day
- Links 24/10/2025: "Independent Media in Cambodia is Collapsing" and Serious F5 Breach
- Links for the day
- They Never 'Put Down' Corporations
- There are "pests" that are traded in Wall Street
- Correct Information is a Valued Asset in the Age of Slopfarms and Public Relations (PR) or Spin
- Publishing suppressed facts is never easy
- The Register MS Continues to Bag Money to Promote a Ponzi Scheme, Even Money From China
- Today in the front page
- analytics.usa.gov: The Only Supported Version of Windows (This Past Week) is Only Used by About 13.9% of People in the US, the Home Base of Windows
- Even Vista 7 is still used more
- Rust is Very Secure
- If only Rust itself is secure
- Who Will be Held Accountable for Breaking Ubuntu by Imposing Rust on Otherwise-Functional Programs, in Effect Replacing GNU With Proprietary Microsoft (GitHub)?
- they're practical people who merely point out that a bunch of buffoons not only ruin Ubuntu but also every future distro based on Ubuntu
- Generation Chaff - Phase VIII: In Summary
- Like "Science" with a capital "S", what we see here commercial interests usurping everything
- Generation Chaff - Phase VII: Curtailing Alternative Media
- There was always an obligation - a collective duty of sorts - to uphold independent journalism
- Generation Chaff - Phase VI: Centralisation of Information (X, Cheetok/Fentanylware)
- Would you trust information when controlled by such people?
- Generation Chaff - Phase III: Slop and Plagiarism
- A lot of the current so-called 'economy' is built upon false valuations
- Generation Chaff - Phase II: "Cloud", Blockchains and Other Hype
- For those of us who turned down those propositions there was a struggle; we needed to justify not having skinnerboxes or "social" accounts in some site run by a private company
- Generation Chaff - Phase I: Social Control Media
- IRC predates the Web
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Thursday, October 23, 2025
- IRC logs for Thursday, October 23, 2025
- More Clues Shed on Collapse of Microsoft XBox
- XBox is basically circling down the drain as Microsoft implements 2-3 waves of layoffs each month
- 'Vibe Coding' Doesn't Work
- In a lot of ways, so-called 'Vibe Coding' is already considered vapourware or a passing fad promoted in the media by managers who try to justify mass layoffs, especially ridding companies of "very expensive" software engineers
- Links 24/10/2025: Microsoft's Killing of XBox Connected to Revenue/Profit Problems, "How Elon Musk Ruined Twitter"
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 24/10/2025: 86,400 Seconds and "Society's Task"
- Links for the day
- Slopwatch: Google News and Slopfarms That Relay Nonsense From LLMs
- Google News, which once prioritised or used to care about provenance and quality, is feeding slopfarms
- Links 23/10/2025: More Health Concerns Over Dumb Chatbots (LLMs) and "Talking Cars" as Latest Buzz
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 23/10/2025: Daylight Savings Time and Duration Shorthand
- Links for the day
- Links 23/10/2025: LLM 'Hallucinations' (Defects) in Practical Code 'Generation', China Becomes More Economically and Technologically Independent
- Links for the day
- Why We Support Richard Stallman and You Probably Should Too
- It's not about being "Richard Stallman fan", it is about maintaining the right to hold positions (on technology) like his
- Linux Foundation Uses LLM Slop to Promote Microsoft in Linux.com (Again), Rendering It a Linux-Hostile Slopfarm
- Openwashing with slop by "Linux.com Editorial Staff", which basically seems to be a bot
- 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 23/10/2025: Windows TCO Galore and "The Internet Is Going to Break Again"
- Links for the day
- 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?
- 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)
- Social engineering attack: Debian voted to trick you on binary blobs
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Techrights Will Always Stand for Women's Rights
- We even invest money - personal savings that it - in our principles
- Certified Lawyers Should Know Better (Than to Intimidate Us With Man Who Drives on Motorcycle Through a Really Bad Storm Between Distant Cities, Then Collects Photos of Our Home)
- Mentioning someone was in prison for bad things isn't a crime, it's a public service
- The "AI" (Slop) Bubble is Already Imploding
- "ChatGPT Usage Has Peaked and Is Now Declining, New Data Finds"
- The So-called "Sexy" Buckets (AI, Quantum) Cannot Save IBM From Reality, Shares Tank
- "No matter how much financial hocus-pocus they use to reclassify revenues to land in the "sexy" buckets (AI, Quantum), it still smells old and musty - just like this company."
- Paul Krugman is Wrong About the Scope of Mass Layoffs in the United States
- A few years ago society was accelerating its journey towards feudalism, boosted by COVID-19
- Links 23/10/2025: Proprietary Blunders and CISA's Latest Disclosure of Holes
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 23/10/2025: Fast Past (F1), 99.9% Uptime
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, October 22, 2025
- IRC logs for Wednesday, October 22, 2025
- 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
- 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)
- 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" Was Always a Joke, But This Week Was the Punchline
- Maybe stop following tech trends and fashions
- "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)