Privacy News: Ten States Against the NSA, Snowden Speaks About Espionage
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2014-01-27 09:28:36 UTC
- Modified: 2014-01-27 10:26:48 UTC
Summary: News from the past couple of days, mostly about the NSA
State-level Actions
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With the introduction of the 4th Amendment Protection Act this week, Mississippi became the tenth state in the country to consider legislation to make life difficult for the NSA’s ongoing mass surveillance programs.
Edward Snowden
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Former U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden told German TV on Sunday about reports that U.S. government officials want to assassinate him for leaking secret documents about the NSA's collection of telephone records and emails.
In what German public broadcaster ARD said was Snowden's first television interview, Snowden also said he believes the NSA has monitored other top German government officials along with Chancellor Angela Merkel.
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Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden claims in a new interview that the US agency is involved in industrial espionage.
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German public broadcaster ARD will air a half-hour interview with NSA contractor turned whistleblower Edward Snowden on Sunday. The first snippet, aired late Saturday, accuses the NSA of conducting industrial espionage.
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The NSA agency is not preoccupied solely with national security, but also spies on foreign industrial entities in US business interests, former American intelligence contractor, Edward Snowden, has revealed in an interview to German TV.
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Snowden says the NSA will use information even if it "has nothing to do with national security".
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NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden held a public Web chat on Thursday during which he answered questions sent in from hundreds of curious citizens via Twitter. This was Snowden's first live chat since June of last year, and during the broadcast viewers became privy to some of the outspoken leaker's opinions, especially that of the NSA and their previous actions.
Radical Politicians
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White House spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden declined to comment, but people familiar with the matter said an announcement is expected soon.
Rogers, a Navy cryptologist, had long been seen as the frontrunner to succeed Gen. Keith Alexander, who has been NSA director since 2005. Alexander, who will retire March 14, is the longest-serving NSA head. He is also the first commander of U.S. Cyber Command, which launched in 2009.
Criticism
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Just a friendly reminder that the NSA's children's website, "CryptoKids," is an actual thing that exists.
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If, for instance, you wanted to stop mass shootings, legislation outlawing the sale, possession or manufacture of any gun capable of firing more than one bullet without reloading might work. It would also be a terrible idea.
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As it tries to protect us from the “bad guys,” the government has become more intrusive in our lives. Where do we draw the line? If you have nothing to hide, would it be OK for government agents to show up unannounced at your door (without cause) to search your home? Would it also be OK for agents to randomly select citizens from off the street and subject them to full body searches?
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Try to think back to the 1970s if you are old enough. Imagine if one day there had been a decree from the Nixon Administration that all citizens must within a week pay for a hand-held device that will allow government to keep track of all your movements and to monitor your telephone calls and written messages you'd be able send through the air to other devices.
I think it would have scared the crap out of most people, and I think they'd be massive resistance to it. So 40 years later millions of people are cajoled through gradual technological advances, advertisement, government secrecy, and peer pressure to actually line up at stores to pay for the latest model of these monitoring devices.
Corporate Spying
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The public is fickle; it will always want the next and best thing, and there will always be someone eager to provide it. For a blink of history's eye, that was the Pony Express. No matter how brilliant your business idea, how diligent and disciplined your execution of it, there is forever someone hungrier and faster coming over the horizon.
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The major selling point for BlackBerry has always been its security and privacy - the way it encrypted communication across its network was the only game in town - that is, until 2010, when governments threatened to “block encrypted BlackBerry corporate e-mail and messaging services” unless their security agencies were granted access to them.
This was the beginning of the demise of Blackberry. Because of The Surveillance State’s inability to spy on their own citizens, governments forced BlackBerry to change their business model, which in turn played a major role in the company’s collapse.
Recent Techrights' Posts
- Ron Wyden: Microsoft Should be Held Accountable for Security Breaches (He Has Said This for Years Already, It Never Happens)
- Negative media coverage isn't a fine and it does nothing to compensate Microsoft's billions of victims
- Disable 'Secure Boot' (If It Lets You)
- it doesn't put you in control
- Longtime Red Hat Staff: Maybe Just Disable 'Secure Boot'
- A refreshing take from Adam Williamson
- A Dozen Observations About "UEFI 9/11" Deflections
- What we are expected to see, tentatively
- The World's Richest Ponzi Scheme (Faking Value Using Net Waste)
- The higher they go the harder they fall
- We Could Dual-Boot Back in the 1990s, Why Has This Become So Difficult?
- And prone to breakage
- Slopwatch: Google News is Still Promoting Many Fake Articles About "Linux", in Effect Rewarding Misinformation and Plagiarism
- things continue to deteriorate
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- UEFI 9/11 Aftermath - Part I: "I Believe This Affects Thousands of Devices... Because Multiple Devices I Checked, Whether Client or Server [...] Affected."
- Most people aren't even aware that this is happening or about to happen
- The UEFI 9/11 - Part X - An Outline of the Series About Microsoft Sabotaging GNU/Linux (With Ramifications to Unfold Online in Coming Weeks as People Reboot)
- Today is UEFI 9/11 (9/11/2025)
- Culture of silence: Ubisoft harassment convictions, Mozilla, Sylvestre Ledru & Debian make no comment
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Links 11/09/2025: "Hey Hi" Ponzi Schemes at Oracle (Unpaid Contracts) and Cindy Cohn is Leaving the EFF
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 11/09/2025: Playdate Console, Dichotomy between the Real and the Digital
- Links for the day
- The Microsoft AstroTurfing and Microsoft-Led Blame-Shifting Tactics Are Ahead of Us
- Of course it has nothing to do with security, it's about control, i.e. them controlling everything
- Celebrating Assassination is Bad Because It Legitimises Assassination of the People You Like, Too
- Condoning or even celebrating political assassinations is bad optics (and taste)
- Being Conditioned to Accept Unreliable Computer Systems That Fail With Black Screen of Death (BSoD)
- Welcome to 2025
- New Series: The Coup Against GNU/Linux Has Begun
- today, this year in particular, we shall also focus on Secure Boot, which is sold based on a lie and tortures many computer user
- New Paper on "BYOVD, but in firmware. Signed UEFI shells, vulnerable modules offer new paths for Secure Boot bypasses."
- One might say digital "security theatre"
- Links 11/09/2025: Oracle Layoffs, Drunk Pilots in Japan Airlines, US-Korea Tensions Grow
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, September 10, 2025
- IRC logs for Wednesday, September 10, 2025
- Xubuntu Site Compromised
- Let's hope it is not a security breach
- Links 10/09/2025: Retaliation at Facebook and Microsoft Reveals Almost 100 Security Holes
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 10/09/2025: Annihilation of Self, The Future Eaters, and Leaving Academia
- Links for the day
- They Say That People Are Afraid of or Worried About "Hey Hi", But the Worriers Should be the Fools Who Invested in It
- At the end of the day nobody should worry more than those who invested their money in this bubble
- Harassment evidence: franceinfo's Clara Lainé report on Ubisoft prosecution
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Links 10/09/2025: Microsoft Layoffs in "RTO" Clothing and Windows TCO, GitHub TCO
- Links for the day
- Blaming Everything on China
- TikTok works for China. GAFAM works for fascists.
- People Get Tired of "Hey Hi" (AI), Unlike the Subservient Money-Obsessed Media That Gets Paid to Pretend This Bubble Still Matters
- "crash will be way bigger than dot.com burst in 90s. and that was Internet, actually transformative technology, not this expensive AI toy with direct dependency on the energy input which is not scalable"
- Brett Wilson LLP Accepts That the Serial Strangler From Microsoft Filed a Case That Also Implicates My Wife (Everything is Connected)
- They used to pretend that there were two separate cases
- 10 Reasons to Disable (or Enable) UEFI Secure Boot
- Tomorrow the "trusted corporation" Microsoft will see a certificate expire
- Gemini Links 10/09/2025: Hospital and Large Feeds
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, September 09, 2025
- IRC logs for Tuesday, September 09, 2025
- The Bluewashing of Red Hat is Being Completed, Many Staff Understand They'll be Made Redundant
- Jim AllowHurst (Whitehurst) is meanwhile promoting Microsoft's agenda from within other companies
- Throwing Away "Old" Computers (Mozilla and Other Climate Deniers)
- Mozilla is not leftist
- statCounter Sees GNU/Linux Exceeding 10% in Bulgaria This Month
- What can Microsoft still do to stop GNU/Linux?
- Dark Patterns
- Microsoft saying "security" is like a Convicted Felon in the White House saying "law and order".
- It's Almost Fall (Autumn)
- To "Facebook prison" you are bound
- Bruce Schneier About "Secure Boot"
- Bruce Schneier isn't a fan of "Secure Boot"
- Links 09/09/2025: Microsoft Mass Layoffs Again and "RTO" (Timed Like It Serves as a Distraction From the Mass Layoffs)
- Links for the day
- RMS Told Microsoft to Stop 'Secure Boot' (He Even Went There to Say That), But They Didn't Listen
- Dr. Stallman (RMS) assumed that speaking to sociopaths would work
- What Richard Stallman Told Me About 'Secure' Boot in 2012
- "if the user doesn't control the keys, then it's a kind of shackle"
- Those Who Helped Microsoft Weaponise "Secure Boot" Against GNU/Linux and BSDs Are Fleeing
- Microsofters doing what they do best: they evade accountability
- Simple is Better, Simplicity is Power
- That is "the advantage of having commodity GNU/Linux systems," an associate notes
- Much Ado About Nonsense
- Microsoft Lunduke is still all dramatisation and sensationalism
- Current Events in France
- It needs to dump Microsoft and other GAFAM (US) giants, move to Free software
- Further Media Cut-downs
- media reporting about the media being cut
- Links 09/09/2025: US-Korea Tensions and Meta Whistleblowers
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 09/09/2025: Moon Eclipse and ROOPHLOCH Reports
- Links for the day
- Links 09/09/2025: “Torrents of Hate” and Political Crisis in France
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 09/09/2025: "Dedigitizing" and Forgejo on FreeBSD
- Links for the day
- Google News (Not Just Google Search) Lets Itself by Gamed by One Slopfarm - to the Point Almost Half of "Linux" News is Bot-Produced Plagiarism (LLM Slop With Slop Images)
- That says a lot about what Google thinks of quality, even in Google News
- Bill Gates-Funded Media Inadvertently Refutes the Microsoft Lie That in 2025 Microsoft Had Just Two Waves of Layoffs
- There were about 12 rounds of layoffs so far in 2025
- Official SUSE Blog Still Uses LLM Slop (Bots) to Make Fake Articles (Marketing)
- The company is all about sound bites
- Companies Realise That Slop Doesn't Work as Advertised, Accordingly Dump It
- "Hype dims as a country-wide survey of US corporations shows a sudden drop-off in AI use among firms with more than 250 employees."
- Microsoft-Funded Lawsuits Against Critics of UEFI 'Secure Boot'
- Remember that no company (or law firm) ever survives collaborations with Microsoft
- From theregister.co.uk to theregister.com (US) to The Register MS (Run by Microsoft Operatives) and theregister.ai
- The best way to break this racket (or cycle of hype and harm) is to break the chains of funding
- Open Source Initiative (OSI) Culture of Censorship Necessitates More Speech
- The OSI bans dissent or people who merely point out that the OSI is abusive
- How to Reach Us Discreetly (Other Than Encrypted E-mail)
- We're still managing to maintain a 100% source protection record. We soon turn 19.
- LLMs Are Vastly Worse Than a Waste of Energy and the Externalities Are Huge
- Worse than just higher power bills for everybody
- LLMs Versus Search (Not Replacing Search But Engaging in DDoS Attacks Against Web Sites That Permit Searching)
- The state of the Web isn't just bad; it's utterly terrible
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Monday, September 08, 2025
- IRC logs for Monday, September 08, 2025
- It's Only the Second Week of September and Already Two Waves of Layoffs at Microsoft, Slopfarms and Microsoft-Funded Sites Spin It as "AI Investments" Rather Than Commercial Failure
- A very large third one expected next week
- The UEFI 9/11 - Part IX - Shunning Old Computers (in 2023 the Certificate Was Updated/Overridden, Underlying Aim May Be Herding/Forcing People to Get TPM and Other 'Novel' Restrictions)
- the "upgrade treadmill"