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
-
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
-
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.
-
Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden claims in a new interview that the US agency is involved in industrial espionage.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Snowden says the NSA will use information even if it "has nothing to do with national security".
-
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
-
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
-
Just a friendly reminder that the NSA's children's website, "CryptoKids," is an actual thing that exists.
-
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.
-
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?
-
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
-
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.
-
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
- An Illusion and Cult Worship of Magnitude (Ubiquity as "Victory")
- GNU has been around for over 40 years and it'll likely continue to exist for another 40 (in some form)
- Wall Street Does Not Care About Microsoft's Impending (August) Layoffs, It Believes Lies From Microsoft, Whose Debt Grows Rapidly
- If Microsoft is doing so well and swimming in money, why so many cuts (about 29,000 layoffs so far this year)?
-
- Sabotaging Linux on Behalf of Microsoft With UEFI 'Secure' Boot (De Facto Remote 'Kill Switch'), Then Defaming, Stalking and Harassing Critics of 'Secure' Boot for 12 Years, Then SLAPPing Their Spouses and Them
- The sorts of stubborn lunatics we've been dealing with
- Moving on in Techrights, Geeks Gonna Geek
- In the coming weeks we plan to focus (as we explained last week) on patents, GNU/Linux issues, and the occasional philosophical essays
- Slopwatch: Google News Has Lost the Plot
- Almost the majority of articles returned for "Linux" are fakes
- Links 31/07/2025: Australia Restricts YouTube Access, Personal Privacy at Risk
- Links for the day
- Links 31/07/2025: Spotify Collapses and Spotify Now Forcing Some Users to Undergo Face-Scanning
- Links for the day
- A Lot of Supposedly "Successful" Businesses Are Just Debt-Racking Vessels Without Any Prospects of Financial Sustainability
- The probability of bankruptcy of any business is more than 0%
- theregister.com: The Voice of Microsoft US?
- It basically sold out
- Yes, You Can Love and Adore Things Whilst Also Criticising Them
- Is society being divided and groomed/primed to be resistant to constructive criticism?
- Links 31/07/2025: War in Ukraine, Security News, and Cyberattacks Against Journalists on the Rise
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 31/07/2025: Fake Money and Gemini Diaries
- Links for the day
- Google: From Pointing to Relevant Sites to Pointing to Social Control Media to Actually Parroting Social Control Media as "Facts"
- Google has become a misinformation company
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, July 30, 2025
- IRC logs for Wednesday, July 30, 2025
- How to Report Apple Layoffs Without Saying the "L" Word
- don't look for the "L" word
- Wayland Considered Harmful (to GNU/Linux Adoption)
- it's not limited to games
- My Experience With Judges Has been Positive, But We Must Still Pursue SLAPP Reform in the United Kingdom
- We believe it'll be a "feather in the cap" if we can help change laws in the UK to better protect investigative reporters
- Slopwatch Makes the Web Better
- Remember what happened to BetaNews?
- Slopwatch: Google News is Pumping in Lots of Web Traffic Into Fake Sites That Say "Linux"
- somewhere between 30% and 40% of today's "news" about "Linux", as seen by Google News, is LLM slop
- Links 30/07/2025: Climate Calamities Highlighted, Kyrgyzstan Crackdown on Expression/Freedoms
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 30/07/2025: Watson’s List of Limits, Lysenko 2000
- Links for the day
- Riot for peace & Love: Catholic Influencers and Digital Missionaries welcome Jubilee of Youth
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Some People See What Others See... But Only 40 Years Later
- When people deviate from "the norm" they typically get ridiculed and dismissed as "crazy"
- Links 30/07/2025: Tea Class Action and Google Killing the Web With Slop
- Links for the day
- Last Month Our IRC Community Turned 17
- Funnily enough we never missed a single day when it comes to logging
- "The Unix Kernel"
- Linux was inspired by MINIX
- The Register Relays Microsoft Marketing, Dubs That Marketing "Research"
- Hours ago they did a "Microsoft sez" piece
- Dealing With Sociopaths, Liars, and Cranks
- A dysfunctional society such as this would never develop
- Not Owning Mobile Phones
- It's not about resistance; it's common sense
- Google 'Search' is Fast Becoming No Better Than Social Control Media Infested With Bots
- Google emerged almost 30 years ago as a company looking to organise the Web and direct people towards informative pages. That Google is dead.
- PCLinuxOS Had Functional Backups Before the House Fire, the Site Will be Restored in New Webhost
- This is the direction we want for GNU/Linux, not some IBM sales strategy
- Gemini Links 30/07/2025: Two Sides of Me and "Hooked on Cosmic Voyage"
- Links for the day
- Microsoft Will Continue Resorting to Crimes in Order to Keep GNU/Linux Usage Down
- It is a real problem and we'll revisit it later this week
- GAFAM 'Revolving Doors' at The Register and a "Bribe Price List"
- "an analyst at Microsoft"
- Microsoft Rapidly Shrinking (No, It's Not About Efficiency, It's About Unbearable Debt)
- We'll soon see how much debt grew in the past quarter
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, July 29, 2025
- IRC logs for Tuesday, July 29, 2025
- Corruption is the Standard Operating Procedure at the European Patent Office (EPO)
- The EPO is a dictatorship that stains Europe
- Local Staff Committee Munich (LSCMN) at the European Patent Office (EPO) Requests an Urgent Meeting to Avoid Abolishing the Office
- This is dictatorship led by the most corrupt
- Slopwatch: Fake 'Linux' 'Articles' and Spamfarms/Slopfarms
- at least 5 fake articles in one day
- Gemini Links 29/07/2025: Wayland Unfit for Use and LLM Slop Faking One's Language Skills With Robot Communications
- Links for the day
- Before the OSI Was Bribed and Hijacked by Microsoft via GitHub and Compromised Management...
- The OSI isn't even remotely "woke"
- Nailing the "Hey Hi" (AI) Hype Bubble
- So-called "hey hi" as they define it now is all about large companies or regimes remotely controlling the processes running on your machine and even your very own behaviour on your machine, which is in effect no longer your machine but some remotely controlled apparatus
- The OSI Has Been Silent for Over 3 Weeks, It Has a Severe Trust Issue After Promoting Microsoft and Proprietary GitHub
- OSI took a lot of money from Microsoft to become a Microsoft lobbyist
- "Four decades; Four freedoms; For all users" Now as a T-shirt
- That's shown along the sidebar
- Bribery is OK If You Work for Microsoft (No Punishment Expected)
- It's very troubling and a symptom of a broken society/system when particular laws or rules are applied and enforced against some people but not against others
- Links 29/07/2025: Bad Climate and "Fair Software Licensing" Blasts Microsoft
- Links for the day
- Links 29/07/2025: Data Brokers Gone Wrong/Rogue and "Copyright Thicket"
- Links for the day
- Slopwatch: Linuxconfig.org, Linuxsecurity.com, Fagioli, The Register
- Today's "Slopwatch" isn't the first article about LLM slop
- Someone Should Remind Microsoft Lunduke That Microsoft Hires Many Sexual Criminals and Pedophiles as Well
- Microsoft Lunduke on an "expedition" to find one or more perverts, then generalise to everyone in the "community"
- Cash Machines (ATMs) Make Mistakes and They're Proprietary Software
- Correcting mistakes is a colossal challenge
- We Cover Topics Other Sites Are Too Afraid to Cover (Even When They Know the Facts)
- It's not that they doubt the truth, they just realise there may be consequences for talking about it
- They Try to Tell Us the Free Software Foundation Inc is Dying, But Its Revenue Doubled Since the Dot-Com Bubble Burst
- Being in "Activism" is never easy; but it does positive things for society
- Yes, Microsoft is the Problem
- "I am no MS shill."
- It's About the Cost of Workers, Not the Fictional Skills Shortage (That Does Not Exist, the Media Spreads False and Sometimes Self-Fulfilling Narratives)
- This issue isn't limited to computing, some dub it "globalism"
- Another Failed Use Case for Chatbots (LLM): Legal Advice and Analysis
- They're just some self-discrediting toy that costs way too much to operate
- Links 29/07/2025: More Pushbacks Against Slop and More Praises of Tom Lehrer
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 29/07/2025: Purple Yarrow and Understanding Op Amps
- Links for the day
- This Monday WebProNews Absolutely Flooded the Web With Fake (LLM Slop) 'Articles' About "Linux", Google News Promoted Them as Legitimate
- All of the following are fake articles attributed to pseudonyms or authors that don't exist; the images are also slop. Why does Google promote these?
- Linuxiac is Not a Slopfarm, But at Least Some of Its Articles Are Machine-Generated Fakes
- what we said about it was correct
- Expect More Microsoft Layoffs
- "Are more job cuts coming?"
- Microsoft Behaving Like It's Running Out of Money to Pay Salaries
- Does that seem like the behaviour expected from a company which claims it is "worth" trillions?
- LWN Downtime Due to Linode, Not LLM Bots
- "I’ve received an email letting me know that there is a potential for data loss."
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Monday, July 28, 2025
- IRC logs for Monday, July 28, 2025