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
- Mobbing at the European Patent Office (EPO) - Part IV - EPO Can Get Away With Murders, Suicide Clusters, and Systematic and Prolonged Bullying by 'Team Campinos' ("Alicante Mafia" as Insiders Call It)
- Nobody in the Council or the EU/EC/EP gives a damn as long as laws are broken to fabricate 'growth'
- Jeff Bezos Isn't Just Killing the Washington Post, He's Killing Thousands of News Sites/Newsrooms (in Dozens of Languages) That Rely on It for Many Decades Already
- Not just slopfarms; even the Ukraine-based reporters are culled by Bezos, who's looking to please the dictators of the world
- Central Staff Committee Confronted António Campinos for Giving His Cocaine-Addicted Friend Over 100,000 Euros to Do Nothing, Just Pretend to be Ill, While Cutting the Salaries of Everybody Else
- "On the agenda: Amicale framework & Financial assistance for courses"
- How to Win Lawsuits in 5 Simple Steps
- Keep issuing threats every week and send 60 kilograms of legal papers to the target
- Living in Freedom When 'False Flag Operations' Like EFF Get Captured by Billionaires to Take Freedom Away
- There are many ways to think of Software Freedom
- Changes at the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA)
- SRA is basically a waste of money
-
- GNU/Linux Measured at 6% in One of the World's Largest Nations
- Democratic Republic Of The Congo
- Linux Foundation Operative Says We and Our Software All "Owe an Enormous Debt of Gratitude" to a Software Patents Reinforcer
- The only true solution is to entirely get rid of all software patents
- More Than 99% of "AI" Companies Aren't AI, They're Pure BS
- We need to discard those stupid debates about "AI" and reject media that gets paid to participate in such overt narrative control (manipulation like The Register MS)
- AI Used to Save Lives, Now "AI" is a Grifting Scheme That Burns the Planet and Will Crash the Economy
- What the media calls "AI" (it gets paid to call it that) is the same stuff that could instead be dubbed "algorithms"
- Amutable is a Microsoft Siege Against Freedom in GNU/Linux, Just Like the People Who Brought You 'Secure Boot' Controlled by Microsoft
- Do whatever is possible to avoid Amutable and its "products"
- Growing Focus on Publication
- Over the past ~10 days we always served more than a million Web hits per day
- "Going to be a large number of Microsoft layoffs announced soon"
- Everybody knows a giant wave of layoffs is coming Microsoft's way
- End of the 'GPU Bubble' and NVIDIA Finally Admits It Won't Bail Out Microsoft OpenAI Anymore
- circular financing (financial/accounting fraud)
- Corrupt Media Won't Hold Accountable Rich People for Role in Pedophilia
- Journalistic misconduct or malpractice is a real thing
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Thursday, February 05, 2026
- IRC logs for Thursday, February 05, 2026
- EPO Management ("Alicante Mafia") Not Properly Sharing Information on Scale of Strikes by EPO Staff
- disproportionate (double) deductions in salaries against people who participate in strikes, which are protected by law
- Gemini Links 06/02/2026: Slop/Microslop, Home Assistant, and Valid Ex Commands
- Links for the day
- Blackmail evidence: Debian social engineering exposed in ClueCon 2024 talk on politics
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Bitcoin crash: opportunity or the end game?
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Claims That IBM Will Lay Off 20% (or 15%) of Its Workforce This Year Unless It Finds a Way to Push Them All Out by Threats, Shame, Guilt
- Where are the articles about IBM layoffs?
- IBM Isn't a Serious Company Anymore, It's a Ponzi Scheme Operated by a Clique and It Misuses Companies It Acquires to Prop Up or Legitimise the Scheme
- IBM seems like it's nothing but a "Scheme"
- Google News Drowning in Slop About "Linux" (Slopfarms Galore)
- Google should know better than to link to any of these slopfarms, but today's Google is itself a pusher of slop
- Links 05/02/2026: EU Commission Gutting Net Neutrality
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 05/02/2026: NixOS Books and Monochrome Emojis
- Links for the day
- Links 05/02/2026: Canadian Government Uses US LLMs to Override Expert Opinions, NVIDIA Troubles Due to Enablement of Mass Plagiarism ('Piracy') Misleadingly Obscured as "Hey Hi"
- Links for the day
- Explaining the Letter From JUDGE SYKES FRIXOU, Threatening Me Around the Time GNOME's Nat Friedman Lost His CEO Job at Microsoft GitHub and His Best Friend Got Arrested for Strangulation
- this letter (with annotation) is critical
- Linuxiac Not Rehabilitated, It's Still Full of LLM Slop (Part of a Trend)
- The Web as a resource/source of information is perishing
- "Sponsored by Azul" to Write Fake 'Article' About Azul, Quoting Azul Itself
- The "journalism" industry [sic] became so utterly corrupt
- JuristGate is for sale: three billion Swiss francs for a domain name
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Like Microsoft and IBM, the 'Alicante Mafia'-Governed EPO Does PIPs Nowadays (at the EPO, It's "Professional Incompetence Procedure")
- So "PIPs" are definitely in the EPO and we saw letters sent to staff
- Time for Change, More New Articles, Less Curation
- The oligarchy wants to gut the real press and replace media with slop and social control media (or social control media with slop in it, i.e. their own voices, mechanised)
- Gemini Links 05/02/2026: Coercion, Antibiotics, and LVDT Project
- Links for the day
- Almost 1,600 EPO Employees Went on Strike Last Week
- There is another strike coming 2.5 weeks from now
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, February 04, 2026
- IRC logs for Wednesday, February 04, 2026
- Links 04/02/2026: Extreme Malice in Microsoft's Visual Studio Code on GNU/Linux, More Hey Hi (AI) Chaos
- Links for the day
- Sexism & GNOME: shaming men, hiding women, Sonny Piers update
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- You Know Microsoft's "Value" is 100% Fictional When in One Single "Trading" Day in Wall Street It Loses THREE TIMES More in "Value" Than It Was 'Worth' in 2009
- Microsoft does not behave like a company riding trillions but like a company that struggles with payroll
- Gemini Links 04/02/2026: Humanity and Animality, systemd (Controlled by Amutable, a Proxy of Microsoft) Moves on to "Extinguish" Phase
- Links for the day
- Better Outcomes When Facing the Discomfort of Conflict
- Don't take the easy way out when the "hard way" is the right way and it can result in positive revelations
- Certificate Authority Let's Encrypt Used to be Widely Used in Geminispace, Now It's Down to Just 0.2% of the Whole
- Let's Encrypt is not your friend
- What IBM Does Is Clearly Illegal in the US: Tying Severance Packages to NDAs (Non-Disparagement Agreement/Clause)
- The NDAs make things worse; they keep people isolated and silent
- Microsoft's Giant Snowball of Layoffs and PIPs (in 2026)
- They would delay until March or April if they wanted to, but then we can expect numbers exceeding 10,000 layoffs (Microsoft always low-balls the real figure/s)
- Mozilla Turned Firefox Into Shovelware, Adding 'Kill Switch' for Slop Still Means Mozilla is Participating in a Pyramid Scheme, Plagiarism, Grifting
- Mozilla is still a slop pusher
- Leaving the United States 3 Years Ago Was the Best Decision We Made
- A lot of stuff is being consolidated
- Links 04/02/2026: "Laws of Succession" and Microsoft's VS Code as Code-Stealing Malware
- Links for the day
- BillBC (BBC) Covered Up Pedophilia, Now It's Covering Up for Its Sponsor Bill Gates by Reprinting His Lies, Which His Own Wife Disputes
- Is Bill Gates having orgies (group sex)?
- Phoronix Swims With the Real Trolls, People Who Fancy Proprietary Software and Back Doors
- If Larabel begins to actively participate in provocation with the "Microsoft GitHub fans club", what does this tell us about Phoronix?
- They Know Microsoft Layoffs Are About to Hit Them Hard
- The gaming division at Microsoft is a complete catastrophe, lots of money (debt) down the drain [...] Buying Activision was all about misleading shareholders or hiding the deep trouble/problems XBox was having
- Red Hat is Not a Linux Company, It's IBM's Ponzi Scheme Enabler
- Had we still been stuck in 2021, perhaps IBM would plaster "NFT" or "metaverse" all over RedHat.com
- Keep Grinding
- "Don't let the bastards grind you down"
- Mobbing at the European Patent Office (EPO) - Part III - Who's Going to Pay for the EPO's Corruption? (Aside From European Citizens)
- Some people inside the EPO reached out to us
- "Investors Are Concerned About an AI Bubble" (That GAFAM and IBM Ride)
- A few decades from now IBM will only be remembered in the same sense many so-called 'AI' companies will be remembered
- EPO Staff Union: "Very High Strike Participation on Friday 30 January", Another Strike Starts 19 Days From Now
- EPO management in a bit of a panic
- Censorship/Free Speech and Social Control Media
- It's important to have a grasp of how contemporary censorship works and how to tackle it
- Google News as Slop Booster
- this is what Google links to
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, February 03, 2026
- IRC logs for Tuesday, February 03, 2026
- Gemini Links 04/02/2026: "Raspberry Pi Relaxes the Rules for Its RP2040 Hacking Challenge" and "Long Web Society"
- Links for the day