NSA Watch: GCHQ/NSA Gang Up Against Servers, Hide Violations, Face Blowback
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2014-01-28 20:27:44 UTC
- Modified: 2014-01-28 20:27:44 UTC
Summary: News from Monday and Tuesday, covering a range of development in the NSA saga and beyond
Corporate Servers
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British intelligence officials can infiltrate the very cables that transfer information across the internet, as well as monitor users in real time on sites like Facebook without the company's consent, according to documents leaked by Edward Snowden.
The internal documents reveal that British analysts gave instruction to members of the National Security Agency in 2012, showing them how to spy on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube in real time and collect the computer addresses of billions of the sites’ uploaders.
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Some of the world's most popular smartphone applications are telling British and American intelligence agencies everything about you – from your location to your politics or whether you're part of the swinging set.
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British and US spy agencies have gathered data from smartphone apps which leak personal data on to global networks, according to reports.
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EXILED AMERICAN WHISTLEBLOWER Edward Snowden has revealed evidence that shows GCHQ is able to monitor web traffic without the knowledge of either the website or the user.
Operation Squeaky Dolphin is explained in the presentation "Psychology A New Kind of SIGDEV" (Signals Development) obtained by NBC from the Snowden files. It describes an operation to harvest Facebook Likes, Youtube URLs and Blogger visits
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Security expert and technologist Bruce Schneier has told the BBC that he believes the NSA and GCHQ have "betrayed the trust of the internet".
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New information made public by Edward Snowden reveals that the governments of the United States and United Kingdom are trawling data from cellphone “apps” to accumulate dossiers on the “political alignments” of millions of smartphone users worldwide.
Crimes Concealed
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In a weekend interview with German ARD public television network, Edward Snowden revealed that the U.S. government uses its broad electronic surveillance capabilities to engage in industrial espionage. Snowden told ARD TV that, “I will say is there is no question that the U.S. is engaged in economic spying,” Snowden gave the example that, “If there is information at Siemens that they think would be beneficial to the national interests, not the national security, of the United States, they will go after that information and they’ll take it.” Snowden left hanging what exactly is done with such potentially useful economic intelligence, and he provided little additional information on this subject beyond indicated the news outlets holding copies of yet published NSA leaked documents could provide more specific information.
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At the same time that the Obama administration publicly mulls over how to end its controversial storage of millions of Americans’ phone records swept up by the National Security Agency, the government is also reportedly exploring ways to prevent other spies from seeing what it’s spying on.
Police/FBI (Domestic Spying)
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If you had any faith left in anonymous email services, now would be the time to let that go. New court documents show that in chasing down associates of Freedom Hosting, the FBI managed to download the entire email database of TorMail. And now it's using that information to take on the Darknet.
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Police began tracking Aguilar's phone and soon discovered it was at the mall.
US Political Reaction
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A group of six Congressmen have asked President Barack Obama to remove James Clapper as director of national intelligence as a result of his misstatements to Congress about the NSA’s dragnet data-collection programs. The group, led by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), said that Clapper’s role as DNI “is incompatible with the goal of restoring trust in our security programs”.
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The RNC has declared domestic spying illegal. A faction led by George W. Bush-era bureaucrats is pushing back.
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The National Security Agency depends on huge computers that guzzle electricity in the service of the surveillance state. For the NSA's top executives, maintaining a vast flow of juice to keep Big Brother nourished is essential -- and any interference with that flow is unthinkable.
European Reaction
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When the EU agreed its current Data Protection Directive in 1995, the internet was just coming onto the horizon, and Mark Zuckerberg was just 11.
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SAP and Atos are working with the European Union to bring in new standards for web-based programmes and data storage in an effort to tackle growing surveillance fears following ongoing NSA revelations.
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AT&T’s ambitions to expand in Europe have been put on ice, for now. And the NSA spying scandal is at least partly to blame.
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Public broadcaster ARD airs interview in which whistleblower says National Security Agency is involved in industrial espionage
People's Voice
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It only makes sense that the NSA be confronted online. After all, it’s the Internet the agency uses to spy on us. They’re not following us down dark streets or steaming open our snail mail. Instead, they’re monitoring our emails to discover who is in our circle and stalking us on Facebook and Google Plus. Especially if we use Windows, there’s no need for them to dirty their hands sifting through our garbage when they can enter through a virtual trap door on our computer to rifle through our word processor and spreadsheet files. Phone tapping? How old school in a world where every call we make, even from a land line, becomes VoIP somewhere along the line. When we use VoIP or Skype, they can easily listen. If we visit a website located in a country on their hit list, they sit-up and take notice.
Corporations' Voice
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The Obama administration has reached a deal with a number of technology giants, allowing the companies to disclose more information on customer data they are compelled to share with the government.
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For quite some time there have been rumours of Google wanting to take AI to the next level. Popular Android-based game, ‘Ingress‘ presents an artificial layer on top of real world landmarks and allows players to claim territories while the interact with their surroundings. Although it’s not what the public expected initially, it did represent the future that Google envisioned for gaming.
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72% of you said that you thought the NSA’s actions would have an effect on the entire U.S. software industry, with 20% of you expressing the opinion that proprietary software developers only would be effected. Taken together, this means that 92% of you are of the opinion that the NSA’s dirty tricks will have a negative effect on the U.S. tech sector. 7% of you answered “maybe a little but not much” with only 1% choosing “not at all.”
Recent Techrights' Posts
- Kazakhstan Doesn't Need GAFAM Datacentres (Spy Hubs)
- Suffice to say, as far as we can gather nothing came out from the empty (false) promises of GAFAM's "data centers in Kazakhstan"
- Christmas Music Project: Back to When Music Was Music
- now Canonical (or Ubuntu) says we should make available tens of gigabytes of disk space
- Browsing Techrights With a GUI and 10 Megabytes of RAM Per Tab
- Some people say it's not possible in 2025, maybe in part because they depend on very bloated software
- Gemini Links 25/12/2025: Hibernation and TV Detox
- Links for the day
- The Right to Repair (Especially When Products Are So Poorly Made)
- Many electrical appliances fail often/quick and are nearly impossible to repair
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- Links 26/12/2025: French Postal Services Under Russian Attack, U.S. Cheetos Accuse People Who Obstruct Information Warfare by Russia of "Censorship"
- Links for the day
- Debian's Daniel Kahn Gillmor is Wrong, Signal is No "Gold Standard" (It's Also Promoted by Proponents of Back Doors)
- I'm not too sure why Debian or the ACLU would wish to associate with this
- Next Year Will be the Year of Quantum, Just Like 2020, 2015, 2010, 2005 and So On
- "Quantum" is the future
- The Silent Power of Coercion Over Speech
- The important thing is optics
- So Simple That You Can Touch and Feel It
- In light of recent experiences
- Internet Relay Chat (IRC) Under Attack by Cross-Network Spam Floods
- So far we've been spared (our network has not been targeted at all) [...] Let's hope the spam won't discourage the hundreds of thousands of people worldwide who still use IRC
- An "AI-Infused" Windows
- Microsoft Windows isn't becoming a worthless pile of garbage by accident
- Microsoft Laid Off Over 30,000 People This Year, Coders Are "Too Expensive"
- Go get some popcorn. Microsoft "slopware" is about to get real!
- Critics Have Long Said Microsoft Produces "Slopware", Microsoft Wants to Prove Them Right
- Slop instead of code is a step in the right direction?
- The Top 8 Innovations of IBM in 2025
- What innovations will come out from IBM in 2026?
- And as the Year Turns...
- The significance of new years isn't based on geology or astronomy or anything like that
- Appliances Versus Computers
- Replacing a computer inside an object of some kind or inside an appliance (which nowadays includes "modern" cars) isn't simple and isn't cheap
- A Dark Side of Europe
- They try hard to silence people who speak about these issues
- Why People Love Techrights (and Also Loved "Boycott Novell")
- I will continue to publish for many decades to come
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Thursday, December 25, 2025
- IRC logs for Thursday, December 25, 2025
- A Tribute to Richard Stallman
- It's about knowledge and sharing
- Links 26/12/2025: Impermanence, Salt and Thermometer, Freetube
- Links for the day
- Canonical is Making the Cost of PCs Very High, Due to Unnecessary Ubuntu Bloat
- They say the reason for the price surge is LLM hype/frenzy
- Canonical's Ubuntu is Bloatware
- How did Ubuntu get so fat?
- The EPO is a Very Vicious Organisation You Neither Wish to Join Nor Stay in for "Too Long"
- Consider what the EPO thinks of its own workers, the staff that actually does real work
- 2026 Will Hopefully Turn Out to be Slopless
- we seem to be starting the post-Christmas period on the right footing
- Links 25/12/2025: Mail Carriers in "a Murky Future", Dihydroxyacetone Man’s "Chip Embargo Against China Backfiring Spectacularly"
- Links for the day
- The Register MS: All I Want For Xmas is Microsoft
- they actually put effort into it
- How to Win Nobel Prize for Peace
- Do you get to Heaven (or peace platitudes) by sleeping with 72 virgins?
- Links 25/12/2025: Ample Cover-up Found in Jeffrey Epstein Files; ChatGPT Causes Psychosis, Not a Good Use Case
- Links for the day
- Giving Money to Free Software
- In life, people must make sacrifices to do what's right and just
- The Register MS: Don't Use Linux
- That really says a lot about The Register MS
- EPO People Power - Part XV - EPO Cocainegate to Resume This Weekend
- The next installment (number 16) will probably come out this weekend
- Microsoft: XBox is Going "Online", "Cloud"...
- XBox as a console is pretty much dead
- The Year of the Bubble
- We hope that in 2026 the marketing liars will find some new buzzwords to latch onto and quit calling everything "AI"
- Mozilla Firefox is a GAFAM Browser With Slop, Move to a Free Software Web Browser
- on mobile the options would be more limited
- libera.chat Was Under Attack Last Night
- Several months from now libera.chat turns 5
- Free Software Foundation (FSF) Raises Over $300,000 Before Christmas
- the FSF made it past $300,000
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, December 24, 2025
- IRC logs for Wednesday, December 24, 2025
- Sounds Like Microsoft 'Open' 'AI' (Slop) Ran Out of Money to Borrow
- Maybe in 2026 slop will be scarce enough that eventually, maybe by year's end, we'll manage to just ignore it.
- In India, Staff Works on Christmas Eve, Becomes Unemployed (Last Day)
- The company fires based on how "expensive" workers are more often than based on their productivity
- Links 24/12/2025: US TACOs on "China Chip Tariffs Until 2027", Russian Snickers in U.K. Convenience Shops
- Links for the day
- Links 24/12/2025: Cheeto President "Accused of Rape in Jeffrey Epstein Files", Windows to be Replaced by Slop?
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 24/12/2025: Tea, Love During Pain, and Gaming This Year
- Links for the day
- GAFAM is a Bubble, Nothing is Free in This World
- Nothing is free in the world
- My New CD Player/Stereo Didn't Even Last a Year, My CD Player/Stereo From the Early 1990s Still Works
- That helped reaffirm what I said in recent years about production/manufacturing standards of "modern" things
- GitHub Isn't Free, Microsoft Subsidises It (Losses) to Entrap You Inside Proprietary Software, Now Come the Fees
- GitHub was never free
- XBox Console is Dead, "Microsoft is Rethinking What XBox is"
- So XBox is now "cloud"
- IBM SkillsBuild: Teaching Slop to People
- What skills does that give? Making more slopfarms?
- Maybe 2026 Will be the Last Year of António Campinos
- Europe's patent system is run by thugs and it serves thugs
- 2025: The Year LLM Slop Rose to Prominence and Then Fell
- the slop hype is bound to end
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, December 23, 2025
- IRC logs for Tuesday, December 23, 2025
- Links 24/12/2025: Spotify Surveillance and Shadow Over Rule of Law in Hong Kong
- Links for the day