NSA Watch: Climate as 'Terrorism', War on Journalism and Anonymity, Anger in Europe and Angry Birds
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2014-01-30 12:37:56 UTC
- Modified: 2014-01-30 12:37:56 UTC
Summary: A roundup of yesterday's and today's news about the NSA
New Leaks
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The document, with portions marked "top secret," indicates that the NSA was monitoring the communications of other countries ahead of the conference, and intended to continue doing so throughout the meeting. Posted on an internal NSA website on Dec. 7, 2009, the first day of the Copenhagen summit, it states that "analysts here at NSA, as well as our Second Party partners, will continue to provide policymakers with unique, timely, and valuable insights into key countries' preparations and goals for the conference, as well as the deliberations within countries on climate change policies and negotiation strategies."
Illegal Collection of 'Evidence'
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A man charged with aiding a terrorist organization has asked a U.S. court to throw out information collected by the National Security Agency, saying the NSA's surveillance of his Internet communications violates the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
Prosecuting Anonymisers
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In oral arguments heard on Tuesday, Lavabit and federal prosecutors each presented their cases in front of a three-judge panel at the Fourth US Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia. The case is an appeal of contempt-of-court charges against Lavabit, a now-defunct e-mail hosting service that once offered secure communication.
In the summer of 2013, Lavabit was ordered to provide real-time e-mail monitoring of one of its users, widely believed to be Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor-turned-leaker. When Lavabit told the feds that the only way it could hand over communications was through an internal process that would deliver results 60 days after any communication was sent, the authorities returned with a search warrant for Lavabit's SSL keys, which could decrypt the traffic of all of Lavabit's users. Ladar Levison, the CEO of Lavabit, handed over the SSL keys but then shut down his 10-year-old business rather than expose all of Lavabit's users.
War on Journalism
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James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, has issued a blistering condemnation of Edward Snowden, calling the surveillance disclosures published by the Guardian and other news outlets a “perfect storm” that would endanger American lives.
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Director of National Intelligence James Clapper urged former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and his “accomplices” to return leaked documents during a hearing on Wednesday.
Europe
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A former Ukrainian president warned on Wednesday that the country is now on “the brink of civil war,” and Russia added to the gloom by announcing the suspension of its financial aid package, which was all that had been keeping Ukraine solvent.
[...]
Protesters for weeks had suspected that the government was using location data from cellphones near the demonstration to pinpoint people for political profiling, and they received alarming confirmation when a court formally ordered a telephone company to hand over such data.
Earlier this month, protesters at a clash with riot police officers received text messages on their phones saying they had been “registered as a participant in a mass disturbance.”
Then, three cellphone companies — Kyivstar, MTS and Life — denied that they had provided the location data to the government or had sent the text messages. Kyivstar suggested that it was instead the work of a “pirate” cellphone tower set up in the area.
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Former employee of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Edward Snowden will be invited to the spring session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), APA’s Europe bureau reports.
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Chancellor says Germany and US still 'far apart' on sweeping surveillance and spying activities revealed by Edward Snowden
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Berlin and Washington are still "far apart" in their views on the US National Security Agency's (NSA) mass surveillance of Germany but they remain close allies, Chancellor Angela Merkel told parliament on Wednesday.
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The German government and the German Federal Intelligence Service are facing legal action because they allegedly aided the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) data collection program.
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THE EUROPEAN UNION JUSTICE COMMISSIONER has spoken out on Data Protection Day about national security agency surveillance.
US Politics
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Ever since leaked NSA documents first started popping up this summer, the battle against NSA surveillance has proceeded on multiple fronts: legislators pushing for new laws, journalists pushing for new stories, and tech companies fighting to regain users’ trust. Yesterday, one of the major fronts closed down. Since July, tech companies had been putting pressure on the Department of Justice, fighting for the right to say more about their interactions with law enforcement. Yesterday they made peace, reaching a settlement and withdrawing a class action suit that had drawn in some of the most powerful companies in America. On this front at least, reformers have likely gotten all they’re going to get.
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Senator Patrick Leahy questioned how the Constitution allows the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of U.S. telephone records and repeated his calls for President Barack Obama’s administration to end the program during a hearing Wednesday.
The Obama administration should heed the recent advice of the U.S. Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) and end the phone records collection program, said Leahy, a Vermont Democrat.
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The NSA's new data center in Utah has provided the flashpoint for legislation targeted at "nullifying" the agency by cutting off its access to public utilities and/or leveraging the powers granted to states to combat federal government overreach. An activist group known as The Tenth Amendment Center proposed a state law that would cut off the new data center's much needed water supply, along with any other public utility or service, like sanitation and road repair, in hopes of (at minimum) forcing the NSA to reconsider its collection tactics, or failing that, to find a new home.
Angry Birds
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Some users trying to access the www.angrybirds.com website late Tuesday were greeted by an image depicting the Angry Birds game characters accompanied by the text "Spying Birds." The U.S. National Security Agency's logo was also visible in the image.
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Reacting to recent revelations that smartphone apps such as Angry Birds and Google Maps are being used by the National Security Agency (NSA) and Britain’s Government Communications Headquarter (GCHQ) to spy on their users, the Application Developers Alliance has condemned the NSA for damaging the industry.
BBC
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When the Guardian and Washington Post newspapers published the first of Edward Snowden's NSA-GCHQ leaks in June, it unleashed a stream of abbreviations, acronyms and jargon describing the cyberspies' activities.
Recent Techrights' Posts
- Another Slew of Fake Articles About 'Linux' and 'Security' From Brittany Day at linuxsecurity.com (Spamfarm/Slopfarm)
- linuxsecurity.com is basically a pariah and parasite. It lessens the incentive to write real articles about "Linux" by generating fake ones to outrank the originals.
- IBM: Many Thousands of Layoffs in 2025
- If 2025 is expected to be the same, then perhaps about 20,000 IBM workers will no longer be there
- Google: Your Only Option is Google YouTube (Coming Soon: Mandatory DRM and Attestation?)
- Digital Restrictions (DRM) to follow? Only for "approved" (attestation) browsers?
- The Munich-Based EPO is Still Using a Platform That Promotes the Far Right and Rehabilitates Nazism
- Active Twitter account
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- Links 30/01/2025: Fentanylware (TikTok) Causes Deaths, FBI Seizes Domains
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 30/01/2025: Action vs Inaction, Gopherholes, and More
- Links for the day
- Links 30/01/2025: Microsoft Wants Convicted Felon to Give Fentanylware (TikTok) to It (After Making a Phonecall Asking for That in 2019), "Moving Away From Google's Ecosystem"
- Links for the day
- Jack M. Germain (LinuxInsider) Seems to Have Turned to LLM Slop, Graphics Slop, and B2B SPAM
- LinuxInsider is barely active anymore
- Links 30/01/2025: Amazon Layoffs and DeepSeek Panic
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 30/01/2025: Chaos Reigns, E-mail, Searching
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, January 29, 2025
- IRC logs for Wednesday, January 29, 2025
- Mastodon Was Always Biased (Just Like Twitter After Abandoning Chronological and Neutral Timelines in Order to Become More Like Facebook)
- So bury-brigading and click-farming control what people see
- Certificate Authority Let's Encrypt Falls to Only 0.4% of the Total in Geminispace
- Geminispace does not need to outsource trust
- Links 29/01/2025: Dismantling Public Health in the US, Air Busan Plane Up in Flames (South Korea's Air Disasters Streak)
- Links for the day
- Announcements and Administrivia
- This week we're going out for two days in a row to celebrate an achievement that's very respectable
- Gemini Links 29/01/2025: Japan, GTD, and More
- Links for the day
- Sir, Yes, Sir. The Life of EPO Patent Examiners.
- If working for the EPO makes it harder to sleep at night, take action
- How the EPO Pressures Staff Into Minting More Monopolies (Patents), Even Illegal Ones That Harm Europe and Ultimately Dismantle the Rule of Law
- insights into the pressure examiners are under
- LLM Slop Machines Are Not a Win for "Open Source" and If They Get Cheaper, It's Even Worse
- If some program that claims to be "Open Source" pollutes the Web with fake articles (Microsoft SPAM and fake "Linux" articles), whose win is it?
- Links 29/01/2025: Data Privacy Day and Growing Tensions in Europe
- Links for the day
- Nazi Twitter (aka "X") Became a Troll Site That Lets People Buy a Blue Tick While Its Boss Actively Promotes Neonazi Politicians
- the intellectual level of people who infest the Web through "Twitter" or "X"
- This is Why They're So Afraid of Richard Stallman (He Tells People the Correct History)
- Then they post about it to Microsoft's LinkedIn
- Richard Stallman Speech in Bengaluru, "Silicon Valley of India"
- 62 years have passed since his "young nerd" days and he's still at it
- Claim: Facebook Deletes Posts of IBM Red Hat Critics
- As always, follow the money (advertisers)
- Links 29/01/2025: Climate Crisis and "It’s time for the Xbox to fade away" (Microsoft Lose)
- Links for the day
- Links 29/01/2025: Buying Groceries During a Trade War, Political 'Retro'
- Links for the day
- More Illegal Patents at the EPO, Legality of Granted European Patents No Longer Matters to the Office
- breaking the law for profit
- Network Improvements Tomorrow
- "Network maintenance" down in London
- Sharing is Caring (But Advocating Copyleft Makes You a "Target")
- GPLv3 does not close all the loopholes which the "Affero" helps close
- Articles About Free Speech at Facebook
- 'Facebook vs Linux' story is now receiving a lot more media coverage
- We Were Right About stallmansupport.org Making an Error by Joining Social Control Media. mastodon.social Suspends stallmansupport.org.
- From what we can guess, accounts can be banned by some oversensitive admin or a mob of users ("bury brigades")
- "Latest Technology News" in BetaNews Still LLM Slop and SPAM Composed by LLMs (It's Basically a Spamfarm Disguised as a News Site)
- Only a fool would visit BetaNews in search of actual news
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, January 28, 2025
- IRC logs for Tuesday, January 28, 2025
- The EPO's Corruption, If It Remains Untackled, Helps the Far Right and Enemies of European Unity/Solidarity
- Do not negotiate with evil
- The Web, Including Wikipedia, Gets Filled With Lies About Bill Gates, Added by Bill Gates and His PR Team
- Of course Wikipedia is funded by Gates
- Facebook Banning Linux Sites (or People Who Link to Linux Sites) is Another Symptom of the Web's Demise
- The state of media on the Web is really bad; Social Control Media amplifies the badness, as Facebook serves to show
- Gemini Links 29/01/2025: Neovim Telescope and Writing Less
- Links for the day
- Links 28/01/2025: Chaffbot as Commodity Fad, New Import Restrictions in Thailand
- Links for the day
- Links 28/01/2025: "Against Social [Control] Media", "Smart" Buses' Ticketing System Cracked
- Links for the day
- [Video] Richard Matthew Stallman (RMS) in India, Talking About Proprietary Software's Dangers Only Yesterday
- WebM file
- Gemini Links 28/01/2025: Thinking About Not Much, Computing Fatigue, the Curse of JavaScript
- Links for the day
- "SuccessFactors" (SAP) Stunts at the EPO Used to Break Laws and Constitutions, Staff Tricked Into Harming Themselves
- Ongoing corruption and lawlessness became the norm; Europe's second-largest institution (EPO) along with the largest institution (EU) has its very own Minsk
- The GNU Manifesto Turns 40 in a Few Weeks
- The FSF turns 40 later this year, too
- Continued Support and Momentum at the Free Software Foundation (FSF)
- "This helps protect our community."
- Another Talk by Richard Stallman Tomorrow, This Time in Bengaluru
- This means that in January 2025 he is giving at least 5 public talks
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Monday, January 27, 2025
- IRC logs for Monday, January 27, 2025