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
- Amazon's Debt Skyrockets by Almost 100 Billion Dollars in 9 Months
- On top of that there is additional (secret, kept stealth by accounting tricks) debt
- Many People "Left" Red Hat This Month, Including Yesterday
- We already saw this with SUSE
- Birss Replaces Vos in UK's High Court, LLM Slop Plagiarism a Contentious Issue
- Only days ago we mentioned Sir Geoffrey Vos in relation to lobbying for LLM slop
- Despite the Mass Layoffs Microsoft's Debt Soared by 5.1 Billion Dollars in Just 3 Months
- This is why Microsoft asks 60,000 workers to leave
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- "AI" as Surrogate for Debt and Distraction From Computing (Bots Described as "Agents" and/or Any Form of "Intelligence" is More Like a Religion)
- We're letting people without even college degrees game the "market" (Wall Street) by lying to it
- Intercontinental Brigading - Part XXV - Election Integrity at a Time of Back Doors and Very Severe Bugs in UEFI
- How dare British media comment on insurrection following a US election?
- "The Judge Accepted That Mrs Schestowitz Had Been the Subject of a Vicious Campaign of Online Harassment"
- That's consistent with how they men treat women
- Gemini Links 31/10/2026: Hallowe'en and "Thinking About People"
- Links for the day
- Links 31/10/2026: The Hinge on Apple's Constantly Breaking New Foldable iPhone Was "Built With Slop", Slop Causes Cash Squeeze GAFAM
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- Google is bleeding from slop
- Slavery at Microsoft
- illegal if true
- Gemini Links 31/10/2026: "Where I Draw the Line With" Slop Plagiarism and "Nobody Cares That You're Leaving Proton" (Over Slop)
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Friday, October 30, 2026
- IRC logs for Friday, October 30, 2026
- Links 30/10/2026: "Over 41,000 DHS Employee Records Leaked Online" and Concerns Over Radicalism in France
- Links for the day
- Intercontinental Brigading - Part XXIV - It's an Inherently American Issue and American Elections Are at Risk From Restricted ('Secure') Boot and LLM Chatbots (Disinformation at Scale)
- We'll focus a lot on US elections in the coming days
- "Early Retirement" (Silent Layoffs) for Everybody Except the Executives
- Some will stick around even past 70
- Gemini Links 30/10/2026: Solar MiniBBS, Kubernetes With FreeBSD, "Sysadmin Day"
- Links for the day
- Microsoft Layoffs Far Worse Than the Media Tells (Microsoft Spin Laundered as "Reporting")
- Some people are made to "retire" and sign an NDA to make it seem like a happy ending and mostly consensual retreat
- Links 30/10/2026: Google Crashes on Slop Disappointment and GAFAM's "Data Center Blitz Is Burning Through Cash and Scaring Wall St."
- Links for the day
- Fake 'Articles' in The Register MS Concerning "AI"
- We don't suppose The Register MS will be around for much longer after this bubble pops
- What Linus Torvalds Told Me Two Decades Ago
- It seems like he was eager to distinguish himself from the "elders" of FSF [...] For anything "revolutionary" to happen in the sciences one must accept the risk of living in poverty like Tesla (the person, not the right-wing fanatics) and Torvalds isn't too old to "cause a stir"
- GNU/Linux as a Free Software Platform is More GNU (and GPL) Than Linux
- GNU predates Linux by nearly a decades and it was born to tackle injustices
- Who Or What Are Security Professionals/Experts?
- Companies like GAFAM are willing to tolerate cheaters because those companies themselves are cheats
- Intercontinental Brigading - Part XXIII - What Garrett Did Puts Elections at Risk (Also in His Own Country, Where a Dictator Trusts Only Machines That 'Support' Him)
- UEFI 'security' is only as trustworthy as its ferocious boosters
- Gemini Links 30/10/2026: RIP Patrick Stewart and Amp Integration
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Thursday, October 29, 2026
- IRC logs for Thursday, October 29, 2026
- The Metric is Not the Mission
- "Passing Thoughts" by Andy
- More Than 5 Years Have Passed Since Official Release of Vista 11 and in the US It's Measured as Only 3 Times Bigger Than GNU/Linux on the Desktop/Laptop
- If mobile is culled from the statistics, then GNU/Linux is somewhere near 11%
- It's About Intention, Not Attrition, at Microsoft
- Microsoft does in fact aim to push many workers off the cliff
- The Next 50 Years of Emacs (and GNU)
- GNU's founder made the widely used editor, GNU Emacs
- Links 29/10/2026: Microsoft-Connected and Funded Openwashing at FOSDEM, Tragedy in Spain
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 29/10/2026: London, Worcestershire, and Robot Exclusion Protocol
- Links for the day
- The Register MS is Publishing Spam About "AI" for HP, Sponsored by HP, Even Composed by HP
- Or "HPE" as they choose to call themselves (with the hype of "enterprise")
- Links 29/10/2026: Anthropic Still Sued Over Copyright Infringement (Plagiarism Isn't "Training"), Elon Musk Openly Admits He Helps Putin Crush Ukraine
- Links for the day
- Intercontinental Brigading - Part XXI - Techrights Was Right, So Why Was It Punished by Lawfare While the Culprits Walk Away Scot-free?
- Techrights did a public service, cautioning about real risks to the public, but the people who caused the problems walk away scot-free
- Intercontinental Brigading - Part XXII - Still "Radio Silence" From "Restricted Boot" Perpetrators (After Techrights Proven Right Again)
- Maybe when they sober up they'll say something...
- 'Secure' Boot Is Not Secure, Here Are News Reports About the Latest Evidence
- We'll be linking to this page in the future as evidence of the catastrophe
- No, Microsoft Isn't Doing Well (It Has Struggled for a Long Time)
- Microsoft isn't growing, the shares are a Ponzi scheme of sorts
- What Makes Techrights a Community
- Communities can accomplish a lot. They cannot be "bought" and "sold", they're based on trust, mutual respect, and shared ideology.
- Linux Links 29/10/2026: Refractor Stargazing and Making Better Use of RAM in Linux
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, October 28, 2026
- IRC logs for Wednesday, October 28, 2026