NSA Watch: New Faces, Same Policy, Obama Defends Clapper
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2014-01-31 22:55:06 UTC
- Modified: 2014-01-31 22:55:06 UTC
Summary: Today's news about privacy and the NSA in particular
-
La Quadrature du Net launches a crowd-funding campaign to support the making of the upcoming animation movie about privacy, mass surveillance, and the urgency to rethink our relationship with technology. Help us finance this project!
-
Demonstrators protesting Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych suspected their cellphone location data was being tracked since at least last week, when people in the vicinity of a clash between riot police and protesters received a chilling text message. It read: "Dear subscriber, you are registered as a participant in a mass disturbance."
-
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said Friday that relations with Germany have gone through a "rough patch" recently because of revelations about NSA spying, but insisted that the two countries can put the episode behind them.
-
Leaders from several countries, including Union Minister Jairam Ramesh, have reacted angrily to revelations that the US spied on their governments at the 2009 Copenhagen climate summit, according to a media report.
-
Leaders from several countries, including Union Minister Jairam Ramesh, have reacted angrily to revelations that the US spied on their governments at the 2009 Copenhagen climate summit, according to a media report.
-
German interior minister Thomas de Maiziere at the Munich Security Conference Friday said the US is not doing enough to restore trust after the NSA scandal: "The information we are being provided with is not satisfactory and the political damage [of the NSA's work] is greater than the security benefit."
-
US Secretary of State John Kerry acknowledged Friday that relations with Germany had gone through a "rough period" of late over NSA snooping but that shared security priorities would keep the countries close.
-
Those of you following the steady stream of news stories on the National Security Agency's insatiable appetite for information already know that the spy agency has figured out how to snatch data from mobile apps. Since 2007, The NSA and its partner Britain's Government Communication Headquarters (GCHQ) have siphoned from apps address books, buddy lists, phone logs and geographic data.
-
NSA also wishes to develop the technology so that it is capable of breaking modern Internet security.
-
German operator group Deutsche Telekom has hailed last year’s revelations that the US spy agency NSA and the UK’s GCHQ had been monitoring ordinary citizens’ browsing and messaging habits as an “opportunity” for operators to provide data privacy and data security services.
-
Alessandro Acquisti in his TED talk tells us why privacy matters in a world in which it is vanishing. "Privacy is not about having something negative to hide," he says.
Indeed, the privacy of all Americans is a matter of principle, enshrined in the Constitution. It used to be we had control of what we wanted people to know about us, good and bad. But not anymore.
As troubling as this assault on privacy is, the Edward Snowden revelations about the National Security Agency's surveillance show that something even more dangerous is afoot. And it's about what the NSA can do with this information they are collecting on us.
-
Documents leaked by Edward Snowden show NSA kept US negotiators abreast of their rivals' positions at 2009 summitfree
-
Developing countries have reacted angrily to revelations that the United States spied on other governments at the Copenhagen climate summit in 2009.
-
Vice-admiral Michael Rogers, the commander of the US navy’s tenth fleet and its Fleet Cyber Command, will take over from NSA Director Keith Alexander, who reluctantly became a global figure in the wake of the Snowden revelations.
-
any of us are still quite disappointed that James Clapper has kept his job as Director of National Intelligence after flat out lying to Congress over whether or not the NSA spied on Americans. There have been increasing calls from within Congress to have Clapper investigated and possibly prosecuted for the felony of lying to Congress, but there appears to be no movement there at all. Not only does the Obama administration seem to want to protect one of their own, but it's also made it clear that something like that would make it look like Ed Snowden "won" and they can't allow that sort of thing.
-
As the NSA leaks have expanded to detail spying activities in other countries, those governments affected have had a variety of reactions. In some cases, legitimately questionable tactics were exposed (potential economic espionage in Brazil, tapping German chancellor Angela Merkel's phone) and the responses were genuinely outraged. In other cases, the outrage was temporary and somewhat muted, suggesting these countries were allowing the NSA to take the heat for their own questionable surveillance programs aimed at their citizens.
-
We thought we won the Crypto Wars, the fight to make strong encryption accessible to all, in the 1990s.1 We were wrong. Last month, Reuters broke news about a deal struck between the popular computer security firm RSA and the National Security Agency. RSA reportedly accepted $10 million from NSA to make Dual_EC_DRBG—an intentionally weakened random number generator—the default in its widely used BSAFE encryption toolkit.
-
In the motion filed in federal court in Denver on Wednesday with help from the American Civil Liberties Union, Jamshid Muhtorov also requested that prosecutors disclose more about how surveillance law was used in his case. Muhtorov denies the terror charges he faces.
-
There is so much missing or purposefully obfuscated in the debate about NSA/Five Eyes spying, US Government illegality, CIA collusion with al-Qaeda, Guantanamo, 9/11, torture, drones, Afghanistan, Iraq and everything that millions of people have been outraged about for over a decade, but the most striking is that almost no one is proposing closing these organizations down and few are talking about prosecuting those responsible.
-
The NSA has finally found an officer for its civil liberties and privacy office. A new member of the NSA team will have to provide expert advice as well as develop measures for strengthening the NSA's privacy protection. The appointed officer seems to be a good choice for the NSA whose reputation has been tarnished, but at the same time this raises some experts' doubts.
-
Documents from Edward Snowden reveal that Canada's foreign signals intelligence agency picked up metadata on airport travellers from free Wi-Fi available at a major Canadian airport.
-
Prime Minister David Cameron said Thursday he believes the British public has largely shrugged off the espionage disclosures of former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, telling lawmakers that people seem to be satisfied that U.K. spies are doing their jobs.
-
When the National Security Agency’s surveillance program PRISM was disclosed in early June, the immediate question wasn’t if the program would harm the U.S. tech industry but how badly. Six months and many more disclosures later, it’s clear NSA surveillance is an economic millstone that threatens to drag down the U.S. tech industry.
-
Two decades ago, the National Security Agency (NSA) sought legislation requiring a "back door" in all public encryption technologies, enabling the agency to monitor electronic communications even when the parties sought to shield them from prying eyes. That push failed. The NSA then embarked on an effort to accomplish essentially the same goal in secret.
-
The US relationship with the Saudis appears to be changing and even though several decades ago Saudi agreed to sell the US oil at $10 a barrel in perpetuity, the love affair appears to be over. According to former MI5 officer and whistleblower David Shayler there may be plans to change the official story of 9/11 and the US start pointing the finger at Saudi Arabia. Mr. Shayler believes the way to stop all of the illegality being committed by agencies such as CIA, NSA, MI6 and GCHQ is to simply stop funding them.
Recent Techrights' Posts
- American Back Doors No Longer Trusted by Europeans
- Has the EU paid attention, for a change?
- When Energy Prices Double in About a Month the Slop Bros Won't Sleep at Night
- Unhinged leadership does not seem eager to end a conflict that it started
- Newer is Not Better, Lunar Edition
- Maybe in 57 years (2083, after all these wars) we'll managed to launch a capsule with a human and a dog above the stratosphere again
-
- Ubuntu More Honest Than Microsoft Windows
- If you don't like the direction Ubuntu has taken, then try something else
- Azure is Dying, the "Entertainment" (Slop) Couldn't Lift Up Fake 'Demand' For Azure
- Azure has had mass layoffs every year since 2020 and even earlier this year
- 2026 Starting to Feel Like 2020
- Can Wall Street survive this?
- Growing Awareness of Techrights' Importance
- We're not an individual's blog but a community project
- Harassment by Microsoft, Then a Cover-up
- That Microsoft relies on blackmail, bribes and harassment (even against its own people) isn't surprising given the roots of the company and its toxic, deceitful management
- SLAPP Censorship - Part 37 Out of 200: The Correct Suspicion Garrett and Graveley Were Collaborating in Overseas Litigation Against Critics
- Microsofters and back doors' boosters from America frivolously sue Brits
- Microsoft Has Lost Nearly 20% in "Desktop Operating System Market Share" Since COVID-19 Began
- Add Android and iOS, then Windows falls to 24%
- Maintenance Later This Month
- Apr 24, 2026 21:00 - Apr 25, 2026 09:00 BST
- Microsoft: Move Over, XBox, Slop is the New "Entertainment" and We Demote Our "Entertainment" CEO
- Marketers, marketers, marketers, as a CEO called Ballmer put it
- linuxbuz.com is a Slopfarm, It Depends on LLMs
- In the more distant past it could be said that linuxbuz.com was an OK site
- Links 07/04/2026: Patent Trolls Leigh M. Rothschild, Bolstered by GNOME and OIN, Continues to Attack; ‘Retaliatory Antitrust Suit’ by MElon
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 07/04/2026: Copyleft Revisited, Killing Linux Processes With FZF
- Links for the day
- It Would be Good for Debian to Have a Female DPL, But...
- Debian isn't exactly selecting people for quality or policing bad behaviour
- IBM Insiders Say What's Wrong With IBM in Albany (and Yes, There Are Layoffs)
- promotions boil down to what insiders now call "brown-nosing" and nepotism
- After Killing OpenSource.org IBM Together With OSI Told Us It Would Carry on OpenSource.net, But the Site Has Been Essentially Dead for 9 Months (Effectively Abandoned)
- OpenSource.org has been dormant for 4 weeks already and OpenSource.net last had a new page 9 months ago (it'll be 9 months tomorrow) [...] That's IBM in a nutshell
- A Lot of What Happened to OSI is Because of Reporting by Techrights
- Half a year since Stefano Maffuli (Executive Director) "left"
- Public Presentations by RMS Hardly Interrupted Anymore
- We'll carry on covering those sorts of topics throughout the year
- Links 07/04/2026: US Wants to Put Journalists in Prison for Reporting Facts, Artist ‘Bale’ Arrested Over Rape Allegation in Social Control Media
- Links for the day
- To IBMers, IBM Has Failed and is Fast Becoming a Book of Jokes and One-Word Punchlines
- How else can one make it obvious that IBM is circling down the drain?
- "AI Revolution" Was a Lie: Microsoft CEO Admits What He Calls "AI" is Sometimes Sloppy and Microsoft Admits That Slop is for "Entertainment Purposes Only" (Not for Any Serious Work)
- if it gets "memory-holed", we can bring it up again and again
- Social Control Media is Not a Viable Business Model
- The future of the Web might not be the Web
- From Datacentres Boom to Actual Booms That Target Datacentres, Now Struggling to Justify Humongous Energy and Water Consumption
- Datacentres that are used for mindless "entertainment" (as Microsoft calls it) like slop are not a priority at this time
- Gemini Links 07/04/2026: Aircraft Lift Force, Editor History, and Consumer Hardware Stagnation
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Monday, April 06, 2026
- IRC logs for Monday, April 06, 2026
- What Matters is Software Freedom, Not the Brands
- The important thing is to speak about Software Freedom
- Wikileaks is About to Turn 20
- ~2 days ago it turned 19.5
- The Cloud of Smoke
- Will 2026 be the year that "The Cloud" openly confesses the risks it brings about?
- SLAPP Censorship - Part 36 Out of 200: Claim KB-2024-003529 in a Nutshell (Microsoft Employee Does Terrible Things, Then Sues the Reporter in Another Continent)
- It commences with more of an overview
- Gemini Links 06/04/2026: Solar Panel Story and Centralisation
- Links for the day
- "Free Speech, Free Press": What the World Needs to Improve
- Darkness breeds corruption
- IBM prioritises a "lot of smoke and hype and use of trending buzzwords"
- IBM can pretend all it wants things are fine
- GAFAM Paying the Price for Pursuing US Military Money (Taxpayers' Money as 'Stimulus' With Strings Attached)
- The "cloud" in cloud computing is a cloud of smoke
- Observing Slop's Demise
- If energy becomes more scarce, then one rare/side perk (or upside) will be slop companies screaming for lifeboats
- Links 06/04/2026: Crackers Breached the European Commission, Why "Old Way of Campaigning Won’t Cut It Anymore"
- Links for the day
- Enron Versus NVIDIA (the Cost of Circular Financing, or Funding Your Own Customers to Buy Your Products) - “The Inventory Paradox” or “The Vibe Revenue Admission”
- Round-tripping (finance)
- You Know "The Economy" is Fake When 6 Months After Oracle Says Debt-Saddled 'Open' 'AI' (Slop) Will Pay It $300,000,000,000 Oracle Says It Must Lay Off 30,000 Workers at 6AM
- Oracle is in deep debt, which increased at a pace of almost 4 billion dollars per month lately
- Free Software Will Outlive GAFAM
- GAFAM is overhyped
- Techrights Was Further Decentralised Three Years Ago
- In 2020 we began working on IPFS stuff
- The Military Attacks on Dubai Internet City as Reminder That GAFAM Isn't Safe (Disregard the "Nobody Gets Fired for Buying GAFAM" Mindset)
- These are all realistic and foreseeable scenarios that GAFAM sceptics have long warned about
- The Wars Aren't Ending, Now We See GAFAM Facilities Being Bombed
- This is becoming a tech issue
- Links 06/04/2026: Turning 34, Throwing Things Away, and Printing in GNU/Linux
- Links for the day
- Links 06/04/2026: Ex-Microsoft Engineer Explains Why Azure Fails, Germany Prepares for War
- Links for the day
- EPO "Cocaine Communication Manager" - Part XI - EPO Strike Enters Its Second Week, EPO Sheds Off Qualified Staff to Make Way for Nepotists
- More than six months ago the "Cocaine Communication Manager" got arrested for cocaine use
- Another Microsoft Outlook Downtime
- Microsoft has sloppy code, it's not something suitable for mission-critical things
- Week 2 of April IBM Layoffs Accelerate Based on Rumours
- "Heard about Layoff at IBM"
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Sunday, April 05, 2026
- IRC logs for Sunday, April 05, 2026
- Culture of Harassment Inside Microsoft, Says Former Director at Microsoft
- listen to Microsoft insiders
- Drone Strikes on Amazon (GAFAM) Datacentres Highlight Azure's Miniscule Share
- Azure is failing
- SLAPP Censorship - Part 35 Out of 200: How to Make ~10,000 Pound Sterling (13,220.50 United States Dollars) by Copy-Pasting and Editing 10 Pages
- Today it's Easter Sunday, so we'll keep this part relatively short
- Gemini Links 05/04/2026: Artemis II Mission Tracker, Meditation on Copyright, Alhena 5.5.5, "Gemini as the Final Frontier of Human Cognition"
- Links for the day
- Microsoft Windows Falls to All-Time Low of ~60% in Switzerland, GNU/Linux Among Top Gainers
- What will it take for mainstream media (not just geeks' site) to cover it?
- Mainstream Media on "Practical Survivalism"
- Suffice to say, panic buying begets more panic and price surges
- Cloud Computing as a Cloud of Smoke (Your Hosting Provider is a "Legitimate" Military Target)
- When a French datacentre went up in flames people joked that the "cloud" meant a cloud of smoke
- Andreas Tille Congratulates Sruthi Chandran Before the Election for Debian Project Leader (DPL) is Even Over
- Andreas Tille, the current Debian Project Leader (DPL) who has been in this role for nearly 24 months
- When You Try to Change the World for the Better and Somehow They Find a Way to Say You Are the Villain
- Don't be a fool. Don't fall for inversions of narratives.
- Slop Was a Flop and Energy Crisis Will be Slop's Final Blow
- Today we see no slopfarms in Google News
- Links 05/04/2026: "Taiwanese Airlines to Hike Fuel Surcharges 157%" and Openly Racist Voter Suppression Starts in the US
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 05/04/2026: Playing with Hyprland and Migrating Antenna Filters
- Links for the day
- Links 05/04/2026: "Confidential Computing" as Proprietary Bundle of False Promises and "The Web Is an Antitrust Wedge"
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Saturday, April 04, 2026
- IRC logs for Saturday, April 04, 2026