Weekend News: Surveillance, Drones, CIA, and Ukraine
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2014-03-10 09:29:54 UTC
- Modified: 2014-03-10 09:29:54 UTC
Summary: More weekend news (plus early Monday news) about issues scarcely covered in the wider media/press
NSA/Surveillance
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed two briefs on Friday challenging secret government demands for information known as National Security Letters (NSLs) with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The briefs—one filed on behalf of a telecom company and another for an Internet company—remain under seal because the government continues to insist that even identifying the companies involved might endanger national security.
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Has it only been 10 months since Edward Snowden's NSA revelations changed the world? Can you even remember what the world was like, before he gave 50,000 -- no, 200,000 -- no, wait, 2 million-- secret documents to Glenn Greenwald: smoking guns that exposed Washington's global surveillance state, which far outstripped the wildest, wettest dreams of the Stasi, of Stalin, yea of Orwell himself?
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Speaking over Skype from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, fugitive WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said his living situation is a bit like prison - with a more lenient visitor policy.
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We never knew the National Security Agency were such fans of the Master Sword.
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Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt wants you to know he's "pretty sure" your data is safe from surveillance.
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There are also other eras I could proclaim, the Era of Severe Money Troubles, since some of the surveillance is justified by lack of monetary responsibility, and the Era of Complacency, because of people not doing anything about the mounting surveillance when they could. I could even call this the Era of Cyber Warfare. But one thing at a time.
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National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden answered questions before the European Parliament on Friday, saying that the United States spy agency pressures its allies to take steps towards further enabling widespread and indiscriminate surveillance.
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We have seen how the NSA’s phony court system has acted as a substitute for genuine judicial review, allowing the NSA to build up precedents purporting to assist its constitutional claims. We have also seen that the NSA is able to obtain surveillance authorization through misrepresentations to the court, without any genuine consequence to the agency, even when discovered. In this Part, we now examine how the NSA shields its activities from review by the public court system, through the control of secret information that could be used as evidence against them.
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Addressing thousands of audience during a teleconference interview at South by Southwest, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said that Americans in exile were fast emerging as new age National security reporters.
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CHELSEA Manning is ‘happy’ and ‘doing well’, according to her Pembrokeshire family who travelled to the US last month.
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Julian Assange, who has been at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London since 2012 to avoid extradition, addressed attendees of SXSW via Skype, where the confirmed 'there is upcoming material' that will be released and made mention of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
Drones
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The idea of a killer robot, as a coalition of international human rights groups has dubbed the autonomous machines, conjures a humanoid Terminator-style robot. The humanoid robots Google recently bought are neat, but most machines being used or tested by national militaries are, for now, more like robotic weapons than robotic soldiers. Still, the line between useful weapons with some automated features and robot soldiers ready to kill can be disturbingly blurry.
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Will we rescue our character, our culture, and our Constitution from a sort of 9/11 P.T.S.D?
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As an adapter to the thinking of men of power, Obama was a quick study. It took him less than half a year as president to subscribe to Dick Cheney’s view on the need for the constant surveillance of all Americans. This had to be done for the sake of our own safety in a war without a visible end. The leading consideration here is that Obama, quite as much as George W. Bush, wants to be seen as having done everything possible to avoid the “next 9/11.” He cares far less about doing everything possible to uphold the Constitution (a word that seldom occurs in his speeches or writings). Nevertheless, if you ask him, he will be happy to declare his preference for a return to the state of civil liberties we enjoyed in the pre-2001 era. In the same way, he will order drone killings in secret and then give a speech in which he informs us that eventually this kind of killing must stop.
CIA
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A month later, at a meeting sponsored by Schwab Capital markets, CIA executive director "Buzzy" Krongard laid out for investors what such a war would entail. "[It] will be won in large measure by forces you do not know about, in actions you will not see and in ways you may not want to know about," he said.
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Investigators for the Senate Intelligence Committee, working in the basement of a C.I.A. facility in Northern Virginia, had obtained an internal agency review summarizing thousands of documents related to the agency’s detention and interrogation program. Parts of the C.I.A. report cast a particularly harsh light on the program, the same program the agency was in the midst of defending in a prolonged dispute with the intelligence committee.
Ukraine
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Foreign Minister Andriy Deshchysta on March 8th said the Ukraine is ready to negotiate with Russia “at any level” over the Crimea issue, the move followed announcements by India and China that they were officially backing Russia’ right to intervene in the Crimea. Deshchysta added that international mediation efforts over the issue have made some small steps forward, including progress in efforts to establish a contact group. He also said the mediation group membership had yet to be settled, and progress is fragile. But with over a third of the world’s population backing Russia, the Ukrainian Crisis is over.
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Double standards are on display as Western leaders attack Russia regarding Ukraine, while they themselves commit or endorse worse aggression on other countries.
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In her March, 2011 testimony before Congress, Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, lamented that the US propaganda mill was losing ground to its rivals for lack of funding. In an informal interview she went further, stating that when abroad she got her news from RT, since CNN had become obsessed with celebrity trials and failed to cover international developments. So the US Secretary of State declared publicly that her most trusted news source was....(drum roll ) Russia Today .
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As the Euromaidan protests in the Ukrainian capitol of Kiev culminated this week, displays of open fascism and neo-Nazi extremism became too glaring to ignore. Since demonstrators filled the downtown square to battle Ukrainian riot police and demand the ouster of the corruption-stained, pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovich, it has been filled with far-right streetfighting men pledging to defend their country’s ethnic purity.
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The Russian invasion of Crimea occurred in a place little known to Americans, for reasons rooted in a tangled and bloody history. The showdown between President Vladimir Putin and the new Ukrainian government is a fight about tangible matters of intense mutual interest.
But many Americans can't address international crises without sounding like a Toby Keith song: "I Wanna Talk About Me."
Recent Techrights' Posts
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- This is a classic way to avoid paying workers
- Techrights Should be Even Faster Now
- We're now better off
- Richard Stallman (RMS) Gave 3 Talks in India in Less Than a Week
- In India this month we've not seen a single negative comment about RMS
- Microsoft Mass Layoffs Without Severance Pay Reported Hours After Microsoft Reported Weak Numbers and Microsoft Stock Fell
- Microsoft has a bloodbath this month
- 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.
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- Links 31/01/2025: Mass Layoffs at Amazon and Microsoft, Sweden Again Fails to Protect Critics of Violence
- Links for the day
- Slopwatch: Fake Articles About "Linux" and More (Latest Roundup Featuring BetaNews, Janus Atienza, and Brittany Day From Guardian Digital, Inc)
- LLM slop season
- "Not one of us" by Dr. Andy Farnell
- Elon Musk has brought embarrassment to nerds and technologists
- Gemini Links 31/01/2025: "Bulletin Buble" and "Why Blog?"
- Links for the day
- Static Site Generators (SSGs) Pay Off: Vastly Faster Sites, Much Smaller Hosting Bills
- success story for SSGs
- Of Note: Linux Foundation Has Already Let Linux.com Rot for About 4 Months (No Activity)
- there's no campaign aside from marketing spam there
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Thursday, January 30, 2025
- IRC logs for Thursday, January 30, 2025
- Indian Data Biases statCounter For or Against "Linux"
- In statCounter, the GNU/Linux increases and decreases are deeply tied to what it does with data collected in India
- The Corporate Media Pretends That Facebook ("Meta") Has Performed Well, But Its Debt Doubles Every 2 Years Despite Mass Layoffs
- That same media also helps parrot misleading financial claims
- Microsoft's Debt Surged by More Than 6,000,000,000 Dollars in Just 3 Months
- numbers released hours ago
- The Sheer Irony of Microsoft Proxy Accusing Others of 'Stealing'
- Wherever DeepSick's data came from, Microsoft (or its proxy) is in no position to issue criticism.
- The Difference a Decade (and GAFAM Money) Makes
- Credibility cannot be purchased
- [Meme] The Free Software Foundation (FSF) Has Critics Because Its Message is Effective
- Applying to others the same standards one is willing to violate?
- The Free Software Foundation (FSF) Raised $422,000 (Another $22k in the Two Weeks After Campaign Ended), Proving That Truth and Justice Tend to Find a Way
- 10,000+ dollars a week even without campaigning for more funds
- Faking Revenue Increase by Buying Your Own Products and Services (Through Scams and Scammers Like Scam Altman)
- Is this what society deserves? Media that instead of exposing corruption has chosen to participate in it and profit from it?
- 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
- 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
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, January 29, 2025
- IRC logs for Wednesday, January 29, 2025
- Google: Your Only Option is Google YouTube (Coming Soon: Mandatory DRM and Attestation?)
- Digital Restrictions (DRM) to follow? Only for "approved" (attestation) browsers?
- 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
- The Munich-Based EPO is Still Using a Platform That Promotes the Far Right and Rehabilitates Nazism
- Active Twitter account
- 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