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
-
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.
-
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?
-
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.
-
We never knew the National Security Agency were such fans of the Master Sword.
-
Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt wants you to know he's "pretty sure" your data is safe from surveillance.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
CHELSEA Manning is ‘happy’ and ‘doing well’, according to her Pembrokeshire family who travelled to the US last month.
-
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
-
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.
-
Will we rescue our character, our culture, and our Constitution from a sort of 9/11 P.T.S.D?
-
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
-
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.
-
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
-
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.
-
Double standards are on display as Western leaders attack Russia regarding Ukraine, while they themselves commit or endorse worse aggression on other countries.
-
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 .
-
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.
-
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
- IBM is "Taking the PIP" (Piss), People 'Retire' 'Voluntarily' to "Focus on Family"
- IBM has a billion bucks for 'the butcher', but not a million dollars for critical projects and initiatives in Free software
- It Should be Uncontroversial to Say That Social Control Media is a Weapon
- Democracy is not compatible with the likes of Kapo-Berg and MElon controlling public discourse of billions
- Debian: Plagiarism OK, Just be "Responsible" About It
- The result isn't the worst, but it's not good either
- Don't Let Them Kill Activism
- Are the oligarchs shutting the lid on activism and whistleblowers?
- Michael Catanzaro's Latest Blog Post Affirms Rumours of Red Hat Changes and RAs/PIPs at IBM
- reading between the lines, IBM is "spitting out" Red Hat staff
-
- Links 29/08/2026: Microsoft GitHub Outage (Again), "Displaying Ads Directly on Your Monitor", and "Election Deniers Could Soon Control Elections"
- Links for the day
- Misuse of Bots (Now Sold as "Agents", "Hey Hi", "Automation", and "Efficiency")
- They even try to rebrand robotics as "hey hi" and try to sell slop as "work"
- SLAPP Censorship - Part 165 Out of 200: Two Years Since My Wife and I Sued
- In early September 2024 we hit back
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Friday, August 28, 2026
- IRC logs for Friday, August 28, 2026
- Gemini Links 29/08/2026: Death Notice, Systems Biology, and Gopher
- Links for the day
- Links 28/08/2026: Chatbot Pushers Admit They're Used Heavily for Social Engineering Scams, Strong Backlash Against "Smart Glasses" (CCTV on Legs)
- Links for the day
- If Linux Was Written in Rust, 80% or More of Linux Developers Would Not Understand It (Same If It's Composed by LLM Slop)
- The licence (GPL) is not enough when there are ways to bypass it
- Gemini Links 28/08/2026: Absurd Tomodachi Summer, Screen Piggery, and Jugulans 1.0.3 Released
- Links for the day
- Links 28/08/2026: "UK Power Grid Has a Phantom Data Center Problem" and "Growth at All Costs is Cancer"
- Links for the day
- SLAPP Censorship - Part 164 Out of 200: Patent Troll SLAPPs, Defamation Trolls, and Stranglers From America
- You start to wonder if the core issue is insecurity
- Rumours of More PIPs and Layoffs at Confluent Just Months After IBM Bought It
- It is meanwhile apparent IBM will have mass layoffs next week (September)
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Thursday, August 27, 2026
- IRC logs for Thursday, August 27, 2026
- After Many Waves of PIPs (Silent Layoffs) IBM Makes Non-Silent Layoffs, Effective Next Week (September)
- What we heard is turning out to be true
- Gemini Links 27/08/2026: Oklahoma, Tennessee, Haiku OS, Digital Resistance, and Staying Offline
- Links for the day
- Links 27/08/2026: Facebook to Pay Up to $17.1 Billion to Cover Up Known Harms, Nepal Landslide Kills Many
- Links for the day
- The Register MS Has Just Published Paid Spam That Says "AI" 19 Times
- 1.5 hours ago
- Mainstream Media is Paid to Link "AI" Criticism/Boosting to Jeffrey Epstein Enablers, in Effect Showing How Corrupt This Media Became
- Many readers will have noticed what was a paid-for PR campaign of a global scale
- RSS is King: Why Having Subscribers or Followers in Sites You Neither Own Nor Control is Loss of Autonomy and Search is Mostly Slop (Plagiarising Sites, Not Linking to Them)
- Because digital connections in third parties aren't assets; they endow another party with tremendous power over people (e.g. MElon getting to decide who can and cannot reach people or what messages to "dim down")
- Claims of Tens of Thousands of 'Silent Layoffs' at IBM (and Red Hat)
- Looking at recent activity in thelayoff.com, about 80% of the comments and posts are about PIPs
- Links 27/08/2026: "Flock’s CEO Is Lying to Cops" and Microsoft's GitHub Actions Breaks Down Again (Too Many Layoffs, Loss of Knowledge)
- Links for the day
- Clownflare Sees GNU/Linux and ChromeOS at Over 13% in Bahamas
- Narrowing down to desktops and laptops, and judging by Web requests that go through Clownflare, many people there use GNU/Linux or Google's 'bastardised' version of it (with spyware preloaded)
- Richard Stallman Complains That Linux Gives a Bad Name to GNU and Asks for Feedback on What's Wrong with Systemd (and Wayland)
- Maybe some people want to send him a detailed, polite explanation
- GNU/Linux Does Not Need Social Control Media to Succeed
- When it comes to Social Control Media, Richard Stallman was right
- Increasing Focus on Patent Injustices
- We'll soon cover the EPO a lot more
- SLAPP Censorship - Part 163 Out of 200: Attack on Computer Science and on Computer Security (or Associating Back Doors and Kill Switches With "Security")
- Nowadays there are many who pretend to be security professionals
- There's No "Next XBox"
- Nothing comes ahead except layoffs and price hikes
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, August 26, 2026
- IRC logs for Wednesday, August 26, 2026
- Gemini Links 27/08/2026: Conditioning, Lagrange 1.21, and Computer Games
- Links for the day