Samsung Galaxy Back Door, NSA Malware, Congressional Backlash, More Drone Strikes, and Ukraine Intervention
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2014-03-13 11:31:38 UTC
- Modified: 2014-03-13 11:31:38 UTC
Android
While working on Replicant, a fully free/libre version of Android, we discovered that the proprietary program running on the applications processor in charge of handling the communication protocol with the modem actually implements a back-door that lets the modem perform remote file I/O operations on the file system.
Privacy
Last month, National Football League special investigator Ted Wells delivered a shocking report about Miami Dolphins player Richie Incognito's bullying tactics aimed at teammate Jonathan Martin. At the heart of the report: More than 1,000 text messages, many of them outrageously explicit, that Incognito and Martin swapped between October 2012 and November 2013.
NSA's Latest Scandal
The latest batch of top-secret intelligence documents from the hoard collected by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden detail the massive increase in the agency's use of its Tailored Access Operations (TAO) hacking unit – including a system dubbed TURBINE that can spam out millions of pieces of sophisticated malware at a time.
While U.S. law enforcement agencies have long tried to stamp out networks of compromised computers used by cyber criminals, the National Security Agency has been hijacking the so-called botnets as a resource for spying.
The NSA has "co-opted" more than 140,000 computers since August 2007 for the purpose of injecting them with spying software, according to a slide leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and published by The Intercept news website on Wednesday.
US Congress
The top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee said yesterday that he favors ending the National Security Agency’s widespread collection of U.S. citizens’ phone data, making him the first of the four leaders of the congressional intelligence panels to do so.
European Parliament
THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT is miffed about data snarfing by the US National Security Agency (NSA) and has threatened the country with an end to the Safe Harbor agreement.
The European Parliament voted yesterday (12 March) to adopt a resolution condemning spying by the US National Security Agency (NSA) on EU citizens.
The European Parliament's consent to the EU-US trade deal "could be endangered" if blanket mass surveillance by the US National Security Agency (NSA) does not stop, MEPs have warned.
Google
Drones
His report on targeted killing, discussed on Tuesday, is partly an effort to spur the United States and other countries to bring drone killing under the auspices of international law. The report sets forth key questions raised by targeted and semi-targeted killing, and encourages the international community to grapple with them.
We cannot "kill" terrorism with a drone.
John F. Kennedy once said he wanted to "splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds." He reached that conclusion after CIA officials, including Director Allen Dulles, had misled him on many of the planning details of the disastrous April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion.
With the revelations that the CIA has been aggressively obstructing the work of the Senate Intelligence Committee, even to the point of spying on Senate staff conducting a long overdo review of its "detention and interrogation" program, we see the CIA has not changed its ways.
The Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, called the committee's current battle with the CIA "a defining moment for the oversight role of our intelligence committee . . . and whether we can be thwarted by those we oversee."
Sana'a, March 13: A US drone strike killed three suspected Al Qaeda militants in Yemen's Al Jawf province on Wednesday, Yemeni officials said.
Earlier this month, I spoke at a panel in Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) in Richmond. During the talk, I showed a photo of a young Yemeni boy in the province of Mareb (which was hit by five drone strikes this month), demonstrating how he ducked in his school as soon as he heard the sound of a plane. He was not sure whether it was a drone or a fighter jet, but he has become used to ducking this way ever since his village was hit and his friend hit with a shrapnel.
Ukraine
International law is suddenly very popular in Washington. President Obama responded to Russian military intervention in the Crimea by accusing Russia of a “breach of international law.” Secretary of State John Kerry followed up by declaring that Russia is “in direct, overt violation of international law.”
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and a group of senators are slated to travel to Ukraine on Thursday to show support for the new interim government there.
Recent Techrights' Posts
- Computers Got Smaller, So GNU/Linux Got Bigger
- Many people here recognise the lack of urgency (or need) to get expensive new laptops
- GNU/Linux Grows at Windows' Expense and Microsoft Trolls Infest and Maliciously Target Articles About It
- Microsoft is - and has long been - organised crime
- They Say I'm Mr. Bombastic
- They didn't take good lawyers
-
- Gemini Links 09/06/2025: Addition Addiction and Nitride
- Links for the day
- Links 09/06/2025: Science, Hardware Projects, and Democracy Receding
- Links for the day
- BetaNews is a Plagiarism and LLM Slop Hub, the Chief Editor Isn't Addressing This Problem Anymore
- SS Fagioli is basically a parasite leeching off or exploiting other people's work
- Links 09/06/2025: Chaos in Los Angeles and Hurricane Season
- Links for the day
- Links 09/06/2025: Windows TCO and Many Data Breaches
- Links for the day
- Abuse Inside the Polish Patent Office (UPRP) - Part VI: Political Stunts by Former President Edyta Demby-Siwek and the Connection to Profound Corruption at EUIPO
- it's like a money-laundering operation where one politician rewards another at taxpayers' expense
- Gemini Links 09/06/2025: Pipelines and Splitgate
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Sunday, June 08, 2025
- IRC logs for Sunday, June 08, 2025
- Links 08/06/2025: Tiananmen Carnage Censorship Persists, North Korean Goes Offline
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 08/06/2025: Love as an Ethnographic Method and Monitorix Gemini-Frontend v0.1
- Links for the day
- Links 08/06/2025: Exposure of More GAFAM Surveillance and Social Security Records Compromised
- Links for the day
- Linux Foundation is a Mediator for Microsoft et al, Not for Small Companies That Support Rather Than Attack the GPL
- Many people still wrongly assume that because it is called "Linux Foundation", then it is pro-Linux and represents the same mindset
- This Past Friday, Confirming What We Said All Along About Brett Wilson LLP: It's Shrinking, Has Considerable Debt, Loss of Net Assets Despite the Microsoft SLAPP Money
- The documents only became publicly available less than 2 days ago
- Some of the Many Reasons We Sued Microsofters for Harassment
- perpetrators of harassment
- For 20 Years Many People Were Sharecropping for Canonical's Oligarch, Now He's Deleting All Their Contributions
- "Ubuntu has erased instead of archiving the trove of material at Ubuntu Forums"
- There Was Always Too Much 'Crazy Stuff' Going on Around Freenode
- What many IRC users lost sight of
- Exposing Crime is Not a Crime (It Never Was)
- In the eyes of rich and powerful people, those who speak about their crimes are the "criminals"
- GNU/Linux Distros Abandoning Microsoft GitHub
- Will curl be next to leave Microsoft GitHub?
- Expect More XBox Mass Layoffs Soon If the Rumours Are True
- From a Microsoft media operative
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Saturday, June 07, 2025
- IRC logs for Saturday, June 07, 2025
- Europe Needs to Move Away From GAFAM; The Sooner, the Better
- Europe - not just the EU - must abandon GAFAM as soon as possible
- The Issue Isn't GNOME's Promotion of Diversity But GNOME Corruption, Abuse, Censorship, and Worse
- So-called "Conservative" (republican, pro-Trump, bigoted) people want you to think the problem with GNOME is politics
- When the News Sources Become Scarce and Increasingly Full of Polluted/Contaminated 'Content' (With LLM Slop and Slop Images)
- Integrity matters
- "Linux" Sites That Spew Out LLM Slop
- We're lacking enough material for another "Slopwatch"
- Abuse Inside the Polish Patent Office (UPRP) - Part V: Breaking the Law, Just Like EPO
- We'll hopefully cover some of the pertinent details later this year
- Links 08/06/2025: Security Lapses, CISA Cuts, and More
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 07/06/2025: Mime Types and Geminisphere Introduction
- Links for the day
- Links 07/06/2025: Slop Companies Retain All Private Data, More Books Banned in the US
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 07/06/2025: "A Monk's Guide to Happiness" and "Wireless Earbuds"
- Links for the day
- Links 07/06/2025: More Rumours of Mass Layoffs in Microsoft's XBox Division, New COVID Variant
- Links for the day
- Drug Addiction is a Real Problem, It Destroys Families
- a rather sensitive matter
- Abuse Inside the Polish Patent Office (UPRP) - Part IV: Political Scrutiny and Errors/Inconsistencies in Official Documents
- When such organisations receive scrutiny they start focusing on cover-up and muzzling of facts (or crushing people who say the truth)
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Friday, June 06, 2025
- IRC logs for Friday, June 06, 2025