Covert Apparatus Still Under Fire: Surveillance, Interventions, Drones and Beyond
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2014-03-19 23:34:15 UTC
- Modified: 2014-03-19 23:36:50 UTC
Privacy
Appearing remotely at the Ted 2014 conference in Vancouver, National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden publicly criticized Amazon for leaking info like a sieve.
Snowden has publicly challenged the policies of major tech companies before, most notably during his live video appearance at the South by South West conference. This is, however, the first time the former NSA contractor has singled out Amazon, according to numerous conference attendees and a branch of TedX.
Whistleblower Edward Snowden has appeared as a surprise guest at the Ted (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference in Vancouver.
"Is it really terrorism that we're stopping? I say no," Snowden said. "The bottom line is that terrorism [...] has always been a cover for actions. Terrorism evokes an emotional response."
Several Australian law enforcement agencies and the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO) have submitted proposals asking the country's senate for more surveillance power, and state police have even asked that the government move to log its citizens' Web browsing history.
You may not find it difficult to identify a face in side-by-side photos but for computers, this has not proven to be a simple task so far. Now Facebook has come up with new software called DeepFace, which can verify whether two unfamiliar photos of faces show the same person. With 97.25 percent accuracy, the software comes pretty close to replicating human abilities.
A young anti-racism protester abandoned her campaigning work because she felt intimidated by a covert police officer who tried to persuade her to spy on her political colleagues, she has said.
The latest scoop from Barton Gellman, reporting for the Washington Post on documents Ed Snowden leaked, highlights an NSA program known as MYSTIC, with some snazzy clipart... and the ability to retrieve all recordings of phone calls in certain (non-US) countries going back at least 30 days.
The National Security Agency has built a surveillance system capable of recording “100 percent” of a foreign country’s telephone calls, enabling the agency to rewind and review conversations as long as a month after they take place, according to people with direct knowledge of the effort and documents supplied by former contractor Edward Snowden.
Admission that DoD office doesn’t have investigations open into the controversial surveillance comes as new report reveals NSA can harvest every call made in unnamed foreign country
The Guardian’s revelations about the scale of surveillance on American citizens by the National Security Agency has been recognised with a top US journalism award.
The Scripps Howard Foundation announced that the Guardian’s reporting on revelations contained in documents leaked by the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden received the Roy W Howard award for public service reporting.
The senior lawyer for the National Security Agency stated unequivocally on Wednesday that US technology companies were fully aware of the surveillance agency’s widespread collection of data, contradicting months of angry denials from the firms.
Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and other tech giants knew of the existence of the Internet surveillance program PRISM, they just didn't know it was called that, according to the NSA's top lawyer.
Rajesh De, the spy agency's general counsel, said that the companies knew that the NSA was collecting data from them. This revelation comes after months of repeated — and very similar — denials by the tech companies.
The National Security Agency has many secrets, but here’s a new one: the agency is refusing to say how much water it’s pumping into the brand new data center it operates in Bluffdale, Utah. According to the NSA, its water usage is a matter of national security.
The agency made the argument in a letter sent to officials in Utah, who are considering whether or not to release the data to the Salt Lake Tribune. Back in May, Tribune reporter Nate Carlisle asked for local records relating to the data center, but when he got his files a few months later, the water usage data was redacted.
Asked to debate whether Edward Snowden is "a patriot or a traitor" during an event at the UCLA School of Law, Bruce Fein, the attorney representing all of us in a class-action suit against the NSA, remarked on the spirit of the Fourth Amendment.
The proliferation of digital and wireless devices has boosted the amount of information that can be gathered on individuals, Page said.
U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden scorched senior CIA and NSA officials, the secret doings inside the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and a controversial section of the USA Patriot ACT on Tuesday night during a lecture in downtown Portland.
Today, the ACLU’s Jameel Jaffer will appear before the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board as its members question government officials, privacy advocates, law professors, and policy experts about the government’s surveillance programs operating under the FISA Amendments Act (“FAA”), also known as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
The board — known as the “PCLOB” — is holding its third workshop since last June’s initial revelations about NSA surveillance. In December, the PCLOB released a meticulous and devastating report about the government’s bulk collection of Americans’ phone records under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, concluding that the program violates the plain terms of Section 215.
Interventions and Ukraine
There is no sign of any referendum on self-determination for the people of Chechnya and Dagestan.
As the US and the European Union impose sanctions on 21 officials from Russia and Ukraine for helping the people of Crimea to make a democratic choice to become a part of the Russian Federation, one specific question arises – where were all the sanctions when the West was carrying out genuinely illegal wars and interventions that resulted in destruction and thousands of innocent civilians being killed?
At the tactical level, US policy has devolved to “regime change.” At the strategic level, US policy is simply incoherent, if not nihilistic; swapping corrupt oligarchs for neo-fascists or religious zealots. The logic for supporting recent coups have little to do with common sense -- or democracy. And with Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Egypt, and now the Ukraine, language needs to be coined to avoid words like coup.
Sooner or later, leaders in nations cleverly slandered by a monopolized media and brutally attacked by USA covert violence and murderous interventions will defeat this evil by quoting to the world the outraged words of famous Americans who bravely condemned their nation's many atrocities - the most recent three of whom were shot to death.
Drones
Last month I noted that we’re in the midst of the longest pause in drone strikes in Pakistan since the beginning of Barack Obama’s presidency. The pause corresponds with the Pakistani government’s halting efforts to hold peace talks with the Taliban, but also reported discussions within the U.S. government about whether to kill a U.S. citizen accused of collaborating with al-Qaida in the country.
When the documentary ended, to our surprise, Johnson himself came out to talk to us. After an intense discussion about the ethics and efficacy of drone warfare, he invited us for a follow-up meeting once he was confirmed at the DHS.
On March 14 the U.N. Human Rights Committee meeting in Geneva began a two-day examination of the U.S. human rights record, its first since 2006. The Committee is charged with upholding the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, a U.N. treaty that the U.S. ratified in 1992. At this meeting the U.S. came under sharp criticism for its counter-terrorism tactics of using unmanned drones to kill al-Qaida suspects, its transfer of suspects to other countries that practice torture, and its failure to prosecute any of the officials responsible.
The U.S. rejected this criticism, however, stating its belief that the rights treaty “imposes no human rights obligations on American military and intelligence forces when they operate abroad.” “The United States continues to believe that its interpretation—that the covenant applies only to individuals both within its territory and within its jurisdiction—is the most consistent with the covenant’s language and negotiating history.”
Pakistan is trying to push a resolution through the United Nations Human Rights Council that would trigger greater scrutiny of whether U.S. drone strikes violate international human rights law. Washington, though, doesn't want to talk about it.
The almost weekly US anti -terror attacks in Yemen and Pakistan rarely make American newspapers' headlines. But when there are claims that innocent civilians have died in a drone strike mistake it creates news around the world. In one of those deadly drone attacks in Yemen on a convoy of 11 trucks carrying 60 men to a wedding, between 12 and 17 people were killed in four vehicles and many others wounded turning the wedding procession into a slaughter.
As LaRouche Democrat and U.S. Senate candidate Kesha Rogers of Texas calls for the impeachment of Democratic President Barack Obama, she lists among her reasons the "assassination" of U.S. citizens.
Rogers says on her campaign website that Obama violated the Fifth Amendment "with the avowed assassination of at least four American citizens, Anwar Al-Awlaki, his 16-year-old son, Samir Khan, and Jude Mohammed, without benefit of due process of law. Indeed, the death warrants against these individuals were effectively signed in secret, in a committee which is overseen directly by the president."
A new United Nations report has called for independent probes of a series of drone attacks that have killed civilians around the world. Ben Emmerson, U.N. special rapporteur on human rights, identified 30 drone strikes – most of them by the U.S. – in which civilians were killed, badly injured or threatened. They include a U.S. drone strike on a wedding party in Yemen that killed as many as 12 civilians in December. While drone strikes in Pakistan appear to have declined, strikes in Yemen increased and civilian casualties tripled in Afghanistan last year.
DeLappe is hoping not only to memorialize those killed by American drones, but also to bring attention to America’s drone policies.
Military
Jacobus claims that members of the military are not disproportionately from poor backgrounds, and indeed some studies seem to back him up. And, indeed, most members of the military, when asked if they joined to “serve their country” answer yes. But three-quarters also say they joined for education benefits, which makes one wonder what the impact on recruitment would be if the United States made education free or affordable the way other nations do. And, if that happened, what would be the further effect on susceptibility to Pentagon propaganda of a populace with a higher education level?
The less expensive option is using drones for close air support. The cost per flight hour of a Predator drone is just $3,769. However, as Cockburn’s piece illustrates, drone technology and cameras just aren’t there yet.
This decontextualized rendering of violence in Iraq as a sort of atmospheric condition of the country is, sadly, typical of much of the reporting in Iraq today. It not only fails to explain political divisions and struggles in Iraq in a meaningful way for US readers. It also fails to explain how this violence is a direct consequence of the US invasion and occupation, blaming the victim for the violence that is our sour bequest to them.
CIA
According to a report from Al Jazeera America , the Senate investigation into Bush-era tactics after 9/11 found that the CIA used interrogation techniques not authorized by the U.S. Department of Justice against one or more "high-value" detainees. The report follows Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein's Senate floor speech calling out the CIA's "intimidation" techniques against members of her committee.
The FBI is evaluating separate criminal referrals sent to the Justice Department by the CIA in its dispute with Senate investigators over access to documents about the agency's "enhanced interrogation" practices, officials familiar with the matter said.
The CIA and one of its two main congressional overseers, the Senate Intelligence Committee, have traded accusations that each inappropriately intruded into computer systems containing highly classified data about the Bush-era practices, which human rights activists have described as torture.
The Justice Department has not decided whether to formally investigate the conduct of CIA officers or Senate staffers in a high-profile dispute that has emerged from a Senate Intelligence Committee investigation of now-banned CIA interrogation practices, Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. said Wednesday.
So the CIA officer is suspended for being a bad boss. But he was not censured for his role in the killer drone program. However, there is poetic justice that his identity was blown because of his involvement in this CIA assassination program.
The Obama administration itself -- the supposed "most transparent administration in history" -- is one of the worst offenders. As Mike covered earlier, administration-directed agencies have abused these exemptions hundreds of thousands of times in the last five years. Even when the agencies have been "responsive," they've still been mostly unresponsive. The FBI's documents on warrantless GPS tracking were handed to the ACLU with 111 pages redacted entirely.
Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul believes Americans should be afraid of an intelligence community he believes to be unapologetically "drunk with power."
Civil Rights
Weev Appeal Andrew Auernheimer Appeal Identity Theft AT&T Ipad Hacker Technology News Cybersecurity Weev Auernheimer Weev Andrew Weev Auernheimer Hacker Ipad Hack Andrew Weev Auernheimer Goatse Security Security Researchers Andrew Auernheimer Technology News
Censorship
Recent Techrights' Posts
- LLM Slop Has Virtually Killed unixmen.com and Many Other Sites
- There's no longer any incentive to write real articles in there
- Taking a Moral Stand Against Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPPs) and the Worst Offenders/Facilitators
- Any other stance would sidle with moral depravity or moral hazard
- France: Apple and Microsoft Down, GNU/Linux Up to New Record Levels
- How will tariffs against France impact things in the coming months?
- Open Source Initiative (OSI) Privacy Fiasco in Detail: What Was Reported to the California Privacy Protection Agency (CPPA)
- We hope to finish this whole lot within a week, then move on to election, lobbying etc.
-
- One Person's Take on Jef Spaleta, the New Fedora Project Leader
- "With a little searching, I wonder what else may be found regarding Microsoft."
- Links 06/04/2025: Flood, Cool Gemini Capsule, and Long Form
- Links for the day
- Links 06/04/2025: Science, Politics, and Pricier Goods
- Links for the day
- Sharp Declines for Microsoft Windows in Bangladesh (Pop. ~175,000,000), Big Gains for GNU/Linux
- Microsoft Windows has been having a really hard time in poor countries
- Links 06/04/2025: Fake Reviews, Privatisation Heists, and "AI" as Smokescreen for Impoverishing Humans
- Links for the day
- Links 06/04/2025: Many New Acts of Repression and Elements of Financial Depression
- Links for the day
- In Qatar GNU/Linux Rose From Under 1% to Over 4% in Two Years (or Over 5% If Counting ChromeOS)
- It's a big improvement compared to what we saw last year
- LLM Scrapers Are a Nuisance, But They're Also a Reminder It's Time to Make Your Site Static
- Perhaps the best protection is the ability to endure surges
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Saturday, April 05, 2025
- IRC logs for Saturday, April 05, 2025
- Links 06/04/2025: Attacks on Education, Fake Patents, and Fake (Illegal) Patent Courts
- Links for the day
- Links 05/04/2025: Tariffs Backfiring, YouTuber Arrested, X/Twitter Set to be Fined
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 05/04/2025: Offline is For Everyone, Copyright Colonialism, and More
- Links for the day
- Links 05/04/2025: TikTok Unsold (Still), Royal Society is Dead
- Links for the day
- Techrights Will Spend the Next Few Years Writing a Lot About Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPPs)
- It's a growing problem
- The State of EPO Staff's Health in Rijswijk or The Hague
- We're going to cover the EPO some more later in the month
- NVIDIA Corp Lost 36% of Its "Value" Since Cheeto Inauguration, But "Gen Hey Hi" (GenAI) is Totally Not a Bubble
- Selling loads of unneeded hardware based on hysterical hype; like selling shovels during a Gold Rush
- GNU/Linux Growing in East Asia, Windows by Default No More?
- GNU/Linux is now on the shelf
- Slopwatch: Anti-Linux 'Articles' From Linux-Hostile LLMs
- It is almost always negative things and nobody can be held responsible for it except the charlatans prompting the LLMs
- Links 05/04/2025: Fentanylware (TikTok) "Sale Looks Highly Imminent" (US), Stock Market Drowning in Panic
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 05/04/2025: Moving Plants, No to Smartwatches, RAID Hygiene
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Friday, April 04, 2025
- IRC logs for Friday, April 04, 2025
- Techrights Has Dealt With More Potent SLAPPs Than Violent Microsofters Begging to Hide What They Did to Women
- I became accustomed to SLAPPs
- Links 04/04/2025: Fury in South Korea, Flight MH370 Remains Mystery
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 04/04/2025: Anger and Raspberry Pi CM4
- Links for the day
- Links 04/04/2025: LLM Slop Bubble Bursting and Korea Music Copyright Association Bans Slop 'Music'
- Links for the day
- Traf-O-Data, the Company That Jeffrey Epstein's BFF (Bill Gates) (Co)Founded 53 Years and Went Out of Business Due to Heavy Losses
- Who will die first, Bill or Microsoft?
- Why Microsoft's Shares Sank Almost 20% in Recent Months (the Bubble is Imploding)
- verified press reports from the past 24 hours
- A Note on SimilarWeb
- Or why SimilarWeb is meaningless for more than 99% of the sites on the Web
- GNU/Linux Rises to Almost 5% in Algeria While Windows Sinks to All-Time Low
- GNU/Linux grew tenfold
- Where to Get More Gags
- A valued reader recommended that to us
- Links 04/04/2025: Tech Stock (Inc. GAFAM) Fall, Google Pretends to Do End-to-End Encrypted Emails (With Google in Control)
- Links for the day
- IBM Said to be Shutting Down Offices or Sites in the United States
- the press can no longer avoid admitting that IBM moves many jobs to India
- To Participate in Fedora Diversity You Must Use Proprietary Software
- Not for the first time either
- LLM Slop as Attack Vector on the Reputation of Linux
- The attacks on Linux have escalated to information warfare
- Yandex About to Be Three Times Bigger Than Microsoft (Bing) in Asia
- That's about 60% of the world's population
- Gemini Links 04/04/2025: Decoupling Updates, Elaho as Gemini Client
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Thursday, April 03, 2025
- IRC logs for Thursday, April 03, 2025