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
- A radical proposal to keep your personal data safe, by Richard Stallman
- "The surveillance imposed on us today is worse than in the Soviet Union. We need laws to stop this data being collected in the first place"
- An Update About Soylent News, With Jan Rinok "Back in the Saddle"
- Burnout or "near burnout" a possibility when having to curate abuse
-
- Richard Stallman Talk Now Available for Viewing (Archived Copy, Not Live-streamed)
- This recording is over 2 hours old
- Links 21/10/2025: AWS-Induced Chaos and Social Control Media Curbs
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 21/10/2025: Programming, StarGrid, Brand-New Palm OS Strategy Game in 2025, and Chatbot as Addiction Mechanisms
- Links for the day
- The African Lion and the American Cowards
- Safaris exist for people to watch and enjoy animals
- Amazon Web Shenanigans Perfectly Timed for Today's Talk by Richard Stallman
- Maybe listen to him instead of looking for excuses to ridicule the messenger
- Mission:Libre Has Taken Off (Project by Carmen Maris)
- there will be a lot more to report on next month (after the event)
- Techrights to Publish More EPO Leaks Next Week
- We're meanwhile also doing lots of work on search, whose interface now looks better
- Links 21/10/2025: 'The Lost Art' of Neon Signs and Twitter (X) to Enable Identity Theft (or Handle Theft) as a Service
- Links for the day
- Plagiarism With LLM Slop: Hindustan Times (HT Digital Streams Limited) Has Become a Slop Factory/Hub
- What a disgrace
- Next Week We Launch Search at Techrights
- We're planning to launch it some time next week. Maybe Tuesday, maybe Thursday.
- Talk by Richard Stallman Will be Live-streamed in Less Than 10 Hours
- Happy hacking
- "No Kings" in the Software World (GAFAM Should Not Exist, Either)
- "No Kings" is a good slogan. Let's start by ridding ourselves of masters, not only those who reside in DC or visit DC
- Every Morning
- Bugs/edge cases combined with automation can spell disaster
- Insane, Deliberately Dishonest, or Just Another Bigot?
- very intellectually-dishonest human being
- A Lot of Techrights is Built on Perl
- Perl also runs the sister site
- The Register MS Selling Slop for Microsoft (Vapourware, Ponzi Scheme, False Claims)
- What will be left of The Register MS if it keeps repeating falsehoods and looking to profit from Ponzi schemes?
- analytics.usa.gov Says Less Than 14% of Web Requests (to Government Sites) Come From Vista 11
- Vista 11 was released more than 4 years ago!
- People Who Attempt to Take Down Correct Information Need a Doctor a Day
- “Journalism is printing something that someone does not want printed. Everything else is public relations.” ― George Orwell
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Monday, October 20, 2025
- IRC logs for Monday, October 20, 2025
- Vista 11 is Sinking While Microsoft is PIPing (Mass Layoffs But Silent Layoffs)
- We're witnessing a shift in platform dominance
- Richard Stallman is Having a Good Week Already (Stallman Was Right About 'Clown Computing')
- That alone is worth bringing up in his talk
- When Prominent GNU/Linux Distros Are Run by Spies
- What has Microsoft Canonical become?
- More Publishers and Companies Nowadays Say "GNU/Linux", Not "Linux"
- It's not to see InstallAware saying GNU/Linux this week
- Google News is Now Promoting a Parasitic Slopfarm Called "findarticles.com", Where Plagiarism of "Linux" Articles is Rampant
- Does Google even care about the slop epidemic? Google itself is a vendor of slop now (and it calls it "Gemini")
- Gemini Links 20/10/2025: Pumpkin Carving, "Hey Hi", and Other Buzzwords
- Links for the day
- Slopwatch: Google News Promoting Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt (FUD)
- What is the value of Google News if so many results in it are fake 'articles?
- Rejecting 'Snoop-Phones' and Turning "Old" Phones (or Tablets) Into Freedom-Respecting Appliances
- Paul Fernhout (pdfernhout.net) wrote back to Akira Urushibatathis this past weekend
- Our Uptime This Year Was Better Than AWS (Also a Lot Cheaper)
- We never used "the cloud"
- Amazon Web Shenanigans
- An ongoing, experimental endeavour
- Death of Elias Diem: FSFE mailing list archives hidden
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Links 20/10/2025: Louvre Museum Reveals Weakness, About 7 Million Protest US Turning Into Oligarchy/Monarchy
- Links for the day
- They Should Have Listened to Techrights Over a Month Earlier (Xubuntu Site Compromised)
- we reported this issue about 40 days earlier and nobody did anything about it
- Richard Stallman to Give Another Talk Today in Bavaria (Bavarian Academy of Science)
- Tomorrow at 6 PM he speaks in Munich
- Apple is the Company of Dictators and Worse
- Apple is just another greedy corporation in search of sweatshops and even pedophiles (especially the high-profile ones)
- Counting Unhatched Eggs Is Not Counting Chickens
- Everything here will persist as normal
- Barry Kauler Explains That Puppy Linux and EasyOS Exclude Systemd to Keep Things Simple
- Barry Kauler's Puppy Linux is in the community's hands. He now focuses on EasyOS and more.
- The "Infinite Bread"
- The biblical story of Jesus feeding the 5,000 has software parallels
- Half a Year After Brian Fagioli Got Kicked Out of BetaNews for Slop He's Still Doing LLM Slop and Slop Images Targeting 'Linux' (Plagiarising Original Works)
- If the Web gets polluted or flooded by slopfarms such as these, and Slashdot then sends traffic so these slopfarms (Slashdot probably doesn't do this intentionally), then real writers with real knowledge of GNU/Linux will lose the spark for publishing
- In Many Cases and in Many Different Ways, Technology Became Less Durable and Less Reliable Over Time
- The "modern" things are more complex. And complexity is a foe or reliability and repair-ability.
- Microsoft's LinkedIn is Losing Money, Traffic, and Hope; Now It Wants to Sell Its Users' Lifeblood (and Data)
- Let this be a reminder of what social control media really is about
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Sunday, October 19, 2025
- IRC logs for Sunday, October 19, 2025
- Campaign of FUD Against Framework Laptops and GNU/Linux (Using Microsoft's Attack on Linux, 'Secure Boot')
- Ritual Defamation Cult has turned its attention over to Framework
- Microsoft Lunduke: Freedom of Speech Means Spreading What I Have to Say and Banning People I Disagree With
- 4Chan is one he aims for and he is siccing 4Chan trolls at people he doesn't like
- Liberation From 'The Feed'
- They rank things based on the editor's choice/ideology (he or she knows the sponsors, hence the masters)
- Microsoft's Killing of Vista 10 Seems to Have Resulted in More Articles About GNU/Linux (But Also FUD)
- We not only saw a rise in traffic, we also saw a remarkable rise in the number of articles
- Today (a Day Before Richard Stallman Talk at TUM) There's a Patent Propaganda Event at TUM
- Perhaps an opportunity for Dr. Stallman to rebut this "invention to patent" nonsense/fantasy (conflating monopolies with innovation)
- OpenSource or "Open Source" as a Brand is Dying, Let's Get Back to Talking About Software Freedom
- Those of us who actually want to reform the industry and put users in control of their systems/devices will recognise that "Open Source" was selling a lie or got-co-opted by liars
- 19 Years in Numbers: Techrights' Anniversary Countdown and Retrospective
- In 2019 we began improving our workflows and, accordingly/predictably, we became a lot more productive
- Slop Turns People Off (LLMs Lack Intelligence, They're Just Plagiarism Powerhouses That Fail to Deliver Any Real, Measurable Value)
- "More" (or "MOAR") isn't always better
- IBM Red Hat Has Re-calibrated or Adjusted to Bubble Economics, False Promises, and Slop/Plagiarism
- This won't end well
- Fake Numbers, Fake Claims, Fake Economy, and Media Grifters That Prop Up Fraud
- Grifters like The Register MS won't be looked upon kindly after the bubble implodes
- For Some, the GNU Web Site is Not Accessible This Week
- They seem to have gone into some kind of lock-down mode
- Richard Stallman Back at the "Rudolf-Diesel" Hörsal "MW 2001" in About 40 Hours
- He spoke there before; there's a very high seating capacity there
- Symptoms of Upcoming Microsoft Layoffs in XBox
- A crashing franchise
- Psychiatrist confession: Germanwings crash & Debian toxic culture recognized before suicides
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Gemini Links 19/10/2025: Scentjacking 101, Slop Hype Boosters, and Steam Next Fest
- Links for the day
- Slopwatch: The Serial Slopper, LinuxSecurity, and Google News
- Let's hope slopfarms die as soon as possible
- Links 19/10/2025: Cambodia Scam Centres, Slop Hurting Wikipedia Traffic
- Links for the day
- As Economies Crumble Free as in Beer Will Matter, Not Just Free as in Freedom/Libre (Libertad)
- French regions choosing to embrace Software Freedom
- 25 Years Ago, an Explanation of How Reducing Free Software to 'Apps' Would Interfere With Freedom Goals
- there's nothing unreasonable about it
- A List of 63 Known Gemini Clients (Software to Browse Geminispace Content With Gemini Protocol)
- Not counting browser plugins for Web browsers
- Gemini Links 19/10/2025: "Firma Odin Is Transforming" and Bot Attacks While "AFK"
- Links for the day
- US Government: 6.1% of Site Visitors Use GNU/Linux
- GNU/Linux has a considerable share and it is growing
- LLM Slop Could Not Rise to Prominence Without Media Complicity and Artificial Hype
- Inane garbage disguised as "journalism"
- Why the FSF No Longer Recommends Debian, as Explained by Richard Stallman This Month
- some weeks ago
- All the Latest Half Dozen Articles by Mehedi Hasan (UbuntuPIT) Only Admit at the End That He's Using LLM Slop
- Disclosure is OK, but the practice of using slop is not
- The 'Modern' Web of Fake Security and Easy Censorship of Whole Domains
- Each year it gets worse
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Saturday, October 18, 2025
- IRC logs for Saturday, October 18, 2025