UK moves towards longer jail terms for trolls

Chuck Schumer, Author Of Media Shield Bill: It's 'Probably Not Enough' To Protect Glenn Greenwald

A supporter of a bill to protect reporters and the news media from having to reveal confidential sources said Friday the measure has the backing of the Obama administration and the support of enough senators to move ahead this year.

Apple Rejects Tank Battle 1942, Then Approves; Shows How Stupid The iOS Approval Process Is

It's not much of a secret that Apple sees itself as some kind of supreme overlord of apps for its iProducts. And that supreme overlord has some very puritanical views, it seems: no nudity, no literature, and no immoral comics (censorship claims based solely on Apple's pure-as-the-driven-snow morality indexer). Far be it from a silly little human like myself to question whether our overlords' iron-grip is good for the app ecosystem, but with all the questionable decisions that seemed to be made in the name of the app approval process, perhaps it's time for a more democratized solution, like letting customers decide whether they want something or not.

Former US President Jimmy Carter does not send emails because he thinks the NSA is spying on him

Jimmy Carter believes U.S. is spying on him

Former President Jimmy Carter believes U.S. intelligence agencies are spying on him — so much so, he eschews email to avoid government spies.

Even Jimmy Carter Thinks the NSA Spies on Him

Bruce Schneier sneers at IBM's NSA denials

Ten days ago IBM issued ”A Letter to Our Clients About Government Access to Data” that, as we reported, swore on all that is good and holy that it did not hand over data to the NSA and would never do such a thing.

An Open Letter to IBM's Open Letter

Judge Scalia Suggests The Supreme Court May Be Asked To Determine Constitutionality Of Metadata Program

Antonin Scalia Has a Civil Liberties Debate in Brooklyn

Obama to set out proposal to end NSA's mass collection of phone data

Obama to Propose Ending NSA Phone-Data Collection

President Obama is set to announce a new proposal to scale back one of the most sweeping and controversial national-security surveillance programs in U.S. history, according to multiple reports.

House intelligence chair says Edward Snowden backs Russian expansionism

Mike Rogers Says Snowden's To Blame For Russian's Aggressive Actions Against Ukraine

Mike Rogers is still willing to spread his stupidity to any new outlet that will have him. Despite the NSA and FBI being unable to find any evidence that Snowden colluded with Russian intelligence, Rogers continues to insist the former analyst is a Russian spy.

United States for fear that the company would create "back doors" in its equipment

American officials have long considered Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications giant, a security threat, blocking it from business deals in the United States for fear that the company would create "back doors" in its equipment that could allow the Chinese military or Beijing-backed hackers to steal corporate and government secrets.

After Reports on N.S.A., China Urges End to Spying

The Chinese government called on the United States on Monday to explain its actions and halt the practice of cyberespionage after news reports said that the National Security Agency had hacked its way into the computer systems of China’s largest telecommunications company.

Huawei disturbed by NSA server infiltration

Chinese technology giant Huawei has said it will condemn the infiltration of its servers on the part of the United States’ National Security Agency (NSA) should allegations be true, according to Reuters.

Xi Jinping raises reports of NSA spying on Huawei in meeting with Obama

US Moral High Ground Completely Gone As China Demands US Stop Spying On Its Companies

Some people forget this, but the day before the very first of the Ed Snowden revelations, there were plenty of headlines about how President Obama was about to meet with China's President Xi Jinping, with a major focus of the talk being about how Obama wanted to the Chinese to stop their "cyberattacks" on US companies.

Los Angeles Cops Argue All Cars in LA Are Under Investigation

Who or what can stop the NSA?

Snowden's latest revelations show that the National Security Agency has the capacity to store 100 percent of a given nation's phone calls and store them for a month. Is there no other way of preventing terrorist attacks?

This Man Is Suing The NSA, FBI And DIA For Answers In Decades-Old Mandela Mystery

A Ph.D. candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is suing three government agencies to get answers about America's role in Nelson Mandela's infamous 1962 arrest.

In a lawsuit filed Tuesday morning, Ryan Shapiro targets the National Security Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Defense Intelligence Agency for their failure to comply with Freedom of Information Act requests he has filed (read the full complaint below).

Why NSA spying is breaking UK law

The show is over. The fat lady has finally sung. The fat lady, in this case, is a former White House lawyer, Rajesh De, now the senior legal counsel for the US National Security Agency (NSA).

Last week, De told a statutory body of the US government, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB), that the so-called Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (Fisa) corporations – a collection of US companies that were made subject to secret court orders to spy on their customers outside the US – had indeed done just that.

Local Law Enforcement Act Like CIA, Abuse Public Records Laws to Conceal ‘Stingray’ Surveillance

More and more local law enforcement agencies in the United States are manipulating or abusing public records request laws in order to conceal whether they are using “Stingray” surveillance technology to collect data for law enforcement activities, even going so far as to pretend that records do not even exist.

A “Stingray” surveillance device is, according to the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a device “that can triangulate the source of a cellular signal by acting like a fake cellphone tower and measuring the signal strength of an identified device from several locations.” Such technology has been in use in some form by the FBI since 1995.

The American Civil Liberties Union considers the technology to be the “electronic equivalent of dragnet ‘general searches’ prohibited by the Fourth Amendment.” It maintains that “no statutes or regulations” currently exist to address “under what circumstances ‘Stingrays’ can be used.” There is very little case law to properly limit law enforcement use.

The NSA is burning down the web, but what if we rebuilt a spy-proof internet?

What will life be like after the internet? Thanks to the mass surveillance undertaken by the National Security Agency and the general creepiness of companies like Google and Facebook, I've found myself considering this question. I mean, nothing lasts forever, right?

Yahoo UK Moves To Dublin To Escape Surveillance; UK Asks It To Stay... For The Spies

Yahoo discovered, as many tech companies did last year, that they had been opted-in to broad surveillance programs operated by the NSA and GCHQ. While these companies had always responded to official requests coming through official channels (the sort of thing detailed in their transparency reports), they were unaware that these agencies were also pulling data and communications right off the internet backbone and tech company servers.

Illicit activities of Royal Dutch Shell snared in NSA surveillance programs?

Reaching back into the relatively recent past, the US Dept. of Defense also confirmed that Shell was or had been under investigation for allegedly conspiring to violate US espionage laws by targeting classified technologies.

U.S Drones Flagrant Violation of Human Rights

"Pakistani to convince UNHRC to pass a resolution to force US drone strikes adhere to international law

Russian media rejects US claims on civilian deaths in drone attacks

Droning On: the More Drones We Worry About, the Less We Care About What Matters

According to The Washington Times, as of November of last year, the United States, Britain, and Israel were the only countries to have fired missiles from drones.

[...]

A global shift toward drone warfare is already under way, meaning Americans currently mostly disinterested in the debate may one day be up for a rude awakening. Governments the United States finds unsavory will end up pointing to America’s clandestine drone program as a precedent. “That’s where you have the problem,” the Brookings Institute’s Peter Singer told The Washington Times.

[...]

The United States has boycotted the U.N.’s drone investigation, arguing that the U.N.H.R.C. lacks the expertise and narrowness of focus to be effective at policing drone warfare. With little domestic outrage over the killings of civilians like the victims of the Yemen wedding massacre, it’s hard to see why our government would give human-rights activists the time of day. After all, did you hear about the fancy realtors using drones to create marketing videos for high-value properties?

MPs call for openness in use of drones

Ministry needs to be open about drone war

Unmanned drones: MoD told 'transparency will build public trust'

Need for 'more clarity' over UK drones programme

Drone Operations Need To Be More Open MPs Tell MoD

MPs urge MoD to be open about drone use

MPs: Drones are a key future resource for British military

Jimmy Carter: Drones Create More Terrorists

Former President Jimmy Carter sat down with HuffPost Live on Tuesday, throwing some cold water on the Obama administration's use of drones.

When asked about his stance on the policy, Carter said he "would not" rely on drone warfare, arguing that they kill innocent people and aggravate hatred toward the United States.

'Liberty and Justice for All' Means Security Risks

The U.S. has committed egregious misdeeds in the name of reducing the risk of terror by a tiny—or even non-existent—margin.

Exclusive: For A New Type Of Targeted Killing, Yemenis And Americans May Co-Pilot Crop Dusters Armed With Missiles

The new program could put more of a Yemeni face on killings that have been carried out by U.S. drones.

What does it mean to be a progressive Democrat today?

Obama has deported more individuals than any other president, he supports coal and nuclear power, and his big victory in repealing the Bush era tax cuts came with a reinstating of the payroll tax, imposing on Americans a more regressive and costly tax system than before. Obama also defends the use of drones to kill Americans abroad, and he refuses to make any serious changes in an NSA surveillance program that runs roughshod on the civil liberties of Americans. And in 2008 he took more money in from Wall Street than any presidential candidate in history.

CIA horrors

CIA Moved Tons of Cocaine Under Mayan Jaguar Court Documents Reveal

The National Transportation and Safety Board, NTSB, is still conducting continuing research into a jet crash in Mexico in the autumn of 2007. The jet was carrying 3.7 tons of powdered coke and is just one of several cases that point to deep corruption within the American bureaucracy.

The jet, a Gulfstream II, that crashed was one aircraft that was affiliated with an ongoing US covert operation called Mayan Jaguar. Recently released court records reveal that the jet was just one of tens of aircraft sold to Latin American cartel organizations. Narco News reported recently that several of the jets sold through Mayan Jaguar have been used to move cocaine into Europe, via Africa. The aircraft were being observed and traced by US law enforcement and intelligent agencies that were responsible for Mayan Jaguar.

John Pilger: CIA role in Australia's forgotten coup

Washington's role in the fascist putsch against an elected government in Ukraine will surprise only those who watch the news and ignore the historical record. Since 1945, dozens of governments, many of them democracies, have met a similar fate, usually with bloodshed.

Nicaragua is one of the poorest countries on earth with fewer people than Wales, yet under the reformist Sandinistas in the 1980s it was regarded in Washington as a "strategic threat". The logic was simple; if the weakest slipped the leash, setting an example, who else would try their luck?

The great game of dominance offers no immunity for even the most loyal US "ally". This is demonstrated by perhaps the least known of Washington's coups — in Australia. The story of this forgotten coup is a salutary lesson for those governments that believe a "Ukraine" or a "Chile" could never happen to them.

The serious costs of weak CIA oversight

This meant developing policy outside of FISA and keeping most of Congress in the dark.

Constitutional Conflict Escalates between US Senate and CIA

In twin letters sent Wednesday to the Justice Department and the Central Intelligence Agency, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid renewed charges of unconstitutional CIA spying on the Senate, first made in a speech March 11 by the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Dianne Feinstein.

Marcus: CIA making enemies of friends

Watching Dianne Feinstein tear into the Central Intelligence Agency on the Senate floor the other day brought to mind a 1970s-era television commercial about a margarine supposedly indistinguishable from butter.

“Chiffon’s so delicious, it fooled even you, Mother Nature,” says the narrator.

“Oh, it’s not nice to fool Mother Nature,” she replies, her voice becoming steely as she raises her arms to summon thunder and lightning.

History of CIA torture after 9/11 must be confronted or risks being repeated

Nearly a decade after the CIA ended its clandestine programme of kidnaps and torture in the wake of September 11, there has still not been a full reckoning of what happened.

Even With Its 'Public Facing' Tumblr Blog, The Intelligence Community Is Still Avoiding The Surveillance Discussion

As we've pointed out before, nearly every document released has been the result of court orders in FOIA lawsuits pursued by the ACLU, EFF and EPIC. Others have been compelled by executive orders (Obama's surveillance reforms) or are nothing more than official statements and press releases. There's no transparency here, no intrinsic effort to "foster greater public visibility." The agency has been forced out of the shadows and its awkward embrace of openness is nowhere more apparent than at its Tumblr blog.

TED 2014: NSA may start transparency reports